The Secrets of Manderley: Rebecca

Abstract

Gothic fiction over the last two hundred years has given us characters such as Dracula and Frankenstein who have passed into popular culture and taken on an almost mythic dimension.1 Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s most famous character, has achieved a similar status. Influenced by Jane Eyre (Angela Carter goes so far as to describe Rebecca as a book that ‘shamelessly reduplicated the plot’ of Charlotte Brontë’s novel2), du Maurier’s best-seller, published in 1938, has itself become a strong influence on women’s romantic fiction and Female Gothic writing. As Joanna Russ notes in her discussion of popular or ‘drugstore’ Female Gothic fiction: ‘The Modern Gothics resemble…a crossbreed of Jane Eyre and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and most of them advertise themselves as “in the Du Maurier tradition”, “in the Gothic tradition of Rebecca”, and so on’.3 The first sentence of Rebecca, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’, a poetic evocation of place, has become one of the most famous opening lines in English fiction.4 What is it, then, that gives Rebecca her mythic status and Manderley that enduring place in the twentieth-century imagination?KeywordsSexual IdentityRomantic LovePatriarchal SocietyAdult Female SexualityCountry HouseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.