Why the Most Powerful Person in Rebecca Is Already Dead

Spoiler warning: This essay discusses Rebecca’s death, Maxim’s confession, and the end of the novel.

At Manderley’s costume ball, the second Mrs. de Winter comes downstairs expecting to surprise her husband. She has taken Mrs. Danvers’s suggestion and dressed as Caroline de Winter, the woman in a family portrait. Maxim tells her to go upstairs and change. Rebecca wore the same costume at the previous ball.

The new Mrs. de Winter thought she had found a way to make an entrance as herself. Instead, she walks into a scene that everyone who remembers Rebecca can read faster than she can. That is the peculiar power of the dead woman in Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel. Rebecca sets the terms on which the living understand what they see. Even a dress chosen in her absence can turn a party into a public humiliation.

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Mrs. Danvers makes the past look like a household rule

The costume works as a trap because the narrator wants to do something right at Manderley. Taking inspiration from a family portrait seems like a way to show that she belongs. Mrs. Danvers understands the house well enough to know exactly how that gesture will be received. She can make the narrator look like an intruder by giving her advice that sounds like an invitation to join the family.

Rebecca’s bedroom is an even more intimate version of the same trick. Mrs. Danvers preserves the room and shows the narrator Rebecca’s belongings, including the nightdress she holds up to show how sheer it is. It’s a strange detail to linger on in front of the woman who now shares Maxim’s bed. For Mrs. Danvers, handling the garment lets her remember someone she loved. For her audience, the same gesture makes a dead woman feel like a rival with a living body.

That scene gives the housekeeper more to do than keep a shrine. She gets to decide who sees Rebecca’s things and what those things mean. The narrator may be mistress of the house, but Mrs. Danvers knows which objects can make her feel as if she has wandered into somebody else’s marriage.

The second Mrs. de Winter supplies part of the haunting herself

The woman telling us the story never gives us her first name. Rebecca, meanwhile, gets the title of the book. The distinction matters because both women can be called Mrs. de Winter. The narrator has the social title she hoped would give her a place in the world, yet it keeps pointing back to the woman who held it before her.

Du Maurier lets us watch the narrator turn that unease into a habit of interpretation. Before Maxim’s confession, his silences seem to her like proof that he still loves Rebecca. The less he explains, the more room she has to imagine a marriage so passionate that her own could never compete. Readers can fall into the same trap. The story arrives in the voice of someone who has spent so much time picturing her rival that the picture begins to feel like a memory.

That is what makes the costume ball sting on a reread. It takes only a suggestion from Mrs. Danvers to send the narrator upstairs to plan the whole thing herself. By then, she has spent much of the novel imagining what a more assured Mrs. de Winter would do. She is eager for a night when she can finally play the part.

Maxim’s confession changes what Rebecca means

When Maxim admits that he shot Rebecca and sank her boat with her body inside, the narrator learns that the love story she imagined was never his. Her first great relief is that he did not love Rebecca. The man she feared she could never please has just confessed to murder, and what she wants to know is whether she has him to herself.

It is easy to feel some of that relief before recognizing what it costs. Du Maurier has spent so long making the narrator’s jealousy hurt that an answer to it can feel like good news. The novel then leaves us with a harder question. If we were ready to believe in Rebecca’s perfection when it explained the narrator’s suffering, how readily will we accept Maxim’s account of her cruelty when it makes the couple easier to root for?

The doctor’s account of Rebecca’s terminal cancer gives Maxim and the others a reason to believe she may have provoked him deliberately. Her intention remains an inference. Mrs. Danvers has her memories of Rebecca, Maxim has his version of their marriage, and the narrator has reasons to prefer one account over the other. The woman they are all explaining never gets to tell us what she meant to happen. For the sequence of discoveries that follows the confession, see our Rebecca ending explainer.

Manderley burns, and the narrator goes back anyway

The fire destroys the place where Rebecca’s routines and possessions could be preserved. Yet du Maurier has already shown us how much survives it. The novel begins years after the events at Manderley, with the narrator returning to the estate in a dream. The house is gone as a place she can live, but she can still walk its grounds in her mind.

The woman at the costume ball once hoped she could make a memory of her own at Manderley. Years later, when she sits down to tell her story, the memory she gives us is inseparable from Rebecca’s. She has the first word and the last. Rebecca still has the title.

If you’re picking up the novel again, find Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca on Amazon and reread the bedroom scene before the ball. Mrs. Danvers has already shown how easily she can make an article of clothing feel like a claim on the house.

Read next: Our review of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Rebecca book club questions.

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