Essay Examples -English Literature Essays
Examine the different ways in which Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca engages with issues of desire and identification.
Several texts have focussed on the role of time dynamics in the novel, both as a characteristic of the gothic and as a device attached, inescapably, to a psychoanalysis narrative.
Jean Harbord asserts that the past and present are virtually anthropomorphised in Rebecca, set against each other as familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown, same andother. As in modern novels the notion of future is often represented as a feared, fantasised unknown, so here the past has come to stand for everything fearful, murky and culpable. The annihilation of the future was present from the start, of course, locked into the events of the past; the flaming Manderley at the end is a clearly iconographic- both of the house's impossible future and of the dubious smoking future of Max and the Narrator- unlocked by the revelation of Rebecca's illness.
Janet Harbord describes the way in which both psychoanalysis and romance narratives work from a notion of development in which to move in time is to progress from a state of flux to a state of stability, where the present is established as 'real' only in relation to a past that has been othered, reworked and reconfigured to give eminence to the present of identity. So romance narratives follow a similar pattern to psychoanalysis, sharing an emotional, symbolic, and almost fetishistic, interpretation of past events. The past is a ghost that must be exorcised in order for us to live happily in the present.
Happiness is closely related to institutional conformity- but so too is sadness- it seems one must make the choice to conform in order to be happy, rather than have that choice made for them. Ultimately happiness is represented in novels and psychoanalytic doctrine in the form of a stable, sexual, and self-selected marriage: the consequence and propagator of desire.
The problem with both psychoanalysis and romantic narratives is the central futility of the enterprise. Things are beautiful for the same reason they are tragic: the precariousness arising precisely because a glimpse of promise will only very rarely or fleetingly be realised. The ambition of forgetting and discarding the past is a beautiful one because it can never be fully completed. In Harbord's words, the past returns to haunt, to ghost the present and disturb the familiarity of 'home.'
In her superb essay 'Disembodied Spirits' Revisiting Manderley, Korosi suggests that one psychoanalytic reading is facilitated by du Maurier's choice of repetition as a chief narrative tool in her novel. According to Korosi, Rebecca can be read as a text of continuous repetition and repression, returning and discarding, which provides a method to express female subjectivity and desire.
The most significant repetition, Korosi suggests is the wife-doubling represented by the Narrator's position as the second Mrs de Winter. Duplicity has inevitable implications for symbolism of chronology. In Derridan postmodernism, doubling occurs everywhere as a symptom of the irrevocable: the moment of escape from origin is always violent - a split into presentation and representation. The duplicity of the women in Rebecca seems to play directly on this problem.
Who is the true Mrs De Winter and who is the trace - the copy? Are the two, linked so powerfully by name, actually bound much more intimately than it at first appears? Further- with past existing in the present, as the novel form allows it to, ghosts can influence and overthrow the power of the present characters. Rebecca controls everyone in the story, not just the Narrator, but it is only the Narrator who allows herself to be characterised entirely in relation to an imagined image of the dead woman. Of course this impossible association of past and present always ends miserably, as in the scene where the Narrator unwittingly dresses in Rebecca's gown for the ball, and comes down the stairs to be greeted with horror,
my curls were her curls, they stood out from my face as hers did in the picture. I don't think I have ever felt to excited before, so happy and so proudThey stared at me like dumb things. Beatrice uttered a little cry and put her hand to her mouth [Maxim]'s eyes blazed in anger. His face was ashen white.
By dressing the new Mrs De Winter as Rebecca, Mrs Danvers uses the memory of Rebecca for cruel parody, painfully torturing Maxim and humiliating his new wife. Indeed, as Korosi goes on to explain, Maxim de Winter and Mrs. Danvers to some extent represent opposing sides in a battle to construct and interpret Rebecca. The image of Rebecca shifts and changes, slips through past and present, fades and looms, according to who is recalling her.
Ultimately, Rebecca refuses to fit the exact imaging of either Danvers of De Winter, the repercussions and repetitions of her own apparent acquisitiveness and materially desirous nature over-riding the desires of any other character to revive her. Du Maurier has called the novel a study in jealousy, but this not to be taken at face value. The events inRebeccaare constructed from a conflation of supernatural imagery and conventional Freudian symbolism, all of which point to the fact that the story is powered entirely by the force of desire issuing from the dead woman. At the agonisingly pompous ball, for example,
A board creaked in the gallery. I swung round, looking at the gallery behind me. There was nobody there. The gallery was empty, just as it had been before. A current of air blew in my face though, somebody must have left a window open in one of the passages.
Supernatural semiotics construct an impossible time travelling anguish, and are therefore often framed in irony, as we find in the next section- where a coarse sailor approaches the couple,
'I tell you what,' said the sailor, turning to me, 'you ought to say you are a forget-me-not.
Through the endless instances of her remembrances, Rebecca signifies the uncanny in this novel, and it relates to what Freud has called repetition-compulsion. The uncanny has been defined as something frightening because it is familiar but unwelcome, its return is surprising and often apparently inexplicable and irrepressible. As Freud describes an encounter with the uncanny, the person seems to be experiencing something passively, without exerting any influence of his own, and yet always meets with the same fate over and over again.
Rebecca may be characterised as the always-returning presence, whose significance and power to shock, shifts according to who is interpreting her. Through her married name (her only name in the novel), the new Mrs de Winter of course becomes a signifier of Rebecca, and must contend not only with her own desires for a stable marriage with Max, but, sharing her name, has also to endure the repeated tracing, the painfully re-inscriptions of all the unfulfilled desires of the dead woman. The Narrator is the sharer, not merely the inheritor of the name, since Rebecca's presence is made current and relevant by continuous reference in the novel.
The first Mrs de Winter's intervention often comes through writing; when the narrator finds herself digging through Rebecca's letters, she completely forgets who she is supposed to be. Ironically, it is precisely because she shares Rebecca's title that she has legitimate access to the former's letters,
and visiting cards, ivory-white, in little boxes. I took one out and looked at it, unwrapped it from its thin tissue of paper. 'Mrs M. de Winter,' it said, and in the corner 'Manderley.' I put it back in the box again, and shut the drawer, feeling suddenly guilty and deceitful, as though I were staying at someone else's house
Rebeccaappears to be a novel about the anguish of duplicity in the forms of repetition, echo, and reflection. Rebecca is the Narrator's other, but the line dividing the two characters is a precarious one, more frightening than the line dividing life and death, since the name-signifier that both joins and divides them has an eternal quality that overthrows the mortal boundary. InThe Literature of Terror,David Punter argues that Gothic writers work on the fringe of the acceptable, for it is on this borderland that fear resides, and that furthermore,
the two sides of the border are grafted onto each otherreversible medallions, displaying on one side the contours of realityon the other the shadowy realm of myth, the lineaments of the unacceptable.
Figures within the novel share a symbolic identity in this way, but there is a duplicity operating on another level, too. The book is emphatic fantasy and employs a wry, almost post-modern, self-awareness. Manderley is a symbolic haunted house- that is, haunted by symbols of the past- and grounded in realism only by the force of adult emotions the author has built into its walls. In fact, the narrator, or rather, Du Maurier, is keen to show us just how hazy the distinction between reality and fantasy are.
The core and fundamental duplicity of the novel- the arbitrariness of the real- is set up right from first line, Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Everything the Narrator associates with Rebecca in her dream is frightening and oppressive, but no more so than anyreal evidence of the woman she ever found at the house. The rhododendrons are slaughterous red, luscious and fantasticas monsters, rearing to the sky.
So Manderely, if not exactly foreign, is certainly alien or illegitimate in the English countryside. The house has a complicated identity, not least because it is so secretive, and does not easily construct the usual metaphors of English romance, although in many ways it superficially appears to.Rebeccaseems to establish a caricatured version of Englishness, presenting it as something rather farcical through the tweedy Beatrice; the louche Jack Favell; punctilious Colonel Julyan and sexually retarded English-gentleman Frank Crawley.
Manderley stands out as a bastion of resistance to stereotype, and thus, despite its dream-quality, becomes more real (within the parameters of reality in this metaphor-driven story) than the thinly drawn markers of Englishness that occur through the novel.
Manderley's location in the Narrator's dream do seem to establish the place as somewhere for fantasies to be fulfilled. The romance reader may be initially confused, however, by Maxim's unsatisfactory nature as an object of desire. Through the novel he is mainly remote and icy, and even at the end he seems to have become tiresome as an invalid. Horner and Zlosnik have noted ways in which Manderley functions as nightmare house, a vessel of fear as much as desire, and analyse how the horror of the house- and therefore the marriage, have been signalled in the novel,
'Like being buried down here?' quips Jack Favell to the young bride, while later in the novel Beatrice whispers in her ear, 'Why don't you sit down? You look like death' (Rebecca, pp. 169 and 236)
The Narrator's resemblance to death is the natural consequence of her proximity to the borders of mortality, a peculiar no man's land of symbolism that she is granted passage to via her new title. Her desire for Maxim seems tied to her irresistible visits to this dark realm, as he is repeatedly described in terms of something medieval and rather dangerous. As Horner and Zlosnik put it,
ThusRebecca, in presenting Maxim through the eyes of the narrator, encourages us to construct Maxim as both fascinating Gothic villain (in the spirit of Schedoni and Montoni)andas the fantasy product of a naïve young mind. For the narrator continually presents her younger self as one whose values and expectations have been heavily influenced by popular fiction.
The inaccessibility of Maxim's true identity and motives, and indeed those of Rebecca, is the very thing that constitutes their attractiveness. Desire is equated with elusiveness and mystery throughout the novel, and inevitably also with fear. For the juvenile Narrator, Maxim's apparent maturity is the elusively desirable, the potentially wise and omniscient.
For the illusion to be sustained, Max must keep his new wife as young and innocent as possible, as signalled by his suggestion that she attend the fancy dress ball as Alice in Wonderland. His desire for the Narrator turns out to be surprisingly passive: it seems that, for all his power and gothic aloofness, it is he who is the most dependent, he who desires to be desired.
Yet this was not the same needy, jealous impulse that killed Rebecca. Rebecca died because she was pregnant with another man's child- and, above all, Maxim sought honesty and purity. There was no way he could tolerate the lie of raising a child in his name who wasn't his. As Horner and Zlosnik explain,
The importance of property, class and lineage as aspects of masculine identity is confirmed by the way in which the novel endsthe novel offers strong evidence that the burning of Manderley takes place on the orders of Jack Favellthe battle between the two men over her dead body is, then, fought through a patriarchal system built on class, property and lineage.
So again, the tension gathers around the arbitrariness of the family name. As the new Mrs de Winter, the narrator was kept innocent by remaining in the dark. Her inherited name was infused with the sins of Rebecca and brought with it a responsibility, a post-fall penitence that Max tried to reach through his efforts to perpetuate the narrator's innocence. He infantilises her, pats her on the head, laments that she has to grow up.
The narrator's response is often sorrowful, internalised indignation, as she refers to forbidden books, sensing and yearning for the dark adult knowledge that she imagines to be hidden in the pages of inaccessible texts. The association, again, is with words and identifiers; Manderley is a house about signs,Rebeccaa book about texts. Du Maurier's novel is about signs that refer to themselves, and since her fundamental signs are words, many of her principal characters use words themselves to speak of their identity issues.
Rebecca's uncanny presence in the novel is due not just to other characters' memories of her but to an indelibility which continually surfaces through her signature and her handwriting.
Just as the character of Rebecca can be seen as the agent of supernatural symbolism and super-chronological intervention from thepast, equally she can be read through her manifestations in thepresentof the story: a configuration of signs and markers- empty in themselves but given meaning through the suggestion of the characters. Mrs. Danvers's construction of Rebecca, for example, appears to arise from a sort of fetishistic preoccupation with her, and in one reading of the novel, it is this almost homo-erotic obsession which is chiefly responsible for Rebecca's ongoing potency in the house.
Mrs. Danvers holds onto the belief that the sea carried Rebecca away, since no mortal man could ever be strong enough to conquer her. All her assumptions are based on a misconception, however- she insists on believing that Max and Rebecca were in love and that his morose distraction is symptomatic of a broken heart.
Not one character inRebeccaknows the full story of the first Mrs De Winter's death, or of Max's feelings, or of Danvers's peculiar fetishes around her Rebecca memory. Each character is condemned to striving independently, alone, to vainly work at unravelling the binds of the past in an attempt to free achieve a clean imaginary present, fresh and wiped of memories. The loneliness permeates the book: characters are isolated by their desires. Max's marriage with the Narrator is the only truly reconciliatory moment in the novel: his desire for her is genuine, in a way that it probably never was for Rebecca, and desire creates a unity and expulsion of a great deal of loneliness.
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There is an astonishing play with prohibition of knowledge in this novel. The Narrator barely knows herself, but establishes her identity in relation to the places she has been allowed access to. Real spacesareopposed to psychic ones, quite vigorously. While the new Mrs de Winter can do everything the old one could do, go everywhere she could go, and even dress up like her for the ball, she cannot truly access the personality. It is, it seems, always Rebecca's choice to visit the Narrator's heart and mind, while hers remains mysterious to the Narrator until the end. Prohibition implies a duplicity, since frustrated, unrequited, or impossible desire will always find an outlet for satisfaction. Judith Butler writes;
if prohibition creates the 'fundamental divide' of sexuality, and if this 'divide' is shown to be duplicitious precisely because of the artificiality of its division, then there must be a division that resists division, a psychic doubleness or inherent bisexuality that comes to undermine every effort of severing.
The present is known to be real in relation to the past, but in fiction- and occasionally in life- the past is always constructed to support the unfolding events of the present. Consequently objective proof becomes irrelevant in an emotion-driven novel like Rebecca; the past is something retroactively arranged by individual memory, and what is real is only what is felt.
Like the famous Schrodinger's Cat experiment where the cat is both alive and dead, whichever the observer believes it to be, until the box is opened- so long as Max felt guilt for his wife's death, he was responsible for it. Desire is the most powerful and alienating emotion when it is not directed at a reciprocal partner, and its effects reverberate. Max's desire to turn back the clock, for example, invoked his dead wife.
Bibliography
Butler. Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge (1990)
Du Maurier, Daphne,Rebecca, London: The Readers Digest Association Ltd (1997)
Freud, Sigmund, Phillips, Adam (ed) The Uncanny,London: Penguin Classics (2003)
Harbord, Janet.Between Identification and Desire: Rereading Rebecca, Feminist Review 53 (1996) 95-107.
Horner, A. and Zlosnik, S. Daphne Du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination Chapter 4The Secrets of Manderley: Rebecca,London: MacMillan (1998)
Korosi, Márta,'Disembodied Spirits' Revisiting Manderley: The Construction of Female Subjectivity in du Maurier's Rebecca The Anachronist, Issue 2002 online here Janet Harbord, Between Identification and Desire: Rereading Rebecca, Feminist Review 53 (1996) 95-107, p. 95.
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