Rebecca a Game of Perception
A Rebuttal for the Critics Who Dismiss du Maurier's Popular Novel
The novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is about perception versus truth.
The novel Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, is criticized for being melodramatic formula fiction with one-dimensional characters. However, the long-term success of the novel challenges critics to review it closely to determine why it has been popular for so long. Do the novel’s one-dimensional characters ensconced in a melodramatic piece of formula fiction provide the reader with more than the simple satisfaction of a well-paced suspense story? The answer is yes.
The Future
The bulk of Rebecca occurs in the past although it is narrated in the present tense. As a result, the first two chapters appear to occur in the future.
Here we learn that Maxim and his wife are idling away their lives in obscurity while attempting to forget the past. The narrator says, “I would willingly give my five senses if they could ensure us our present peace and security.” In a single sentence, she negates the past and the future and asks only for the present moment.
The Moment
The narrator is Maxim de Winter’s new wife. She is young, innocent, and concerned about the passage of time and how it changes who we are. For her the moment is all that exists. The person we were in the past is gone. To know a person, we must know them in the present moment.
“We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.
And then I open the door and go to the dining-room...and I think how in that moment I have aged, and passed on, how I have advanced one step towards an unknown destiny.” (44)
Perceptions of Rebecca
An interesting technique that du Maurier uses is that of a nameless narrator. The nameless narrator upholds the idea of no past, no future. She is ‘now.’
By not giving the narrator a name, du Maurier prevents us from hanging a history on her. Without a name, it is difficult to see her as an individual with a past. Later in the book she is sometimes referred to as Mrs de Winter but that simply reminds us of her predecessor, Rebecca.
Rebecca is static. As a dead person, she lives only in the past. As a result, people’s memories of Rebecca hold the power of the present. The power of death is that what Rebecca did or thought is still true now. When the characters in the novel tell the narrator that ‘Mrs de Winter always used the alabaster vase, Madam.” (137) they entrap the narrator in the past. Each point of view, each memory is a point from which the web hangs or an intersection of partially seen threads.
Perception Versus The Truth
The narrator struggles to pull memories that various people share with her into the shape of Rebecca. However, because each ‘static’ memory of Rebecca is from a different perspective, the narrator is unable to create an accurate image of her.
It is not until Maxim tells her the story from his perspective that the narrator gets a clear image of Rebecca. It is then she realizes the faultiness of perception and the need for truth.
I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth. Had I made one step forward out of my own shyness Maxim would have told these things four months, five months ago. (276)
Truth Versus the Moment
Throughout the novel, the narrator expresses the need to live in the moment because the person you were in the past is no longer the person you are in the present. However, it seems that she ignores an essential truth. While to know the adult is not to know the child, to know the child is to know the adult. That child is still part of who we are.
Is she right to live with Maxim who killed his wife and feels little or no remorse?
Her truth argues that she is safe because she is in ‘now.’ But is she?
du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca. Harper Collins Publishers, 1971. ISBN 0-380-7855-6
