Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: The Female Narrator, Rebecca, and a Male Self are One Person with Three Personalities

The main characters in the novel are Maxim de Winter and his first wife, the deceased Rebecca, and his second wife, the nameless narrator.

Consistent with the previously discussed biographical information about Daphne du Maurier—her having a male alternate personality—both wives in this novel are described as having a male side to their character.

At the end of the novel, the two women are revealed to be the same person when the second wife sees the first wife in the mirror.

As previously discussed in this blog, it is a classic phenomenon of multiple personality for one personality to see an alternate personality in the mirror. (For example, see posts on mirrors and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

Female Narrator’s Male Side

“I was like a little scrubby school-boy with a passion for a sixth-form prefect, and he kinder, and far more inaccessible. ‘There’s a cold wind this morning, and you had better put on my coat,’ [said Maxim]. I remember that, for I was young enough to win happiness in the wearing of his clothes, playing the school-boy again who carries his hero’s sweater…” (1, pp. 216-217).

“Maxim,” I said, “can’t we start all over again?…I’ll be your friend and your companion, a sort of boy” (1, p. 381).

Rebecca’s Male Side

“She had all the courage and the spirit of a boy had my Mrs. de Winter,” [says Mrs. Danvers of Rebecca]. “She ought to have been a boy, I often told her that” (1, p. 365).

“[Rebecca] looked like a boy in her sailing kit, a boy with a face like a Botticelli angel” (1, p. 391).

Female Narrator and Rebecca are One

“It was not I that answered, I was not there at all. I was following a phantom in my mind, whose shadowy form had taken shape at last. Her features were blurred, her coloring indistinct, the setting of her eyes and the texture of her hair still uncertain, still to be revealed” (1, p. 222).

“…in that brief moment, sixty seconds in time perhaps, I had so identified myself with Rebecca that my own dull self did not exist, had never come to Manderley” (1, p. 334).

[Dreaming,] “I was writing letters in the morning-room…But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my small square hand-writing at all, it was long, and slanting, with curious pointed strokes…I got up and went to the looking-glass. A face stared back at me that was not my own…The face in the glass stared back at me…Rebecca” (1, p. 464).

1. Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca [1938], pp. 193-465, In Four Great Cornish Novels: Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, Frenchman’s Creek, My Cousin Rachel. BCA, 1992.