Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: The Nameless Main Character, an Unreliable Narrator, is Rebecca’s Alternate Personality

Why does Rebecca get its title from the name of Maxim de Winter’s allegedly deceased first wife, and not from the main character, who is the narrator? And, in particular, why is the main character, the narrator, nameless? Daphne du Maurier was often asked, but she never gave a plausible answer.

The narrator gives the reader two facts about her undisclosed name: that most people find it difficult to spell, and that when she first meets Maxim, he has no difficulty spelling it. Why does he have no difficulty? Is he a linguist? Or is it, I speculate, because he had found writings, signed with that name, hidden in his wife, Rebecca’s, room?

I am not the first one to think that the narrator and Rebecca are two halves of a split personality:

“[The second] Mrs de Winter [the narrator] dreams vividly twice in the novel, once at the beginning and once at the end: each time, the dream conveys a truth to her that her conscious mind cannot, or will not, accept…The vision she has just had, of Rebecca and herself united, of first and second wives merged…she rejects…”

“This woman, not surprisingly, views Rebecca as a rival; what she refuses to perceive is that Rebecca is also her twin, and ultimately, her alter ego…”

“The themes of Rebecca — identity, doubling, the intimate linkage between love and murder — recur again and again in du Maurier’s work…there had always been duality in her life…”

Sally Beauman. “Rebecca,” pp. 47-60, in Helen Taylor (ed), The Daphne du Maurier Companion. Virago Press, 2007.