Rebecca Themes

From the first sentence, it’s apparent that Rebecca is constructed as a memory. The narrator (never named) remembers her time at Manderley after marrying her husband, the handsome, mysterious Maxim de Winter. As the novel goes on, however, we realize that life at Manderley is dominated by the memory of Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca. In essence, the novel Rebecca is about the memory of a memory. In light of memory’s obvious importance to…

Rebecca is a dated novel in many ways. When it was published in the 1930s, assumptions about how women, especially married women, should behave were markedly different than they are today. To “get into” the novel, readers would have to believe that the public would be shocked by the thought of a wealthy aristocrat divorcing his wife—something that seems fairly uncontroversial by modern standards. Additionally, Du Maurier blurs many of the sexual details of her…

In Rebecca, du Maurier addresses the theme of imprisonment in many ways. From a feminist standpoint, for example, it’s easy to see that the narrator is imprisoned by the gender roles of her time. But du Maurier also confronts the theme of imprisonment in an even more literal sense: by studying the role of a physical place, Manderley, in the narrator’s life. In order to study Manderley, the de Winter family estate, Rebecca…

Like many of Daphne du Maurier’s works, Rebecca studies how people maintain power over others. Surprisingly, the characters in the novel almost never rely on physical force (the simplest form of power, one would think) to assert themselves—in fact, on the one significant occasion when a character does use violence, his actions are presented as a total failure. Instead of violence, the powerful characters in Rebecca control their weaker peers using intimidation, manipulation, and various…