REBECCA
"I dreamt I went to Manderley again." (Dumarier 2) is the famous opening line to the classic novel Rebecca. Right from the beginning Dumaurier builds up the mystery of Manderley by showing a conflict between the way the main characters live now verses how they remember the tragic events of the past. The narrator is an inexperienced young girl who is overwhelmed when she moves into Manderley. The husband, Maxim, is still troubled by the death of his last wife Rebecca, which happened almost a year before. Rebecca is "a heroine that we never see in the flesh, but whose spell is written through every page" (Weeks 163). Mrs. Danvers is Rebecca's former maid who has sinister intentions and remains loyal to the dead Rebecca and is even obsessed with her in some ways. "Mrs. Danvers' relationship to Rebecca, is such that she could never allow herself to believe that any human being could destroy her" (Kelly 60). As clues to the cause of Rebecca' death are uncovered, the story form of the story changes. Dumarier uses not only writing techniques such as foreshadowing and symbolism to make the novel more suspenseful, but she also uses the elements of greed, deception, and insecurity to change Rebecca from a Gothic Romance novel into
Dumaurier starts off her novel with elements of a classic Gothic Romance, and ends the story in mystery and suspense. She uses the writing techniques of symbolism and foreshadowing to build up suspense throughout the story, and elements of insecurity, deception and greed to transform the story into a mystery. At the end of the story Dumaurier proves that she has transformed the story by completely contradicting the standard of the Gothic Romance ending. There is a twist on the last page of the book that shatters the dreams of the two main characters. The burning down of Manderley seems to finally be the end of Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers. Instead of living happily ever after, the characters are shown many years later still being haunted by their experiences at Manderley. As the story evolves from a Gothic Romance to a mystery, the narrator also evolves. By including all of these elements Dumaurier creates even more than a simple thriller or mystery. She creates a "profound and fascinating study of an obsessive personality, of human identity, and of the liberation of the hidden self." (Kelly 54). The presence of greed in the story heightened the tension at the end of the story. The main conflict was started when Rebecca married Maxim out of greed. She did not love him, she just married him for his wealth and popularity. After the inquisition of Maxim it seems that the conflict is finally resolved and the story will end. Just then, Jack Favell enters and tries to threaten Maxim with blackmail. He wants Maixim to pay him to keep quiet, and when Maxim refuses, the investigation starts all over. Favell's greed pushes the investigation toward the truth and as each clue is found, the tension builds. Symbolism is also used to foreshadow some of the important events in the story. Rebecca's boat which was also the one she sank in, was called Je Revienss, which means "I come back". The name is symbolic in that the boat was risen from the bottom of the bay and physically did come back. It was also symbolic in that Rebecca came back to haunt the present (Kelly 58). Another symbol that reoccured throughout the story was the big slanting R. Whenever the narrator saw an R that Rebecca had written, she immediatly thought of how incredible Rebecca must have been and how she herself was so inferior. Many of the characters in the story are deceptive, which adds to the mystery and suspense. The deception starts right from the beginning when the narrator is told that Rebecca had drowned accidentally. That makes it even more shocking when the truth is finally revealed. The narrator was not the only one deceived though, Maxim was able to deceive everyone about the death of Rebecca. Nobody
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1831
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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