Daphne Du Maurier´s Rebecca: A 1920s Rebel

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Recommended: How women are oppressed by female writers in literature

Born Unbound, Raised Imprisoned

An Ivy League girl who has no daddy issues and a rich family is no better than any other woman because she has never taken her clothes off for money. A girl is no better than a woman who allows people to caress her, or escorts on the side based on her boundaries. Different things work for different people. Free a woman to live the life in which she is more than the way she looks, what she buys or what she has to sell, and she will amount beyond what society could have even imagined for her. Compromise for the sake of being accepted is insolent. Once the boundaries set by society are broken, society does everything within its power to contain the beasts again. Daphne Du Maurier felt the restraints 1920s society placed on her with idealizing domestic women. By using Rebecca as the backbone within her novel and counteracting such a strong character with the weak narrator, Du Maurier displays that oppression can only be destroyed with rebellion. In Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier uses the contrast of female personas to emphasize the 1920s society’s malevolence towards women and justify their right to break out of patriarchal submission in order to be distinguished as an equal.

Rebecca’s identity as “lady of the night,” ultimately contrasts 1920s society’s “ideal woman.” She is the antagonist of a classic love affair heroine: strong, willful, sexually promiscuous, and overtly manipulative. Du Maurier’s characterization of Rebecca as a woman in control of her own body and destiny deliberately shows the female novelists defiance of oppression. Rebecca states in bargaining with Maxim, “You’d look rather foolish trying to divorce me now after four days of marriage. So I’ll play the part of a devoted wife mi...

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...make progress through rebellion. The narrator herself was imprisoned by a masculine essence nearly leading to her death, she faded into the background. Her identity was lost in societal oppression and the force of domesticity. Du Mauriers use of Rebecca as the commander of every moment within Rebecca further accomplishes her attempt to distinguish the faults of society. An unfree world can only be dealt with if you become so absolutely free that your existence is an act of rebellion in itself.

Works Cited

Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997. Print.

Harbord, Janet. “Between Identification and Desire: Rereading ‘Rebecca’” Feminist Review. 53 (1996): 95-107. Web. 20 April 2014.

Light, Alison, “’Returning to Manderley’-Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class.” Feminist Review. 16 (1984): 7-25. Web. 20 April 2014.

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