Rebecca Birthday Letters Analysis

Compare and contrast the writers’ presentation of tormented mind in Rebecca and Birthday letters.

Rebecca, which is a bildungsroman novel and Birthday letters both have elements of tormented minds which are effectively caused by the darker side of love, memory, honesty and betrayal.

‘Rebecca’ looks into the faults of the class structure and upper class society. It shows the narrators inability to accept her new social class when marrying Maxim which adds to her torment. The narrator is told by Mrs Van Hopper she will never fit in at Manderly because of her social class, and tells her she is making a “big mistake" marrying Maxim and that she will "bitterly regret" it, this foreshows the struggle that she will face during her marriage with Maxim

Maxim has to retain the honour of his name and this means putting on a facade about his marriage with Rebecca. This is because in the 1930s, when the book was set, divorce was viewed as a sinful and unacceptable act thus destroying his name. The novel Rebecca also shows the duties and limits and of both men and women in 1930s and the social stigma that they faced, Maxim was tortured by the fact Rebecca was going to supposedly have another man son and he would inherit his fortune, it tormented him to such an extent he killed Rebecca. Maxim is tormented by the memory of his marriage to Rebecca and his eventual murder of her which adds to his inability to move on with his life with the narrator, the very fact that Ted Hughes produced ‘Birthday letters’ 35 years after Sylvia’s death displays that he can neither move on and is still tormented and troubled by her death. Almost every poem in ‘Birthday Letters’ is addressed directly to Plath, after so many years he still has clear memories of events and experiences that he shared with

The poem ‘The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother’ refers to the actions of feminist critics who blamed Ted Hughes for Sylvia Plath’s death. Sarah Lyall said Plath was turned into a “tragic feminist icon” and that Ted Hughes’s was casted, “in the eyes of many, as her executioner”. Her death was seen as horrifying. The poem ‘The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother’ references the way in which Sylvia died, Hughes stated how “She leapt from our window” it seems less disturbing if she leapt from a window in comparison to placing her head in the oven with the gas turned on. If she leapt out of a window it would have been as though she was flying. Likewise in Rebecca, the narrator was suggested by Mrs Danvers to commit suicide in front of an open window when she says “Why don’t you go none of us want you here”. This shows the extent of how tormented both the narrator and Sylvia were, as they were both driven to the thought of suicide. The narrator was tormented because she could not control her marriage and would rather have died than to see it fail and Rebecca was tormented because she had cancer and could not comprehend the thought of her beauty deteriorating. Ted Hughes wanted privacy after Sylvia’s death for the sake of his children. This is expanded upon in the poem through the single stanza of “so leave her”.