Abstract
This essay examines the problematics of the fragmentary, the ruined and the untimely in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Gaston Bachelard argues that a “creature that hides and ‘withdraws into its shell’ is preparing an escape.” Such escapes, which “take place in cases of repressed being,” manifest a “postponed aggressiveness, aggressiveness that bides its time”—a dynamic dramatized by Rebecca’s spectacular return. The narrator’s namelessness reflects her belated and fragmentary ontological status as dramatized by her fruitless attempts to erase Rebecca’s presence from Manderley. The tropes of fragmentation and of the return of the repressed are encapsulated by the narrator’s figure of the “funny fragment of time.” Manderley materializes the novel’s tropology of the ruined and the fragmentary.
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Notes
- 1.
In Chapter 4, Claire Potter also ponders on the significance of the name in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, seeing Tess’s name as a wound.
- 2.
As Light observes, the narrator “ends, as she began, as a paid companion” (1984, 20).
- 3.
See also Potter’s discussion of the “blot” in Hardy (Chapter 4).
- 4.
Smith links “the sloping ‘R’ of Rebecca’s signature” to the phenomenon of the phantom, citing it as a sign of the narrator’s “unconscious participation in Max’s secret” (Smith 1992, 303).
- 5.
Hovey argues that Maxim “covers over the memory of his sexual rejection and castration at his first wife’s hands”; he further “represses his part in her murder, as well as his role in the similarly national murders of others on the battlefields of the First World War” (2001, 161).
- 6.
Linkin argues that the narrator employs paralipsis, omission, underreporting and misreporting to “exonerate her actions in Monte Carlo, in Manderley, and in exile” (Linkin 2016, 224).
- 7.
Abraham and Torok’s phantom effect is also discussed in Chapter 11 by Jeffrey Spear.
- 8.
Most critics assume that the narrator is unaware that Rebecca had worn the Caroline de Winter costume the previous year. But see Linkin, who contends that she “likely had ample opportunity to glimpse the masquerade costume and perhaps even read about it in the society pages” (2016, 237).
- 9.
Joan Copjec argues that the discovery of Rebecca’s body releases the narrator from her psychic vise: because the dead-without knowing-it Rebecca refuses to relinquish her place, [the narrator] is unable to enter the symbolic network of the household. What releases the younger woman, finally, is the exteriorization of her battle with the excess body, the double (2015, 132).
References
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Teahan, S. (2019). Untimely Returns: Shoring Fragments Against Ruins in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. In: Mitsi, E., Despotopoulou, A., Dimakopoulou, S., Aretoulakis, E. (eds) Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26905-0_6
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