Jealousy, Possessiveness, and Unknowability Theme Analysis

At the heart of Philip and Ambrose’s infatuation with Rachel is a desire to fully possess her. Both of the Ashley men are deeply jealous of Signor Rainaldi, Rachel’s Italian friend and advisor, and suspect Rachel of having an affair with him. Eventually, Philip even begins to feel jealous of his late cousin Ambrose, the person he loves above all others, because Ambrose was married to Rachel prior to his death. Du Maurier portrays this possessive jealousy as particular to male characters: because social norms code women as subordinate to their fathers and husbands, women become objects that can be coveted by male characters. However, du Maurier also suggests that the root of jealousy and distrust in all relationships is a fundamentally unbridgeable gap between people: the inherent unknowability of another person.

The only non-male character in the novel to openly exhibit jealousy is Louise Kendall, Philip’s childhood friend and would-be sweetheart. (Rachel does mention in passing to Philip that she felt jealous of Ambrose’s affection for him in the early days of their marriage.) Yet, even though Louise seems envious of Rachel’s captivating influence on Philip, she remains a true friend to Philip. This is perhaps most powerfully exemplified when Rachel and Philip have a public disagreement after Philip announces their “engagement” at his dinner party. The following day, Louise sends a note to the Ashley house offering to meet Philip in town in case he “want[s] someone to talk to.” Contrastingly, the men of the novel—namely Philip and Ambrose—are virulently self-absorbed in their performances of jealousy. Philip finds himself resenting any and all men whom Rachel interacts with, including his godfather, Nick Kendall, and the vicar, Mr. Pascoe. Ambrose, too, immediately assumes that Rachel must be having an affair with her long-standing friend Rainaldi, ignoring the possibility that Rachel needs someone other than her husband in whom to confide about the loss of her child after her miscarriage. By limiting this kind of possessive jealousy to male characters, du Maurier powerfully illustrates men’s frustration at not having a monopoly on the women to whom they consider they have a claim.

Yet, despite her clear emphasis on the way that society convinces men they have a right to women as a sort of commodity, du Maurier also has a broader argument to make: she is attempting to show that the root of jealousy is the fact that it is fundamentally impossible to really know another person. This is true across the gender divide in the novel. Ambrose is mystified by how Rachel’s manner “alter[s]” after the loss of their child, unable to fathom the depth or extent of her grief (which du Maurier also hides from the reader, as Rachel never directly discusses her miscarriage in the novel). Philip, too, constantly references how mysterious and elusive he finds Rachel to be. Du Maurier intends to show how ill-equipped her male characters are at understanding her female characters, thanks to the way society has taught them to view women. However, she pushes this argument further, suggesting that no one, regardless of gender, can ever truly know someone else. This is clear in the following passage, which occurs near the end of the novel, when Rachel is planning her return to Italy: “She must believe me happy, to have peace of mind. I had left the land of fantasy, to her to enter into it. Two persons therefore could not share a dream. Except in darkness, as in make-believe. Each figure, then, a phantom.” While this passage does, once again, highlight a divide between men and women—only “in darkness,” presumably in the act of lovemaking, do men and women come close to “sharing a dream”—it is noteworthy that du Maurier uses non-gendered nouns. This passage references persons and figures, a distinction that separates it from other passages in the novel that explicitly discuss the two sexes. Here, du Maurier is making a much broader philosophical point: on an existential level, people are no more than phantoms to each other.

Du Maurier underscores this point by paying careful attention to the letters Ambrose writes to Philip. Philip is flabbergasted at the news that his cousin has married, since, as Louise points out, Ambrose has never “admire[d] a woman yet.” As the novel unfolds and he discovers more missives from Ambrose, Philip becomes less and less able to understand his cousin’s thoughts and actions leading up to his death. Indeed, the novel ends without Philip ever building a clear picture of Ambrose’s marriage to Rachel and his physical decline. As Philip falls in love with Rachel, he begins to realize why Ambrose was so taken with her—yet the rupture between Philip and his beloved cousin remains. Philip, it turns out, did not know Ambrose as well as he believed, and neither he nor the reader will ever know the truth of Ambrose’s death.

Thus, du Maurier depicts male jealousy as yet another byproduct of a patriarchal society that relegates women to the status of property. Yet she also suggests that jealousy is rooted in people’s fervent yet ultimately futile desire to bridge the gap that separates them from people they love. In this way, du Maurier gestures toward a powerful, invisible force at work in the lives of her character: it is not the question of guilt or of love, but rather the threatening, looming realization that one can never fully know another person—and thus that the condition of humans is to be always, on an existential level, lonely.