Rebecca: Metaphors 3 key examples

"Bradshaws" were a British series of travel guides that were popular in the 19th century and up through 1961. They began as books of train schedules but soon expanded to include more detailed maps, information about historic buildings, and other contents aimed at guiding tourists. The narrator refers to the "vice of reading Bradshaws." As travel guides became more popular, many people read them for the fun of it. They would learn about far-off places and "plan innumberable journeys" without ever embarking on them. This hobby met criticism from those who worried that people were confusing trip-planning with the actual experience of travel. As still happens today, those who traveled widely often distinguished themselves as "cultured" people a cut above those who never made it out of the place where they were born. Then, as now, travel had major class connotations. Being able to afford travel put people in a different class from those who merely fantasized about travel by reading Bradshaws.

The narrator, too, distinguishes herself from people who compulsively read Bradshaws. She does seem to enjoy thinking of herself as an aristocrat, but it is not exactly a class difference that she emphasizes. Instead, she uses the allusion to introduce a metaphor about her memory. Unlike Bradshaw readers, who go to the books for information about far-off places, the narrator herself is a "mine of information on the English countryside." It is as though she herself is a Bradshaw, chock full of all the intimate details a traveler may need to know about the English countryside. Most people have to consult books for these details, but she need only consult herself. While she has traveled—after all, she makes a point to let the reader know that she is writing from outside England—she is not bragging that she knows places far and wide. Instead, she is emphasizing her deep connection to the place where Manderley once stood. The sensory memories of that place "will not be denied" because they have made her, just as train schedules make a Bradshaw.

The narrator earlier expressed the wish that she could bottle up a pleasant memory to uncork and experience again whenever she wished. Maxim describes his memories as something he has shoved inside bottles so that he doesn't have to re-experience them. Trying to keep corks in these bottles, so that the memories don't spill out, is a maddening process. Being at Monte Carlo instead of Manderley has allowed him to keep the bottles closed, for the most part. Maxim likes spending time with the narrator not in spite of, but because of her youth and naïvety. She is so unlike Rebecca. She helps him to keep his memories bottled up by distracting him from the past.

The simile Maxim introduces next is a bit complicated, but it is important to understanding the way he thinks about the narrator. He says that sometimes "the devil" in a bottle tries to take the cork out "like a furtive Peeping Tom." The phrase "Peeping Tom" originally comes from the legend of Lady Godiva, a woman who rode naked through town so that her husband would lower the taxes; "Peeping Tom" watched. Here, Maxim uses the allusion in a more general sense to describe voyeurism. It is clear that Maxim is upset with the narrator because in asking about his past, she has acted like a "Peeping Tom" trying to get a look at something that is not meant for her to see. But it is not the narrator, but rather "the devil in one" that Maxim compares to a Peeping Tom. This is an ambiguous phrase. Does he mean the devil in a memory? In a bottle? In a person?

The simile makes sense if we interpret Max to mean that the narrator herself is a bottle for his memories. Her very existence makes space for him to bottle everything up. As long as she remains naïve, the cork stays in the bottle. But the narrator is a more complex person than Maxim accounts for. Her voyeurism is "the devil in one [of these bottles]," trying to take the cork out to understand the trauma Maxim has poured into her. He is angry because she is less placidly naïve than he thought, and his own strategy of forgetting is working against him.

This room has been shut up, but the young narrator can't resist going in after she sees Mrs. Danvers and Jack Favell conferring in the window. The two schemers have closed the shutter again when the narrator first arrives on the scene, leaving only artificial light in the room. The narrator compares the artificially-lit bedroom to a stage where fictional events play out, over and over again, every time the curtain rises. But when she opens the shutter again, she loses the sense that she is an audience member waiting to watch actors put on a play. Instead, now that she has opened the shutter as though to use the room for herself, everything is "vivid and alive" around her. If the room was an empty stage before, she has stepped onto that stage and brought the action to life. Everything in this room was waiting for her, the new Mrs. de Winter, to open the shutter and set things in motion.

Soon, the narrator finds herself not in her own story, but rather in the midst of a flashback in which Rebecca's last night alive plays out on the "stage." The flashback, narrated by Mrs. Danvers, comes on slowly. It starts as mere reminiscence and builds in intensity until Mrs. Danvers, and not the narrator, seems to be in control of the narration. Mrs. Danvers shows the narrator the unwashed clothing Rebecca was wearing that fateful night. She shows her the brushes she used to use on Rebecca's hair. She asks the narrator to hold these objects, to smell them, and to feel them as no one but Mrs. Danvers or Rebecca ever has. Mrs. Danvers takes over speaking for long, immersive stretches, using these objects as props. Whenever Mrs. Danvers pauses, the narrator reports feeling under the maid's physical and narrative control: Mrs. Danvers bruises the narrator's arm with her grip, and the narrator feels a strong impulse to "get away from her, away from the room."

The narrator wants to come to her senses and disentangle herself from Rebecca's past by stepping off the "stage" where that past is doomed to play out over and over again in people's memory. The way she yields narrative control to the flashback reinforces that the story of her life at Manderley never belonged entirely to her. From the moment she married Maxim and became "Mrs. de Winter," she was living Rebecca's life as well as her own. Her presence at Manderley makes Rebecca "vivid and alive" again so that, over and over, people must remember Rebecca's death like the tragic ending of a play that is performed night after night.