Rebecca: Motifs 3 key examples

Again and again, the narrator will remark on Mrs. Danvers's "skull's face." It practically becomes her epithet. It is somewhat odd to say that she has a "skull's face" on a "skeleton's frame" given that every face lies on top of a skull, and a skeleton provides the frame for every human body. What the narrator seems to mean is that Mrs. Danvers is so thin and so pale that she looks like a skeleton with no flesh. Instead of the rosy cheeks of a lively woman, she has protruding cheekbones. Instead of eyes that help the narrator "see into her soul," as the expression goes, she has "hollow eyes," almost as though they are empty sockets. She looks as though she has been rotting in the grave for some time. Even Mrs. Danvers's severe black dress suggests that she is still mourning Rebecca while others are trying to move on from her death. This same dress washes her out, accentuating her deathlike pallor.

The narrator uses even more deathlike imagery to describe Mrs. Danvers's handshake. "Limp [...], heavy, [and] deathly cold," it feels like a "lifeless thing" in the narrator's hand. It is almost as though the narrator is holding a dead fish that has flopped into her hand from the ocean. The "sea of faces" refers merely to the crowd of servants, but the phrase also evokes the image of Mrs. Danvers emerging from the actual sea where Rebecca's body lies. Although Mrs. Danvers does not yet know that Rebecca's body remains close to the shore, she is obsessed with the side of the house that overlooks the water because that is where Rebecca lived and died. This woman is alive, but it would hardly be surprising to learn that she sleeps each night under the ocean next to Rebecca and reanimates in the morning.

By linking Mrs. Danvers with Rebecca's burial place and by describing her as a dead woman walking, the narrator gives the reader the spooky sense that there is not such a clear difference at Manderley between the dead and the living. Rebecca is dead, but she is still haunting the place. In the end, she has Mrs. Danvers to do her bidding from the grave, burning Manderley down and preventing Maxim from keeping hold of it.

This is not just any hand-me-down handkerchief that Maxim or the household staff has given to the narrator to use. Instead, it is an unwashed handkerchief that she has found by accident. By wiping her hands on the same piece of cloth that bears the mark of Rebecca's lipstick, the narrator comes into more intimate contact with the woman than anyone ever meant her to. It is almost as though, across time, she is touching Rebecca's lips and holding her hand as they both reach into the pocket of the coat. The narrator realizes that the familiar smell is that of the azaleas she was admiring earlier when she was out with Maxim. That sense memory of brief happiness with Maxim, before the walk took a turn for the worse, turns out also to be a sense memory of Rebecca. The narrator realizes that Rebecca's scent was lingering in the air between her and Maxim the whole time.

The narrator stumbles upon many other intimate traces of Rebecca as well. For instance, she accidentally breaks an expensive ornament that turns out to have been special to Rebecca. Rebecca's handwriting and initials come up over and over again. The narrator finds these traces of her predecessor especially disturbing. There are scraps of Rebecca's writing in the morning room that offer a glimpse into what she was working on before she died, and they make the narrator feel out of her element managing a household. Before the narrator even arrived at Manderley, she burned the title page of a book Maxim gave her because it bore a handwritten inscription from Rebecca. The handkerchief in the passage above is monogrammed with Rebecca's initials. The "R" looms larger than the other letters, reminding the narrator that Rebecca towers over her as the real Mrs. "de W."

She goes on to fill the "canvas" with a collection of close-up details about the party. She describes Robert dropping a tray of ice. She follows a a woman with large teeth as she first dances and then eats salmon and lobster mayonnaise. She notes new worry lines on Frank's face. All of these details make the party come alive on the page, and yet it is also clear that the reader's perception of the party is both enabled and limited by the details the narrator notices and chooses to depict in her representation of the party.

While any story is limited to the perspective of its narrator, this particular narrator makes it clear that she is not just a storyteller trying to describe events at an objective remove. She is an artist. She regularly refers to paintings both real and imaginary from art history, demonstrating a deep knowledge of art. She has fantasized about Manderley since she was a child because of a postcard she has kept with a painting of the house. Her wedding gift from Beatrice is a collection of art books. She knows artistic techniques and has developed her own, which she deploys here. While she sometimes expresses insecurity about her sketches when she is young, the novel itself appears to be her masterpiece. Full of rich imagery, the book makes it easy to see and feel the narrator's memories and all the emotions they bring. To an objective outsider, the hydrangeas may not look so wild, and the lines on Frank's face might not register. But because the narrator brings a focus to these details, the reader must look at them.