“All night within her womb
The worm lay, till it grew to a serpent”
William Blake, The First Book of Urizen. ll. 347-48.
Daphne du Maurier begins her novel Rebecca (1938)[1] describing “some half-breed from the woods, whose seed had been scattered long ago beneath the trees and then forgotten” (3) and ends it with the revelation of the titular character’s “certain malformation of the uterus” (413). This introduces the notion of both half-breed existence, and the malfunctioning uterus. Rebecca maintains a status “so frequently dismissed as a Gothic ‘romance’ ” alongside feminist scholarship declaring it as concerned with “psycho-sexual desire and patriarchal relationships” (Davies, 182). Whilst Rebecca’s engagement with inter-uterine hybridity may nod to certain patriarchal inadequacies, it is concerned more acutely with a sense of cultivation from which common criticism ensues from. In his essay Das ‘Unheimliche’ (1919) (translated to English as the ‘uncanny’ or unhomely; the German heim meaning home), as translated by Alix Strachey, Freud describes the experience of being buried alive as “the most uncanny thing of all” (Strachey, 366); a process which he declares to be a “transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about […] of intra-uterine existence” (Strachey, 367)[2]. McLintock’s translation of Freud’s Das ‘Unheimliche’ varies this term slightly, to the more simplistic “fantasy of living in the womb” (McLintock, 150). On Strachey’s clinical translation of Freud’s intra-uterine existence, Nicholas Royle explains the implications of such a diagnosis; “the various senses of ‘clinical’ as ‘hospital-like’ […] derive from the Greek klinikos, from kline ‘a bed’ […] the clinical becomes a place of trance, at once a bed of repose and suspension, and a death-bed” (Royle, 148). The womb is the idealised, and initial heim, re-identifying du Maurier’s traditional, stately Manderley as essentially a redundant womb, cultivating hybrid half-breeds of society. It functions in accordance with Royle’s clinical, inter-uterine setting, and therefore qualifies it as at once both a dwelling of death, and repose; a womb or ‘malformed uterus’. Derived from the Latin hybrida, “offspring of a tame sow and wild boar; hence, of human parents of different races, half-breed” (Sollors, 129), hybridity is etymologically concerned with breeding, but more specifically synonymous with the ‘half-breed’ that du Maurier describes as cultivated at Manderley. This confirms hybridity as a concept manifested in Manderley’s own ‘malformed uterus’, the text functioning as an investigation into inter-uterine hybridity, an uncanny existence.
Rebecca seems the most appropriate example of du Maurier’s oeuvre for this enquiry due to its existence as a sort of literary brain-child of du Maurier’s; Rebecca was “twice-begun and once-aborted as a ‘literary miscarriage’” (Davies, 187) and is therefore an imperative example of hybridity. It is a physical half-breed, manifesting out of a less than ideal origin, the product existing as a hybrid text, a physical representation of its subject matter. Freud talks of the uncanny in literature as a “much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life” (Strachey, 372), which is confirmed insofar as Rebecca structurally supports its own uncanniness. Royle establishes that “the beginning is already haunted” (Royle, 1), Rebecca’s introductory pages exhibiting the narrators dream of Manderley; “last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again […] the lodge was uninhabited” (1) [3] and reveals how “Manderley was no more” (4). In starting with a ‘haunting’ of what the reader has not yet learnt, the novel’s from depicts a cyclical pattern, constructing a landscape in which the ultimate beginning, the womb, can manifest its own haunting. The circular structure begins and ends with Manderley, whilst the body of the text itself reveals detail gradually, the eventual turn occurring when narrator learns that her husband Maxim did not love Rebecca and killed her. This gradual release of information develops, like a gestation of sorts, in this way the text physically aligning with its inter-uterine metaphor.
Upon the narrator’s marriage to Maxim de Winter, occurring during the novel’s opening quarter, Maxim reminds her “you forget […] I had that sort of wedding before” (61) in response to her confusion at the minimal scale of the wedding. This immediately dismisses Rebecca from any traditional marriage-plot; indeed, the wedding occurs swiftly and immediately, the remaining text providing an examination of the subsequent marriage. In this way, Rebecca is a sort of anti-marriage plot in terms of genre, a resistance to convention and expectation. Not respecting the bounds of either bildungsroman nor tragedy, the novel seems to be further appropriate as a hybrid text. Du Maurier challenges literary convention in that “the narrator, recording her memories many years hence, is still obsessed with the profound malignancy of Rebecca and is compelled to tell her story in the hope that the demon can be contained within the prison of her narrative” (Kelly, 62). She tries to confine Rebecca within her narration, the text functioning as a sort of attempted-womb. The resulting hybrid of this womb, the character Rebecca, commands the whole novel due to her titular authority, despite her effective absence within the novel. Rebecca’s character is an active one in the text; despite her death, she remains to be an active, participating character.
Royle deems the uncanny to be a “crisis of the proper” and a “crisis of the natural”; “a disturbance of the very idea of personal or private property” (Royle, 1). Royle likens the uncanny to a degradation of property, and considering Freud’s inter-uterine example of the uncanny, the two are similar, they are “familiar and unfamiliar” (Royle, 1) in that both the house and the womb combine to be the home, the disturbance of which thus operating as the un-homely, the uncanny. Du Maurier’s narrator encounters this discomfort of the unhomely home in her first visit to Manderley. She remarks how “to me, a rhododendron was a homely, domestic thing, strictly conventional, mauve or pink in colour […] these were monsters, rearing to the sky, massed like a battalion, too beautiful I thought, too powerful; they were not plants at all” (72). Not ‘plants’ as they naturally should be, but ‘monsters’, frightening, unnatural excuses for plants, malformed from the ‘homely, domestic thing’ expected. If the mauve rhododendron is ‘homely’, those that bloom at Manderley are inevitably un-homely, uncanny. They resist the domestic, the conventional, in place of the monstrous, the unnatural, and depict the “unchartered recesses of the womb” (Davies, 185). Freud acknowledges the problematic nature of such recesses; “there is something uncanny about the female genitals. But what they find uncanny [‘unhomely’] is actually the entrance to man’s old ‘home’, the place where everybody once lived” (McLintock, 151). This is repeated in how “the primrose was more vulgar, a homely pleasant creature who appeared in every cranny like a weed” (33). The primrose is at once homely, and yet a ‘vulgar creature’. It is homely, that is, canny, in that it is at home at Manderley, in line with Manderley. The fact that it is a weed-like creature therefore suggests that what is homely at Manderley may be uncomfortably uncanny out of Manderley, and that which is uncanny, may be inherently at home within Manderley. Regardless, the creature, not flower or plant, but uncategorical creature, hybrid, is at home at Manderley. Maxim “had special cultivated flowers grown for the house alone, in the walled garden” (33). This overtly authorises Manderley as a cultivator, keeping its inhabitants walled from the outside ‘wild’. This informs the reader that that which is not entirely comfortable, will be cultivated and nurtured within the Manderley walls, or membranes.
On first arriving through the membranes of Manderley, the narrator notices how “the drive twisted and turned like a serpent” (71), an indicator of Rebecca’s non-human hybridity immediately, and a prolepsis to Ben’s later claims that Rebecca “gave you the feeling of a snake” (174) qualifying her as the serpent that lay, haunting the womb of Manderley (Blake, ll.347-48). She also notices “the blood-red wall still flanking us on either side” (73) as if travelling through the bloody walls of the birth canal, revealing an “attachment that is native in some way to the primary function of inhabiting” (Bachelard, 4). The ‘native’ and ‘primary’ function of inhabiting is arguably that of inter-uterine existence, the initial and primal accommodation. The cavernous “wall of colour, blood-red” (72) that introduces Manderley alludes to the red-room of Jane Eyre (1847) with its “curtains of red damask” and “crimson cloth” (Bronte, 17), a room of warm, soft, red fabric, and the chamber in which Mr Reed “breathed his last” (Bronte, 17). This literary union of conception and death exposes the respective settings with a certain unhomeliness. When Jane catches sight of herself whilst in the red room, she likens her reflection to “one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp” (Bronte, 18) as if she too contributes to this womb-inducing half-breed categorisation. These ‘birthing’ processes however remain in a sort of inter-uteri limbo awaiting some point of arrival that ultimately does not deliver; they are not birthed. The closest ‘birth’ we witness in Rebecca is one in which the womb is entered, not left; it is very much returned to. The narrator undergoes bodily anxiety concentrated around her own womb at the point of entering married life at Manderley. She is “aware of a little pain at the pit of my stomach, and a nervous contraction in my throat” (74). The narrator undergoes a sort of labour as she ascends the steps of Manderley, a literal contraction, almost as if she felt a serpent laying in her womb. However, she is not releasing some offspring nor herself being released, but entering Manderley; she is climbing the steps, not coming down them; she is returning to the womb.
This re-introduction to an old home is explained in that “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Strachey, 340). Therefore, when Maxim remarks, “that’s Manderley in there” (69), it is imperative to note that Manderley is not merely ‘there’, but in there. It is intrinsically internal; one must enter it, not go to it, the drive “penetrating even deeper” (72). There is something inaccessible about Manderley, it must be entered or penetrated to go ‘in’. “For Freud the terms of the uncanny and homely slide into each other in an (uncanny) way; so that the everyday, the homely, also becomes the site of secrets” (Smith, 87). Like a surgical procedure, gaining entrance to the internal workings, Manderley is more extracted than visited, a hystero-procedure, and a necessary one considering the literary “conversation of the female body into a site of dis/ease” (Davies, 182-3). The narrator describes the fog at Manderley as “stifling, like a blanket, like an anaesthetic” (277). Functioning as both ‘blanket’ and ‘anaesthetic’, the landscape of Manderley not only has the capability to maternally comfort, like a blanket, but to perform surgical procedures with its anaesthetic quality. Like a hospital, it has the equipment to support its gestation at the appropriate moments, consistently establishing some omniscience above its inhabitants. Du Maurier emphasises in this that Manderley works as the most powerful character in the text, implementing the course of the plot, or plot-procedure. The narrator wonders “why it was that this home of his, known to so many people by hearsay, even to me, should so inevitably silence him, making as it were a barrier between him and others” (24). Manderley acts as a barrier or membrane between its inhabitants and ‘others’, constraining the hybrids it harbours; “keeping up these little barriers between us” (341) like fraternal twins in their respective amniotic sacs. The ‘patients’ of such surgery are the victims of “the fever of first love” (37). The narrator describes love as disease, infirming its victims. With infirmary comes a certain transformation, establishing our narrator as somewhat changed after undergoing her marriage. She is a filtered, operated version of her prior self, a now Manderley-infirmed self. Manderley is further described as a “vague substance of the house” (269). As a ‘substance’ it converts to the stuff of the body, and ceases to be a building, but some lucid, amniotic substance that cultivates those within it.
Lydenberg notes that “Freud’s argument brings him back twice to the uncanniness of the mother’s body” (Lydenberg, 1077); “Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers” (1). The her with which du Maurier describes the nature of Manderley is revealing, it qualifies the landscape of Manderley as innately feminine, a ‘mother nature’ that confirms is womb-like quality. Simultaneously however, this female space is ‘tenacious’ and ‘insidious’, arguably unnatural, an unnatural female space. The explicit anthropomorphism of “the house was not an empty shell but lived and breathed” (3) exposes Manderley to be a breathing entity, a living accommodation akin to the ultimate living dwelling of the womb. This uncanny animism encourages the reader from these introductory pages to consider Manderley a living, functioning, contributing device, character, of the text. Therefore, when Favell asks the narrator “like being buried down here?” (181) as if Manderley is some subterranean crypt, as opposed to the floral and stately home that it is, du Maurier, like Freud, likens inter-uterine existence to the allusion of being buried alive, “the most uncanny thing” (Strachey, 366). Separate to Freud’s deduction, du Maurier seemed to recognise this tendency of these two experiences to correlate as Favell’s comment criticises Manderley as a sort of deathly breeding ground, by which living victims are mistakenly confined. This idea of living at Manderley as being buried alive, some terrible mistake, unmasks its façade of the quintessential English home and reveals it to be the ultimate un-home. Some uncanny mistake has occurred; the nourishing womb has been replaced with a malfunctioning one, and we are not meant to be here.
The irony of the unhomely home remains in how “the apparently warm and all-enclosing interiors of inter-uterine existence, were, as Freud pointed out, at the same time the very centers of the uncanny. At once the refuge of inevitably unfulfilled desire and the potential crypt of living burial, the womb-house offered little solace to daily life” (Lee, 152-3). Du Maurier attempts to deal with this ironic failing of solace in the inter-uteri space in other works besides Rebecca. In The Birds (1952), du Maurier emphasises how “each householder must look after his own” (20), and yet “the birds would be imprisoned in the bedrooms. They could do no harm there. Crowded together, they would stifle and die” (27). The protagonist Nat shouts “let me in” (25) before “he stumbled across the threshold, and his wife threw her weight against the door” (25). More chaotic than soothing, the solace of the walled home in The Birds manifests as less of an incubator and more of a violent labour. Nat begs to be ‘let’ across the threshold, into womb safety, from inevitable reality. This desire for a return to an ultimately failing and redundant womb is uncannily ironic.
This irony is further examined by the co-existence of a generative womb with death. Royle talks of the psychoanalytic desire to revert to inter-uterine space as “the story of life from A to Z, or from Z to A, from death to birth, from the imminence of death to the timeless pleasure of womb-life” (Royle, 142). At Manderley, it is not as linear (or counter-linear) as progressing to and from a state of death and a state of birth, but a simultaneous existence of the two; death and birth co-exist as two of the same. When Mrs Van Hopper exclaims to Maxim “of course you miss the fogs at Manderley; it’s quite another matter; the west country must be delightful in the spring” he reaches “for the ash-tray, squashing his cigarette” (17). This juxtaposition of the Manderley of springtime, a time of fertility and rebirth, with the ash of the cigarette, serves not only as a prolepsis of the ash Manderley ultimately disintegrates to, but also aligns Manderley as at once a space of fertility, and yet barren, dead material; ultimately, a counter-productive womb.
This is not the only prolepsis in du Maurier’s text; it is laden with premonition and prophecy of what is to come, a telepathic pregnancy of sorts. The narrator states “I knew now why I had bought that picture post-card as a child; it was a premonition” (59). In the narrator experiencing this ‘premonition’ as a child, arguably closer to the initial womb-life state, the post-card therefore prophesises her eventual return to a womb, perhaps stunting her growth to the infantile-state she was in at that point, explaining her subsequent ‘child’ identity. “You’re a capable child in many ways” (19), one of these ways being capable of the vulnerability Manderley will exploit. A capable inhabitant for a redundant womb, an acceptable child. Maxim too is a child of Manderley in many ways. The narrator describes him as “a child in pain, a child in fear” (131), Manderley thus being what solidifies Maxim in this child state, but the fact that he is a fearing child confirms something uncanny is occurring in the homely ‘childhood’ at Manderley. This validates Maxim and the narrator as embryos or receptors of Manderley’s womb, objects to be given birth to. In her short story Giving Birth (1977), Margaret Attwood questions the act of giving birth, who is giving and who is receiving. She concludes with the realisation that after giving birth, Jeanie “ceases to be what she was and is replaced, gradually, by someone else” (Attwood, 323). This introduces the idea that in harbouring and growing a creature internally, it is not only the offspring that develops and changes, but the mother that undergoes a sort of transformation simultaneously; in this case, birth is undergone or given to both mother and baby. This explains the lucidity of Manderley, how it both comforts and supports the narrator and alienates her at once; “how lovely it was to be alone again” (170) to be in the soothing but unrealistic cacophony of the womb, and yet, “Oh, God, what a fool I was to come back” (130). Both womb and hybrid are fluid, transgressive beings.
Freud describes the idea of life within the womb providing “the deepest unconscious basis for the belief in survival after death, which merely represents a projection into the future of this uncanny life before birth” (Royle, 144). Royle condenses this in arguing that “uncanny life before birth provides the sole reason for all belief in survival after death” (Royle, 144). That is to suggest that the ‘uncanny’ life before birth is akin to existence after death; Rebecca’s existence, or at least presence after her death is therefore explained as being facilitated by the womb nature of Manderley. Freud’s ‘womb’ is the ‘basis’ for such an existence, just as Rebecca’s presence is explicit to Manderley. Outside of the estate, characters are protected from her legacy, but it is the physical matter of Manderley which her existence relies on. She haunts through her material things, the props of the Manderley womb that allow her to penetrate the living world. Similarly, Maxim and the narrator escape Rebecca’s hold with the demise of Manderley, again confirming that her existence is exclusive to the setting of the Manderley estate. Manderley therefore provides a ‘future of this uncanny life before birth’, a prophetic reversion that is concerned with facilitating Rebecca’s transcendence after death by manifesting an inter-uterine environment of uncanniness by which she can continue to ‘live’. Manderley is essential to cultivating Rebecca’s hybridity in her unnatural ‘survival after death’.
Royle further asserts that inter-uterine life is the “uncanny time prior to what may be called the ‘canny moment’, in other words ‘the moment of childbirth’” (Royle, 144). Whether the novel ever arrives at this ‘canny moment’ is obscure. The courting chapters of Monte Carlo perform as a sort of conception, with the remaining plot providing a gestational period at Manderley, the ‘uncanny time’. The novels conclusion therefore expects a certain canny birth, but this fails to manifest with the burning of Manderley hardly being the canny ending anticipated, but perhaps a necessary one; the reader has to awkwardly return to the novel’s opening chapter to consolidate the ending that will somehow validate the plot. Readership at this point physically engages with the uncanny gestation of the plot, in cyclically returning to its start to comprehend its end, the ‘beginning is haunted’. Manderley on fire is therefore an appropriate alternative to the ‘canny moment’ of birth; the characters are indeed granted access to an outside world, escaping from Rebecca’s legacy, but this is not established through an act of birth, but through a demolishing of the womb they were inhabiting. Manderley does not contract its inhabitants outward, but must ultimately destruct itself permanently for its inhabitants to break free.
Rebecca’s demise was equally appropriate, and dependant on her tormenting of Maxim at the thought of her bearing his illegitimate child. Here, the prospect of this ‘canny moment’ of a birth is what ensures Rebecca’s death. Their marriage had been developing towards this moment, which in its revelation of what is to be a ‘canny’ thing, the outcome is subsequently all the more uncanny in its irony. The ideal marriage of the de Winter’s would culminate in a potential heir, the canniest thing of Manderley externally, but the marriage is a sham, the heir illegitimate, and the awaiting outcome a death, not a birth. The ‘canny moment’ is replaced with the antithesis of childbirth; death. Traditionally this would be an antithesis, but in the context of Rebecca and of this enquiry, it makes for an appropriate conclusion. The plot therefore defies the ‘canny moment’ traditionally expected with uncanny alternatives, but in doing so, is canny alongside our enquiry. In fact, if the ‘canny moment’ of birth does occur somewhat in death, as “there was nothing on the body when it was found, all those weeks afterwards” (191), supposing Rebecca naked, expelled from Manderley bare like a new-born, when Rebecca’s correct body is eventually found, it was “dissolved of course, there was no flesh on it” (295). Transcending from the naked new-born to the skeletal body, naked to the point that its own flesh fails to remain intact does echo the entrance of a baby, but surpasses the homely limits of childbirth to an un-homely extent, transcending the canny moment of childbirth to an uncanny proximity.
Now that we have established Manderley as a ‘malformed’ uterus, it is imperative to address the nature of the half-breed hybrids that it cultivates. Freud expresses difficulty in deducting singular definitions of the uncanny due to the idea that “we ourselves speak a language that is foreign” (Strachey, 341). Language and naming is declared in accordance to Manderley. The only name the narrator ever acclaimed is Mrs de Winter, it is Manderley who maternally names her, and prior to that it was defined by her male counterpart; “you have a very lovely and unusual name” answered with “my father was a very lovely and unusual person” (25). She exhibits a hybrid identity solely dependant on her current cultivator. Born foreign to its uterus, the narrator must learn the language of Manderley. She considers herself “handicapped by a rather desperate gaucherie” (10), a ‘handicapped’ form within Manderley’s malformed uterus. The handicapped anonymity of ‘Mrs de Winter’ develops as it has the potential to be any woman, identified only by affiliation with Maxim. Whilst abiding to Manderley’s legacy, the image is simultaneously distorted by a mitosis of descendants; each a replicant of ‘Mrs de Winter’, each a hybrid of that trope.
The narrator certainly identifies with the uncanny “experience of oneself as a foreign body” (Royle, 2). She is self-declared “ill-bred” (75), as opposed to Manderley-bred; “they were not like me […] I was badly bred” (245). The narrators self-announcing failings of her breeding expose her as an anomaly at Manderley. Davies describes the narrator’s existence as an “under-needy body” and “asexual” (183), that is, fundamentally lacking in some essential human needs. She recognises that “poise, and grace, and assurance were not qualities inbred in me, but were things to be acquired, painfully perhaps” (90). Manderley supposes that certain qualities are not grown, but acquired, relying on some external resource to provide such an unnatural acquisition. Manderley thus facilitates this transformation, the catalyst to an unnatural hybridity that would not have otherwise been ‘bred’. This idea of acquiring development is evident as Maxim exclaims “it is not a question of bringing up, as you put it. It’s a matter of application” (162). This complicates the notion of Manderley as a solely active force that produces hybridity, but suggests its inhabitants need to engage in a certain application and submission to its forces. They must apply themselves to Manderley’s incubator, and consent to a resulting hybrid transcendence. “I don’t want you to look like you did just now. You had a twist to your mouth and a flash of knowledge in your eyes. Not the right sort of knowledge” (226) Maxim instructs. This suggests that along with Manderley, Maxim equally partakes an active role in influencing the narrator’s development. He requires a ‘Rebecca antithesis’ to comfort his patriarchal model of respectability and is threatened by the narrator acquiring any sort of ‘knowledge’ that will destruct her innocence and naivety. In this way, Maxim cultivates the narrator as a sort of nurse to Manderley’s womb, ensuring conventional heteronormativity.
Despite Maxim and Manderley’s cultivating efforts, Rebecca “radiates contempt for most ‘types’ and for both sexes” (Davies, 182), that is, it does not adhere to categorisation, but provides alternative hybrids that do not conform to static roles. Not all of Manderley’s inhabitants can be controlled; “Amongst this jungle growth I would recognise shrubs that had been landmarks in our time, things of culture and grace, hydrangeas whose blue heads had been famous. No one had checked their progress, and they had gone native now, rearing to monster height without a bloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites that grew beside them” (2). This parallels du Maurier’s The Apple Tree (1952), in which hybridity surpasses even the domain of the human as a wife evolves into an anthropomorphic tree in death. The gardener, Willis, explains that the redundant apple tree had “been barren for as long as I’ve worked here […] well, she’s taken on a new lease now” (123). Du Maurier’s apple tree functions both as a reworking of sterility, as well as a half-breed plant; or a hybrid wife. Concerns dealt with on the macro scale of Rebecca are confronted here on the micro. Death and birth are intertwined, along with hybridity and a sort of malfunctioning, at least misbehaving, uterus. A deceased wife indeed ‘returns’ as a mishap. Her widower husband complains how “even the moonlight could not give it beauty. What in heaven’s name was the matter with the thing that it had to stand there, humped and stooping, instead of looking upwards to the light?” (125) Humped with pregnancy, and laden with the inter-uterine poignancy of the moon, the tree is uncannily “pointing as though in accusation” (125). Deemed a “freak of nature” and “half-dead” (126), du Maurier experiments with hybridity as a result of other oppressive ‘womb’ environments.
Unlike The Apple Tree however, Rebecca’s narrator is flattered at the idea of being a decoration of Manderley, thus submitting herself as object to Manderley’s incubator. Frank urges the narrator to “look decorative”, which in response she deems “very polite” (143) of him. Upon the event at the fancy dress ball, where the narrator masquerades as the late Caroline de Winter, she claims “my own dull personality was submerged at last” (236). She is relieved at the idea of relinquishing her own autonomy to Manderley legacy, to transforming into a repeated Manderley clone. She contributes to Manderley’s attempt to cultivate her and submits to it willingly. The fancy dress ball serves as a physical opportunity for the narrator to reinvent herself and is an opportunity for hybridity amongst the remaining characters, an external success, but ultimately a tragedy for the narrator. She fails to exhibit the tendencies she feels she should as mistress of Manderley, leaving her to remain an awkward, hybrid guest in her ‘home’. Du Maurier confronts a supposed human need to be ‘cultivated’; “It’s a universal instinct of the human species, isn’t it, that desire to dress up in some sort of disguise?” (330), with the ball, or more specifically Manderley, providing the means by which its guests could be fashioned and divided into novel hybrids. At this opportunity, the narrator claims “it was not I who watched them at all, not someone with feelings, made of flesh and blood, but a dummy-stick of a person in my stead, a prop who wore a smile screwed to its face. The figure who stood beside it was wooden too” (252). The narrator refers to herself as ‘it’, her and Maxim having been ‘screwed’ and carved out of ‘wood’, purely material ‘props’ of Manderley. In addition to Maxim seeming “less fettered than he had been before, more modern, more human; he was not hemmed in by shadows” (26), this exposes the fact that when Maxim is freed from the ‘shadows’ that abide at Manderley, he manifests as more human, suggesting his existence has a sort of anti-human, wooden quality whilst at Manderley, that is exclusive to Manderley. This confirms that the womb-hybrid dynamic is a co-dependent one, one only thrives in accordance to the other. When absent from Manderley, Maxim reclaims his human form and resists his subjected hybridity. In this way, Manderley transcends its womb-like nature from cultivating the characters to a more sterile, mechanical automaton. Made out of material instead of ‘flesh and blood’, the characters are mere Manderley prototypes, and Manderley a sterile, clinical womb.
Rebecca of course remains to be a more autonomous hybrid than her ‘wooden’ counterparts. Crawley “called her ‘she’. He did not say Rebecca or Mrs de Winter” (144). Perhaps Rebecca defied categorisation as ‘wife’ or ‘woman’, a mere ‘she’, Crawley providing some meagre attempt at identifying her existence, before settling on a “beautiful creature” (151). Beautiful, but a creature nonetheless, uncannily “beautiful but at the same time frightening” (Royle, 2). Like Bronte’s Bertha Mason, Rebecca is threatening and out of control; “love-making was a game with her, only a game. She told me so. She did it because it made her laugh […] I’ve known her to come back and sit upstairs in her bed and rock with laughter at the lot of you” (382) the rocking, laughing, and love-making aligns Rebecca as a Bertha-like character, ‘mad’ and uncontrollable. Bertha remains to be a “lunatic kept there under watch and ward” (Bronte, 336). Mr Rochester unapprovingly does not regard her as even human; “you shall see what sort of a being I was cheated into espousing, and judge whether or not I had a right to break the compact, and seek sympathy with something at least human” (Bronte, 337) reducing Bertha as anti-human; “what it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell” (Bronte, 338) a hybrid, a “bad, mad, and embruted partner!” (Bronte, 337). In determining Bertha’s crime here, it is unclear whether it is being ‘bad’ or ‘mad’. Perhaps they are two of the same; according to Rochester, if a wife is to be the former, she is inevitably the latter. Maxim seems to reach the same conclusion with Rebecca, and thus, ‘badness’ is aligned to madness, and thus hybridity. Rebecca, like Bertha, is parasitic; these feeding qualities qualify her as the offspring of Manderley’s womb. Like the “catastrophe” (Shelley, 45) of the ‘birth’ of Frankenstein’s creature, Rebeca represents a certain doctrine or ‘breeding’ gone awry, creating the hybrid woman.
The inevitable outcome for such hybridity in Rebecca’s part is death, facilitated by Manderley’s reductive and reversed womb, an anti-birth. Rebecca and Favell’s relationship as “lovers” (365) and the threat of an incestuous, illegitimate offspring, “it would grow up here in Manderley, bearing your name” (313), is enough to instigate her murder by Maxim as it threatens to “taint his blood-line and its rightful ‘space’ at Manderley with that supposedly growing in the ‘space’ of Rebecca’s transgressive body” (Davies, 189). Ironically, the threat of a hybrid child that does not adhere to the already hybrid Manderley, the tainted blood-line already condemned with redundant conformity, is what Maxim cannot bear. Rebecca’s incestuous tendencies along with her assumed homosexuality, “she despised all men. She was above all that” (382),s transcends every limit of the Manderley conventional wife. She rejects this supposed identity and functions as her own hybrid-woman. “Since Rebecca’s uterine deformation is a separate issue entirely, and since it is also a wholly unnecessary detail in terms of the plot, its inclusion screams out for attention” (Davies, 187); whether it would have been her here-mentioned sexuality, “the growth [that] was deep rooted” (412) in her womb, or “the X-rays [that] showed a certain malformation of the uterus” (413), it is ultimately Rebecca’s own reproductive system that ensures her demise. As Davies explains, Rebecca’s “anatomical arrangement disrupts her female biology rendering her infertile: she is not a ‘real’ woman, then, because she cannot give Maxim an heir” (Davies, 187), thus explaining how she cannot be ‘woman’ according to Manderley dogma, so subsequently becomes a villainous hybrid. The fact that she could never have children inhibits her from ever fulfilling the expectation of a conventional wife of Manderley, and thus a hybrid in terms of expectation, but also a literal ‘malformed’ being. Unlike Rochester, “Maxim does not have a handy attic in which to store his sexual, taboo-busting wife” (Davies, 189), she cannot be eternally gestated, her delivery is imminent and she must submit to a “uterine tomb (or watery attic)” (Davies, 189).
The subsequent conclusion to Manderley’s ‘delivery’ is appropriate; “there was no moon […] the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood” (428). In failing to generate authentic life, but merely distorted hybrids, a conventional ‘birth’ would not be appropriate of Manderley. It must therefore bleed ‘crimson’, and be destroyed in menstrual, Havisham-esque chaos, as the inter-uterine becomes an outward ex-uterine. Like Rebecca’s womb, the only release is to be destroyed, and in this way the hybrids complete their gestational development and are released into the outside. Manderley is reduced to “ashes” that “blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea” (428), eventually exposing its womb to be barren and sterile; in its initial homeliness, it is impossible to be a home, an ironic unheimliche home. The ash exposes Manderley as a physical signifier of death and decay, as opposed to the fertile and productive space it pretends to be. The original uncanny nature of inter-uterine existence manifests in Rebecca, and facilitates a hybrid legacy, however Royle states that “the uncanny is not so much in the text we are reading: rather, it is like a foreign body within ourselves” (Royle, 43)[4]; in this way, reading of the text makes hybrids of us all, each retreating to some amniotic space, and cultivating our own unheimliche.
Bibliography
Attwood, Margaret. “Giving Birth”. Mother Reader: Essential Literature on Motherhood. Ed. Moyra Davey. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. 311-324. Print.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at how we Experience Intimate Places. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Print.
Blake, William. Selected Poems. London: Penguin Classics, 2005. Print.
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Penguin Classics, 2006. Print.
Davies, Madeleine K. “Rebecca’s Womb: Irony and Gynaecology in Rebecca”. The Female Body in Medicine and Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. 182-195. Print.
Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca. London: Virago Press, 2015. Print.
– “The Apple Tree”. The Birds and Other Stories. U.K.: Arrow, 1992. 114-157. Print.
– “The Birds”. The Birds and Other Stories. U.K.: Arrow, 1992. 7-43. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny”. The Pelican Freud Library. Trans. Alix Strachey. Ed. James Strachey and Albert Dickson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. 339-376. Print.
–The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. St. Ives: Penguin, 2003. Print.
Kelly, Richard. Daphne du Maurier: Twayne’s English Author Series. Ed. Kinley E. Roby. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987. Print.
Lee, Pamela M. Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark. U.S.A.: MIT Press, 2001. Print.
Lydenberg, Robin. “Freud’s Uncanny Narratives”. PMLA. 112.5 (1997): 1072-1086. Print.
Royle, Nicholas and Andrew Bennett. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. U.K.: Routledge, 2009. Print.
– The Uncanny. U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2003. Print.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Harper Collins, 2010. Print.
Smith, Andrew. Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the fin de siècle. Bath: Manchester University Press, 2004. Print.
Sollors, Werner. Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Expressions of Interracial Literature. U.S.A.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.
[1] Written in 1931 but published in 1938.
[2] Translated from the German “Leben im Mutterleib” (Lydenberg, 1077).
[3] Unless otherwise stated, all further citations will be from Rebecca.
[4] From An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, as opposed to previous Royle citations which were all from The Uncanny.
Literary Essays and Reviews 