Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca: The Replacement Wife

This chapter offers a critical analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), a film pervaded at first by a fairy-tale atmosphere progressively transforming into a murder story culminating in a kind of Gothic-horror finale. Here, however, the plot with its suspenseful elements remains less interesting than the psychological characterization and emotional vicissitudes of its protagonists. After briefly introducing its director, producer (David O. Selznick), lead actors (Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine) and novelist (Daphne Du Maurier), this chapter describes the film’s narrative and reflects upon the complex personalities of its lead characters: a socially and psychologically badly assorted couple, painfully incapable to satisfy each other’s emotional needs. The focus is on the two female dramatis personae: the troubled second Mrs. de Winter, a young and timid woman in love with her high-society husband Maxim but always feeling out of place in his wealthy environment, and the creepy Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper at the Manderley grand mansion where the couple has recently moved; her uninterrupted attachment to her late employer, the first Mrs. de Winter, displays clear morbid features, including fetishistic ones for all the objects that had belonged to her. Memories of Rebecca, the deceased but still powerfully present first Mrs. de Winter, dominate both the action and the internal world of the film’s protagonists. One of the resons why Rebecca is relevant to psychoanalysis is because it is a movie primarily concerned with the enormous power that memories—sometimes comforting, other times disturbing ones—have in shaping people’s lives; such concepts as the replacement child, the uncanny, the shadow of the object and the presence of absence are introduced to provide a psychoanalytically informed perspective on the movie.