Rebecca: The Mind Obsession Can Help or Haunt The human’s mind is one of the most interesting topics in the world. How does it work? Many ask this question, but the answer is still unknown. Obsession can come from a small thing or a huge problem. When a person combined the mind with obsession, that can make an amazing mystery novel. In Rebecca, Du Maurier introduces the reader to the second Mrs. De Winter. Her name is unknown in this novel. Her identity is overshadowed by the first wife, Rebecca. After the honeymoon the second wife is brought back to the beautiful Manderley, the mansion. She is faced with the unknown issues with her husband and Rebecca. She soon starts to obsess over everything in the house because Rebecca was always present in a spiritual way. She …show more content…
De Winter is alienated, not only from the upper-class world that Manderley represents, but also from the world of adult femininity, of which she remains ignorant. It is this sense of alienation, together with her frustrated attempts to fit in, that make her both hate and identify with Maxim’s dead wife, Rebecca, whose ghostly presence represents the beauty, the intelligence and the knowledge that Mrs de Winter would like to possess. And the more acute her obsession grows, the more invisible she becomes (Patriarchal Hauntings: Re-Reading Villainy and Gender, 73).
The narrator identifies herself with Rebecca, but cannot find her own identity, “in that brief moment, I had so identified myself with Rebecca that my own dull self-did not exist, had never come to Manderley. I had gone back in thought and in person to the days that were gone” (Du Maurier 224-25). Feeling like she made the situation worst, the narrator runs into Mrs. Danvers to confront her about putting the idea in her head. Mrs. Danvers is constantly cruel to the narrator and repeatedly compares her to Rebecca, which she is not match