The Manipulation Of Love In Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca

940 Words4 Pages

The manipulation of love
A healthy marriage is a love between two people maintained by selfless practices. Daphne du Maurier's novel “Rebecca,” tells the story of a marriage between the narrator and her husband Maxim De Winters. While staying in Monte Carlo, the narrator meets Maxim and they supposedly fall in love. She marries him and they move back to his home in Manderley. There she struggles with navigating her new life at Manderley while trying to find her place in this new home. Maxim's marriage with the narrator is not healthy or nurturing instead, it is toxic and destructive. He takes advantage of her naivety and exploits it for his own control.
Maxim is distant towards the narrator and only shows love when it benefits him. During …show more content…

As the narrator recalls the neglect of Maxim she says, “As I sipped my cold tea, I thought with a tired bitter feeling of despair that I would be content to live in one corner of Manderley and Maxim in the other as long as the outside world should never know” (236). The narrator’s grown so accustomed to Maxim's negligence, that she's more concerned with how the world views their marriage than how it is. Maxim has so much control over her that he can treat her with no love and she is content with that. Such is seen when the narrator pleads for Maxim’s forgiveness, saying, “I don't want you to love me. I will not ask for impossible things. I will be your friend and your companion, a sort of boy. I don’t ever want more than that” (269). The narrator has given up on the idea of Maxim loving her so much, that she is begging for his mere friendship. Trapped in the cycle of abuse, the narrator does not have the emotional strength to leave him. Maxim's neglect of the narrator has drained her self-worth, leaving her desperate for any validation he will give …show more content…

The narrator is left with no choice but to go along with it and hope one day they can finally stand together as one. This is seen when she notices Maxim laughing about a discussion they had saying, “I wished something would happen to make me look wiser, more mature. Was it always going to be like this? He’s away ahead of me, with his own moods that I did not share, his secret troubles that I did not know? Would we never be together, he a man and I a woman, standing shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, with no gulf between us? (199)” Maxim is not nurturing a relationship surrounded by equality but instead, makes her feel inferior and worthless. The narrator feels like she and Maxim are not hand in hand because of the deteriorating comments he makes. He destroys her self-worth and leaves her praying that they one day will be