The plot of Rebecca thereafter will be familiar: it has echoes of Cinderella and Bluebeard as well as Jane Eyre. The narrator, working as a paid companion to a monstrous and tyrannical American, and staying with her in a palatial hotel in Monte Carlo, meets Maxim de Winter, a widower twice her age, who is the owner of a legendary house, Manderley. She marries him after a few weeks’ acquaintanceship, returns with him to Manderley, and there becomes obsessed with Rebecca, his first wife. Patching together a portrait of Rebecca in her mind, she creates a chimera—and an icon of womanhood. Rebecca, she comes to believe, was everything she herself is not: she was a perfect hostess, a perfect sexual partner, a perfect chatelaine and a perfect wife. This image she later understands is false, but before she can grasp the truth about Rebecca’s life, she has first to be told the truth about her death. Rebecca did not drown in a yachting accident, as everyone believes: she was killed by de Winter, who from the days of his honeymoon （also in Monte Carlo） loathed his wife.
Mrs. de Winter, once enlightened, accepts without question her husband’s version of her predecessor as a promiscuous （possibly bisexual） woman, who was pregnant with another man’s child when he killed her, and who taunted him that she would pass off this child as his. De Winter’s confession—and a very hollow melodramatic confession it is—is accompanied by a declaration of love—the first he has made, despite months of marriage. There is also the suggestion—very subtle but it is there—that their marriage is consummated, and for the first time, after this confession （note the references to single beds in the novel, and the heroine’s embarrassment when there is speculation as to whether she is yet pregnant—something that recurs frequently. Modesty may explain that embarrassment, but in a du Maurier novel, it may well not）。
Without hesitation, Mrs. de Winter then gives her husband her full support—her one concern from then onwards is to conceal the truth and protect her husband. Thus, she becomes, in legal terms, an accessory after the fact: more importantly, she makes a moral choice. This is the crux of du Maurier’s novel: de Winter has confessed, after all, to a double murder. He believes he has killed not only Rebecca, but also the child she was carrying—a heinous crime, by any standards. Here, du Maurier was taking a huge risk, particularly in a novel aimed at a popular market. To have an apparent “hero” revealed as a double murderer, one prepared to perjure himself, moreover, to save his neck, could have shocked and alienated readers in their thousands. Hitchcock, when he came to film the novel two years later, ran a mile from this scenario, which he knew would be unacceptable. In his version, there is no murder, and Maxim’s crime is at worst manslaughter since, during a quarrel, Rebecca falls, and （conveniently and mortally） injures herself.
How does du Maurier occlude this issue? She does it with immense cleverness: so involved have we, the readers, become in Mrs. de Winter’s predicament, and so sympathetic to her, that we conjoin with her. Because she loves her guilty husband, and he appears to love her, we too begin to hope that he will escape justice. If Mrs. de Winter is culpable, therefore, so is the reader who endorses her actions—and that issue ticks away like a time bomb under the remaining chapters of the book.
This final section of the novel, which is brilliantly plotted, concerns de Winter’s attempts to suppress the truth, and—with his loyal wife’s assistance—escape the hangman. And so he does, but not without cost. Returning to Manderley from London, with information that gives Rebecca a motive for suicide and thus saves him, both partners are uneasy. De Winter senses impending disaster; in the back of the car, his wife is asleep, dreaming that she and Rebecca have become one, and that their hair, long and black, as Rebecca’s was, is winding about de Winter’s neck, like a noose.
Mrs. de Winter dreams vividly twice in the novel, once at the beginning and once at the end: each time, the dream conveys a truth to her that her conscious mind cannot, or will not, accept. She prefers the sketchy and cliché-ridden visions she summons up when she daydreams—and she daydreams incessantly. The vision she has just had, of Rebecca and herself united, of first and second wives merged into one dangerous female avatar, she instantly rejects. Her husband halts the car on a crest near their home; the night sky beyond is lit with a red glow. （The color red is linked with Rebecca throughout the novel.） His wife assumes it is the dawn, but de Winter understands at once: Manderley, his ancestral home, is burning. This destruction was prefigured in the dream with which the novel opened, and the literal agent of the destruction （possibly Mrs. Danvers） is far less important than the poetic agent, which is Rebecca. Like some avenging angel, Rebecca has marshaled the elements: she has risen from the sea to wreak revenge by fire—thus echoing, and not for the first time, her literary ancestress, that madwoman in the attic, the first Mrs. Rochester.