Return to Article Details Framing the Absence and Presence of Rebecca: Female Subjectivity and Voyeurism On and Off-Screen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca

Introduction: Alfred Hitchcock, The Master of Suspense

Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) is one of the most influential and commercially successful film directors of all time. He developed a visionary style with an aura of suspense that established the foundations of the psychological thriller genre. His unique ability to employ psychological tension, his thrilling plots, plot twists, and unexpected endings earned him the name “Master of Suspense.” His camera moves often imitate a person’s gaze, forcing the audience to engage in voyeurism. His iconic films, such as Rebecca (1940), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and North by Northwest (1959) revisit the themes of anonymity, the rise of the national security state, voyeurism in urban life, the psyche and fears of the individual, but they are also vital to the understanding of American life in the twentieth century (Freedman 2015, 1).

Hitchcock is well known today for his auteurial cinema, whereby “the name of the artist marks the frame of his work” (Foucault in Cristian 2008, 63), and the director is responsible for the aesthetics and the mise-en-scéne (Stam in Cristian 64). Hitchcock’s unique filmmaking style became known as “the Hitchcock touch”. Enjoying an exceptional degree of filmmaking autonomy, he played an active role in developing the films he directed and had control over the production process, as both the producer and director of his movies from the late 1940s onward (Schatz 2015, 25). I am interested in those technical and aesthetic strategies that established his public reputation, and the functioning of the memorable shots that gained his films’ cult following.

Thomas Schatz differentiates between Hitchcock’s different filmic cycles. The spy cycle of the 1930s began with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). The female Gothic cycle of the 1940s can be associated with Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946). The third and fourth cycles developed along very different lines in the 1950s. The successful romantic thrillers in the 1950s included Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959). During the work with Warner Bros, he made four movies, among them Dial M for Murder (1954), while Rear Window and Psycho (1960) were Paramount films (and Hitchcock ended up working with Universal in his final years) (Schatz 26). Despite its inexpensive budget and lack of top stars, Psycho created the ultimate prototype of modern horror.

Hitchcock, as “The Master of Suspense”, began experimenting with different methods of generating cinematic tension quite early in his career. Throughout his career, he thought of cinema as a primarily visual medium. For Hitchcock, image has always been more important in telling a story than dialogue, sound, and actors (Duguid 2003). This emphasis on spectacular shots that gained an iconic cinematic signifance is evidenced in the memorable and haunting shower scene in Psycho (1960), the nightmarish close-ups of scenes when the birds attacking people in The Birds (1963) or the visionary apparition of the unnamed narrator entering the dead wife’s room in Rebecca (1940).

I. Rebecca and Hollywood’s Gothic Romance Films in the 1940s

The gothic romance cinema belongs to the gothic cycle of woman’s films or – as they are often called – the gothic-influenced woman’s films, which came into prominence in Hollywood between 1940 and 1949. The best-known films of the gothic cycle include Gaslight (1944), Jane Eyre (1944), The Spiral Staircase (1946), Dragonwyck (1946), The Two Mrs Carrolls (1947), Sleep My Love (1948), Secret Beyond the Door (1948), and Caught (1949) (Hanson 2007, 40). These films were produced by well-known directors of the era such as George Cukor, Joseph Mankiewicz, Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk; Alfred Hitchcock, however, can be considered as a pioneer among them since chronologically he was the first in producing the suspenseful gothic romances so popular in the 1940s. The cycle began with Rebecca (1940), often considered the most successful of gothic romance films, and was followed by Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound (1945), and Notorious (1946) (Hanson 40).

The gothic woman’s film cycle had a feminine appeal in the Hollywood movie industry: their commercial and critical success largely depended on the star persona of the actresses. The genre famed for its fluid hybridity has been alternately labeled as “suspenseful drama, murder thriller, heavy drama with femme appeal, melodrama and cinematic psycho-thriller” (Hanson 40). Tania Modleski introduced the term “gaslight genre” (42), Britton interpreted the corpus as “the persecuted wife cycle” (Hanson 41) while Mary Ann Doane referred to it as “paranoid woman’s film” (Doane 1987, 123).

Paranoia felt by the heroine or the growing suspicion that her life is at risk is a common theme in these films. According to Doane, “the paranoia evinced in the formulaic repetition of a scenario in which the wife invariably fears that her husband is planning to kill her—the institution of marriage is haunted by murder” (123). From this respect, gothic romance film revisits the Bluebeard literary tradition: the unexperienced heroine marries a ruthless womanizer of noble origin and gradually discovers her groom’s dark secret about marrying several women whom he successively murdered in a series of amoral sex crimes. In most cases, the husband is unknown or insufficently known by the woman, and there is always a certain degree of doubt about each other’s identity between the male and female character, as the female protagonist often comments in her voice-over, “I’m marrying a stranger” (Shoos 2017, 41).

Gothic romance films apply many of the principal tropes of the gothic novel: typical sceneries include dark castles, large and sinister houses and mansions, gloomy natural landscapes and raging seas. Space, especially domestic space as the familiar suddenly emerging in an uncanny light, is central to its narrative. Holland and Sherman refer to this gothic formula as “woman-plus-habitation” (Shoos 41). The women-plus-habitation theme is of pivotal importance to the gothic subgenre called homely Gothic. Here, instead of haunted castles in foreign lands, the fears and horrors are transformed into one’s own home. The gothic romance films take up the women-plus-habitation theme on the level of representation through the images and the spatial relationships they construct. Rebecca, Gaslight, and other similar movies epitomize “the gothic romance film in its visual foregrounding of the mysterious space the heroine inhabits, undermining the idea of the domestic realm as a secure one for women and, on a larger level, potentially opening up to scrutiny the patriarchal institution of marriage” (Shoos 45). In these films, as Doane puts it, the home is not a “homogeneous space—it asserts divisions, gaps, and fields within its very structure. There are places which elude the eye; paranoia demands a split between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen” (Doane 134).

I. 1. The Production of Rebecca

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), is nowadays considered a classic, whether we use the term to evaluate, merit, or point out its popular appeal. Following the classic female Gothic narrative, Rebecca is about an unnamed, orphaned, naïve and young woman who meets the charming and mysterious English aristocrat, Maxim de Winter whose wife, Rebecca, died under mysterious circumstances. They marry in haste and Maxim brings his new bride to his lavish mansion Manderley, near Cornwall. The unnamed second Mrs. de Winter must adjust to her new surroundings in the upper-class world, while trying to be the new mistress of the house. She is haunted, however, by the memory of her husband’s first wife.

Hitchcock’s international career began when he left England for America in 1939. He was determined to do a film adaptation of du Maurier’s bestseller. The novel’s success also reached the US, however, most people came to know it because of Hitchcock’s brilliant adaptation. He signed a one-movie contract with David O. Selznick, who was a successful, independent producer in Hollywood. Selznick agreed to buy the screen rights, and when Hitchcock came back to Hollywood, his one-movie contract had been renegotiated as a seven-year contract, wherein his first movie would be Rebecca in 1940. Selznick cast the movie, choosing Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter, Joan Fontaine as the second Mrs. de Winter and Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers (Schatz 30). Hitchcock’s debut American film won two Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Cinematography and gathered fame for Hitchcock and situated him among the most prominent Hollywood directors in the late 1930s (Billheimer 2019, 72). Although, Hitchcock was the master of suspense, thriller, and mystery, he often mixed those genres with romance. In my opinion, Rebecca was not only a commercially successful, but also an influential movie, which laid the groundwork of the popular romantic suspense film genre.

Hitchcock’s visual and cinematic masterpiece is about a dead woman’s domineering presence and an unnamed narrator’s maturation and struggle of overidentification with her husband’s late wife. Thus, Hitchcock’s haunting tale introduces the audience to a spine-chilling tale about love, obsessions, violence, and anxieties. The movie was marketed both as a “Selznick production” and as a “Hitchcock picture,” an amalgamation of the two filmmakers’ style. The film was marked by Selznick’s propensity for women’s pictures, ill-fated love stories, and stardom. Hitchcock, however, was more interested in the film’s Gothic atmosphere, psychological qualities and the opportunity to blend the romantic melodrama with suspense (Schatz 31). Rebecca became a mixture of psychological thriller, murder melodrama, gothic romance, “paranoid woman’s film” (Doane 123), and a “gripping blend of detective story, gothic romance and psychological drama” (Dickason 2003).

Hitchcock as a director promoted an image-centered cinema instead of an actor-centered one. As Cardiff claims that “practically all of Hitchcock’s dramatic ideas were visual. If a cameraman is supposed to ‘paint with light,’ Hitchcock painted with a moving camera” (Cardiff in Jacobs 2007, 25). In the title sequence, Rebecca is described as a “picturization” instead of an adaptation. I believe this highlights that, as a director, Hitchcock did not just translate the words of a literary work of art to filmic images as faithfully as possible, but also provided a wide range of innovative special effects and created his very own and unique version of Rebecca. In my opinion, Hitchcock, by the term picturization wished to highlight that visuality and design are crucial in Rebecca’s filmic narrative. Hitchcock’s brilliant stylistic choices – the use of black and white cinematography, sound and editing – successfully establish the film’s gothic suspense. The macabre natural sets, the mansion of Manderley and the Victorian architecture take the stage in the film and contribute to the film’s moody atmosphere and also act as important symbols and manifestations of the late Rebecca.

II. Exploration of the Cinematic Rhetoric of Hitchcock’s Rebecca

II. 1. Feminist Theories on Gaze and Female Subjectivity in Cinema

Disapproving criticisms are in some cases related to Hitchcock’s supposedly negative representation of and attitude toward women connected to themes such as voyeurism and murdered women. Nevertheless, his films have been a favourite subject matter and source of inspiration for feminist film theory. The following brief overview of a range of feminist film theoretical perspectives might facilitate Rebbeca’s close-reading analysis.

According to many feminist film theorists, the figure of the woman in women’s films is associated rather with spectacle, space and image than with the narrative of the plot. Laura Mulvey focuses on classical Hollywood films and suggests that women in these movies are turned into passive objects meant to satisfy male voyeuristic impulses through being reduced into an eroticized spectacle, an embodiment of “to-be-looked-at-ness” (63). Feminist film theory claims that in the women’s films of the 1940s, there is a certain deficiency and failure in the woman’s appropriation of the gaze. Ann Kaplan formulates these questions as follows: “Is the gaze male?” and “Could we structure things so that women own the gaze?” (24). As regards the female spectator’s identification with the filmic characters she watches on screen, Mary Anne Doane draws on Mulvey’s theory, arguing that a woman has two ways of watching a movie: she can identify herself as feminine, passive, and spectacularized, or through a sort of “double identification” she might perform a transgender identity performance through adopting an active spectatorial stance, a masculine point of view incompatible with her biological sex and culturally assigned gender roles (6). Kaplan describes this patriarchal practice of transforming women into image as follows: “woman is likewise, as her actual self, a real woman, lifted onto the second level of connotation, myth; she is presented as what she represents for man, not in terms of what she actually signifies” (18).

Rebecca as Hitchcock’s first Hollywood success has been widely analyzed by feminist film critics as an interesting example of a woman’s film addressing issues of feminine to-be-looked-at-ness, female spectatorship and women’s relation to processes of imaging in general. According to Tania Modleski, the representation of women in film is more complicated than Mulvey suggests. Modleski in a more optimistic manner argues for the possibility communicating a female desire, a female look and a female gaze by courtesy of the women’s cinema engendered medium. She claims that Rebecca and other woman’s films

"do allow for the (limited) expression of a specifically female desire and that such films, instead of following the male Oedipal journey, which film theorists like Raymond Bellour see as the trajectory of all Hollywood narrative, trace a female Oedipal trajectory, and in the process reveal some of the difficulties for women in becoming socialized in patriarchy." (2)

Teresa de Lauretis, while studying Rebecca, develops a theory of the female spectator, arguing that

"identification on the part of women at the cinema is much more complicated than feminist theory has understood: far from being simply masochistic, the female spectator is always caught up in a double desire, identifying at one and the same time not only with the passive (female) object, but with the active (usually male) subject." (de Lauretis in Modleski 2)

Subsequently, Modleski draws on Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze and revindicates the possibility of a female gaze. John Orr challenges critics’ misreadings of Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze and female subjectification, and calls attention to the significance of the direction of Hitchcock’s camera and the possibilities of the female gaze many have unjustly neglected in his female gothic movies such as Rebecca, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, and Spellbound (85).

II. 2. Female Subjectivity in Rebecca

I agree with Modleski’s viewpoint that Rebecca can be understood as a female version of the Oedipal story or rather an Electra narrative because it features the female protagonist’s maturation and her quest for subjectivity as she tries to become the mistress of the house through rivalry with an older, ghastly, step-motherly female figure. Women in Rebecca do not necessarily lack narrative agency and independence. Dreaming protagonists and the fantasmatic exchange of stories are characteristic features of the female gothic films which celebrate women’s imaginative agency (Hanson 71). Rebecca adopts a female point of view, by turning the feminine power of storytelling into a crucial plot organizing device. Rebecca’s narrative structure is interesting since the events of the story are recalled by the older self of a mock-naïve narrator who pretends to be still unaware of the happenings that would take place. As the film opens from the heroine’s dream “the main events of the film are subjectively marked, she is the organiser of the gothic fragmented narration, and she is permitted to shift from the teller of the tale to a character within it” (Hanson 71). Giving away the ending and the mystery at the beginning of the film is not only an unconventionally subversive strategy, but also an invitation for the spectator to participate in the co-authoring of the narrative along with the female protagonist.

In Rebecca, the female protagonists are at the center of the narrative and occupy most of the screen time, while the male character seems to fall out of the focus. The plot is structured by different stages of the heroine’s journey, including “romance, suspicion, investigation/discovery, confrontation, confession, and resolution” (Hanson 56). Romance is a dominant narrative strand in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, while marriage is assumed to be the ultimate reward for women both on and off the screen. In the case of the female gothic film, the female character yearns for romance and wedded bliss, but her expectations are reconfigured. Many classical Hollywood movies culminate in the happy ending of marriage, however, female gothic films move beyond the happily ever after and scrutinize what happens after the marriage ceremony. The romance in the narrative is often presented as “an intense or condensed ‘whirlwind courtship’, sealed with a wedding ceremony that is more of a passing incident than a developed event” (Hanson 64). In Rebecca, the narrator works as a lady companion in Monte Carlo, where she meets the mysterious English aristocrat, Maxim de Winter, whom she marries after a couple of days of intensive courtship. However, as they leave the marriage certificate in the chapel, their wedding does appear to be a “passing incident” or a random accident that allows romance or rather “romantic estrangement to be re-explored from the woman’s angle” (Hanson 66).

One of the most important features of the female gothic narration is the secrecy or mystery in the plot. The constantly curious heroine emerges as an “investigative figure” and an “agent of the gaze”, who is in charge of the epistemological trajectory of the text, as the one for whom the secret beyond the door is really at stake” (Hanson 53, 134). As the narrative begins to unfold, the heroine becomes suspicious and engages in investigation and learns about her husband’s dark past potentially threatening her present existence (Hanson 56). For this reason, the female gothic film is often compared with the detective film and film noir. In Rebecca, the narrator takes up the position of the investigator as she slowly discovers beneath the mysteries of the cursed house and the sinful secrets of her husband. Upon her arrival, she quickly realizes that Manderley is not the loving and warm home, and her husband is not the prince charming she envisioned. Her disillusionment, a “rapid move from the romance stage of the narrative to one of suspicion and investigation shows the transition in the heroine’s perception of her husband,” and a drastic change in interpersonal relationship dynamics, a move from submissive blind self-objectification to inquisitive agency (Hanson 67).

The backstory is a crucial part of the female gothic filmic narrative: “Understanding another woman’s story is at the centre of the female gothic heroine’s own” (Hanson 60). The heroine gradually becomes more interested in her husband’s ex-wife than her actual spouse. She seeks for clues and misinterprets stories about her predecessor, who is described as the epitome of femme fatale-ish beauty and a sublime gothic double of the plain female protagonist. Her predecessor’s ghostly presence permeates the house even in her absence, and causes anxieties for the narrator about her own social inadequacy. She slowly develops an obsession with Rebecca and constructs an idealized version of her to which she maniacally compares herself. The detection for the dead bride hence becomes a risky journey of self-investigation, too.

In many gothic romance films, as the narrative unfolds, the male character becomes more and more violent and the heroine often becomes a victim of verbal and physical abuse. This phenomena or technique is called “gaslighting.” The expression describes “an extreme form of psychological abuse whose goal is to control the victim’s mind through fear and terror” (Shoos 39). In Hollywood cinema, the representation of domestic violence on screen was introduced by George Cukor’s movie Gaslight (1944) in which the husband verbally abuses her wife in order to trick her out of her inheritance by deliberately manipulating her physical environment to make her doubt her own sanity (Shoos 40). Hitchcock, too, was among the first to explore the themes of psychological and domestic abuse and laid the foundations for later domestic violence films, or as we call them today, domestic thrillers or domestic noirs. Interestingly, in Rebecca, it is not the husband who abuses the heroine but the housekeeper, who often acts aggressively toward the narrator and abuses her verbally. A master of psychological control, Mrs. Danvers slowly and subtly sows seeds of doubt in the narrator, who begins to feel as a second-rate person and questions her own perception, and judgments. Increasingly frustrated and neurotic the nameless narrator’s figure seems to fade away, as the former mistress’s memory – cherished by the housekeeper and all who knew her – gains a more and more massively overwhelming (absent) presence.

II. 3. The Role of Look and Gaze in Rebecca

The structure of the gaze and look are particularly cunningly structured in Rebecca. As humans, we are naturally curious and intrusive in our everyday life, especially when it comes to seeing something which is private or forbidden. The pleasure of the cinema is rooted in “the inherently voyeuristic mechanism that comes into play here more strongly than in the other arts,” granting “the erotic gratification of watching someone without being seen oneself” (Kaplan 1988, 14). Hitchcock played with the human scopophiliac drive, the fascination with watching by introducing a camera that stood in the place of the eye of the audience. On many occasions he forced spectators into the pleasurable yet shameful position of a voyeur. I believe that the most powerful aspect of Rebecca is how he manages to maintain a visual interaction between spectators and characters of his film. In Rebecca, voyeuristic spectators are also forced to actively identify with the protagonist’s point of view, to see, feel, and hear everything that the fictional characters experience. Hence, they will enjoy a simultaneous experience of onlooking and to-be-looked-atness.

Like many woman’s films, Rebecca uses for its narrative voice a homodiegetic first-person narrator. The movie begins with a title sequence which is accompanied by an out-of-shot commentary by the second Mrs. de Winter. The beginning of the narrative is also embedded in the frame of a dream, as the narrator says, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” thus forming a mise-en-abyme. The narrative is told analeptically and the audience is informed by the narrator that Manderley was burnt down, and they can never return. The scene starts with a foggy sky which partially clouds the full moon and an iron gate that reframes the entry to the pathway that leads to Manderley. Hitchcock’s mise-en-scène perfectly captures the haunting quality of the large mansion. As the narrator speaks, the camera zooms in and passes through the pathway which appears as a labyrinth, with its menacing red flowers. The spectator, rather than just following the camera movements, is instead placed in the position of the invisible narrator. Thus, as spectators move along with the narrator they get the feeling that they not only witness the narrator’s dream but also intrude into her mind and imagination.

Thus, in this scene Hitchcock forces the spectator to watch either what he wants him to see or what the protagonist sees. Hitchcock is fond of creating uncomfortable situations and makes us feel the anxiety that the character feels and often deliberately uses the camera in a way that the spectator is unable to avoid watching what they are seeing. It is often Hitchcock’s effective camera angles and lighting that forces the spectator to pay attention. In this dream scene, we, as voyeurs might feel uncomfortable watching someone’s dream, while we are just as passive as the character, unable to intervene. However, through this “embodied experience of ambiguity” (Kérchy 2011, 108), we feel pleasure, while watching someone’s discomfort or anxiety, although we know we should not feel this way.

Hitchcock is known for his skillful use of the shot/reverse shot and reaction shots. A reaction shot is a point-of-view shot, which captures what the subject is looking at and reflects his or her reactions (Hayward 2006, 354). In Rebecca, each time the protagonist feels threatened or reacts in fear, her facial expressions are shown in a close-up shot. Hitchcock makes the close-up shots more effective and visually compelling by how the camera holds the shot for longer than usual. This way the gestures and the reactions are highly accentuated. Through a very effective technique, the spectator’s gaze is governed: we cannot avoid observing the main protagonist’s fearful reactions, we watch her, but also identify with her, and respond together to the happenings around her. The most powerful feature of the film in terms of the spectatorial look is not just that Hitchcock provided a point-of-view shot to every character but that through the clever use of the camera, he manages to evoke fear and create suspense, too.

According to Orr, Hitchcock establishes a gaze structure in Rebecca, which he defines as triangulated gaze. This gaze structure is predominantly based on the look and gaze between “two women haunted by the absent presence of a third” (Orr 2005, 84). In the movie, interestingly, the gaze of Maxim de Winter (the male gaze) seems to fall out of the established gaze structure. The husband hardly seems to notice her new wife and he acts more like a father figure for the narrator than a lover. Therefore, a female gaze – the housekeeper’s gaze, the narrator’s musing detecting eye, and Rebecca’s absent look triply gain preeminence. The third gaze type introduced by Hitchcock is the judging gaze, embodied by the housekeeper. (Orr, 84-85). The sinister Mrs. Danvers is characterised by her judging gaze based on her “sudden appearance in a room: a woman with no footfall, her dark, still form often watching with face and eyes half in shadow” (Orr 85). The housekeeper’s appearance is frightening because in many cases her face is lit from below, which gives the actor a sinister and ghostly look. Mrs. Danvers hates the narrator because she thinks she steals the dead Rebecca’s place. Her role in the film is to mark the “heroine as an outsider and to act as keeper of knowledge about the family” (Hanson 75). Mrs. Danvers also acts as an important catalyst in the story because she constantly talks about the perfect Rebecca and with this re-embodies her through remembrance by fueling the narrator’s insecurity.

II. 4. Secrets of Manderley: The (Un)homely Home

Cinematic space plays a crucial role in each Hitchcock film. In Rebecca, every component of the mise-en-scène emphasizes the importance of the main setting, Manderley, where most of the action takes place. Both Hitchcock and Selznick agreed that the architecture of the house should have a crucial role in the narrative. They used many visual tricks for creating Manderley’s haunted atmosphere: the exterior views of the mansion, for instance, are shown only a few times in the film and were created using mattes and miniatures of the building (Jacobs 180).

Hitchcock’s mise-en-scène beautifully highlights the eerie world and the “phantasmatic quality of Manderley” (Bronfen 2004, 36). Bronfen stresses the importance of the main protagonist’s first look at the house: “Hitchcock presents an image of her new home from her subjective perspective, rising powerfully from amid the trees, then cuts back to a close-up of her face as she stares, openmouthed, at the spectacle before her” (36). Hitchcock stages the protagonist’s first view of the house as a quasi-erotic gaze of a phantasmatic site as image (36). In the opening scene, the house seems to gain an uncanny anthropomorphization. As a result of the camera movement, the house is staged in a manner as though it has its own look and gaze. Bronfen also observes that

"Hitchcock often stages an arrival at an unfamiliar home in such a way that the spectator has the uncanny impression that the house itself is returning his or her gaze. This disembodied gaze, which according to Jacques Lacan constitutes the subject, is effectively a missing gaze, in the sense that it is purely phantasmatic." (Žižek in Bronfen 36)

As I have mentioned, the house is not the safe haven the female protagonist first assumes it to be. Right after arriving at Manderley, the narrator experiences the house as oppressive, rigid, and disempowering. As Hitchcock stated “in a sense the picture is the story of a house. The house was one of the three characters of the picture” (Jacobs 176). One can safely argue that Rebecca is about a house and three women (the narrator, the housekeeper, and the dead wife), and as a gothic romance it emphasizes the menacing interdependence between the unhomely home and its female inhabitants:

"[the] women protagonists of the Gothic novel lose their bearings in a maze of rooms and corridors. This mental, psychological and often also physical inability to discern the structure of the house can be attributed to a spatial determinism: the irregular layout of the architecture encourages a disorientation of the kind. Often a literal labyrinth to the characters, the architecture is also presented as a mentally disrupting construction." (Jacobs 183)

According to Bronfen, “Hitchcock uses his reflexive camera to stage her subjection to the overwhelming architectural design of this mansion” (40). The protagonist is intimidated by the massive size of the house and herself often notes how little and insignificant she is compared to the vast halls of Manderley. For this reason, Hitchcock often raises the camera above eye-level, so it looks down on the narrator, and as a result, she appears very small in size compared to the large space. As a result of Hitchcock’s clever use of the camera, these scenes give the impression to the spectator that the narrator is dwarfed, and because of this visual trickery, the actual filmed space appears much bigger than in reality. Hitchcock also places doorknobs at shoulder level, thus, the spectator “receives a subliminal impression of the protagonist as a child peeking in on or intruding into an adult world that provokes both curiosity and dread” (Modleski 45).

II. 5. Visualising the Absence and Presence of Rebecca

Surprisingly, Daphne du Maurier’s novel’s most haunting and frightening aspect is something which is not even physically there – the absence of the titular character, Rebecca. In the novel, Rebecca’s omnipresence pervades not just the narrator’s mind and the whole text but that of the reader’s to the extent that she seems more alive than the actual living characters. She only lives in the memory of the living, who speak constantly about her and preserving everything the way she left. The secret of the enduring appeal of Hitchcock’s adaptation of Rebecca is the smart use of visual effects which allow for capturing the impossible: the absent presence of Rebecca.

In Hitchock’s opening scene, the narrator reiterates the lines of the focalizer-heroine of Du Maurier’s novel: “‘We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us.’” (du Maurier 2015, 5). The cinematic adaptation is true to the novel, as both capture the anxiety the newcomer heroine faces in her new home, where everything has been preserved as Rebecca left it and everyone in the household seem to miss her, and yearn for a return to the past when she lived among them. At the minute of the narrator’s arrival, the romantic dreams she envisioned about her future life and husband are shattered. She suddenly finds herself in the place of her dead predecessor, but is unable to take her place. Her girlish dreams and married life quickly turn into a nightmare. Both the film and the book version, Rebecca can be approached “not only as an exemplary text of returning but also as a rewriting/rereading of the concepts of absence, frame and memory” (Ferreira 2012, 230).

As I earlier stated, the narrator is constantly opposed by Rebecca’s memory haunted at every turn by traces of her predecessor. Hitchock’s Rebecca is everywhere and nowhere, paradoxically, she exists only through her absence. The film resembles a ghost story but only without a ghost. Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1993) writes about hauntology and the strange status of ghosts or spectres, which have a “‘paradoxical phenomenality’ that unsettles the conventional binary opposition or ‘sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being’” (Badmington 2011, 69). Neither in the book nor in the movie, does Rebecca ever appear as an actual ghost figure. Nobody is addressed by the spectre of the first Mrs de Winter; there are no otherworldly cries, no banging of doors and windows. According to Badmington, the film concerns itself with what Derrida defines as “the spectrality effect” embodied by SpectRebecca who is neither entirely present nor absolutely absent (70), both unforgettable, unrememberable, and unforgiveable.

The most fascinating aspect of Hitchcock’s visualization of Rebecca is that she is never present in a physical sense, yet the narrative revolves around her, as she occupies both onscreen and offscreen space. If Rebecca is not present in a physical sense nor as a ghost, one might pose the question, how does Hitchcock translate Rebecca’s absent presence into a particular cinematic language? According to Ferreira, the film’s haunting quality also lies in the

"intimidating spirit of the place, as audible in the words of Du Maurier as it is visible in Hitchcock’s dramaturgy, is conveyed by the evocative register of the narrator’s voice-over as well as by the subjective ‘I’ of the camera, whose panning movements tend to create the illusion of a female disguise." (230)

I believe it is Hitchcock’s creative camerawork and mise-en-scène, which convey Rebecca’s invisible visibility. Even though she is physically never present, Hitchcock visually recreates or materialises Rebecca in a way that the spectator has the impression that she is actually a character. Sutureing the invisible Rebecca into screen, Hitchcock uses various camera angles, movements and techniques. Pascal Bonitzer discusses the power of off-screen space or blind space in cinema in the following manner:

"Specular space is on-screen space; it is everything we see on the screen. Off-screen space, blind space, is everything that moves (or wriggles) outside or under the surface of things, like the shark in Jaws. If such films ‘work,’ it is because we are more or less held in the sway of these two spaces. If the shark were always on screen it would quickly become a domesticated animal. What is frightening is that it is not there! The point of horror resides in the blind space." (Bonitzer in Modleski 50)

In the movie, Rebecca dominates the offscreen space and “Hitchcock allows his camera to move into the position taken by the dead woman” (Modleski 49). In many scenes, the camera is actually filming a blind space, which always points to the invisible Rebecca. In fact, the invisible Rebecca takes up the position of the camera and the spectator follows the panning of the camera, and it gives the impression or illusion that we are following an actual character, instead of an invisible one. In some scenes, when the characters are talking, the camera shifts and takes up another point of view – a position taken by the absent Rebecca. The spectator has a feeling that this absent figure acts as a voyeur who takes the pleasure at watching the inhabitants of Manderley. Orr defines this position taken by the absent figure of Rebecca as the absent gaze. As he notes “in any encounter, the dead Rebecca always seems present, an invisible witness; always there as the text or subtext of any conversation between them, and always watching both of them” (85). Thus, the audience cannot feel but uncomfortable yet intrigued by this all seeing still eyeless gaze.

As I already noted, Hitchcock favoured an image-centered cinema instead of an actor-centered one. As a result, in most of Hitchcock’s films, the characters become “one of the many precisely calculated details in the décor” (Jacobs 25). His point-of-view shots in many of his films “freeze the characters into tableaux that turn the actors into architectural components” (25). Hitchcock always paid a lot of attention to the placement of his characters in the frame, and also to the visual, psychological and social relationships between the characters and their surroundings. (25). Due to his impressive technical skills, he was able to manipulate with cinematic space and “spatial deception through editing” (25). In Rebecca, Hitchcock makes a special effort to give the viewer a geography of the house as the narrator endlessly wanders in the house, exploring it room by room. This is testified by the special effort that was put into building the whole setting of the famous Manderley where an impressive amount of twenty-five sets were constructed for interiors (Jacobs 179).

Hitchcock’s visual way of thinking has been noticed by Jean-Luc Godard, who claimed that in a Hitchcock film “one remembers shots rather than scenes” (Godard in Jacobs 26). In Hitchcock’s films, the audience never really remembers the plot rather they concentrate on images. According to Jacobs, the audience often remember shots focusing on key objects: a handbag, a curl of hair, pair of glasses, and so forth (26). According to Sarris, “these objects embody the feelings and fears of characters as object and character interact with each other in dramas within dramas” (Sarris in Jacobs 26). In Hitchcock’s cinema, objects are very much fetishized and many have architectural and domestic connotations such as a closed door, a window, or a doorknob. According to André Bazin, the architectural details are part of what he defines as “doorknob cinema” (Bazin in Jacobs 26).

In Rebecca, we rather remember the fascinating interior shots of the house and the narrator’s almost claustrophobic relationship with the house as she wanders frightfully and endlessly in the house. In the movie, the motif of the closed door with a key in it relates to something forbidden or to a secret. The characters have a special relationship not just to places and rooms but also to the objects as well. I believe, objects are the very essence and substance of Rebecca, which play an important role in visualising the absent Rebecca. Hitchcock materializes the immaterial Rebecca through décor and setting. The camera often points to the invisible Rebecca by making beautiful close-up shots to her personal belongings. In almost every piece of clothing there is a large embroidered letter ‘R’, which was the late Rebbeca’s monogram. The narrator finds a napkin embroidered with ‘R de W’, the handwriting of Rebecca de Winter in an address book and menu and a pillowcase that bears the letter ‘R’. The absent Rebecca is literally imprinted on these objects.

Rebecca’s palpable presence in the house is the most visible when the narrator secretly ventures into the west wing of the house, where she is forbidden to enter. Entering Rebecca’s bedroom is the most chilling and memorable scene from the movie. The setting is carefully and meticulously arranged and it highlights Hitchcock’s creative vision and and mesmerising cinematography. Before the protagonist enters the room, the camera takes a shot of the bedroom’s large and impressive doors. As the narrator slowly comes to the entrance, the camera tracks her and takes a close-up shot of her hand reaching for the doorknob. As the narrator enters the enormous room, the spectator is introduced to this lavish room. In this scene, the narrator unintentionally but becomes a voyeur herself – a Peeping Tom – who lurks and peeps into someone’s private world. At first, the spectator only sees a poorly lit room and the only source of light comes from the heroine’s standpoint. However, the heroine is not alone in the room. Mrs. Danvers, the sinister housekeeper is with her. The narrator notices that Rebecca’s room has been left untouched as if she was still living there. Mrs. Danvers has this whole scene under her control. She shows the narrator around the room and forces her to look at the objects and Rebecca’s most intimate possessions.

Christian Metz argues that in narrative cinema, the cinematic object and the actor are part of a fantasy world whose “visual and aural richness are meant to veil its physical absence (the screen’s lack), and satisfy the spectator’s desire to see, the spectator being aware of cinema’s imaginary nature” (Raz and Meiri 2018, 241). Rebecca and other Hitchcock films such as Psycho and North by Northwest are among those rare films, in which the protagonists or other major characters are not “visually portrayed by actors, thus frustrating the spectator’s desire to see” (242). These so-called “bodiless-character films” prove that “narrative film’s paradoxical nature lies precisely in the unattainability of the object on the screen making it possible for spectators to let the camera inscribe them into an imaginary space” (Raz and Meiri 2017, 2). Bodiless-character films evince the imaginary nature of film, in Freud’s terminology, its ‘daydream’ status, while emphasizing narrative film’s role in teaching us how to keep desire alive. According to Freud, daydream is a “visual configuration that stages desire, emphasising the protective function of conscious fantasies against lack, because of their satisfying nature” (243). Metz compares Freud’s notion of the daydream to filmic experience as daydream in classical narrative cinema offers the spectator “an experience whereby s/he can pretend for an hour and a half that there is no lack. Although the spectator is absorbed in the sequences of images projected on the screen, s/he is nevertheless aware of the film being only a daydream” (243).

According to film theories, through its editing techniques and camera movements, cinema uses its “temporal and spatial discrepancy (the impossibility of spectators and actors coinciding in the same scopic space) to inscribe the spectator into the spatial and scopic space of its characters” (Raz and Meiri 243). In doing so, the camera imitates the human eye, which is present in the space where a filmic scene takes place and transports our bodies as if we were in the particular scene and allows us to see what the characters see but, at the same time, makes us realise that we are not really there (244). The actor’s body can function as a fantasy object to the spectator and “by ‘emptying’ this function, bodiless character films show us that objet a can never be filled and at the same time they reveal narrative cinema’s great appeal in that it offers a transgressive experience while remaining within the boundaries of the imaginary” (244).

Some bodiless character films feature deceased characters who are never fully personified embodied by actual actors. For instance, in Psycho, Norman’s mother is never present, we only hear her voice. It turns out only at the end of the film that Norman killed her mother, taxidermied her body and wears her clothes and imitates her voice. In Rebecca, we never see nor hear Rebecca but her omnipresence is indicated by the camera filming a blank space and by showing various objects that belonged to her. The film thus uses objects that “metonymically testify to Rebecca’s (omni)presence, which make up for her absence, and at the same time reflexively point to narrative film’s need to compensate for the screen’s lack” (246).

These bodiless character films prove the “imaginary nature of the unity of body-actor-character, hence of cinema, precisely by revealing the screen’s emptiness” (245). Cinema achieves this by engaging the spectator with the protagonist’s desire, which in the end is satisfied. In Rebecca, the narrator feels inferior to Rebecca and assumes Rebecca had been the object of desire for everyone who knew her. Through the film, the spectator witnesses the narrator’s unconscious desire to take Rebecca’s place and a desire to be loved by her husband. Rebecca here serves as an object a, a desired other woman for the narrator. As Modleski writes, “the beautiful, desirable woman is not only never sutured in as object of the look, not only never made a part of the film’s field of vision, she is actually posited within the diegesis as all-seeing” (50). Rebecca is also a figure of the narrator’s imagination and the audience never learns who she really was. Her absent gaze represents “the gaze which never coincides with the eye of the subject that does the looking; it is in the field of the Other, the object that sets desire in motion” (247).

In one of the most important scenes, Maxim tells his young wife about what really happened the night when Rebecca died. This scene can be considered as a primal scene because Maxim reveals that she actually hated his wife and accidentally killed her in the boathouse where this scene takes place as well. Maxim explaines the night he and Rebecca quarrelled because she told that she is pregnant and Maxim is not the father. While Maxim speaks, the heroine is situated at the end of the room and her look swifts from her husband to the divan where Rebecca must have stood before she died. The spectator sees this from her point of view, therefore, “rendering a static shot of the divan from her point of view” (248). As Maxim explains where Rebecca was standing, the camera simulates the absent Rebecca’s movement.

Conclusion

In this essay, I highlighted the importance of the genre of women’s film of the 1930s and ‘40s and its cinematic appropriations of the gothic romance genre. Hollywood gothic movies of the 1940s “translated and transmediated” (Kérchy-Sundmark, 2020) the literary female gothic genre onto the cinema screen. The commercially and critically successful gothic woman’s film cycle had a feminine appeal in the classic Hollywood movie industry because of the actresses’ star personas and the revamping of romance through generic hybridization. Rebecca, Hitchcock’s first American blockbuster and a par excellence example of female gothic cinema marked a watershed in the director’s career. Hitchcock was a pioneer in producing suspenseful gothic romances later known as noir thrillers. With Rebecca, he forged a new kind of contemporary art film that also earned popular acclaim. Stylistically, the film lent to his cinematic profile a different structure of feeling, the vision of sexual stress and desire, and a commentary on the power (the uses and abuses) of the look and gaze. I have demonstrated that Hitchcock’s unique style and special camera techniques reach uncanny effects by visualising the absent presence of the eponymous character. My spatial analysis explored how the narrative establishes the haunting nature of domestic space without presenting an actual ghost, presenting just a vision of the uncanny atmosphere itself.

 

Works cited


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