Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

elieved the project would be well-received considering the prior success of Orson
Welles’s radio adaptation of 1938. 23
Rebecca creates a threatening atmosphere surrounding the courtship and marriage
of a young woman, Mrs de Winter (Joan Fontaine), to an imposingly temperamental
aristocrat widower, Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). Once settled in his gigantic
mansion, the shy and naïve bride feels fear and pain from the implied “presence” and
memories of the first Mrs de Winter, Rebecca, deceased in a boating accident. She is
tormented by Rebecca’s mean-spirited housekeeper, Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson),
whose loyalty, even after the woman’s death, remains absolute, perpetrating her memory
and allowing it to haunt the whole house. Her real character (and the secret of Rebecca's
death) only become clear towards the end of the film. There is a play in the entire film
around the revealing and concealing of the woman in the past – Rebecca – that is
maintained through an enticing trail of visual clues. The letter “R” of her signature opens
the film and is present on most of the domestic items and personal possessions that the
heroine touches.
Rebecca uses a female voiceover, that of the second wife, who goes without a
Christian name for the oneiric opening sequence. The film opens with that line: “Last night
I dreamt I went to Manderley again”, pronounced by the woman dreaming about her return
to her former mansion called Manderley, de Winter’s cliffside Cornwall estate, now a
totally burnt out and ruined place. We are then sent on this emotional excursion as her
story unfolds in flashback about the mysteries of the forbidding mansion and the dark
secrets of Rebecca’s death (fig. 18). Stylistically, the film relies very much on mise-enscène
and camera movement, especially the low-angle shot, to accentuate the fears and
fantasies of the new wife, who eventually learns that her husband did not love his former
wife, an unkind and egoistical woman. Rebecca’s power to haunt the inhabitants of
Manderley is achieved through her invisibility. Tania Modleski states that the way the
character appears in the film does not follow the usual representational conventions of the
Gothic female, where “typically, a shot of a woman is followed by a shot of a man – a
surrogate for the male spectator – looking at her” (Modleski 1988:52):
23 The producer David O. Selznick sent a transcript of the broadcast to Hitchcock. “If we do in motion
pictures as faithful a job as Welles did on the radio,” Selznick wrote, “we are likely to have the same success
the book had and the same success that Welles had.”
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