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

In Rebecca 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 – as for example when Mrs Danvers asks
the terrified heroine if she thinks the dead come back to watch the living and says
that she sometimes thinks Rebecca has come back to watch the new couple
together. (Modleski 1988:52)
Figure 18. Rebecca
In the case of Rebecca, her narrative presence is over-determined by the persistent
conversations about her by the other characters. As Modleski notes, she “lurks in the blind
space of the film (...) but (...) her space, Manderley, remains unconquered by man”
(Modleski 1988:53). The questions of identification (or over-identification in Rebecca) and
recognition are part of the suspenseful mystery that usually involve a heroine in the Gothic
romances (since heroes must either be mysterious or of a suspicious nature). In romantic
suspense stories, we normally see both the hero and the heroine working together so as to
catch the criminal or the culprit (like in The 39 Steps (1935)). These Gothic novels,
however, are female-centred and so she normally works alone as she cannot trust the male
character or, when in love with the hero, it takes nearly until the end for the heroine to find
out whether he is of good character or if he has been involved in some heinous crime. The
element of mistrust is at the centre of the mystery and we very often find the heroine either
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