“Je Reviens”—Returning to Jane Eyre in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca

Proud Sethabutr

Authors

Proud Sethabutr Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

Keywords:

Rebecca; Jane Eyre; monstrous feminine; feminist criticism; the uncanny

Abstract

This paper takes as its starting point the body of feminist criticism that treats Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca as merely a recapitulation of Jane Eyre, often dismissively, as evidenced in du Maurier scholar Nina Auerbach’s uncharacteristically scathing indictment of the novel, and proposes instead to read it as a narratological continuation or expansion of Jane’s epilogue. Through a close reading of the way that the novel disrupts boundaries between self and other, human and nature, beauty and the sublime, feminine and monstrous, and the domestic order itself, the paper argues that Rebecca is a site in which a certain narrative excess in the earlier novel makes an uncanny reappearance. This approach yields an analysis that highlights how the novel exposes the violence inherent in Jane Eyre’s Gothic romance narrative, wherein a woman's security within the domestic order comes at the expense of another.

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