Hitchcock and Feminist Theory

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Rebecca is largely constructed by the narrator and by what we hear the others say about her in the novel. How does Hitchcock’s ‘construction’ of Rebecca differ from the novel?

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.

- Simone de Beauvoir

The continuing appeal of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic-romance, Rebecca1, is tribute to its popular and academic influence. Published in 1938, du Maurier employs refined complexities and sophistication to provide an evocative investigation of the power of the past and its disturbance on the present. Du Maurier’s use of a naive and easily influenced narrator ensures the reader is completely reliant upon the narrator’s interpretation and presentation of Rebecca. Furthermore, du Maurier’s construction of Rebecca questions patriarchal gender stereotypes whilst also critiquing other notions that underpin and aim to preserve patriarchal order. Contrastingly, Hitchcock ultimately alters and weakens du Maurier’s didactic through the adherence to film censorship regulations and the masculine lens of cinema. Furthermore, due to the masculine gaze of the director and producers, the objectification of the woman as the spectacle is perpetuated throughout the 1940’s film. Although the gothic suspense of the novel is transmogrified into a sense of gothic glamour in the film, the adaptation unfortunately produces the inescapable conflict of character construction when a film endeavours to translate a female’s story within the male-dominated 1940’s Hollywood.

Du Maurier’s construction of the intoxicatingly magnetic Rebecca De Winter is derived primarily from the imagination of the young na...

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... Censorship, and Audiences of Questionable Type: Lesbian Sightings in “Rebecca” and “The Uninvited”. Cinema Journal. Vol. 37, no. 3, pp.17.

Castle, T (1995). The Apparitional Lesbian. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cixous, H (1976). The Laugh of the Medusa. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

De Beauvoir, S (2009). The Second Sex. Random House Books Australia: Sydney.

Mitchell, M 2009 ‘Beautiful Creatures: The Ethics of Female Beauty in Daphne du Maurier’s Fiction’. Women: A Cultural Review. Vol. 20, no. 1, pp.28.

(Modeleski 1988). The Woman who knew too much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall.

Pateman, C (1988). The Sexual Contract, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

White, P (1999). Uninvited: classical Hollywood cinema and lesbian representability. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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