Dreaming of Manderley: Individualism, Aging, and the Novel

This essay examines how Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca maps the bildungsroman journey of self-development in youth onto the process of self-decline in age, creating an uncanny structure that forfeits the climactic achievement of an ultimate self as bodied forth by the traditional novel. This ultimate self is a fantasy of Western individualism that reflects its historical devaluation of the limitations of the body and the associated necessity of human interdependence and care. The limited selfhood achieved by the narrator undercuts the individualist ideal of perpetual self-expansion and leaves her haunted by its fantasy of aristocratic power, represented by the Manderley estate and its former mistress, the titular first Mrs. de Winter. The concrete losses attributable to the aging process thus double in Rebecca as the subversion of individualism's ideal.