Rebecca

Rebecca’s bold handwriting, with its towering “R,” is a recurring symbol in the novel of the first Mrs. de Winter’s undying powerful personality. The image of Rebecca’s signature, “the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters” (33), is especially utilized to convey the frightening dominance of the narrator’s predecessor. The insecure narrator compares herself to the imagined first wife when she views Rebecca’s slanted, almost brutal handwriting, “stabbing the white paper, the symbol of herself, so certain, so assured” (43). The sense of the dead Rebecca’s presence is perpetuated as the narrator notices “how alive was her writing though, how full of force” (57). Although the narrator attempts to destroy Rebecca’s continuing influence by cutting the title page containing her handwriting out of the poetry book, when she looks at the tiny pieces of the page, “Even now the ink stood up on the fragments thick and black, the writing was not destroyed” (57). The narrator sets fire to the fragments with a match, but “the letter R was the last to go, it twisted in the flame, it curled outwards for a moment, becoming larger than ever” (57), before crumbling to dust. The evil strength of Rebecca seems finally eradicated and the narrator feels hopeful about her upcoming marriage: “A new confidence had been born in me when I burnt that page and scattered the fragments. The past would not exist for either of us, we were starting afresh, he and I” (59).

At Manderley, however, the young narrator encounters Rebecca’s handwriting again—in the morning room where the first wife labeled the pigeon-holes in her writing desk according to correspondence category. The second Mrs. de Winter is shocked and startled to recognize the bold handwriting: “for I had not seen it since I had destroyed the page from the book of poems, and I had not thought to see it again” (83). The narrator discovers that the past is not so easily dismissed. Rebecca’s handwriting seems to admonish her for idleness. The narrator is haunted by imagining Rebecca’s confident signature, “that tall sloping R dwarfing its fellows” (86). When the narrator tries to write a letter, she becomes self-critical of her own “halting, labored fashion” in comparison with Rebecca’s apparent ease. The narrator notices “for the first time how cramped and unformed” her handwriting is and concludes that her own penmanship is “without individuality, without style, uneducated even, the writing of an indifferent pupil taught in a second-rate school” (87). Rebecca seemingly wins the handwriting contest, as the narrator reflects on her own unformed identity. Through the symbol of handwriting, it is illustrated that unlike Rebecca, the narrator was not born into wealth and expected to command. The narrator has had to adapt to others, working as a companion to earn her livelihood, and been unable to assert herself. The narrator must learn to overcome the imagined standards set by her predecessor and develop her own confident identity.