Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rebecca’ explained: What happened to Rebecca in the movie?
The original film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling novel Rebecca was Alfred Hitchcock’s first foray into Hollywood filmmaking. With production bankrolled by David O Selznick to the tune of $1.3 million, for the first and possibly the last time, Hitchcock wouldn’t get things all his own way.
That includes what happened to the titular character, who is never seen in the movie prior to its event. Rebecca is the dead wife of aristocrat Maxim de Winter, who remarries at the start of the movie. His new wife, simply known as the second Mrs de Winter, is haunted by the presence of Maxim’s first wife throughout his stately home Manderley.
Rebecca may be dead, but she casts a long shadow over the house and its contents, from her evening dress to the sauces she chose for food served at parties, and even in the form of obsessive housekeeper Mrs Danvers. Why does the former Mrs de Winter’s influence over the place endure to this extent? At least partly because of the tragic nature of her death.
Early in the film, we learn that she drowned at sea off the coast of the Manderley estate, in an area that Mrs Danvers suggests is visible from her bedroom window. Yet later on, we learn that this account of her is not quite what it seems.
So, did George kill her?
For so much of the story, the second Mrs de Winter assumes Maxim is still in love with Rebecca and struggling to get over her. She believes she can never take her place in his heart. Mrs Danvers tells her as much, claiming, “She’s too strong for you. You can’t fight her, no one can”.
But when a sunken boat is recovered with “Rebecca’s body lying there on the cabin floor”, Maxim confesses, “I put it there”. He sank the boat containing Rebecca, who was already dead. In the original novel Rebecca, he did so because he murdered her.
In Hitchcock’s movie version, on the other hand, Rebecca simply “stumbled” and “hit her head on a heavy piece of ship’s tackle”. She died of an accident because Hollywood’s Production Code at the time didn’t allow spousal homicide to be included in a plotline.
There’s no doubt Hitchcock wanted to include the actual murder instead. Everything else in his film faithfully follows the novel’s plot, from Maxim’s admission that he “hated” Rebecca, to her tricking him into thinking she was pregnant by another man.
The way he disposed of her body and his arrest on suspicion of murder are also kept the same. Altogether, these details render the unhappy accident that Maxim recounts in a lengthy exposition during the movie’s final act quite ridiculous.
It seems logical to the audience that Maxim must have killed his first wife once he reveals that their marriage was a sham; she was conducting multiple affairs against his wishes, and she convinced him she was pregnant with another man’s child who would inherit his fortune. Hitchcock sets us up perfectly for this twist. Perhaps he presented the explanation of Rebecca’s death in this way on purpose, to make a mockery of the production code undermining his film.
