"Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier. Characterisation of the Main Characters and Comparison to Hitchcock's Film Adaptation

Pre-University Paper from the year 2018 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, , language: English, abstract: In the following, the Gothic elements in "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier will be examined and the main characters will be analysed: every character in the novel represents a different type of social class of people with different habits and living standards. Therefore, I am going to interpret these types with their qualities and debilities and figure out the actuality in du Maurier's characters. After that, my focus will be on the comparison between the novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and the film adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock. In order to compare them, I will search for parallels or common features, and differences between the novel and the film.
Daphne du Maurier is widely known for her Gothic novels and short stories. Unaffected by the literary fashions of her days, she wrote simple narratives that appealed to the reader's love of adventure, fantasy, sensuality and mystery. Her novel "Rebecca", published in 1938, was probably her most famous novel. It has never gone out of print and is one of the great international bestsellers. Du Maurier began writing it at a difficult point in her life: it was only a few years after the death of her adored father, she was pregnant with her second child and her husband, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, had been posted with his battalion. Her homesickness and her resignation about her wifely duties, together with a guilty sense of her own ineptness, were elements she included in her Gothic romance Rebecca. The novel's iconic opening line was born out of du Maurier's own preoccupation with Menabilly, a country house in Cornwall, which was later the inspiration for Manderley in Rebecca.