Rebecca: Chapter 27 Summary & Analysis

As usual, Jack Favell puts everything into plain language: Maxim has just caught a lucky break. Even though Rebecca intended to frame her husband for murder by sacrificing her own life, the detectives will conclude that she killed herself (and in a way, of course, she did).

Maxim accepts the Colonel’s conclusion, even though it will undoubtedly cause a flood of gossip at Manderley (to say the least, it makes Maxim look like a wicked husband who drove his wife to suicide). This isn’t ideal, but it’s preferable to being accused of murder.

Julyan’s parting words to Maxim and the narrator suggest that, like Maxim, he was really most concerned with the public perception of Manderley all along, rather than ensuring that justice was served. He always acted as a rather biased detective, and seems as relieved as Maxim is to be able to justify his “verdict” of suicide. Maxim’s privilege is shown in plain view as Julyan leaves the scene—instead of Rebecca’s murder being thoroughly pursued and ending with a (correct) conviction for Maxim, instead Julyan performs a rather halfhearted investigation and ends by advising Maxim to visit Switzerland.

Maxim confirms this to be the case—Julyan figured out the truth, but just didn’t want to start a scandal. This motive may seem foreign by modern standards, but a century ago it wasn’t uncommon for the police to take aristocrats’ sides in a criminal case, even in the face of all the evidence. Despite everything, Maxim still displays no regret for his actions, and even feels more justified now that he has learned that Rebecca probably wanted him to kill her. All this makes us wonder if he’s as admirable a husband as the narrator still seems to believe.

The mention of Mrs. Danvers in this scene is particularly menacing, because now Mrs. Danvers has all the information, and she knows Rebecca well enough to deduce that Rebecca manipulated Maxim into killing her. There’s no telling that Danvers will do, now that she blames Maxim for the death of the woman she admired above all others. One other uncomfortable element of this section is that the narrator seems perfectly comfortable in her role as “child bearer” for her husband: she’s finally embraced the role of the perfect, subdued English wife, where previously she’d struggled with it. One could easily interpret this to mean that the narrator is surrendering her freedom to fit with misogynistic gender roles—the exact opposite of Rebecca, who pushed for her freedom and independence up to the end, even in the very manner of her death.

Du Maurier leaves it up to the reader to decide what kind of relationship the narrator can have with Maxim, now that she knows the truth about Rebecca. For the time being, she seems content to travel with her husband, and to have accepted the fact that her husband is a murderer. Some critics see the narrator’s acceptance as a mark of her maturity and intelligence, while others see it as foolish or even misogynistic—the narrator accepts her husband’s hatred of Rebecca without question, never thinking that perhaps Rebecca wasn’t such a one-dimensional villain, and that Maxim’s anger might be turned on her someday.

In this shocking finale, we discover that Manderley—the symbol of the past, of trauma, and of Rebecca, is destroyed. (Though it’s not explained, we can assume that Danvers has destroyed the manor in revenge for Maxim’s murder of her beloved mistress.) Perhaps the destruction of Manderley is meant to symbolize the end of Rebecca’s stranglehold on Maxim and the narrator’s lives: now that the case is closed, Maxim and the narrator can move on and be free of Rebecca’s oppressive presence. By a slightly different reasoning, we should note that the end of Manderley also exactly coincides with the end of the book. Rebecca—the novel we’ve just finished—was a confession, written by the narrator for the reader. Over the course of the last 300 pages, the narrator has “worked through” her conflicted feelings about Rebecca, Manderley, and Maxim. Now that she’s shared her guilty, her pain, and her anxiety with us, she’s ready to move on. Perhaps she’ll now stop “dreaming about Manderley again.”