Love, Identification and Feminine Subjectivity: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Reading of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Li, Min-Ying
Abstract
This thesis aims to propose a new interpretation to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) by means of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Contrary to traditional patriarchal reading, which tends to read Rebecca as a negative symbol of ‘bad woman’, based on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this thesis argues that Rebecca in fact plays an important helping role in the formation of the narrator I’s feminine subjectivity. Chapter One attempts to reanalyze the relationship between the two Mmes. de Winters, Rebecca and I. By resorting to Lacan’s Mirror Stage theory, which delineates the process of ego formation through identifying with the mirror image and the traverse from the Imaginary Order to the Symbolic Order, this chapter explains how I is transformed from an unsophisticated young girl to a feminine subject by identifying with the gestalt figure, Rebecca. Subsequently, Chapter Two further investigates the relationship between the two Mmes. de Winters and their husband, Maxim de Winter. This chapter not only intends to reconsider the relationship between these three characters via Lacan’s sexuation diagram and sexuation theory proposed in his Seminar XX, but also simultaneously subverts the traditional reading of their relation as a love triangle. Through identifying with Rebecca, I is able to form her feminine subjectivity, and from this, the author du Maurier suggests the possibility of a rising new feminine subjectivity in the 20th century.
Subjects
Rebecca
Lacanian Psychoanalysis
mirror-stage relation
love
sexual relationship
feminine subjectivity
Type
thesis