Rebecca

In the west wing corridor, the narrator opens the door from which Mrs. Danvers exited on her first morning at Manderley. She enters a dressing room filled with wardrobes, and then Rebecca’s bedroom. By the electric light, she is shocked to see a room furnished with flowers, brushes and combs on the dressing-table, a freshly made bed, and a satin dressing-gown with slippers. Expecting to see a shuttered room with sheet-covered furniture, the narrator is disoriented: “I thought that something had happened to my brain, that I was seeing back into Time, and looking upon the room as it used to be, before she died” (165). For a moment, she expects Rebecca to walk into the room. She waits for something to happen, until the ticking clock brings her back to present-day reality. She realizes that the flowers do not conceal the musty smell of disuse. She tells herself that Rebecca has been dead for a year, buried in the de Winters’s church crypt. She opens the shutter and discovers it is the same window at which Favell and Mrs. Danvers stood earlier that day. Daylight brings the room alive. She feels like an uninvited guest who “had strolled into my hostess’s bedroom by mistake” (165).