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Early in the novel Maxim tells the heroine, "You have a very lovely and unusual name." But the reader never learns what that name is, or what her family name was before she married Maxim and became Mrs. de Winter. This absence of a name symbolizes the heroine's uncertain identity, on which she often nearly loses her grip during her time at Manderley. In marrying Maxim she has taken a new name, and her new acquaintances address her by this name, but she cannot feel comfortable in it--for she is not the first Mrs. de Winter. Effectively, she is competing for the right to bear her title of Mrs. de Winter- -competing with a ghost, the dead Rebecca. In each of the roles denoted by that name--wife, society hostess, mistress of Manderley--she feels eclipsed by the memory of her predecessor. Indeed, it is Rebecca's name that echoes throughout the book, over and over; and her name constitutes the book's very title. For most of the novel, Rebecca is on the verge of overpowering the heroine, and the heroine seems in danger of losing herself altogether; the danger reaches its peak in the symbolic scene in which she wears the same costume Rebecca wore to Manderley's previous costume ball. Only the revelation of Rebecca's true nature enables the heroine to feel confident in being Mrs. de Winter, and in being mistress of Manderley. Only then does she learn that the name of Rebecca, the name she has heard over and over again since marrying Maxim, has denoted a mere illusion; the real Rebecca was nothing like the mythic woman to whom the heroine had ascribed the name. Now the heroine must no longer compete for her name with an unattainable perfection; she can begin to forge her identity.
The Oedipus complex is a psychological theory that suggests that boys have a strong desire to kill their father and marry their mother. When the genders of this complex are reversed, the phenomenon takes the name "Electra complex," after a character in Greek drama who connived in the murder of her mother. It is this dynamic that plays out in
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