The narrator in Rebecca may be seen as the conventional romantic heroine, as she is the inexperienced, naive and dreaming child bride of a handsome, powerful, rich and condescending man. Being the second Mrs de Winter, the narrator is haunted by the suspicion that her husband is still in love with his dead first wife. Her fear and insecurities stem from feelings of inadequacy compared to the glamorous and brilliant Rebecca, who is still referred to as Mrs de Winter. Her fear of being inferior to the Other Woman stretches so far as when she learns that her husband killed his first wife, she is surprisingly indifferent. Instead of questioning the fact that she is married to a murderer, she is relieved to know that he never loved his first wife, saying: ‘None of the things that he had told me mattered to me at all. I clung to one thing only, and repeated it to myself, over and over again. Maxim did not love Rebecca. He had never loved her, never, never, never.’ (271)
Consumed with the assertion that Maxim only loves her, she never reflects on the idea that she might be in danger herself.
While Maxim seem to be guided by a “Madonna-Whore Complex”, believing himself to be justified in killing Rebecca in punishment for her promiscuity, Mrs Danvers, as Bernadette Bertrandias has noted, presents Rebecca as ‘a complex amalgam of attributes which, above all, transgress gender boundaries’. Rebecca is on the one hand described as being ‘lovely as a picture’ with a good sense of style, while on the other she has ‘the courage and the spirit of a boy’, and a diverse and ambivalent sexuality. According to Bertrandias, Rebecca’s strength is a ‘rejection of the social and cultural one-dimensional definition of femininity and the assertion of a multifaceted, complex and independent personality.’ Through Mrs Danvers’s presentation, the reader is allowed to form their own opinion of Rebecca, and reflect on the double standard limiting women to either be chaste ‘Madonnas’ or promiscuous whores.