Mrs De Winter Character Analysis

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Pages: 4

Fiction Creates Characters
Mrs. de Winter is the main character. She is a self-conscious young women whose parents died. She became a paid companion to the American Mrs. Van Hopper before marrying the wealthy and older Maxim de Winter.

Fictional Characters Want Something
The thing that Mrs. de Winter wants most is for Maxim to love her. She believes that he is still in love with his late wife, Rebecca, and is extremely jealous.

Fictional Characters Succeed or Fail in Getting What They Want
Maxim was always in love with her, he was just caught up in a horrible past. He actually killed Rebecca because she was cheating on him and their marriage wasn’t working. So, she gets what she wants, but also learns that Maxim murdered someone.
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de Winter, the main character of the novel, becomes a paid companion to the American Mrs. Van Hopper. As a shy young women in Monte Carlo, she meets the extremely wealthy and much older Maxim de Winter whom she falls in love with. After he asks her to marry him, she declares “I don’t belong to your sort of world for one thing” (du Maurier 57). She is trying to be a humble and wise young lady, as she has been taught is expected in society by Mrs. Van Hopper. Eventually, her love for him prevails and they get married, moving to his massive estate called Manderley. However, Maxim seems to be distracted, over what Mrs. de Winter believes to be his love for his late wife Rebecca. She grows increasingly jealous until Rebecca’s body is found and Maxim confesses that he killed Rebecca. Mrs. de Winter, clouded by her desire for Maxim’s love, does not even care that Maxim is a murderer. She seems to turn to madness, repeating “He did not love Rebecca, he did not love Rebecca” (du Maurier 319). She obviously doesn’t testify against him, but society accepts that she is supposed to stand by him. These events change Mrs. de Winter, and she is no longer the innocent girl that she was in the beginning of the novel. She has become the grown-up that she always wanted to be, at the cost of learning the horrible truth about