May

The second Mrs de Winter arrives at Manderley in early May, a season Maxim de Winter chooses deliberately because it brings the first swallows and the bluebells, and because the azaleas in the valley will be prodigal of scent and the blood-red rhododendrons in bloom. She remembers the journey: leaving London in a heavy shower of rain, the clouds parting at Exeter, and the sun shining for them as they approach the estate. The timing is meant to show Manderley at its best, but for the narrator the month carries a weight of expectation and dread that no beauty can lift.

Arrival and First Impressions

When they drive through the lodge gates at about five o'clock, the narrator is struck by the drive itself—narrow, serpentine, flanked by a colonnade of trees whose branches intermingle like the roof of a church. The woods are dark and silent, and the engine of the car takes on a new, throbbing note. Then, suddenly, the rhododendrons appear: a wall of blood-red, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red. The narrator finds them bewildering, even shocking, unlike any rhododendron plant she has seen before—monsters rearing to the sky, massed like a battalion, too beautiful and too powerful. This is the landscape of May at Manderley, a month of violent floral excess that seems to announce the overwhelming presence of the house and its past.

The Season's Significance

May is also the month when the bluebells are in the woods, though Maxim has forbidden them in the house, insisting they must be seen in the morning about twelve o'clock when the sun is overhead, their smoky, rather bitter smell rising from the stalks. The primrose, a homely pleasant creature, appears in every cranny like a weed, and the azaleas in the Happy Valley are in their full glory, their scent so thick it seems to have mingled with the running waters of the stream. The narrator walks through this valley with Maxim on their first afternoon, and the spell of the place is upon her: this at last is the core of Manderley, the Manderley she will know and learn to love. The first drive is forgotten, the black, herded woods, the glaring rhododendrons. Here, in the Happy Valley, she feels no trespasser.

Contrast and Foreboding

Yet even in this perfect May setting, the narrator senses the presence of Rebecca. The azaleas that perfume the valley are the same flowers whose crushed petals later yield the scent on a handkerchief left in a mackintosh pocket—a handkerchief monogrammed with a tall sloping R. The month that should be a time of new life and bridal happiness becomes, for the narrator, a period of acute insecurity. She is aware that the rhododendrons, which she first saw as monsters, were Rebecca's favourites, and that the morning-room, where she must sit and write letters, is filled with them, their great warm faces looking down from the mantelpiece, floating in a bowl on the table, standing lean and graceful on the writing-desk. The room itself was arranged by Rebecca, every particle of furniture chosen with great care, and the result is perfection in a strange and startling way, vividly alive, having something of the same glow and brilliance that the rhododendrons have. The narrator, sitting at Rebecca's desk in May, feels the weight of a perfection she cannot match.

Thematic Significance

May at Manderley is thus a month of paradox: the season of greatest natural beauty is also the season of greatest psychological threat. The narrator's arrival in May sets the pattern for her entire first year at Manderley—a time when the loveliness of the estate is inseparable from the memory of the woman who made it lovely. The month's flowers, the azaleas and rhododendrons, become symbols of Rebecca's lingering presence, their scent and colour saturating the house and grounds. The narrator's experience of May is one of being overwhelmed by beauty that is not her own, a beauty that belongs to the dead. It is only later, after the truth about Rebecca is revealed, that the month loses its power to intimidate, and the narrator can think of Manderley in May without fear.