the truth about Rebecca's illness

The truth about Rebecca's illness is the terminal cancer diagnosis she received from Doctor Baker on the afternoon of the day she died, a revelation that retroactively transforms the inquest verdict of suicide from a legal fiction into a psychologically coherent act and finally breaks the dead woman's posthumous hold over Manderley.

Discovery and Diagnosis

On the last day of her life, Rebecca de Winter kept an appointment at two o'clock in the afternoon with Doctor Baker, a well-known women's specialist whose consulting rooms were then at Museum 0488 in Bloomsbury. She gave the false name "Mrs Danvers" — the name of her devoted housekeeper — and demanded the unvarnished truth. When Baker took X-rays a week earlier, she had complained of certain symptoms; now she stood in his consulting room, held out her hand for the photographs, and said, "I want to know the truth; I don't want soft words and a bedside manner. If I'm for it, you can tell me right away." Baker, judging her not the type to accept a lie, complied. The growth was deep-rooted and inoperable; the pain was still slight, but within three or four months she would have required morphia constantly. An operation would have been useless. She paid her fee and left. He never saw her again.

The Medical Facts

The X-rays revealed a deep-rooted growth that had already taken too firm a hold for any surgical intervention. The pain would increase week by week, and in four or five months she would have had to be kept under morphia. The X-rays also showed a certain malformation of the uterus, which meant she could never have had a child — a fact entirely separate from the disease but one that, in the context of her marriage to Maxim de Winter, carried its own devastating implications. Outwardly she appeared a perfectly healthy woman, though Baker noted she was rather too thin and rather pale; he attributed this to fashion rather than illness.

Consequences and Aftermath

The diagnosis provided the missing motive that the inquest had been unable to find. Rebecca, who had told Mrs Danvers scores of times that when she went she wanted to go quickly, "like the snuffing out of a candle," now faced a slow, painful death that her nature could not endure. The note she wrote to Jack Favell that same day — "I've got something to tell you, and I want to see you as soon as possible" — was not a lover's assignation but a summons to share the news of her terminal condition. When Maxim de Winter confronted her that night in the cottage on the cove, she told him she was pregnant, a lie designed to provoke him into killing her and thus spare her the protracted agony of cancer. Her laughter as she died was the last and most successful of her practical jokes: she had manipulated him into becoming her executioner.

Significance

The truth about Rebecca's illness, once revealed by Doctor Baker to Maxim, the second Mrs de Winter, Colonel Julyan, and Jack Favell, dismantled the blackmail case Favell had attempted to build against Maxim. It also provided Colonel Julyan with a credible explanation to spread quietly in Kerrith and the county, quashing any lingering gossip about the circumstances of Rebecca's death. For the second Mrs de Winter, the knowledge that Rebecca had been suffering from a terminal disease — and that Maxim had never loved her — finally exorcised the dead woman's shadow from Manderley. Rebecca's power had dissolved into the air, like the mist had done. She would never haunt her again.