the dream
The dream is the opening and framing device of the novel, in which the second Mrs de Winter returns in her sleep to Manderley, only to find it a ruined, overgrown shell. The dream establishes the novel's central themes of loss, memory, and the inescapable grip of the past, and it introduces the reader to the narrator's haunted, elegiac voice.
The Dream Journey
The dream begins with the narrator standing by the iron gate leading to the drive, barred by a padlock and chain. She calls to the lodge-keeper but receives no answer, and peering through the rusted spokes she sees the lodge is uninhabited. Then, as dreamers do, she passes through the barrier with supernatural powers. The drive, once familiar, has become narrow and unkempt, choked with grass and moss, its gravel surface gone. Nature has encroached upon it with long, tenacious fingers; the woods, always a menace even in the past, have triumphed in the end. The beeches lean close to one another, their branches intermingling in a strange embrace, making a vault above her head like the archway of a church. Scattered amongst the jungle growth are shrubs that had been landmarks in her time—hydrangeas whose blue heads had been famous—now gone native, rearing to monster height without a bloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites beside them. The drive winds on, now east now west, a poor thread of its former self, and the narrator feels the miles have multiplied, leading to a labyrinth, not to the house at all.
The House and Garden
She comes upon Manderley suddenly, its approach masked by the unnatural growth of a vast shrub. There it stands, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand. The terrace slopes to the lawns, and the lawns stretch to the sea, a sheet of silver placid under the moon. Yet the garden has obeyed the jungle law: the rhododendrons stand fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and have entered into alien marriage with nameless shrubs. A lilac has mated with a copper beech, and the malevolent ivy has thrown her tendrils about the pair, making them prisoners. Nettles are everywhere, the vanguard of the army, choking the terrace, sprawling about the paths, leaning against the very windows of the house. The narrator leaves the drive and walks on the terrace, for the nettles are no barrier to a dreamer.
The Illusion of Life and the Waking
Moonlight plays odd tricks upon the fancy, and as the narrator stands hushed and still, she could swear the house is not an empty shell but lives and breathes as it had lived before. Light comes from the windows, the curtains blow softly in the night air, and in the library the door would stand half open as they had left it, with her handkerchief on the table beside the bowl of autumn roses. The room would bear witness to their presence: the little heap of library books, the discarded copy of The Times, ashtrays with the stub of a cigarette, cushions with the imprint of their heads, the charred embers of the log fire still smouldering. And Jasper, dear Jasper, with his soulful eyes and great, sagging jowl, would be stretched upon the floor, his tail a-thump when he heard his master's footsteps. Then a cloud, hitherto unseen, comes upon the moon and hovers an instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion goes with it, and the lights in the windows are extinguished. The narrator looks upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls. The house is a sepulchre; their fear and suffering lie buried in the ruins. There will be no resurrection.
The Dream's Resolution
In her waking hours, the narrator resolves, she will not be bitter. She will think of Manderley as it might have been, could she have lived there without fear. She will remember the rose-garden in summer, the birds that sang at dawn, tea under the chestnut tree, the murmur of the sea coming up from the lawns below, the blown lilac, and the Happy Valley. These things are permanent, they cannot be dissolved; they are memories that cannot hurt. All this she resolves in her dream, while the clouds lie across the face of the moon, for like most sleepers she knows that she dreams. In reality she lies many hundred miles away in an alien land, and will wake, before many seconds have passed, in the bare little hotel bedroom, comforting in its very lack of atmosphere. She will sigh, stretch herself, and turn, and opening her eyes, be bewildered at that glittering sun, that hard, clean sky, so different from the soft moonlight of her dream. The day would lie before them both, long and uneventful, but fraught with a certain stillness, a dear tranquillity they had not known before. They will not talk of Manderley; she will not tell her dream. For Manderley was theirs no longer. Manderley was no more.
