the hairbrushes

The hairbrushes that lie on Rebecca's dressing-table in the west wing are not merely decorative accessories but charged relics, the most intimate of the objects Mrs Danvers maintains as though their owner might return at any moment. They sit among the scent bottles and the powder, part of the elaborate stage-set of a life that has not been allowed to end. For the second Mrs de Winter, who stumbles into the forbidden room on the afternoon of the fancy dress ball, the brushes become the point at which the abstract legend of Rebecca collapses into a concrete, unsettlingly human presence.

Material Evidence of a Living Hand

When the second Mrs de Winter sits down on the stool before the dressing-table, she notices at once that one brush is more worn than its fellow. She understands the asymmetry immediately: "There was always one brush that had the greater use. Often you forgot to use the other, and when they were taken to be washed there was one that was still quite clean and untouched." This small, mundane observation—the differential wear on a pair of identical objects—is more devastating than any grand description of Rebecca's beauty. It reveals a person who performed the same nightly ritual the second Mrs de Winter performs, who reached for the same brush out of habit, who was careless and human and alive. The brushes are not museum pieces; they bear the trace of a hand that is now gone, and the second Mrs de Winter's recognition of this fact makes her own reflection in the glass seem sallow and plain by comparison.

The Brushes as Fetish Objects

Mrs Danvers has preserved the brushes exactly as Rebecca left them, "unwashed and untouched," and she describes to the horrified second Mrs de Winter the ritual of the nightly "hair-drill": how she would stand behind Rebecca on that same stool and brush for twenty minutes at a time, and how, in the early years of the marriage, Maxim himself would brush Rebecca's hair, standing in his shirt sleeves with the two brushes in his hands while Rebecca laughed up at him and urged him on. The brushes are thus the focal point of a remembered intimacy that excludes the second Mrs de Winter entirely—the physical closeness of a husband and wife, and the proprietary devotion of a servant who performed a service no one else was trusted to do. Mrs Danvers' account transforms the brushes from mere objects into evidence of a bond the second Mrs de Winter can never replicate, and the younger woman's act of touching them becomes a trespass into a sacred space.

The Brushes and the Mirror

The second Mrs de Winter's encounter with the brushes is framed by her own reflection. She puts out her hand and touches them, and then she looks at herself in the glass: "How white and thin my face looked in the glass, my hair hanging lank and straight. Did I always look like this? Surely I had more colour as a rule? The reflection stared back at me, sallow and plain." The brushes, which belonged to a woman of dark, vivid beauty, become the instrument of a cruel comparison. They do not merely remind the second Mrs de Winter of Rebecca's existence; they actively diminish her in her own eyes, forcing her to see herself as inadequate. The material object—a pair of silver-backed brushes—thus participates in the psychological warfare that Mrs Danvers wages throughout the scene, making the second Mrs de Winter feel like an intruder in her own home, a pale substitute for the radiant woman who once sat at that dressing-table.