the handkerchief

The handkerchief is a small, lace-edged cambric handkerchief monogrammed with the letters R de W, which the second Mrs de Winter discovers in the pocket of a mackintosh she borrowed from the flower-room at Manderley. It becomes a potent physical relic of Rebecca de Winter, carrying her scent of white azaleas and a trace of lipstick, and it forces the narrator into a direct, tactile encounter with the predecessor she has never met but whose presence pervades the house.

Discovery and Physical Description

The handkerchief comes to light on the afternoon of the quarrel that follows the walk to the cove and the cottage. After the strained tea in the library, the narrator, her fingers messy with butter from a crumpet, reaches into her pocket for a handkerchief and draws out "a tiny scrap of a thing, lace-edged" that is not her own. Frith had picked it up from the stone floor of the hall after she returned from the walk, and it must have fallen from the pocket of the mackintosh she had worn. The handkerchief is grubby, with little bits of fluff from the pocket clinging to it, and it has clearly been in the pocket for a long time. In the corner is a monogram: a tall, sloping R with the letters de W interlaced, the R dwarfing the other letters, its tail running down into the cambric away from the laced edge. The handkerchief had been rolled into a ball, put away in the pocket, and forgotten.

Evidence of Rebecca's Presence

The handkerchief bears two distinct marks of its former owner. There is a pink mark upon it, the mark of lipstick, suggesting that Rebecca had rubbed her lips with the handkerchief and then rolled it in a ball before leaving it in the pocket. More hauntingly, when the narrator wipes her fingers with the handkerchief, she notices that a dull scent clings to it still — a scent she recognizes, something elusive and faint and fragrant that she cannot immediately name. She had breathed it before, touched it that very afternoon. Then she realizes that the vanished scent upon the handkerchief is the same as the crushed white petals of the azaleas in the Happy Valley. The handkerchief thus carries the signature scent of Rebecca, the same perfume that filled the valley where Maxim had described the azaleas to the narrator during their drive in Monte Carlo.

The Mackintosh and the Body It Implies

The handkerchief's presence in the pocket of the mackintosh leads the narrator to reconstruct the body of the woman who had worn the coat. She must have been tall, slim, broader than the narrator about the shoulders, for the narrator had found the mackintosh big and overlong, the sleeves coming below her wrist. Some of the buttons were missing; Rebecca had not bothered to do it up, but had thrown it over her shoulders like a cape or worn it loose, hanging open, her hands deep in the pockets. The narrator thus imagines Rebecca's physical form — her height, her casual negligence with clothing, her habit of leaving things behind — through the evidence of the garment and the forgotten handkerchief.

Thematic Significance

The handkerchief functions as a material synecdoche for Rebecca's lingering presence at Manderley. It is a small, intimate object that the narrator touches, smells, and examines, and it brings her closer to the dead woman than any secondhand description could. The monogram R de W, the lipstick stain, and the azalea scent all assert Rebecca's claim on the house and on Maxim, even in death. The narrator's discovery of the handkerchief occurs immediately after the quarrel about the cove and the cottage, deepening her sense of being an interloper in a world that still belongs to Rebecca. The handkerchief is one of the "little things, meaningless and stupid in themselves" that the narrator must confront every day, objects that remind her that she is not the first Mrs de Winter and that Rebecca's physical traces are everywhere.