the mackintosh

The mackintosh is a raincoat that hangs in the flower-room at Manderley, a garment left behind by Rebecca de Winter and later worn unknowingly by the second Mrs de Winter. It becomes a charged object through which the narrator physically encounters the lingering presence of her predecessor, revealing the extent to which Rebecca's possessions still permeate the house and the narrator's daily life.

Discovery and First Use

On the afternoon of the walk to the cove, when Maxim de Winter impatiently calls for a coat, he directs Robert to fetch one from the flower-room, saying, "There must be half a dozen raincoats hanging there left by people at one time or another." The narrator struggles into the coat, which is too big and too long, but there is no time to change it. She does not know whose coat it is, and Maxim does not tell her. The coat is simply a practical garment, grabbed in haste for a walk in the rain. Its size and fit, however, already hint at a different body: the narrator finds it "big and overlong," with sleeves that come below her wrist and some buttons missing.

The Handkerchief in the Pocket

Later that same day, after the walk and the quarrel, the narrator sits in the library with Maxim. She takes a piece of crumpet and divides it between the dogs, then feels in her pocket for a handkerchief. She draws out "a tiny scrap of a thing, lace-edged" that is not hers. Frith had picked it up from the stone floor of the hall, and it must have fallen out of the mackintosh pocket. The handkerchief is grubby, with little bits of fluff clinging to it, and 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, the tail running down into the cambric away from the laced edge. The narrator realizes that she must have been the first person to put on that mackintosh since the handkerchief was used. She who had worn the coat before was tall, slim, broader about the shoulders. There is a pink mark on the handkerchief, the mark of lipstick. Rebecca had rubbed her lips with it, then rolled it in a ball and left it in the pocket.

The Scent of the Azaleas

As the narrator wipes her fingers with the handkerchief, she notices that a dull scent clings to it still, a scent she recognizes but cannot name. She had breathed it before, touched it that very afternoon. Then she knows: 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 not only Rebecca's monogram and the trace of her lipstick but also the distinctive fragrance of the flowers that grow in the valley Maxim had described to the narrator in Monte Carlo. The object becomes a sensory bridge between the living and the dead, collapsing the distance between the narrator's present and Rebecca's past.

Significance

The mackintosh and its hidden handkerchief function as a key moment in the narrator's growing awareness of Rebecca's inescapable presence at Manderley. The coat is not merely a forgotten garment; it is a vessel for Rebecca's physical traces—her height, her scent, her careless habit of leaving things in pockets. The narrator's unwitting use of the coat and her discovery of the handkerchief force her to confront the reality that Rebecca's belongings are still in use, still part of the household's daily life, and that she herself is inhabiting the spaces and objects of a woman who is dead but not gone. The mackintosh thus exemplifies the novel's central theme: the past is not past, and the dead continue to inhabit the world of the living through the material objects they have left behind.