let her burn

Flippin' the Script #6

Rebecca de Winter is dead.
Her husband killed her.
And somehow she’s the villain.

Because we always need one, don’t we? A wicked woman. A difficult woman. Someone to blame.

Rebecca, 1940. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

I love Rebecca. The book captivates me with its atmospheric tension, but it’s the Hitchcock film that truly haunts me. There’s something about Joan Fontaine as the new Mrs. de Winter — so young, so demure, so fragile, practically trembling through every frame. While Daphne du Maurier’s prose lets us inhabit the narrator’s anxious mind, Hitchcock’s camera makes us feel her discomfort in every hesitant step. She’s naive, uncertain, completely out of place in the grand halls of Manderley. And because she’s our protagonist, we’re meant to root for her.

Which means we’re also meant to side-eye Rebecca.

But here’s the thing: Rebecca isn’t a character. She’s a ghost story. A myth. A collection of whispered horrors designed to make us hate her, blame her. She exists entirely in the memories of others — spoken of in reverent, hushed tones by Mrs. Danvers, in clipped, bitter remarks by Maxim, in the uneasy glances of the household staff.

Rebecca is beautiful, sophisticated, utterly in command. Her legendary costume ball entrances, her effortless social grace — all stand in stark contrast to our protagonist’s awkwardness. And so, she must be the villain.

But let’s pause for a second — what do we really know about her? Everything we learn comes pre-filtered. The narrator’s imagination fills in gaps with assumptions colored by her own insecurities. What terrible crimes did Rebecca commit to justify the fear wrapped around her name? She was dazzling. She was charming. She threw parties and captivated a room. She made her own rules. She had affairs. She was, God forbid, demanding.

And in a story told entirely from the perspective of her replacement, these traits are not just threatening; they are damning. Rebecca doesn’t need to sneer or plot or cackle like a traditional villain — she looms, larger than life, an unshakable presence in a house that refuses to let her go. Her monogram is on the stationery, her initials are embroidered on the pillowcases, her morning room sits undisturbed, a shrine to a woman who will never walk through its doors again. She doesn’t need to haunt Manderley. Mrs. Danvers does it for her.

And so does Maxim.

He roams the halls of Manderley not with grief but with guilt. His silence isn’t poetic brooding but calculated evasion. Every pained look isn’t romance but the weight of his terrible secret.

Because for all his tortured expressions, Maxim de Winter isn’t a grieving husband — he’s a murderer. He is the one who decided that Rebecca needed to be erased. That she had too much control. That she was too much, period.

Yet Rebecca is the name we remember, the one that’s muttered as a warning. Not Maxim’s. Not the weak-willed husband who killed her.

Because we always need a villain. And it’s easier to make it her.

It’s not lost on me that Joan Fontaine, our delicate heroine, is at the center of another famous story of rivalry. Offscreen, she was the one cast as the troublemaker in a lifelong feud with her sister, Olivia de Havilland.

Just like Rebecca, the public decided who to root for and who to blame. The story demands a saint and a sinner. The good sister and the bad one. The tragic wife and the evil temptress. A woman to admire and a woman to cast aside.

And Joan, despite playing the meek, quivering Mrs. de Winter, was never actually that way. That was Olivia. Olivia, the refined, dignified elder sister. Olivia, the Hollywood grande dame. Joan, despite winning her own Oscar — before Olivia, no less — was still cast as the lesser one. The bitter one. The difficult one.

But why? Why was Joan the “bad” sister for refusing to bite her tongue? For saying exactly what she thought? And why was Olivia the “good” one simply for keeping quiet?

Because silence is graceful. Because deference is rewarded. Because a woman who swallows her resentment, who keeps her grievances neatly tucked away, is easier to admire than one who spits them out.

Joan was honest. She didn’t temper her words, didn’t tailor her personality to be more agreeable, didn’t pretend to like what she despised. And that made her bad. Olivia, by contrast, was measured. Composed. She understood the value of restraint. And that made her good.

We tell people that endurance is a virtue. That the best thing they can do is keep the peace. Smile through the slight. Swallow the insult. Make themselves softer, smaller, easier to bear. But the moment they say, Actually, no. I don’t like this. I don’t like you. And I don’t care if that makes you uncomfortable — the crowd turns.

Joan Fontaine was the problem. Not necessarily because she was cruel. Not necessarily because she was unkind. But because she refused to pretend. She didn’t smooth over the edges. She let the world see exactly what she thought of it.

And isn’t that just another version of Rebecca?

A woman who would not shrink. Who would not become the sweet, docile wife her husband wished he had married. A woman punished for it, even in death.

So they made her disappear.

But not every rivalry is a tragedy. Not every fraught relationship has a villain. Sometimes people simply don’t like each other. Sometimes they are too much — too proud, too stubborn, too unwilling to bend. Too alike in the ways that breed resentment, too different in the ways that make understanding impossible. Sometimes the wounds aren’t deep betrayals but a thousand small cuts — slights, misunderstandings, moments where one reached for grace and the other pulled away. And sometimes, that’s just the way it is. Not a grand moral failing. Not a battle of light versus darkness. Just two people, caught in the tangle of their own histories, unable — or unwilling — to find their way out.

But we crave tidy stories. We want resolution. A good sister and a bad one. A wife to mourn and a wife to despise. Something clean. Something easy.

But life isn’t easy, and Olivia and Joan weren’t simple. They were two brilliant, ambitious women fighting for the same space, the same status, the same scraps of respect. Make no mistake, there was no love lost between them. But that’s not the point. They clashed, they chafed under the weight of it all — does that make either of them wrong?

Do we have to pick a side?

Just like Rebecca de Winter.

We are told to revile her. To shrink from her. To believe she was something awful. But what if she wasn’t? What if she was simply a woman who did not beg to be loved? A woman who saw no need to apologize?

And what happens to women like that?

Sometimes, they burn.

Yield, or the world will strike the match for you.

Manderley is reduced to ash, just like Rebecca herself. She is erased, wiped from existence. Contained.

But fire is not always destruction. Sometimes it is revelation. Sometimes it is freedom. Because once the smoke clears, once the embers die — there is nothing left to hide behind. No illusions. No pretty lies. No more pretending.

Because there was never a villain. Only a woman who refused to disappear.

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