STUDIES ON PERSONA OF THE THREE PROTAGONISTS IN REBECCA

Abstract

Rebecca, written by Daphne du Maurier, the well-known British female writer in 20th century, is a masterpiece suffused with suspense and mystery. Since its publication in 1938, it had caused quite a sensation among readers and became an instant best seller that had never gone out of print. In the existing studies of the novel, most scholars laid their emphasis on character analysis, feminism criticism, narratology, gothic writing and psychoanalysis. However, the analysis of the personality of the Protagonist from Carl Jung’s Archetypal theory is rarely seen, moreover, no one has yet made a comprehensive study of the persona of three protagonists under Jung’s persona theory. By analyzing the persona of both the male protagonist, Maxim, and the two female protagonists, Rebecca and “I”, and exploring reasons resulting in their imbalanced persona, hopefully this paper could render a new approach to reveal the theme of the novel and interpret Daphne du Maurier’s dilemma in her bisexuality. In this paper, three parts are presented. The first part initially makes a survey of previous studies on the novel both at home and abroad, and then introduces Carl Jung’s persona theory. The second analyzes the three protagonists’ persona in detail: Maxim’s overdeveloped person, the nameless narrator’s underdeveloped persona and Rebecca’s well-balanced person; the last part explores reasons resulting in their different personas, mainly from two perspectives: the social background and Daphne du Maurier’s ambivalence about her bisexuality.