Examples Of Sympathy For Rebecca '

Barristers in court often attempt to pull on the emotions of the jury to get their sympathy in order to excuse the perpetrator of a crime. It is no different for the narrators in these novels. It is true to the gothic genre to have male characters with a mysterious painful past which haunts them throughout the novel. Both Bronte and Du Maurier attempt to justify the crimes committed by their male protagonists Edgar Rochester and Maxim De Winter. Du Maurier seeks to justify why Maxim killed his first wife Rebecca, in order to prevent her illegitimate child from becoming the heir to Manderly. The novel is resolved when it emerges that Rebecca was not pregnant, but extremely ill with cancer and she had in fact manipulated Maxim into killing her. Bronte also attempts to justify Rochester’s crimes.
Mrs Danvers reveals Rebecca ‘despised all men’ and this prompts some pity for Maxim because it is then clear Rebecca hated him too. Her threat to Maxim that ‘neither you, nor anyone in the world would ever prove that it was not yours…It would grow up here in Manderley bearing your name’ clearly presents to the reader a manipulative character. She taunts Maxim with what she knows he holds dear in order to goad him into killing her, thus eliciting sympathy for Maxim. Readers are led to pity Maxim and empathise with him or perhaps excuse the crime he commits.
He has been forced into an economically wise marriage, to a woman who is later discovered to be mentally ill. Divorce is not an option. Bertha’s clear hatred for Rochester ‘a tone of demon hate’ potentially elicits sympathy from the reader as he wishes to ‘break away, and go home to god’, Illustrating that the life he lives with Bertha is Hell and that he would sooner die than have to carry on living a marriage from which he cannot escape. Again, readers may sympathise with him as he wishes to take his own life and not somebody