Rebecca is largely constructed by the narrator and by what we hear others say about her in the novel. How does the Hitchcockian “construction” of Rebecca differ from the novel? The representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth. - Simone de Beauvoir The continued appeal of Daphne du Maurier's gothic romance, Rebecca1, is a tribute to its popular and academic influence. Published in 1938, du Maurier uses refined complexities and sophistication to offer an evocative investigation into the power of the past and its disruption of the present. Du Maurier's use of a naive and easily influenced narrator ensures that the reader is entirely dependent on the narrator's interpretation and presentation of Rebecca. Furthermore, du Maurier's construction of Rebecca challenges patriarchal gender stereotypes while critiquing other notions that underlie and aim to preserve the patriarchal order. In contrast, Hitchcock ended up modifying and weakening du Maurier's didactics by adhering to the rules of film censorship and the male lens of cinema. Additionally, due to the male gaze of the director and producers, the objectification of women as spectacle continues throughout the 1940s film. Although the novel's gothic suspense shifts to a sense of gothic glamor in the film, the adaptation unfortunately produces the inevitable conflict of character construction when a film attempts to translate a woman's story into the male-dominated Hollywood of the 1940s. the intoxicating magnetic Rebecca De Winter comes mainly from the girl's imagination...... middle of paper ...... Censorship and audiences of questionable type: lesbian observations in "Rebecca" and "The Uninvited" . Cinema Journal. Flight. 37, no. 3, pp.17.Castle, T (1995). The lesbian appearance. New York: Columbia University Press. Cixous, H (1976). The laughter of Medusa. Chicago: Chicago University Press. De Beauvoir, S (2009). The Second Sex. Random House Books Australia: Sydney.Mitchell, M 2009 'Beautiful Creatures: The Ethics of Female Beauty in the Fiction of Daphne du Maurier'. Women: a cultural review. Flight. 20, no. 1, p. 28. (Modeleski 1988). The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall. Pateman, C (1988). The Sexual Contract, Stanford: Stanford University Press. White, P (1999). Uninvited: classic Hollywood cinema and lesbian representability. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.