Rebecca is largely constructed by the narrator and what we hear others say about her in the novel. How does Hitchcock's "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 point of view, which they mistake for the absolute truth. - Simone de BeauvoirThe continuing appeal of Daphne du Maurier's Gothic novel, Rebecca1, is a tribute to her popular and scholarly influence. Published in 1938, du Maurier employs refined complexity and sophistication to provide an evocative investigation of the power of the past and its disturbance in the present. Du Maurier's use of a naïve and easily influenced narrator ensures that the reader is completely dependent on the narrator's interpretation and presentation of Rebecca. Furthermore, du Maurier's construction of Rebecca questions patriarchal gender stereotypes while also criticizing other notions that support and aim to preserve the patriarchal order. In contrast, Hitchcock ultimately alters and undermines du Maurier's didactics through adherence to film censorship regulations and the male lens of cinema. Furthermore, thanks to the masculine gaze of the director and producers, the objectification of women as spectacle is perpetuated throughout the 1940s film. Although the gothic suspense of the novel is transformed into a sense of gothic glamor in the film, the adaptation unfortunately produces the inevitable conflict of character building when a film attempts to translate a woman's story in male-dominated 1940s Hollywood . the intoxicating and magnetic Rebecca De Winter derives primarily from the imagination of the young n...... middle of paper...... Censorship and Audiences of a Questionable Kind: Lesbian Sightings in "Rebecca" and "The Uninvited" . Cinema journal. vol. 37, no. 3, pp.17.Castle, T (1995). The lesbian appeared. 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. vol. 20, no. 1, pp.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.