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we finish reading we will become aware of it and look back the whole story.2.3.1Maxim’s attitudeYes, firstly, we find that Maxim doesn’t welcome topics either about Manderley or his dead wife when he first appears in Monte Carlo. When Mrs. Van Hopper praises Manderley as a fairyland, “…(Maxim) he went on smoking his cigarette, and I noticed faint as gossamer, the line between his brows. [4](P19) ‘His silence now was painful. His own words must have jolted a memory for his face clouded again and he frowned very slightly.” [4](P20) All this indicates that he has something unhappy happened in his home, Manderey, there must be some bitter memory.On his wife, Rebecca, Maxim says as below: “All memories are bitter, and I prefer to ignore them. Something happened a year ago that altered my whole life, and I want to forget every phase in my existence up that time. Those days are finished. They are blotted out. I must begin living all over again.”[4](P43) “ I was there some years ago, with my wife. You asked me if it was still the same, if it had changed at all. It was just the same, but I was thankful to realize oddly impersonal. There was no question of the other time. She and I had left no record.” [4](P43) Such sentences show Maxim’s unhappy life with his first wife—Rebecca.2.3.2 Others’ odd mannerSecondly, Frank’s odd manner when “I” talk about Rebecca; and Beatrice’s rather different negative attitude. The silence is a silence born of shame and embarrassment. Frank says, “…We none of us want to bring back the past. Maxim least of all. And it’s up to you, you know, to lead us away from it. Not to take us back again.” [4](P141) Readers may a little hesitate when they came to this. Why does Frank say so? Well, isn’t the past good enough for them? After all, their hostess is almost perfect. Therefore, the curiosity drives us go on reading. There seems a mist. We have an egger to look through it to the core. That is what suspense skill used perfectly by Daphne. She gives us a dream, and all of us get drown in it. The great writer handles our inquisitiveness skillfully.2.3.3 Rebecca’s handwritingRebecca’s handwriting has given us a lot of implications. It gives us an inkling that what a person Rebecca is. She is strong, proud, independent, debauched, like a demon.“‘Maxim from Rebecca 17may,’ written in a curious slanting hand. A little blob of ink marred the white page opposite, as though the writer, in impatience, had shaken her pen to make the ink flow freely. And then as it bubbled through the nib, it came a little thick, so that the name Rebecca stood out black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters.”[4](P37) “They slept in peace, the grass blew over their graves. How alive was her writing though, how full of force. Those curious, sloping letters. The blob of ink.”[4](P62.)2.3.4The unusual rhododendronThe rhododendron, which Daphne describes in this novel, is not just a kind of flower. In some sense, it is the character of Rebecca, bloody, cruel. It has created an atmosphere of constrained and terror that shades Maxim’s second marriage.“The nameless shrubs had disappeared, and neither side of us was a wall of color, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The words had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing