Extending ‘Daphne’s Theory’ by Dr Emmeline Burdett

Dr Emmeline Burdett

Dr Emmeline Burdett had generously provided us with a post for our Interesting Facts section of the Daphne du Maurier website. In it, she talks principally about the character Ben, who appears in Rebecca.

Let me introduce you to Emmeline:

Dr Emmeline Burdett is a writer, translator and academic who gained her PhD from University College London in 2011. She is a co-editor of the blog journal Public Disability History. She has translated two academic books from Dutch into English and published a third, Disability, Nazi Euthanasia, and the Legacy of the Nuremberg Medical Trial, at the beginning of 2025. She has also published several short stories. She became interested in Daphne du Maurier through her membership of the Brontë Society, as Rebecca is often considered to owe something to Jane Eyre. Emmeline Burdett has spina bifida and is a wheelchair-user.

Here is her article:

Extending ‘Daphne’s Theory’

In his 2022 ‘Postcard from Haworth’, Chris Main describes the idea that the Brontë sisters’ unsuccessful brother, Branwell (1818-1848) might have had some form of epilepsy as ‘Daphne’s theory’. Though she might not have been the first person to propose this, she was certainly the first person to try to make anything of it, in her 1961 biography, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë.

Consequently, I thought it might be interesting and instructive to take a look at another example of du Maurier’s apparent idea that disability was just a category of human experience. Du Maurier can even be seen as being considerably ahead of her time in her treatment of it. Apart from the fact that the protagonist of du Maurier’s 1946 novel The King’s General, Honor Harris, is a wheelchair user, it may be less well-known that one of the minor characters in du Maurier’s seminal 1938 novel Rebecca is disabled too. His name is Ben, and it is him that I want to discuss in this post.

Ben is included in the novel principally so that the second Mrs de Winter is not on her guard against Mrs Danvers. As the novel unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that being liked by Mrs Danvers is something of a red flag – an indication that a character should be treated with extreme caution. Sure enough, the first time the second Mrs de Winter meets Ben, she decides to discount his warning about the titular Rebecca on the basis that he is an ‘idiot’, and thus could not know what he was talking about:

Poor wretch, he was potty, of course. It was hardly likely that anyone would threaten him with the asylum … Perhaps he had heard himself discussed once, among his own people, and the memory of it lingered, like an ugly picture in the mind of a child. He would have a child’s mentality too, regarding likes and dislikes. He would take a fancy to a person for no reason. … It was absurd to notice anything said by an idiot.

So, there we have it. If the second Mrs de Winter had not decided within nanoseconds of meeting Ben that she knew what he was like because he had learning difficulties and obviously all people with learning difficulties are the same and anxious to conform to the stereotypes that others might have of them, the story of Rebecca might have been very different, and a lot shorter. The more of du Maurier’s work I read, the more convinced I am
that this was quite deliberate. Apart from anything else, Rebecca also includes a passage in which attention is drawn to the practice of speaking to an elderly, blind character ‘in a special voice’, decades before anyone was supposed to have noticed this, let alone questioned it.

‹‹ Back