âWe have learnt from psycho-analysisâ, wrote Freud in 1910, âthat the notion of something irreplaceable, when it is active in the unconscious, frequently appears as broken up into an endless series: endless for the reason that every surrogate nevertheless fails to provide the desired satisfactionâ (2001a: 169) . Two years later he returns to this pessimistic conclusion, in somewhat different terms:
as a result of the diphasic onset of object-choice, and the interposition of the barrier against incest , the final object of the sexual instinct is never any longer the original object but only a surrogate for it. Psycho-analysis has shown us that when the original object of a wishful impulse has been lost as a result of repression, it is frequently represented by an endless series of substitutive objects none of which, however, brings full satisfaction. (2001d: 189)
The contemporary media are full of accounts of the pain of replacement. Vanessa Nicolson writes about an impulsive Facebook message she sent, after the sudden death of her nineteen-year-old daughter, to the latterâs boyfriend who had started a relationship with another woman: âI was on Rosaâs Facebook page when I saw a conversation between Adam and Lucie that made it clear they were in a serious, loving relationship. It was six months after Rosa had died. I instantly felt the most unimaginable pain, as if my daughterâs life had meant nothing, as if she had already been replacedâ (3) . When she invites Adam over to apologise eight years later, she explains: ââI think I felt you didnât love Rosa any more because you had transferred your love to someone elseâ.â Compounded by herself ventriloquising her daughterâs Facebook voice, this act of anger was a replacement to avenge a replacement, but such reactions always express the same thing: the feeling that a personâs value is blotted out if someone else is now in the place where they once were.
The drama of replacement in human relations is both complex and dynamic; it is potentially damaging to all the dramatis personae. In the film 45 Years (2015), a couple about to celebrate forty-five years of marriage learn of the recovery of the body of the husbandâs long-dead girlfriend â whose name was Katya , almost identical to that of the wife, Kate â preserved in alpine ice. This discovery implicitly affects the two differently: it appears that the man is shocked at reminders of his lost youth, while the woman is affected by the vivid idea of a rival who seems to have a permanent kind of precedence. In 2017 the female lead, Charlotte Rampling , reappeared in The Sense of an Ending , in which another ageing man gets a blast from the past when he is left a friendâs diary in the will of his ex-girlfriendâs mother . Rampling plays the girlfriend, now also in her seventies, suffering as silently as ever â but this time she plays the replacee rather than the replacer. The implication of both films is that moving the pieces around (as life inevitably seems to do) can cause only loss and bitterness.
An interesting, and perhaps not unconnected, gendering of the replacement drama appears in another set of recent fictions, more directly concerned with the dangers of doubling. In March 2017, a BBC TV series named The Replacement ran in three episodes, focusing on the disruption to the life of architect Ellen when she becomes pregnant and is âreplacedâ at work â only temporarily, she is assured â by Paula, a similarly talented, dedicated and attractive woman a few years older. Like the almost identical plot of another TV fiction, The Kindness of Strangers (2006), this hangs on the idea of the threat to a womanâs sense of reality when she gets or loses a baby. Indeed, there are echoes in both these series of feature films The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) and Fatal Attraction (1987), in which, again, the woman who comes to disrupt the apparently smoothly-functioning life of another woman is by definition made mad by the fact that she cannot have or keep a child of her own. Whether male- or female-authored, when this compulsive contemporary legend is focalised on a pair of female protagonists, its crux is maternity and the supposed overweeningness of our âwanting to have it allâ. Even though the male characters commit acts of violence, the danger is only tangentially, it seems, from men; the stake is implied more viscerally as being between women engaged in a divide-and-rule catfight.1
Two recent novels named The Replacement , one American (Yovanoff 2010) and the other British (Redmond 2014) , are both set in the traditional creepy village and centre on a male figure. Like a number of 1990s films (see Segal 2009, chap. 7) , they show what happens to one man when he is placed âinside the skinâ of another. In these fictions, replacement is a career move; women in todayâs replacement fictions, meanwhile, find their own skins invaded by maternity and then recovered by someone elseâs envy, like a garment that no longer fits after a too-drastic diet.
The fiction Rebecca can be seen as part of a replacement chain, positioned between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea (see this volume, Chap. 11), not to mention many less distinguished fantasies of the plain-girl-conquers-dashing-rogue variety. It has given rise not only to the âclassicâ Hitchcock adaptation of 1940 but to many small-screen avatars as well. In 1962 a black-and-white version ran in the American TV series âTheatre â62â, slashed to under one hour and starring Joan Hackett , later the doomed Dottie of The Group; in 1969 there was an Italian version, Rebecca, la prima moglie, followed by another under the same title in 2008, in which the otherwise universally unnamed protagonist is called Jennifer. Two British TV miniseries not only appeared in the echoing years 1979 and 1997 but have mother and daughter in the parallel role of the second Mrs de Winter â Joanna David and Emilia Fox . The 1979 version also stars Jeremy Brett and Anna Massey , seventeen years divorced at the time, who, their son reports, âignored each other for the entire filmingâ (Huggins, n.p.) . Another parallel can be found in the subsequent careers of two Mrs Danvers , Judith Anderson and Diana Rigg , both later celebrated for playing Medea . But the differences are as instructive as the parallels â Joanna David wears Caroline de Winterâs wig pinned up and hatless, while Emilia Fox faces the wrath of her husband in a splendid bonnet (as our cover image shows). The ending is especially varied. In every version Manderley burns down, but whereas in du Maurierâs novel Mrs Danvers has simply âcleared outâ (421), in most other versions we see her raving among the flames like a latter-day Miss Havisham or Bertha Mason. Here and there Maxim and his loyal wife are exculpated: for Hitchcock , whose hands were tied by the Hays Code, he has not actually murdered Rebecca , only knocked her down; and as Charles Dance in 1997 he plunges into the fire to rescue Mrs Danvers , tumbling down the staircase with her in his arms. Just once, startlingly, we get to see Rebecca â in the same production, her eyes, hands and head are glimpsed bewitchingly in the shape of Lucy Cohu .
Her earliest avatar was surely that of du Maurierâs short story âThe Dollâ, written when she was barely twenty-one, published in 1937 and then âlostâ until its rediscovery and republication in 2011. In it an inaugural Rebecca , the desperate narratorâs love-object, is much more in line with the traditional vamp as la belle juive â a Hungarian violinist herself crazily obsessed with a male sex doll called Julio.
Of course, Daphne du Maurierâs Rebecca (1938) makes a virtue of the inaccessibility of the first wife, decisively dead and thus ensconced in the attic of other peopleâs certain memories and uncertain desires. A man marries once; a man marries twice. The second wife enters a house dominated by her predecessor and the obsessive enigma surrounding her. Yet her torment is curiously reversible. Mrs Danvers taunts her: âSheâs the real Mrs de Winter , not you. Itâs you thatâs the shadow and the ghostâ (273), but...