Impulsivity
Philip Ashley tells his own story in the first person. As a human being, he is of only middling interest; certainly not the equivalent of Rachel. Ironically, he is fascinating as a narrator. The tale that unfolds from his point of view is situated precariously upon a foundation of ambiguity. At the center of his narrative is the question he himself poses: “Was Rachel innocent or guilty?” This question is raised early in the narrative and is never satisfactorily answered because Philip is incapable of doing so. The novel’s ambiguity is inhabited within his character. His impulsivity—the ability to believe in Rachel’s innocence one minute and her guilt the next—is driven by the circumstances of the moment and that characteristic is displayed in a virtuoso example of imagery at the height of his conviction of Rachel’s undeniable guilt:
“I stared down at the river, watching it surge and flow and lose itself in the darkness, and by the single flickering lantern light upon the bridge I saw the bubbles forming, frothy brown. Then borne upon the current, stiff and slowly turning, with its four legs in the air, came the body of a dog. It passed under the bridge and went its way. I made a vow there, to myself, beside the Arno.”
Doubling
Throughout the fiction of Daphne du Maurier runs an obsession with the concept of the double. The Scapegoat actually even goes to the length of identical strangers, but as with this novel the double is mainly metaphorical. Philip, an orphan raised by another family member, comes to identify with the older Ambrose to such an extent that they are identical in every way except physically. This conceptualization of the doubling seems to be playing in their live stories as well: both fall in love with Rachel and both are driven by misogynistic suspicions to believe she is poisoning them to death:
“We were dreamers, both of us, unpractical, reserved, full of great theories never put to test, and like all dreamers, asleep to the waking world. Disliking our fellow men, we craved affection; but shyness kept impulse dormant until the heart was touched. When that happened the heavens opened, and we felt, the pair of us, that we have the whole wealth of the universe to give. We would have both survived, had we been other men.”
Halving
Juxtaposed against the persistent imagery which suggests that Philip and Ambrose together add up to just one single man, Rachel is often presented as two separate and distinct halves joined together as one. This, of course, is a vital element toward creating the overall ambiguity of Rachel’s status as both a murderous black widow and a victim of misogynistic suspicion. The idea subtly is brilliantly planted first as a tracing of her family lineage:
“A Coryn married an Ashley two generations ago, as you will find on the family tree. A descendant of that branch was born and brought up in Italy by an impecunious father and an Italian mother, and married off at an early age to an Italian nobleman called Sangalletti, who departed this life by fighting a duel, it appears, when half-seas over, leaving his wife with a load of debts and a great empty villa. No children. The Contessa Sangalletti, or, as she insists on calling herself, my cousin Rachel”
A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigmatic Veil
The mystery of Rachel’s guilt and the ambiguity of Philip’s convictions about her guilt or innocence are most persistently manifested in the imagery of the veil which Rachel wears and is peculiarly stubborn about lifting or removing.
“She was wrapped in her dark mantle, and she wore her veil down, so that I could not see her face.”
“I would sit with my back to the horses, in the carriage, so that I could look at her; and, I think to tease me, she would not lift her veil.”
“She lifted her veil, and the eyes that looked into mine were not smiling as I had hoped, or tearful as I had feared, but steady and serene and quite unmoved, the eyes of someone who has been out upon a matter of business and settled it in satisfaction.”
