Rebecca was Hitchcock's first American film. Despite his stated resistance to working in a woman's genre, the gothic romance, he articulates with uncanny knowingness the dilemma of the female oedipal drama: the childlike heroine is rescued from a domineering old woman by Maxim, a handsome, fabulously wealthy man, old enough to be her father; but at the culmination of her triumph-her possession of Manderley, her husband's ancestral home-she must confront Rebecca, the woman who possessed Maxim first, appears to still possess him, and can possess/annihilate her too. Rebecca, of course, is dead, and never appears in the flesh, but her spirit lives in Manderley, which Hitchcock has said is one of the three main characters in the film. In this Cinderella story gone wrong is a theme that recurs with a vengeance in Vertigo and Psycho-the dread of being taken up and absorbed by a stronger personality, whose omnipotence is augmented rather than diminished precisely because that person is dead. -Marilyn Fabe