Ever-Present
THE PASSAGE
A.H. ... Mrs. Danvers was almost never seen walking and was rarely shown in motion. If she entered a room in which the heroine was, what happened is that the girl suddenly heard a sound and there was the ever-present Mrs. Danvers, standing perfectly still by her side. In this way the whole situation was projected from the heroine's point of view, she never knew when Mrs. Danvers might turn up, and this, in itself, was terrifying. To have shown Mrs. Danvers walking about would have been to humanize her (pg. 129-130).
A quick note
The first sentence of the above passage is somewhat surprising upon first glance. As you will see in the video, it is not really the case that Mrs. Danvers is not shown walking or in motion. In fact, I think most people would agree that the way in which she glides about Manderley is one of the things that makes her such a terrifying and wonderful character. So perhaps she isn't, in fact, walking, per se? Anyway, I take Hitchcock to mean that everything Mrs. Danvers does is deliberate — there is no dilly-dallying or aimlessly walking throughout the grounds. She is on a mission and no image of her is free of the psychological distress she inflicts upon "I" (the second Mrs. de Winter) and therefore us.
Finally, I understand Hitchcock not wanting to, as he says, humanize Mrs. Danvers. She is of course a villain; if Rebecca were an episode of Scooby Doo, then Mrs. Danvers would most definitely be the person under the mask at the end of the episode (or perhaps Rebecca herself?!). And she plays the role of a kind of demonic ghost, not least because she nearly convinces "I" to commit suicide and later burns Manderely to the ground, killing herself in the process. However, one of the most interesting moments in the film comes when Mrs. Danvers is at Maxim's trial, visibly upset, and then even more so when it is revealed that Rebecca may have been pregnant and diagnosed with cancer. In that moment, she is not wearing her usual black dress, she is not on the job, and we see her humanity. I cannot deal with this thought fully here (perhaps it will be the subject of another essay) but I figured it was worth putting out there!
THE VID