She has no name — deliberately. Du Maurier's choice not to name her heroine enacts the novel's central theme: a woman who cannot assert a self. She is defined by relationships (companion to Mrs. Van Hopper, second wife to Maxim) and by the absence she can't fill (Rebecca's place). The extraordinary arc of the novel is her development from passivity to agency — but the agency she achieves is built on complicity in murder and the destruction of her home. Whether she is liberated or simply differently trapped is the question the ending refuses to answer.