In Rebecca (1940), the first film Hitchcock made after moving from his British home to Hollywood, exile and memory take centre stage. Hitchcock's narrative revolves around an unnamed, orphaned heroine (Joan Fontaine) who longs for a home to overcome her dislocation and who finds out after her marriage that she cannot inhabit Manderley as its mistress. The film opens, however, with a retrospective frame underscoring the condition of exile in which the heroine finds herself after the house has burnt down. Her voice-over and the camera retrace how, in her dream, she approaches Manderley along the meandering drive, leading from the closed gate up to the mansion. The sequence underlines that she can return to the once magnificent country estate only by virtue of her imagination. While the continuing presence of Rebecca, her dead predecessor and the first Mrs de Winter, never allowed her to feel at home, the destruction of the house makes it possible for her to take possession of Manderley through the ‘supernatural powers’ of her dream work.

The heroine's revisitation of Manderley in her exile refers us back to the poetic re-creation of an ‘imaginary homeland’ in Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Indeed, similar to Nabokov's reconstruction of the family home, the fantasy work of Hitchcock's heroine enables her, at least momentarily, to reverse the state of things. When she reaches Manderley on her imaginary nocturnal journey, it seems to have returned to its former condition – ‘time could not mar the perfect symmetry of these walls’, her voice tells us.