In the novel, eyes symbolize the impulse to make clear-cut judgements about people, which fails to account for rich, nuanced personalities. Both Rachel and Philip have distinct eyes. Philip’s are remarkable because they are nearly identical to Ambrose’s. Meanwhile, Rachel’s eyes are one of her finest physical features: dark and fine, they are also incredibly expressive. Philip often judges whether or not Rachel is making fun of him based solely on the expression in her eyes. However, du Maurier complicates the platitude that “eyes are the windows to the soul,” by filling the novel with shifting glances, averted gazes, and impossible-to-read expressions. While Rachel’s eyes may be her finest feature, they are also her most sinister one; in his letters, Ambrose writes that Rachel’s eyes are always “upon [him], watchful and strange.” Philip, too, is unsettled by Rachel’s eyes, even as he is captivated by them. He once thinks of Rachel: “Had I ground the face to powder with my heel, the eyes would have remained.” Rachel’s eyes thus have a timeless, almost mystical power to them. Philip often refers to Rachel’s eyes as “the eyes,” using the definite article (“the eyes”) rather than the possessive pronoun (“her eyes”) suggesting that there is something inhuman, perhaps even otherworldly about Rachel. The paradox of Rachel’s eyes is their expressiveness coupled with their unreadability, and du Maurier uses this complexity to suggest that it is impossible to fully interpret another person’s behavior, especially by a physical marker. Philip often attempts to do this, distrusting Rainaldi’s “dark hooded eyes,” and immediately warming to the servant Giuseppe, at the Villa Sangalletti, due to his “dog’s eyes, honest and devoted.”
Eyes Quotes in My Cousin Rachel
Once, not so long ago, I had seen other eyes with that same age-old look of suffering. Those eyes too had held reserve and pride, coupled with the same abasement, the same agony of supplication […] it must be because the eyes are the same colour and they belong to the same race. Otherwise they could have nothing in common, the beggar woman beside the Arno and my cousin Rachel.
I looked up, startled, and it seemed to me, as we stared at one another, that she knew now all my fantasies, my dreams, that she saw one by one the faces of the women I had conjured all those months. Denial was no use, protestation absurd. The barriers were down. It was a queer feeling, as though I sat naked in my chair.
She would take great care about her person, when she went calling. Her best mantle, and her new veil and bonnet. 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 to satisfaction.
For no great reason I felt blank, and in some sense cheated. I wanted the eyes to be as I remember them at sunrise.
Then, tears coming to her eyes, she looked at me and said, “A woman can’t suffer twice. I have had all this before.” And lifting her fingers to her throat she added, “Even the hands around my neck. That too. Now will you understand?”
I looked over her head, straight at the portrait above the mantelpiece, and the young face of Ambrose staring at me was my own. She had defeated both of us.
Her head was turned to him as she listened, so that from the head of the table, where I sat, I looked on her in profile. She was always a stranger, thus. Those neat clipped features on a coin. Dark and withdrawn, a foreign woman standing in a doorway, a shawl about her head, her hand outstretched. But full-face, when she smiled, a stranger never. The Rachel that I knew, that I had loved.