Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca

One of the fundamental concerns of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is the fragile relationship the narrator develops with traditional ideals of womanhood and femininity, and the consequences that arise from the obsessive pursuit of such ideals. This conflict in ideologies is apparent in several instances, one of them being in the marriage between the narrator and Maxim De Winter; the narrator’s passage into womanhood is interrupted at a crucial point in her development, as she meets her husband who is twenty years her senior when she is in state in-between youth and impending adulthood. Her development, or lack of it, is evidently in a delicate state before the pressures of pleasing a far more mature aristocratic partner is added