«I Wanted to Be Old»: Gender and Aging in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Susan Hill’s Mrs de Winter

This article aims to analyse the process of aging as a major factor that articulates the politics of gender in Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca (1938) and Susan Hill’s sequel Mrs de Winter (1993). Even though Du Maurier’s seminal novel has been traditionally interpreted as a novel of romance, by means of focusing on the aging process of different characters, and especially, of the female narrator, this article intends to read Du Maurier’s Rebecca as a novel of awakening. The comparative analysis of Du Maurier’s text with the sequel that Susan Hill published decades later will serve the purpose of defending the interpretation of Du Maurier’s narrative as a novel of awakening, since the action in Susan Hill’s novel takes place twelve years later and gives significant importance to the aging processes of the characters. This article will also analyse the association between male aging and patriarchy, female youth and traditional femininity, old age and masculinity crisis, and female aging and female awakening.