Abstract

With the emergence of the “New Woman” at the beginning of the twentieth century, writers, both men and women, started to deal with this social phenomenon as a major issue in the representation of female characters in literature. They often depended on traditional myths that depict the war between the sexes, like the Lilith myth. While previous studies on Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” focus on the writer’s feminism and her Gothic style, no reference has ever been made to the relationship between the novel and this myth of the Genesis, despite the fact that many allusions in the text prove that the novel is obviously a modern treatment of this myth. This study analyses the novel in relation to this myth and tries to deconstruct the mainstream critical discourse on the text as representing the writer’s identification with the title character, Rebecca, as a victim of patriarchal oppression.