In Pendennis Thackeray redefines the meaning of “maturity” in order to suit the unusual needs of Pendennis in his compulsive search for emotional security. The narrator's ability simultaneously to denigrate and to celebrate the sentimental purity of Pen's mother, Helen, is the paradox whose development gives esthetic coherence to an otherwise commonplace story. Both Helen's youthful disappointments and her later possessiveness elicit protective responses from the narrator, although he goes out of his way to make her destructive nature increasingly obvious to the reader and to Pen himself. Moreover, Pen's continued inability to break away from Helen's demands reinforces her insistence on total allegiance from him. The narrator presents his characters' problems within a framework of psychological reality, but solves them only on the level of pseudo-incestuous fantasy. Therefore, final freedom from the terrors of insecurity involves Pen's willing enslavement to the mindlessness of Helen's sentimentality.