Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness

by Marilyn Yalom

This book explores the interrelationship between the option and experience of motherhood and the experience of mental breakdown as vividly communicated by 20th-century women writers. The focus is on three writers—Sylvia Plath, Marie Cardinal, and Margaret Atwood—but others are included, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and Emma Santos. Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness calls attention to the ways in which maternity and motherhood represent common forms of apprehension for all women, reactivating the fear of death that has been discovered and repressed in childhood, and, in some instances, contributing directly to mental breakdown. It offers evidence of the particular stresses encountered by highly gifted women who try to negotiate their way between creation and procreation and "write their way out" of madness.

Genres: Feminism, Mental Health

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Marilyn Yalom grew up in Washington D.C. and was educated at Wellesley College, the Sorbonne, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She has been a professor of French and comparative literature, director of an institute for research on women, a popular speaker on the lecture circuit, and the author of numerous books and articles on literature and women's history.