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.
- ISBN10 0271003987
- ISBN13 9780271003986
- Publish Date 1 October 1990
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 27 January 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Pennsylvania State University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 144
- Language English