This book is a feminist analysis which combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France. It focuses on three major thinkers whose personal relation to origins is problematic, Rousseau, Constant and Stendhal, and also includes a broad reading of the nineteenth-century novel within the frame of pathological generation, giving special attention to works by Michelet and Zola. Professor Mossman identifies important areas of interaction between production and reproduction at the level of aesthetic form and between private, birth-related discourse and the ideology of the birth of democracy. Within the context of the collapse of Ancien Régime France, the nascent ideology of motherhood collides with modes of discourse that invade and colonize the maternal body, generating a considerable burden of anxiety expressed in the nineteenth-century French novel.

"Mossman's presentation, while demanding, rewards the reader by providing an innovative contribution to feminist criticism. Her study has the merit of introducing a measure of balance to traditional interpretations of nineteenth-century fiction that focus on the father." Hollie Markland Harder, Nineteenth-Century French Studies