SOURCE: “Woman as Creator: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's Transformation of the Lyric,” in Nineteenth Century French Studies, Vol. 21, Nos. 1-2, Fall-Winter, 1993, pp. 57-65.

In the following essay, Ferguson evaluates Desbordes-Valmore's poetic vision of mothers and children.

Birth and motherhood have never been universal themes in lyric poetry. For centuries death and sexual love have fired the poet's imagination. Yet, is not birth as powerful an experience as death? And is not the bond between mother and child as profound, as tied to the soul and the flesh, as the love between man and woman? Why have poets been silent about these depths of human experience? Is it because “women have never expressed themselves?”¹ Or because the few women who have dared to express themselves in our phallocratic society have adopted the existing themes, have written within the male tradition, have written as men, or as men expected them to write...