SOURCE: "Women and Religion," in A Woman's Revenge: The Chronology of Dispossession in Maupassant's Fiction, French Forum, Publishers, 1986, pp. 82–108.

In the following excerpt, Donaldson-Evans examines Maupassant's skepticism of traditional religion through his portrayal of various feminine types, including the pious woman; the woman who identifies herself with the Divinity; the woman as Virgin Mother; the sadistic woman incapable of love; and the cruel mother.

The disaffection for traditional religion that was prevalent at the end of the 19th century in France had many sources, literary, philosophical, scientific, historical. France's sobering defeat at the hands of the Prussians in the War of 1870 shattered French self-confidence; the horrors of the Commune even further shocked the nation and plunged her into an emotional depression from which she did not fully emerge until the end of the century. Marked by a resurgent interest in Romanticism's dark side,¹ the literature of this period...