A feminist analysis that combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France, this book focuses on three major thinkers--Rousseau, Constant and Stendhal--and includes a broad reading of the nineteenth-century novel within the frame of pathological generation. In the collision of the nascent ideology of motherhood with modes of discourse that invade and colonize the maternal body, Professor Mossman identifies a considerable burden of the cultural anxiety expressed in the nineteenth-century French novel.