Maternity and Violence: An Analysis From Different Women Writers of German Literature

Abstract

The scarce presence of women in the usually handled literary canon derives from certain socio-historical conditions. This has had repercussions in notable areas such as German literature, where, for hundreds of years, the female gender has been invisibilized, either in the role of writer or as a fictional character. Many times we did not have the chance to hear voices beyond the male ones and, therefore, we were left with a narrower perspective in the construction of different stories and characters. Thus, in that vast world made up of women of letters, lies one of the topics that has given us the most to talk about: The role that the character of the mother maintains within the family, a role that, in general, has been little delved into literary works written by men. In this article, then, we hypothesize that literature written by women contributes to think about the representation of mothers based on much more complex nuances; for example, the coexistence of a passive and active role around violence. In order to delve deeper into this idea, our corpus will be made-up of certain Novelles and other works written by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Marlen Haushofer and Elfriede Jelinek.