Woman as Creator: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's Transformation of the Lyric

In an age where most women writers disguised themselves by adopting a male pseudonym and wrote within the male tradition, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore wrote as a woman, proclaiming her feminine identity in strong personal verse. Transforming poetic conventions, she reimagined love poetry by invoking a new speaker and a new object: mother and child, in turn lover and beloved. The sources of Desbordes-Valmore's poetic power are images, of birth and of the sacred, rising to a unique triumph over death through maternal love, and to a vision of woman as the universal creative force. (SDF)