Like a Bridge over Troubled Waters: the Death of the Mother a Comparative Study in Literature Between USA and French Feminist Poetry

Abstract

The power of fear and the need for happiness are equal, wrote Adorno in Minima Moralia (2001, p. 223) describing in a phrase the inevitable contradictions of the human condition. Mother and motherhood reflect both, fear and need, transforming eachother in a constant dialogue that mediates the various expressions of our sociopsychological transformations. A dialogue unready to be completed as long as our worldviews sustain hierarchies that manipulate the need and the fear.