The Silent Mother. A Literary and Biographical Analysis of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and María Zambrano

Abstract

In this literary paper on the traumas of unwed motherhood and the silence surrounding it, I compare the experiences of two mother-poets: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and María Zambrano. Although these women writers are from two separate centuries and countries, the motherly pains they experience and the scholarly silence surrounding their motherhoods closely mirror one another's. Through their cartas (letters) and poems, the silence surrounding their losses as unwed mothers with deceased young children is shattered, seeing as their traumas are forever recorded within their written words. Utilizing biografías (biographies), las cartas, Susan Stanford Friedman's birth theory, and poetic analysis, I make the argument that both Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and María Zambrano encapture their motherly pains in their poetry unlike that of any of the scholarly work written about either of them.