Motherhood and Suicide: a Genealogy of Scriptures about how to Subvert the Weight of Guilt

Abstract

How does the myth of the suicidal writer address with precepts regarding motherhood? And how do Latin American suicidal writers dialogue with other Anglo-Saxon suicidal writers who are mothers (Plath and Sexton) or non-mothers (Woolf) in their effort to place their literary motherhood above the filiative one? This paper tunes into the call to be free from the tyranny of children within a regime where motherhood is placed at the center of the family (Meruane, 2015), and must be assimilated as the broader matrix from which to understand gender conflicts (Rich, 2010). Antonia Rivas Mercado receives the stigma of “social motherhood” (Vicuña, 2001) as the ultimate responsibility assigned to women within her moral constitution: tribulations that she exposes in her Diario de Bordeos (1930-1931). Later, Teresa Wilms Montt rebels in her Diarios íntimos (1906-1921) against the mandates of the genre. Her fourth diary will coincide with the re-encounter with her daughters, from whom she grew apart in her constant need to run away. Such an imperative of estrangement, common to both authors, finds resonance in Violeta Parra, whose life and death is re-interpreted in Violeta se fue a los cielos (2006), a biography in which her own son Ángel outlines a maternal ideal -frustrated and challenged- that he attributes to her: the omnipresence of an ancestral mother.