ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some ways in which recent French fiction draws on the theme of collective memory and engages with birthing tales from earlier centuries to interrogate or construct contemporary perceptions of birth. It focuses on a collection of eight female-authored fictional and autofictional writings on childbirth, published under the title Naissances. The chapter also focuses on two specific ways in which the maternal imagination assumes a crucial dimension. First, a comparison between the perception of the passage of time during labour and references to the collective past is seen to bring past and present into dialogue. Second, another recurrent trope, the widespread maternal fear or hallucination of bearing a child resembling an animal, will allows to probe the utility of historicized readings. The chapter discusses that they attest to the broader cultural and psychological significance of common distortions of reality by the imagination.
