ABSTRACT
Images of mothers and motherhood are deeply woven into the fabric of Leduc's autobiographical and fictional writing. Leduc's autobiographical quest for identity seems to be intimately related to her representations of motherhood and of the mother-daughter relationship, and her efforts to understand them. Colette Hall argues that in doubling her representation of maternity Leduc was able to come to terms with the ambiguous feelings of love and hate that her mother inspired. During the Second World War, when Leduc began writing L'Asphyxie, pronatalist activists of the 1920s and 1930s found in the Vichy regime a reactionary worldview that complemented perfectly their belief in women's confinement to the role of wife and mother. Under Vichy, political, scientific and social discourses influenced by pronatalism had a direct effect on official state policy. In the climate of debate and discussion of women's role and identity that prevailed in France in the early 1960s the issue of motherhood was a contentious issue.
