ABSTRACT
Bode presents a compelling reading of “Her Story,” a disconcerting short story in the Gothic mode by Harriet Prescott Spofford, one of the most prolific, versatile, and exuberant woman writers of the nineteenth-century. In what little scholarship exists about the story, which is told by a narrator who is confined to an insane asylum, it is unanimously understood as a tale of sexual rivalry, the jealous spite of an older woman who loses her husband to his younger, female ward who has moved in to live with the family. In contrast, Bode reads Spofford’s story as “a narrative of motherhood” that receives both its forward thrust and psychological depth not from pitting two women against each other but from Spofford’s masterful creation of the ward as “a pervasive backdrop of maternal preoccupations against which the narrator’s own struggles with motherhood play out.” Read as a tale about the dark side of motherhood, “Her Story” certainly was a daring rarity. Not only did Spofford acknowledge the difficulties that conventional gender expectations posed for women but implicitly the author also demanded better medical treatment and care for those afflicted by postpartum depression or those who otherwise suffered from the psychological or physical burdens of motherhood.
