Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Alphonse de Lamartine are two early-nineteenth-century French poets; whereas Lamartine is a canonical figure currently neglected by scholars, Desbordes-Valmore is attracting increasing attention thanks to recent feminist criticism.

Both Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine seek out the mother as the origin of their poetic voice. The prevalence of maternal imagery in their poetry counters widespread assumptions about the gendering of French Romanticism, with its three founding fathers -- Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and Lamartine. Whereas these two poets are often contrasted by scholars who invoke Lamartine as a paternal figure, Maternal Echoes complicates the status of sexual difference in Romantic discourse by insisting on the similarities in their treatment of the maternal.

Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Didier Anzieu, Guy Rosolato, and Donald Winnicott, Maternal Echoes argues that by attempting to echo the maternal voice in their poetry, Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine rethink the place of the body in poetic language and found a new ethical relation to the listener. The maternal fantasy that these two poets deploy offers us a new point of origin from which to reconceive French Romanticism.

Maternal Echoes begins by examining how nineteenth-century readers' conceptions of gender and of maternity branded Desbordes-Valmore's poetry as deliciously feminine and Lamartine's as repulsively effeminate. Because, for the most part, the post-Romantic generation read Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine in their youth, they sought to determine their own poetic voice by mimicking or rejecting their forebears, as an infant seeks a mirror image in his mother.

The book also places the poetry of Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine in the historical context of the 1830s, when the evolving image of motherhood reached new heights of idealization in the Saint-Simonian movement and in the religious drift towards mariolotry. In his social poetry of the 1830s, Lamartine actively appropriates maternal attributes at the expense of the feminine. In contrast, Desbordes-Valmore uses the maternal persona to undermine the traditional image of sacrificing motherhood. The contradictory readings of the mother put into play by her poetry, and our interpretation of it, reveal the contradictions at work in feminist discourse on the maternal. Maternal Echoes locates in her poetry new working definitions of the maternal.

Three chapters are devoted to exploring the "maternal echo" in Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine through close readings of poems, combining a variety of theoretical approaches including psychoanalysis, linguistics and ethics. In psychoanalytic accounts of child development, such as the theory of the "acoustic mirror" proposed by Guy Rosolato, the "maternal echo" is the child's voice echoing the mother's. In addition, in the Romantic tradition, echo appears in Victor Hugo's preface to Voix intirieures, in which he defines the poet's function in ethical terms, as one who responds to others.

The response of Desbordes-Valmore and Lamartine to the mothers' voices takes shape through her embodiment in the landscape as "sound envelope." While Lamartine's search for the maternal voice leads him succumb to fatal narcissism, Desbordes-Valmore is able instead to re-create the mother's voice in her representation of the mother-daughter union, in such poems as "Ma fille," which brings to a climax an aesthetics of reciprocity and of acoustic mirroring. As one prolongs the other, the daughter's voice resonates with maternal echoes.