I have argued in the previous chapter that Enlightenment representations of mother–child bonds frequently offer us decidedly Gothic perspectives of maternity that problematized writers' attempts to graft the physical dynamics of motherhood onto the bodies of nations, accentuated women's accountability for societal degeneration, and idealized the sufferings and sacrifices of fond mothers. This chapter explores some of the literary lines of inheritance of this theoretical model and also traces lines of resistence in newly emerging late eighteenth-century Gothic literatures and in Romantic women writers' representations of the all-but Gothic experience of maternity. The Gothic attributes of motherhood evident in works by social theorists and medical writers would come to characterize more generally the experience of maternity for many popular writers of the period, who suggested not only that maternal sympathy frequently rendered women sacrificial victims, but that sympathy might be transmuted in pathological obsession, turning mothers themselves into oppressive victimizers and, to invoke Downman's terms, “perverting to criminal the sweetest, best emotions of [their] soul[s].”