Mme Lefebvre

Mme Lefebvre is a sixty-year-old bourgeois woman whose hostility toward her daughter-in-law culminates in murder when she suspects the younger woman is pregnant. Her story gives a concrete, extreme form to the book’s account of maternal possessiveness: the prospect that her son will establish a new family makes Mme Lefebvre feel that her own identity as a mother is ending.

Background and Family

In August 1925, Mme Lefebvre lived in northern France with her husband and children. She had passed menopause but remained desperately attached to maternity; for twelve years, she had suffered from ailments that manifested themselves symbolically in an imaginary pregnancy. This history places her later violence in a long-standing fixation on motherhood, rather than presenting it as an isolated reaction.

Hostility Toward Her Daughter-in-Law

Mme Lefebvre had long hated her son’s wife. In the book’s analysis, a mother may regard the son’s new attachment as an imposture and treat the newcomer as a calculating threat, while trying to hold her son within the protective world of his childhood. The daughter-in-law’s pregnancy sharpens this conflict: the son’s family will continue without his mother at its center, and the mother’s hope of living on through him gives way to a sense of displacement.

The Murder and Its Aftermath

When she suspected that her daughter-in-law was pregnant, Mme Lefebvre bought a revolver, supposedly for protection against robbers. In August 1925, during a car trip with her son driving, she killed the younger woman, who was six months pregnant. The timing and setting make the crime a direct consequence of the pregnancy’s announcement in the book’s account, rather than an unexplained act.

Mme Lefebvre was condemned to death and later pardoned. She spent the rest of her life in a reformatory and showed no remorse. She believed that God approved of the killing. As the sole proof of her daughter-in-law’s supposed wrongdoing, she cited the younger woman’s insistence that, now that she was part of the family, Mme Lefebvre would have to take her into account.

Significance

The book describes this case as a pathological extremity of the conflict between a mother’s attachment to her son and the daughter-in-law’s place in his adult life. Pregnancy makes the generational change unmistakable: the mother who imagined herself indispensable is reduced, in the book’s formulation, to one link in a succession that will continue without her. Mme Lefebvre’s murder turns that perceived loss into violence; her imagined pregnancy and her refusal of remorse underscore how tenaciously she clung to maternity even after it had ceased to define her place in the family.