Jeebus, @DerdriuF, you really uncorked this.
So I'm already six layers deep and I remember a particularly important maxim from ethno-psychologist Clarissa Pinkola-Estes' "Women Who Run with the Wolves" --
A good mother knows when to bring death.
Pinkola-Estes uses the example of a wolf mother who must kill a sickly pup in order to preserve the health and well-being of the rest of her otherwise healthy litter. A pup which is suffering will cause all the other pups harm; the kindness and blessing of real motherhood is in bringing a merciful death.
Rosalie becomes the avenging angel; I think of J. Robert Oppenheimer's quote of the Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." She brings the ultimate power of motherhood here, putting to death her vicious fiance and his evil cohort in direct retribution for killing her human procreative powers through their rape and abandonment of Rosalie unto her own death. She ends the waste that these sick pups represent.
But this exercise of the negative power of motherhood demands a positive counterbalance. This may be the unconscious reason why her baby-hunger remains so rabid in her vampiric life.
The wolf mother, having put down the sick pup, still has a litter to nurture, and Rosalie still demands hers.
This may also partially explain her terseness during the family vote on Bella's transformation. This dark side of motherhood is something we do not wish on any human being lightly. It's not just the taking of human reproductive choice from Bella, but the possibility that Bella might only be a bringer of death, a destroyer of worlds once transformed.
[cross-posted from FemmeMalheureuse.Posterous.com]
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