This essay, which is historical in approach, uses feminist theory to analyze the complex ways in which two male-authored texts, The Blithedale Romance and As I Lay Dying, use the female reproductive system to link women`s identity with death and dying. In comparing the different circumstances but similar fates of Zenobia and Addie, we argue that their deaths, which can both be interpreted as suicides, gain force as cultural pleas for social change regarding female experience when the menstrual metaphors associated with them are examined closely.