Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

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RO M A N T I C I S M , M AT E R N I T Y, A N D THE BODY POLITIC

In Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic, Julie Kipp examines Romantic writers’ treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies in the context of the legal, medical, educational, and socioeconomic debates about motherhood so popular during the period. She argues that these discussions turned the physical processes associated with mothering into matters of national importance. The privately shared spaces signified by the womb or the maternal breast were made public by the widespread interest in the workings of the maternal body. These private spaces evidenced for writers of the period the radical exposure of mother and child to one another – for good or ill. Kipp’s primary concern is to underline the ways that writers used representations of mother–child bonds as ways of naturalizing, endorsing, and critiquing Enlightenment constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations. This fascinating literary and cultural study will appeal to all scholars of Romanticism. j u l i e k i p p is Assistant Professor of English at Hope College in Michigan. She is the author of articles on Robert Browning, Friedrich Schlegel, and Maria Edgeworth.

cambridge studies in romanticism General editors Professor Marilyn Butler Professor James Chandler University of Oxford University of Chicago Editorial board John Barrell, University of York Paul Hamilton, University of London Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge Kenneth Johnston, Indiana University Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara Jerome McGann, University of Virginia David Simpson, University of California, Davis This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those ‘great national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking place’: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanisation, industrialisation, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of ‘literature’ and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded. The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. For a complete list of titles published see end of book.

R OMA N T ICIS M , M ATE RN IT Y , AN D TH E BO D Y POL IT I C JULIE KIPP

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521814553 © Julie Kipp 2003 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2003 - isbn-13 978-0-511-07339-7 eBook (EBL) - isbn-10 0-511-07339-9 eBook (EBL) - isbn-13 978-0-521-81455-3 hardback - isbn-10 0-521-81455-3 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Danny, Kevin, Meghan, Matty, and Emma

Publishing is to thinking as the maternity ward is to the first kiss. Friedrich Schlegel (Atheneum Fragment 62)

Contents

Acknowledgments

page xi

Introduction Naturally bad or dangerously good: Romantic-period mothers “on trial”

1

1

Revolutions in mothering: theory and practice

21

2

A love too thick: Gothic mothers and monstrous sympathies

55

3

The Irish wet nurse: Edgeworth’s Ennui

96

4

Infanticide in an age of enlightenment: Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian

122

The case of the Shelleys: maternal sympathy and The Cenci

155

Postscript

183

5

Notes Bibliography Index

189 219 232

x

Acknowledgments

This book has been in the works since I was a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame and many friends and colleagues offered counsel on the project and provided me with the support which helped me see it to completion. I am grateful to the English Department at Notre Dame for research and teaching fellowships that motivated me in the early stages of the project, and to Seamus Deane, Julia Douthwaite, Chris Fox, Gloria-Jean Masciarotte, and James Walton for their sound advice on the dissertation. Greg Kucich, most especially, proved to be not only an exception dissertation director, but a genuine friend, who set standards as a teacher and scholar that I will always try to emulate. This project would never have come to fruition without his early guidance. Faculty members and administrators at Hope College likewise have been very helpful during revision stages. I benefited particularly from three summer grants and from a Hope College Towsley Research Scholar Fellowship which enabled me to complete final revisions on the book. I extend particular thanks to the Chair of the English Department, Peter Schakel, who has vigorously supported my work since I joined the department, and thank too my Dean, William Reynolds; my wonderful colleagues in the English Department; friends in other disciplines; and members of the Women’s Issues Organization for their ongoing encouragement and counsel during the last three and a half years. Students at the University of Notre Dame and at Hope have also sparked ideas that I have incorporated into this project and, more importantly, have reminded me that my work does not happen in a vacuum. I want to extend special thanks to one of these, Sarah McCluskey, for her invaluable assistance with the index. Carol Barish, Terry Eagleton, Susan Greenfield, Diane Hoeveler, Alan Richardson, Jennifer Thorn, and Kevin Whelan also read sections of this book and provided me with extremely valuable feedback. I am continually amazed that I am fortunate enough to work in a profession that encourages the kind of fellowship and generosity of spirit these colleagues have shown xi

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Acknowledgments

me. Some of their advice was channeled into earlier publications, and I want to thank the publishers at the University of Kentucky Press and Camden House for granting permission to reprint material that originally appeared in Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature 1650–1865 and Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity, respectively. Josie Dixon was my initial editor with Cambridge and I am thankful for her early interest in the project. Linda Bree subsequently has proved an exceptionally professional and very patient editor. Gillian Maude carefully copyedited the final manuscript, and I am thankful not only for her attention to detail, but also for her encouraging comments. Jackie Warren was very helpful in addressing my questions about the index. My Cambridge readers provided extensive commentary on early versions of the manuscript and helped me to turn an unwieldy mess into a publishable monograph. I am more grateful to them for their advice than I can express. Series editor James Chandler not only gave me thoughtful feedback on the final manuscript but provided ongoing advice on, and support for, the project itself. I will never forget his kindness. Ray Ryan originally got the ball rolling with Cambridge, and for this I am forever indebted to him. He has been the truest of friends and a professional advisor of the highest caliber. I thank Paul Costello and Don and Christine Costello for their extensive assistance during the early stages of this project. My mother, father, brothers, and sisters-in-law encouraged me endlessly and helped to care for my children during research trips and before a number of deadlines. Any success I ever achieve I share with them. I owe special thanks to Matt Kipp for his faith in me and for his numerous “contributions to the arts.” I am also exceedingly fortunate to have a number of amazing friends who provided personal support and helped me to keep my sense of humor over the course of this book’s evolution, years during which I underwent a number of serious trials of my own. I would not have survived these without Katie Barry, Mary Burgess and Jim Smyth, Linda Dove, Katie Freeman, Donna Mahieu, Margaret O’Callaghan, Erin Selmer, Sue Stopka, and the members of Con Los Dudes, especially Adam Bandstra. I thank John Roe and Holly Verde, too, for their practical assistance. R´on´an McDonald provided me with food, lodging, and a receptive ear on a crucial research trip to London and Oxford and likewise has proved to be a longtime shining star as a friend. Willa Murphy, who has been an extraordinary comrade and an endless source of strength for me, deserves a special word of thanks, as she also provided highly useful scholarly advice on this project.

Acknowledgments

xiii

Above all, I thank my children, who taught me how to negotiate the trials I faced as a mother, inspired me with original ideas for my scholarship, and bore with me during the writing of this book. This book is dedicated, with love and deepest gratitude, to them.

Introduction Naturally bad or dangerously good: Romantic-period mothers “on trial” [I]n the case of our children we are responsible for the exercise of acknowledged power: a power wide in its extent, indefinite in its effects, and inestimable in its importance. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education1

Nature has given women so much power, that law has wisely given them little. Samuel Johnson, “Letter to Dr. Taylor” (18 August 1763)2

This book deals with the trials and errors of Romantic-period mothers, the politicizing of maternal bodies and the maternalizing of political bodies, and the authoring of mothers and the mothering of texts. In the chapters to follow, I identify abstract theories and material practices associated with motherhood during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and consider especially ways these were negotiated discursively by writers attempting to make legible the seemingly self-disclosing, but often highly mysterious maternal body. My primary concern is to trace ways that writers deployed representations of mother–child bonds as a means to naturalize various constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations, but I also want to consider some of the fault lines between writing motherhood and reading the bodies of mothers, between books about birth and the birthing of books. I view Romantic writers’ treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies especially through the lens of the legal, medical, educational, and socioeconomic debates about motherhood so popular during the period, discussions that rendered the physical processes associated with mothering matters of national importance. Widespread interest in the workings of the maternal body tended to make public the privately shared space signified by the womb or the maternal breast, both of which evidenced for writers of the period the radical exposure of mother and child to one another – for both good and ill. It is not my intention, then, to lay claim to any definition of motherhood or to suggest that 1

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Romanticism and the Body Politic

Romantic writers tapped into any kind of authentic maternal experience, but rather to argue that representations of maternity during the Romantic period were thoroughly implicated in broader politicized discourses that specifically constructed and evaluated maternal subjects in terms of their relation to a child who was figured explicitly as both self and Other and represented the interests of the child as radically distinct but also absolutely inseparable from those of the mother. Because this book foregrounds the writing and reading of motherhood and maternal bodies, I begin with the assumption that readers of texts often function as jurors of sorts who bear witness to, and are called to deliberate on the evidence presented in specific “cases.” I borrow this analogy in part from Ian Watt, who, in The Rise of the Novel, compares the epistemological rules governing formal realism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the procedures in a court of law, likening novel readers to the members of a jury: “[B]oth want to know all the particulars of a given case – the time and place of the occurrence; both must be satisfied as to the identities of the parties concerned.”3 James Chandler’s recent reflections on the distinctly Romantic “case form” in England in 1819, moreover, provide me with an analogy geared even more precisely toward the historical focus of this book. Following Andre Jolles’s 1930 analysis of the case form, Chandler argues that “Romanticism is itself describable in terms of a massive altering of ‘the case.’” In so far as Romantic texts record both a break from and a grappling with the inheritance of Enlightenment thought, Chandler stresses that the Romantic “case” is not an “instantiation of a general scheme or normative system; nor is it just the form in which that instantiation occurs.” Rather, it “is the very form of ‘deliberation.’ It is always calling for judgement, and it is by virtue of judgement that it offers formal mediation between the particular and the general, between instance and rule, between circumstance and principle.” Ultimately the case form does not provide pronouncements of truth, but an occasion for the kind of vacillating deliberation that Romantic-period texts invite.4 This study takes its cue from Watt’s and Chandler’s legal analogies, focusing specifically on the trials of mothers in texts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and considering especially the ways in which the case of Romantic motherhood intersects with broader debates concerning the construction of civil society, the legitimacy of nationalist loyalties, and the union of national bodies. Not all of the texts examined here conform to the conventions of formal realism as these are defined by Watt, though most, to some extent, position the reader as a juror – in most cases as a carefully selected juror. Some of these trials are explicitly judicial, as for

Introduction: Romantic-period mothers “on trial”

3

Maria Venables in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798), Effie Deans in Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1819), and Beatrice Cenci in Percy Shelley’s The Cenci (1819). In other instances, the defendants are not fictionalized characters; the very real trials of Marie Antoinette; Mary, Queen of Scots; Charlotte Smith; and Alice Clifton are part of the historical record. But I have also in some instances invoked the term “trial” more loosely, to designate broader processes whereby late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century mothers were scrutinized, interrogated, and more often than not found guilty for crimes against nature, the state, or both natural and political orders. In this sense, motherhood itself constituted a “case,” in the sense in which Chandler uses this term. As my focus lies chiefly with Romantic-era negotiations of maternal responsibilities and culpabilities, the motif of the mother on trial proves a particularly useful lens through which to consider the ways in which constructions of motherhood would be enforced, transgressed, contested, and reconfigured during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Representations of mothers before the bar reveal acutely the period’s divisive attitudes toward motherhood and betray some of the difficulties authors faced in attempting to establish the “identities of the parties concerned.” In presenting the case of Romantic motherhood, I want to expand upon the arguments of a number of recent feminist theorists as well as highlight the affinities between contemporary debates about motherhood and those which marked texts produced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While motherhood has become a fairly trendy topic among Romantic-period scholars, few acknowledge fully the extent to which the category of maternity has proven to be a source of great contention among feminist scholars. Whereas many early Anglo-American feminist critics looked to motherhood as a distinctly female experience and hence as a point of feminist consolidation,5 many second-generation feminists (in the vein of Judith Butler, for example), have tended to focus on the discursive, hence cultural production of the “natural” so as to destabilize those experiences which authorize themselves via appeals to the body.6 Continental feminist critics like H´el`ene Cixous have often worked from a somewhat different direction, stressing, for example, the ways in which women’s biological experiences inform their writing practices (i.e. women, “never far from ‘mother,’” write “in white ink”).7 Others, like Susan Stanford Friedman, have countered that this “biologic poetic” theoretically “privileges motherhood as the basis of all creativity, a position that symbolically excludes women without children and all men.”8 Emmanuel Levinas describes the conditions of one’s always already presupposed “responsibility to the

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other” as a “gestation of the other in the same” and admits up front to the “evocation of maternity” in his analogy,9 while Sara Ruddick suggests that mothers are not marked by their capacity for sympathy and alterity but by the suppression of the impulse for violence.10 Maternal bodies and temperaments are rendered within this context both simplistically self-evident and hopelessly obscure and, in this sense, I want to argue, contemporary theoretical debates about maternity are thoroughly Romantic. Writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries similarly appealed to and disputed the workings of reproductive bodies and the role of mothers in society in ways which strongly resemble recent debates about the nature of maternal nature. In both contexts, for example, theories about maternity have garnered authority from rapidly shifting medical technologies. Advances in genetic engineering now explicitly challenge even the apparent biological selfevidence of maternity. Is a mother one who carries and bears a child, one who raises him/her, or one who merely provides an egg? Within this climate, as for Romantic writers, the reproductive body becomes as much a site wherein the category of the “natural” can be disputed and reworked as it does a stable referent of experience. Recent critical forays into the theoretics of motherhood also necessarily spur broader questions about who controls the means of reproduction in modern societies, whose reproductive choices will be sanctioned in the future, and to what extent it is the state’s responsibility to decide. Again, these concerns were of paramount importance for Romantic-period writers, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein being perhaps the most obvious testament to what I will argue here were widespread anxieties concerning reproductive technologies and the state’s interest in reproductive power.11 Mary O’Brien argued over a decade ago (and her words take on increasing resonance), Men have always defined the social parameter of the forms of reproductive relations. They have also controlled technological development. It is this old male control of production combined with newer control of reproduction which makes the development of reproductive technology a political question, a historical event of a momentous kind and a renewed struggle for reproductive power . . . There is no issue which throws down the challenge to women to seize control of their usurped reproductive power in the way that this issue does. There is no issue in which the holding in balance of the laws of the natural world and the law of the historical world offers us radical choices and possible transformations of such a fundamental kind.12

To this end, the task of historicizing maternal subject positions in ways which do not produce idealist categories or enshrine specific maternal experiences as either available to all mothers or as definitive of “femininity”

Introduction: Romantic-period mothers “on trial”

5

seems more crucial than ever. This book constitutes an attempt to demonstrate the centrality of the case of the Romantic mother to the evolution of this conversation. I work primarily from the position of Michel Foucault and others in his wake, who hold that sexualities are produced in specific historical contexts and that gender is a contested social category that is imposed on, or (as Judith Butler holds) performed by a sexed body. Although Foucault does not provide us with extensive reflections on maternal bodies per se, his groundbreaking work on political “anatomies” (which transverses both the terrain of the state as a “body” and of the body and its surroundings in terms of a “small state”) serves as a useful point of departure for this study. His understanding of the body politic as “a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes, and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge” provides me with a framework for considering the intersections and divergences between theories of motherhood and material practices associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing – between the general case of the Romantic mother, and specific cases involving Romantic-period mothers.13 Indeed, like Watt and Chandler, Foucault invites this legal analogy, directing our attention to the ways that the individual (as opposed to the species) enters into the field of knowledge toward the end of the eighteenth century, most specifically as a “case”: “a case which at one and the same time constitutes an object for a branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power.” The individual, he stresses, is “described, judged, measured, compared with others in his [sic] very individuality,” but also has to be “trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc.” through reference to the group. Integral to this process is the “turning of real lives into writing,” a procedure which for Foucault involves both “objectification and subjection.”14 The case of the Romantic-period mother offers us particularly fruitful ground for examining some of the discursive procedures at issue for Foucault (in medical manuals, conduct literatures, housekeeping guides and cookbooks, works produced by social theorists and political economists, as well as literary texts), particularly in so far as these operate along gender lines and participate in a disciplinary framework that moves individuals toward cultural consensus as well as operating through more overt methods of social, moral, and legal coercion. I find especially useful Joan Scott’s two-pronged definition of gender as “a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” and as “a primary way of signifying relationships of

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power.”15 Motherhood proves (to borrow Scott’s terms) a useful category for the historical analysis of Romantic-period texts, particularly in so far as writers of the period appealed to the mother–child bond as a means of naturalizing other forms of social interaction, maintaining and sometimes challenging dominant relationships of power. I examine ways in which normative gender categories were produced and maintained via discursive attempts to repress or override alternative possibilities. But behind my argument lies the further assumption that this process involves that which Foucault has identified as the “formation of a certain mode of relation to the self in the experience of the flesh”16 – in this case a relation to the physical self as “non-self.” Many women writers of the Romantic period in fact described the experience of motherhood in precisely this way. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poem “To a Little Invisible Being Who is Expected Soon to Become Visible” provides a case in point.17 The poem accentuates the alienation from self which a mother feels when inhabited by that “stranger guest” (line 23) who is both “[p]art herself, yet to herself unknown” (line 22). Even while celebrating the anticipated arrival of the “little captive,” the speaker realizes that this “[g]erm of life” has strange “powers” which also hold her prisoner (lines 1, 5). She characterizes the womb itself as a “living tomb,” and a “prison” (lines 20, 29), but this poem’s tension springs from the fact that the womb not only keeps the child captive, but also that it so captivates (in both positive and negative senses of the word) the mother herself. Recognizing that the moment of birth will bring release, she is also aware that she must endure in the process “nature’s sharpest pangs” (line 19) and that she must pass through “life’s mysterious gate” (line 4) in order to “lay her burden down, / That her glad arms that burden may resume” (lines 17–18). Given the high mortality rates associated with pregnancy and childbirth during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this mysterious passage in point of fact constituted for many women of the period a one-way trip.18 The sense of physical dispossession expressed in Barbauld’s poem is more than a fear of death, however. This speaker is not overtly anxious for her life; the tone of the poem is, for the most part, one of celebratory anticipation. Yet the speaker describes a radical shift in her experience of self and it is this sense of physical and mental dislocation which most concerns me. She has become something other than that which she had been prior to her pregnancy, and this transformation of self resists any easy slippage into categories traditionally associated with the role of “mother.” She is Other, rather than mother, or more precisely, the poem records her recognition of the otherness that is at once within herself. To be sure, her captivity/captivation

Introduction: Romantic-period mothers “on trial”

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is apparently willed; the pregnancy itself seems to be desired. And yet the entire poem constitutes an appeal to be released: “Haste, infant bud of being, haste to blow!” (line 12). The sense of urgency which these repetitive imperatives reinforce suggests more than a fond parent’s longing – “On thy soft cheek a mother’s kiss to lay” (line 16); this woman wants to possess, rather than be possessed by her child. She stresses that her child’s powers now “lie folded in thy curios frame, / Senses from objects locked, and mind from thought!” (lines 5–6), yet the infant’s dormant subjectivity clearly serves as a mirror of the mother’s own state of consciousness. She, too, is “folded within”; her child’s life has been “fed with her [own] life” (line 24), that “self ” that can only be reclaimed by the expulsion of the child.19 Barbauld’s poem, which seems on the surface a rather standard celebration of the joys of motherhood, actually radically challenges simplistic readings of the maternal body, especially in so far as she represents the body not as a static thing but as a “situation,” in the sense in which Simone de Beauvoir uses this term.20 This is to say that Barbauld’s mother is a subject who experiences her body in a radically temporal way, as a dynamic, ongoing process – as well as one who experiences the particulars of her actual situation (her placement in time, her actual physical locatedness). This type of deployment of pregnancy (as an experience of being inhabited by another) allows that one woman might occupy differing bodies variously at any given point in time; to describe the body in this way is to remove it from the essentialist framework advocated by numerous writers of the period, thwarting any understanding of women’s nature as simplistically “legible.”21 While Barbauld’s poem thus works against the grain of standard theories of the Enlightenment period, which sought to decode and demystify the body as a way to substantiate broader arguments about the nature of female nature, she also highlights here the sense of self-alienation that marks many women writers’ accounts of the experience of motherhood during the Romantic period. I stress in the chapters to follow that historical circumstances were helping to generate an atmosphere in which the type of maternal ambivalence and self-division evident in Barbauld’s poem could flourish. The broadbased medical reassessment of the conditions in which women gestated and gave birth to their children – which coincided neatly with a political reevaluation of the environment in which they reared them and from which they subsequently “delivered” them into society – distinguished the second half of the eighteenth century from historical periods that had preceded it. Physicians and educators scrutinizing the daily business of mothering found numerous targets for their censure and, while some invoked examples of

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“unnatural” maternal behavior so as to promote the need to monitor and regulate the relationship between mother and child, others appealed to the sympathies of their readers in representing the “natural” constrictions imposed on, and trials experienced by mothers. I want to note at the outset that I am less interested in an analysis of the oppression of mothers than the title of this introductory chapter might suggest. Indeed, many of the mothers on trial that I engage in this book are oppressors rather than (or as well as) victims. Nor am I interested solely in an analysis of the ways in which modes of economic production interact with or determine processes of reproduction, in the vein of critics like O’Brien, though I do begin this study with a sustained look at shifting attitudes toward reproductive labor and the transformation of childbirth technologies during the eighteenth century. Yet I am more concerned with the ways in which revolutions in the childbirth industry were negotiated discursively than in substantiating the claims of critics like O’Brien and Shulamith Firestone that reproductive labor becomes a bitter trap for women.22 Clearly economic interests underwrite medical debates about pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing practices (then as now); clearly motherhood has imprisoned women historically in restrictive roles and delimited their political agency and opportunities. Yet to assume women’s economic and political victimization as mothers is to tell only part of the story. Accounts like Firestone’s reveal little about the ways in which ideological structures are internalized by individuals, about the lived experiences and desires of women who bear and/or raise children, about the empowering dimensions of motherhood and the complex psychic repercussions of enacting this role. Psychoanalytic theory offers a route into this terrain, and, while this book is not informed explicitly by psychoanalytic methodologies, I was heavily influenced by the work of continental feminists like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray in conceptualizing this project. I would agree with most post-Lacanian theorists that subjects, including maternal subjects, are not determined a priori by sexed bodies, but rather negotiate constant and unstable processes of differentiation and distinction, the repression and acceptance of subconscious and conscious drives and desires. I largely view the maternal body as a discursive construct, and motherhood as a cultural performance, an effect of systems of power that variously create and regulate the desire for maternity. Yet I am more concerned in this book with tracing the construction of gendered subjectivities in political and historical contexts than in legitimizing or debunking myths of motherhood. I am especially concerned with the reproduction of mothers’ tales at a broader ideological level, and in the role that disciplines like psychology may play

Introduction: Romantic-period mothers “on trial”

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in this process.23 Psychoanalytic approaches to the experience of motherhood, for example, more often than not operate from the viewpoint of the child and so tend to focus on the body of the mother as an object rather than a source of desire, revealing little about the consciousness of mothers (mothers “feed, but do not speak,” Luce Irigaray notes24 ), while frequently describing mother–child relations in ways that may prove proscriptive and delimiting. I find that the most intriguing work offered by poststructuralist feminists rather posits an historical trajectory of maternal consciousness that studies such as this might help trace. My aim, in some respects, is thus to historicize poststructuralist psychoanalytic narratives of maternal subjects, rather than to endorse or revise them. Texts examined here which suggest that pregnancy might be experienced as an invasion of physical/psychic space (as in Barbauld’s poem) for instance, reflect the development of a late eighteenth-century maternal consciousness that would be inherited and explored subsequently in the twentieth century by a wave of poststructuralist feminists offering critiques of Freudian theory. In appealing frequently to the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding – which seemingly materialized (and therefore legitimated) Enlightenment theories of sympathetic intersubjective relations – numerous Romantic writers linked the extra-ordinary subject position of the mother not only to a condition of Levinasian alterity but to the experience of abjection, in the sense in which Julia Kristeva deploys this term in Powers of Horror.25 While Kristeva indeed sees pregnancy as “extract[ing] woman out of her oneness and giv[ing] her the possibility – but not the certainty – of reaching out to the other,” she also stresses that during childbirth, there is this other abyss that opens up between the body and what had been its inside: there is the abyss between the mother and the child. What connection is there between myself, or even more unassumingly between my body and this internal graft and fold, which, once the umbilical cord had been severed, is an inaccessible other? My body and . . . him. No connection. Nothing to do with it.

This divided (or doubled) response to the other (and to the otherness of the self ) is not, despite its biological underpinnings, to be understood as essential or transhistorical for Kristeva, who rather invites an analysis of the ways in which seemingly self-evident maternal experiences are socially constructed, as well as a consideration of the functions they serve in specific historic contexts. She stresses, for example, the “corporeal and psychological suffering of childbirth and especially the self-sacrifice involved in becoming anonymous in order to pass on the social norm . . . without

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which society will not reproduce and will not maintain a constancy of standardized household.” If pregnancy and childbirth trigger the experience of abjection, in other words, while maternity itself may be lived out as “psychosis,”26 Kristeva allows that this experience has been naturalized through the institutionalization of specific material practices that facilitate the transmission and reproduction of patriarchal lines of power – in the process alienating women from the products of their physical labor and their own bodies. In the forthcoming chapters, I consider ways in which shifting attitudes about maternal nature helped naturalize the seemingly self-referential experience of maternal psychosis to which Kristeva refers. Moreover, I argue that for many writers of the period, transforming ideas about the dynamics of motherhood carried nationalist inflections. This book therefore also serves as a gloss on Luce Irigaray’s observation that “The relationship with the mother is a mad desire, because it is the ‘dark continent’ par excellence.”27 Irigaray here points to ways in which the mother–child bond is often figured as savage, primal, unenlightened – all of which tropes were standard fare for Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment writers, particularly those employing maternal metaphors as a means to explore questions concerning legitimate and illegitimate national bonds and loyalties. Thus Walter Scott, for example, likens the mother–child bond to those fierce local attachments and clan loyalties prevalent in Scotland prior to the 1745 rebellion – a point which marks for Scott a turn toward Enlightenment progress, even if at the expense of native Scottish identity. Yet I want to stress, too, that maternal metaphors were employed very differently by writers working within other genres and politicized contexts, in ways which prefigure alternative poststructuralist descriptions of the mother–child bond. In a more recent interview with H´el`ene Rouch, for example, Irigaray argues that the placenta is an organ which mediates continuously between the bodies of mother and child, maintaining rather than collapsing difference.28 A number of Romantic-period writings posited similar arguments and deployed maternal imagery as a way to reconfigure the “true” nature of romantic love: not as a form of sympathy which depends upon the colonization of the other or reflects a narcissistic desire to obliterate difference, but as mutuality, exchange, a kind of interactive independence. The politics informing the deployment of this type of maternal imagery resembles that of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism; mother–child bonds may function in this context as part of a broader critique of Romantic nationalism rather than serving to exemplify a totalizing connection between individual and motherland. Julia Kristeva has described Enlightenment

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cosmopolitanism in terms which point to ways in which constructions of the maternal body were utilized by writers of the period negotiating the political fabric of an increasingly globalized community: “The nation’s burden, so often acknowledged, [was] transposed in order to be absorbed at the heart of a borderless political philosophy dominated by the concern for politics understood as the maximum integration of mankind in a moderate, attainable ideality.”29 The permeability of the borders between the body of the pregnant or breastfeeding mother and her child, the fact that the maternal body was conceived as a “domain that [was] not homogeneous but [was] preserved as a union of singularities,” whereby the rights of each member were “recognized on the basis of their singularities, which cannot in themselves be harmonized,”30 meant that the maternal body might be utilized as an ideal metaphor for political structures that transcended the dynamics of the individual nation-state. Appeals to the maternal body as a borderless “state” helped naturalize a cosmopolitan world view, even as these pointed glaringly to some of the more problematic aspects of realizing such an ideality. This book thus demonstrates the wide variety of way in which maternity was envisioned by writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and suggests that similar metaphors and narratives might serve diverse political purposes. My selection of texts was largely governed by the legal metaphor that informs the title of this introductory chapter; literal and figurative “trials” in these texts provide a route to considering the ways in which maternity was negotiated by writers of the period. But, to return to Ian Watt’s analogy – that of the reader-as-juror – this motif also highlights the generic strategies at issue in the chapters to follow. In large part, this book concerns not so much “maternity” per se as the ways in which maternity was written during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the audiences to which maternal narratives were geared, and the purposes which various representations served.31 Most specifically, I argue in the chapters to follow that Romantic-period mothers were caught in a fascinating double bind, indicted indiscriminately for following and/or rejecting their presumed natures. This is to say that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century mothers were deemed monstrous either way: they were “dangerously good” if they loved their children too generously, too indiscriminately; and “naturally bad” if they did not love them enough. This either/or neither/nor trap positions Romantic mothers outside the standard good/bad oppositions endorsed in mainstream Enlightenment writings. The Romantic-period mother frequently serves in this way to undercut the binary logic of Enlightenment categories; she

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lends herself to a deconstructionist critique. Yet critics have not sufficiently addressed this fact: much historically grounded feminist research on motherhood ends up validating in one form or another the idea of the “good” mother as this was constructed in eighteenth-century texts, even if from a seemingly objective, scholarly distance. This seems particularly true in Romantic-period scholarship, especially given the current emphasis in this field on the recuperation of lost or marginalized women’s voices. Attempts to negotiate this vast new territory of Romantic women’s writings have in many ways consolidated themselves around troublesome distinctions between masculinity and femininity. Thus the traditional “big six” are frequently hailed as problematically masculinist in their solitary quests for Romantic transcendence, while women writers of the period conversely are held to “endorse a commitment to the construction of subjectivity based on alterity,” which is grounded in “what Carol Gilligan has recently taught us to call an ethic of care which insists on the primacy of the family or the community and their attendant responsibilities.”32 Maternity plays a large role in these discussions, and indeed the case of the “good mother” has become a very trendy topic in eighteenth-century and Romantic-period scholarship, given that motherhood seems to exemplify this thrust toward the other, this “construction of subjectivity based on alterity,” this prioritization of issues of responsibility over those of power. Yet it is important to recognize that motherhood was a highly contested term during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on a variety of fronts: medical, philosophical, political, economic, spiritual, legal – a fact which largely has been played down by scholars of the period. As Susan Greenfield recently observes, “[E]ven as motherhood evoked an increasingly standardized set of values, the concept was pliant and adaptable . . . Maternity was, in this sense, continually invented and re-invented.”33 Critics have to date, nonetheless, tended to focus almost exclusively on Romantic-period writers’ preoccupations with cases of sympathetic, “natural,” and hence necessarily “good” mothers. Although Romantic authors pervasively questioned the intimate relationship between mothers and their children and betrayed persistent fears about the physical as well as spiritual dimensions of the mother–child bond, studies of the period primarily reflect the ways in which the maternal body was idealized and celebrated as a figure of sympathetic relationship between the self and an Other, or appropriated as a vehicle of masculine desire. Marlon Ross and Jerome McGann, for example, stress that women writing during the Romantic period made positive connections between the maternal body and its range of influence. Ross links the kind of alterity

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that Mellor associates with women writers’ constructions of subjectivity directly to the physical condition of pregnancy, arguing that feminine influence was represented as “based on the necessity of shared space” which was linked to the space of the womb. Mothering as a process was held to encourage “empathetic nurturing,” which was associated with a “natural” feminine predisposition for sympathy – the ability to share and participate in the emotional experiences of others.34 This predisposition, in turn, frequently authorized women’s literary productions. Their sensibilities were designated as superior by virtue of their ability to feel more acutely, and so to render more completely, the depths of emotional experience. McGann further argues that the mother becomes an emblem of perfect sensibility for many Romantic women poets “because her feelings are incorrupt, and her purity is imagined as a direct function of her motherhood,” especially in poetry in which a mother “appears the medium of the child’s inarticulate life.”35 Barbara Gelpi points out that a cult of motherhood conquered male artists of the period as well, arguing persuasively that the maternal body constituted an aesthetic ideal for writers following Edmund Burke.36 The masculine Romantic desire to reproduce the state of consciousness associated with motherhood has also been equated by numerous critics (including Ross) with a kind of envy for a form of sympathetic oneness which the male author could never fully experience. Alan Richardson notes that, as developments in moral philosophy and aesthetics challenged traditional notions of masculinity, the “Man of Feeling” who reflected the new Romantic sensibility necessarily had to negotiate his own contradiction in terms by reclaiming feminine qualities. Richardson stresses that “strategies for absorbing feminine qualities developed by Sensibility and Romantic writers all seem to proceed from early experiences of and fantasies about the mother’s body.”37 The maternal body becomes for Richardson (and numerous critics in his wake) a sign of the male writer’s desire to recuperate a sense of forever-lost unity with another, or, in psychoanalytic terms, a projection of his primary narcissism.38 Critics working on gender relations earlier in the eighteenth century, by contrast, have considered more extensively representations of neglectful, “savage,” and otherwise deviant mothers, yet they do so primarily so as to demonstrate ways in which stereotypically unnatural mothers helped establish normative codes of feminine behavior during this period. The “bad” mother signifies within this scheme everything that the “good” mother is not.39 Toni Bowers stresses particularly the ways in which “varieties of maternal possibility [were] denied credibility in the effort to create a monolithic version of maternal excellence” during the first half of the eighteenth

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century. Asking us to consider “What silencings, abandonments, and abortions became necessary to bringing forth Augustan Britain’s ideal mother?” she emphasizes the Augustan pursuit of a “single correct version of maternal virtue,” one which refused to admit “differences of economic privilege and historical position,” despite the fact the “maternal difference [was] everywhere apparent, even in texts that den[ied] it most insistently.”40 Bowers directs our attention here to a curious phenomenon of eighteenth-century British narratives of motherhood: their tendency to resist the homogenizing impulses of their narrators by making visible some of the differences against which maternal ideals were measured during this period. Theories of deviant maternal behavior certainly proliferated during the eighteenth century, and, even as these helped render normative (through comparison) a “single correct version” of maternal subjectivity, they frequently publicized and helped generate sympathy for cases of mad, bad, and even death-dealing mothers, whose stories had not been previously widely recorded. But I want to stress, too, that even seemingly “good” mothers, who followed the dictates of nature in sympathizing completely with their children, were portrayed as deviant by numerous writers of the Romantic period.41 The overtly sympathetic mother becomes emblematic of the dangers associated with narrow allegiances or highly localized loyalties, and so plays a key role in discussions concerning the fostering of nationalist bonds. An obsessive concern for things local proves a distraction from duty to nation. Better to see one’s child die a martyr to the cause, then, than turn traitor and betray the interests of the many. The “good” mother, in this instance, must necessarily harden her heart. Rousseau provides us with an anecdote which illuminates this point: A Spartan mother had five sons with the army. A Helot arrived; trembling she asked his news. “Your five sons are slain.” “Vile slave, was that what I asked thee?” “We have won the victory.” She hastened to the temple to render thanks to the gods. That was a citizen.42

Implicit here is the assumption that overtly loving mothers do not necessarily make good citizens. I will argue in the chapters to follow that, as the century progressed, the seemingly rigid binary distinctions invoked by Bowers and others – between the ideal and the real, the natural and unnatural, the loving and murderous mother – in fact grew increasingly blurry, so much so that, by

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the turn of the nineteenth century, the concept of murderous mothers had been all-but naturalized, while loving mothers were frequently demonized. Representations of infanticidal mothers, for instance, prove a strong case in point. In her recent study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century infanticide narratives, Josephine McDonagh identifies “two recurrent and opposing” authorial strategies at work in infanticide narratives of this period: the infanticidal mother’s behavior is characterized in earlier accounts as savage and untenable within a modern, civilized society, but in later narratives as nearly heroic, a response to the injustices of modern civilization, “an act of salvation within a corrupt world.” To kill a child in order to save her/him from a life of misery might, according to the latter narrative, be a “humanitarian act of salvation,” just as to sacrifice sons in battle in the interest of national independence or imperial glory is held to be enlightened, disinterested, heroic.43 As we will see, Romantic-period child murderers frequently are represented precisely in this way – as benevolent mothers whose love brings death. The mothers in Felicia Hemans’s “Indian Woman’s Death-Song” and “The Suliote Mother,” for example, kill their children so as to save them from future pain or lives of enslavement. Yet literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also abounds with portraits of well-intentioned but ultimately death-dealing mothers (like Lady Delacour in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, who believes herself to have killed her baby by breastfeeding it), women who poison their children with the same reproductive bodies that are supposed to nurture and shelter their developing young (like Maria Venables in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, whose daughter is rendered sickly because “debilitated by the grief with which its mother was assailed before it saw the light”44 ). Even overtly affectionate mothers prove potentially murderous for many Romantic period writers, in so far as these women were deemed likely to “kill” their children with love. Women’s seemingly natural dispositions for sympathy were invoked frequently to this end as evidence of their inability to make discriminating judgments and act objectively in their children’s best interests – and hence in the best interests of the nation. Romantic-period mothers essentially faced a nearly unresolvable double bind on this front, mandated as they were to sympathize perfectly with their children (as dictated by nature and articulated by numerous poets), while remaining wholly reasonable about their children’s and their nation’s needs. By the end of the eighteenth century, mothers on trial before the literary/critical bar were likely, in effect, to be found guilty by a jury of their (supposed) peers, regardless of whether they rejected their maternal nature and children outright or succumbed entirely to them.

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This simultaneous naturalization of murderous mothers and demonizing of loving mothers suggests a very different relation of “bad” to “good” mothers than that which has been traced in the bulk of scholarship on maternity to date – one which depends largely on narrative strategies and which is therefore inflected by generic concerns. In the first instance, those who naturalize murderous mothers include political and economic theorists who are less preoccupied with the actions of individuals than with universal laws of economic growth and decline, the dictates of population, demography. The inevitability of population growth, for example, makes child murder somewhat comprehensible according to this scheme. In related vein, medical writers after mid-century look to universal laws scripted in nature as a way to account for the actions of individuals, and the focus in medical jurisprudence debates turns to the instability of women’s physiologies. “Humanitarian” narratives of infanticidal mothers (to invoke Thomas Laqueur’s term45 ), which tended to accentuate the acute suffering and especially the mental disorder of women during the lying-in period which preceded and followed childbirth, often severely challenged popular assumptions about the nature of the maternal body, identified widely during the eighteenth century as the source of women’s naturally sympathetic dispositions. The same intimate physical connection between mother and child which so many Romantic-period writers were busy celebrating, it would seem, proved at times dangerously unstable – even potentially deadly. The maternal body in these accounts stands in need of rigorous policing. Needless to say, these narratives which naturalize murderous mothers generally function as a means of establishing the credentials of their authors: physicians and social theorists, luckily enough, are best positioned to monitor the reproductive patterns of the women in question. Medical writers and political theorists often cautioned women, too, about their dangerous tendencies to sympathize excessively with their children. The emphasis for physicians turns on the regulation of diet in this instance: stuffing one’s child with sweets, for example, is held to be a form of inadvertent abuse which weakens the child’s constitution and might even prove deadly. In chapter 1 I argue that social and educational theorists like Rousseau, who drew heavily on the growing body of medical literatures that addressed issues concerning child-rearing, further inflected these arguments with strong nationalist implications. To smother one’s child with love becomes a means of crippling the state, which depends upon citizens who are strong in character, not ones who have been spoiled by loving mothers. There is no room for self-indulgence in an ideal republic; rather the tendency to succumb to desire and feeling becomes, during the second half of the eighteenth century, the mark of a corrupt national character.

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We find similar narrative strategies at work in literary treatments of motherhood of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In chapter 2 I turn to Gothic novels and plays, which offer us numerous examples of pollutant maternal bodies or dangerously unchecked maternal desire. Authors of Gothic texts frequently referenced biological experiences as a means to explore the dangers of human sympathies run amok. Mothers prove consistent referent points in these narratives, serving as examples of the threat posed by natural feminine sympathies and irrational instincts. As we will see, Gothic writers often rely heavily on Enlightenment theories of human nature in these accounts, and borrow textual conventions utilized by Enlightenment theorists, who regularly deployed images of maternal sympathy that were highly sublime, even horrific. Maternity is defined as a route to the sphere of moral sentiment in the accounts of writers like David Hume and Adam Smith, but one which is marked by an impulse for self-sacrifice so extreme that it becomes a form of horrific selfannihilation. Many Romantic-period women writers similarly underscored the instability of those physical processes associated with motherhood and represented the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding in Gothic terms. For Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, in The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, pregnancy is represented as an experience marked by radical physical and spiritual dislocation. Mothers in Wollstonecraft’s text are horrified by the recognition that they have been physically possessed by an other, who must be expelled, cast out, lest psychic dislocation or madness result. Those who critique overly sympathetic mothers are likewise frequently women building on the arguments of medical experts and political theorists in order to establish their own rhetorical authority. Since, during this period, women are widely assumed to be the more feeling sex, supporting the position that individual mothers are certainly capable of utilizing disinterested reason and disassociating their behavior from their physical “instincts” becomes all the more crucial for educational theorists like Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth. Each wants to align herself with Enlightenment theory and disavow the tendency toward excessive maternal sympathy by stressing the need for objectivity in child-rearing, and provides her readers, to this end, with an alternative form of readerly “food for thought” in the form of the educational text and moral tale. In chapter 3, I argue that, for Edgeworth, the daughter of an Enlightened Ascendency class reformer in Ireland, this dynamic holds as true for the education of her Irish tenants as it does for English schoolchildren. “Overfeeding” the native Irish, Edgeworth stresses, becomes a way of encouraging indolence and destructive self-indulgence.

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Walter Scott, to whom I turn in chapter 4, provides a good example of an author who straddles both camps: those who demonize “good” mothers and those who naturalize “bad” ones. As a Scottish writer catering to a British audience and a student of Scottish Enlightenment theory striving to balance an objective focus on universals and a Romantic preoccupation with things local, Scott was well versed in negotiating multiple points of view. He seeks to address in the emergent form of the historical novel the need to keep sympathies in proper check while simultaneously cultivating in the reader a benevolent concern for the plight of individuals. His novel functions to this end both as a surveillance mechanism and as a means to legitimize the suppression of certain truths. For him, the possibility of achieving some sort of healthy balance in presenting the historical record lies in the kind of deliberate attentiveness to specific “cases” and thus to the “differences of economic privilege and historical position” that Bowers finds absent in novels from the previous century – an attentiveness which the Waverley novels are expressly designed to cultivate in Scott’s readers. In confronting directly in The Heart of Midlothian those (especially temporal and regional) maternal differentials so persistently denied or suppressed by his predecessors, Scott demonstrates (like Edgeworth) the way in which problematic mothers’ tales could be mapped onto the bodies of nations. Yet, even as both writers attempted to domesticate the dynamics of colonialism and legitimate a new sense of hybrid Britishness, they questioned the limits of “sympathetic” interpersonal and intercultural relations by critiquing the highly localized, if seemingly benevolent, drives and desires associated with motherhood. In Edgeworth’s case, the Irish wet nurse serves as a positive model of intercultural “exchange” while manifesting the potential dangers of succumbing to excessive sympathies in a community driven by hungers of a variety of natures. For Scott, similarly, mother love proves overtly dangerous, a manifestation of the pull of things local that threatens progress, enlightenment, national stability. In The Heart of Midlothian, child murder and mother love in fact go hand and hand, and both become representative of the kind of dangerous sympathies Scotland fosters in her loving “children.” Each of these chapters engages directly the overarching paradox at the crux of Romantic motherhood: that is, mothers were encouraged both to follow their natures and to channel, tame, or subordinate them in the best interests of the child and, more broadly, of the state. The mother–child bond, in fact, served many writers of the period as a natural marker of the often conflicting interests of the one and the many, the local and the universal. Maternity hence proves a particularly useful category through which to examine the intersections, rather than the sharp distinctions between

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Enlightenment and Romantic themes and discourses. One of the central aims of this study is to muddy these distinctions, to demonstrate the ways in which Romantic writers extended the concerns of their enlightened predecessors, rather than substantially broke with them. For progress-oriented women like Mary Wollstonecraft, this proves especially true, given their need to distance themselves from charges of excessive emotion and sentimentality and to position themselves (through the application of enlightened reason) on the side of change, and hence on the side of revolutionary theory. Yet, as David Simpson points out, “as literature came to be more and more defined and redefined as a nontheoretical and immethodical genre, glorying in its imprecisions, so it was increasingly assimilated to a feminized identity.” For Simpson, this situation “produced a series of tensions rather than neatly defined subject-positions for writers and for the ‘literary,’ tensions that were especially urgent for male writers seeking a place in a social subculture that was, both symbolically and actually, more and more the domain of women.”46 The Romantic period consequently saw the birth of “womanly” men as well as “manly” women – and the anxieties released as a result of these gender-bendings are often expressed in terms of nationalist sentiments and goals. Motherhood becomes a locus for these tensions on a generic as well as conceptual level, a point which I will pursue at greater length in chapter 5, which focuses on aestheticized maternal bodies in the work of Percy Shelley. In considering the theatrical medium negotiated by Shelley during the composition of his 1819 poetic drama, The Cenci, I argue that his anticipation of a different, more popular, and explicitly feminized audience challenged his understanding of the sympathetic relationship between the artist and the work – a relationship that Shelley tended to represent in overtly maternalized terms. If Shelley appealed frequently to the sympathetic identification between mother and child in his early writings as a means to endorse the natural basis of the human desire for social connectedness, in The Cenci he suggests that to gaze into the eyes of a child spawned by violence might prove the ultimate occasion of self-alienation. In reconfiguring the experience of interconnectedness between mother and child in this way, Shelley further confronted the ways that an artist’s brainchild may be radically exposed to an audience in the theater, and explored his own anxieties about this communal experience. While he presents us with a decidedly Gothic perspective of maternal sympathy in The Cenci, he does so via a move which suggests his growing awareness of the gender politics that underwrite his own commitment to sympathy as a the source of political transformation. I further argue that Mary Shelley substantially influenced

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Percy’s representation of the limits of maternal sympathy in The Cenci, particularly in so far as her own aesthetics and her personal experience of motherhood impacted Percy’s conception of the play’s central metaphor of impregnation. This concluding chapter thus constitutes an attempt to acknowledge the complex influence of motherly role models on canonical Romantic-period writers like Percy Shelley. In utilizing a variety of critical approaches in this book and examining diverse ways in which Romantic writers utilized concepts of maternity (as a means to validate or negate the behaviors of individuals and groups, as a metaphor for relations between citizens and the state or national bodies united politically, as a means to reconfigure the bond between an artist and his/her literary offspring or the relationship between author and audience) I attempt to demonstrate that motherhood becomes an entirely mutable concept for Romantic-period writers, which served a variety of often conflicting ends. The effects of the politicizing and aestheticizing of maternal bodies on the lives of actual women like Mary Shelley are, of course, very difficult to gauge. But I do want to suggest that, at the very least, motherhood is marked during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by an aura of doubleness and/or radical self-division that was alternatively celebrated and demonized by writers attempting to decode the mysteries of the female body. This phenomenon invites analysis not simply in that it broadens our understanding of the complexities that underwrite Romanticera gender configurations, but because focusing this particular lens on the past might throw into relief some of the ways that contemporary mothers continue to negotiate these theorized as well as lived dichotomies of self/otherness. Women who bear children today are as rigorously policed during pregnancy, as subject to critique in their child-rearing practices, as suspect of acting contrary to the interests of the state as were mothers two centuries ago, and current discussions about acceptable and unacceptable maternal behaviors certainly betray the kinds of racial, ethnic, and class tensions that are evident in Romantic-period writings. Julia Kristeva reminds us that this ongoing interrogation of mothers and exploration of maternal spaces tends to render the mother “unrepresentable” within Western humanist discourse: the maternal body frequently occupies “the extralinguistic regions of the unnameable.”47 Yet we might begin to confront these regions hitherto largely marked by silence, ambivalence, and even horror by tracing lines that connect us to, and implicate us in, the “case” of the Romantic mother – considering en route new possibilities for negotiating human relations, while remaining fully conscious of all the “Romantic” implications such a critical procedure necessarily belies.

c h a pt e r 1

Revolutions in mothering: theory and practice

When Catherine gave the piercing cry, That did her child-birth pangs proclaim, Each portrait seem’d to vivify, Amazement shook each frame! Behold how each right reverend sire Seem’d struck as with Promethean fire. Mrs. Hale, “To Mrs. Moore, On the Birth of the First Child Ever Born in Lambeth Palace October 13, 1786”1

Over a decade before the publication of Emile (1762), a text which played a foundational role in late-eighteenth-century debates about child care practices and spurred a “fundamental transformation in the attitude of parents to children,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau deposited each of his five children by Th´er`ese Levasseur in a foundling’s home, apparently against their mother’s wishes.2 At the heart of the critical debate surrounding Rousseau’s actions (the details of which have been rehearsed elsewhere3 ) lie questions regarding his ensuing constructions of motherhood in texts like Emile. As numerous critics have noted, Rousseau became the “most pervasive spokesman” of the late eighteenth century for “natural” maternity,4 a role for which he was certainly strangely fitted, given his persistent disdain, suspicion, and even horror of the maternal body. “[F]or my own part,” he urged in Emile (in what sounds like a justification for his earlier actions), “I think it is better that the child should suck the breast of a healthy nurse rather than of a petted mother, if he has any further evil to fear from her who has given him birth” (14). While he mistrusted the “petted mother” who nursed her own child, he nonetheless stressed that a woman “who nurses another’s child in place of her own is a bad mother; how can she be a good nurse? She may become one in time, use will overcome nature, but the child may perish a hundred times before his nurse has developed a mother’s affection for him” (14). 21

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Rousseau’s deeply ambivalent attitude about mothering practices and especially about maternal bodies – his paradoxical idealization and suspicion of female nature – was not atypical, but rather reflects the deeply divided attitudes of many of his enlightened contemporaries and Romantic heirs. For Rousseau, motherhood was a decidedly duplicitous vocation: at once a manifestation of universal and of localized drives, a locus of (to invoke Julia Kristeva’s distinction) powers of love and powers of horror. In this chapter, I trace the development of anxieties such as these to widespread public debates of the second half of the eighteenth century concerning women’s physical relationships with and responsibilities to their children. Rousseau played a pivotal role in these discussions, not only because he helped widely publicize them in texts like Emile, but because he harnessed so successfully the weight of medical authority to his political platform. More so than any philosopher or political theorist of his era, Rousseau tapped into the medical advancements of the day, drawing on and helping to disseminate rapidly transforming ideas about motherhood, maternal bodies, and the health and well-being of children as a means to promote a very specific political agenda. His influence was far-reaching; perhaps no writer of the period had such an immediate and direct impact on popular attitudes concerning the organization of social spaces and the relationship between the public and private spheres of activity.5 Yet Rousseau’s conflicted attitude toward mothers and motherhood reveals a paradoxical double thrust characteristic of Enlightenment arguments about the nature of women’s nature: for him, maternal bodies both served as evidence of women’s foundational role in society and testified to the need to control their access to and participation in the public sphere. He simultaneously idealized the mother, as the vehicle through which nature manifests its most fundamental laws, and shrunk from her, sought to contain her, feared her incontestable access to and influence over the future citizen. As numerous critics have noted, the widespread interrogation of mothering practices had been well underway long before the publication of Emile. Distinctions between “savage” and enlightened mothers were familiar to a variety of eighteenth-century discourses and were common rhetorical devices in travel literatures of the early century as well as in novels.6 But late-eighteenth century ambivalence about the maternal body took on decidedly new inflections. Writers in Rousseau’s wake expressed as much a deep fascination with the impenetrable mystery of the maternal body as a desire to restrict its influence. In its capacity, most particularly, to be “more” than singular, to be both self and Other at once, the maternal body seemed to render concrete the abstract ideal of sympathetic interconnection

Revolutions in mothering: theory and practice

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between subjects nevertheless separate. Yet, while the union of the bodies of mother and child signified for many the transcendence of difference, so, too, the mother–child bond became a locus of fears regarding the potential for difference to contaminate, consume, or control the “self.” These anxieties held particular resonance for the Romantics, as heirs of the eighteenth-century British imperial project and as witnesses to the erosion of stable class differences in the wake of the French Revolution. One of the primary assumptions of this study is that the institutionalization of gender differences during the late eighteenth century – especially in so far as this was organized around the reproductive bodies of women – constituted a compensation of sorts for such growing cultural instability and worked to deflect growing concerns about dangerous forms of racial and class proximity. The reproductive body served numerous writers as a legible text, in other words, onto which feminine attributes could be grafted and rendered normative across geographic and class boundaries.7 Nevertheless, as Carol Mossman notes, the maximizing of gender difference in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries via appeals to the natural order of things carried with it “the paradoxical result of rendering ‘the grossness of bodies’ – certain bodies – too visible for comfort.”8 While breastfeeding consequently was promoted as the most natural of duties associated with motherhood, certainly all women were not considered equal in their qualifications to perform this duty. Rousseau thus urged in Emile, for example, that a child’s (invariably) lower-class nurse “must be healthy alike in disposition and body. The violence of the passions as well as the humors may spoil her milk” (28). The class assumptions inherent in such distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable maternal bodies clearly betray deep rifts in the logic of Enlightenment writers like Rousseau, whose argument for maternal breastfeeding is grounded simultaneously in utilitarian reasoning which stresses the natural benefits of this practice and on the assumption that any given mother’s capacity to perform this function was highly relative. If female nature was innate for Rousseau, mothers were by no means interchangeable. Implicit in Rousseau’s preoccupation with the physical processes associated with motherhood are underlying assumptions concerning the means of promoting, more generally, the health and well-being of the nation. Even while consigning women to hearth and home and severely qualifying their influence in the public realm, he consistently identified the work of mothers with the inherently political process of socializing future French citizens. “Bad” mothers consequently figured centrally in his arguments concerning the potential degeneration of not only the moral but also the

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physical constitution of France. To no small extent, Rousseau wanted to usurp the domestic authority of those mothers he simultaneously idealized, largely via a platform grounded in the surveillance and regulation of feminized, domestic spaces.9 This monitoring of the private sphere, however, always served for him a public function: “Would you restore all men to their primal duties, begin with the mothers; the results will surprise you!” he urged in Emile: Every evil follows in the train of this first sin; the whole moral order is disturbed, nature is quenched in every breast . . . But when mothers deign to nurse their own children, then will be a reform in morals; natural feeling will revive in every heart; there will be no lack of citizens for the state; this first step by itself will restore mutual affection . . . When women become good mothers, men will be good husbands and fathers. (14–15, emphasis mine)

For Rousseau, the maternal body constituted a site where public and private interests seemingly collapsed into one another. Women’s “labor” in this scheme becomes an expression of both private desire and of public utility. Thus, while the Rousseauian mother in one sense was “successfully removed from the social sphere,”10 she was also assigned an implicitly political role – the production of the French citizen. Rousseau represents the state’s developing interest in the child as identical to the mother’s own interests: not only does the home become a center for the cultivation of natural affections, the mother–child bond provides a model for the relationship between any legitimate governing body and its citizenry. (As Mary Jacobus has demonstrated, representations of France as a breastfeeding mother subsequently would play a central role in the ideological apparatus of the Republic in the wake of the French Revolution.)11 This type of idealization of motherhood, with its attendant emphasis on a separate, feminine, domestic sphere of influence, of course worked to disguise the fact that the social contract here endorsed actually “repose[d] silently” on divesting woman of other kinds of cultural/political authority.12 If the “real nurse is the mother,” Rousseau also insisted that “the real teacher is the father. Let them agree in the ordering of their duties as well as in their method, let the child pass from one to the other” (Emile 18). Though assigned a foundational material role in their children’s development, ultimately women are held to be intellectually and morally unequipped to prepare those children to assume their places in society (and unequipped, too, to fully enter the public world themselves). Women’s political rights within this scheme could only be filtered – so to speak – through the children they produced. A mother is too much for Rousseau a creature of the

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body, desire, emotion. She is therefore likely to spoil her child, to teach the child “things which are of no use to him,” to stifle the child’s nature with “the passions [she has] implanted in him” (18). Because the overly fond mother represents to him as much of a threat as does the unhealthy nurse, Rousseau frequently warns mothers against their tendencies to love to excess, as well as providing extensive advice to women in Emile on the physical care and handling of their children, including suggestions on bathing habits and on teething and weaning practices, as well as strictures on diet (for both child and nurse) and recommendations against infant swaddling (25–47). Insisting that motherhood was the most natural of vocations for a woman, he paradoxically offered his female readers a very specific program of instruction on how to develop their maternal instincts by engaging in material practices associated with middle-class ideals – like breastfeeding – urging them simultaneously to curb those instincts lest they interfere with maternal duties. It is important to recognize the weight of philosophical as well as medical authority which informed these conflicting recommendations, and the various political ends such advice would serve. Indeed, Rousseau’s arguments about regulating maternal bodies reflect broader eighteenth-century philosophical and medical debates that testify to a growing interest in the depths and surfaces of the maternal body as well as to deepening concerns about channeling potentially subversive maternal energies. Utilizing radically different narrative strategies as a means to authorize different readings of maternal experience, writers of the period working within a variety of genres shared a common assumption: the maternal body constitutes a legible text onto which general theories of human nature and social relations might be grafted. Medical writers tended to focus on the unstable physiologies of mothers in an effort to establish their professional authority. Social and political theorists, in turn, drew on these accounts of potentially problematic maternal bodies, appealing to the sublime dimensions of motherhood as a means to variously promote or critique the bonds linking individuals and nations and attempting to decipher the mysterious threads that connected mothers and children in ways that often defied reason. The “case” of the mother was widely debated throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, though writers’ accounts of maternal experience generally supported one of two verdicts (both of which are clearly evident in Rousseau’s representations of motherhood gone wrong): mothers were held to be either naturally bad, in so far as their bodies were represented as potentially pathological, conduits of infectious diseases or unwholesome character traits; or dangerously good, given that their innately sympathetic

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natures often overruled their abilities to think and act autonomously and govern their children reasonably. Motherhood proved a concept which lent itself especially well to philosophical debates concerning the nature of sympathy – that ability to imagine oneself in the place of another so highly valued by writers of the day – as pregnancy and breastfeeding were considered to be occasions which clearly manifested a breakdown of the boundaries between the self and another, essentially the prerequisite for a sympathetic disposition. Lauding the naturally sympathetic dispositions of women as an intrinsic component of their destined roles as mothers, numerous writers of the period referenced the connection between mother and child as a means to substantiate the claim that moral sentiments were grounded in natural laws. Yet Enlightenmentperiod representations of maternal subjects often read like passages from Gothic novels, in so far as mother love in these accounts frequently leads to various forms of self-annihilation. Consider the following excerpt from Nougaret’s Anecdotes of the Reign of Louis the XVIth, the Present King of France (translated into English in 1787): [As it] has been often said that many mothers have not that maternal affection for their children which their infant state requires, it may be, therefore, not improper to produce an instance of maternal tenderness, which, in the end, proved fatal to the affectionate parent. A poor woman, of the village of Conriet, the tender mother of five children, finding her house on fire, begged her husband to save three from the ravaging flames, and she would exert all her power in securing the other two: She succeeded with the first, and hearing the cries of the last unfortunate little sufferer, she rushed amidst the flames, hoping to secure the infant, but, in the attempt, perished herself. Let not those mothers who have not felt that maternal affection which influenced this poor woman to rescue her children from the devouring flames, say that they would not follow her example; if they do, the answer is simply this, she acted according to the dictates of nature, and though she herself should fall a sacrifice, she felt pleasure in it, as it was in the preservation of her infants.13

Mothers in Nougaret’s scheme are not just called upon to throw themselves into the heart of the “flames,” they are supposed to enjoy doing so. Not only does maternal affection necessarily belie a willingness for self-sacrifice, in other words, it inspires its happy embrace. Many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period thinkers appealed in this way to women’s self-sacrificial natures as a means to argue that human sympathies served as an antidote to self-love, and sought to reclaim maternal sympathy as a quality compatible with manliness, duty, and empire. To no small extent, aesthetic concerns inflected many writers’ accounts of mother–child bonds, given that political theorists of the period were striving

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to construct a picture of civil society characterized by an harmonious relationship between the individual and the larger social group. Although newly emerging bourgeois capitalist discourses in Western Europe (and the liberal humanist philosophy which underscored them) promoted and helped naturalize the concept of the self-determining, autonomous subject, many philosophers and social theorists found it hard to square this understanding of personal freedom with their broader claims for an individual’s social connectedness. Put simply, at issue is the question of how to strike a balance between individual liberty and social necessity, or harmonize the personal with the general good. The eighteenth-century philosophical commitment to various forms of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism facilitated many writers’ impulses to mediate between the duties, responsibilities, and rights of the one and the many. Julia Kristeva stresses that “[t]he notion of separation combined with union was to clarify such a practical cosmopolitanism that nature foresees and men carry out.”14 Because the maternal body seemingly represented a form of union that nonetheless allows for separateness, mother–child bonds were frequently referenced as the natural underpinnings of a civil society or even a global Republic characterized by this sense of coordinated diversity. Eighteenth-century political theorists working within the Scottish Enlightenment tradition, for example, thus frequently attempted to lay claim to an aestheticized connection between disparate individuals nevertheless “linked to each other in their very flesh,”15 representing civil society as a sphere in which the individual is nevertheless naturally bound to others, who should be treated benevolently in the best interests of everyone. For writers like Francis Hutcheson, this “law” governing interpersonal relations was irreducible to a set of abstract theoretical principles (as per Kant’s categorical imperative), but was rather scripted in nature’s (fundamentally utilitarian) mechanisms.16 Hutcheson, an Ulsterman who was educated and subsequently taught in Glasgow (1729–46) and who heavily impacted the emerging Scottish Enlightenment school, supported the benevolence hypothesis explicitly through reference to its conformity to aesthetic dictates.17 For Hutcheson, we respond to the stimulus of the beautiful deed just as to that of the beautiful object, approving actions and social structures in which there is “some Tendency to the greater natural Good of others,” as these confirm an harmonious balance between the individual and the species as a whole.18 While maintaining that behavioral standards are by no means uniform across nations and cultures, Hutcheson appeals repeatedly to the concept of “uniformity amidst variety” as a way to account for correspondences among “the vast Diversity of moral Principles, in various Nations and Ages” (204).

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He refers, for example, to the “natural Affection” parents exhibit toward their children, “notwithstanding all the toil [involved] in educating their young” (206). While such behavior is anterior, he maintains, to any external laws which might operate in the service of the weak, Hutcheson holds that this is not determined by some kind of instinct, but by a common, and inherently reasonable predilection toward the public good (204–5). Even when “other Motives” seem to “overpower Benevolence in its strongest Ties” (that is, the ties of the flesh), as in “certain Countries” where “strange Crueltys [are] practis’d toward the Aged, or Children,” we can conceive that such behavior takes some “Appearance” of utility on the local level, such as to secure [one’s children or parents] from Insults of Enemys, to avoid the Infirmities of Age, which perhaps appear greater Evils than Death, or to free the vigorous and useful Citizens from the Charge of maintaining them, or the Trouble of Attendance upon them . . . We know well that an Appearance of publick Good was the Ground of Laws equally barbarous, enacted by Lycurgus and Solon, of killing the Deform’d or Weak, to prevent a burdensome Croud of useless Citizens. (205–6)

This apparent justification for euthanasia and infanticide is perfectly compatible with Hutcheson’s benevolence theory, which is in the end consistent with nature’s way. Thus, although Hutcheson finds the methods of Lycurgus and Solon “barbarous,” in so far as these were designed with consideration for the “publick good” they confirm the benevolence model just as much as does the behavior, for example, of the loving parent. Hutcheson makes no distinction here between the duties of mothers and those of fathers, as parental feeling within his scheme is not necessarily gendered. His social model would be increasingly embodied over the course of the eighteenth century, however, in ways which both intensified his aesthetics of harmony and problematized the role of the maternal body in concretely manifesting such an aesthetic ideal. Roy Porter and Leslie Hall stress that one of the chief goals of Enlightenment writers was, to this end, to “set conduct upon a sounder footing, [by] developing a sexual psychology grounded in a proper science of human nature.”19 Thus philosophers in Hutcheson’s wake, like David Hume, were far more explicit about the aesthetic implications of sexual organization, and more attuned to the ways in which particular forms of sensibility appeared to be marked by the flesh.20 In an appendix to his An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) entitled “Of Self-Love,” Hume defends Hutcheson’s doctrine of utilitarian benevolence against the appositional claim that behind every seemingly

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disinterested action or impulse lies (at least the trace of ) self-interest. While he allows that benevolent intentions can be colored by self-love, he insists that the benevolence “hypothesis” is “more conformable” than ego-centered theories of the subject “to the analogy of nature.”21 The analogy Hume provides is of the “fond mother”: Tenderness to their offspring, in all sensible beings, is commonly able alone to counterbalance the strongest motives of self-love, and has no manner of dependence on that affection. What interest can a fond mother have in view who loses her health by assiduous attendance on her sick child, and afterwards languishes and dies of grief when freed, by its death, from the slavery of that attendance? (Principles of Morals 117)

Hume accentuates the total abandonment of self-interest of the “sensible” mother, her complete surrender of ego. She becomes a powerful exemplar of disinterested benevolence – not unlike the example Hume gives us of his own widowed mother, “a woman of singular merit, who, though young and handsome, devoted herself entirely to the rearing and educating of her children” (“My Own Life,” in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion 3, emphasis mine). The sympathetic mother serves Hume in this way as a natural testament to the utilitarian logic of the disinterested benevolence theory. Upon her “assiduous attendance,” he implies, rests the well-being of the child and, more broadly, of the entire species. Yet, in so far as her love is realized explicitly as self-sacrifice, Hume’s “fond mother” serves, too, as a concrete example of the physical “self ”denial which the benevolence theory may entail. Far from remaining aloof from the implications of his idealized representation of maternity, Hume foregrounds the gritty materiality of this mother’s response to her child. The mother loses first her health, and then her life, through an attendance which is compared to slavery. While Hume thus invokes this image of selflessness so as to confirm the existence of actions which are void of self-interest, he also paints a portrait of maternal sympathy which is nothing short of Gothic. If, as a locus of sympathy, Hume’s idealized mother represents the beautiful because harmonious relationship between the self and another, in so far as her love is infused with fear and characterized by extraordinary suffering she is thoroughly sublime. Adam Smith, following Hume, would continue to foreground the selfsacrificial nature of women’s sympathetic responses to their children, opening his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) with a reflection on the nature of sympathy, and arguing that, regardless of an individual’s tendency toward selfishness, “there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest

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him in the fortune of others.”22 Among other examples Smith offers, like Hume, that of the loving mother: What are the pangs of a mother, when she hears the moanings of her infant that during the agony of disease cannot express what it feels? In her idea of what it suffers, she joins, to its real helplessness, her own consciousness of that helplessness, and her own terrors for the unknown consequences of its disorder; and out of these, forms, for her own sorrow, the most complete image of misery and distress. The infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of the present instant, which can never be great. With regard to the future, it is perfectly secure, and in its thoughtlessness and want of foresight, possesses an antidote against fear and anxiety, the great tormentors of the human breast, from which reason and philosophy will, in vain, attempt to defend it, when it grows up to be a man. (12)

As with Hume, we find here a portrait of maternity which is characterized by the experience of suffering. Smith’s reading of maternal experience accentuates the “terror” and “sorrow” of the loving mother, whose sympathetic response to her child (even if the product of imaginative experience rather than pure “instinct”) is described as a form of torment far worse than the ravages of physical disease. Smith explains that sympathy is not actually a physically conditioned response to the pain or pleasure of another (which we can never experience), but an imagined conception of “what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (9). He stresses however, with an image that evokes the condition of pregnancy, that when we place ourselves in the situation of another, “we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him” (9). Only when his agonies “are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own,” can they begin to affect us (emphasis mine, 9). Smith prioritizes in this way local affections over abstract moral dictates, arguing that sympathy is born of a thirst for likeness, an impulse to harmonize difference. Yet the “terror,” “sorrow,” “misery and distress” which characterize this sense of personal interconnectedness, from the point of view of the mother, again recall the sublimity that marks and even defines maternal love as a condition equated with all-but Gothic suffering. In both Smith’s and Hume’s accounts of idealized mothers, sympathy poses a dangerous threat to autonomy – to the “fond mother’s” very survival (just as for the “poor woman” of Conreit, who dies trying to save their children from the “ravaging flames”).23 Responsibility to “others” obviously carries a painful price in this scheme, but one held to be of paramount importance to harmonious civil relations for both Smith and Hume. Hume thus frightfully describes, by way of contrast, a vision of society wherein benevolence and social harmony have given way to chaotic and dangerous self-interest,

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suggestively offering us another explicitly maternalized example, that of a “blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children” (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion 211). Hume points here to the “monstrous” side of the same maternal body that he champions elsewhere as a manifestation of nature’s benevolent utility.24 His image of nature as indiscriminately productive of “maimed and abortive children” in fact anticipates the way in which early Enlightenment attitudes regarding the “usefulness” of reproductive labor would begin to shift in light of the population explosion in England and its neighboring territories during the eighteenth century. Later economists like Smith and (more notably) Thomas Malthus, would stress that the value of any given woman’s capacity to produce children was highly variable, and that over-reproduction might be another form of excessive consumption – a conspicuous drain on the shared resources of the community.25 Irish mothers were frequently subject to such charges, especially after the turn of the nineteenth century (a point to which I will return in chapter 3). But closely related to these concerns about overpopulation is the suggestion that the value of a mother’s love was also variable in relation to the interests of the many: an alternative conception of motherhood, associated with female volatility, a lack of discernment or prudence, hovers ominously alongside Hume’s benevolent self-sacrificing maternal ideal. We should be attentive to the ways in which this highly ambivalent deployment of maternal metaphors feeds the underlying civil politics of Hume’s and Smith’s arguments. For each, the mother–child bond becomes a model for aestheticized human relations, one which, we might suggest, refigures an idealized Union of Scotland and England – as discrete bodies nevertheless made “one.” (Such a two-in-one model indeed had long marked the Scottish Highland–Lowland division, which may have set something of a precedent.26 ) Colin Kidd points out that, after the Act of Union of 1707, the long-historied dispute over Scotland’s independence from England was transformed rather than settled: “Scots needed more than ever to convince their fellow Britons that the Union had been a treaty between two sovereign equals, and not the reabsorption within an English panBritannic imperium of a wayward vassal nation” (133). It was imperative for both Hume and Smith that the political domain be conceived not as a homogeneous entity, in other words, but as a “union of singularities,” which “cannot necessarily be harmonized,” to borrow Kristeva’s terms.27 What is at issue for writers of the Scottish Enlightenment school, to put this another way, is the acknowledgment of “variety” within the broader

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context of uniformity, as Hutcheson would maintain. The priorities of local affections and ties must necessarily be sustained in this scheme within a broader community figured not so much as a univocal totality but in terms of coordinated diversity. Thus even supportive Unionists naturally remain bound to their distinct motherland. “[N]ature has implanted in everyone a superior affection to his own country,” Hume notes in “Of National Characteristics,” and to be so impregnated with national feeling is more consistent with nature’s way than holding “loose indeterminate views to the good of the species” (225). Moreover, the self-sacrificial behavior of the benevolent mothers described by Hume and Smith serves to emphasize particularly the material dimensions that underwrite such a Union – the immediate, tangible responsibilities of Great Britain to her fledgling Scottish subjects, as it were, who must be nurtured and physically cared for, even to the point of suffering material losses. If Union between England and Scotland is on the one hand highly desirable within the Enlightenment progress-oriented scheme, in other words, it cannot be so in an atmosphere devoid of sympathy, whereby the interests of the nation take precedence over the rights of its individual members. It is important to remember that both Hume and Smith were working within a framework whereby the Union of England and Scotland had not necessarily brought about unity. A more maternalized model of intercultural relationship, based on mutual affection and responsibility, might certainly seem preferable within this context to the use of force and the kind of oppressive legislation that antedated the 1745 rebellion in Scotland.28 Yet, as Terry Eagleton notes, “To root government in human affections is in one sense to lend it an alarmingly fragile foundation.”29 This maternalized model of civil relations is recognizably unstable because potentially “self ”destructive. Sacrificing all to the interests of some, in the vein of those mothers who die out of love for their children, inevitably might prove as problematic as strict utilitarian disinterestedness. Hume and Smith therefore each want to stress that a sense of cultivated prudence rather than mere instinct must inflect the bonds that link individuals in a community, although, for both, the ordering of social systems based on the principle of pure disinterestedness needs to be tempered by the natural, if sometimes seemingly irrational, sacrifices of self evidenced by sympathetic mothers.30 Edmund Burke’s representations of civic relations would be inflected in similar ways, which not only underscore how “[the British] constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts,” but stresses that the advantages “obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims, are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement.”31 When he turns to his native Ireland,

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however, Burke paints a picture of an harmonious society which depends upon the maintenance of local, explicitly feminized affections of the sort not evidenced in England’s punitive treatment of Irish Catholics. In his Tracts Relative to the Laws against Popery in Ireland (1765), Burke reveals where his own sympathies lie, stressing that our “feeling for those who have grown up by our sides . . . the benefits of whose care and labours we have partaken from our birth” are more natural than the kind of disinterested benevolence that Burke would later associate with Rousseau’s vision of society (Works iv:27).32 Burke’s famous attack on Rousseau in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) in fact targets specifically Rousseau’s lack of maternal instinct – his abandonment of his children to the hospital of foundlings. “[I]n these gentlemen,” Burke notes of such agents of the revolutionary spirit of the day, “there is nothing of the tender parental solicitude which fears to cut up the infant for the sake of the experiment” (Reflections 181–82). For Burke, such a corruption of natural affection results in bigotry and oppression: “I do not know whether benevolence so displaced is not almost the same thing as destroyed” (Tracts Relative to the Laws against Popery in Ireland, Works iv:27). Burke’s Reflections nevertheless offers a staunch defense of Britain’s manliness over and against the instability of the effeminate French (“All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued” [Reflections 47]), yet, as Seamus Deane notes, Burke’s distinction between femininity and effeminacy helps explain this apparent shift in gender references. Feminine sensibility is, for Burke, a virtue that is often compatible with manliness, sublimity, and England’s “frame of polity,” which Burke describes as “the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections” (Reflections 46). French effeminacy, however, bears no resemblance to such a framework. Burke explicitly aligns qualities he associates with sublimity in On the Sublime and Beautiful – “admiration, reverence, and respect” (49) – with British national character and sets these dispositions in opposition to those effeminate qualities that he aligns with the fashionable tastes, gross appetites, and animal-like ferocity of the French.33 Moreover the former sublime dispositions are attributes associated with the responsible mother (they “nurse manly sentiments”); the latter alternatively reflect a “barbarous philosophy” which speaks to a reproductivity of a different order (as “the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings” [Reflections 213–14]). France has “abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue”; the “mixed mob” consists

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not only of “ferocious men” but of “women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode [the Assembly]” (Reflections 49–50, 81). Consider, by way of contrast, the famous apotheosis of Marie Antoinette, in which Burke describes this classic “mother on trial” as both an emblem of matronly sensibility, and as a thoroughly sublime Gothic heroine (she is described as a being “made for suffering,” as bearing “the weight of her accumulated wrongs,” and as carrying a “sharp antidote against disgrace [i.e. a vial of poison] concealed in [her] bosom”). The Queen has comported herself during her period of captivity with all the “dignity of a Roman matron.” She is deserving of “veneration,” as well as “respectful love”; her treatment “in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers,” constitutes a tragedy of sublime proportions. But the spectators of this tragedy have not demonstrated the proper aesthetic response: [T]he age of chivalry is gone. – That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness. (Reflections 88–89, emphasis mine)

The problem with the revolutionary spirit of the day, according to Burke, is precisely that it breeds barbarism rather than a sublime interest in the plight of others; it renders mothers, even queens, mere animals, and animals “not of the highest order” (Reflections 90). This leveling effect is evidenced for Burke in the unrestrained hysteria of the overtly feminized mob which leads the captured royals into Paris amidst “shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women” (Reflections 85). If, on the one hand, Burke wants to elevate the maternal sufferings of the Queen while maintaining that feminine sympathies serve as the foundation for harmonious civic relations, the threat of female instability – of a reproductivity of another kind – clearly lurks closely beneath the surface of the Reflections. What I wish to underscore here is the decided ambivalence that marks these various writers’ preoccupations with the realm of natural affections, maternalized sentiment, and the female body more generally. Moral

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sentiments rooted in physical bodies prove, in the end, highly dangerous for many writers of the period because bodies conform to dictates which were widely held to be naturally injudicious. Indeed, Scottish Enlightenment theorists were not dissimilar from their German counterparts in betraying these anxieties. Immanuel Kant’s writings, for example, evidence even deeper concerns about the realm of feminine affections than those which are apparent in the Scottish Enlightenment camp – especially in so far as these pose a threat to absolute duty. Kant’s deep mistrust of feminine sympathy, in fact, strongly resembles Rousseau’s; for each sympathy poses a threat to the universal ideals dictated by reason as the necessary ends of individual freedom. For each, consequently, the concept of “woman” becomes synonymous with localized interests and desires that must be subordinated to the interests of the many – and thus with a version of benevolence which is anything but disinterested or rational. If, within the British theoretical tradition, maternal sympathy would become a tenuous sign of uniform relations between diverse bodies nevertheless linked by their common “Britishness,” for Kant, the maternal body betrays the overtly threatening aspects of allowing natural sympathies to serve as a model for the body politic. Yet Kant represents women’s reproductive bodies, on the surface, quite benignly, celebrating the way sexual difference operates as a sign of the aestheticized operations of nature: “Why was it necessary for such a pair [man and woman] to exist? The answer is: In this pair we have what first forms an organizing whole, though not an organized whole in a single body.”34 Kant is clear on how women function within this system. It is “with a view toward the propagation of their species” that nature has so organized the sexes (Critique of Judgment 187). As for Hume, women’s reproductive labor makes manifest for Kant the harmony implicit in nature’s organizational scheme. That scheme, however, also confirms for Kant a fundamental difference between the sexes: just as “among the masculine qualities the sublime clearly stands out as the criterion of his kind,” so, too, “all the other merits of a woman should unite solely to enhance the character of the beautiful” (Observations 77, 76). He explicitly links female beauty, moreover, to woman’s “many sympathetic sensations, good heartedness, and compassion”: “Sublime attributes stimulate esteem,” he explains, “but beautiful ones, love” (Observations 77, 51). Woman’s “philosophy,” he stresses, is “not to reason, but to sense” (Observations 79). Although he suspects that “the fair sex” is incapable of “principles” (which he admits are rare, too, in most men), Kant concedes that “in place of it Providence has put in their breast kind and benevolent sensations, a fine feeling for propriety, and a complaisant soul” (Observations 81). If women are capable of benevolent

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actions, this is due to the fact that they respond not to “universal rules,” but rather to “the conduct they see about them” (Observations 80). Women respond feelingly to that which they can immediately see and touch, Kant insists, while men are more naturally inclined to make moral choices based on disinterested, reasonable principles. Feminine sympathies, because instinctual, thus confirm for Kant our “natural” reciprocal connection to others in the world, yet, because women’s abilities to experience sympathetic feelings for others are not born of rational thought processes, they are associated with a lack of “self ”-control. Women, Kant claims, are intolerant of the concepts of “duty . . . compulsion . . . obligation,” therefore one “should not at all demand [of them] sacrifices and generous self-restraint” (Observations 81). This distinction helps explain Kant’s particular discomfort with his own construction of “feminized” sympathy. Sympathetic identification with another, he claims, is: beautiful and amiable; for it shows a charitable interest in the lot of other men, to which principles of virtue always lead. But this good-natured passion is nevertheless weak and always blind. For suppose that this feeling stirs you to help a needy person with your expenditure. But you are indebted to another, and doing this makes it impossible for you to fulfill the stern duty of justice . . . On the other hand, when universal affection toward the human species has become a principle within you to which you always subordinate your actions, then love toward the needy one still remains, but now, from a higher standpoint, it has been placed in its true relation to your total duty. (Observations 58)

This is a standard argument directed toward the dangers of excess “giving,” but one which reveals, within the context of Kant’s distinction between the dispositions of the sexes, a central paradox of female “nature.” For, if sympathy leads to actions that are “dutiful and amiable,” these nevertheless have “no true moral worth” (Grounding 11). With its strong associations of bodiliness, immediacy, and lack of “self ”-control, feminized sympathy threatens to upset the interests of the many in favor of those of the few. A certain amount of distance from the other seems as necessary to Kant as it is inevitable, lest duty be forgotten in the swell of “fondness for every interest” or “sadness at every stranger’s need” (Observations 58). Hence, while women are more naturally inclined to sense and respond to the suffering of others, this capability becomes a detriment when it detracts from the “rule” of justice and slips into complaisance, “an inclination to be agreeable to others by friendliness, by consent to their demands, and by conformity of our conduct with their intentions” (Observations 58–59). When the “motive of the mind does not rest upon a universal principle,” he notes, “it easily takes on changed forms according to whether the objects offer one or the other aspect” (Observations 63).

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So, defining the mutable, inconsistent nature of woman becomes a means for Kant to argue against local or privatized sympathies, in favor of a more disinterested “Principle of Coexistence, according to the Law of Reciprocity or Community” (Critique of Pure Reason 166). Because women follow the dictates of the heart, they respond to laws which, for Kant, are “merely private,” and which therefore do not meet the conditions necessary for a truly reciprocal “international” or “public” law (Perpetual Peace 51). “[A]ll politics,” he argues in Perpetual Peace, has for its juridical basis the establishment of “harmony to its greatest possible extent.” Kant maintains, to this end, that as a “science of right,” political duties must be distinguished from sophistic maxims which reduce all duties “to mere benevolence” (52). He offers an example which is evocative of pregnancy but which, in fact, figuratively reverses the birth process – that of the small state being “swallowed up in order that a much larger one may thereby approach more nearly to an alleged good for the world as a whole” (52). Kant’s “feminizing” of localized or private sympathies, Terry Eagleton suggests, can be seen as an attempt to deal with the problem of political absolutism in eighteenth-century Germany, a territory divided into feudal states, “marked by a particularism and idiosyncrasy consequent on its lack of a general culture.” State controls on industry and trade, guild-dominated towns, poor systems of communication, and the bourgeoisie’s lack of access to ready capital all testified to the potential problems in maintaining exclusively localized interests.35 Kant’s work is not so much an endorsement of absolutist authority as it is an exposure of the disadvantageous effects of prioritizing local interests over more universal structures of authority. To put this another way, localized sympathies function for Kant like conditional rather than categorical imperatives: “[S]uch laws as are whispered to [us] by an implanted sense or by who know what tutelary nature” may provide a pillow upon which “human reason in its weariness is glad to rest,” but this is a “sweet illusion,” whereby “there is substituted for morality some bastard patched up from limbs of quite varied ancestry and looking like anything one wants to see in it” (Grounding 34). Kant’s suggestion that feminized sympathies produce bastard children echoes in many respects the ambivalence associated with maternity and with the realm of feminine affections so apparent in the work of Scottish and Irish authors. Yet, whereas Hume, Smith, and Burke focused particularly on the self-sacrificing aspects of feminine sympathy as a means to acknowledge the natural primacy of those localized interests which for Kant were so problematic, Kant himself emphasized the dangerous components of sympathy as part of a plea for a cohesive (masculinized) German culture. In either context, feminine experience is marked and, in fact, defined by a

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sense of doubleness or self-division which might be read from either side of this ideological divide, given the social, political, and economic interests which philosophers and social theorists were attempting to negotiate. It is worth emphasizing again the ways in which the maternal body so often identified as the source of women’s sympathetic instincts garnered increasing attention in late eighteenth-century British and German medical and educational discourses alike. Much like their British counterparts, German educators and moralists strongly advocated, for example, the cause of early maternal breastfeeding. By 1794, however, with the publication of the Prussian Legal Code, this advocacy would become a mandate of the German state. Healthy women were required to breastfeed under the Code, which also assigned to fathers the responsibility for determining when a child should be weaned. In contrast to practices in England, furthermore, wet nurses were licensed in late-eighteenth-century Prussia.36 The state’s assumption of this type of jurisdiction over maternal bodies, as Ann Taylor Allen recently notes, contrasted strikingly with German moralists’ and educators’ prevalent representations of motherhood as an “ineluctable instinct.”37 Institutional forms of control within the Germanspeaking world in fact reinforced assumptions that motherhood was more duty than instinct, more a responsibility than a right.38 Indeed, German mothers who breastfed their own children against their own inclinations conformed more directly to those dictates established by Kant as indicators of true morality. Because considered an absolute duty, rather than a pleasure or an otherwise self-interested means to an end, legislated maternal breastfeeding might indeed prove, according to Kantian metaphysics, a means for women to demonstrate rational moral principles. Advocates for early maternal breastfeeding in Britain tended to take a different tack. While the German emphasis on legislated maternity privileged more explicitly women’s public duty to society, British medical writers, in the same vein as theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment school, tended to sentimentalize the private experiences of mothers and to advocate the highly self-interested, and ultimately utilitarian benefits of early maternal breastfeeding. Nevertheless, the kinds of anxieties relating to the physiological dimensions of maternity evident in philosophers’ accounts of maternal experience tended to be mapped out even more graphically in medical literatures of the period and in literary texts that drew on and helped promote various physicians’ “cases.” If philosophers tended to tell tales of problematically sympathetic mothers, physicians of the period tended to pathologize those maternal bodies widely held to be the source of women’s sympathetic natures, emphasizing the dangers inherent in the physical ties

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binding mothers and children. Debates over the pros and cons of early maternal breastfeeding reveal strikingly not only ways in which science underwrote arguments concerning the nature of maternal nature, but the ways in which the maternal body proved to be a highly troublesome source of authority for writers bent on celebrating the unique bond between mother and child. As I have already indicated (and as numerous recent critics have noted), attitudes about early maternal breastfeeding were shifting dramatically in England by the mid-eighteenth century.39 Physicians were beginning to take note of the benefits of the colostrum produced by the breasts in the early weeks after the delivery of a child and consequently to promote “new milk,” while successful experiments in putting children early to their mother’s breasts conducted in the newly established lying-in hospitals in London and Dublin during the 1740s and 50s were widely publicized in medical literatures of the period. Physicians used the available data not only to attack the practice of hand-feeding infants, but to indict upper-class women who traditionally engaged wet nurses. Dr. William Cadogan, who played a central role in the establishment of the London Foundling Hospital and was a vocal advocate of early maternal breastfeeding, pointed to the Bills of Mortality for evidence of maternal negligence among women who chose not to nurse their children, arguing that children under the age of five accounted for half the death toll. No one, he lamented, attends to these numbers, “notwithstanding the maxim in everyone’s mouth that a multitude of inhabitants is the greatest strength and support of a commonwealth.”40 The benefits of breastfeeding for mothers likewise emerged at this time as a major focal point in this discussion, a probable consequence of the changing readership of medical-advice texts. As Valerie Fildes notes: “After 1750, writers of popular medical books addressed themselves directly to mothers, whereas before 1750 they had addressed themselves largely to midwives, nurses, or to no-one in particular.”41 Most late-eighteenth-century physicians argued that putting the child to the mother’s breast within twenty-four hours radically reduced instances of “milk fever” (an infection caused by plugged milk ducts), which often proved fatal.42 Dr. William Smellie, for example, in his 1752 A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery, noted: “Women of an healthy constitution, who suckle their own children, have good nipples, and whose milk comes freely, are seldom or never subject to this disorder; which is more incident in those who do not give suck.”43 Dr. Hugh Downman, in his three-book poem Infancy (1774–76), alternatively paints a vivid picture of the disastrous effects of breastmilk “confin’d or driven / Back on the Blood”:

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Romanticism and the Body Politic The raging Fever, from the fatal Cause Holding its Name, Obstructions fierce, dire Pangs Of torture, future Cancers by the Juice Of bloated Hemlock not to be remov’d. (Book I, lines 94–99)

Downman goes on to urge mothers considering employing a wet nurse not to “give to an Alien’s care / Thy orphan Babe,” for such a choice betrays that: The Form of Woman’s thine, but not the Heart; Drest in Hypocrisy, and studied Guile This Act detects thee, shews thee to have lost Each tender Feeling, every gentle Grace, And Virtue more humane . . . . . . to have unsex’d thy Mind, become The Seat of torpid dull Stupidity. (lines 106–7, 116–20, 123–24)44

Yet women (especially upper-class women) had previously faced considerable pressure to engage wet nurses rather than nurse children themselves.45 Fildes stresses that well into the eighteenth century “great strength of purpose was needed by upper-class women whom were determined to go against the cultural norm.”46 This alone may have inhibited the production of a good supply of milk for some, a condition of which many aristocratic women of the period complained – and for which they were much ridiculed. Inverted nipples (and other complications) resulting from the practice of wearing tightly-laced corsets were also a problem for many,47 and fears about scarred breasts caused by nursing plagued others.48 The long-standing taboo against sexual intercourse during the period of lactation, moreover, caused many husbands to forbid their wives to breastfeed. (Mary Wollstonecraft famously takes issue with such husbands in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.) The infertility caused by the suppression of ovulation in the nursing mother further worked against the desires of many upper-class women to produce numerous children. Breastfeeding was commonly acknowledged to be a somewhat effective method of birth control, as Downman’s poem, for example, attests: She who refuses to her Young Ones Lisp her Swelling Bosom, each returning Year Conceives, and each returning Year sustains The pangs of Childbirth. Harnass’d by Fatigue The strongest Constitution fails. (Book I, lines 189–93).

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The contraceptive advantages of breastfeeding proved a boon for the lowerclass nurse and for many middle-class women of limited means but not necessarily for women of the aristocracy, concerned with producing numerous heirs during a time when infant mortality rates were high.49 These psychological, physical and political pressures were largely undermined, however, by eighteenth-century medical writers and moralists, who strongly promoted the cause of early maternal breastfeeding, especially after mid-century, and frequently attacked women’s reluctance to perform (or mismanagement of ) what was increasingly labeled their natural duty. Poets and novelists followed suit. William Roscoe’s 1798 translation of Luigi Tansillo’s sixteenth-century The Nurse, A Poem, for example, offers as fierce an indictment of the negligent mother as is found in any of the medical literatures of the eighteenth century. After a nine-month period of carrying the child in her womb, the narrator tells us, the mother is “reliev’d from danger and alarms” and: [t]he perfect offspring leaps into her arms, Turns to a mother’s face its asking eyes, And begs for pity by its tender cries; Then, whilst young life its opening powers expands, And the meek infant spreads its searching hands, Scents the pure milk-drops as they slow distill, And thence anticipates the plenteous rill, From her first grasp the smiling babe she flings, Whilst pride and folly seal the gushing springs; Hopeful that pity can by her be shewn, Who for another’s offspring quits her own . . . Ah! sure ye deem that nature gave in vain Those swelling orbs that life’s warm streams contain . . . –Why else, ere health’s returning lustre glows, Check ye the milky fountain as it flows? Turn to a stagnant mass the circling flood, And with disease contaminate the blood? 50

Many women writers of the period also took up this theme, frequently referring to the unhappiness and sense of physical dislocation of the foster child. Mrs. Hale’s poem, “The Infant’s Petition to be Nursed at Home” (1800) equates an infant’s separation from its mother to a state of foreign exile: What! banish me my native home! Thus early sent abroad to roam! Commit me to a stranger’s care,

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Romanticism and the Body Politic Who in my pains will feel no share! Should fits disturb my midnight rest, She’d scold that I her dreams molest; And with rude hands, and ruder strains, Add to my misery and pains. Was it for this I saw the light, To be debarr’d my parents sight? Not so the little bleating lamb, Who close attends the fost’ring dam; She ne’re gives up the mother’s part, But leaves to man this cruel art. (lines 1–14)51

References like these opposing the benevolent order of the natural world to the cruelly artificial trends of the times were common rhetorical devices.52 As Londa Scheibinger has demonstrated, such comparisons informed a variety of scientific as well as literary and religious discourses – the best example being perhaps Carolus Linnaeus’s animal classification system, which notably defined mammals as a species which breastfed its offspring.53 If mothers were targeted as “unnatural” in choosing not to breastfeed, however, they were also represented by writers of this period as constituting a threat to the well-being of their infants even when they chose to nurse, in so far as the maternal body, as a food-source, was deemed a potential source of contamination. Cadogan qualified his endorsement of maternal breastfeeding (as “best for every child and every mother”) by noting that such a recommendation required that mothers be “temperate,” and applied only to those women “whose foundations are not greatly disturbed or tainted.”54 The historian and educational theorist Catherine Macaulay, in the same vein, limited her support of maternal breastfeeding, stressing that children’s physical connections to their mothers were, in the case of “fashionable” women, “almost always of more prejudice than good.”55 Maria Edgeworth documented in Belinda (1801), similarly, the adverse, even tragic consequences of the pressure exerted on upper-class mothers to breastfeed against their inclinations. Lady Delacour, the exemplar par excellence of pathologized maternity, supports her own observation that “fine nurses never made fine children” by recounting to Belinda the history of her own experiment in following “the fashion at this time for fine mothers to suckle their own children”: [A]fter the novelty was over, I became heartily sick of the business; and at the end of about three months my poor child was sick too – I don’t much like to think of it – it died. – If I had put it out to nurse, I should have been thought

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of by my friends an unnatural mother – but I should have saved its life . . . I determined, that if ever I had another child I would not have the barbarity to nurse it myself.56

Edgeworth takes pains to direct our attention to the fact that Lady Delacour’s maternal body has been corrupted from without, suggesting that such degeneration stems from her unnatural desires to partake in the barbarous practices of upper-class society. When these practices are rejected, the “cancerous” breast which had signified her pollutant maternity is exposed as a mental delusion and restored to “health” – along with her maternal “instincts.”57 Catherine Macaulay reminded her readers, however, of the obstacles to this type of forced resolution. “Can you expect,” she asked, that a fine lady should forgo all her amusements and enter into the sober habits of domestic life, in order to enable her to nourish her offspring with wholesome food? . . . Now milk overheated with midnight revels, and with the passionate agitations of a gamester’s mind, must have qualities rather injurious than beneficial to life.58

Macaulay likened in this way the attributes of the mother to those of the food she provided, and indeed, maternal “value” in this scheme depended largely on a woman’s constitution, on the integrity and purity of the body she allowed others to consume. This would hold true not only for upper-class women, but especially for the lower-class wet nurse. While rural nurses were represented frequently in medical advice literatures and novels as “healthy” alternatives to corrupt mothers (like Lady Delacour in Belinda), urban wet nurses were associated increasingly with vices and disease – especially the dreaded disease of syphilis. As early as 1497, Gaspara Torella (physician to the Borgias) had linked the transmission of syphilis to affectionate nurses: In nursing children the infection first appears in the mouth or on the face; and this occurs on account of infected breasts or from the face and mouth of the nurse, either one or the other. Also nurses are accustomed to kiss infants and I have often seen infants infected with this disease by diseased nurses.59

Not only were kind-hearted wet nurses widely considered by the turn of the eighteenth century to be a potential source of infection, “it was subsequently understood that the nurses could become infected by their nurslings,” and then pass the disease on to other children, creating a “web of infectious people.” Fears about the lines of transmission of syphilis were in fact widespread in England during the eighteenth century, and even more so in France (where the business of wet nursing was more deeply rooted) – not

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only because mortality rates associated with the disease were high, but because it was assumed that children who survived might “generate a ‘tainted posterity’ of the stunted, deformed, and dull – a citizenry that would itself cause the Enlightenment’s vision of human progress to recoil upon itself.”60 Dr. Hugh Downman’s Infancy, which extolls the virtues of the (in this case British) mother who chooses to nurse her own child, makes this point explicitly: The “blasted Child” who has been infected by the nurse either lives a solitary life, “or haply weds,” And propagates th’ hereditary Plague, Entailing on himself the bitter Curse Of Generations yet unborn, a Race Pithless and weak, who live not half their days.61

The mother’s tale becomes in this way central to the narrative of the nation, the “health” of which remained dependent upon the physical constitution of the child. Given the case of a “polluted” woman, or, as Rousseau would have it, one who is not “healthy alike in mind and body” (Emile 28) the physical proximity between nurse (or nursing mother) and child became dangerous exposure. After mid-century, the wholesale employment in the London Foundling Hospital of wet nurses drawn from the working classes helped feed these anxieties and especially the negative stereotypes already associated with the wet nurse, despite the fact that the screening process for nurses was closely monitored.62 Of course, as Barbara Dunlap argues, “the mere existence of legislation did not prevent abuse”63 – not to mention the fact that, in its latent stages, syphilis was not detectable, in either the child or the nurse. Other more overtly detectable physical characteristics of “bad” nurses, however, had been cited routinely in medical texts since the previous century. Hugh Chamberlen’s 1697 translation of Francis Mauriceau’s The Diseases of Women with Child, And in Childbed : As also the best Means of helping them in Natural and Unnatural Labours (1688) catalogues a long list of those qualities highly undesirable in a nurse: She must have “no Scab, Itch, Scald, or other Filth of the like Nature”; she must be “neither too tall nor too low, too fat nor too lean; because a person of such Symetry performs all the functions more perfectly”; she must not be pregnant; she should have a “Sanguine complexion . . . not altogether so red, but inclining to white”; she should not be menstruating, as then her “Blood is too hot”; nor have white discharges, as this is “a sign of bad habit”; “she must not be red-haired, nor marked with red spots; but her hair must be black, or of Chestnut brown”; she must not have any rotten or spoiled teeth, “lest her Breath should smell”

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and because “the Nurse that constantly kisses the Child, would infect its Lungs by often drawing in her corrupted Breath”; she “ought to have a sweet Voice to please and rejoice the Child, and likewise a clear and free Pronounciation, that he may not learn an ill accent from her, as usually the red-hair’d have, and sometimes also those that are very black-hair’d and white skins, for their Milk is hot, sharp and stinking, and also of an ill taste.”64 And so the list goes on and on. Implicit in such attacks is the assumption that the child assumes the characteristics of the nurse – mental, physical, emotional, racial. Mauriceau claimed that “as the Nurse is, so will the Child be.” In suckling, the child “will draw in both the Vices of her Body and Mind”: Now even as we see Trees, tho of the same kind, and growing in the same place, being afterwards transported into another Soil, produce Fruits of a different taste, by reason of the Nourishment they draw thence; even so the Health of Children, and sometimes their Manners, depend on their Nourishment at the Beginning.65

Mauriceau explains that the humors of the body retain the nature of the food consumed, and that temperament flows from the bodily humors. Others to follow would be less medically precise. The anonymous author of The Ladies Dispensatory (1739) refers more generally to the “ill Qualities” of the breastmilk of those who do not bear enough “Similitude” to the parents of a child: [A]nd if you were to bring up a Lamb and a Goat with each other’s Milk, you would find their Coats naturally contrast somewhat the Softness and Roughness that is peculiar to each Kind . . . It is no wonder that we see so many Children bear so little Resemblance to their Parents.66

William Roscoe’s The Nurse, A Poem (1798) reveals the nationalist overtones that would color these arguments by the turn of the nineteenth century. Asking, “What secret taint, what dread contagion runs / Thro’ Britain’s noble but degenerate sons?” Roscoe concludes: ’Tis from his nurse your offspring draws disgrace, And thence adulterates his generous race. ’Till the kind father sees with wondering eyes A motley offspring round his table rise; Unlike the parent stock from whence they sprung And various as the breasts on which they hung.67

Although references such as this to the dangers of intermingling bloodlines were still frequent at the turn of the nineteenth century, superstitious attitudes about the child’s absorption of the nurse’s physical characteristics

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were on the decline, as arguments concerning the effects of environment and education on the child’s character displaced those stressing biology. The practice of wet nursing was more consistently represented by writers after 1750 (like Rousseau) as a source of the widespread moral degeneration, given that the fosterage system weakened “the ties of nature” (Emile 12). But it was the physical dynamics of mothering in particular – the mother’s or nurse’s intimate relationship with the body of the child – which worked most overtly as an uncomfortable reminder of the material basis of women’s authority in the domestic sphere over the future citizen. Medical authorities’ concerns about the maternal body, moreover, were by no means fixed exclusively on the breast, but rather encompassed the entire reproductive process. The explosion of eighteenth-century medical literatures on pregnancy and childbirth practices cast the maternal body as an object of scrutiny and analysis, and represented the birth process as an experience fraught with potential trauma. The medical reassessment of the conditions in which a woman gestated and gave birth to her children both fed and drew on the corresponding reevaluation of the environment in which she nurtured them (physically as well as spiritually) and from which she subsequently delivered them into society. These concerns, in fact, appear to have arisen almost simultaneously in the late seventeenth century,68 and correspondences between these related investigations of maternal “spaces” were by no means coincidental. Each was facilitated, for example, by the widespread development of a medical and educational advice literature industry during the eighteenth century, and the growth of a middle-class audience for those texts. The cultivation of that audience by medical writers helped physicians to establish a clientele base among the upper and middle classes. Obstetrics proved a lucrative specialty, and paved the way for later “family practice” patients. As Oakley and Hood note, “a successful delivery meant a grateful woman and a household full of potential clients.”69 As male practitioners received higher pay for their services, it became a middle-class aspiration to “show [one’s] neighbors that [one] could afford the higher priced article,” while the prosperity of the times “meant that increasing numbers were able to do so.”70 Previous to the entrance of male midwives on the scene, the regulation of the birthing room had been largely the domain of Church Fathers.71 The Church’s prime concern seems to have been the baptizing of infants, who, if they died unbaptized, “would lose [the] chance of salvation.”72 The early intervention of the Catholic Church in midwifery practices was thus grounded in the belief that a woman’s body sheltered two souls during pregnancy, over which the Church held separate “jurisdictions.” While the

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salvation of the child was the primary goal of the Catholic Church’s involvement in the birthing room, the concerns of the ecclesiastical authorities did lead to a careful screening of applicants and to some formal training for midwives, which no doubt benefited many childbearing women. Yet many midwives were further assigned the role of “informant” in those matters in which the ecclesiastical authorities had an interest – such as the names of the fathers of infants born to unmarried women. Formal oaths were fairly standard, and midwives were expressly forbidden to perform abortions, or in any way injure the child intentionally, or assist the mother to do so.73 Midwifery practices were implicitly linked in this way to a disciplinary religious context whereby the interests of mother and child were sharply differentiated, even as these were, in some respects, held to be the same. Advances in modern medicine further problematized traditional ideas regarding the nature of the mother’s contribution to the pregnancy itself. Prior to the eighteenth century, a woman’s role in the reproductive process was widely misunderstood, though frequently debated. Most prevalent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the idea that male and female genitals were essentially alike, if different in some aspects of external development. According to this theory, conception arose from a union of male and female seed or substances “jointly ejaculated at mutual orgasm by both men and women.”74 William Harvey’s ovum theory, however, gained credence toward the end of the seventeenth century, and by 1755 “had pride of place in even the most popular literature, though without entirely effacing the old ideas.” Newer theories, in fact, supported the suggestion that only the female contributed concrete substance to the conceptive act, while male ejaculation supplied the necessary impetus, “without which the female contribution remained inert.”75 The mother’s role in the process of conception was thus increasingly understood to be more materially substantial, yet female orgasm was no longer believed to be necessary for conception to occur.76 As Roy Porter notes: a “view of the biological (and by implication social) sexual passivity of women readily gained currency, particularly amongst men, but, as it seems, amongst women as well.”77 This shift in ideas with respect to women’s reproductive bodies may have contributed somewhat to those anxieties displayed by Rousseau and others concerning the “nature” of woman’s nature, although in rural areas, and among the lower classes (those domains of the uneducated “granny” midwife), such medical advances were little understood or known. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the majority of British women were, in fact, still employing midwives or were attended during birth by family members or friends, yet this was soon to change. The authority and popularity of

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accoucheurs (male midwives) steadily increased throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, despite the fact that the choice of a birth attendant generally depended upon a woman’s class status and the location of her home.78 The “experience” of childbirth was indeed broadly stratified throughout the eighteenth century, though in cases of uncomplicated delivery, things probably progressed along similar lines despite the attendant. Yet “normal” labor was never the primary concern of the male practitioners, who had been excluded almost entirely from the birthing room until the second half of the seventeenth century, except in cases of extreme emergencies.79 The fact that male practitioners were such newcomers on the scene in part accounts for the emphasis on methods of intervention in the birthing process which would come to distinguish the literature of male midwifery. Hugh Chamberlen’s work offers a well-documented case in point. In his 1697 translator’s preface to Mauriceau’s highly influential The Diseases of Women with Child, And in Childbed, Chamberlen apologizes for “not publishing the Secret I mentioned we [i.e. himself, his father, and two brothers] have to extract Children without Hooks” referring to one of the best kept secrets of the century – the forceps. Stressing that in utilizing this modern device, “I have not been unservicable to my Country,” Chamberlen concludes by advertizing the obstetric services of his family, noting that the Chamberlens are in a position to deliver English babies “with greater safety than others.” Such advancements in childbirth technology were not always guarded so zealously by male midwives of the eighteenth century, but they did provide the men with a leg up on their competition. Male medical writers in Chamberlen’s wake tended to emphasize, as he had, that it was no great discredit to a female “Midwife (let some of them imagine what they please) to have a Woman or Child saved by a Man’s Assistance, as to suffer either to die under her own Hand.”80 Tew argues that “deprived of the opportunity to witness how simple and safe childbirth could be, the men’s experience was biased toward its complexity and problems.”81 This is borne out in the texts of Mauriceau (who claims that the Womb “causeth most diseases in women”), Smellie (who argues that the “Foetus may suffer death from diseases and accidents that happen to the mother; [but also from her] violent passions of joy, fear or anger, suddenly raised to such transports as ocassion tremors, fainting, or convulsions,”) and numerous other male physicians.82 Increased attention to emergency situations, rather than to the dynamics of normal labor and delivery, necessarily brought to a head issues regarding the training and licensing of birth attendants, their abilities to deal specifically with unnatural presentations or other complications.83 The female midwife was

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a frequent object of attack. Smellie cautioned that “she ought to void all reflections upon men practioners, and when she finds herself difficulted, candidly have recourse to their assistance.” But he also stressed that: this confidence ought to be encouraged by the man, who, when called, instead of openly condemning her method of practice (even though it should be erroneous), ought to make allowance for the weakness of the sex, and rectify what is amiss, without exposing her mistakes . . . These gentle methods will prevent that mutual calumny and abuse which too often prevail among the male and female practitioners, and redound to the advantage of both.84

Smellie’s condescension betrays more than mere misogyny: it marks his recognition of the fact that female midwives were frequently disadvantaged in the birthing room given their lack of access to formal education. In Great Britain there was in fact no formal standardization of midwifery practices or licensing program for female midwives before the passage of the Midwife Act in 1902, which meant that the word “midwife” was used as an umbrella term to refer to a diverse group of women practitioners. Edward Shorter distinguishes particularly between skilled urban midwives of the eighteenth century (apprenticed in their trade, literate, and, in some European countries, licensed), and the traditional rural midwife, who was subject as much to the influence of generationally transmitted superstitions as she was to the more empirical method of trial and error.85 It is therefore difficult to make generalizations about the relative merits of female vs. male midwives during the eighteenth century in England, though medical debates of the period tended to operate specifically along these lines.86 More telling, perhaps, is the shift in attitude toward the experience of birth which these debates reveal. While physicians tended to stress the potential pathology of the reproductive body, and focused on various methods of extracting the foetus, many female midwives accentuated the naturalness of the birthing process, and tried to integrate the actual birth within a larger dynamic of physical as well as psychological support (note that the term midwife means “with woman”). Martha Mears’s 1797 instructional manual, The Midwife’s Candid Advice to the Fair Sex; or the Pupil of Nature (In which the Latin Terms are entirely omitted), offers us a striking example. Mears’s title page cites Alexander Pope: “Take Nature’s Path, and Mad Opinions leave,” and her opening injunction to her reader extends this reference, which will form the basis of her philosophy of the childbirth process: “Follow Nature – trace her footsteps – listen to her voice.” Rejecting the “pomp” and “ornaments” of the standard “parade of learning” offered in most midwifery manuals

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written by men during the eighteenth century, Mears establishes her own authority on different grounds: I hope that my own sex will grant a hearing to one who is herself a mother; – who has united the advantages of experience with those of a regular education and a moderate share of practice; – who knows no language but that of the heart; – and whose fondest wish, in the present attempt, is to allay the fears of pregnant women, to inspire them with a just reliance on the powers of nature, and, above all, to guard them and their lovely children against the dangers of mismanagement, of rashness, of unfeeling and audacious quackery.87

Suggestively, Mears advocates maternal breastfeeding not only on the grounds that it helps promote the recovery of the mother from childbirth, ensures her good health, and promotes bonding between the mother and child, but because “the act itself is attended with a sweet thrilling, and delightful sensations, of which those only who have felt them can form any idea.”88 Focusing this way on the pleasurable aspects of mothering, as well as on the strength of women’s constitutions, she differentiates her text from those of male writers before her. Mears refers to the work of eminent physicians like Smellie as “praiseworthy,” but adds that the “state of pregnancy has too generally been considered as a state of indisposition or disease: this is a fatal error and the source of almost all the evils to which women in childbearing are liable.” Women thus become prone to “imaginary terrors,” fed both by “the fairy tales of old nurses,” and by “the rules without number, and the medicines without necessity which interested men so often prescribe.”89 Indeed, Smellie’s earlier text offers ample examples to support Mears’s claims. He prescribes opiates, and, more frequently, bloodletting as necessary in any number of varying situations: from the potentially disastrous separation of the placenta from the wall of the uterus to the more innocuous receiving of a shock “either in mind or body,” and even as an antidote to morning sickness.90 But, clearly, Mears is not simply advocating that nature takes its course regardless of the attendant in the birthing room; she suggests explicitly that a certain disposition toward the patient is essential in allaying women’s fears about childbirth – a disposition not always evidenced in male medical attendants. Physicians (then, as today) were less likely to stay with women during the long hours of labor, and indeed “monthly nurses” were trained in the lying-in hospitals, for a small portion of the doctor’s fee, to “wait out” labor and attend to the postpartum mother and child during the first month.91 Adrienne Rich argues that the male midwife was “a technician rather than a counselor, guide, and source of morale; he worked ‘on’ rather

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than ‘with’ the mother.”92 Male accoucheurs offered a different kind of intimate knowledge of the reproductive body than women; most read women’s bodies like texts that could be objectively analyzed and demystified. It is hardly surprising that female authors of midwifery texts during the eighteenth century frequently described the implementation of this type of knowledge as a physical invasion. Female midwives, however, were often likely to subject their patients to other methods of “interference.” Prenatal care prior to the mid eighteenth century indeed involved taking precautions “against a whole armada of threats from the supernatural,” which included prohibitions against pregnant women looking at the moon (lest the child become a lunatic), and the monitoring of the times of day when pregnant women might leave their houses – if they were allowed to leave at all. Other more harmful prenatal practices, such as the forcible extraction of the placenta immediately after delivery (which frequently resulted in an inverted uterus, shock, and even death for the mother), were still routinely performed by midwives until the end of the eighteenth century.93 I would stress then, that the significance of the appearance of male midwives in the birthing room during the eighteenth century lies less in the general merits of one set of practitioners over another, than in the vocalization of widespread fears regarding the physical processes of the maternal body which was occasioned by this movement. The debates between female midwives and male practitioners rendered the maternal body an object of widespread public discourse – a locus of vacillating anxieties regarding the legibility as well as the inscrutability of processes seemingly natural. Women’s bodies were “invaded” on two related levels throughout the century – probed by physicians as well as colonized by medical writers of the period. Certainly such intense scrutiny benefited women in numerous ways. Without the assistance of forceps and before the advent of safe Caesarean sections (early in the twentieth century), undeliverable babies would be hacked to pieces in an effort to extract them from the uterus, and this would have been preceded, perhaps, by days of excruciating labor.94 Shorter notes that women in England were particularly susceptible to the disease of rickets in childhood, which deformed their pelvises, greatly increasing the possibility of a difficult delivery.95 (Even after the introduction of the forceps such deliveries posed numerous complications – brain damage to the child, the tearing or mangling of the mother’s tissues, etc.) Other “developments” in the birthing room, however, such as the institutionalization of the lithotomy (lying-down) position as the preferred one during labor, actually frustrated women’s participation in the delivery process and

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accentuated their passive role during childbirth – a role inconsistent with the facilitation of birth itself. While midwives had used stools or chairs to accommodate the gravitational forces of the body and to allow more easily for pushing, the lithotomy position preferred by male physicians in many cases slowed labor, generating problems in the delivery which the physician was then called upon to alleviate, with forceps, for example. Clearly medical advances in the childbirth industry during the eighteenth century offered a mixed bag of benefits and ills. What I most wish to call attention to here is the mystique of Gothic terror which surrounded the birthing process. In confronting impending motherhood, women clearly confronted potential trauma, and faced the very real possibility of death. Puerperal fever caused by postpartum infection (which eventually took Mary Wollstonecraft’s life) was disastrously high,96 as were the dangers of postpartum hemorrhaging and other complications of childbirth such as eclampsia.97 Likewise “milk fever” frequently proved life-threatening. Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, as late as the 1840s, that in the Vienna Lying-in Hospital, the mortality rate was so high that two women were buried per coffin to disguise the death rate.98 Such a devastating toll on the lives of women was, of course, impossible to conceal, however, and rather contributed to the naturalization of an idea of childbirth as an experience that was highly unnatural, despite the efforts of women writers like Mears to counter this trend. Philosophers’ idealizations of maternal self-sacrifice take on decidedly new inflections in this context, while theorists’ suggestions that mothers happily embrace death in the service of their children resonate especially chillingly in the face of the harsh realities faced by childbearing women of this era. It is hardly surprising that so many Romantic-period texts are marked by the absence, rather than the presence of living mothers, a point which holds true well into the Victorian period.99 More suggestive, perhaps, are ways in which writers of the period simultaneously idealized and demonized the physical intimacy that linked mothers and children. Both praised for their self-sacrificing natures and rendered suspect because governed by instincts and physical processes that seemed unthinking, animal-like, and even potentially pathological, mothers were trapped in double binds which rendered them Gothic victims if they succumbed to their “natures” and unnatural monsters if they refused this Gothic script. It is important to recognize the points of correspondence between those anxieties betrayed by medical writers like Mauriceau and Smellie and those registered in poems, novels, and educational tracts geared toward broader audiences, as these not only indicate the pervasive authority of medical

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opinion during the eighteenth century and the expansion of popular interest in the body as a source of empirical knowledge, but testify further to escalating fears concerning the physical relationship between mother and child – so often hailed as the source of women’s sympathetic dispositions. Medical men’s attempts to read maternal experience through the lens of science provided mainstream educators and literary writers, as well as social theorists like Rousseau, with seemingly concrete evidence from which to draw more general conclusions about the proper civic duties and physical and moral weaknesses of mothers. The striking paradoxes imbedded in medical debates of the period suggest a variety of ways in which physicians could appeal to the physical processes of motherhood in order to substantiate particular “cases”: Even as their interests were collapsed via arguments stressing what is best for both, mothers and children were frequently set at odds against one another in these accounts; their physical “territories” were sharply delineated and borders rigorously patrolled. Breastmilk was hailed as universally beneficial for newborns but also as a form of nourishment that might prove highly dangerous under certain conditions. Wet nurses were targeted both for their negligence and for their affection (as with the nurse who transmits disease through a kiss, or who cheats a mother of the love properly due to her). The maternal body, in short, was both praised as the most efficient of nature’s machines and demonized, held to be in need of policing. Physicians obviously had much to gain from the latter arguments, and consequently often stressed that they were best positioned to monitor the physical behaviors of the mothers in question. But so, too, women writers like Edgeworth and Macaulay often foregrounded the instability of women’s bodies as a way to substantiate their arguments concerning the need to exercise women’s minds. Even those most intent on celebrating the role of the maternal nurturer frequently targeted those women who deviated from the middle-class norm as potentially monstrous, a fact which is hardly surprising given that medical texts as well as novels and educational tracts were increasingly pitched to a growing middle-class readership. Given that the maternal bodies invoked as the source of women’s natures were deemed so unstable, the fact that numerous philosophers’ and social theorists’ appeals to the mother–child bond as a model for sympathetic human relations should be marked by considerable ambivalence is likewise unsurprising. The Gothic dimensions of motherhood and especially the irrational nature of mother love evident in works by philosophers and political economists clearly reflect widespread apprehensions concerning the authority of any mother over her child. Whether writers found her to

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be physically pathological or problematically sympathetic, most stressed that she threatened more generally the health and well-being of the nation, given that national vitality depended, in their accounts, upon the strong (bodily and well as moral) constitutions of members placed at risk under her supervision. These twinned narratives of naturally bad and dangerously good mothers would be cast and recast in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as writers working within a variety of genres explored women’s roles in society and utilized the mother–child bond as a figure for other forms of social relationship. In the following chapter, I turn to ways in which founding fathers of the Gothic text drew on Enlightenment accounts of maternal sympathy in their representations of dangerous mother love, considering thereafter at greater length the responses of a number of women writers (many of whom were mothers themselves) to the pathologizing of women’s bodies and the demonizing of maternal sympathy. Tales of Gothic motherhood often betray strikingly the ways that maternal ambivalence would be internalized by Romantic-era women, even those most adamantly trying to empower themselves through appeals to their unique natures and dispositions. As anxieties connected to the regulation of pregnancy and birth gained widespread currency, radical dislocation and a sense of imprisonment in one’s own flesh increasingly characterized women’s representations of the “experience” of maternal experience. Yet many women writers targeted especially the adverse effects of external forces on maternal bodies, appealing to the sympathies of their readers as an antidote to the oppression frequently experienced by fond mothers. While physicians and social theorists thus predominantly demonstrated their concerns with identifying broader maternal behavioral patterns (especially those affecting the physical and moral health of the nation), women writers of the period rather tended to offer their readers first-person mothers’ tales geared toward restoring the right to interpret the maternal body to mothers themselves.

c hapte r 2

A love too thick: Gothic mothers and monstrous sympathies

Thou too curb thy zeal O Mother, that impulsive ardour rule, That love inordinate, which urges on To weakness, and perverts to criminal The sweetest, best emotions of thy soul. Dr. Hugh Downman, Infancy. A Poem1

This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone . . . “Your love is too thick,” he said. Toni Morrison, Beloved 2

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].” Mothers “on trial” in the works considered here frequently exhibit distorted or exaggerated responses to their children according to the social dictates of the period, despite the fact that their actions 55

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flow out of and are expressive of maternal nature as this was defined in their contemporary society. The writers to whom I turn in this chapter – Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Smith, Sophia Lee, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Felicia Hemans – share a common fascination with the sublime dimensions of maternal nature, an interest that they clearly inherited from their Enlightenment predecessors. For Walpole and Lewis, Gothic writers par excellence who helped establish and codify the conventions of this literary genre, mother love proves a disruptive force in society, a perfect vehicle for the examination of individual and social diseases, physical and psychological imprisonments, and those dark forces supposed to be illuminated by enlightened reason. In Walpole’s play The Mysterious Mother and Lewis’s novel The Monk, an infectious, diseased version of motherhood prevails, conquering rather than taming hearts and transmuting sympathy into obsession.3 Maternal nature operates in deceptive ways for these writers, who want to insist that the maternal body is a text that proves highly undecipherable and that motherhood is a mystery perhaps too deep to delve. To root government in natural affections through appeals to the kind of sympathetic disposition evidenced by fond mothers, according to this line of reasoning, is to let loose highly irrational forces – the kinds of potentially destructive energies that Lewis, like Burke, will associate with a feminized mob. Fixing on the unstable and mysterious forces of the maternal body, not unlike medical authors of the day who undertook the project of revealing to their readers the “divers Secrets of Nature,”4 Walpole and Lewis each reinforce a sense of the ultimate inscrutability of the natural world, the operations of which often defy logic. Such assumptions are necessary to the Gothic text’s efficacy, given that this genre establishes its credentials via appeals to the realm of things beyond nature and our rational quest to decode it. Women writers of the period, alternatively, tended to offer a different take on the dangerous components of maternal sympathy, generally associating Gothic forces of darkness with the prevailing gender, class, and nationalist politics of the period. If Walpole and Lewis tend to naturalize bad mothers, in other words, Smith, Lee, Wollstonecraft, and Hemans allow that even exemplary mothers cannot realize their “true” natures in societies that pervert maternal experience or render mothers victims of Gothic proportions. To varying degrees, the women authors referenced here manipulate standard Gothic conventions in order to “bring home” the experience of Gothic motherhood – stressing that women need not move in subterranean realms or be chased by banditti to be victimized. Rather, the wrongs done to mothers most often take place in broad daylight, with the full endorsement

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of lawgivers. In differing ways, each of these writers utilizes first-person narrative strategies to target the reader directly, suggesting that universal perspectives can not always account for the experiences of individuals, especially the unique experiences of mothers who are denied a voice in public affairs and policies. While the texts under consideration in this chapter do not provide us with a comprehensive overview of the terrain of Gothic literature, they do suggest ways in which men and women writing during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries variously negotiated the case of motherhood. If Walpole and Lewis’s mothers are controlled by impulses that testify to the irrational nature of women’s responses to their children, Smith, Lee, Wollstonecraft, and Hemans present us with fond mothers who are not born bad, even when their bodies prove subversive or their love becomes murderous. Their heroines are rather products of their historical moments who exemplify the Romantic case form as Chandler presents it, directly appealing to readers to bear witness to their suffering and, potentially, to serve as agents of social change. Women writers tend to wield their pens as weapons of defense against oppressive forces that victimize mothers or turn them into victimizers and found in the newly emerging Gothic genre an appropriate vehicle for publicizing their causes. As numerous critics have suggested, Gothic literatures as developed during the latter decades of the eighteenth century generally explore transgressions and borderline territories and subject positions; foreground slippages between outside and inside, the body and the psyche; seek the unheimlich in the heimlich; and render overtly political those privatized interiors so often identified with women’s activities and subjectivities.5 Given the wide extent of recent scholarship in this field, it is noteworthy that Gothic mothers have been to date the subject of so little scholarly inquiry.6 Anxieties about defining the boundaries between the bodies of mother and child, and the simultaneous emphases placed on her powerlessness and her authority, made the mother a prime target for Gothic writers seeking to explore marginal subject positions and render uncanny the overtly commonplace. The Gothic fascination with the uncanny of course troubled the superficial seamlessness of Enlightenment categories, theories, and methodologies, even when, as is so frequently the case, supernatural-seeming mysteries are explained away reasonably in the end. Generally concerned with critiquing oppressive forms of institutional authority, Gothic novels and plays also tended to challenge the authority of the rational mind itself, suggesting that even the most reasonable of systems may be subject to uncontrollable forces. In one sense, prioritizing the supernatural over the natural became

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a means to rekindle interest in things spiritual during an increasingly secularized Age of Reason, but Gothic texts also attacked the Enlightenment emphasis on the transparency of the natural world, and on legibility of the gendered codes seemingly imprinted there. If Enlightenment theorists identified the doubleness of the maternal body with a seemingly sympathetic doubleness of perspective, Gothic texts often inscribed motherhood as a condition marked by radical duplicity or self-division. Horace Walpole’s drama, The Mysterious Mother (1781), is exemplary of this trend. Although the play has received surprisingly little critical attention, The Mysterious Mother provides us with an excellent example of an early Gothic response to Enlightenment themes and gender concerns, particularly those involving fond mothers. The play’s events revolve around the mysterious secret of a widowed countess, who spends her days in fasting and prayer while raising a supposedly orphaned girl, Adeliza, who is her sole source of comfort. The Countess is also the mother of a son, a soldier for hire who has been away fighting since his father’s death, though she seems to “lov[e] him not” (11) giving him money only if he promises to stay away from the castle where she dwells with her ward. Edmund appears to be “banished, driven [off] by a ruthless mother” (5), and yet we are told in seemingly inconsistent fashion that the Countess also constantly “beg[s] of heav’n the health of her son’s soul” (2). Midway through the action Edmund returns, in disguise, to stake his claim on hearth and home. He is tired of fighting quarrels “nor my country’s nor my own,” while his own castle molders (21). Longing for “Domestic bliss,” he sets his sights on Adeliza, with the intent of thereby “reconcil[ing] my mother” (25). Only after Edmund has wed Adeliza in secret, through the manipulations of the friar, Benedict, is the Countess’s awful secret revealed. Seeing the young lovers together and hearing of their marriage, she loses all composure: My children! horror! horror! yes, too sure Ye are my children! – Edmund, loose that hand; ’Tis poison to thy soul! – hell has no venom Like a child’s touch! . . . Lo! where this monster stands! thy mother! mistress! The mother of thy daughter, sister, wife! (83)

She then confesses the entire truth to the astonished Edmund and Adeliza. Prior to his death, her husband had been away at battle for eighteen months. When he returned at last, he was a bloody corpse, and she grew deranged by the sight. “[M]y fancy saw thee,” she tells Edmund, “Thy father’s image”:

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Yes! thou polluted son! Grief, disappointment, opportunity, Rais’d such a tumult in my madding blood, I took [Beatrice’s] place; and while thy arms Twin’d, to thy thinking, round another’s waist, Hear, hell, and tremble! – thou dids’t clasp thy mother! (85)

Adeliza, she tells Edmund, “is thy daughter, / Fruit of that monstrous night!” (85). Edmund’s horror is evidenced by his response: “Infernal woman! / My dagger must repay a tale like this!” (85). But he stays his hand, allowing the Countess to seize his sword instead, and stab herself. “[C]onceal our shame” she tells him as she dies, “– quick, frame some legend –” (86). In The Mysterious Mother, the incest theme, a regular component of the Gothic text, is taken to new levels. In the preface to the play we are told that the author has, in fact, tried to prevent its publication, as he “is sensible that the subject is disgusting” (v). While we might speculate about whether the preface constitutes a warning or an advertizement, what concerns me most here is not the “disgusting” subject matter of the play per se, nor the supposed depravity of this mysterious mother. Such themes were standard fare in Gothic works of the period. Of more particular interest is the way in which the incest plot enables Walpole to invert radically all the standard assumptions of the day concerning maternal sympathy and the mother–child bond. Throughout the play, the Countess is accused of being a monster for appearing to reject her son: “Are you a mother?” (77) wonders Edmund’s confidant Florian, before the truth is revealed. Walpole takes this point even further, with a reversal that appears, at first, quite inexplicable. Wishing for her son’s death early in the narrative, the Countess explains, “Should I not wish him blest?” (15). She later similarly confesses to Adeliza, “Pity would bid me stab thee, while the charm / Of ignorance locks thee in its happy slumbers” (64). Before we know the Countess’s secret, these statements are difficult to understand and yet, when her secret is disclosed, her motives become clear. This longing for the death of those closest to her reveals her sympathy, not her monstrosity; keeping Edmund at a distance prevents her from infecting him yet again with her diseased passions. This mother is damned for feeling too much, not too little, although throughout the play she appears to be most unnatural precisely because she attempts to banish these feelings. The Mysterious Mother thus offers us a strong critique of Enlightenment interpretations of the maternal body and of mother love – one which exploits those echoes of infectious maternity and excessive sympathy so

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prevalent in medical literatures and theoretical accounts of motherhood of the period. The incest plot most certainly pushes the boundaries of those definitions of sympathy offered by theorists like Adam Smith; mother love is not based here on the ability to imagine oneself in the place of another but rather is grounded in an impulse to impose oneself on another or seek in the Other a reflection of one’s own desires. In a reversal of the standard Oedipal drama, Edmund is inserted by his mother into a subject position which he finds horrendous. His resemblance to his father proves a blight, while his affection for Adeliza merely seems to reproduce this highly problematic quest for likeness. She is wife, sister, and daughter at once: the play gives us mirror after mirror reflecting always the same image. The incest theme also indicts more subtly the prevailing rules of political inheritance of the day. For the son to automatically be inserted into the position of the father (as per the logic of the system of primogeniture) is rendered monstrous here, a consequence of a momentary loss of the Countess’s rationality. It is highly suggestive that, given the long-term consequence of this lapse of reason – Edmund’s banishment – dangerous feminine feeling continues over time to exacerbate the decline of the family. The Countess herself assumes political authority over Edmund’s dominions, substituting for the legitimate heir in his absence though ultimately proving herself incapable of maintaining this position of authority because so driven by guilt and self-loathing. A victim of her own acute sensibilities, she cannot shake the past and embrace a healthy existence in the present. Instead, she invests her energies in Adeliza, who, knowing nothing about the truth of her origins, is destined to repeat the cycle. Edmund and Adeliza’s eventual union offers no sense of reconciliation within this pervasive atmosphere of secrecy and political degeneration. Because it, too, is born of a monstrous form of personal interconnectedness, it is destined to be aborted in embryo. These confusions of identities and interpersonal relationships speak to a number of other types of confused affiliations in the play. As is typical of Gothic works, loyalties to corrupt religious and political institutions are everywhere questioned: “The Church is but a specious name for empire,” allows Martin, a sojourner at the Abbey, “And will exist wherever fools have fears” (54). The scheming friars who inhabit the castle, intent on ruining the family and stealing from its coffers, are obvious targets of Walpole’s critique, but so, too, is the all-absorbing devotion of the Countess herself to spiritual exercises which fail to ease her burden of guilt. So, too, a theme of confused political loyalties runs throughout the play. Edmund’s banishment from his home and native land thrusts him into foreign battles in which he has no real interest. Florian questions whether the end of Edmund’s exile will bring

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him relief or merely thrust him into new local quarrels, noting that those “Imperial lords” of old, Edmund’s forefathers, fought constant “Deadly feuds / For obsolete offenses,” and wondering if it is “Edmund’s soul’s ambition to revive” these feuds (22). We are left to speculate whether the entire tragedy has been the result of Edmund’s father’s unhealthy politics. Had the Count remained satisfied with those simple domestic pleasures so welladvertized during the period of the play’s composition, had he stayed on the home front rather than seeking pointless “glories” and perpetuating the imperialist mind set, this play’s devastating events would never have been set in motion. And yet this question is never fully engaged in the play, which seems rather to attribute the disasters it explores to the Countess’s excessively passionate nature, to “domestic demons,” to invoke Nancy Goulder’s term, rather than imperialist policies.7 We might suggest that the mysterious mother functions to this end as the political unconscious of the play, in so far as she internalizes the value system it critiques. She has given herself over to an obsessive interest in things local, divided her house against itself, withdrawn into a state of paralyzing self-effacement which enables corrupt outsiders to assume control over her dominions. To be governed thus by passions, and what’s more to be immobilized by their consequences, is to abdicate all sense of proper responsibility and risk inevitable chaos. While Walpole could not have forseen the forthcoming events of the years ahead, he strikingly anticipates popular arguments of the decade to come, suggesting that authority that does not operate according to the dictates of reason becomes self-consuming and associating monstrous manifestations of feminized sympathy with the kind of irrationality that leads to personal and political turmoil. Suggestively, The Monk (1796), by Matthew Lewis, betrays very similar strategies and concerns. By all accounts, The Monk upped the stakes of its Gothic predecessors in terms of supernatural themes, details of excruciating suffering, and overt examinations of religious, political, intellectual, and physical corruption. Imprisonment, murder, greed, seduction, rape, incest, torture, witchcraft, hell-fire – Lewis’s novel has it all, and in no small measure. Published in the wake of the bloodiest years of the French Revolution, Lewis’s novel further associates dangerous maternal energies (not unlike Burke) with the uncontrollable violence of the masses. As in The Mysterious Mother, moreover, in The Monk that which proves most dangerous is not the rejection of maternal nature and instinct, but its arduous embrace. The novel has recently inspired a fair amount of commentary, and it is not my intention to rehearse again in detail its themes or its place in

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the cannon of Gothic literatures of the period.8 But Lewis’s critique of the Enlightenment view of maternal sympathy has received almost no critical attention, and so merits a few words here. The Monk, in fact, offers us one of the most bizarre representation of “mother love gone bad” to be found in the literature of the Romantic period proper (and perhaps in the entire history of the British novel). I refer, of course, to the story of Agnes, one of the central characters of the novel, and perhaps the most acutely oppressed of its numerous severely victimized heroines. Over the course of the narrative, Agnes is: deceived by cruel relations into believing herself abandoned by the man she loves; pressed into taking the veil and pursuing a vocation for which she has little inclination; forced to follow the dictates of an austere religious order led by a thoroughly corrupt and vicious prioress; reunited with her lover only to be seduced and impregnated by him; denied mercy by her confessor, who thwarts her attempt at an escape from the convent; made to suffer as an example for breaking her vow of chastity; and drugged, tortured, ridiculed, imprisoned, and enchained in a subterranean vault, which is filled with “cold vapours” and overrun with “Reptiles of every description” (409). She pleads for mercy, for both herself and her unborn child, but the evil Prioress refuses. “Better that the Wretch should perish than live” the Prioress replies: Begotten in perjury, incontinence, and pollution, It cannot fail to prove a Prodigy of vice. Hear me, thou Guilty! Expect no mercy from me either for yourself, or your Brat. Rather pray, that Death may seize you before you produce it; Or if it must see the light, that its eyes may immediately be closed again for ever! No aid shall be given you in your labour; Bring your Offspring into the world yourself, Feed it yourself, Nurse it yourself, Bury it yourself: God grant that the latter may happen soon, lest you receive comfort from the fruit of your iniquity! (410)

Agnes is delivered of her “wretched burden” without assistance, in “solitude and misery . . . with pangs which if witnessed would have touched the hardest heart,” but watches (“with agonies which beggar all description”) the baby die shortly after its birth. Wrapping the baby in a sheet, she places it on her bosom, puts its arm around her neck, rests its “cold cheek” upon hers, covers it with kisses, talks to it, weeps, and moans over it “without remission, day or night” (412). Agnes’s response thus far seems like that of any grieving mother, and even her adamant refusal to allow her attendant to bury her child seems understandable, given the severity of her circumstances. Yet Lewis pushes and pushes this point, beyond, perhaps, the tolerance of many readers. “I vowed not to part with [my child] while I had life,” Agnes narrates:

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It soon became a mass of putridity, and to every eye was a loathsome and disgusting Object; To every eye, but a Mother’s. In vain did human feelings bid me recoil from this emblem of mortality with repugnance: I with-stood, and vanquished that repugnance. I persisted in holding my Infant to my bosom, in lamenting it, loving it, adoring it! Hour after hour have I passed upon my sorry Couch, contemplating what had once been my Child: I endeavoured to retrace its features through the livid corruption, with which they were overspread: During my confinement this sad occupation was my only delight; and at that time Worlds should not have bribed me to give it up. (412–13)

She later adds, lest we have missed the full implications of these horrors, “Often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms, which bred in the corrupted flesh of my Infant” (415). In a novel loaded to the brim with grotesque images, these of Agnes and her decomposing child are perhaps the most chilling, and it is tempting to suggest that, in this instance, Lewis has gone too far. But he does leave the door open to a somewhat “reasonable” interpretation of these events. We might suggest that the fact that the child is rapidly turning into a thing, a “disgusting object,” means little to Agnes, given that she has become herself an object of disgust. She does not admit “human feelings” of revulsion because she has been placed beyond the parameters of human feeling; the result of her barbaric treatment is that she is herself hardly human any longer. Perception, here as elsewhere in the novel, depends upon perspective. Hence the focus here on visual detail and the gazing eye (“to every eye was a loathsome and disgusting Object; To every eye, but a Mother’s”; “I endeavoured to retrace its features through the livid corruption”) – persistent referent points throughout The Monk which speak to its overarching concern with deceptive appearances.9 On the other hand, we might read Agnes’s response to her child as altogether natural, or perhaps as hyper-natural. Her actions are but the exaggerated response of any sympathetic mother, according to the Enlightenment line of reasoning. Agnes laments, loves, adores her child; gazes at it, holds it, takes delight in it, will not to be parted from it. She refuses to be repulsed because this response does not conform to the dictates of maternal nature – as that which transcends the nature of “ordinary” human beings. According to this interpretation, it is the reader’s perception which is at issue. It is we who recoil, we who do not “see” through “a Mother’s” “eye.” To buy into this reading, however, is not to say that Agnes’s response, even if “natural,” is in any sense reasonable. To the contrary, Lewis provides us here with perhaps the clearest critique of maternal sympathy to be found during the post-Enlightenment era. He suggests that there may be

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something inherently distorting in a mother’s perception of her child, that mothers are too much bound to their children, in sometimes oppressive ways, to think rationally in either their own or their children’s best interests. Regardless of how we read this scene, Lewis, like Walpole, is ultimately concerned with the potentially horrific (because all-consuming) nature of mother sympathy. That Lewis identifies a distorted version of sympathy with a lack of self-control becomes especially clear in the riot scene which immediately precedes the text’s disclosure of Agnes’s imprisonment. Suggestively, it is the sympathy of the masses for Agnes that incites their fury, after Virginia, another “prisoner” of the convent, relates to the crowd some of the details of Agnes’s story. Like Agnes, the rioters lose their individuality, their very personhood, when they become cognizant of the extent of the corruption in their midst and unite as a mob. A “popular phrenzy” reigns as the rioters “exercis[e] their impotent rage” upon the lifeless body of the Prioress, “till it became no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting” (355–56). The Prioress’s flesh resembles here that of Agnes’s dead child: just as Agnes’s distorted maternal perceptions place her outside of the realm of “normal” human feeling, the rioters traverse the bounds of legitimate human response, unable to recognize on any level that the mass of flesh on which they unleash their fury is in fact a person. Marjorie Howes’s distinction between a “mob” and a “people” provides us with a useful point of reference for understanding Lewis’s representation of the rioters in this scene. Rather than embodying a healthy organic unit, the kind of single group mind that reflects unity among individuals under the rubric of a nation, this illegitimate collective demonstrates the dangers inherent in a mob mentality which encourages the “dissolution of the individual subject.” Just as Agnes loses herself in her child and ultimately gives herself over to a perverse form of intersubjective relationship, the rioters are not moved by any sense of collective good, but by a form of populist politics that constitutes their “unconscious connection” rather than their “conscious choice” to unite as a people.10 Moreover, in juxtaposing this scene with that of the imprisoned Agnes, grown mad from grief and loss, Lewis equates a dangerous mob mentality with the point of view of a mother, whose instinctual connectedness to her offspring allows for a similar dissolution of self. The mob scene obviously holds further resonances for a post-French Revolution audience. Set in Madrid during the period of the Spanish Inquisition, various forms of persecution saturate the text, which suggests everywhere that an unthinking fidelity to political or religious authorities is

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inflected by superstition, fear, and narrow vision. Confirming throughout the novel the existence of forces beyond the realm of human understanding and thereby authorizing the Gothic text as a legitimate response to Enlightenment attempts to decode the natural world, Lewis further associates unhealthy allegiances to any narrow system or individual with a feminine sensibility. Agnes’s initial embrace of enlightened absolutes and her later irrational commitment to her dead child, like Antonia’s naive trust in, and Matilda’s all-consuming desire for Ambrosio – each constitutes a different “read” on the same problematic fixation with things local. So too, the faults of Ambrosio (whose desires-run-rampant link him to a similarly feminized perspective) stem directly from the fact that “[i]nstead of universal benevolence He adopted a selfish partiality for his own particular establishment” (237). As for Walpole, Lewis’s loyalties clearly lie rather with the universal. Underscoring the problematic nature of maternal sympathy enables each of these writers to emphasize particularly women’s obsessive and mindless preoccupations with those things closest to them – a type of sympathy that does not approximate the kind of disinterested benevolence and enlightened cosmopolitanism advocated by writers like Hutcheson and Hume. Lewis in particular, however, wants to distinguish this framework for Enlightenment principles from a theoretical commitment to rigid absolutes, differentiating between the kind of conscious choices that link individuals in a nation and those abstract, theoretical relations among individuals that mark a “constructed aggregate,” to borrow Howes’s term.11 Given that he had, by 1796, witnessed the failure of the French Republic to embody “One Will” and had seen the coercive and violent methods deployed by revolutionary agents attempting to realize such a forced universal standard, he could stress in hindsight that a blind allegiance to reason might prove as potentially distorting as the embrace of irrational maternal instinct. Although Walpole’s and Lewis’s texts by no means represent the entire spectrum of male writers’ attitudes concerning the nature of maternal nature and feminine sympathy, they do serve as useful points of reference as we turn to consider texts produced by women of the period which take up the case of the Gothic mother. Both Walpole and Lewis associate dangerous manifestations of mother love with an unenlightened allegiance to things local, a theme which clearly echoes the concerns of many Enlightenment theorists, who argued that women’s naturally sympathetic dispositions rendered them less capable of making abstract moral choices or disinterested political decisions. If Walpole’s and Lewis’s texts accentuate ways in which mother love might prove irrational or even perverse, thereby endorsing the

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need to restrict women’s range of influence, women writers of the Romantic period tended to focus a somewhat different lens on the question of maternal sympathy, fixing on corrupt institutions that render mothers Gothic victims and on those external forces which pervert maternal instinct, often as part of a broader plea for reform and the expansion of women’s rights and opportunities. Most would seem to agree with Poulain de la Barre that, “All that has been written about women by men should be suspect, for the men are at once judge and party to the lawsuit.”12 Much like Walpole and Lewis, nevertheless, a number of Romanticperiod women writers do represent the physical intimacy between mothers and their children as potentially unstable, at times even deadly. Women writers by no means present a unified perspective on Gothic mothers, however, and the range of positions advocated in texts penned by women of the period reveals striking divergences in opinions about the nature of maternal nature and the role of the female author in offering testimony on the case of maternity. To be sure, women’s representations of Gothic motherhood do illustrate some of the alliances forged among female authors of the Romantic period, but they also serve to remind us of the potential problems inherent in contemporary critical attempts to delineate a specifically “feminine” Romantic perspective. For instance, many female-authored texts of the period clearly operate according to standard conventions associated with literature of sensibility, expressly engaging the sympathies of the reader in presenting portraits of women subject to extreme suffering, captivity, and villainous actions of a variety of kinds as a means to promote the cultivation of the type of heightened sensibility demonstrated by their heroines as an antidote to social/political oppression. Bravely facing their trials, mothers in these works often conform to the idealized behavioral patterns advocated by writers like Hume and Smith. They are undoubtedly “good” according to the conventions of the day, which is to say that they are selfless emblems of maternal devotion and piety who have suffered terrible wrongs but retain their faith and natural sympathies, thereby testifying to women’s extraordinary capacity for endurance, but also to their inability to effect change themselves. Ann Radcliff ’s A Sicilian Romance (1790), for instance, a novel largely marked by the absence of mothers who are killed off early in the action or before its commencement, offers such an idealized example. The long-imprisoned Marchioness Mazzini, upon being discovered by her daughter Julia in her subterranean prison, can only sigh deeply for the sufferings of her children, “raising her eyes to heaven, endeavour[ing]to assume a look of pious resignation.”13 The maternal feelings of women

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such as this remain uncorrupt, yet the vicitimization of mothers is enshrined as all-but inevitable. Resigning themselves to their fates, women like the Marchioness can only hope to gain their rewards in the afterlife. In igniting the sympathies of her audience for the plight of women such as this and publicizing their pain, however, Radcliff herself pursues a more direct course of action. Capitalizing in this way on the fact that women were widely assumed to be marked especially by their capacities for sympathy, many female authors adopted in like fashion what would prove to be a definitive Romantic pose, representing feminine sympathies as the solution to, not the cause of the ills of modern life, and rejecting the rigid adoption of Enlightenment reason as an antidote to social and political corruption. Charlotte Smith, a Gothic novelist and popular poet, offers us a representative example. Like Radcliff, Smith critiques the ways in which corrupt institutional authority plagues and victimizes mothers and children alike in an effort to endorse maternal sympathy as the natural base of a society marked by a revolution of sensibilities. Transforming the sonnet (a standard poetic vehicle for the expression of chivalric sensibilities), into a receptacle for voicing the unique sufferings of mothers, while simultaneously utilizing her author’s prefaces as occasions to indict the legal system in England and to defend her aesthetics of pain, Smith further demonstrates the versatility of Gothic conventions in the hands of women of the period. Smith was herself an infamous Romantic “mother on trial,” who not only confronts directly the political forces which render mothers Gothic victims but utilizes the text as a mirror of her own sufferings. She scripts and re-scripts her own personal Gothicized tale of woe into her poetry and into the prefaces to the volumes of her poetry collections, with a narrative voice that often hovers somewhere between an accusation and a moan. These first-hand descriptions of suffering inflect her work with an urgency that is palpable. For Smith, words are decidedly weapons of attack, and she frequently targets as Gothic villains those British lawyers who “rob” herself and her children of their rightful inheritance. With a striking indictment of themes prevalent in other Gothic literatures of the period, however, she suggests explicitly that feminine sympathies serve not as the cause, but as the antidote to social oppression. It is tempting, nonetheless, to charge Smith with the crime of whining, of giving excessive vent to her emotions, and cultivating a poetics of pain. Smith’s prefaces to her volumes of poetry certainly do evidence ever-growing preoccupations with her personal experience of victimization. In the 1792 “Preface to the Sixth Edition” of the Elegiac Sonnets, for example, Smith explains that many of her poems were born of personal suffering:

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It was unaffected sorrows drew them forth: I wrote mournfully because I was unhappy – And I have no reason yet, though nine years have since elapsed, to change my tone. The time is indeed arrived, when I have been promised by “the Honorable Men” who, nine years ago, undertook to see that my family obtained the provision their grandfather designed for them, – that “all should be well, all should be settled.” But still I am condemned to feel the “hope delayed that maketh the heart sick.” Still to receive – not a repetition of promises indeed – but of scorn and insult when I apply to those gentlemen, who, though they acknowledge that all impediments to a division of the estate they have undertaken to manage, are done away – will neither tell me when they will proceed to divide it, or whether they will ever do so at all.14

Smith refers here to a protracted legal battle over disputed provisions in her father-in-law’s will, the details of which prefigure some of the concerns later pursued by Charles Dickens in Bleak House. In the subsequent 1797 “Preface to Volume II” of Smith’s works, her self-fashioned persona of Gothic victim becomes even more apparent. Referring to the “long account of injuries” she has suffered due to her Chancery suit, Smith pulls out all the stops in attacking the men who have victimized her. I beg leave to quote at length: Let not the censors of literary productions, or the fastidious in private life, again reprove me for bringing forward “with querulous egotism,” the mention of myself, and the sorrows, of which the men, who have withheld my family property, have been the occasion. Had they never so unjustly possessed, and so shamelessly exercised the power of reducing me to pecuniary distress, I should never, perhaps, have had the occasion to ask the consideration of the reader, or to deprecate the severity of the critic. Certainly I should never have been compelled to make excuses as a defaulter in point of punctuality to the subscriber. Nor should I have found it necessary to state the causes that have rendered me miserable as an individual, though now I am compelled to complain of those who have crushed the poor abilities of the author, and by the most unheard of acts of injustice ( for twice seven years) have added the painful sensations of indignation to the inconveniences and deprivations of indigence; and aggravating by future dread, the present suffering, have frequently doubled the toil necessary for tomorrow, by palsying the hand and distracting the head, that were struggling against the evils of today! It is passed! – The injuries I have so long suffered are not mitigated; the aggressors are not removed: but however soon they may be disarmed of their power, any retribution in this world is impossible – they can neither give back to the maimed the possession of health, or restore the dead. The time they have occasioned me to pass in anxiety, in sorrow, in anguish, they cannot recall to me – To my children they can make no amends, but they would not if they could . . . Would to God I could dismiss these oppressors from my mind for ever. (7–9, emphasis Smith’s)

These references to her children’s misfortunes run throughout the Elegiac Sonnets; Smith alludes here not only to her ongoing difficulties in providing

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an education for her ten children, but to the death of a favored daughter, Anna Augusta De Foville (in 1795) and to the disfigurement of her son Charles, who was “driven from [his] prospect in the Church to the Army” (7), and whose leg was amputated after his participation in the siege of Dunkirk in 1793. Smith’s misfortunes largely stemmed from her husband’s bad investments and dissipate lifestyle; she obtained a legal separation in 1787 and thereafter provided for her children alone, chiefly by writing. Stuart Curran notes that a “sense of the legal system as an arbitrary machine of power operating without any essential relation to equity runs deep in Smith’s writing . . . augmented by her recognition that the law is a social code written by men for a male preserve.” Women, alternatively, can only “suffer consequences over which they have no control.”15 But Smith also significantly targets her readers and critics as Gothic villains, bemoaning in her 1797 Preface, for example, the decrease in subscriptions “to this and the former volume”: I also know, that as party can raise prejudices against the colour of a riband, or the cut of a cape, it generates still stranger antipathies, even in regard to things almost equally trifling. And there are, who can never forgive an author that has, in the story of a Novel, or the composition of a Sonnet, ventured to hint at any opinions different from those which these liberal-minded personages are determined to find the best. (10)

Referencing here her own Jacobin sympathies and elaborating on the shift in the opinions of her patrons between the years 1787 and 1797, she concludes that “[t]en years do indeed operate most wonderful changes in this state of existence” (11). And never more so, one is tempted to add, than during the decade to which she refers. Not only themes of personal, but of political injustices thus inform Smith’s writings, and it is toward these latter concerns that I wish to focus my attention here. “It is, indeed, a melancholy truth,” Smith concedes by way of conclusion to her 1797 Preface, “that at this time there is so much tragedy in real life, that those who having escaped private calamity . . . [prefer to] throw a transient veil over the extensive and still threatening desolation, that overspreads this country, and in some degree, every quarter of the world” (11–12). In her most compelling poems, I would argue, Smith attempts to tear off this veil of illusion (invoking one of Edmund Burke’s favorite metaphors), look behind the curtains hanging in Gothic novels of a more standard and exhilarating fare (like her own Emmeline; or the Orphan of the Castle, Desmond, and The Young Philosopher), and examine more closely the impact of politics on the lives of individuals.16

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One of the most memorable poems included in the Elegiac Sonnets collections is titled “The female exile. Written at Brighthelmstone in November 1792.” Smith not only alludes in this piece to the tragic consequences of the Revolution on French exiles, she suggests that women, even if united in bonds of sympathy, may be forced into a state of exile from one another given their experiences of personal suffering. The poem concerns a lone “stranger” (line 5), whose “distresses” are apparent to the speaker / observer, and whose “beauty is blighted by grief’s heavy hours” (lines 15–16).17 Alerting us to the sublimity of the scene in this way, the speaker also calls our attention to the fact that the grief here observed is that of a mother, whose “innocent children” are, unlike her, “unconscious of sorrow”: “Amused with the present, they heed not to-morrow, / Nor think of the storm that is gathering today” (lines 17, 19–20). These lines recall Adam Smith’s distinction between a mother’s sympathy and a child’s oblivious disregard of all but the present moment. Sympathy depends in Charlotte’s poem, as for Adam Smith, not so much on a shared experience of suffering, but on the ability to imagine oneself in the situation of another: Ah! victims – for whom their sad mother is dreading The multiplied miseries that wait on mankind! To fair fortune born, she beholds them with anguish, Now wanderers with her on a once hostile soil, Perhaps doom’d for life in chill penury to languish, Or abject dependence, or soul-crushing toil. (lines 21–26)

In the final stanza, Smith collapses the line between the speaker and poet, revealing the implicit connection between herself and this exile: “Poor mourner! – I would that my fortune had left me / The means to alleviate the woes I deplore” (lines 33–34). As herself a mother, Smith can extend her thoughts beyond her own experience of victimization and identify on a more universal level with the suffering of others like herself. But she mourns nonetheless that she cannot assist them materially, given the loss of her own estate. Events of enormous political significance are frequently linked in Smith’s poems in this way to her own domestic struggles, and never more so than in her long poem The Emigrants, which expands the cast of characters and extends the concerns raised in “The female exile.” Book I of The Emigrants is set in Brightelmstone (modern Brighton), in November, 1792, about two months after the September Massacres and the subsequent establishment of the French Republic. Smith admits at the outset that, while her own grief

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has often tempted her to “abjure Society,” the sorrow that resides in her own heart has enabled her to recognize “that others like myself / Live but to swell affliction’s countless tribes” (lines 42, 63–64). In Book II, subsequently, which is set during the height of the Reign of Terror in April 1793, Smith builds on this theme. Surveying the sea from an eminence on “one of these Downs . . . to the North of the Weald of Sussex” (149), she reflects: Lost in despondence, while contemplating Not in my own wayward destiny alone (Hard as it is, and difficult to bear!) But in beholding the unhappy lot Of the lorn Exiles; who amid the storms Of wild disastrous Anarchy, are thrown, Like shipwreck’d sufferers, on England’s coast, To see, perhaps, no more their native land, Where desolation riots: They, like me, From fairer hopes and happier prospects driven, Shrink from the future, and regret the past. (lines 6–16)

Focusing on numerous individual cases of suffering, Smith’s eye view gives way in the latter half of the poem to images called up by her imagination. One of the most horrendous is of a mother, fleeing the ravages of a battle as flames engulf her home and “clasping close / To her hard-heaving heart her sleeping child, / All she could rescue of the innocent groupe / That yesterday surrounded her” (lines 264–67). Guilt as well as “Fear, frantic Fear” consumes this sufferer, who senses that it is pointless to live given that her other children have died, and is “half repentant now” of her escape: “she wishes she had staid / To die with those affrighted Fancy paints / The lawless soldiers’ victims” (lines 268–71). “[O]verwhelm’d / Beneath accumulated horror, [she] sinks”: . . . yet, in Death itself, True to maternal tenderness, she tries To save the unconscious infant from the storm In which she perishes; and to protect This last dear object of her ruin’d hopes From prowling monsters, that from other hills, More inaccessible, and wilder wastes, Lur’d by the scent of slaughter, follow fierce Contending hosts, and to polluted fields Add dire increase of horrors – But alas! The mother and infant perish both!– (lines 279–91)

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This image of mother and child, exposed to the elements and destined to be food for wild beasts of prey, provides no sense of consolation, but only inspires a response of sublime horror in the reader, who can do nothing but recoil from the thought of such a brutal end. It is difficult in the extreme to conceive of anything pleasurable, in the Burkean sense, about the sympathy which marks our engagement with this scene of suffering. Nor will Smith’s poetry suffer any sense of tragic catharsis. She wants her reader’s heart to bleed openly for these victims; we are ripped apart by the wild beasts of her imagination, lured by the scent of slaughter and slaughtered both at once. Smith’s images, like the invective speeches in her prefaces, attack her readers (though we have, in point of fact, been forewarned by Smith in her prefaces about what’s coming, and who the real wolves are). This horrific scene is strikingly foreshadowed in the poem by a Gothic description of the imprisoned Marie Antoinette and the young Dauphin, that “Innocent prisoner! – most unhappy heir / Of fatal greatness” (lines 127–28). Smith’s portrait resembles Burke’s, yet certainly contains no apotheosis of the Queen, focusing rather on her more banal conformity to the conditions of her imprisonment. Addressing a few lines first to the young Louis, “Who round thy sullen prison daily hear’st / The savage howl of Murder, as it seeks / Thy unoffending life,” Smith notes that, “while sad within / Thy wretched Mother, petrified with grief, / Views thee with stony eyes, and cannot weep!” (Book II, lines 148–53). Though her son has become prey for beasts of a different order, this mother on trial seems devoid of any feeling except all-consuming horror. Staring into the abyss, Marie Antoinette is hardly represented here as inspiring admiration. She is, however, an object of the poet’s and reader’s sympathy: Ah! much I mourn thy sorrows, hapless Queen! And deem thy expiation made to Heaven For every fault, to which Prosperity Betray’d thee, when it plac’d thee on a throne Where boundless power was thine, and thou were rais’d High (as it seem’d) above the envious reach Of destiny! Whate’er thy errors were, Be they no more remember’d; tho the rage Of Party swell’d them to such crimes, as bade Compassion stifle every sigh that rose For thy disastrous lot – More than enough Thou hast endured; and every English heart, Ev’n those, that to the highest beat in Freedom’s cause, Disclaim as base, and of that cause unworthy, The Vengeance, or the Fear, that makes thee still

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A miserable prisoner! – Ah! who knows, From sad experience, more than I, to feel For thy Desponding spirit, as it sinks Beneath procrastinated fears for those More dear to thee than life! (lines 152–73)

In identifying with the Queen’s sufferings, Smith offers up here the proper Burkean aesthetic response to tragedy. The Queen’s confinement inspires not only the poet’s sympathies, but her horrified indignation. Like Burke, moreover, Smith identifies England’s national character with its “heart” – and consequently with the ability of citizens like herself to feel compassion and recognize injustice. Yet implicit in her treatment of the Queen is the suggestion that discriminating Englishwomen like herself need to identify the root causes of such misery as well as lamenting its effects. Smith indicts as well as exonerates Marie Antoinette for her “errors” and “crimes,” with an argument suggestive of the corruptive influence of absolute power on both victim and victimizer.18 It is a strategy which enables her to demonstrate her own decidedly Jacobin sympathies and link these politics to “Freedom’s cause” (as this beats in all true English hearts), while allowing her to remain critical of the violent methods of the revolutionaries, which reduce the Dauphin to the status of a hunted animal, and his mother to a “miserable prisoner.” Smith’s argument is further grounded in the assumption that to raise the Queen to sublime heights, as does Burke, is to ignore the conditions in which natural sympathies flourish. Identifying with suffering depends here, as for Adam Smith, on commonality, recognition, one’s ability to seek in another the reflection of oneself. Smith’s address is to an equal – to another mother of a suffering child. Moreover, she can contrast her own vibrant (English) heart to that of Marie Antoinette, grown cold and placed beyond the reach of feeling. This, Smith suggests, is the “hapless” Queen’s real tragedy. Motherly sympathy thus provides Smith with a foundation for the type of radical politics that so troubled Burke; indeed sympathy proves the basis for legitimate Republican virtue which is itself quintessentially nothing more than proper English virtue. Smith reconciles the divisiveness so frequently associated with maternal sympathy and the realm of feminine affections, largely because she sees mother and child as thoroughly united in a common struggle against the oppressive forces of male persecution which masks itself in antiquated chivalric codes. Mothers are never set at odds against their children in her work, nor is natural instinct ever presented as inimical to universal duty. What renders the conditions of motherhood “Gothic,” so to speak, concerns more a mother’s overwhelming experience of suffering

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and her burden of responsibility than it does her irrational sympathies or her embrace of self-sacrifice. Indeed, Smith might express compassion for the agonies experienced by mothers, but she represents the impulse toward self-sacrifice that we find in many representations of idealized mother love as a cop-out, a means to avoid the pain and cost of existence. Sympathy for Smith involves living, not dying for the love of a child. Nevertheless, the level of responsibility for others that she herself was forced to assume clearly entails for Smith a different kind of loss of self: a loss of autonomy, of privacy, of poetic license, and finally of the joy of mothering, since her love is always mediated through fears of Gothic proportion. Smith inevitably cultivates the image of woman as victim so representative of the Gothic genre, a move that seems to enshrine male oppression as uniform or cohesive, and female persecution as all-but inevitable. Yet, in foregrounding the historical and political conditions of her narratives, Smith also allows for a different ending to the story of the Gothic mother. She attacks chivalric codes and explodes “proper” feminine poetic conventions so as to expose their ideological bankruptcy – everywhere reminding us that she knows first-hand those things of which she speaks. And her strategy was not unsuccessful. Smith made a decent living with her writing, though her Gothic novels certainly outsold her poetry. Suggestively, as Judith Pascoe points out, “the section of [The Emigrants] devoted to the French Queen and the Dauphin, in addition to a section chronicling the fate of another aristocratic mother and child, were the parts of the poem that achieved the widest distribution”; these sections were not only reprinted but were singled-out in reviewers’ excerpts from the poem.19 Nevertheless, Smith’s powerful appeals to her audience certainly bore the taint of her personal grudges, and her emotional outbursts played neatly into the hands of those critics of the period who were all too willing to dismiss her histrionics as indicative of that type of instability which rendered women unfit participants in the realm of commerce and politics. Significantly, some of Smith’s female contemporaries were among the most severe critics of such emotive displays in so far as they seemingly confirmed the volatility of women. A number of women writers of the period – including Sophia Lee and Mary Wollstonecraft – qualified or rejected outright Smith’s adherence to the concept of an essential maternal nature which served as the basis for women’s unique capacities for sympathy and sentiment: engaging in their works the more problematic aspects of mother–child bonds, suggesting that the extraordinary interconnectedness between mothers and children often causes, rather than alleviates suffering, and accentuating the

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instability of maternal “nature” as part of a broader program for social reform which involves the education of women and the expansion of their political rights. Sophia Lee, for example, a successful playwright and novelist, daughter of well-established actors John and Anna Sophia Lee, and the founder (along with her sisters) of one of the most successful girls’ schools in England, while not wholeheartedly dismissive of the concept of a unique maternal sensibility, emphasizes nonetheless in her 1783 novel The Recess women’s overall susceptibility to outside forces and especially their limitations as mothers.20 The Recess, an epistolary novel loaded to the brim with Gothic conventions (and one of the earliest examples of historical fiction on record), concerns the sufferings, trials, and imprisonments of Mary, Queen of Scots and her fictive twin daughters. The novel fixes particularly on the widespread social injustice prevalent in Elizabethan England, while portraying numerous examples of Gothic maternal endurance. Lee significantly veers from Radcliff and Smith, however, in suggesting that sympathy and personal interconnectedness often breed misery and offer little succor to mothers and daughters alike. Queen Mary’s maternal legacy to her daughters, Matilda and Ellinor, is, in fact, one of intense suffering. Matilda finds herself a “sad inheritor of my mother’s misfortunes, methinks they are all only retraced in me – led like her, a guiltless captive through a vindictive mob, the object of vulgar insult, and opprobrium – like her enclosed unjustly in a prison” (144). So, too, Matilda bequeaths to her own daughter a “mother’s anguish” that “foreran [the child’s] birth”: “throbs of terror” constitute the child’s “first symptoms of existence” (91). Her daughter Mary, being exposed to Matilda’s grief, “seemed at her first entrance into existence, to bewail her unknown calamity” (133). Not only are mother–child bonds in The Recess marked in this way by the generational transmission of pain, they prove at times all-but deadly. Matilda and Ellinor thus each fear that they have been the instruments of their mother’s execution: “Perhaps,” reflects Matilda, “even at the moment she laid that beauteous head, so many were born to worship, on the block, every agony of death was doubled, by the knowledge her daughter brought her there” (118). Both daughters love and admire her, but are driven in numerous instances to deny their connection to their mother, who, similarly, from their birth, has publically denied them: Mary lives, they are told by their nurse, “but not for you” (11). Not only has the existence of the twins endangered the reputation and safety of their royal mother, the recognition of her own pregnancy proves a blight for Matilda, as it initiates a course of events that culminates in the murder of her husband and, subsequently, in

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Matilda’s long period of imprisonment in Jamaica. Grief-stricken, Matilda longs for death after the “agonizing effort” of childbirth is complete, not only for herself but for her daughter, and only after a struggle acknowledges the “sad necessity of living” (132, 134). These highly ambivalent maternal references allow for the fragility of women’s dispositions toward their children and indeed, for the adverse effects of environment on any mother. That maternity is by no means an absolute indicator of a self-sacrificing or sympathetic nature is rendered explicit in a scene set in Jamaica, where native mothers make “offers of their children, to assuage the wrath of the incensed victors” after an unsuccessful rebellion against the colonial landholders is staged (142). Nevertheless, in the end Lee still strongly endorses the unique bond that binds mother to child and saves each from collapsing under the weight of accumulated terrors. Gazing at her newborn child, the anguished Matilda thus has a turn of heart: An impulse new, exquisite, unexpected, took possession of my soul; an impulse so sweet, so strong, so sacred, it seemed as if I had never loved til then. Feebly straining her on my bosom, I enthusiastically prayed the Almighty to bestow on her every blessing she had innocently wrested from me, while my fond heart baptized her in its tears. Powerful, powerful nature! How did I worship all thy ordinations! (133)

Lee ultimately represents mother love as conforming more precisely to nature’s dictums and blames the corruption of mother–child bonds on political systems everywhere associated with greed, powerlust, jealousy, and court intrigue. Indeed, the fact that relations between mothers and children have taken an unnatural course in this narrative serves as the firmest evidence of the unnatural basis of the social structure Lee’s novel critiques. Elizabeth I, for example, is everywhere chastised for her lack of maternal feeling, a consequence of her unhealthy desire for absolute power – a desire which in the end proves inimical to a “real” feminine sensibility. In Elizabeth and in numerous ladies of the court who desire to increase their wealth and social standing, womanly feeling has been suppressed to the point of extinction. Alternatively, benevolent mothers and substitute mother-figures abound, who testify to the conquering strength of natural feeling and to its potentially restorative effects. One of the most striking of these proves to be a Jamaican native, who demonstrates that maternal sensibility is not the sole province of a Western mind set. The savage behavior of those “poor wretches, who [have been] seduced by European crimes to a dire imitation of them” in the end more speaks to the corrupting influence of the colonizer than it evidences the barbaric nature of the native Jamaican (142).

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Matilda herself, needless to say, eventually proves an exemplary mother, whose daughter becomes her all-in-all. Lee’s gender politics in the end prove basically conservative, despite her suggestion that instinct may not always gain sway in mothers. Yet this suggestion in and of itself clearly testifies to her steady commitment to quality female education, not only as a means to strengthen women’s characters and prepare them for the vocation of motherhood, but also to facilitate the kind of independence she herself enjoyed as a single wageearner. In presenting us with portraits of women who frequently fall victim to their acute sensibilities (Mary, Queen of Scots, Matilda, and Ellinor all invite disaster in following their hearts, rather than their heads, and so, too, Elizabeth I proves most oppressive when most enamored of her courtiers) Lee builds a strong case for rational female behavior via the exercise of reason – in mothers and childless women alike. Moreover, if her heroines continuously resign themselves passively to Heaven in the face of their victimization, they also actively pick up the pen as a defensive weapon against tyranny, recording their stories (in the form of letters to one another) as personal testimonies against oppression, and thereby modeling for the female reader a concrete method of retaliation against the forces of patriarchy. Though she was critical of Mary Wollstonecraft’s more revolutionary “Jacobin” feminism,21 in these views and strategies Lee clearly resembles her more famous contemporary, whose unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798) charts the ways in which the failure of Republican idealism is registered in flesh of mothers.22 Wollstonecraft’s Gothic mothers, in fact, demonstrate more decidedly overt tendencies toward the “naturally bad” than we find in The Recess, yet she everywhere foregrounds, like Lee, the deleterious effects corrupt systems impose on seemingly natural, biological processes. Thus, for Wollstonecraft, in a society in which mothers have no status as citizens, the uterus may serve as a tomb rather than as a source of new life. While a number of critics have emphasized the importance of maternal tropes in Wrongs, stressing the centrality of the bond between Maria and her daughter, Wollstonecraft’s attention to the more horrific or sublime aspects of maternity have been almost entirely overlooked.23 Her often chilling depictions of the physical experience of motherhood are critical components, however, of the novel’s more overarching concern with the ways in which political ideologies are internalized by women. Wollstonecraft was actually working on Wrongs during the course of her second pregnancy, which would culminate in the birth of Mary Godwin (later Shelley), and in Wollstoncraft’s death from a postpartum infection.

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William Godwin details these events in his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), and a few details from the memoir are worth recording here. Godwin stresses at the outset: She was so far from being under apprehension as to the difficulties of child-birth, as frequently to ridicule the fashion of ladies in England, who keep their chamber for one full month after delivery. For herself, she proposed coming down to dinner on the day immediately following . . . She hired no nurse. Influenced by ideas of decorum, which certainly ought to have no place, at least in cases of danger, she determined to have a woman attend her in the capacity of a midwife. She was sensible that the proper business of a midwife, in the instance of a natural labour, is to sit by and wait for the operations of nature, which seldom, in these affairs, demand the interposition of art.24

Wollstonecraft almost seems to have taken her cue from Martha Mears’s The Pupil of Nature, but, more likely, her attitude toward childbirth speaks to the positive experience of her daughter Fanny Imlay’s birth in France in 1794. Unfortunately, things did not progress the second time around as she had anticipated. Godwin notes that about two and a half hours after his daughter was born, “I received the alarming intelligence, that the placenta was not yet removed, and that the midwife dared not proceed any further, and gave her opinion for calling in a male practitioner.” A “physician and man-midwife” eventually brought out the placenta “in pieces, till he was satisfied that the whole was removed. In that point however it afterwards appeared that he was mistaken.” The next hours were “full of peril and alarm. The loss of blood was considerable, and produced an almost uninterupted series of fainting fits.” The following day Wollstonecraft told Godwin “that she had never known what bodily pain was before.” Godwin details the rapid progression of her illness, which included severe shivering fits: “Every muscle of the body trembled, the teeth chattered, and the bed shook under her.”25 Wollstonecraft died on the eleventh day after Mary Godwin’s birth. These details, while not affecting the composition of Wrongs, might have been grafted from the pages of that novel. It is striking that Wollstonecraft seems to have faced childbirth herself with such ease of heart, given her novel’s emphasis on the catastrophic dimensions of the physical experience of motherhood. But this in itself speaks to her tendency to accentuate the adverse effects of mental health on the physical body, of environmental forces on biological processes. If she herself looked forward to childbirth as a natural event, the women she portrays dread the onset of motherhood because each suffers varying kinds of brutality at the hands of the men who impregnate them.

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Wollstonecraft’s representation of maternal experience in Wrongs is thus a far cry from that which is presented in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), where she promotes, for example, the imperatives of maternal breastfeeding as a “natural way of cementing the matrimonial tie” (213). The “cementing” of the bond between husband and wife is rather experienced deleteriously by Wollstonecraft’s Gothicized heroine, Maria Venables, who stresses that “Marriage had bastilled me for life” (115), and again that, “I had been caught in a trap, and caged for life” (108). Although Maria obviously cares deeply for her daughter, she is disgusted by the union with George Venables which produces the child, equating forms of maternal “imprisonment” throughout the novel with the socially created bonds of matrimony and the consequent physical dispossession experienced by a woman bound to a man she does not desire. She explains that she loves her daughter with both “a mother’s tenderness, [and] a mother’s self-denial” (61), phrasing which expressly captures the divisive response to motherhood that pervades the novel. Later she elaborates on this point, again using the term “self-denial” in referencing her loss of control over her body during sexual union: The greatest sacrifice of my principles in my whole life, was the allowing of my husband again to be familiar with my person, though to this cruel act of self-denial, when I wished the earth to open and swallow me, you owe your birth, and I the unutterable pleasure of being your mother. (114)

The pleasure of being a mother, Maria suggests, is “unutterable” because on one level incomprehensible. Her daughter is born of an act of self-sacrifice so profound it is equated with a desire for death. That Maria experiences sexual union with her husband as a form of rape is reinforced through her analogous relationship to Jemima, a servant in the madhouse in which Maria is literally imprisoned by her husband. The women eventually exchange stories, and we learn that Jemima was raped (“I became the prey of his brutal appetite” [83]) and impregnated by a former employer. Familiarity with suffering had begun to help Jemima learn to sympathize with others, she explains, “to extend my thoughts beyond myself, and grieve for human misery” – but these feelings die when she discovered “with horror – ah! what horror! – that I was with child” (83). Left abandoned and “utterly destitute” in the street, she admits to “detest[ing] mankind, and abhorr[ing] myself ” (84). The same self-hatred and abhorrence of others likewise had marked Jemima’s own mother’s experience of unwanted pregnancy, as this woman, Jemima explains, “feared shame, more than the poverty to which it would lead” (80). Attempts to conceal

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her condition (in this case, Jemima’s mother’s resolution “to famish herself ” [80]) reveal one impetus behind the pregnant woman’s “withdrawal” from others – her desire to extinguish her own being and, with it, the child who has invaded that physical space. Jemima, too, longs for release from her state of self-imprisonment. She swallows a “potion that was to procure abortion” with the wish “that it might destroy me, at the same time that it stopped the sensations of newborn life, which I felt with indescribable emotion”: “My head turned round, my heart grew sick, and in the horrors of approaching dissolution, mental anguish was swallowed up. The effect of the medicine was violent, and I was confined to my bed for several days” (84). Wollstonecraft represents Jemima’s abortion as an act of desperation born of suicidal despair, a far cry from those references to abortions characteristic of medical reformers and moralists of the late eighteenth century. William Roscoe’s The Nurse, A Poem (1798), published in the same year as Wrongs, offers a more representative treatment of the subject: – Does horror shake us when the pregnant dame, To spare her beauties, or to hide her shame, Destroys, with impious rage and arts accurst, Her growing offspring ere to life it burst.26

Wollstonecraft’s portrayal of Jemima’s suffering presents us with an altogether different take on the experience of an unwanted pregnancy, which, if displaced here onto the figure of the lower-class mother, also resembles Maria’s own (securely middle-class) response to pregnancy. Impregnation is, in fact, represented throughout the novel as an extraordinary violation of identity, and the desire to reject “the other” is played-out as a “natural,” if horrifying impulse toward “self ”-preservation. The child becomes for Wollstonecraft a sign of physical and spiritual violation; pregnancy is described as a state of imprisonment within one’s own flesh, an imprisonment which mirrors Maria’s psychological entombment in her marriage as well as her physical confinement in the madhouse. (The term “confinement,” repeatedly used by Maria to describe her situation in prison, also commonly referred to the period immediately preceding and following childbirth.) Wollstonecraft reinforces these associations between imprisonment, madness, and maternity still further. In the cell adjoining Maria’s, for example, rings the “horrid” laughter of a “lovely maniac” who had, “during her first lying-in, lost her senses” (70).27 Maria’s alleged “malady” (as described by Jemima) even sounds like the “labor” which precedes childbirth; it is characterized by “fits” which occur at “long and irregular intervals” between

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which she “must be carefully watched” (63). Wollstonecraft repeatedly in this way equates states of mind with those of the body. In Wrongs, she accentuates particularly the way women’s bodies may be repeatedly defiled from without by the penetration or invasions of “others.” Moreover, Maria’s experience of violation is linked to the decline of her child – made sickly because “debilitated by the grief with which its mother was assailed before it saw the light” (Wrongs 65). Like The Recess, Wrongs calls into question the very possibility of maternal love in an environment which so debases women’s bodies, and thereby corrupts their “instincts.” Contrary to those representations of wet nurses that adversely target their physiologies or moral characters, for example, Wollstonecraft suggests that it is the poverty of the nurse that destroys her maternal affection. Jemima thus describes the consequences of being placed with a destitute nurse: I was consigned to the care of the cheapest nurse my father could find; who suckled her own children at the same time, and lodged as many more as she could, in two cellar-like apartments. Poverty, and the habit of seeing children die off her hands, has so hardened her heart, that the office of a mother did not awaken the tenderness of a woman; nor were the feminine caresses which seemed part of the rearing of a child, ever bestowed on me. (80)

Nothing good, Wollstonecraft insists, can flourish in such an environment, which rather breeds misery and cyclical maternal bankruptcy. Where Wollstonecraft differs from many other writers of the period, however, is in her suggestion that the exclusive dependency of children on their mothers and substitute mothers makes slaves of women as well as of children. Behind Wollstonecraft’s often chilling representations of maternal neglect lies the assumption that in her contemporary society, mothers assume the full burden of the physical as well as emotional responsibilities of caring for children. Thus her heroine, for example, offers to help financially support the child of her husband’s mistress, though he himself refuses such assistance. In the opening passage of the novel, Wollstonecraft inscribes this sense of responsibility in her heroine’s flesh, noting that Maria’s “burning bosom . . . [was] bursting with the nutriment for which [her] cherished child might now be pining in vain” (61). Note that it is the co-dependency between mother and child that Wollstonecraft accentuates here; as the child is “emptied” or diminished, Maria is painfully “increased.” While the “fluidity” of this interconnectedness suggests a potentially positive model of interpersonal relations based on dynamic exchange, rather than dominance,

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the radical instability and constant flux of this interchange clearly render both mother and child vulnerable to one another. Again, it is worth underscoring that Wollstonecraft’s preoccupations with the unstable physical body feed her broader political agenda. In the earlier “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters” (1787), she had already argued that “maternal tenderness arises quite as much from habit as instinct,” and indeed, only the performance of the “office” of mother “produces in a mother a rational affection for her offspring” (Works iv:7). There is nothing innately instinctual about maternal affection, Wollstonecraft suggests, as this is itself only cultivated through a network of material practices. Her position is not dissimilar in many ways from Rousseau’s, yet, while his politics remain dependent upon his assumption of a necessarily inferior (because less rational) maternal nature, Wollstonecraft suggests that maternity is ultimately performative, in the sense in which Judith Butler uses this term. For Butler, motherhood is a culturally constructed concept that is authorized by biological processes that have no inherent significance in and of themselves: the (maternal) body’s surfaces rather reveal “the performative status of the natural itself.”28 While Wollstonecraft never directly confronts in this way the construction of “the natural itself ” as a categorical ideal, she nevertheless argues that maternal responses remain dependent upon the biological performances associated with motherhood. Breastfeeding, in other words, may solidify the mother–child bond, but neither the urge to breastfeed nor mother love in and of itself is to be considered an automatic impulse in new mothers. Maternal instinct is rather something “implanted” from without – like a seed which may or may not take. If the body is not necessarily a reliable source of maternal authority, moreover, it clearly becomes all the more necessary for women to exercise their minds, suppress dangerous passions, and strive to govern their children with reason – arguments she puts forward explicitly in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The bodies of her mothers are not inherently subversive, as in the accounts of many physicians of the period and in those of social theorists like Rousseau who drew on their testimony, but they threaten to become so when they are subjected to brutality, forced to accommodate repeated “foreign invasions,” or when their natural processes are violently interrupted. Wollstonecraft does not concede that women’s bodies need policing, however. Indeed she rejects this argument outright – the surveillance and containment of women of being a critical part of the problematic society she describes in Wrongs. Rather, she insists that women need to legislate their own behavioral patterns, via various material practices and the acceptance of certain duties that can be learned – breastfeeding being one of these.

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Yet the physical duties of motherhood in Wollstonecraft’s scheme are everywhere underwritten by women’s performance of the cultural role of instructor and guide to their children. The narrative, the bulk of which assumes the form of an autobiographical letter to Maria’s daughter, in fact reproduces such a performance. Maria initially writes to her daughter largely in order to maintain and sustain her sense of herself as a mother, but in so doing she reorients her (and the reader’s) understanding of “real” maternal responsibility. When she is denied the opportunity physically to mother (to breastfeed) her daughter, in other words, her words become a kind of substitute for milk. Her memoir functions as an alternative and more vital form of nourishment, penned in the hopes that learning about Maria’s experience might prevent her daughter from repeating the same mistakes. Clearly the narrative is meant to serve as a warning for the middle-class British reader as well. Maria’s circumstances are held to be all-too-familiar to modern British women,29 many of whom, like Maria, may have received little or no instruction in the ways of the world from their own mothers. Wollstonecraft wants to disassociate motherhood from the realm of the purely material by drawing a direct correspondence in this way between the dynamics of caring for minds and bodies. The quality of a mother’s lessons, she suggests, are necessarily as important as the qualities of her milk. Note that Maria describes her own education (or lack thereof ) as “improper food” of the type that generates corrupting bodily “humours” (96). Wrongs constitutes to this end an attempt not only to endorse but to put into play Wollstonecraft’s understanding of maternal responsibility, to offer Wollstonecraft’s readers nourishing food for thought, motherly wisdom born of experience. The painful story Maria relates, we are to understand, veers dramatically from those proffered in standard novelistic treatments of motherhood. If based in fictional events and infused with Gothic conventions, Wollstonecraft is nonetheless explicit in her “Author’s Preface” that Maria’s story is meant to serve as a representative example of countless mothers’ tales, and is grounded in an examination of the “partial laws and customs of society” (59). The laws of coverture, most specifically, which grant George Venrables the authority to steal Maria’s inheritance, abduct her child, have his wife imprisoned, and thwart her later attempts to seek redress in a court of law and gain a divorce, clearly function as an overt means to enforce an explicitly domesticated version of Gothic villainy in the novel. The age of chivalry so mourned by Burke is indeed alive and well in the 1790s, Wollstonecraft (much like Charlotte Smith) wants to point out, although thousands of women are suffering as a consequence the tyranny of an antiquated legal code designed to supposedly protect them.

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As George Haggerty has recently pointed out, the trial staged at the end of the novel “is in this sense an ideal narrative device. Here Maria can make her own arguments and bring charges” against her victimizer and the system which supports him, despite the fact that it is “logical according to the rule of law that the judge reject her claim.” But Maria’s first-hand account of her sufferings is aimed at a potentially more sympathetic audience – Wollstonecraft’s readers, who are “alive to the inhuman treatment [Maria] has received.”30 As necessarily positioned in the role of juror, to return to Ian Watt’s analogy, the “kind reader” accepts Maria’s evidence as credible not because it is delivered objectively, but because we have been commanded, via a series of first-person points of view, to bear witness to agonies which are brought home to ourselves, which we have adopted and made our own. Wollstonecraft’s is an interventionist aesthetic, which refuses sugar-coating because the text depends for its life on the reader’s swallowing whole the bitter pill she offers us. In filtering her narrative through the mouths of women speaking to other women, Wollstonecraft attempts to construct an alternative “history . . . of woman” (“Author’s Preface” 59), which eschews “uniformity and perfection,” and tells it like it is. Her “sketches,” she explains, with a revealing metaphor that identifies the intellectual labor of writing with the physical labor of childbirth, “are not the abortion of a distempered fancy, or the strong delineations of a wounded heart.”31 Neither will her heroines “be born immaculate . . . [or] come forth highly finished Minervas from the head of Jove” (“Author’s Preface” 59). Rather, Wollstonecraft wants to give us pages torn from the book of life and delivered naturally – sans forceps, so to speak – the operations of nature seldom demanding, to invoke Godwin’s terms, “the interposition of art.”32 The effectiveness of Wollstonecraft’s narrative strategy thus depends, she insists, upon the restraint of “fancy” and the abandonment of those devices which produce “stage-effect” (“Author’s Preface” 59), i.e., the knight on white horse who “rescues” the fair maiden in distress, the conventional happy ending in which goodness is rewarded and evil punished. Maria’s romantic fantasies rather prove her downfall: the liberal, republican ideals of the “celestial” Darnford, to whom Maria becomes attached in the madhouse, merely provide him with the means to seduce and impregnate her. Claudia Johnson links this plot device to Wollstonecraft’s personal experience of abandonment by Gilbert Imlay, and reads Wrongs as a critique of the kind of “sentimental heterosexuality permeating radical as well as conservative discourse”: “Maria cannot hear Darnford’s grossness because republican discourse has intervened and recoded it as frankness, much as it has recoded his selfishness as a lack of servility, his gallantry as generosity of spirit, and his arrogance as the unaffected brashness – the hypermasculinity, if

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you will – of the natural man.”33 So, too, Maria recounts, her husband “professed patriotism,” and “pretended to be an advocate for liberty,” but felt “little for the human race as individuals [and] thought only of his own gratification.” George “was just such a citizen, as a father” (119). Republican patriarchal structures, in other words, here prove as corrupt as the hereditary patriarchal systems they seek to replace. In such a world of lost idealism and corrupt citizenship, death is frequently hailed in the novel as women’s only chance for deliverance. Wollstonecraft’s notes for the conclusion of the novel indeed suggest that suicide becomes Maria’s most attractive option upon discovering herself abandoned by Darnford and “again with child.” The maternal body appears again to her as a “tomb”: “And could [the child] have a nobler?” Maria speculates, “Surely it is better to die with me, than enter on a life without a mother’s care!” (47). The final lines of the manuscript, however, offer the reader a potential resolution to this crisis: Jemima, who has assumed the role of protectoress for her former charge, restores to Maria her (assumed-dead) daughter and Maria vows to “live for my child!” (148). The heterosexual matrix which liberal Republicanism assumes is cast off in this scenario in favor of a society in which women care and live for one another. Political transformation depends, in this reading, upon a rejection of the paternalist model of civil society advocated alike by writers Rousseau and Burke, and upon the cultivation of a matriarchy of sorts, grounded in an enlightened understanding of maternal responsibility (but inflected, too, by the kind of maternal compassion and self-sufficiency evidenced by Maria and Jemima). Under the rubric of this type of properly maternalized civil society, physical energies might be directed toward responsible ends, and nonconformity might be celebrated as a virtue, rather than as a seed of chaos.34 Maternity in Wrongs thus ultimately serves as a vehicle through which to examine the interpersonal relations governing political bodies. Like the French nation in the early years of the Revolution, motherhood is depicted in the novel as a condition pregnant with possibilities which will subsequently be aborted because they are conceived in violence, poisoned by dissimulation, and thwarted by greed. Wollstonecraft wants to remind us that, when fueled by dangerous passions – even those passions that are the products of hopes and ideals – rather than being guided by the steady light of reason, revolutionary energies (like maternal energies) may become self-consuming. Yet this is particularly true given that both the bodies of the mothers and the social body Wollstonecraft describes are ultimately subject to and policed by men who prove corrupt in their designs. Not only are women denied a voice in the late eighteenth-century society Maria negotiates, they are essentially rendered nationless, homeless: “[T]he laws

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of her country – if women have a country – afford [them] no protection or redress from the oppressor,” Maria concedes (118). Haunted and ejected violently from refuge to refuge, Maria and Jemima both exemplify women’s fundamental alienation from their society, their inability to identify with their countrymen as members of an imagined community (to invoke Benedict Anderson’s oft-quoted phrase), or claim any of the rights of citizenship as these were defined in revolutionary discourse. Women’s status as non-citizens resembled the status of those without a homeland or peoples without an adequate government to defend them under the terms of influential political documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). As Julia Kristeva reminds us, this document defined the citizen not as an individual who is independent of all government, but as one who is a citizen of a nation.35 Consigned rather to the status of citizens of the universe – because considered merely the vehicles of universal natural laws – the sufferings of individual mothers are effectively disregarded under a legal system which, according to the judge at Maria’s trial, “might bear a little hard on a few, a very few individuals, [though they] were evidently for the good of the whole” (145). Wollstonecraft disdains this version of Enlightenment universalism, for she recognized that women have little say in what constitutes “the good of the whole.” Only in a nation which recognizes the full and equal status of women as citizens, she maintains, can mothers properly play the parts nature has assigned them. But homeless, penniless, devoid of advocates, subject to physical violence and emotional abuse, and silenced under the law – under these conditions maternal nature is bound to miscarry. If the mothers in Wrongs are characterized by weakness, cruelty, even murderous impulses, this is not “the natural consequence of things” but rather the “consequence of short-sighted despotism” (133). Tapping into the fears of her male contemporaries with respect to the dangers associated with the motherhood, Wollstonecraft often seems on the surface to confirm them. Yet with her portraits of mothers who affirm the fragility of things “natural,” Wollstonecraft adopts a line of reasoning which ultimately underwrites a platform of liberal education for women – instruction which, on the one hand, would prepare them to overcome the unstable impulses of their bodies, but which, on the other hand, might render them fit for occupations other than motherhood. Like Lee, she rejects sympathy as the sole indicator of woman’s nature, demonstrating rather ways in which a highly tuned sensibility paves the way for women’s victimization and advocating the deployment of reason as the route to change. As with Lee, moreover, she suggests that writing might prove the most effectual weapon in the battle against male tyranny.

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Women’s portraits of Gothic mothers frequently served in this way an enlightened agenda which prioritized the healthy embrace of rationality over those unstable emotional responses stereotypically associated with women’s behavior. The poetry of Felicia Hemans, to which I turn in conclusion, evidences a similar critique of Enlightenment assumptions about maternal sensibilities, though via very different means than those employed by Lee or Wollstonecraft. On the surface, Hemans’s narratives seem to endorse the idealization of maternal sympathy, yet the self-sacrificing actions of the women she depicts simultaneously reveal that maternal sympathy in and of itself may prove an ineffectual solution to the oppression experienced by mothers. Indeed, Hemans’s portraits of sympathetic mothers in many ways exhibit the kinds of tensions reflected in Walpole’s and Lewis’s texts, where mother love is presented as an all-absorbing, and almost pathological form of desire. More so than any of the writers previously considered, Hemans suggests ways in which the exemplary behavior of mothers proves monstrous, or, conversely, the ways in which murderous mothers could be held to be benevolent – but renders these confusions inevitable within societies that simultaneously idealize the conditions of motherhood while denying mothers the rights of autonomous citizens. With Hemans, we take a leap forward in terms of historical circumstances, to a post-Napoleonic British state in possession of a more distanced perspective on the course of revolutions. Separating early from her husband (like Smith, she experienced first-hand the effects of a bad marriage), Hemans largely devoted herself to her poetry, with an outpouring of verse that testified to her embrace of Republican ideals and distinguished her as “an energetic commentator on the international scene,” to quote one recent critic.36 As with Smith, Hemans’s poems frequently meld the personal and the political, although the styles of each writer differed vastly. While Smith incorporated in her verse her personal experiences of victimization, Hemans assumes a more distanced perspective, frequently offering her readers narratives devoid of the apparatus of authorial commentary.37 These stories provide us with historical “records” of women’s experiences in a variety of social contexts, and, while the use of repetitive themes at first glance seems to reinforce the universality of these experiences, Hemans’s interest in the particular historical dynamics informing women’s responses to their children works against the grain of such assumptions. A familiar theme for Hemans concerns the valor of mothers who confront disaster bravely, conquering fear and oppression with self-sacrificing love. In one of the poems included in her collection The Records of Women, entitled “Pauline,” for example, Hemans tells a tale which strikingly

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resembles Nougaret’s account of the “poor woman” of Conriet, referenced in chapter 1.38 A fire breaks out in a palace on the banks of the Seine, “’Midst the light laughter of festivity” (line 28) transforming a “gay throng” (line 19) into a “hurrying throng” which sweeps Pauline outside to safety, “as a stormy blast” (lines 49, 50). Yet this “loveliest” of ladies, in whose countenance are blended “deep love and matron thought” (lines 11, 18) thinks only of her daughter. That “gentle girl” (line 57), only moments earlier dancing in “fairy rings round the echoing hall” (line 32), is now in “fear’s cold grasp alone” (line 57) and “[p]owerless hath sunk within the blazing pile; / A young bright form, deck’d gloriously for death, / With flowers all shrinking from the flame’s fierce breath!” (lines 58–60). Vivid details and exclamatory phrases lend to the horror of this account, heightening the anxieties of the reader, who is pulled, like Pauline herself, back into the “blazing pile”: But oh! thy strength, deep love! – There is no power To stay the mother from that rolling grave, Though fast on high the firey volumes tower, And forth, like banners from each lattice wave Back, back she rushes through a host combined– Mighty is anguish, with affection twined! And what bold step may follow, midst the roar Of the red billows, o’er their prey that rise? None! – Courage there stood still – and never more Did those fair forms emerge on human eyes! Was one brief meeting theirs, one wild farewell? And died they heart to heart? – Oh! who can tell? (lines 61–72)

A discovery the following morning provides the reader with answers to the queries put to us in the lines above: And bore the ruins no recording trace Of all that woman’s heart had dared and done? Yes! there were gems to mark its mortal place, That forth from dust and ashes dimly shone! Those had the mother, on her gentle breast, Worn round her child’s fair image, there at rest. And they were all! – the tender and the true Left this alone her sacrifice to prove, Hallowing the spot where mirth once lightly flew, To deep lone chastened thoughts of grief and love. Oh! we have need of patient faith below, To clear away the mysteries of such woe! (lines 79–92)

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The complete immolation of Pauline’s body mirrors the all-consuming nature of her love, which if on the one hand seems a “mystery” too deep to delve, on the other proves an example of the kind of sacrifice which might “chasten” the grief of those survivors who could or would not display the kind of courage shown by this brave mother. The poem, like the gems that mark this maternal sacrifice, provides us with a “recording trace” of the nature of a mother’s love, preserving Pauline’s story and serving as evidence of the fact that while the ephemeral body may be destroyed, love like this cannot be. Hemans’s poem seems a rather straightforward account of the selfsacrificial nature of maternal nature according to this reading, yet the poem’s epigraph, which forecasts the events Hemans will describe, also offers a somewhat different explanation for Pauline’s sacrifice: To die for what we love! – Oh! there is power In the true heart, and pride, and joy, for this: It is to live without the vanish’d light That strength is needed.

While suggesting, like Nougaret, that to die for one’s child is in some sense a “joy,” Hemans also stresses here that this is so because existence without the child is unbearable. The mother’s enclasping of her child to her breast signifies a form of oneness which is preferable to life, change, inevitable separation. The fact that the events that precede this tragedy – the daughter’s dancing onto the stage of public life, with its implications of a sexual awakening, and hence a parting from her mother – occupy almost half of the narrative, is surely telling. This poem not only serves as a “record” of maternal love, in other words, but suggests that death is the only way to keep intact the complete sympathy that binds mother to child. This theme runs like a thread throughout Hemans’s work. In “The Image in Lava,”39 for example, the poet–speaker contemplates the “rude monument” (line 35) of a child “fearfully enshrined” (line 10) in lava while “slumbering / Upon [its] mother’s breast” (lines 13–14). The poem records the tale of this woman’s “dark fate” (line 17), though again Hemans stresses that even this horrific end is more desirable than its alternative – life, with its inevitable dissolution of the union of mother and child. “Far better then,” we are told, for the mother to perish, Thy form within [her] clasp, Than live and lose thee, precious one! From that impassioned grasp. (lines 29–32)

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The “impassioned grasp” of the mother indeed is suggestive of “the fiery tomb [of lava] / Shut round each gentle guest” (lines 15–16). While maternal love here constitutes a memorial to “love and agony” (line 4) which “[s]urvives the proud memorials rear’d / By conquerors of mankind” (lines 11–12), that memorial signifies stasis, an entombment which will “outlast” those “glories” of “[e]mpires [which] from earth have passed” (lines 8, 7) because it is frozen in death. That maternal love should here be equated with a death wish is due to the fact that the child’s gradual separation from the mother is rendered inevitable – their fusion in death is “better than to part” (line 20).40 In “Indian Woman’s Death-Song.”41 Hemans takes this suggestion even further. The poem recounts the story of a deserted woman’s suicide and “mercy killing” of her infant daughter, yet the mother’s lamentation is presented strangely as a song of liberation for herself and for her child: “I leave thee not,” she tells the babe she clasps, “Too bright a thing art thou to pine in aching love away, / Thy mother bears thee far, young Fawn! from sorrow and decay” (lines 37–39). This misplaced “benevolence” strikingly reveals the dangerous side of all-consuming maternal sympathy, which here distorts the “Indian woman’s” ability to differentiate between her own interests and those of her daughter. Yet Hemans clearly works to alleviate the potential anxieties of her reader, not so much by displacing the motivation for infanticide onto the seemingly “savage nature” of the Native figure, but by representing her actions as all-but heroic. The eloquence of this speaker, in fact, works strongly to normalize her behavior, and, indeed, what most distinguishes this account is the Indian woman’s insistence that she has an important story to tell. She sings passionately as she hastens on her death and the death of her child, with an unflinching resolve that is inconsistent with those characterizations of women as weak and unstable that we find in so much writing of the period. This mother is bent on enlightening her audience about those forces which have driven her to such desperate measures. Similarly, in Hemans’s “The Suliote Mother,”42 a poem which recounts another suicide / infanticide, child murder is cast as the natural response of a loving mother to desperate circumstances. The Suliote mother leaps off a cliff with her child to save him from a life of misery; as she watches the advance of the invading Turkish troops who would enslave them both, she legitimates her actions via the impassioned words to her child which shape the poem itself: Hear’st thou the sound of their savage mirth?– Boy! thou wert free when I gave thee birth,– Free, and how cherish’d, my warrior’s son!

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He too hath bless’d thee, as I have done! Ay, and unchain’d must his loved ones be– Freedom, young Suliote! for thee and me! (lines 35–40)

Not only do her words serve as a means of explaining the incomprehensible, the act of telling itself helps inspire her courage and works like a balm on her wounds. Just as Maria’s and Jemima’s confessional narratives in The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria express a sense of desperate urgency and serve therapeutic ends within the context of the text, Hemans’s mothers demand a sympathetic audience with whom they can share their pain. These haunting narratives speak not only to Hemans’s preoccupations with the unique suffering of mothers, they testify more broadly to the awful sublimity of this most “natural” of female roles. Hemans’s mothers are frequently characterized by a sense of horrific sympathy; theirs is a love that kills. Yet these impulses toward self-destruction and child murder are undoubtedly presented as heroic: in taking their children’s lives, these mothers demonstrate the extent of their devotion. As Josephine McDonagh recently suggests, many infanticide narratives of the period in this way offer critiques of the inherent injustices in modern, civilized societies which operate according to the exclusive dictates of reason. When child murder is read as a “humane act, an act of salvation in a corrupt world,” an alternative model of civilized society is invariably posited, “one based on sympathy and feeling.”43 Yet Hemans’s murderous mothers do more than ignite the unfeeling modern reader’s sympathies. They also, paradoxically, offer a critique of the very nature of sympathy itself. The suggestion that runs throughout Hemans’s poetry – that death is preferable to the dissolution of the mother–child bond – in fact severely undercuts the humanitarian impulse that informs her portraits of suffering mothers. Death becomes, to some extent, the only way of maintaining a state of perfect sympathy between mother and child because it is a condition which admits of no possibility of change or individuation. This static union all-but bespeaks a mother’s desire to return her child to the protective shelter of the womb. This reading offers some interesting twists on psychoanalytic paradigms of mother–child symbiosis, which generally operate from the perspective of the child, whose cognizance of the mother’s physical separateness or material absence precipitates a crisis. Freud and, later, Lacan each stress the melancholic structure of the subjectivity that may result from the child’s attempts to master this experience of loss through processes of substitution. Maternal abandonment is renounced on one level although endlessly pursued via other objects of desire that replace the lost, original object – a

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process that may be played out later as a narcissistic disorder in the adult subject who is unable to come to terms with a lost loved object.44 What interests me most about Hemans’s narratives of maternal love, however, is their emphasis on a side to this equation which Freud’s account does not pursue. Hemans suggests repeatedly that the process of individuation is experienced as a catastrophic rupture for mothers, not children – one which results in a desire to maintain a sense of fusion with another, even to the point of death. Death becomes a way of mastering maternal melancholia within the context of Hemans’s poems. To die for the sake of or in the company of one’s child is to put an end to the kind of all-consuming desire that is evidenced, for example, by the Countess in The Mysterious Mother and Agnes in The Monk. Freud might argue that a mother’s all-absorbing desire for her children stems from her own inability to master the separation from the maternal body as an infant. Nancy Chodorow provides us with a gloss on this question, arguing that daughters undergo the process of maternal differentiation differently than sons: this process is, for Chodorow, “incomplete” in the case of a daughter, whose identification with her mother is maintained in ways which come to significantly distinguish women’s subjectivities and experiences of communal relationship.45 Carol Gilligan, following Chodorow, maintains that women’s constructions of interpersonal relations tend to endorse the primacy of family and community in terms which stress cooperative interaction rather than dominance,46 and many feminist literary critics have adopted Chodorow’s understanding of a feminine “ethic of care” in their accounts of Romantic women writers’ aesthetic sensibilities. Yet I would argue that the more troubling implications of this framework become especially apparent in Hemans’s poems, which suggest explicitly that, from a mother’s perspective, it is better “to die than to part.” What is at stake for Hemans, as for Walpole and Lewis, is the inability of mothers, not children, to experience a sense of healthy autonomy. If the child is able to master the severance from the maternal body through processes of substitution and the introjection of other objects, as Freud suggests, Hemans’s poems maintain that given their position in societies which dictate that motherhood is the exclusive expression of and outlet for women’s essential nature, no similar process is available to mothers. It is this emphasis that distinguishes Hemans’s portraits of maternity from those of many of her Gothic predecessors. Of course, there is nothing necessarily inevitable about the maternal experience that she describes, and, indeed, what most concerns me here is that Hemans does not construct records of maternal experience per se as much as she provides an account of

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the experience of mothers negotiating specific forms of social imprisonment that mirror their totalizing connections to their children. In her accounts of maternal suicide/infanticide, for example, which explore the deadly nature of maternal love most overtly, Hemans accentuates that the desperate actions of mothers constitute a response to the brutal conditions of their societies. Her portraits of infanticidal mothers to this end anticipate Toni Morrison’s more recent exploration of this theme in Beloved (1987), which recounts the desperate decision of Sethe, an escaped slave, to murder her children and take her own life rather than be returned to a state of bondage. While Heman’s Suliote mother similarly chooses death for her child and herself over a life of slavery, her “Indian woman” (who has been deserted by her husband for another wife) in fact insists (in the vein of Smith and Wollstonecraft) that slavery is a condition that all women experience in some form or another. To take the life of a daughter becomes a means of saving her from “woman’s weary lot” (“Indian Woman’s Death-Song” line 36). While motherhood in one sense appears a possible route of escape from that lot – a vocation which allows women a sense of control and a legitimate social status otherwise unavailable to them – it is ultimately an inadequate escape. Given the hierarchical nature of the societies these women negotiate, they can never function as true warriors in defense of their children or function autonomously without them. A perverse form of personal interconnectedness results, one that signifies stasis, an inability on the part of mothers to imagine themselves or their children as discreet individuals. In poems like “The Suliote Mother,” moreover, this death-dealing interconnectedness is further equated with a nationalist perspective that prioritizes the interests of the many at the expense of the individual. Choosing death for herself and her son over enslavement, the Suliote mother maintains that her child has been born free, and must remain “unchained” at all costs. We should note that her act of suicide/infanticide does more than spare mother and child a life of misery; it robs the Turkish troops of their imperial booty. We might go so far as to say the Suliote mother’s sacrifice belies a commitment to maintaining genetic boundaries between nations and racial groups, to maintaining the country’s eugenic purity in the face of rape by foreign soldiers. Better to die than to produce a Turkish-fathered child, in other words, whose existence would serve as a reminder of the victories of the enemy. As Susan Grayzel points out in her study of French and British propaganda during the First World War, such a mind set demonstrates “society’s overarching concern not with the violence done to women [during wartime], but with ‘racial mixing’ and attacks on national honor.”47

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Yet, clearly, Hemans’s record of the Suliote mother works from the opposite angle, highlighting rather than obscuring the violence that provokes such “unnatural” maternal behavior and providing the reader with a fierce indictment of the imperialist mind set that renders human beings spoils of war. Nan Sweet has persuasively argued that Hemans’s corpus of work marks in this way the “traces of nineteenth-century imperialist history,” whereby the historical experiences of women and of conquered countries are alike marked by rapine and exile. Personal sacrifices are represented within this scheme as “accident[s] of history” – not as transcendental indicators of human experience.48 It is important to recognize, in other words, that the types of maternal sacrifices that infiltrate her poetry constitute accidents of circumstance, fragmentary glimpses of human experience, to adopt Sweet’s terms. The problematically sympathetic actions of her mothers are presented as highly “unnatural” responses conditioned by politicized forces that might change over time. Although the narrators of her poems thus often mimic the voices of Enlightenment theorists, who held that selfsacrifice constitutes the highest realization of true maternal nature (just as martyrdom proves the mark of a true patriot), the perspectives of Hemans’s mothers prove in the end highly unreliable as indicators of universal experience. If her poems seem to tell the same story over and over, in other words, linking women of vastly differing historical epochs in the common experience of Gothic motherhood, Hemans never invites the reader to see the conditions that produce their suffering as transhistorical. The impulse at work is rather “to blast open the continuum of history,” to adopt Walter Benjamin’s terms, not only so as to reveal that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” but in order to make present a sense of the past that is “charged with the time of the now.”49 Hemans adopts the perspective of the historical materialist in this way, challenging the enlightened view of history as a record of stadial progress and demanding rather that we confront the present through the lens of the past. As is true of other women writers of the period, her literary politics are, in this way, interventionist. While both her literary strategies and her analysis of the dynamics of maternal sympathy differ vastly from those of a writer like Charlotte Smith, this common impulse links their projects, demonstrating strikingly the ways in which Romantic-era women’s writings might pursue alternative courses toward the same end. Each of the female authors examined here – though they utilize differing narrative conventions and arrive at strikingly different conclusions about the nature of maternal sympathy – deploys the text itself as a legitimate weapon for combating

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the conditions in which Gothic maternity flourishes. Whether endorsing or critiquing Enlightenment assumptions about maternal sensibility, all agree that mothers and children alike are subject to victimization under the prevailing gender codes of the day and see the first step toward change as involving the disclosure of mother’s tales from the lips of women who have witnessed and/or lived them. Indeed, the imperative to bear witness and “feed” readers with instructional lessons in life becomes a central component in women’s literatures of the Romantic period. For Maria Edgeworth, to whom I turn in the following chapter, this dictum is of paramount importance. More so than most women writers of the period, Edgeworth overtly plays the role of maternal educator and sees literature as a form of intellectual nourishment vital to the strength not only of individual, but of national bodies. But clearly this is a trope that broadly informs Romantic-period women’s writings, even those overtly sensationalized texts that so disconcerted didactic educators like Edgeworth. In surveying the terrain of women’s representations of Gothic motherhood, we discover a range of perspectives and encounter maternal bodies that are bearers of multiple meanings – which may be packaged in a variety of ways and harnessed to a number of political agendas – but so, too, we find a common impulse among women to speak, to generate their own literary progeny, to name themselves and their experiences so as to demystify them, correcting the public record and legitimating in the process a new form of maternal labor: the birthing the of the book.

c h a pt e r 3

The Irish wet nurse: Edgeworth’s Ennui

Was she bad? Was she worse than the general run of her race? No. They had an unfair show in the battle of life, and they held it no sin to take military advantage of the enemy – in a small way; in a small way, but not in a large one. Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson1

It is also good to speak while feeding a child, so that it does not experience feeding as a violent force-feeding, as a rape. Luce Irigaray, “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother”2

“We once told a good-hearted but extravagant cook,” writes Isabella Beeton, in her phenomenally popular nineteenth-century Everyday Cookery and Housekeeping Book, that we should much like to give her carte blanche in cooking details, but that if we did so and spent all the housekeeping money on eating and drinking, we should be unable to do what we have always done – give the maids good medical advice when they were ill, pay for their medicine, and give them wine if ordered by the doctor. Her only reply was “Lor, mum!” but a speedy change took place, and she remained a careful, faithful woman, until her marriage.3

Beeton’s anecdote speaks to a widespread concern for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century homemakers: one’s extravagance might point to a “good heart,” but it also frequently indicates imprudence, as unguarded generosity may deplete the resources upon which others depend. Such arguments were standard fare not only in housekeeping guides like Beeton’s, but in the writings of political economists, social theorists, and novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When targeted explicitly toward women, as in Beeton’s text, such advice takes on special resonance, given the period’s widespread concerns about women’s tendencies to love to excess. The way in which a woman regulated (or failed to regulate) the eating habits of her family proved, in fact, a focal point for writers arguing that mother love might prove deadly. Medical writers like William Cadogan 96

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stressed particularly the dangers associated with overfeeding, suggesting that affectionate upper-class mothers might kill their children with love, by stuffing them with sweets, for example: “[T]he puny insect, the heir and hope of a rich family, lies languishing under a load of finery that overpowers his limbs, abhorring and rejecting the dainties he is crammed with, till he dies a victim to the mistaken care and tenderness of his fond mother.”4 Such messages not only informed popular housekeeping manuals and medical texts of the period, but were mapped onto the bodies of nations by literary writers, and none more so than Maria Edgeworth. Edgeworth frequently configured the relationship between Ireland and England in overtly maternalized terms as a means to further a very specific sociopolitical agenda: she aimed to celebrate the Enlightenment progress model, endorse the “practical education” of the Irish, and promote “reform” and “improvement” in Ireland by fashioning herself as a maternal educator who might nourish the minds of readers with a diet of instructional fiction. But she would also come to question the limitations of her own motherly aspirations for Ireland, in so far as she would link those aspirations explicitly to her own divided (or doubled) responsibility, as the daughter of a wealthy Anglo-Irish landlord,5 to regulate not only the material but also the spiritual consumption patterns of those beneath her – to feed the bodies as well as the minds of the lower-class Irish. “The difficulty” she confronted, as explained by the good agent, Mr. M’Leod, in her novel Ennui (1809), was “to relieve present misery, without creating more in the future.”6 In the face of spiraling hunger in Ireland, Edgeworth would feel this difficulty acutely during the years before her death in 1849. Although the utilitarian political economists that she admired had stressed since the turn of the nineteenth century that too generous a system of poor relief in Ireland would foster indolence and overpopulation, Edgeworth persistently questioned the physical implications of the British government’s limited responses to repeated subsistence crises, even before the appearance of the devastating potato blight in 1845.7 In May, 1844, she wrote the Rev. Richard Jones, a staunch supporter of laissez-faire policies: Take away the horror of seeing human beings perish – without offering aid . . . [y]ou raise, you educate a race of political thugs. There are whole bands of the selfish well-prepared for this education and quite ready to seize philosophical reasoning as its pretext.8

Like incorrigible children, she believed, the Irish necessarily had to be managed, but they also needed, first, to be fed. If she fed the body, however, she might inadvertently contribute to the corruption of the spirit: “How shall

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we get the people who have been fed gratis to believe that the government and their landlords are not bound to feed them always?” she wrote to Jones in 1847. “They evidently have formed this idea . . . The character of Paddy knows well how to take advantage of his misfortunes and of all fear and blunders.”9 Edgeworth had given this conflict a sustained treatment in Ennui, the second of her Irish novels, and one which anticipates many of the concerns which would trouble her during the 1830s and 1840s. Set during the years immediately preceding the passage of the Act of Union in 180010 (and written during the first half of the decade following the Union [1803–5]), the novel explores Edgeworth’s concerns about controlling the consumption of her Irish tenants – largely through its sustained analysis of the figure of the lower-class Irish wet nurse, Ellinor O’Donoghoe. Ellinor epitomizes the gross materiality and political subversiveness Edgeworth associated with the lower-class Irish, but she also embodies an alternative model of domestic authority and enacts a different politics of consumption than that promoted elsewhere by Edgeworth. In Ennui, it is Ellinor, and hence Ireland, who feeds England, regulates the consumption of the aristocracy, commands their affections, and shapes their identities. While she is in many ways representative of the lower-class Irish mother whose consumption patterns and disorderly housekeeping, Edgeworth persistently stressed, needed to be managed in the broader interests of the nation, Ellinor also supplants the duties and rights of the upper-class (and necessarily absentee) Anglo-Irish mother, for whom she substitutes. Through the central figure of the wet nurse, Edgeworth poses questions about what kind of woman really has the authority to mother, and what the authority to mother in the hands of the lower classes might portend. As herself a food source, the wet nurse provokes the question “who is feeding whom?” and thereby foregrounds acutely the material dynamics of power relations in Ireland. In Ennui, Edgeworth suggests that, like Ireland, Ellinor is valued only as much as she can be consumed, though as with Ireland, Ellinor will threaten to turn the tables and become a devouring consumer herself. Edgeworth’s critics have largely ignored this attention to the physical dynamics of interpersonal and intercultural relations in Ennui, or like Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, have stressed that Ellinor represents that which Edgeworth herself “struggled not to become.”11 Katie Trumpener argues persuasively, however, that Edgeworth accentuates in her national tale the “imperatives of cultural preservation” and that Ellinor’s maternal body becomes a site of “transcultural tolerance.”12 Both perspectives are valid, though incomplete unless seen in relation to one another. I will argue here that, while playing the role of enlightened mother–educator certainly

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aligned Edgeworth’s interests with those of the Ascendancy class in Ireland, her focus on the physical dynamics of mothering in Ennui helped her to confront simultaneously the difficulties she herself experienced in reconciling maternal sensibility with sound economic practice.13 She critiques in Ennui those aspects of utilitarian colonial policy which seemed to discount the physical suffering of others and gestures toward a more maternalized model of Anglo-Irish relations, yet remains anxious about the potential dangers of ungoverned local affections and loyalties, associating these dangers explicitly with the threat of unqualified maternal love. Maternal affection indeed proves as subversive a force in Ennui as political intrigue and rebellion. The novel is, in fact, set during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, one of the most important political events of the Romantic period proper, though until very recently one of the most neglected sites of Romantic scholarly inquiry.14 Ellinor’s substitution of her own child for her nursling, the son of an English earl, becomes a form of political rebellion, a means to satisfy her own hungers, if at a distance.15 (Her own child eventually inherits the estate, while the real heir is raised, by Ellinor, as a humble blacksmith.) If she represents a destabilizing threat to individual and cultural identities, however, Ellinor also reveals that the danger of the wet nurse lay not merely in her potential mutinousness, but in the very deference which she appeared to present – in the love which she might foster in the upper classes, and the inverse obligations which that feeling engendered.16 In nurturing and feeding her oppressors, the wet nurse cultivated dangerous sympathies in the ruling classes. While, for Edgeworth, these bonds of affection provide a possible foundation for cultural hegemony in Ireland, such intimacy also functions in Ennui as a potential threat to the political and economic interests of the Ascendancy class.17 As Edgeworth’s contemporary Samuel Ferguson (another Protestant Unionist) would emphasize: “Fosterage was one main instrument in that process of Hibernicization through which the early invaders were invariably withdrawn from their English allegiance.”18 Writing in the immediate aftermath of the political and economic Union of Ireland and Great Britain, Edgeworth questions whether such a distinction between “English” and “Hibernian” allegiances is more destructive than productive – but highlights, too, the potentially problematic aspects of the alternative model of cultural hybridity offered by the Irish nurse. As I have already suggested, wet nurses were the subjects of fierce scrutiny during the period in which Edgeworth wrote Ennui, but the Irish nurse constituted a special threat – not so much to the health and well-being of English foster children, but to their cultural integrity. In no small part, English anxieties about the Irish fosterage system related to their fears

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concerning the potential subversiveness of the Irish themselves, but Ascendancy writers like Edgeworth were just as concerned with the murky allegiances inspired by the physical intermingling of English and Irish bodies as they were with the type of overt political usurpation traced in Ennui. Through the breasts of Irish nurses, Edgeworth suggests, English children might imbibe more than milk; they might glut themselves on different values than those promoted by the ruling class. Hunger might thus be satisfied on one level, and promoted on another. In the process of being weaned from their foster mothers, most specifically, they might fill their empty mouths with her words, ideas, stories, songs – language being the natural offspring of the human desire for connectedness, and hence the most likely substitute for breastmilk during this transitional period. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have recently described “the transition from a mouth filled with the breast to a mouth filled with words” as occurring “by virtue of the intervening experiences of the empty mouth”: Learning to fill the emptiness of the mouth with words is the initial model for introjection. The absence of objects and the empty mouth are transformed into words. So the wants of the original oral vacancy are remedied by being turned into verbal relationships with the speaking community at large. Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation means channeling them through language into a community of empty mouths. Since language acts and makes up for absence by representing, by giving figurative shape to presence, it can only be comprehended or shared in a “community of empty mouths.”19

Abraham and Torok’s concept of a “community of empty mouths” proves an especially apt metaphor for Ireland as conceived by writers like Edgeworth. In Ennui, she locates hunger at the core of the Irish experience, and suggests that empty mouths need to be filled, lest desires, pains, situations be channeled through language into a community driven by unsatiated and perhaps insatiable appetites. In the chapter entitled “Taste and Imagination” included in Practical Education, Edgeworth’s pioneering work on child management (co-authored with her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 1798) she notes suggestively: “When a child sees any new object, or feels any new sensation, we should assist him with appropriate words to express his thoughts and feelings” (444), that is, we should fill mouths with the proper words if we are to channel thoughts and feelings in the proper directions. Given that Edgeworth held her Irish tenants to be little more than children, and thoroughly conflated her educational theory and her reform agenda in Ireland, we might substitute “the Irish” for the “child” in this quote, and read the entire text of Ennui as a gloss on its recommendation.

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I want to stress at the outset that Edgeworth’s interest in the potentially destabilizing effects of diet was widely shared by her contemporaries, but was a concern relatively new to the eighteenth century. Over the course of the century, however, attitudes about food and its relation to identity had undergone rapid changes. Increased availability of a wide variety of previously unavailable products due to the expansion of imperial trade, improvements in transportation, and advances in food refrigeration and preservative techniques meant greater choice for consumers,20 but also increasing exposure to things “foreign.” Certain imported goods, like sugar, coffee, and tea, once considered luxuries (and used primarily for medicinal purposes), became necessity items across the social strata.21 Moreover, consumers found themselves entertaining a new relationship with food, one mediated by monetary currency. The “origins” of imported items and the modes of production (i.e., the colonial labor) which preceded their appearance in the marketplace were obscured. Food products were no longer solely considered to be the result of time and care, physical labor, and God’s beneficence. In the urban marketplace, money was exchanged for goods and the buyer was defined as a consumer, rather than a producer.22 With the institutionalization of the concept of the “refined” palate (and hence, the introduction of the concept of the connoisseur) dietary choices further came to reflect standards of discrimination. Eating was becoming a highly politicized affair in the late eighteenth century, to say the least. The ability to make distinctions between those foods which promoted health, and those which encouraged disease, became a form of managing the “self,” a way of refusing, as Rogers has noted, “to accept the body as a given.”23 For some, like Percy Shelley, careful regulation of diet indeed became a means to strengthen not only body, but mind, soul, and, ultimately, nation. In “A Vindication of Natural Diet,” Shelley held that an adoption of his “natural” diet of vegetables and pure water would convert “disease into healthfulness; madness in all its hideous variety . . . into a calm and considerate evenness of temper, that alone might offer a certain pledge of the future moral reformation of society.” That Shelley associates “madness” in this essay with the uncontrollable excess of the latter years of the French Revolution is apparent. “Who will assert,” he asked, “that had the populace of Paris drank at the pure source of the Seine, and satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature, that they would have lent their brutal suffrage to the prescription list of Robespierre?”24 The domestic homemaker was held to play an important role in this process of promoting the health and moral well-being of the nation – most specifically through the regulation of her family’s diet. Mary O’Brien has

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argued that, despite the fact that the status of reproductive labor was elevated during the late eighteenth century, women’s “home” work came to be defined as non-work, which led to a “definition of women as ‘consumers’ who were not producers.”25 Yet, in the kitchen, women could reconcile these terms: they could “spend,” and thus keep imperial trade flourishing, given that they spent wisely and put their money to proper use. By providing an appetizing environment, women encouraged their husbands to stay in their homes rather than exhausting their energies and incomes in less wholesome pursuits.26 Monies thus saved could be reinvested in the economy, advancing further trade and industry. By nourishing the bodies of their husbands and children, women further demonstrated their affections for them, cultivated their loyalties and affections “naturally,” and taught them to emulate those rules of domestic economy which were foregrounded in housekeeping texts of the day. Proper diet was linked increasingly to moral well-being, sound economic exchange, and solid national identity. The politics of domestic consumption and the role of the middle-toupper-class woman in managing the diets of her family as well as those of the lower classes were clearly spelled out in a genre relatively new to the eighteenth century, and one which was dominated by the work of women writers after mid-century27 – the cookbook. Although many scholars have examined the ways in which conduct literatures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries participated in the construction of specifically classed and gendered British subjects,28 cookbooks have been widely disregarded as a field of inquiry, despite the fact that these texts anticipate concerns central to our understanding of nineteenth-century class and gender relations in Great Britain. The domestic homemaker functioned in cookery books of the period, I would suggest, as the “unacknowledged legislator” of a society increasingly defining itself through the food it consumed, and increasingly wary of the choices it thereby confronted. The careful regulation of diet became a means to a higher (national) end after mid-century, as British cooking was usually defined in opposition to the more costly, elaborate, and time-consuming French culinary methods promoted in culinary literatures of the first half of the eighteenth century. Cookbooks helped to foster a sense of solid national identity, addressing an increasingly urbanized population which evidenced growing signs of imported disease. Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) was perhaps the most successful cookbook of its day, and set the tone for works to follow in advocating economy and moderation in consumption patterns, while characteristically condemning extravagance as a French national trait. “[I]f gentlemen will have French Cooks, they must pay for French tricks,”

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argued Glasse. “So much is the blind Folly of this Age, that they would rather be impos’d on by a French Booby, than give Encouragement to a good English Cook!”29 The title heading of Glasse’s third chapter, “Read this Chapter, and you will find how expensive a French Cook’s Sauce is,” demonstrates an attention to expense (as an indicator of English national character) that runs throughout her book. “I have heard of a Cook,” she notes in her introduction, “that used six pounds of butter to fry twelve Eggs; when any Body knows (that understands cooking) that Half a Pound is full enough – or more than need be used. But then it would not be French!” (all italics Glasse’s).30 Regulating this habit of immoderate extravagance, according to Glasse and other women who followed her, would correspondingly elevate the character of the British nation.31 Integral to this process was the suggestion that waste might be controlled. Glasse offered her readers, for example, hints such as how “To Save Potted Birds that begins to be bad.”32 The implication that this type of ingenuity was an integral component of good housekeeping increasingly assumed broader social implications in subsequent best-selling cookbooks and, by the turn of the nineteenth century, the social dynamics of eating became a central issue in works like Maria Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery; Formed on Principles of Economy, and Adapted to the Use of Private Families (1806), which went into a second edition in less than a year. Rundell encouraged domestic homemakers to feed the urban poor off the left-overs of their tables (thus eliminating the need for organized soup kitchens and other forms of governmentally regulated relief ), and stressed that this type of domestic economy would help to cure the British nation of its blight of poor. In addition to her “receipts” and her extensive coverage of most aspects of thrifty household management, Rundell included detailed instructions to middle- and upper-class housewives on economic cooking practices for the relief of the lower classes. After a lengthy description of how to make nourishing soup from scraps and bones, for example, she notes: I found, in the time of scarcity, ten or fifteen gallons of soup could be dealt out weekly, at an expense not worth mentioning, though the vegetables were bought. If in the villages of London, abounding with opulent families, the quantity of ten gallons were made in ten gentlemen’s houses, there would be a hundred gallons of wholesome agreeable food given weekly for the supply of forty poor families, at the rate of two gallons and a half each.33

Like Glasse, Rundell maintained that the business of feeding a family involved the regulation of its waste – the lower classes might then receive that which would otherwise be discarded: “broken potatoes, the green heads of

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celery, the necks and feet of fowls.” She further stressed that this careful management of detail radiated or circulated throughout the system of the nation. Not only would “the pieces of meat that come from the table and are left on the plates after eating” yield “nutritious soup for the poor two or three times a week,” servants could be taught to subordinate their own needs to those of their “fellow creatures”: It very rarely happens that servants object to seconding the kindness of their superiors to the poor; but should the cook of any family think the adoption of this plan too troublesome, a gratuity at the end of the winter might repay her, if the love of her fellow-creatures failed of doing it a hundred fold.34

Rundell’s domestic philosophy emphasized the inherent value of disinterested acts of “kindness,” which enriched both giver and receiver: “[I]n every family there is some superfluity; and if it be prepared with cleanliness and care, the benefit will be very great to the receiver, and the satisfaction no less to the giver.” But ultimately her goal was to teach others to help themselves, most especially the “industrious [working-class] mother, whose forbearance from the necessary quantity of food, that others may have their share, frequently reduces the strength upon which the family depends.”35 Rundell suggested that there were concrete means through which women contributed to the material as well as spiritual well-being of their families and the families of others, but stressed too that, if the body of the mother ran to waste, the welfare of the entire family would be jeopardized. Edgeworth drew upon these domestic values in Practical Education, but put a somewhat different spin on the question of the mother’s duty to regulate the consumption habits of her family. She cautioned her readers most specifically about the dangers of enjoying food to excess, noting that in homes where “the pleasure of eating is associated with unusual cheerfulness, and thus [with] the imagination,” parents “conspire to make [their children] epicures”: “All children may be rendered gluttons, but few, who are properly treated with respect to food, and who have any literary tastes, can be in danger of continuing to be fond of eating” (200–1). Promoting the values of moderation and self-control, Edgeworth also suggests explicitly that proper literature can become a kind of substitute for food. Her own moral and educational tales (which preach self-discipline and the control of appetites) might provide her readers with precisely that form of alternative nourishment. Yet circumstances in Ireland complicated the more immediate sense of responsibility to the poor that Edgeworth associated with her own position

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as daughter of an enlightened landlord. Targeting the agricultural practices in Ireland as the “root” of the country’s trouble, she aligned herself with political economists who found the potato to be an inferior food which pinned the Irish to the bottom of civilization’s ladder and linked the Irish dependence on the potato to indolence and spiritual decline. Potato farming did not require, she would note years later, “industry or labor sufficient for the moral purpose.”36 It was not only the scarcity of food in Ireland, in other words, which concerned women like Edgeworth, but the abundance of the wrong type of food. Elizabeth Smith, of County Wicklow, expressed attitudes which were by the mid-nineteenth century, widespread: “[T]he cheapness of this low description of food encourages idleness, pauper marriages and dirty habits, and neither mind nor body could be fully developed upon such nourishment.”37 Ironically, though it would be consistently associated in this way with economic and moral decline, Irish potato farming had developed in response to the increased export of grain to England and its other colonies. Christine Kinealy notes that an estimated two million people within Great Britain were fed, on the eve of the Great Famine, with food imported from Ireland, “and the demand for this food was increasing.” Agricultural Ireland was, in fact, described “as a granary for the remainder of the United Kingdom.” Exportation was facilitated under the auspices of protectionist legislation, the infamous Corn Laws, which guaranteed minimal prices for “home-produced corn,” of which Ireland was Britain’s “largest single supplier.”38 Ireland served, in other words, as a wet nurse of sorts to the British. While Irish exports filled British stomachs, the potato provided a local substitute food source which was both nutritious and easy to produce.39 Large quantities of potatoes could be cultivated in poor soil and on small parcels of land. Moreover, the cottier system meant that subsistence might be maintained without cash transactions. Irish cottiers farmed potatoes on small plots of land on a rotating basis. The potatoes helped prepare the soil for other cash crops and were given to the laborers as “left-overs.”40 While they were thus cash-poor, the consumption of upwards of fourteen pounds of potatoes a day41 generally kept the lower classes healthy. Yet over-reliance on the potato crop was increasingly associated with rampant subdivision, earlier marriages, and an ever burgeoning population in Ireland. Thomas Malthus had anticipated the trend to scapegoat the potato in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), where he details “the disadvantageous effect of a low relative price of food on the consumption of the poor”:

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The great quantity of food which land will bear when planted with potatoes, and the consequent cheapness of the labor supported by them, tends rather to raise than lower the rents of land . . . to keep up the price of the materials of manufactures and all other sorts of raw produce, except potatoes . . . The exchangeable value of the food which the Irish laborer earns, above what he and his family will consume, will go but a little way in the purchasing of clothing, lodging, and other conveniences; and the consequence is that his condition in these respects is extremely miserable, at the same time that his means of subsistence, such as they are, may be comparatively abundant.42

While he may be well fed, Malthus explains, the Irish laborer produces no capital with which to reinvest in the Irish economy. In 1826 Malthus would amend this passage, noting that the “indolence and want of skill which usually accompany such a state of things tend further to render all wrought commodities comparatively dear.”43 Increasingly in this way, the negative influence of diet on character was linked to its deleterious effects on national economic stability. Increasingly, too, the “indolence” which was held to “accompany such a state of affairs” in Ireland was associated with an even more threatening disorder – that of the fecundity of Irish mothers. Kinealy notes that, besides “indolence,” the “production of children” was held to be the alleged “favorite pastim[e]” of the Irish people: “Hypotheses about human reproductive behavior . . . in the context of the provision of poor relief, were popular among the intellectual elite, linking high birth rates to indolence and the inactivity associated with poverty on the one hand, and too generous a system of poor relief, on the other.”44 As the fear mounted that the number of Irish mouths was growing more rapidly than the food supply, concerns escalated regarding the “tendency,” as Malthus so ominously expressed it, for population “to increase beyond the means of subsistence.”45 Writers like Malthus and Adam Smith suggested that Irish women’s natural capacity to bear children contrasted sharply with their abilities to rear them – and that the dependence of Irish children on the state would mean the further loss of British revenues.46 As excessive (re)producers (not unlike the potatoes which fueled that reproduction), Irish women were held to be necessarily conspicuous consumers. The Irish wet nurse, however, radically challenged these assumptions. By definition she was a producer (the word “foster” derives from the Old English “fostrian,” which means “feed” or “nourish”) despite her lower-class status. The wet nurse utilized her body to turn a profit (she turned body into bread, so to speak). Indeed, as Valerie Fildes has stressed, wet nursing had been a rather lucrative career for working-class women

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before 1800.47 Extended breastfeeding was widely acknowledged, moreover, to be an effective (if not always reliable) form of birth control,48 and the contraceptive advantages of nursing may have been complemented by the Roman Catholic doctrine advocating women’s abstinence from sexual intercourse while breastfeeding.49 Lower-class Irish wet nurses helped limit their burgeoning families by prolonging the period of lactation, while enabling aristocratic women to increase the size of their own families. The relationship between the aristocratic mother, her child, and lower-class nurse constituted a kind of self-contained economy of mutual benefits and rewards. On the one hand, the nature of this transaction – the nurse’s ability to substitute for the biological mother – suggests a sympathetic model of intercultural relations. Yet, alternatively, the wet nurse becomes an uncomfortable reminder of the tenuousness between outside and inside, self and other. So, too, while maternal value was grounded during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the mother’s supposed separateness from the public world of exchange and competition, the wet nurse testified to the fact that a woman “has value only in that she can be exchanged.”50 Rousseau had suggested this point explicitly, if ironically: “[T]he best nurse is the one who offers the highest bribe” (Emile 27). During the 1790s, the years in which the action of Ennui unfolds, the practice of fostering out children indeed began to decline in Ireland. Terry Eagleton, following Kevin Whelan, connects this trend to the political turbulence of that decade, which culminated in violent rebellion in 1798.51 Yet the Irish wet nurse had long been the victim of British prejudice. As early as 1596, Edmund Spenser had suggested that fostered children might be corrupted by the love they received from their nurses, whom they might come to prefer over their mothers. Spenser appealed to this anxiety in venting his racial as well as class antipathy for the Irish wet nurse in A View of the Present State of Ireland, where he argues that the fostering system in Ireland is a “dangerous infection,” and laments: the child that sucketh the milk of the nurse must of necessity learn his first speech of her . . . [T]he smack of the first will always abide with him, and not only of the speech, but of the manners and conditions . . . They moreover draw into themselves, together with their suck, even the nature and disposition of their nurses . . . so that the speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish.52

This concern that the child might pick up the “nature and disposition” of its nurse reveals Spenser’s deeper anxieties about children learning to love “things Irish” – his fears that milk might be thicker than blood. Edgeworth echoes this concern early in Ennui, where she interrupts the narrative with

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a footnote in which she quotes Sir John Davies: “[F]ostering hath always been a stronger alliance than blood” (36). For Davies, as well as Spenser, the fostering system was one cause of the British failure to subdue Ireland. The embrace of Irish custom, via the embrace of the lower-class wet nurse, had led “the English, which hoped to make a perfect conquest of the Irish” to be “perfectly and absolutely conquered” by the Irish.53 Clare Carroll suggests that Spenser’s “analogy between the child’s learning language and sucking milk through the breast suggests the most physical and erotic sense of language, as well as a linguistically conditioned way of perceiving the world.”54 Associations between words and mouths, language and appetite, in other words, play a determinate role for Spenser in the formation of cultural identity, especially, I would add, given that Spenser associates Irish character with an already altogether dangerous prioritization of orality over the written word, which renders the natives necessarily difficult to discipline using the standard textual tools available to the colonialist. Writers following Spenser would stress to this end the need to curb in the Irish their tendency for oral exaggeration, which manifests itself, too, as an appetite for whiskey, litigation, and gaming (all of which Edgeworth associates with Irish national character in her first novel, Castle Rackrent [1800]). The need to reform the Irish by restraining these appetites is a constant theme in post-Union writing, one which relates more broadly to a wish to suppress in the Irish appetites for any activities that would be subversive, both as actions and as discourse. “Food is a need,” Irigaray explains. “It can become a desire, but it needs speech for that to happen.” To keep the Irish “imprisoned in the reality of need,” to adopt Irigaray’s terms,55 involves suppressing the type of discourse through which desire might be articulated and so realized. The danger for Spenser, and for Ascendancy writers like Edgeworth in his wake, is that the reverse seems to be happening. The English are learning the idiom through which they can translate their own hungers into subversive desires, and they are learning it at the breast of their Irish nurses. Edgeworth clearly draws on such anxieties in Ennui, which is largely a tale of “foreign” desires run rampant. The baby-switch plot highlights the potential subversiveness of the trusted Irish servant, Ellinor O’Donoghoe, whose installation of her own child in the big house suggests a means through which her own appetites can be satisfied second-hand, and whose persuasive use of language throughout the text proves a dangerous source of nourishment for her son, who assumes the position of the usurped heir, the Earl of Glenthorn. Katie Trumpener stresses that Ellinor feeds Lord Glenthorn on her words; she is a spinner of stories, an endless source of

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local lore, who captivates her estranged son’s affections primarily by discursive means.56 The power of her words is all-but hypnotic; they awaken Glenthorn’s imaginative faculties in ways of which Edgeworth the educator fundamentally disapproved. As both Ina Ferris and Catherine Gallagher have argued, Edgeworth wanted to mold her own largely female audience into proper readers by providing them with a proper diet of fiction. Her “overriding concern [was] to identify the sort of reading that would create stable, reliable domestic women, who could in turn raise useful, productive children.” Gallagher stresses particularly the ways in which Edgeworth’s classical economic liberalism informed her theory of literary production, which was “plagued by a constant sense that literature would always exceed its productive uses.”57 Ellinor, by contrast, represents the type of storyteller that Edgeworth most feared: one who stimulated the imagination at the expense of sound reasoning, who particularized at the expense of rational generalization, who encouraged highly emotional responses in her audience. As Trumpener stresses, Ellinor constitutes a threat precisely in so far as she represents the tradition of bardic nationalism that Edgeworth wants to displace with her enlightened moral tales. But Edgeworth also offers a more complex, and a more decidedly sympathetic response to the Irish wet nurse. Her portrait of Ellinor O’Donoghoe emphasizes the (invariably) lower-class nurse’s historical role in sustaining and nurturing the bodies of the British – her ability to be herself a food source which fosters British strength. The rural nurse’s milk, in particular, had been hailed frequently in the late eighteenth century as a healthy alternative for upper-class children. Lord Glenthorn is, in fact, placed with Ellinor as an infant for precisely this reason. His father, a British aristocrat, “had an idea that this would make me hardy” (5). The impulse proves to be sound, as the sickly heir regains his health at the breast of his Irish nurse, who had been “sure . . . that he would die wid me” (289). Although Ellinor is clearly a subversive presence in other ways, whose duplicity is equal to any of Spenser’s or Davies’s charges, she is not an abusive or neglectful nurse (like those targeted by Rousseau, for example). Those aspects of Ellinor’s behavior that ultimately prove most threatening, rather, are those most explicitly associated with her mothering: her unqualified love, her intimacy with her children (both biological and fostered), her ability to produce enough milk (and affection) for not just one, but two. As with the middle-class housekeepers of Glasse’s and Rundell’s texts, who contribute through their thriftiness to the financial well-being of the family, Ellinor channels surplus (the breastmilk which she produces for her own child as well as another’s) into profit – both immediate financial

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profit and an added contraceptive pay-off. Extended breastfeeding has apparently limited the size of her own family (only two biological children are mentioned in the text, both sons). Combining the features of the good middle- and upper-class English mother with those qualities valued in the good Irish nurse, Ellinor serves as a possible figure of reconciliation in the context of the impending Union between England and Ireland – a union which is materialized through her act of suckling the Glenthorn heir. Yet Edgeworth insists, too, that there are dangers inherent in this type of union. If it is, in fact, the Irish mother who is feeding the English, in whose breast does the real power lie? The question of who controls the means of consumption thus becomes a central issue in Ennui, where the regulation of diet indeed proves to be a slippery business. Ellinor is valued as a food source, but only in so far as she furthers the strength of those who would consume her. Ellinor’s own appetites are an uncomfortable variable within this equation, not merely because they represent a potential drain on “shared” British resources, but because they mirror the grossly unregulated appetites of the Ascendancy class in Ireland – those who, according to Edgeworth, ought rather to have been teaching the Irish the value of subordinating desire. As one of the novel’s Irish aristocrats, Lady Geraldine, explains, “We, Irish, might live in innocence half a century longer, if you [English] didn’t expedite the process of profligacy” (177). Lady Geraldine refers to the influence of the English in Ireland as a “contagion,” from which the Irish need to be “quarantine[d]” (177). But how is it, Edgeworth wants to ask, that English national character has degenerated thus when transported to foreign soil? To admit, like Spenser and Davies, the dangerous influence of the Irish fosterage system (the English child’s absorption of “Irishness” at the breast of the nurse), is at once to reaffirm the natural inferiority and infectiousness of Irish national character and to concede the alarming fragility of English identity – a concession which undercut the Ascendancy’s claim to innate cultural superiority. Are the English, then, merely that which they eat? Does national character determine consumption patterns, or might the reverse prove true?58 Rather than providing us with definitive answers to such problematic questions, Edgeworth sidesteps them in Ennui by shifting her attention away from the problem of Irish national character (so central to her earlier Castle Rackrent) and focusing instead on the more overtly “natural” dangers of maternal love. She scapegoats, in other words, not Ellinor’s inherent Irishness, but her seemingly natural maternal responsiveness (her loyalties to both the child of her body and to her nursling). Ellinor’s original crime, the substitution of one child for another, dramatizes these split loyalties. By

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Ellinor’s own account, this substitution represents an attempt to support – not to subvert – the status quo. She claims to have been motivated by sympathy for the Glenthorn family, stressing especially her consideration for their financial interests: I thought with myself, what a pity it was the young lord should die, and he an only son and heir, and the estate to go out of the family, the Lord knows where; and then I thought, how happy [the Senior Lord Glenthorn] would be if he had such a fine babby as [mine]. (289, emphasis Edgeworth’s)

While we might detect more than a shade of Thady Quirk-like dissimulation here59 (even the turn of phrase, i.e., “I thought with myself ”, suggests a doubleness of perspective) Ellinor never denies her consciousness of the future benefits which would ultimately accrue to her own child as the result of her actions. She rather stresses her sense of responsibility to all parties concerned: “I thought . . . what a gain it would be to all, if it was never known” (290). Such apparent disinterestedness of course masks dangerous local interests, and although Ellinor herself seems unconscious of the implications of her actions, the reader is never quite sure how much her part is feigned, how sly is her civility (to borrow Homi Baba’s terms).60 It seems clear, at any rate, that her allegiances have become blurred – not just for the reader, but for Ellinor herself. And this, Edgeworth wants to stress, is precisely what is best and worst about the Irish fostering system. While fosterage breaks down cultural barriors, it also threatens to destroy the objectivity of both the English and the Irish, who can no longer, like the reader, distinguish who is who. Edgeworth is careful to emphasize to this end that Ellinor’s seemingly benevolent actions produce their share of casualties, not the least of which is her natural son, who believes himself to be an orphaned British earl. Raised without the benefit of a mother–legislator (Lady Glenthorn has died shortly after giving birth), Lord Glenthorn does not learn the values of moderation and self-control so necessary for happiness and sound leadership. Rather he has been “[b]red up [in England] in luxurious indolence . . . surrounded by friends, who seemed to have no business in this world but to save me the trouble of thinking or acting for myself ” (1). This faulty education (whereby idleness rather than industry is rewarded), produces in Glenthorn, “[w]hilst yet a boy,” a “mental malady” characterized by melancholy and boredom, which he refers to as “ennui” (2–3). That ennui is a disease foreign to healthy British subjects is reinforced by Edgeworth’s detailed attention to the manifestations of Glenthorn’s disorder, most notably, his French epicurism: “I became a perfect epicure,” he relates, “and gloried in the character,

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for it could be supported without any intellectual exertion, and it was fashionable” (21). Glenthorn’s pursuit of “the pleasure of the table” is shared by his companions, who “either were, or pretended to be, connoisseurs in the science of good eating” (19–20): Epicurism was scarcely more prevalent during the decline of the Roman Empire, than it is at this day amongst some of the wealthy and noble youths of Britain . . . Many affect it because they have nothing else to do; and sensual indulgences are all that exist for those who have not sufficient energy to enjoy intellectual pleasures. (22–23)

This type of extravagance at best, Edgeworth suggests, encourages a capricious and self-indulgent temper (20), at worst, “consumes” one’s enthusiasm for life itself. Immoderate eating thus produces in Lord Glenthorn “a nervous complaint, attended by extreme melancholy,” which leads to thoughts of suicide (24). While his bad eating habits might be viewed, on the one hand, as marks of Glenthorn’s innate Irishness, Edgeworth persistently stresses that her protagonist’s character flaws are the products of his decadent upbringing among English aristocrats – themselves rendered corrupt through exposure to French culture. The thorny path down which Glenthorn has been led, however, takes a radical swerve when he is confronted in England, on the birthday which marks his coming of age, by Ellinor, whom he believes to be his Irish wet nurse. To highlight this transitional moment, Edgeworth has Ellinor, in a burst of joyous enthusiasm, provoke Glenthorn’s “fortunate fall” from his horse – fortunate, that is, because the accident allows him a glimpse of the true characters of his wife (whom Glenthorn has purchased . . . by the numeration table,” 17), and his friends (whom he realizes are anxious “to get rid of me,” 35). The accident is fortunate too in that it provides Ellinor with an opportunity to nurse Glenthorn back to health, both physically and spiritually. The recovered Glenthorn (whose wife has eloped with his crafty financial manager), decides to return to his estate in Ireland, where he believes he can enjoy what he imagines to be “feudal power” and live “as a king” (39). Upon discovering his actual identity, however, Glenthorn assumes his real name (Christopher O’Donoghoe), relinquishes his estate to his foster brother “Christy” (the actual earl, who has been raised by Ellinor), and is finally thrown upon his own wits. Through industry and perseverance he attains self-made happiness and the bride of his choice (upon whom his former estate has been conveniently settled). When Christy, the restored earl, later relinquishes the estate (which has all but been destroyed due, significantly, to his wife’s extravagant consumption patterns), a wiser,

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more deserving Glenthorn/Christopher resumes his former position – “the demon of ennui [now] cast out forever” (359). Ennui thus plays out (on the surface) Edgeworth’s program for the development of legitimate Ascendancy authority. If Glenthorn/Christopher is unqualified to rule by virtue of the birthright which he has been led to believe is his own, in learning the values of hard work and affectionate duty he appears to be so qualified upon the completion of the novel, which is written as his memoir. Like the Ascendancy class in Ireland, his authority will in the end be merited, rather than arbitrarily inherited. “Honors of your own earning,” notes Lord Y****, who oversees Christopher’s education and facilitates his class transition, “How far superior to any hereditary title!” (393). Moving away from an explanatory model of political legitimacy which is rooted in blood ties or in ties to the land clearly helps Edgeworth to validate the claims of the ruling Ascendancy over those of the displaced Irish landowners. Yet the confusion of identities which attends this movement also helps to obscure the fact that an Irish O’Donoghoe eventually assumes control of the Glenthorn estate. Edgeworth pushes this sense of confusion still further. Local lore holds that the low-born O’Donoghoes were once “kings of Ireland” (304), while the Glenthorns, “long and long before they stooped to be lorded,” were at one time but mere “O’Shaughnasees” (37, emphasis Edgeworth’s). Perhaps there is something of poetic (as opposed to strictly utilitarian) justice at work here after all? Even if obliquely, these references to familial decline and ascent raise specters of a violent past marked by the rapid (and coercive) reordering of the social classes in Ireland. A climate of political animosity marks this text in numerous other ways as well, as Edgeworth draws on her own first-hand experience of the 1798 Rebellion for plot detail (the Edgeworth’s were forced to flee their home in Edgeworthstown during the Rebellion). Glenthorn basically bumbles his way through the crisis (with the notable exception of his almost single-handed capture of a band of rebels), but becomes increasingly aware that social unrest has become epidemic. He is at first, however, relatively unconcerned: Evils that were not immediately near me had no power to affect my imagination. My tenantry had not as yet been contaminated by the epidemic infection, which broke out after with such violence, as to threaten the total destruction of all civil order. I had lived in England – I was unacquainted with the causes and the progress of the disease, and I had no notion of my danger; all I knew was, that some houses had been robbed of arms, and that there was a set of desperate wretches, called defenders; but I was annoyed only by the rout that was now made about them. (224)

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Glenthorn’s take on the 1798 uprising is thoroughly unenlightened, both in its naive dismissal of widespread political unrest, and in its misrepresentation of the philosophical origins of the “rout.” The uprising was, in point of fact, largely inspired by the “relentlessly modernising rhetoric of the Enlightenment” and by the “revolutionary orthodoxy” of late-eighteenthcentury France,61 although the oppressive Penal Laws directed against Catholics in eighteenth-century Ireland were the special targets of the rebels’ censure. In his account of the “State of Ireland in 1798,” Theobald Wolfe Tone, one of the leaders of the ’98 insurrection and its most famous martyr, argued that, by 1790, growing discontent with the status quo had produced “a powerful revulsion” in the minds of enlightened Protestants in Ireland, who had come to see that, “whilst they thought they were the masters of the Catholics, they were, in fact, but their jailers”: Eager to emulate the glorious example of France, they saw at once that the only guide to liberty was justice . . . The Catholics caught with eagerness at the slightest appearance of alliance and support from a quarter whose opposition they had ever experienced to be so formidable, and once more, after lying prostrate for above one hundred years, appeared on the political theatre of their country . . . The leaders on both sides saw that as they had but one common country, they had but one common interest; that while they were mutually contending and ready to sacrifice one another, England profited of their folly to enslave both, and that it was only by a cordial union and affectionate co-operation that they could assert their common liberty, and establish the independence of Ireland.

Tone records here the origins and outlines the philosophy of the United Irishmen movement, which proved the central organizing force of the rebellion, claiming optimistically that “Catholics and Dissenters, the two great sects whose mutual animosities have been the radical weakness of their country, are at length reconciled, and the arms which have been so often imbrued in the blood of each other are ready for the first time to be turned in concert against the common enemy.”62 Edgeworth notably blurs these political and sectarian dimensions of the uprising, however, focusing instead on rebellion itself as a “disease” with whose symptoms England is unfamiliar. Yet the British are, perhaps, not as isolated from the source of this infection as it would seem. Later, Glenthorn will link this “illness” to his own, suggesting that boredom is at the root of each: “Perhaps ennui may have had a share in creating revolutions. A French author pronounces ennui to be ‘a moral indigestion, caused by the monotony of situations’” (234). The impulse to revolution is produced, Glenthorn suggests, by a “bad diet” of things French, to which the poor are especially vulnerable, given their habit of indolence and the restlessness

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that it produces. Again, this restlessness mirrors, however, that of the upper classes, of which Glenthorn is, at this point, representative. He laments, in retrospect, that his own “tastes” were similarly corrupt: “Unfortunately for me; the rebellion in Ireland was soon quelled . . . For the tranquility, which I was now left to enjoy, I had no taste” (233). Ellinor, by contrast, represents a healthy substitute to those forces that merely feed Glenthorn’s ennui, given that her methods of political conversion constitute a positive alternative to the problematic colonial model which history offered Edgeworth. In reforming Glenthorn through love, Ellinor teaches him in turn to love, and moreover, to love Ireland, a country for which he has throughout his life felt only antipathy (5). Love will eventually become the motivating force of his existence, driving him to pursue the law laboriously so as to make himself worthy of Cecilia Delamere, his future bride. Ellinor’s resumption of her mothering of Glenthorn is in this sense his Enlightenment, a point which Edgeworth accents through the promise Ellinor asks of him: to be allowed to light his fire in the morning and draw open the shutters (81). The name Ellinor is, in fact, from the French “Helene,” meaning “light.” Glenthorn’s coming into the light is specifically rendered, furthermore, as a return to nature. “[Y]ou want the natural touch, you do,” Ellinor tells him, specifically in the context of Glenthorn’s initial “virtuous resolution” not to be merciful, when mercy might interfere with “what was due to justice” (281–82). Ellinor’s function in the text becomes, consequently, to “touch” Glenthorn, to personalize his understanding of just rule. Her affection cures not only his “hard heart” (282) but via his heart, also his ennui. Hers is a revisionary model of politics, similar to what Anne Mellor has identified as a feminine Romantic “ethic of care.”63 At her death, Lord Glenthorn loses “the only human being who had ever shown me warm, disinterested affection” (321). Yet precisely because “all [Ellinor’s] ideas of virtue depended upon the principle of fidelity to the objects of her affections, and no scrupulous notions of justice disturbed her understanding, or alarmed her selfcomplacency” (299), there are troubling implications for this ethic. Ellinor is a threat to the social order specifically because for her, affections assume precedence over justice. While she inspires in Glenthorn a broader concern for the physical well-being of others which dramatically reorients his sense of personal and social responsibility (and which, consequently, enables him to abandon his former absenteeism), she also reveals that ungoverned sympathies can be problematic. Ellinor, in fact, cultivates in both her natural and her foster child sympathies which threaten the broader political and financial interests of the Ascendancy class. She teaches them to be, in other

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words, “bad mothers,” who cannot control the appetites of others, or reform the consumption patterns which threaten both Ireland and England. The true heir (and former blacksmith) Christy, for example, though a seemingly natural gentleman who appears to be content enough with the life he has been given and who is motivated by affection and a sense of responsibility to others, is nonetheless thoroughly unprepared to govern the estate when he is confronted with his true responsibilities. “[T]ribes of vagabond relations” descend upon Glenthorn Castle upon Christy’s taking up residence there, and the estate becomes “a scene of riotous living, and of the most wasteful vulgar extravagance” (369). Although Christy himself “has lived all his days upon potatoes and salt, and is content” (283), his contentment can be read as complacency which actually helps facilitate the near destruction of the estate. Moreover his degeneration resembles that of the British aristocrat, as much as it does that of the Irish laborer rendered dull from a potato diet. Much like Glenthorn’s early self-indulgent behavior, Christy’s decline in the end testifies to a faulty education. From Ellinor, whose heart rules her head, Christy has learned the wrong lessons. He cannot recognize the dangers of over-indulgence, and so cannot understand the benefits of long-term vision which will improve the land and all its inhabitants. While Ellinor provides Glenthorn similarly with an education of the heart, the sympathies that she inspires in him are as problematic as the liberality she has fostered in Christy. Foremost among the traps to which Glenthorn is susceptible upon his return to Ireland is the tendency to “give” injudiciously to those he should be disciplining. This is a dramatic improvement over the former neglect which characterized his absentee status, though his behavior nonetheless is still qualified by the same sense of apathy: “The method of doing good, which seemed to require the least exertion, and which I, therefore, most willingly practiced, was giving away money” (101). Though “well-meaning,” Glenthorn’s initial charitable attempts to improve the conditions of his tenants are fundamentally unsound because indiscriminate: I did not wait to inquire, much less to examine, into the merits of the claimants; but, without selecting proper objects, I relieved myself from that uneasy feeling of pity, by indiscriminate donations to objects apparently the most miserable. (101)

Glenthorn’s “pity” is targeted by his agent M’Leod as an improper impulse in the greater design to “do good.” For M’Leod, a student of Adam Smith, the task of feeding the poor is inseparable from the goal of educating the lower classes: “to teach men to see clearly, and follow steadily, their real

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interests” (111). It is the confusion of interests, he suggests, which leads to economic degeneration and hunger – a confusion spurred by inappropriate emotional responses on the part of the aristocracy. Glenthorn has, for example, given marriage portions to the daughters of his tenants and rewarded those who have children so as to encourage a growth in population. M’Leod notes, in response, that Glenthorn’s estate was so populous, that the complaint in each family was, that they had not land for the sons. It might be doubted whether, if a farm could support but ten people, it were wise to encourage the birth of twenty. It might be doubted whether it were not better for ten to live, and be well fed, than for twenty to be born, and to be half-starved. (105, emphasis Edgeworth’s)

Controlled giving, on the other hand, which encouraged the industrious, while teaching the indolent to reform, is represented throughout the novel as an acceptable mode of aristocratic philanthropy. Thus Glenthorn’s later desire to reward the daughter of a tenant for her self-restraint in delaying marriage (by providing her with a small farm on which she and her future husband can live comfortably and care for her aging father) inspires a broader pattern of assumed responsibilities, and benefits the estate as a whole. (The family does not, in this case, subdivide, and thus devaluate, the father’s portion of land, and they achieve self-sufficiency at minimal cost and maximum benefit for all.) Acts of charity when motivated solely by pity, on the other hand, constitute unsound investments, and further destructive patterns of consumption. M’Leod argues: Pity for one class of beings sometimes makes us cruel to others. I am told that there are some Indian Brahmins so very compassionate, that they hire beggars to let fleas feed upon them; I doubt whether it might not be better to let the fleas starve. (102)

Shifting to a more remote context, M’Leod at once presents the colonial problem as universal (i.e., all colonial situations are alike, in that the colonizers – as much as the colonized – need to be educated to abandon archaic and unreasonable methods of confronting unpleasant problems), and invokes sympathy for the colonized figure who is himself being devoured by the current state of affairs. The Brahmin’s “philanthropy” merely disguises his displaced consumption of the beggar, whose body is the only commodity left him to sell, and who must be eaten so as to temporarily satisfy his own hunger. The same is, of course, equally true of the wet nurse. Ellinor’s tragedy is explicitly this inability to distinguish the difference between being consumed and being the consumer. Her willingness, for example, to selflessly “sacrifice all she had in the world for anybody she

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loved” leads her to be “as generous of the property of others, as of her own” (299). Such generosity not only threatens the broader interests of the community, it blinds Ellinor to the fact that in attempting to prioritize the needs of others, she has starved herself of the emotional and physical rewards of mothering Glenthorn/Christopher, her “jewel” (285, 288, 292). She recalls the pleasure of nursing him and having him “in my arms” (80, 319) and despairs when he (initially) denies the preference he owes his “old nurse, that carried ye in her arms, and fed ye with her milk, and watched over ye many’s the long night, and loved ye: ay, none ever loved, or could love ye, so well” (280). Depriving both herself and her child of that love has created a chain of events which not only endangers the happiness of each, but which fundamentally distorts the nature of the mother–child bond. Ellinor does not know, in fact, how to be a mother to her real son when he acknowledges their relationship. Faced with Glenthorn’s rebirth as Christopher, Ellinor wills her own death, falling victim to her son’s fall in fortune (to his weaning from the taste for fashionable life). Ellinor’s death suggests that while the influence of the mother is vital to the cultivation of bonds of affection, her authority must be in some measure contained. She dies when the classes are reordered for a second time (when Christopher/Glenthorn gives up his right to the estate), but she also precipitates with her death the further restructuring of the social order by freeing her son to move beyond her orbit and releasing him from the promise he has made to nurse her back to health and take her with him when he leaves the estate. Only through physical separation from her body, Edgeworth suggests, can he free himself from her powerful control and move forward. The Death of the Mother replaces that of the Father, in other words, as the originating act which founds society within this text. In the end, this is the “secret” which Ellinor must conceal, even from herself. Yet, if Edgeworth necessarily had to bury the mother in Ennui, she also insisted that maternalized sympathies must be resurrected in Ireland in something of a new form, which feeds the mind while acknowledging too the primacy of the body. Restoration in Ennui comes, thus, through Cecilia Delamere, who inherits the Glenthorn estate after it has been all but ruined by Christy’s mismanagement. Via the intermarriage of an English Delamere with an Irish O’Donoghoe (which anticipates the ritual endings of many of Walter Scott’s novels), Edgeworth gestures toward the possibility of a legitimately hybrid (and explicitly feminized) Anglo-Irish culture. Cecilia in fact renames Christopher/Glenthorn (he takes the name Delamere in marriage) and thus offers him a new identity which prioritizes the influence of the maternal (Delamere, as Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace points out, is

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“de la m`ere,” of the mother). Cecilia inspires in her husband healthy appetites, which are neither self-destructive nor disabling for others. Rather she motivates him to “persevere” in his “intellectual labours” so as to attain “the pleasures of domestic life” which can only come through “exertion” (396). In this sense, her domestic legislation is grounded in reciprocal affections which produce responsible middle-class behavior and the possibility of real social progress. Moreover this progress is not accomplished through the consumption of the labor and bodies of others, but through a steady diet of words, through Glenthorn’s “eating [his] terms at the Temple” (384, emphasis Edgeworth’s). This movement away from the consumption of the Irish body to that of the English word of course recalls Edgeworth’s own educational intentions. For Edgeworth, as with her protagonist in Ennui, the task of inverting the consumption dynamics in Ireland necessarily began with the re-appropriation of cultural authority in the form of the educational text. If her representations of Anglo-Irish relations reveal an ongoing struggle to reconcile physical and spiritual needs, representing the body as a vehicle for the mind in texts like Ennui enabled her to accommodate the recommendations of enlightened political economists within a broader ethic of maternal care and circumvent in the process her ongoing concerns that charitable “impulses” might detract from longer-term responsibilities (such as keeping the family estate intact). Before his death in 1817, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, fearing that his daughter’s philanthropic impulses might lead her to give away her inheritance, had, in fact, cautioned her to this effect: You have many brothers and sisters and friends, who may each in their turn have claims upon you. You will want to give away your fortune, first to one, then to another . . . [O]n my dying bed I entreat you not to squander away your property on whoever at the moment you may think may want it.64

Yet Edgeworth struggled throughout her career with these contradictory impulses and embedded them firmly in her novels, which could only gesture toward romantic resolutions to the tensions that she continued to see escalate in Ireland, without effecting real relief for the starving Irish lower classes. Significantly, with the assumption of full managerial duty for the family estate in 1826 (she would run Edgeworthstown until 1839), her public writing declined dramatically. During these years, as Hurst documents, she increasingly questioned in her private correspondence the physical implications of the laissez-faire doctrine she had hesitantly promoted in novels like Ennui. It is as though she played out in her life those concerns with which she had struggled in her fiction, in an Ireland which became “impossible

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to draw,” as “realities [were] too strong, party passions too violent to bear to see” (Feb. 19, 1834; Chosen Letters 384). As Catherine Gallagher notes, Edgeworth further questioned the efficacy of the literary marketplace on which the circulation of her ideas depended, given that “the market could create literary excess” by encouraging an author’s wordiness or his/her rapid generation of books. Her correspondence reveals ongoing anxieties about writing “too much and too easily,” thereby defaulting on her contract with her readers by “overproducing.”65 In the year before her death, however, Edgeworth found something of a tentative resolution to her own imperative to responsibly feed Irish minds as well as bodies. In 1848, she published one last story which is located in Ireland, Orlandino, which took as its subject the value of temperance (the text contains a facsimile print of the medal on which is inscribed Father Matthew’s pledge of abstinence, together with a long footnote detailing his temperance mission, which is signed by Edgeworth and dated September, 1847). The plot concerns an Irish youth, self-named Orlandino, who is an actor in a troop of traveling players. Bound as a virtual slave to the troop’s ringleader, Orlandino’s gaming and drinking habits have led him to incur debts which must be worked-off before he can escape and return to his mother, who is ill and in need of his immediate assistance. Sobriety and industry prevail, however, as does the mother–child bond (the boy’s uncle at one point wants to make him an heir on the condition that he abandon his mother, but Orlandino refuses). Set during Edgeworth’s immediate present, that is, during the famine years of the late 1840s, the story pursues a number of threads which harken back to Ennui. The children who serve as role models for the story’s intended audience (the tale is part of a series geared toward adolescent readers), have learned, for example, to sacrifice “amusements” in “these hard times”; just as their parents have “given so much in the time of distress” (5–6). One child gives up “sweetmeats, and puddings, and everything at second course, to save money for the poor” (7–8). The text proper not only references Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (166), it also refers to an essay, written by Orlandino’s mentor, concerning “Whether it would be prudent, if it were in our power, to re-establish the potato as the national food of Ireland” (169). Learned men are depicted as debating the point: “What should be deemed the indispensable, and what the essential, conditions of the stable food of a country?” (169). These references to times of economic distress, admittedly, are subordinated to the broader plot. The narrative makes us keenly aware of the suffering caused by the famine (as when a number of children fight amongst themselves for a piece of bread), but does not

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dwell on scenes of misery. Famine rather provides the backdrop against which Edgeworth’s reforming agenda is sketched out. The moral of this story is clear: the suppression of appetites not only serves benevolent ends (as with the small sacrifices of the children) but furthers personal moral development. Orlandino is portrayed as a dissipate waif, a prodigal son who is reclaimed in time to save his mother from becoming a burden to others, or from a worse fate in the workhouse. Again, the emphasis for Edgeworth is on the assumption of personal responsibility which benefits in turn the community at large. Temperance is once more held to be the key to the future in Ireland. Thus fulfilling her duty to help regulate the consumption patterns of the Irish, Edgeworth evidenced her continued commitment to an educational model based on classical economic principles and an espousal of the control of the appetites. But in this instance she went one step further. Donating the profits from Orlandino to famine relief, she was simultaneously able to provide, via her writing, literal food for the poor. Metonymizing the book (or, more precisely the pen) into figurative breast, she could feed – at least this once – both bodies and souls.

c h a pt e r 4

Infanticide in an age of enlightenment: Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian

A leanbh, a leanbh, the shadow of shame Has never yet fallen on one of your name And oh! may the food that from my bosom you drew In your veins turn to poison, if you are untrue. Mrs. K. I. O’Doherty The Patriot Mother 1

“[A] parent’s heart’s a queer thing!” Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian2

In the 1829 General Preface to Waverley (1814), Walter Scott acknowledges his debt to Maria Edgeworth, “whose Irish characters have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbors of Ireland, that she may truly be said to have done more toward completing the Union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up.” Scott makes a distinction here between Edgeworth’s literary politics of consensus and coercive methods of government policy (such as those enacted in the Scottish Highlands after the 1745 Rebellion3 ), and admits to having been motivated to attempt with the composition of Waverley, something for my own country of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland – something which might introduce her natives to those of her sister kingdom in a more favorable light than they had been placed hitherto, and tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles. (523)

Scott emphasizes the political commitment as well as the “rich humor, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact” Edgeworth evidenced in “introducing” the British to their “kind-hearted neighbors” and describes his approbation in terms which Edgeworth-the-educator would have appreciated. The “triumphs of Miss Edgeworth,” he stresses, “worked in me emulation, and disturbed my indolence” (523–24). For Edgeworth, there could be perhaps no higher form of praise. 122

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Yet Scott himself would aspire to more far-reaching accomplishments. As Ina Ferris has convincingly argued, Scott transformed the feminized (didactic, maternal) authorial stance he inherited from Edgeworth into something decidedly masculine, something which looked beyond the local to the universal4 – which helps explain why Scott is better able to reconcile the relationship between history and national character than is Edgeworth.5 While Edgeworth remained dependent on visionary idealism, on the anticipation of a regenerated Ireland which she imagined in terms of a movement of both Hibernians and Englishmen to a shared state of “Britishness,” for Scott, addressing the Union of the parliaments of England and Scotland (1707), this movement was already well underway. Scott could look back somewhat comfortably to the past for proof of historical progress and so could celebrate the present, despite remaining nostalgic for things lang syne and perhaps too quickly forgotten: “There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland,” he tells us in “A Postscript, Which Should Have Been a Preface” to Waverley. “The present people of Scotland [are] a class of beings as different from their grandfathers as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time” (492). This is a loaded analogy, which calls attention not only to the perhaps too-rapid transformation of Scottish national character, but to the more gradual, stadial development of English national character since the Elizabethan Age – to the attainment of civil and religious liberties in England, to England’s present representational government, etc. Of course Scott sees (and demands that we see) the cost of such achievements on the local level. Like Edgeworth, however, Scott problematizes the pull of local affections and loyalties, in so far as these bonds place claims on the individual which may threaten his/her objectivity. These claims are particularly dangerous for the historian (who needs to remain disinterested so as to tell the true story), but so too for the Scottish clansman, the religious enthusiast, and of course, the fond mother – each of whom betrays for Scott potentially problematic loyalties to a particular cause or set of beliefs, to an isolated group or individual. Thus early in Waverley, for example, Scott presents us, by contrast, with a portrait of an heroic, because enlightened mother – Lady Alice Waverley – who sends her son on a death mission (to distract the soldiers coming to their home to seize Prince Charles), thereby dearly purchasing “the safety of her prince with the life of her darling child” (52). Such self-sacrificing attention to the interests of the many, despite great personal cost, would come to identify Scott’s most exemplary heroes and

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heroines, but none more so than The Heart of Midlothian’s (1819) Jeanie Deans – perhaps the best loved of all Scott’s characters, and by far the most admired of his leading ladies. Jeanie’s singularity, however, lies in her ability to reconcile duty and desire, to respect both the claims of the law and those of the heart. Her efforts to save her condemned sister Effie through due process (rather than through the deceit which their emotional bond dictates) not only effects Effie’s liberation from a death sentence but initiates a broader movement toward the reconciliation of appositional political parties in England and Scotland. It therefore comes as no surprise to the reader to discover, in Book IV of the novel, that Jeanie eventually becomes an exemplary, Edgeworthian-type wife and mother. Yet if The Heart of Midlothian celebrates through Jeanie the possibility of a national union based on properly directed loyalties, the novel also filters this celebration through an examination of mad, bad, and even murderous motherhood – with which even Jeanie herself is identified – a point which is generally overlooked by critics of the novel.6 The Heart of Midlothian offers us a decidedly duplicitous reading of maternity, which is clearly rooted in anxieties, similar to those evident in Ennui, concerning potentially dangerous forms of interpersonal and international union. Scott utilizes the Enlightenment understanding of the mother–child bond so as to explore what is best and worst about national as well as familial loyalties, but stresses, too, that the ties of the heart and of the flesh are subject to the forces of history. He suggests, moreover, that Scotland’s story is itself a tale of murderous motherhood, a history peopled by Lady Alice Waverleys, who must kill their sons to protect their princes, or risk sacrificing universal duty to local desire. On the surface, The Heart of Midlothian seems to be a text less about dangerously good mothers than about naturally bad ones. The infanticide plot that drives the narrative would appear to provoke questions concerning the absence, not the excess of maternal affection. But infanticide was a decidedly complex issue for writers of the period, and Scott demonstrates in his text his awareness of some of these complexities, drawing on two appositional types of infanticide narrative identified by Josephine McDonagh as most prevalent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: that is, the infanticidal mother’s behavior is identified as deviant or savage within the context of a progressive, enlightened society; or is held conversely to be a somewhat reasonable response to the injustices of a corrupt modern world.7 The Heart of Midlothian gives both versions of the story equal play, via the characters of the overtly savage Meg Murdockson and the wronged

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Effie Deans, respectively. Each character presents the reader with a different “case,” so to speak: On the one hand, Effie, a woman of modern sensibilities, is potentially “naturally bad,” which is to say that she is depicted as being capable of committing an involuntary crime due to the instability of her physical constitution. Effie is a sympathetic figure, according to the dictates of modern medical jurisprudence, who inspires the reader’s compassion and cultivates our desire for justice. On the other hand, Meg, a woman bound to and emblematic of the past, is undeniably “dangerously good,” a woman who remorselessly commits voluntary crimes, but does so in the name of instinctual mother love. Ultimately, Meg’s “case” is of more interest to Scott, given that his tale of murderous motherhood is one which is intimately bound up in Scotland’s history; it is the suppressed story of Scotland itself – maternal though murderous, a locus of fierce love which brings death. Before turning to The Heart of Midlothian, I want to set the stage with a brief overview of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment attitudes about the crime of infanticide. Contradictions regarding the nature of maternal nature converged around this issue: in medical and legal discourses and in the work of prominent political economists as well as poets and novelists. Analyzing the causes and effects of child murder became a way for writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to variously call into question or reinforce assumptions about gendered divisions of labor and responsibility, to investigate the impact of the environment on human (in this case female) nature, and to authorize the surveillance and control of women, even while frequently generating sympathy for their hard lot. In eighteenth-century England, infanticide was, in fact, a crime inexorably linked to the separate, but related offense of the concealment of a pregnancy. Since the enactment of the Stuart infanticide law in 1624 (which was replaced in 1690 by the even more severe Scots statute, under which Effie is tried), British courts had turned almost exclusively to the question of concealment – and hence to suspected mothers – to determine guilt in cases of supposed infanticide.8 Peter C. Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull’s 1981 study of infanticide in England and New England between 1558 and 1803 (the years during which “early modern lawmakers and judges made the first concerted effort to put an end to infanticide”), suggests that women were indicted for the crime far more frequently than men: “[I]t was the unwed mothers of bastards who were the typical defendant, and newborn bastards the most likely victim.” During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, penalties were harsh and conviction rates were high. Defendants who

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had hidden their pregnancies or given birth in secret, like Effie Deans, were in the worst position for pleading their innocence. Throughout the eighteenth century, however, the percentage of indictments and convictions for the crime of infanticide declined: Magistrates and officials prosecuted fewer women for the crime, and juries grew unwilling to condemn suspects, especially upon mere proof of concealment of birth. Successful defenses against the Jacobean infanticide statute emerged, and judges gave merciful rulings on evidence of stillbirth. Outside of the courtroom, society was growing more solicitous of mothers and more attentive to maternal sentiment. By the end of the century, statutory law came to reflect the changed atmosphere at the trials.9

After 1700, those who could show probable evidence of communicating their pregnancies (like married women) or proof of preparation for the child – for example, the preparation of baby linen – were far more likely to be acquitted, regardless of strong suspicions of guilt.10 In the absence of such evidence, however, conviction was probable, particularly when the concealment of a pregnancy was attended by the failure to call for assistance during labor or by denials that a birth had taken place. Before 1803 (when a somewhat more lenient statute was passed),11 infanticide was a criminal act virtually defined by the silence in which it was shrouded – by the silence, most specifically, of the suspected mother. Infanticide was not a topic upon which eighteenth-century writers were themselves silent, however. Moralists, political economists, and physicians debated throughout the century the causes of the crime, posed possible explanations, suggested remedies, and issued warnings to women tempted by the pleasures of the flesh. Some of the strongest warnings came from convicted criminals themselves. In a public “Declaration” made before her execution in Boston on September 27, 1733, Rebekah Chamblit cautioned others against the temptation of attempting to conceal their crimes: “Certainly you had better suffer Shame and Disgrace, yea the greatest Punishment, than to hide and conceal your Sin, by Lying. How much better had it been for me, to have confessed my Sin, than by hiding of it provoke a holy GOD, thus to suffer to find me out.”12 Chamblit’s confession, “Sign’d and Acknowledg’d in the presence of divers Witnesses, with a desire that it may be published to the World, and read at the Place of Execution,” clearly serves as a corrective to her earlier silence; her story reads like a sermon (and indeed was utilized as such), which underscores the severity of the law, and emphasizes the inevitability of the “uncleanly” woman’s downfall. Chamblit links the original sin (the loss of chastity) directly to the

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subsequent crime of child murder, which if “unnatural,” becomes nevertheless comprehensible: once fallen, further sin and crime are virtually unavoidable. Virtuous women within this scheme were clearly not vulnerable to this type of corruption. The infanticidal mother, by contrast, appeared to reject her God-given nature and her place in whole natural order. Aaron Bascom’s sermon, for example, “Preached at the Execution of Abiel Converse” in Northampton, 1788, stresses particularly the “unnaturalness” of the murderous mother: You are verily guilty concerning your infant child, in that you saw him, a helpless, defenseless babe; who had neither injured you nor any of your fellow creatures: your own child, born of your own body, whom you had been wickedly instrumental of bringing into the world; yet you hardened your heart against him, and determined that you would not exercise so much compassion toward him as the sea monsters, who draw out their breasts, and give suck to their young ones; but with violent hands you put him to death.13

Bascom argues that infanticide is “attended with more dreadful aggravations than common murder,” where there is generally evidence of “some provocation, or injury received from the person murdered, or a prospect of considerable gain.” Representing Abiel Converse’s actions as incomprehensible because he cannot conceive of an apparent motive, Bascom concludes that she is guilty of a “most horrid, monstrous, and unnatural crime,” a murder which “was brought on by whoredom.”14 Attitudes such as this were changing somewhat, however. The eminent Dr. William Hunter, in his highly influential 1783 “On the Uncertainty of the Signs of Murder in the Case of Bastard Children” (which was frequently invoked by attorneys well into the nineteenth century) argued convincing that the infanticidal mother was not in fact an aberrant monster, and might even have become, “but for having listened to the perfidious protestations and vows of our sex, an affectionate and faithful wife, a virtuous and honoured mother.”15 Hunter’s groundbreaking treatise emphasizes both the faulty reliability of standard tests of proof of the child’s live birth, and the unstable psychology of the frightened and physically traumatized unwed mother, who often faced childbirth alone. “It is only murder,” he insists, when the accused acts “with some degree of cool judgement, and wicked intention. When committed under a frenzy from despair, can [her actions] be more offensive in the sight of God, than under a phrenzy from a fever, or in lunacy?” “The insane,” he allows, “are not to be held responsible for their actions.” Hunter follows-up this statement by establishing his own authority to discern the truth in these matters:

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I have seen the private as well as the public virtues, the private as well as the more public frailties of women in all ranks of life. I have been in their secrets, their counselor and advisor in the moments of their greatest distress in body and mind. I have been a witness to their private conduct . . . and have heard their last and most serious reflections, when they were certain they had but a few hours to live.16

Hunter here verifies his expertise (as physician, psychologist, counselor, confessor), while tantalizing his audience with the possibility of a glimpse into women’s hitherto undisclosed “secrets.” Such revelations are necessary, on the one hand, if he is to inspire the same level of compassion in his audience that he himself possesses, yet Hunter’s graphic descriptions of suffering border on the voyeuristic: We can sneak a peek at the women he describes, but they never speak directly to us as they have to him. Moreover these glimpses behind the doors of birthing rooms are almost without exception horrific. Hunter certainly argues admirably for a legal reevaluation of the unique circumstances encountered by women experiencing the trauma of childbirth, but in so doing he also thoroughly pathologizes the bodies of laboring women, offering accounts of birthing occasions throughout his treatise which are nothing short of Gothic: After waiting some time, [one woman] suddenly fell into such racking pain and terror, that she found she had neither strength nor courage to go downstairs, and through the street [to the private room she had procured], in that condition, and in the night. In despair she threw herself on the bed, and by the terror and anguish which she had suffered, she lost her senses and fainted. When she came to a little recollection, she found herself in a deluge of discharges, and a dead child lying by her limbs.17

Thomas Laqueur has emphasized that representations of women’s suffering such as this encouraged the sympathetic responses of listeners. The preponderance of details helps promote this reaction; we have to experience the horror of these events in their entirety if we are to understand them.18 Yet clearly Hunter’s narrative serves various ends. It hardly matters whether the details of this account are wholly accurate, for Hunter wants to stress that the onset of motherhood itself might drive any woman out of her senses, and perhaps even turn her into a killer. Far from suggesting that the infanticidal mother is monstrous, Hunter’s argument for penal reform turns on the assumption that motherhood is itself attended by monstrous circumstances, that women in labor (and perhaps in general) are necessarily unstable, that their passions are potentially uncontrollable and in need of diagnosis and treatment by a trained professional like himself. Focusing on the horrific aspects of childbirth in this way helped to solidify the male practitioner’s

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authority in the birthing room. Many male practitioners stressed in their medical writings not only their expertise in difficult birthing situations, but their enlightened understanding of the physiological, psychological, and material factors that might drive a woman to commit unconscionable acts when under duress. Hunter’s treatise, while reflective of a growing insistence among male physicians that the birthing room needed to be monitored by professionals like themselves, nevertheless helped lend the weight of scientific authority to the shifting atmosphere within the courtroom itself, which, as Hoffer and Hull stress, increasingly inclined toward greater lenience toward the infanticidal mother, or at least toward a more informed perspective of the circumstances provoking child murder. The transcript for the trial of Alice Clifton “for the murder of her Bastard-Child,” in Philadelphia, April, 1787, offers us a glimpse inside the courtroom of such a case.19 Despite a preponderance of evidence against Clifton (her denials of her pregnancy before, during, and after the birth of her child, her failure to call for assistance during labor, her concealment of the body in a trunk, visible marks of violence on the child, whose throat was cut with a razor, “the value of one shilling”) the outcome of the trial at several points seems very shaky. Medical witnesses (Drs. Jones and Foulke) are called who testify to the probability that the child was born prematurely, and was either stillborn, or died during the delivery. The facts of the case grow murky as the trial progresses (the possibility is raised that the defendant was urged to kill the baby by its father; there is a suggestion that she sustained an injury prior to her delivery, etc.). Nevertheless the final instructions of “his Honor the Chief Justice” leave little room for ambiguity: This case, which has been ably discussed, was heretofore described in this manner – That whenever a single or unmarried woman was delivered of a child, and attempted to conceal it, the bare concealment was made conclusive evidence against the mother, that she murdered it, unless she could make it appear by one evidence at least, that the child so concealed was born dead . . . This Act of James – was recognized by the Assembly of the State; and had the prisoner been tried under that, there would not be the least doubt but your verdict would determine her guilty. But now, by a late act of Assembly, passed last September, a further kind of proof is required.

Despite legal reform in this jurisdiction, the Chief Justice reminds the jury that concealment of the pregnancy and birth weighs heavily against suspected mothers. He follows these cautionary remarks with careful instructions on the nature of circumstantial evidence, and concludes by advising the jury that while the doctors, who are “gentlemen eminent in their

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profession . . . declare, that they are convinced that the child was born dead,” jurors are not bound to give their verdict “upon the opinion or judgment of any man however eminent.” Most damning is the Chief Justice’s own summation of events: “[I]t is denied that the child was murdered by its mother, because it was already dead: yet you find so far as her efforts could effect its destruction, she exerted them unpityingly, and void of maternal affection.” In the case of Alice Clifton, the jury brought in after about three hours a verdict of guilty. But the case did not end there. The attorney for the defense charged, on the day of Clifton’s sentencing, that one of the jurors had admitted before the trial his belief that the defendant necessarily must be guilty. A new trial was requested, but subsequently denied. “[T]he girl then received sentence of death; but since has been respited by the Honorable Supreme Executive Council.” Such shifts and swerves, reprieves and denials of reprieve betray acutely divided responses to Clifton and her story; the judge’s (and jurors’) predetermined assumptions of her guilt contrast strikingly with the all-out battle waged by her attorneys to grant her a fair hearing. But by far the most striking detail of Clifton’s story is that she never tells it herself. She is never called as a witness; nor is her baby’s father called to testify. The explanations which might shed light on this case are never requested in court, and attempts by the defense attorneys to construct an alternative narrative are suppressed by the judge, as effectively as they have been suppressed by Clifton herself throughout her pregnancy. It is as though revealing the truth and suppressing it operate simultaneously throughout this trial. The need to get the facts straight helps disguise the deeper level at which Alice Clifton’s tale cannot be told. Alice Clifton’s story, and the divided response to motherhood which it betrays, is apparently not atypical, and reveals acutely the way in which the crime of child murder severely challenged even the most enlightened of medical men and legal theorists of the period. Dr. James Simson notes representatively in a 1825 essay on the subject that “[i]n the whole range of forensic medicine, there is not a more melancholy example of the contradictory opinions of medical men, and of the uncertainty of the physiological enquiries upon which medical evidence depends, than is exhibited in trials for child murder”20 and indeed, this observation is reflected in numerous essays from the period. The preface to Christopher John’s 1813 translation of Dr. P. A. O. Mahon’s An Essay on the Signs of Murder in New Born Children, to take one example, cites Hunter’s treatise so as to caution against the temptation to rely upon a “favourable view of human nature” when confronted by “a crime so atrocious in the eyes of God and man, and so repugnant to the strongest of animal instincts,” a crime characteristic of “heathen

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worshipers.”21 Dr. William Cummin similarly laments in an 1836 essay the wide influence of Hunter’s “limited” and “peculiar line of argument”: The judges quote it with implicit faith in its perfection: the bar study it, and crossexamine the Crown witnesses on the difficulties which it suggests: and medical men probably will not find it safe to venture into the witness box without being familiarly acquainted with its contents . . . [I]t is frequently found to be a convenient instrument for those engaged on the behalf of the accused.22

Others, however, like Charles Severn, strongly supported Hunter’s thesis, stressing (as he had) that the crime of child murder was “seldom premeditated”: [T]he mother, perhaps unmarried, has not been able to make the necessary preparations for the reception of her child; from ignorance, shame, or despair, or perhaps from suffering, solitude, faintness, and exhaustion, has been unable to obtain assistance for herself, or her infant. These circumstances . . . should be recollected by medical men when called on to give evidence in a case of supposed infanticide . . . and if the proofs are equivocal, as to the cause of death, should incline them to the side of mercy; scarcely deeming it possible that any individual of the female sex, distinguished usually, and deservedly for the strength and ardour of the natural affections, could stifle the loud voice of nature, and imbrue her hands in the blood of the helpless being to which she has just given birth.23

These strongly divided attitudes reveal strikingly the ways in which the crime of infanticide threatened to burst the bubble constructed around the idealized eighteenth-century mother, regardless of whether severity or compassion toward her was the rule of thumb. Either she is a monster, who rejects natural instinct, or she testifies to the instability of those “instincts” in the first place. These views were also evident in Europe more widely. For Julien Offray de La Mettrie in France, for example, the murderous mother’s actions are clearly produced by her unstable physiology. Detailing numerous instances of “unnatural” female behavior, including the example of one woman “who killed her children, salted their bodies, and ate a piece of them every day, as a little relish,” La Mettrie deplores the legal methods utilized to deal with these “involuntary” crimes (“one [woman] was cruelly beaten and burned, and another was buried alive”), urging that “excellent physicians” would be better judges: “They alone could tell the innocent criminal from the guilty. If reason is the slave of a depraved or mad desire, how can it control the desire?”24 While La Mettrie’s solution to the “depraved or mad” women seems, on the one hand, a progressive alternative to punitive efforts to deal

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with child murder, behind his argument lies the same assumption that we find in Hunter’s and Severn’s texts: women’s physiologies render them unstable creatures, who need understanding but especially policing. Infanticide posed a serious problem on this front for Enlightenment theorists, committed as most were to a belief in benevolent human nature (the evidence of which for many was the mother–child bond) and to models of social progress. How was it possible, numerous eighteenth-century writers asked, that female nature and maternal instinct might become thus corrupted, especially in modern Britain? Was woman’s nature bound up in her maternity, or might the performance of that role be determined by cultural and environmental factors? If not in nature, upon what ground does a woman’s authority to mother rest? Questions such as these permeated the accounts of infanticide included in the texts of numerous enlightened political economists (David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, William Godwin, George Ensor) who debated throughout the eighteenth century (and into the nineteenth) whether philosophical reasoning (the practice in Ancient Greece of exposing infants and other burdens on society was often cited in this context), harsh environmental factors, or mere savagery contributed most to the prevalence of infanticide. As the rhetorical authority of these writers depended largely on their ability to rationalize the seemingly irrational and to account for uniform behavioral patterns amidst the variety of human beings’ differing cultural experiences in an age of conquest and exploration, the focus for each is not so much on the pathological dimensions of individual behaviors as it is on broader patterns that manifest themselves in certain societies and under specific conditions. Adam Smith, for example (following Hume), would focus on the environment which produced the infanticidal criminal, noting in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that in nations which are “miserably poor,” the urgency of “mere want” reduces people (or makes them “think themselves reduced”) to destroying or exposing infants, the aged, or diseased “to perish with hunger, or be devoured by wild beasts.” Smith cites China as a specific example: Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them. In all great towns several are every night exposed in the street, or drowned like puppies in the water. The performance of this horrid office is even said to be the avowed business by which some people earn subsistence.25

Smith’s account accentuates both the foreignness of the crime of infanticide, and its roots in extreme poverty. If “horrid” in its apparent inhumanity, the practice of infanticide can be understood as a response to economic deprivation. Posing the problem in this way helped account for the alarming

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prevalence of such savagery in the supposedly advanced British nation, and deflected responsibility for the crime away from the mother, whom Smith elsewhere holds to be a paragon of natural moral sentiment. Child murder becomes a disease of poverty in Smith’s scheme – which might be “cured” if confronted on a theoretical level by experts like himself. William Godwin, by contrast, suggested that infanticide was perhaps not “unnatural” at all, given that the exposure of children (as well as the practice of abortion) functioned in many societies as a “benevolent” check to population growth: “I know that the globe of earth affords room for only a certain number of human beings to be trained to any degree of perfection; and I had rather witness the existence of a thousand such beings, than a million of millions of creatures, burthensome to themselves, and contemptible to each other.” “[T]he exposing of children,” he stresses, “is in its own nature an expedient perfectly adequate to the end for which it has been cited.” Although Godwin himself points out that this “expedient,” like abortion, is “harsh and displeasing,” and that these “remedies . . . have no further recommendation than that they are better than [the] misery and vice” produced by poverty and overpopulation, he was fiercely attacked for his position.26 In an 1801 letter to the Editor of the Monthly Magazine, he defended himself against the charge of advocating infanticide, stressing the theoretical basis of his argument: Because I have spoken of a certain practice prevailing in distant ages and countries, which I deprecate, and respecting which I aver my persuasion, that in no improved state of society will it ever be necessary to have recourse to it, they represent me as the recommender and admirer of this practice, as a man who is eager to persuade every woman who, under unfortunate and opprobrious circumstances, becomes a mother, to be the murderer of her own child.27

Godwin points to the near hysteria surrounding the issue of infanticide, which, if confronted abstractly by political theorists like himself, might be explained reasonably, even if on a local level it appeared monstrous and insupportable. Thomas Malthus attacked Godwin’s position on precisely this front in the 1803 edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, stressing the “extreme pain which [parents] must feel, in making such a sacrifice, even when the distress arising from excessive poverty may be supposed to have deadened in great measure their sensibility”: What must this pain be then, upon the supposition of the interference of a magistrate or of a positive law, to make parents destroy a child, which they feel the desire, and think they possess the power, of supporting? The permission of infanticide is

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bad enough, and cannot but have a bad effect on the moral sensibility of a nation; but, I cannot conceive anything much more detestable, or shocking to the feelings, than any direct regulation of this kind, although sanctioned by the names of Plato and Aristotle.28

Infanticide ranks for Malthus “among the worst forms of vice and misery.”29 If he expresses compassion for the parents reduced to adopt such “shocking” measures, he insists, too, that such a response is unnatural, that the feelings of the parent must necessarily be “deadened,” that the instinct of the parent is to preserve and support the child. Again, Malthus deflects attention away from the gendered dimensions of this crime – it is not specifically the mother who is targeted here as the object of pity and revulsion, but the version of utilitarianism that he associates with Godwin.30 Yet regardless of their particular political slant, the murderous mother is at the center of these debates about the causes and effects of infanticide – she is only thinly concealed. In veiling the fact that most infanticide indictments and convictions were directed at mothers, rather than at “parents,” and in attempting to view child murder as a form of disease, or through the distanced lens of history, physicians, economists, and social theorists of the period evaded a more pressing issue: why was infanticide so prevalent in modern Europe – especially (for our purposes) in Great Britain and the colonies? For to pose this question would mean begging its correlative: what does this tell us about British mothers – those designated increasingly during the eighteenth century as the bastions of the nation’s virtue? Were their conditions, then, acutely miserable? Were they perhaps fueled by diseased passions? Worst of all, might they be acting “naturally” in disposing thus of unwanted children? George Ensor, in his 1818 response to Malthus, would bring these issues closer to home, shifting the focus of the argument most specifically to the “savage,” if domestic, British mother. Addressing first the related issue of abortion, which is lamentably “[a]mong savages . . . generally permitted” Ensor declares that “[a] people who could tolerate infanticide by law, must be sadly obtuse in their feelings.” Among the numerous examples of such toleration cited, is that of the “higher orders . . . in civilized Europe.” Focusing, like Smith, Godwin, and Malthus, on the economic conditions that lead to child murder, Ensor takes a more explicitly moralizing tone than his predecessors, attacking both the negligent aristocratic mother and the death-dealing lower-class wet nurse: And do we not hear and see . . . how fashionable mothers, in their meats and drinks and hours, treat both the embryo and the infant? and that sooner than abstain from

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a life of senseless dissipation, they abandon their children to another’s care? nay, a noble and a rich mother places her child in a pauper’s bosom. And thus the female of fashion improves on that monster among birds, which substitutes its own egg in the nest of its attendant; for the lady often causes the death of the nurses infant, and of her own, by the double transfer of children from their mothers: – and this comes of poverty and riches.31

If somewhat singular among economic treatises on infanticide, Ensor’s position precisely reflects the arguments of prominent physicians and medical reformers during the second half of the eighteenth century, and highlights the ways that explanations of infanticide offered by political economists and physicians frequently intersected and complemented one another as well as their use of similar rhetorical strategies. His formulation also indicates the ways in which class issues fed the motherhood debates of the period. Charges such as these, as we have seen, directed at “fashionable” women who chose not to breastfeed their own children, were standard fare during the period, and enabled writers like Ensor to target even socially acceptable maternal behaviors, like engaging a wet nurse, as murderous. Physicians had been arguing the same point for over half a century. In his plea for funding for the London Foundling Hospital, constructed as a treatise on child care and above all as a plea for early maternal breastfeeding, Dr. William Cadogan, deploring the high death rates for infants and fixing the cause, like Ensor, in the preponderance of maternal neglect in England, argued that the establishment of the Foundling Hospital had “prevented the murder of many.”32 Such arguments by Cadogan (and by Bartholomew Moss in Ireland) were foundational in the establishment of both the London Foundling Hospital, and the Dublin Lying-in Hospital.33 (Whether the Foundling Hospital actually helped decrease the incidence of child murder, or just facilitated the disposal of unwanted children, is still a matter of conjecture for historians.34 ) What seems clear, in any case, is that the Foundling and Lying-in hospitals provided physicians like Cadogan with the opportunity to observe clinically the benefits of various material practices associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and child care, and thus granted them unprecedented authority to endorse or reject specific “types” of maternal behavior in their writings. Among the most frequent of such recommendations, as we have seen, was the advice to mothers to breastfeed their infants. For Cadogan, as later for Ensor, the late eighteenth-century imperative for mothers to breastfeed would turn, however, on underlying arguments against the abuse or neglect of children, in so far as each linked high infant mortality rates specifically to the practice of wet-nursing. Such arguments were common, and not only among physicians. Rousseau, for

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example, in Emile, is explicit in his indictment of lower-class nurses, who “without the ties of nature,” merely “tried to save themselves trouble” (12). Hence the nurse turned to the barbaric practice of swaddling: If the nurse is at all busy, the child is hung up on a nail like a bundle of clothes and is left crucified while the nurse goes leisurely about her business. . . . How long a child might survive under such conditions I do not know, but it could not be long. That, I fancy, is one of the chief advantages of swaddling clothes. (12–13)

If the lower-class nurse was held to be little better than a murderer, however, so, too, for Rousseau was the aristocratic mother, who, “having got rid of her babies, devoted herself gaily to the pleasures of the town” (12). While the lower-class wet nurse was frequently targeted by writers as a figure of vice and disease, in other words, the upper-class woman for whom she substituted was found similarly lethal in her “unnatural” neglect of duty. As I have previously noted, Cadogan and other medical authorities of the period had added yet another twist to this equation, by chastising even the solicitous intentions of upper-class women, and suggesting explicitly that affectionate mothers might kill their children with love, especially by overfeeding them or by feeding them sweets. So, too, Rousseau disdains those “cruel mothers,” who “plunge their children into softness”: The mother may lavish excessive care on her child instead of neglecting him; she may make an idol of him; she may develop and increase his weakness to prevent him from feeling it; she wards off every painful experience in the hope of withdrawing him from the power of nature, and fails to realize that for every trifling ill from which she preserves him the future holds in store many accidents and dangers. (Emile 16)

Affection, Rousseau insists, “has its drawbacks” (14). Dr. Hugh Downman similarly urged that overindulgent mothers are but “[c]ruelly kind”; they must learn to endure “some little violence” in their children’s best interests and to appeal to “Reason” to distinguish “‘twixt true parental love, / And its fond foolish mimic,” to “look / Beyond the present, no dull slave of sense, / And for a lasting good, most willingly / Endure some transient pain.”35 Alternatively, Downman insists, mothers become “Unconscious Criminals! Murthering thro’ love / The hapless Beings they would die to save.”36 These anxieties are clearly tied to these authors’ broader concerns about the authority of any mother over her child. Even while supporting claims for the inherent naturalness of women’s vocations to nurture, educate, and socialize their children, each strongly cautioned that maternal sympathies might interfere with or even displace altogether women’s true responsibilities to their children. Each suggests that the authority of mothers

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should be monitored, that the physical relationship between a woman and her child was a matter of national importance, and therefore should be subject to (necessarily masculine) surveillance and control. While Romantic writers’ representations of infanticide are not always necessarily characterized by the silence of the accused (as in Felicia Hemans’s poems), it is hardly surprising that in the context of this climate – whereby bad mothers are discursively naturalized and even good mothers are figured as a potential threat to their children – many literary treatments of child murder (such as Wordsworth’s “The Thorn”)37 should focus on the threat posed by maternal “concealments”: on the silence of suspected mothers, and on the uneasiness produced by that silence. Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian is no doubt the most sustained literary examination of the subject from the period, and while like Hemans, Scott appears to explore possible motivations for this crime, in the end he endorses a politics of concealment which strongly qualifies his gestures toward unveiling the heart of the murderous mother. The novel is primarily a story of two Scottish sisters – Effie and Jeanie Deans. The former is condemned as a child murderer under the 1690 Scots Concealment Statute; the latter (unable to testify truthfully to her sister’s having communicated her pregnancy) journeys, largely on foot, from Edinburgh to London, gains an audience with Queen Caroline, pleads her sister’s circumstances, and wins her freedom. In this sense, The Heart of Midlothian is also a tale of two cities – Edinburgh and London. The narrative proper commences in Edinburgh in 1736, during a time of relative stability within the context of the Scottish wars for independence, yet Scott focuses on the political turbulence and violence which troubles the relationship between Scotland and England. Scotland, we are told, “was indeed united to England, but the cement had not had time to acquire consistence” (371). As in Waverley, Scott explores in The Heart of Midlothian tensions between discrete national bodies made “one,” largely through his examination of the causes and effects of a local rebellion in Edinburgh, the Porteous riot. The riot is provoked by the English government’s (in the figure of Queen Caroline, wife and acting representative of the “absent” George II) granting of a reprieve for a local magistrate, John Porteous, who has been found guilty in a Scottish court for crimes against the people of Edinburgh. (Following the execution of a smuggler, and local hero, Andrew Wilson, Porteous fires a shot into the crowd, killing an observer of the execution, and initiating a round of fire by his soldiers: “[Si]x or seven persons were slain, and a great many were hurt or wounded” [42].) Led by George Robertson, an accomplice and friend of the executed smuggler, a mob breaks into the Tolbooth prison in

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Edinburgh, seizes Porteous and carries out the execution. The response from London is harsh, and retribution is demanded. Scott targets specifically the indignation roused “in the bosom of Queen Caroline, who considered her own authority as exposed to contempt by the success of this singular conspiracy” (80). The Queen demands vengeance, and vows that, “sooner than submit to such an insult, she would make Scotland a hunting-field” (80). Scott thus sets the stage for the novel by invoking violent enmities between the English government and the citizens of Edinburgh. He characteristically reads the Porteous riot and its aftermath, however, through the lens of an individual family in turmoil, the Deans family. Effie Deans, the “Lily of St. Leonard’s,” daughter of Davie Deans, a poor cow-feeder and Presbyterian extremist, is imprisoned at the onset of the story, charged with the concealment of her pregnancy prior to the disappearance of her child. The father of her missing baby proves to be the same George Robertson (actually Staunton) who leads the rioters in the revolt on the Tolbooth prison. The riot thus serves Robertson/Staunton’s personal as well as political interests; he hopes to secure Effie’s escape in the confusion of the prison break-in, but is unsuccessful (she refuses to leave her cell). Effie’s personal crisis is tied intimately in this way to the political turbulence of the opening chapters, and in fact her “crime” anticipates that with which the rioters will be charged. She stands trial under the 1690 Concealment Statute because she has hidden her pregnancy, and after the birth of her child is unable to account for his whereabouts. The people of Edinburgh have likewise concealed the participants and instigators of the Porteous rebellion, and are indicted (en masse) for their disloyalty to the Crown. Each form of rebellious behavior betrays the subversiveness and above all the secrecy of the Scottish people. Each constitutes an affront to legitimate authority, and each stands in need of correction. In large part, The Heart of Midlothian takes up the question: what form of corrective measures should be adopted in these circumstances? In his analysis of the legal issues posed by the text, Bruce Beiderwell stresses that this is a vexed issue for Scott, who concedes in this text that “the law’s responsibility can be unpleasant,” and that “valuable principles of utility and fairness can clash.”38 With respect to the crime of the concealment of a pregnancy, this discordance becomes especially apparent. As Bartoline Saddletree, the aspiring legal “authority” of Edinburgh explains, Effie’s is a case of “murder presumptive, that is, a murder of the law’s inferring or construction, being derived from certain indicia or grounds of suspicion.” It matters not whether “the bairn was still-born, or if it be alive at this moment”; the Stuart statute is designed to “prevent the horrid derelict of

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bringing children forth in secret” (60). The magistrate overseeing Effie’s case notes that the severity of the statute stems from the fact that the crime of child murder “has been too common, and examples are necessary” (200). Within the course of seven years, we are told, “twenty-one instances of childmurder had occurred in Scotland” (409). Although Saddletree suggests to the contrary that with respect to the issue of presumptive murder, “there’s been nane like it in the Justiciar Court since the case of Luckie Smith the howdie [midwife], that suffered in the year saxteen hundred and seventynine” (58), the text supports the suggestion that the official counts for this crime are in fact conservative. If Effie is ultimately proved innocent of childmurder, others, like Meg Murdockson, are clearly guilty, despite the fact that Meg’s crime has escaped the detection of the authorities (though not the reader). Indeed, the novel becomes to this end in Scott’s hands a kind of “legitimate” surveillance mechanism. Through the lens of the text, we can observe patterns of destructive maternal behavior, identify and classify them, and consider possible correctives. If the surveillance of mothers seems both reasonable and necessary within the world of The Heart of Midlothian, Scott also utilizes the novel to question the legitimacy of the 1690 Scots Concealment Statute – not as part of a campaign for the repeal of the law (as this had been effected in 1803) but so as to emphasize the stadial progress of the judicial system in Scotland. In his note on “Child Murder,” Scott explains that while “[m]any persons suffered death during the last century under this severe act . . . during the author’s memory a more lenient course was followed” (545). Since the crown council had taken to exiling the suspected criminal, rather than executing her, the 1690 statute was eventually abolished, and replaced by another (the 1803 statute), “imposing banishment in those circumstances in which the crime was formerly capital” (545). Effie’s case anticipates this movement toward greater judicial leniency. Although she is originally sentenced to hang, she is eventually banished rather than executed. But Scott goes further in reconsidering the severity of even this more progressive response to infanticide, aligning himself with many of his Enlightenment predecessors and Romantic contemporaries by foregrounding the psychological motivation of the accused infanticidal mother. While Effie’s lawyer concedes in court, for example, that child murder is a crime “more properly belonging to a heathen, or a savage, than to a Christian, and civilized country,” he also argues that it was both “natural” and “reasonable” that a woman in Effie’s circumstances should conceal her pregnancy, and that she should be “found far from disposed to make a confidant of every prying gossip” (239). Far from being devoid of natural affection, he stresses (in the vein of William Hunter) that

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she rather fell sacrifice to her naturally loving nature in committing herself to a man of “prepossessing manners . . . but of a very dangerous and desperate character” (238). Effie’s employer, Mrs. Saddletree, concurs, noting that “if she’s been guilty, she’s been sair tempted,” and adding that “I wad amaist take my Bible-aith she hasna been hersell at the time” (57). These compassionate responses depend not so much on Effie’s innocence of the crime of child murder, but on the presumption of her guilt. Mrs. Saddletree suggests that motivation is key to understanding Effie’s behavior, that circumstances might in fact “tempt” women to destroy their children. Scott’s novel, to this end, seems expressly designed to give us access to such motivation via those private stories which are effectively suppressed or covered over in official accounts of infanticide. Indeed, this impulse informs the conceit which begins the narrative; in the “real records of human vagaries,” we are told by one young lawyer, Hardie, one finds “new pages of the human heart” (24). Yet suggestively, in Effie’s case, this effort toward disclosure is itself woven out of further silences.39 The reader has no direct access, and only limited (though telling) indirect access to her state of consciousness during pregnancy (Robertson/Staunton tells Jeanie, for example, that Effie “often said she would die a thousand deaths ere you should know her shame” [353]). Effie herself is vague on the details of the birth, due to her feverous state at the time. She declares in court that she would never have hurt her child if in her “right senses,” but is herself unable to account for what actually happened (246). We find here the same suggestion that runs through William Hunter’s essay: the occasion of childbirth might drive any woman out of her senses, and even cause her to murder her child. Effie’s experience of childbirth is one of delirium, a state of temporary insanity which may have rendered her incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. Of course, Scott plays up these silences and gaps in the narrative for dramatic effect; we discover in due time, along with Jeanie, that Effie never harmed her child. Her innocence of the crime of child murder, while reinforcing the injustice of the Concealment Statute, nevertheless ultimately seems something of an evasion of the even more troublesome questions raised by the novel concerning the infanticidal mother’s unstable physiology and psychology – an evasion of Effie’s own admitted doubts about her “innocence” – doubts which in fact haunt Jeanie too throughout the bulk of the novel. Although Jeanie, we are told, had never “believed [Effie] capable of touching her infant with an unkind hand when in possession of her reason . . . there was a darkness on the subject, and what might have happened in a moment of insanity was dreadful to think upon” (500–1).

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One of the “morals” of The Heart of Midlothian is of course that appearances can be deceiving – that out of darkness comes enlightenment, justice, truth. Yet Effie’s circumstances are certainly suggestive of, at best, a divided response to motherhood. Certainly in the case of the historical Effie, in actuality Isobel Walker, appearances could hardly have been more damning. M’Diarmid’s “The Real History of Jeanie Deans,” in Sketches from Nature (1830), explains that Isobel was betrayed by her lover, denied her pregnancy throughout its course and later denied resolutely that she had given birth, even when confronted with the body of the dead infant, discovered by the bank of a local river.40 While Scott apparently did not have access to these details in 1817–18, when the novel was written, he might have surmised them, and certainly could have chosen to have told this story from such an angle – the angle of a woman deliberately abandoned by her lover (as Effie is not), and driven to reject the child who would render her a social outcast. Such a tack would be pursued by George Eliot later, for example, in Adam Bede (1859).41 Scott would probably have been well familiar with such accounts due to his legal training and to his experience as SheriffDepute of Selkirk (and later as Clerk of Session in Edinburgh). But instead he takes a different route in Effie’s case, choosing to sidestep the implications of her problematic response to maternity – although at the expense of another, more overtly savage mother in this novel, Meg Murdockson, Effie’s midwife. Meg’s actual guilt for the murder of her daughter’s infant deflects our attention away from Effie’s potential for such monstrosity, just as her bestiality works to preclude in her case those sympathies that Effie may inspire in the reader. Scott ultimately chooses to represent the “real” infanticidal mother, in other words, as monstrous – and proves unable or unwilling to confront directly the murderous intentions which might lie in the heart of any decent Christian woman’s breast. Nevertheless, clearly ambivalence lurks beneath the surface of Effie’s reaction to her pregnancy. Suggestively, Scott attributes her silence on the subject largely to her Christian upbringing, to her father’s rigid Presbyterian principles, as well as to antiquated Scottish laws and customs that severely restrict her behavior and actually produce rebelliousness. Indeed, even Jeanie, the novel’s bastion of virtue and voice of moral integrity, explains in her audience with Queen Caroline that the frequency of infanticide in Scotland is attributed by “some” to the harshness of the “Kirk-Session” – to the use of the cutty stool or stool of repentance “for light life and conversation, and for breaking the seventh commandment” (395). Jeanie stresses too that “there are mony places beside Scotland where mothers are unkind to their ain flesh and blood” (395), an observation which raises the Queen’s

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color, given her own troubled relationship with her son Frederick, Prince of Wales. We should note that Caroline’s own lack of maternal instinct has in fact been targeted as problematic early in the novel. When Mrs. Saddletree wonders whether the Queen would suffer to allow “ane o’ her ain bairns” to attend a public execution, Reuben Butler, a Presbyterian minister and Jeanie’s future husband replies that “Report says . . . that such a circumstance would not have distressed her majesty beyond endurance” (53). The question of what constitutes the good or bad mother pervades the text in this way – underwriting and ultimately displacing questions about the specific psychology or the physiology of the infanticidal mother. Indeed, the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable forms of maternal behavior is deliberately blurred by Scott in numerous characters other than Effie. Even “good” women in this text, in other words, prove potentially “murderous” mothers. To this end, issues of legal authority and civil punishment operate throughout the text in conjunction with questions of parental duty and private discipline. If Effie is representative of Scottish unruliness, in other words, she also serves as an example of the kind of upbringing which breeds such subversive behavior. While Scott invokes sympathy for this “untaught child of nature, whose good and ill seemed to flow rather from impulse than from recollection” (113), he also suggests that Effie was the victim of excessive fondness as much as of strict sectarian principles. Ungoverned as a child, because “[e]ven the strictness of her father’s principles could not condemn the sports of infancy and childhood,” and overindulged as a young woman because “to the good old man, his younger daughter, the child of his old age, seemed a child for some years after she attained the years of womanhood” (111), she grew wild, like the Highland Glens of Scotland itself. In the introductory chapter of the narrative, Scotland’s untamed glens are compared in this respect to the “cultivated field” which is England, Scotland’s “sister Kingdom” (25). In England, “the farmer expects that,” in spite of all his care, a certain number of weeds will rise with the corn, and can tell you beforehand their names and appearance. But Scotland is like one of her own Highland Glens, and the moralist who reads the records of her criminal jurisprudence, will find as many curious anomalous facts in the history of mind, as the botanist will detect rare specimens among her dingles and cliffs. (26)

Effie, we might suggest, is just such a curious anomaly, a weed without a name, an unrecognizable shoot of nature. But Scott is careful to accentuate that her behavior is not the result of some kind of innate Scottish lawlessness – but rather stems primarily from the fact that she was raised

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by over-fond “parents” – permitted by Davie, as well as by Jeanie, her sister and substitute mother, “to run up and down uncontrolled”: Her sister, with all the love and care of a mother, could not be supposed to possess the same authoritative influence; and that which she had hitherto exercised became gradually limited and diminished as Effie’s years entitled her, in her own conceit at least, to the right of independence and free agency . . . [Effie] possessed a little fund of self-conceit and obstinacy, and some warmth and irritability of temper, partly natural perhaps, but certainly much increased by the unrestrained freedom of her childhood. (112)

If Effie’s rebelliousness eventually constitutes something of an adolescent reaction to her father’s strict rule of law, her subversive behavior can be attributed especially, Scott suggests, to Jeanie’s failure to exercise proper maternal authority and check Davie’s early overindulgence. So as to accentuate that Effie’s fall is produced by the absence of a strong, self-controlled, Edgeworthian mother in her life, rather than by her Scottish genes, Scott significantly parallels her history with that of her English lover, George Robertson/Staunton, son of a wealthy landowner and clergyman. George’s “doting mother,” we discover, “beautiful and wilful” like Effie, but of delicate health (and so an object for the compassion and not of the necessary guidance of her husband42 ) was, in fact, vastly overindulgent with George, her only child, in his youth. Those restraints imposed on the boy by his father by way of a corrective were in turn “compensated by treble licence during his absence” (368–69). Significantly, too, although English by birth, the young George is brought up in the West Indies, his mother’s home (she is the heiress of a wealthy planter). As Benedict Anderson notes, those of English ancestry born in the West Indies presented a unique challenge to the concept of British cultural identity. The West Indian planter was identified during Scott’s lifetime with the cultures of both the colonized and colonizer.43 Yet again, Staunton’s mother’s racial obscurity is largely overshadowed by a critique of her faulty maternal supervision and instruction: George “passed the first part of his early youth under the charge of a doting mother, and in the society of negro slaves, whose study it was to gratify his every caprice” (368). The mother’s behavior here mimics that of the slave; she is herself a kind of slave to the child, who assumes a position of mastery, at an age when his faculties for reason have not fully developed. As with the hero of Edgeworth’s Ennui, this upbringing produces a dissipated, riotous profligate. After Staunton’s mother dies, his father returns to England, but even this healthy soil is unable to save the young boy from his mother’s continued “imprudence and unjustifiable indulgence” (369). She

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foolishly leaves him her fortune, thus giving him the means with which to disseminate freely the “seeds of those evil weeds” she had early sown (369). Sowing seeds proves Staunton’s particular talent in this novel, at least at its outset. Not only does he inseminate Effie, but he impregnates first her sister-in-spirit, Madge Wildfire. Madge is the daughter of a faithful servant (and former Cameronian soldier) of his father, and in fact proves to be Staunton’s foster sister (Madge’s mother, Meg Murdockson, served as his wet nurse). This alliance with Meg proves central to the events of the narrative for several reasons. First, Staunton blames his nurse for the corruption of his character: “The source from which I derived food, when an infant,” he tells Jeanie, “must have communicated to me the wretched – the fated – propensity to vices that were strangers in my own family” (349). Although the product of excessive motherly affection, he represents himself as the victim of an infectious mother-substitute. Blaming the nurse proves a way to deny the real threat to virtue in this text – maternal indulgence. It also confirms Staunton’s backwardness (his inclination for superstition), his inability to accept responsibility for his actions, his misogynist perspective.44 Yet Staunton’s alliance with Meg Murdockson does in fact ultimately prove infectious, seditious, even deadly – though due to no fault of her nursing. (This bond actually protects him in the course of the narrative – Meg stresses that she wants to kill him but cannot: “[M]an can never ken what woman feels for the bairn she has held first to her bosom!” [317].) Rather the fault lies in their ensuing physical proximity, which violates cultural and class barriers. The foster son grows intimate with and eventually seduces and impregnates his nurse’s daughter, Madge, whom Meg had planned to marry off to an aged and wealthy local man. “[T]he girl saw me frequently,” he explains to Jeanie. “She was familiar with me, as our connection seemed to permit – and I – in a word, I wronged her cruelly” (350). The product of this illicit, almost incestuous union between foster siblings proves unviable not for genetic reasons, but socioeconomic ones. Recognizing that George is himself in no position and of no inclination to marry Madge, and seeking to promote her daughter’s chances to rise in station, Meg destroys the child. The “extremely natural” result of this mother’s attempt to act in her child’s best interests – “to conceal [Madge’s] shame and promote the advantageous match she had planned” – is the “total derangement” of Madge’s mind, already “constitutionally unsettled by giddiness and vanity” (325). Maternal “concern,” in other words, proves death-dealing on two fronts in this case. Both Meg’s child and her child’s child are destroyed by her manipulations. Although Meg is certainly a demonic figure, who is called “Mother Blood” and “Mother Damnable” (308, 310), her worst

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transgressions are, in fact, those motivated by her obsessive interest for her daughter’s welfare. The crime which lies at the heart of The Heart of Midlothian, the theft of Effie’s child, is, in fact, born of this obsession. Meg had served as midwife to Effie during her labor (at Staunton’s request), and either stole Effie’s child and gave it to Madge, or allowed Madge to carry the child off. (Madge eventually deposits the child with a female stroller.) Later, Meg intercepts Jeanie en route to London, in an attempt to prevent her mission to save Effie. In each case she is driven by her desire to thwart George Staunton’s alliance with Effie, in the seeming best interests of her daughter: “I will strangle her with my own hands,” Meg notes of Effie, “rather than she should come to Madge’s preferment” (315). Indeed, until the last, Meg’s mind is “at once a chaos of guilt, rage, and apprehension for her daughter’s safety”; she is governed by “that instinctive feeling of parental anxiety which she had in common with the she-wolf and lioness, being the last shade of kindly affection that occupied a breast equally savage” (516). Most telling is not the explicit reference to Meg’s savage nature – which might serve on one level as a convenient means for Scott to explain her murderous maternal impulses – but the suggestion that maternal love is itself a savage impulse. Like Cadogan, Downman, and Rousseau, Scott suggests that there is something dangerous about the immediacy of motherhood; that any woman’s response to her child, even one motivated out of concern, might have devastating consequences; that mothers are too much bound to their children, in sometimes oppressive ways, to think and act objectively in their best interests. As a midwife, Meg also bears in this novel the weight of very specific cultural anxieties about the regulation of the maternal body and of the birthing occasion itself.45 As previously discussed in chapter 1, local “granny” (or untrained) midwives like Meg were already on the way out by the mideighteenth century, the targets of fierce attack in texts like Cadogan’s An Essay upon Nursing and the Management of Children from Their Birth to Three Years of Age for their meddling ways and superstitious beliefs. Midwives were subject not only to the derision of many (though by no means all) medical men, but had long been required to play the spy for civil and ecclesiastical authorities – to report (and if necessary testify to) the identities of fathers named by unmarried women in the throes of labor.46 As not only the depositories of secrets, but the harbingers of secret knowledge, midwives functioned as loci of cultural memory, garnered through orally transmitted narratives concealed amongst themselves from generation to generation. Few of those stories would become part of the written public record (as does Meg’s via the broadside publication of her “Last Speech, Confession, and Dying

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Words of Margaret MacGraw, or Murdockson” [498–99]).47 Many midwives served as local abortionists, and anti-abortion and infanticide provisions were “fairly standard in midwife oaths everywhere.”48 Hoffer and Hull cite the oath which was administered by church authorities in England and Massachusetts (the following is an excerpt): I will not use any kind of sorcery or incantation in the time of the travail of any woman; and that I will not destroy the child born of any woman, nor cut, nor pull off the head thereof, or otherwise dismember or hurt the same, or suffer it to be so hurt or dismembered, by any manner of ways or means.49

Large numbers of midwives (like the unlucky Luckie Smith, found guilty of infanticide in 1679, according to Scott’s text) were indicted for the crime of infanticide, or called to testify as witnesses against suspected mothers.50 Others were tried as witches – at least before the repeal of Scottish statutes against witchcraft in 1736, the year in which the bulk of the events of this novel are set.51 Note that both Meg and Madge die the deaths of witches (Meg is hanged as a witch, and Madge dies as the result of a dunking in the river).52 In connecting Meg’s demonic mothering practices in this way to both her role as midwife and to public suspicions about witchcraft, Scott thus draws on the prevailing concerns of his contemporaries that the secrets of the birthing room were powerful and potentially dangerous, and that untrained women held too much control over the processes of life and death. But he is insistent, too, in rendering Meg’s evil nature the product of socioeconomic forces – not of an alliance with the devil. She “was nae witch,” an old woman comments after the execution, merely “a bluidy-fingered thief and murderess” (420), motivated by greed and hatred (which are, in turn, born of love for her daughter). Her savage mothering practices (and even the murder of her grandchild), while rendering explicit the tenuous line marked in The Heart of Midlothian between a mother’s love and her murderous rage, betray an excess, rather than an absence, of maternal “instinct.” Insisting thus that Meg’s behavior is natural (rather than supernatural), Scott affirms his belief in the Enlightenment concept of a stable human (in this case female) nature which in any given time and place reflects a different stage of the evolutionary progress of a people or nation.53 In this case, he links Meg’s dangerous maternal love to her savage environment, accentuating her conditions of economic deprivation, targeting her nomadic lifestyle, and stressing that her brutality has been garnered through years of following her Cameronian husband into battle (499). All of these factors betray Meg’s lower-rung position on the evolutionary scale, but above all,

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Meg’s fierce maternal love marks her as entrapped in an earlier stage of cultural and moral development. This type of “natural” lower-order love in fact lies at the heart of The Heart of Midlothian, and “circulates” throughout the narrative in various analogous disguises. If Meg finds her counterpart in Staunton/Robertson’s natural mother, her behavior is mirrored too, significantly, in Jeanie. While Jeanie, however, succumbs early to her (unevolved) feelings of affection for Effie, she also progressively recognizes that such indulgence has repeatedly placed Effie in harm’s way. Recalling an instance in which she mistakenly gave her fever-stricken sister “milk and water to drink, because ye grat for it,” Jeanie admonishes Effie, “[Y]ou should ken better than ask what canna but hurt you – But come weal or woe, I canna refuse you onything that ye ask me wi’ the tear in your ee” (225).54 The message seems clear: The bonds of the flesh produce unstable and even dangerous alliances; sympathy which is born of local affections and loyalties might prove murderous. A mother’s love may be in its “raw” state incompatible with the universalist goals of disinterestedness or objectivity, and must be tempered in an Edgeworthian fashion in the best interests of the developing child. Of course nationalist as well as domestic loyalties are ultimately targeted by the Enlightenment progress-model line of reasoning. Samuel Ferguson’s remarks about Irish national character in the third part of his 1834 “Review of Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelry” shed light on this subject. Ferguson identifies as the key to Ireland’s “retrogressive” civilization the “excess of natural piety” of its people, which develops itself “in over loyal attachment[s] to principles subversive of reason and independence.” He defines natural piety as: the religion of humanity, the faith of the affections, the susceptibility of involuntary attachments to arbitrary relations in society, that constitution of character most favorable to legitimate religious impressions, were it not that its superabundance of devotion too often runs to waste on sublunary or superstitious and dissipating objects.55

Ferguson targets particularly the threat to the British colonial project posed by the clan system in Ireland – also a recurring concern for Scott, with respect to Scotland – suggesting that excessive local loyalties (the fostering of which Ferguson ties directly to the employment of wet nurses) create internal division and strife in a nation, and ultimately prevent rather than further independence. Ferguson distinguishes, to this end, between evolved and unevolved forms of patriarchal government, between “legitimate loyalty” to a valid monarchy and “the wild and thorny entanglement of factious clanship” – states of civilization which might be coexistent in space, but not

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in time (in degree of moral, cultural, economic, political development).56 In The Heart of Midlothian, Scott pushes this distinction even further along gender lines, associating less highly evolved forms of government (which are based on local affections and narrow political–economic loyalties) with problematic forms of maternal legislation. Scotland itself is a matriarchy of sorts in this novel, nursing radically unstable loves – a state supported by allegiances of the most uncivilized, if most natural kind. Scotland, indeed, has proved a murderous mother to her children, Scott insists, particularly through Davie Deans’s continual references to the profuse amounts of blood shed by Scotland’s martyrs in the cause of national and religious freedom. Scott does suggest implicitly that the cold, unresponsive English might benefit from the kindling of such nationalistic fervor and emotional warmth. George II, the reigning king, for example, is indeed utterly unresponsive to the events at hand in this novel. He is an “absentee” king, bound more to his Hanoverian roots than to his English subjects. Nevertheless, Scottish “heat” is not of itself a simple corrective for English coolness in this text. The sacrifices as well as the demands of the Covenanters have ultimately weakened the national body of Scotland, according to Ferguson’s line of reasoning, depleting the country of its best natural resource – its faithful subjects – and splintering loyalties which might, if united, constitute a real base of power. While this sense of patriotism expresses itself in daily life as a desire among the Scottish to “meet, communicate, and, to the extent of their power, assist each other,” it also manifests itself (as more than occasionally in Davie Deans) as a form of dangerous nationalist “prejudice and narrowness of sentiment” (298). Scott is particularly careful to call our attention to the adverse economic effects of such fierce factionalism. As Davie notes himself, even the seemingly stable institutions of marriage and family are threatened during periods of civil unrest, and (as evidenced particularly by Effie’s predicament) can be considered safe only “if times are such that honest men could be secure against being shot, hanged, or banished, and had ane competent livelihood to maintain themselves, and those that might come after them” (452–53). Factionalism breeds poverty and misery, as is the case with Reuben Butler’s grandmother, who is both harshly fined for her deceased husband’s nonconformity, and left to raise both her child, and subsequently her child’s child, alone (90). Scott stresses to this end, that Davie’s nationalist and religious fervor – if noteworthy in many respects – has taken its toll not only on his pocketbook, but on his domestic happiness. Davie is especially a target of censure in so far as his discipline is administered as a harsh corrective for his

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early indulgence. Such a vacillating administration of authority produces confusion and disorder, even violence, as manifested by Davie’s eventual response to Effie’s arrest. Davie’s rage exemplifies particularly the tenuousness of the line which separates the overindulgent parent from the murderous one: “[W]here is the vile harlot,” he asks of this child of his heart, “that has disgraced the blood of an honest man? – Where is she, that has no place among us, but has come to foul with her sins, like the Evil One, among the children of God?” With a voice that “made the roof ring” he demands, “Bring her before me, that I might kill her with a word and a look!” (121). Davie’s own “infanticidal” tendencies are further illustrated when he vows to sacrifice one daughter’s life (Effie’s) rather than compromise the principles of the other (Jeanie). He is compared (though not without a trace of irony) to a Roman, who “would have devoted his daughter to death from different feelings and motives, but not upon a more heroic principle of duty” (215). While in the former case, however, Davie’s reaction is uncontrolled, governed by “savage” impulses; in the latter, his emotions are kept in fierce check. He reflects and prays about his decision, strives for objectivity, and so demonstrates his moral progress as a parent. Nevertheless, Davie’s dispassionate response is still as murderous as his rage. He later admits explicitly that Effie is a “scapegoat gone forth into the wilderness of the world, to carry wi’ her, as I trust, the sins of our little congregation” (436). To Davie, Effie is a necessary sacrifice to the interests of the many. Of course, Davie’s response to Effie’s transgression resembles in this sense the initial response of Queen Caroline, whom Jeanie must ultimately conciliate (as she does Davie), in order to win Effie’s pardon. Jeanie’s journey (first into Edinburgh, and then to London) prepares her for this task, as others have noted,57 both exposing her to, and preparing her for, the world at large from which she has been almost entirely sheltered.58 As with Davie, it initially becomes crucial to Jeanie’s moral development that she learn to distinguish between properly directed loyalties and ties of the heart, between primal local affection and disinterested universal benevolence. Indeed, her process of maturation is marked by her increasing ability to uphold such distinctions. Suggestively (and somewhat strangely, perhaps, for the modern reader) it is only in ultimately resisting the immediate claims of the heart, in refusing that which Effie asks of her (that is, to lie about her knowledge of Effie’s pregnancy on the witness stand) that Jeanie proves her actual moral worthiness. As Judith Wilt points out, The Heart of Midlothian is thus on one level a novel which celebrates the failure of sisterhood, or renders ambiguous at least the role of a sister within a culture

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that so explicitly identifies women’s nature with maternity, and so makes mothers of sisters.59 Yet Jeanie’s evolution – from overindulgent mother to Edgeworthian maternal legislator – is not played out in terms of the annihilation of her affections, but rather constitutes a reconciliation of natural feeling and necessary discipline. Torn between her local, personal, immediate duty to her sister and her desire to adhere to a more abstract, transhistorical, and expressly theological compass of right and wrong, Jeanie constructs a third option, which unites the local and the universal, and reveals her true capacity for legitimate maternal authority. “[I]f a sister asks a sister’s life on her bended knees,” she tells Effie (who listens like a child in “bewildered astonishment”), “they will pardon her – they shall pardon her – and they will win a thousand hearts by it” (267). This ability to reconcile the personal and political not only proves essential to Jeanie’s development and to the success of her mission but becomes likewise crucial to salvaging the deteriorating relationship between England and Scotland. Only in learning that the interests of home and Scotland are inseparable from those of public policy and London can Jeanie remain true to both, just as only in recognizing that “it is impossible to separate [the] real rights and interests” of the lawful king and his Scottish subjects (391), to quote the Duke of Argyle, can Queen Caroline unite her “feminine” instincts with her decidedly “masculine” understanding (and only through such a reconciliation can justice be served). Caroline eventually pardons Effie not just because she feels with a woman’s heart, in other words (indeed, throughout her interview with Jeanie, Caroline works to suppress such impulses), but because she thinks like a man – strategically, logically, objectively: With all the winning address of an elegant, and, according to the times, an accomplished woman, Queen Caroline possessed the masculine soul of the other sex. She was proud by nature, and even her policy could not always temper her expressions of displeasure, although few were more ready at repairing any false step of this kind, when her prudence came up to the aid of her passions. (387)

Although possessing the passionate nature of a woman, Caroline has learned to subordinate her emotional nature to reason. She is a creature of “caution,” of “circumspection,” who, we are told, “had no small share in reclaiming” the King’s political enemies, and securing his friends’ allegiances (387). If she is moved on some level by Jeanie’s impassioned plea on her sister’s behalf, Caroline is primarily motivated by her desire to effect a political reconciliation with the people of Edinburgh, and their representative in

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this novel, the Duke of Argyle. It is he who initially attempts to impress upon Caroline the politically advantageous course of “justice and of mercy” in Effie’s case, which “may be highly useful in conciliating the unfortunate irritation which at present subsists among his Majesty’s good subjects in Scotland” (391). Yet Caroline’s passions, more than her understanding, are aroused by Argyle’s rational line of argument, which seems dismissive of the personal nature of her displeasure with Scotland. Fighting to regain her selfcommand, she begs “some of the privileges of the sex” and insists that she is a woman first, with a right to an emotional, rather than purely rational response. It is Jeanie who helps her to recognize that the two need not be exclusive of one another. In a highly personal appeal to Caroline as both a Queen and a woman – but above all as a Christian – with eyes streaming tears and “features glowing and quivering with emotion,” Jeanie puts forward an argument geared nevertheless specifically toward Caroline’s enlightened understanding. Stressing that personal as well as political happiness is the natural offspring of benevolence, Jeanie insists that at the hour of death, the Queen will remember her intervention on Effie’s behalf with greater pleasure than “if a word of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at the tail of ea tow” (398). Of course, Jeanie is herself in a position to do both, and chooses not to do so. She ultimately shrinks from exposing Staunton’s involvement in the Porteous riot to Queen Caroline (despite the fact that she might have readily exchanged her secret for Effie’s life), largely because she “felt conscious, that . . . it would be considered as an act of treason against the independence of Scotland” (368). Judith Wilt reads Jeanie’s “concealment” as representative of the novel’s focus on the fact that it is women’s duty to save man, to be “the protector and forgiver of male lovers, children, parents, not their killer.”60 But so too, Jeanie’s silence on this subject reveals her steady commitment to the interests of the many, her conscious recognition that Scotland too is on trial before the Queen. Jeanie suggests that in order to achieve political and cultural harmony, all need forgiveness, as well as instruction on ways to pursue a better course in the future. Progress toward legitimate forms of “union” (sexual as well as cultural), in other words, cannot be achieved through anger (even righteous anger). Jeanie’s lesson for the reader is ultimately that emotion must inform, but not overwhelm reason – and that some silences are not worth breaking. But this necessarily holds true for Scotland as well as England. Concealing the sins of the past is ultimately represented in this novel as the only way to face a better future.

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Book IV of The Heart of Midlothian, as James Kerr has convincingly argued, takes us to just such an idealized futuristic state – the world of Roseneath – where, “the Gael and the Saxons lived upon the best possible terms of good neighborhood,” where virtue is rewarded, vice is cast off (Effie has been banished from Scotland), and Jeanie becomes like the “enchanted princess in the bairn’s fairy tale, that kamed gold nobles out o’ the tae side of her haffit locks, and Dutch dollars out o’ the t’other” (497).61 She brings to her marriage, we are told, the same winning combination of a “firm mind and affectionate disposition” previously demonstrated in her audience with the Queen and she and her husband, Reuben Butler, inspire the affections as well as the “honor of all who knew them.” They “live beloved, and die lamented” (540). Yet the price of such political and domestic harmony in Roseneath is concealment, secrecy, the forgetting of the past. Effie’s name, Davie tells Jeanie upon her arrival at Roseneath, is not to be mentioned: “She hath passed from us like the brook which vanisheth when the summer waxeth warm, as the patient Job saith – let her pass, and be forgotten” (436). Davie likewise intentionally forgets to inquire whether Reuben subscribes to the oaths of government upon being called to his new ministry in Roseneath. (Nor can the narrator, Peter Pattieson, provide the reader with this information, as the books of the Kirk-session which might have thrown light on this matter “were destroyed in the year 1746,” so as to “obliterate the recorded foibles of a certain Kate Finlayson” [468].) Jeanie later keeps the money which Effie regularly sends a secret from Reuben, just as she keeps from him the truth about George Staunton’s identity. Likewise, she conceals her part in the eventual escape of Effie and George’s recovered (but imprisoned) son, grown savage enough through exposure to a brutal life among thieves to commit (though unknowingly) a primal crime – the murder of his father. But by far the most important secret which must be kept in Roseneath is that of the bloody “origins” of the United Nation of Scotland and England. Through the vision of the steady Reuben Butler, Scott constructs a Burkean view of civil society which depends upon cultural memory loss.62 In the service of political and religious reconciliation, Reuben was of the “opinion that it were better to drop out of memory points of division and separation, and to act in a manner most likely to attract and unite all parties who were serious in religion” (479). While Reuben is clearly a peacemaker – like Jeanie (481) – his recommendation to forget the past constitutes a solution born of evasion, and echoes the earlier advice Madge Wildfire offers to the ghost of Ailie Muschat – brutally murdered by her abusive husband: “byganes suld be byganes” (190). Reconciling the past and the present, Butler suggests,

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depends upon forgetting the violence rendered on the feminized body of Scotland (as on Ailie’s body), and burying once and for all Scotland’s murdered children. Keeping such secrets of course ultimately furthers the cause of the British colonial project (note that Butler is himself of English descent), which must necessarily obscure the origins of its authority in order to claim legitimacy. But so too, the politics of concealment endorsed in Roseneath legitimate the “crime” with which this text commences – Effie’s concealment of her pregnancy. Scott suggests explicitly that veiling the truth may be necessary to the preservation both of the myth of British nation and of the myth of maternity which supports the evolving concept of British identity. His own romantic, fairy-tale ending for this story supports the same politics of secrecy; it is itself a fiction, a significant veer from his earlier insistence that Jeanie is “no heroine of Romance” (273) and more importantly, from the events contained in the account of Helen Walker’s story from which Scott drew his story. In actuality, Scott stresses in his 1830 Introduction, Helen lived and died in poverty and lay (before his personal intercession on her behalf ) in an unmarked grave. The truth, he suggests, if indeed sometimes more compelling than fiction (as claimed by the lawyers in the opening chapter of the novel), is eminently less satisfying, less universalist, less hegemonous. Fiction looks to the future, history the past; and Scott wants to, strives to, feels compelled to do both. However successful, he nonetheless has difficulty maintaining the balance. Like the mother who is damned if she gives in to her instincts, but twice damned if she rejects them, Scott confronted the task of recording Scottish history as though always negotiating a double bind: to commemorate nationalist sympathies is to imperil the universal objectives of the Enlightment, and yet to forget the past, to break one’s bond to home and hearth, is to be fundamentally disloyal to “nature.” Scott could not be comfortable either as a pure Enlightenment theorist or as a full-fledged, romantic, cultural nationalist, but what is more, he seemed to recognize that in attempting to effect a balance between these positions, he might compromise the integrity of both. Like Edgeworth, Scott saw the enlightened mother as treading that same thin line between instinct and intellect and, like her, he favored the side of historical progress, if acknowledging the strong pull of nature. Yet, if Scott’s political loyalties ultimately lie with a United Great Britain, his heart remains in Midlothian. This, even his reconciliatory impulses cannot conceal. If he asks his reader to put the past in its place, so too, he indelibly inscribes in The Heart of Midlothian that moment of necessary

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memory loss, makes the “ghost” of his grandmother arise and “speak the Epilogue” (14), and asks his readers to bear witness to the passing of an era. “[E]ven the most correct judges of life and manners,” he seems to recognize along with his heroine Jeanie, “can be imposed on by their preconceptions” (490) – even, that is, such a seemingly disinterested “judge” as himself.

c hapte r 5

The case of the Shelleys: maternal sympathy and The Cenci

W. [August Wilhelm Schlegel] said of a young philosopher: he has a theory ovarium in the brain and, like a hen, lays a theory every day. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Atheneum Fragment 2691

Whether what we are looking forward to is a thought or a deed, our relationship to every essential achievement is none other than that of pregnancy, and all our vain-glorious boasting about “willing” and “creating” should be cast to the winds! . . . And even when this phenomenon becomes dangerous and evil we must not show less respect to that which is generating within us or others than ordinary worldly justice, which does not allow the judge or the hangman to interfere with a pregnant woman. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Ideal Selfishness”2

Thus far, I have primarily looked to ways in which Romantic-era writers utilized representations of mother–child bonds as a means to variously critique or endorse seemingly natural constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations. In this final chapter, I want to examine a somewhat different deployment of maternal imagery in the essays and poetry of Percy Shelley, who frequently described the work of the creative artist through reference to analogies of pregnancy and breastfeeding. To be sure, such comparisons were not unique, either to the Romantic period or to writers who were strongly influenced by Romantic discourses and themes, as the above quotations illustrate. Nor were appeals to the affinities between intellectual and maternal labor the sole province of poets and philosophers. William Harvey, who identified the function of the ovaries in reproduction in Anatomical exertions, concerning the generation of living creatures. To which are added, particular discourses of births, and of conceptions etc. (1653), similarly conflated the “conceptions” of the mind and those of the uterus:

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Because I say, there is no Sensible thing to be found in the Uterus, after coition; and yet there is a necessity, that something should be there, which may render the female fruitful . . . we have no refuge left to us, but . . . to apprehend, that the same thing is effected in the womb, as in the Brain.3

Needless to say, this tendency to compare the work of the maternal body with the mechanisms of mental thought processes proved a particularly effective means for poets like Shelley to naturalize the production of works of art, to argue for the unique status of the artist’s “brainchild,” and to tap into the symbolic implications of the mother–child bond as a means to describe the type of sympathetic connectedness to others to which the Romantic poet aspires. For Shelley, who was well-versed in the teachings of the Scottish Enlightenment school, the infant’s desire for its mother’s breast evidenced, for example, the natural foundation of the human desire for social connectedness. Thus, in “On Love,” where he outlines his doctrine of interpersonal sympathy, he observed, “[T]here is something within us which from the instant we live and move thirsts after its likeness. It is probably in correspondence with this law that the infant drains milk from the bosom of its mother.”4 So, too, he frequently represented the artist’s relationship to the natural world in terms of a hunger for the “green and spangled breast” of Mother Nature (“The Retrospect” [1812], line 124). He notably opened “Alastor” (1815) with an invocation to “our great Mother” (line 2), asking that she “Favor my solemn song, for I have loved / Thee ever, and thee only” (lines 19–20) and declaring that She is the spirit to which the poet’s words lend substance: “I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain / May modulate with murmurs of the air, / And motions of the forests and the sea . . .” (lines 45–47). This type of maternalization of the natural world was certainly a common rhetorical device among poets of the period, which is indicative not only of the masculine Romantic tendency to appropriate the creative energies associated with female reproductivity, but to view Mother Nature as an extension or reflection of the poet’s imaginative faculties. Shelley has received a fair amount of negative press on this front, given that scholars have largely stressed that his deployment of maternal images functions as a “colonization” (to invoke Alan Richardson’s term) of feminine difference or serves as evidence of his primary narcissism, his desire to see in the m/other a reflection of the self.5 In this chapter, I argue that such critiques do not do adequate justice to the complexity of Shelley’s engagements with the dynamics of maternity. He most certainly offers us a decidedly more ambivalent representation of motherhood in his only substantial foray into writing for the stage, The Cenci (1819). In this poetic drama, he uncharacteristically vents his anxieties about the limits of sympathy,

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while exploring the potentially devastating effects of physical/mental fusion with an “other.” Beatrice’s abhorrence of physical penetration by another who is also “of ” her own flesh, like Cenci’s own vulnerability to Beatrice (“Whose sight infects and poisons [him]” [iv.1:119]), testify to Shelley’s preoccupation with the ways in which “union” with another can impinge upon one’s sense of cohesive identity and produce the type of physical/mental crisis which Julia Kristeva associates with the condition of abjection.6 Cenci’s vow to impregnate Beatrice with a “hideous likeness of herself ” (iv.i:146) constitutes the ultimate threat to her being. Patricide becomes, in Beatrice’s mind, her only means of “self ”-preservation. We can read The Cenci in this light as an examination of the material dimensions of Shelleyan sympathy, while seeing Cenci’s threat as indicative of its potential for perversion. Although on the surface The Cenci deals more with themes of corrupt fatherhood than motherhood, and despite the fact that Beatrice Cenci is not literally a “mother on trial” (while she does stand trial in the play, she is not herself a mother), I include The Cenci in this study of naturally bad and dangerously good Romantic-period mothers because the play illuminates so clearly the ways in which dominant theoretical conceptions of maternity informed Romantic texts not only in terms of their imagery but on a generic level. The Cenci marks a turning point for Shelley: written during a period of intense personal crisis in the wake of the death of William Shelley (a crisis during which Mary Shelley ceased to view herself as a mother); serving as a dark counterpoint to the vision presented in Prometheus Unbound (a poetic drama fiercely expressive of Percy’s characteristic idealism); designed to reach a popular rather than an elite audience; The Cenci radically challenges our understanding of the self-fashioned poet legislator’s authorial persona, his doctrine of love, his gendered aesthetics. We can map this turn around the point at which motherhood is envisioned as enslavement and expressed as a curse, the moment in which the recognition of oneself in an other is represented as an horrific crisis. If The Cenci is not a story about motherhood per se, it is a work which explores the vulnerability of the feminine psyche to the threat of maternity, and links such vulnerability to the conditions governing the work of the dramatic artist. Shelley scholars have not fully come to terms with the gender issues of this play, especially with the ways it registers Shelley’s self-critical examination of his own gendered poetic theories. Scholarship on the play rather reflects both the critical tendency to focus on Percy’s culpability when it comes to his handling of gender issues, and to read the markings of literary inheritance in Bloomian terms of paternal influence.7 In this chapter I want to build on

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a newly emerging body of criticism which complicates and extends earlier feminist readings of Percy’s work,8 as well as to suggest new directions for scholarship focused specifically on The Cenci. Analyses of the drama have long focused on its central conflict: is Beatrice’s response to her abuse – the murder of her father – justified? Whether acknowledging Beatrice’s complicity with her Father’s “master text” (Hogle), or conversely defending her “cosmic innocence” (Gottlieb), critics of the play continue to bring Beatrice before the bar again and again.9 We might go so far as to say that with respect to the question of Beatrice’s “crime,” the critical jury remains deadlocked.10 Shelley indeed anticipated such conflicted responses, stressing in the Preface that had Beatrice been a less morally ambiguous heroine – had she responded according to his own philosophy of “kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love . . . she would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a tragic character” (240). Doing the right thing might make for a better world, in other words, but it is not the stuff of gripping drama. Beatrice’s “pernicious mistake” was in fact for Shelley a prerequisite of her legend’s timeless popularity; his purpose in resuscitating her story lies less in adjudging her ultimate guilt or innocence than in exploring the implications of his own system of moral philosophy in the context of theatrical exhibition. As Julie Carlson notes, The Cenci casts “the evaluation of character in terms of acting, rather than being” so as to “highlight theatre’s indissociability from the social and vice versa.” Shelley posits that all the world’s a stage, in other words, in order to direct our attention to the conditions of Beatrice’s performance, moving decidedly away from the emphasis on moral agency which characterizes, for example, Prometheus Unbound (the first three acts of which he finished shortly before commencing work on The Cenci). The real object lesson of Beatrice, Carlson suggests, “applicable to characters on stage [as well as] in the audience,” is that “[t]hose without power in society cannot move the powers-that-be to act on their behalf.”11 I want to expand in this chapter upon Carlson’s argument that The Cenci in this way “consistently transforms moral questions into questions of theatre,”12 considering specifically one “performance” in this text which Carlson herself treats ambivalently – Shelley’s own performance. It is here, I would argue, that his anxieties about the enactment of gendered roles are displayed most acutely. As would-be popular playwright, he assumes an authorial persona in The Cenci (and most specifically in his Preface to the play) which is inflected as much by his gender-based understanding of the role of the dramatic artist as by his concerns about writing for a more broad-based audience. In considering Percy’s adoption of what, I will argue,

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is a more feminized authorial position, I want to underscore that his turn toward the popular stage is accompanied by a decided turn to Mary Shelley for creative advice, inspiration, and instruction. The Cenci explores, perhaps better than anything Percy scripted, the material basis of ideological systems, challenging particularly the Enlightenment view of gendered sensibilities that underscores his own doctrine of sympathetic response to the other, and I argue here that Mary played a more prominent role in this shift in authorial perspective than has hitherto been acknowledged by critics of the play. Following the initiatives of recent theorists of Romantic drama (Julie Carlson, Jeffery Cox, Daniel Watkins),13 I would stress that tracing Shelley’s concerns about The Cenci entails further reevaluation of his negotiation of the theatrical medium. Targeting the play for the popular stage radically challenged his sense of authorial identity and his understanding of the creative process, and problematized especially the gender configurations implicit in his earlier aesthetic theories. The dynamics of Shelleyan sympathy are effectively reversed in this work, as Shelley does not seek in Beatrice a reflection of his own desires, but rather struggles to transform himself into that which her story demands. He connects this sense of exposure to the other specifically to the experience of motherhood in The Cenci, problematizing in the process his own solipsistic tendency to appropriate a maternalized subject position in the service of his poetics. This movement also reflects a broadening of Shelley’s understanding of the relationship between politics and poetics. The Cenci exhibits what Anne Janowitz has identified in Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy” (written in September, 1819, shortly after The Cenci was completed) as a turn to a more “communitarian” politics that stressed diverse “sources of the self ” and established identity as “plural, and a social mode.”14 These concerns are already evident not only in the subject matter of The Cenci – in its obsessive interest with the fragility of boundaries separating “self ” from “other” – but in Shelley’s desire to present this work on the public stage. In the theater, the production of meaning becomes a communal endeavor, and Shelley saw a direct correspondence between this process and the development of national ideals. With The Cenci, he seeks to unite the members of English audiences in common bonds of sympathy, to create an “imagined community” of Englishmen and women, who are distinguished by their enlightened cosmopolitanism, their recognition that society need not be conceived as a homogeneous body, but might be preserved as a “union of singularities,” to return to Kristeva’s analogy.15 In this he evidences his debt to the Scottish school, to be sure. But he also registers in this drama his fears about the potential for theatrical performance to break down the

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divisions between self and other, in ways which are liberating for the artist but also terrifying (ways which to this end resemble the dynamics of maternity as depicted in the play). The poet–legislator confronts with this project the nature of the creative forces driving him, interrogating especially the relationship of an explicitly feminized author to his literary offspring. It is small wonder that The Cenci was such a favorite of Mary Shelley’s. She famously numbered The Cenci among Percy’s best artistic efforts, but stressed in her “Note” to the play that it was an extremely difficult project for him from the outset. Percy’s initial concerns about the public reception of The Cenci – his anxieties that he would seek the recognition of others only to find “repulse and disappointment” (“On Love” 473) – in fact led him directly (and uncharacteristically, according to Mary’s account), to seek her counsel : “This is the only one of his works that he communicated to me during its progress.” Percy, she notes, initially pushed her to write Beatrice’s story herself: “[H]e urged the subject to me as one fitted for a tragedy . . . but I entreated him to write it instead.” Percy’s misgivings about writing for a popular audience, in Mary’s view, stemmed from his misconceptions about his own dramatic talents: He believed that one of the first requisites [for the dramatist] was the capacity of forming or following-up a story or plot. He fancied himself to be defective in this portion of the imagination . . . He asserted that he was too metaphysical and abstract, too fond of the theoretical and the ideal, to succeed as a tragedian.16

Turning to Mary in the hopes of framing a story that would attract a broader audience, Percy betrays a widespread tendency among writers of the period to associate popular culture with feminine taste. If the gift of abstraction and generalization had been apportioned by theorists like Kant to men, women’s penchants for both the writing and reading of plotdriven novels had been commonly assumed and was a source of widespread anxieties among the literary elite since early in the eighteenth century (though this was destined to change in the wake of Walter Scott’s phenomenal success with the Waverley series). Catherine Gallagher has detailed the reciprocal shaping of the terms “woman,” “author,” and “marketplace” during the eighteenth century, while Judith Pascoe recently suggests ways in which these conflations and gender associations spilled over into the theatrical arena. Julie Carlson stresses that popular theatrical productions were associated with the expression of dangerous forms of feminine agency, and argues that (especially second generation) Romantic playwrights felt “indicted as men and as poets seduced by theatre.”17

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If popular stage productions were frequently feminized in the public imagination, so too, the type of moral drama to which Percy aspired had assumed a feminine face, that of the Romantic-period poet, playwright, and dramatic theorist Joanna Baillie. Baillie’s influence on Percy Shelley’s views on drama is difficult to prove definitively, as Shelley never acknowledges a debt in this quarter, yet he was certainly conversant with Baillie’s theories on tragedy, which strongly resembled his own.18 Mary Shelley’s journals record that both she and Percy were reading Baillie’s plays in December, 1814, and while Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse” is not mentioned in Mary’s account, it is doubtful that this influential introduction to the first volume of Baillie’s works was overlooked by either of them. For Baillie, drama works (like the responsible mother) to teach the human heart to know itself. Baillie strongly advocated the playwright’s turn to the private and domestic, suggesting that within these “interior” spaces the psychological struggles of the protagonist – our chief source of “sympathetic curiosity” – is most exposed to observation. Theatrical performances thereby provide us with occasions for self-scrutiny: In examining others we know ourselves. With limbs untorn, with head unsmitten, with senses unimpaired by despair, we know what we ourselves might have been on the rack, on the scaffold, and in the most afflicting circumstances of distress.19

In large part this is due to theater’s immediacy. Whereas the poet relies upon description, “the characters of the drama must speak directly for themselves” (6–7). Nothing mediates our exposure to the characters on stage, which is precisely why the theater offers such unique opportunities for inspiring social change. Above all, Baillie stressed the “moral efficacy” of tragedy, which ideally enlarges our views on human nature, teaches us to admire virtue and execrate vice, and opens to us “the heart of man under the influence of those passions to which we are all liable” (11). For Baillie, tragedy inspires us not necessarily through explicit example, given that we are ourselves supposedly distanced from the circumstances that govern the characters on stage. Rather we receive instruction by applying the particular to the universal – through the “enlargement of our ideas in regard to human nature” (10). Moreover, this instructional impulse is inherently maternal for Baillie, who compares the role of the playwright to that of a breastfeeding mother. Nursing proper sentiments in an audience not only serves the universal good, but helps counter the degeneration of British character encouraged by popular stage productions of the day: “[I]f we are richly fed with what we have good relish for [that is, the “grand, the

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beautiful, the novel, and above all . . . the marvelous”], we may be weaned to forget our native ailment” (5). Good drama rather should feed the mind (as mother’s milk does the body) with that which is most natural, and thereby most nourishing. Shelley thus had two feminized theatrical models on which to draw for inspiration: the popular, which was associated with things novel and with Gothic marvel; and the maternal, as this was developed in Baillie’s theory of moral tragedy. In either case, Mary Shelley’s recent success with Frankenstein (published in 1818) offered Percy an immediate precedent for shaping a work that might capture the interest as well as the conscience of a modern British audience. He found Mary’s novel to be replete with “the heaping up of incident on incident and the working up of passion out of passion”; its plot was destined to leave the reader “breathless with suspense” and “giddy . . . the ground seems to fail under our feet.” But he also stressed the text’s moral efficacy, that fact that it exposed the reader to “the elementary feelings of the human mind.” The “direct moral of the book,” which offered “the most universal application,” was that if you “[t]reat a person ill . . . he will become wicked” (“On Frankenstein” 185–86). While it is unclear to what extent Mary was able to provide Percy with a perspective of the masses whose sympathies he wanted to cultivate, traces of her impact on the development of The Cenci are certainly discernible along several lines. The Cenci is in many respects (like Prometheus Unbound ) another version of the Frankenstein story, another allegory of the French Revolution,20 a study of a suffering victim’s response to sustained tyranny. Like the Creature in Frankenstein, Beatrice Cenci is benevolent by nature, but becomes violent after undergoing a period of sustained abuse. Like the Creature, Beatrice evidences the ways in which victims might become victimizers. And, like the Creature, she suffers at the hands of an irresponsible father, the outrageously abusive and tyrannical Count Cenci, whose desire to ruin his daughter Beatrice culminates with her rape, and with his subsequent vow to impregnate her. In an attempt to prevent the future violations of which she is assured, Beatrice hires assassins, who kill her father. She is caught, publicly tried, and eventually convicted of his murder. The play ends as she faces her own execution. “[A]nd what a world we make,” she laments toward the conclusion of the play: “The oppressor and the oppressed” (v.iii:74–75). If the plot of The Cenci thus clearly resonates with themes from Frankenstein, Shelley also exploited in his play the Gothic mood which Mary herself had so successfully utilized in her novel, and drew heavily on the types of

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standard Gothic conventions that were employed by writers like Walpole and Lewis:21 the text is replete with evil villains and long-suffering victims; the plot concerns a decaying aristocratic family that finds its counterparts in the degenerating institutions of Church and state; scenes are set in a moldering and desolate castle; greed, murder, torture, rape, imprisonment, and corruption on every level carry the day. But, in a closely related vein, Shelley further underscored, as Mary had in Frankenstein, his protagonist’s narcissistic and unnatural desire to colonize the maternal body. In lines which immediately precede the commencement of the scene in which he is murdered, Cenci reveals the full extent of his intentions toward Beatrice: . . . [A]nd thou, Quick Nature! I adjure thee by thy God, That thou be fruitful in her, and increase And multiply, fulfilling his command, And my deep imprecation! (iv.i:141–45)

Note that Cenci imagines Beatrice’s reaction to the offspring of this union in terms which recall the breastfeeding imagery in “On Love”: . . . May it be A hideous likeness of herself, that as From a distorting mirror, she may see Her image mixed with what she most abhors, Smiling upon her from her nursing breast. (iv.i:145–49)

The “nursing breast,” however, becomes here a sign of woman’s vulnerability to the gaze of the other, while Beatrice’s own gaze perceives not, as it were, a “miniature” of herself, an “ideal prototype of every thing excellent or lovely that [she is] capable of conceiving,” as in “a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness” (“On Love” 473–74). She is rather to find reflected back on herself “as from a distorting mirror” her othernessfrom-herself, her visage transfigured in another whose smile mocks her, and whose resemblance to herself demands repulse. With this imagery Percy not only foregrounds the potentially horrific ramifications of his own doctrine of sympathy, he also suggests explicitly that the bond between creator and creation can be one of enslavement. This was a theme with which Mary, too, had obviously struggled in her own “hideous progeny” (“Author’s Introduction,” Frankenstein xii). Cenci elaborates on his curse in terms which explicitly echo the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and the Creature:

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It is hardly surprising that Percy sought Mary’s counsel on this particular literary effort, given her recent success in handling a similar subject in Frankenstein. But Mary most likely inspired her husband, too, on an altogether more personal level during the weeks in which he composed The Cenci, due to her own traumatic experience of motherhood during the summer of 1819. Her relationship with her only surviving child (Clara, the Shelleys’ infant daughter, had died in Venice nine months previously) had, in fact, been abruptly shattered by the sudden death of William Shelley on June 7, 1819. Percy chronicled in his letters to England throughout the summer of 1819 Mary’s acute depression, and their shared sense of deep loss. “Our misfortune is, indeed, a heavy one,” he wrote to Thomas Hogg on July 25. “[T]his event . . . has left me in a very weak state.” Mary’s sufferings he represents consistently as more acutely catastrophic: “Mary bears it, as you may naturally imagine, worse than I do” (PBS Letters 701). Suddenly childless, Mary’s sense of her own identity was obviously shaken, so intimately had her life with Percy been bound up in the experience of motherhood. “May you and my dear Marianne never know what it is to lose two only & lovely children in one year,” she wrote to Leigh Hunt in June, “to watch their dying moments – & then at last to be left childless & forever miserable” (MWS Letters 101). And in September, “I can assure you I am much changed – the world will never be to me again as it was . . . in fact I ought to have died on the 7th of June last” (MWS Letters 108). Mary was again, in fact, four months pregnant when they left Rome for Livorno on June 10th. Whether or not her physical condition exacerbated her depression, the summer months in Livorno which saw the composition of The Cenci were clearly, for her, ones of extreme crisis. “Our house is a melancholy one,” Percy wrote Peacock in July (PBS Letters 697). To Hunt in August he described his wife’s continued “terrible state of mind,” noting that “Mary’s spirits continue dreadfully depressed” (PBS Letters 706). As Mary’s confinement approached, he conveyed to Hunt his hopes that “[t]he birth of a child will probably retrieve her from some part of her present

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melancholy depression” (September 27, PBS Letters 721). The birth of Percy Florence in November appears to have afforded each of them some measure of relief, yet another letter to Hunt betrays Percy’s own continued conflicted emotional state: Yesterday morning Mary brought me a little boy. . . . The babe is . . . quite well, and has begun to suck. You may imagine that this is a great relief and a great comfort to me amongst all my misfortunes, past, present, and to come. . . . Poor Mary begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled; for we have spent, as you may imagine, a miserable five months. (PBS Letters 746)

Mary conveyed her own anxieties in a letter to Marianne Hunt: “[H]e [Percy Florence] is my only one and although he is so healthy and promising that for the life of me I cannot fear yet it is a bitter thought that all should be risked on one.” She emphasizes, nevertheless, the way her sense of identity (as a mother) has been restored: “[Y]et how much sweeter than to be childless as I was for 5 hateful months” (MWS Letters 114, emphasis mine).22 Stuart Curran suggests convincingly that the Shelleys’ collaboration on The Cenci during this period of crushing calamity constituted an attempt on Percy’s part to “reawaken their closeness of aspiration,”23 yet Percy’s motives in turning to Mary most likely extended beyond the need for therapeutic activity. Her experience of radical dislocation during the summer of 1819 provided him with a more immediate (if not necessarily contradictory) perspective on the ties of the flesh than that afforded by the Enlightenment theorists whom he so admired – one which exposed acutely the painful price of sympathetic identification with another, and particularly the “self ”sacrifices demanded of women as mothers. To unite fully one’s interests with those of another, giving oneself over – in mind and body – to the object of love, can become a kind of self-annihilation, and indeed, throughout these months, Mary dwells in her letters on thoughts of death. The Shelleys were experiencing firsthand, in this sense, the horrific aspects of maternal sympathy to which we have seen Enlightenment theorists gesture. Recall, for example, Hume’s image of the “fond mother” whose self-sacrificing mother love ultimately kills her. Both Mary and Percy had an obvious literary predecessor-figure on this front as well: Mary’s mother, who had not only endorsed a Gothic version of maternity in her novel of psychic and physical persecution, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798), but had realized the full measure of maternal sacrifices with her own death, due to complications following Mary’s birth. Wollstonecraft’s critique of the Enlightenment view of maternal nature was, of course, very familiar to Percy Shelley,24 who may have had specific personal reasons during the

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summer of 1819 to recall the reflections of Mary’s mother, particularly her reflections on motherhood. We know, for example, that he was communicating with William Godwin that summer, though Godwin had by this point assumed for Percy the persona of the Gothic villain: “I wrote to this hard-hearted person,” he tells Hunt, “(the first letter I had written for a year), on account of the terrible state of [Mary’s] mind, and entreated him to try to sooth her in his next letter.” Godwin’s response, by Percy’s account, was to call “her husband (me) ‘a disgraceful and flagrant person’” and to “urge her if she ever wished a connection to continue between him and her to force me to get money for him.” Although he is insistent that Godwin “cannot persuade her that I am what I am not, nor place a shade of enmity between her and me,” he concedes that Godwin “heaps on her misery, stiff misery” (PBS Letters 706–7). Godwin has all but become Count Cenci in Percy’s eyes, but, to an even greater extent, he has become Victor Frankenstein – a living testament to the potential corruption of seemingly benevolent Enlightenment principles.25 While Percy the husband was busy disdaining his father-in-law’s lack of sympathy for his daughter’s sufferings, in other words (and perhaps lamenting too the absence of Mary’s own mother’s counsel during this period of distress), Shelley the poet was confronting the apparent deterioration of Enlightenment tenets, in the person of one of their chief spokesman. These themes underwrite Shelley’s exploration in The Cenci of benevolence gone sour, and especially his critique of the mother–child bond – that which had served him elsewhere as a manifestation of the universal quest for sympathetic recognition. Like Wollstonecraft, he consistently dissociates himself in this play from the suggestion that maternal sympathy necessarily arises spontaneously out of a natural connection between mother and child. He highlights, to this end, the circumstantial, rather than physical bond between Beatrice and Lucretia, Beatrice’s step-mother: “Did you not nurse me when my mother died?” Beatrice asks Lucretia: “May the ghost / Of my dead Mother plead against my soul / If I abandon her who filled the place / She left, with more, even, than a mother’s love!” (ii.i:89, 94–97). Maternal love is grounded here upon ties which transcend genetics; but more importantly, physical connectedness is no guarantee of sympathy. Pope Clement’s final condemnation of Beatrice’s actions, in fact, ultimately depends on the fact that “Paolo Santa Croce / Murdered his mother yester evening . . . [S]oon, for some just cause no doubt, the young / Will strangle us all” (v.iv:18–19, 21–22). This detail (which is true to Shelley’s source manuscript) not only lends irony to the judge’s verdict – highlighting

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the arbitrary, circumstantial operations of justice in Beatrice’s society – it speaks to a more pervasive breakdown of familial relationships in that society, to a more extensive corruption of “natural” bonds. At her trial, Beatrice utilizes this sense of degenerated natural bonds as the key to her defense: “I am more innocent of parricide / Than is a child born fatherless” (iv.iv:112–13). Her logic turns on denying the fact that Cenci stands in relation to her as a father. Her brother Giacomo expresses similar feelings: “We / Are now no more, as once, parent and child . . . He has cast Nature off, which was his shield, / And Nature casts him off, who is her shame; / And I spurn both . . . [A]s he gave life to me / I will, reversing nature’s law. . .” (iii.i:282–83, 286–88, 333–34). Cenci has “triumphed,” Beatrice explains most specifically, by physically debasing and victimizing those to whom he is supposed to be physically “bound”: What, if ’tis he who clothed us in these limbs Who tortures them and triumphs? What if we, The desolate and the dead, were his own flesh, His children and his wife, whom he is bound To love and shelter? (i.iii:102–6, emphasis mine)

Cenci wants most to violate natural laws, to be a law unto himself, which is why he works so persistently to corrupt the flesh of his family members – that which most binds them to him: “He has given us all / Ditch water, and the fever-stricken flesh / Of buffaloes, and bade us eat or starve, / And we have eaten,” Beatrice relates. “He has made me look / On my beloved Bernardo, when the rust / Of heavy chains has gangrened his sweet limbs” (ii.i:66–71). Turning to God for spiritual sustenance to nourish her battered body, Beatrice realizes that this relationship, too, has become void: I have borne much, and kissed the sacred hand Which crushed us to the earth, and thought its stroke Was perhaps some paternal chastisement! Have excused much, doubted; and when no doubt Remained, have sought by patience, love and tears To soften him, and when this could not be I have knelt down through the long sleepless nights And lifted up to God, the father of all, Passionate prayers: and when these were not heard I have still borne[.] (lines 111–20, emphasis mine)

The play on the words “still borne” not only points to Cenci’s lethal influence on Beatrice, but to her aborted relationship with God. It is not just

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the case that Cenci is an unnatural father; in other words, in Beatrice’s eyes he has also fathered something which is now unnatural, unloved even by God, “the father of all.” Beatrice sees herself as a miscarriage of nature, and for this reason will come to feel herself as “unbound” by nature’s laws.26 This, of course, is the crux of Cenci’s strategy. He understands full well that in corrupting Beatrice’s flesh with his own, he might gain “the greater point, which [is] / To poison and corrupt her soul” (iv.i:44–45). Critics tend to fault Beatrice for buying into this logic, generally citing Shelley’s acknowledgment in the Preface to the play that “[u]ndoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of another” (240) as his indictment of her response to the rape.27 But Shelley is hardly definitive on this point. He is rather insistent about the enormity of Beatrice’s experience of physical violation, stressing in the Preface the “horrors” contained in the “detailed account” of his source manuscript – horrors which must be diminished in a poetic treatment of the subject, lest the “fearful and monstrous” nature of the story render its presentation “insupportable” (238–39). He stresses, as he does in the play proper, that Beatrice attempted long and in vain “to escape from what she considered a perpetual contamination of both mind and body” (238, emphasis mine), suggesting that it is from this particular perspective that we must attempt to understand her response. Moreover, he is explicit in the Preface about that which would be necessarily veiled in the play itself – Cenci’s “incestuous passion, [which was] aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty and violence” (238). Beatrice is described in the source manuscript, he tells us, as a “young maiden who . . . was evidently a most gentle and amiable being . . . violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance and opinion” (238). She was “expose[d]” to “outrages” (241). While Shelley does not explicitly allow that these details exonerate Beatrice’s actions, he positions them as central to the crisis he will explore – a crisis he defines from the outset as particular to women because it is as much physical as spiritual in nature. Whether because of “circumstances and opinion” or as the result of natural laws, the fact of the matter is that as a woman, in the year 1599 (as in 1819), Beatrice’s body is the source of her spiritual identity. The point is not so much whether or not Beatrice is justified in seeing herself as irrevocably defiled, but that she is entirely more vulnerable on this front than is, for example, a character like Prometheus, whose physical “outrages” are neither dwelt upon in Prometheus Unbound nor linked directly to this kind of threat to essence or being. Beatrice’s experience is in fact radically incommensurate with that of Prometheus, given that her body is supposed to be – most particularly in its capacity to bear

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life – the vehicle for her spirit, the outward manifestation of her inner nature. Much like The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, The Cenci explores women’s extraordinary susceptibility to physical “outrages” through an examination of the maternal body which renders them not only most sympathetic but most vulnerable to others. Moreover, Shelley does not limit this focus to Beatrice’s experience alone. In stressing his heroine’s physical vulnerability to her father, we must not overlook Cenci’s vulnerability to his daughter. Although he offers other motives for his special cruelties to her, telling Cardinal Camillo, for example, that he “love[s] / The sight of agony” and has grown bored with the usual means of afflicting it, Cenci’s particular hatred for Beatrice stems from his own sense of being infected by her flesh – a point which is generally overlooked by Shelley critics. Barbara Gelpi argues, for example, that, with Cenci’s rape of his daughter, “Shelley adopts his – and our – culture’s strategy of assigning vulnerability to women while appropriating a fictitious but pragmatically effective invulnerability for men.”28 But Cenci is far from impervious to Beatrice, whom he calls “this specious mass of flesh . . . this my blood, / This particle of my divided being; / Or rather, this my bane and my disease, / Whose sight infects and poisons me; this devil / Which sprung from me as from a hell” (iv.i:115–19). Cenci’s experience of abjection, his feeling of being possessed by an Other who is also part “self,” mirrors Beatrice’s, and is significantly expressed on stage after the rape. The discomposing effect Beatrice’s words have on her father prior to her recognition of his incestuous intentions is well noted, but most scholars stress that her influence over him ceases with the close of Act I. Yet, while Beatrice herself may cease to feel the extent of that influence, Cenci clearly does not. As her verbal control falters, it becomes increasingly clear that it is Beatrice’s flesh, not her words, to which he feels most exposed. Her very presence shatters the sense of isolation which, as Jeffery Cox notes, marks Cenci’s withdrawal from “the bonds that tie the individual to the external world.” Although his growing isolation from society allows him to ignore those external “checks on his behavior” which limit any individual’s exploration of their internal desires,29 Beatrice’s body functions as an ever-present reminder of his inescapable connection to others. The violation of that body, however, constitutes an attempt on Cenci’s part both to affirm his self-control and to reinstate the principle of self-love as the driving force of his dark universe. In a letter to Maria Gisbourne (who, in fact, served as yet another maternal role model for Shelley during the period in which he composed The Cenci30 ) in November, 1819, Shelley explains that incest can be a form of destructive narcissism:

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Incest is, like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance. It may be the excess of love or hate. It may be the defiance of everything for the sake of another, which clothes itself in the highest heroism; or it may be that cynical rage which, when confounding the good and the bad in existing opinions, breaks through them for the purpose of rioting and selfishness. (PBS Letters 749)

Incest is, in other words (like motherhood), aesthetic in its components, grounded in the same quest for likeness, the same desire to see one’s image reflected in another, as Shelleyan sympathy. Although, in Cenci’s case, sexual union with his daughter becomes no more than an occasion to replicate his own image, “riot” in selfishness, and obliterate difference, this desire to find in the maternal body a reflection of the self betrays the same impulse inherent in Shelley’s fantasy of union with the body of the mother, as articulated in “On Love.” And this, I would stress, is precisely the point Shelley is confronting: sympathy, or the recognition of oneself in another, is never entirely disinterested, and can manifest itself explicitly as domination – in poetry as in life. It seems highly revealing that Mary Shelley would embark, during the same summer months that saw the composition of The Cenci (July and August, 181931 ), on a story which makes a similar point – Matilda. Matilda is generally read as Mary’s response to and critique of her troubled relationship with Godwin, but the timing of this project suggests an extraordinary affinity between the thought processes of the Shelleys. While Mary puts a different spin than Percy on the question of father–daughter incest, the underlying point is the same: “union” with another may prove catastrophic. In seeking to win her father’s confidence by giving him her complete sympathy, Matilda exposes herself to that which most threatens her psyche; she begs him to speak the “dreadful word,” though it be “as a flash of lightening to destroy me” (172). She believes her father to despise her, and sounds much like Beatrice in her appeal for his restored affections: “I adjure you, my father, has not an unnatural passion seized upon your heart? Am I not the most miserable worm that crawls? Do I not embrace your knees, and you most cruelly repulse me?” (172). Yet it is not a monstrous hatred which motivates the withdrawal of father from daughter, but (as in Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother) a “guilty love more unnatural than hate” (179). Love awakes “the fiend” within (179), while sympathy for Matilda’s suffering in the end spurs her father to confess the secret that will destroy them both, “pollut[ing her] mind,” and acquainting her with “the looks and language of unlawful and monstrous passion” (177). The resonances between this story and Percy’s play are unmistakable. Matilda’s father’s remorse-laden “guilty love” is as corrupt as Count Cenci’s remorseless attempt to ruin Beatrice. Each produces, at any rate, the same

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effect. Giacomo, Beatrice’s brother, notes that those subject to Cenci “are left, as scorpions ringed with fire / What should we do but strike ourselves to death?” (ii.ii:70–71), while Matilda, too, longs for death, and feels as though “stung by a serpent, as if scourged by a whip of scorpions” (173). Matilda’s moral crisis obviously mirrors Beatrice’s: if she regards her father “with less abhorrence [she] might hate vice less” (177). Moreover, like Beatrice (who “Stands like God’s angel ministered upon / by fiends” [v.i:43–44]), Matilda is to her father the “ministering Angel of a Paradise to which of all human kind you admitted only me” (178). He compares her effect upon him to that of (another) Beatrice upon Dante (178). Most significantly, both Mary and Percy would represent the feelings of these fathers as manifestations of their own narcissism. Although Matilda’s father claims to have believed in his “madness” that “[Matilda’s] mother’s spirit was transferred into [his daughter’s] frame, and she ought to be as Diana to me” (179), an elderly servant reveals to Matilda the truth, that while she is “like” her mother, “there is more of my lord in you” (168). In Cenci’s case, similarly, the desire for union with Beatrice becomes a means to obliterate her otherness. While, on one level, Cenci wants to overcome the fleshy connection between himself and Beatrice because it threatens his sense of autonomy, he also seeks to totalize that connection, because he wants to reproduce in her an absolute version of himself. Consider, in this light, Cenci’s vision of transfiguring Beatrice through pregnancy. His curse eventually extends to the entire universe, made pregnant with his evil: “All good shall droop and sicken, and ill things / Shall with a spirit of unnatural life / Stir and be quickened ” (iv.1:187–89, emphasis mine). Again, this fantasy betrays both Cenci’s recognition of his connection to thingsin-the-world, and his desire to pervert this interconnectedness through his egocentric will to inseminate others. Clearly, Shelley is confronting here the fact that the impulse to fuse with another and to obliterate otherness are two sides of the same coin. We should note that Cenci’s image of the corruption of “Mother Earth” significantly reverses the explicitly maternal imagery of Act III, scene ii, of Prometheus Unbound.32 The Earth, describing her past state of degeneration, recalls the transmission of her own pollution to her “many children,” who “drew disease and pain from my wan bosom, / Draining the poison of despair” (lines 90, 94–95). Now reanimated, the Earth shall henceforth with her progeny both “take / And interchange sweet nutriment”: [T]o me Shall they become like sister antelopes By one fair dam, snowwhite and swift as wind Nursed among lilies near a brimming stream;

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Shelley utilizes images of breastfeeding in this case to suggest the kind of positive interchange between the self and another (“shall take / And interchange sweet nutriment”) which restores and maintains life, but stresses, significantly, that previous to this scene (as in The Cenci) this same interconnectedness has proved lethal. We should note, moreover, that even the restored, more nurturing connection between Mother Earth and her children seems troubling here, in so far as her loving embrace is likened to a state of death. As in Felicia Hemans’s poetry, we confront here a form of union which seeks no release, which bespeaks the mother’s longing to say “Leave me not again.” There is something static about this longing, this desire for total fusion with another which recalls so strikingly both Matilda’s desire to unite with her father through death, and Mary Shelley’s own desires to rest with her son William in the grave. Though Percy promotes in Prometheus Unbound a vision of reconciliation, peace, and love, we can already detect something dangerous in the kind of “union” he so desperately wants to celebrate. Beatrice makes this point explicitly, prior to her execution: Come, obscure Death, And wind me in thine all-embracing arms! Like a fond mother hide me in thy bosom, And rock me to the sleep from which none wake. (v.iv:115–18)

Shelley is not simply making a distinction between “good” and “corrupt” forms of totalizing union via these maternal images. He is rendering problematic the ideals to which he is himself committed, suggesting explicitly that extreme forms of sympathetic engagement with another may not only lead to a sacrifice of the self, but might annihilate the difference of the other, and questioning what this might mean for the dramatic artist who takes the sympathetic mother as his aesthetic role model – what it meant, that is, for himself. In suppressing his own philosophy so as to do justice to Beatrice’s crisis, would he necessarily have to allow her point of view to usurp his own? Or, to put this another way, what happens when the poet–legislator admits the death of the author?

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In August, 1819, shortly before completing work on The Cenci, Shelley indeed vented his frustration over this dilemma in a letter to Leigh Hunt: “So much for self – self , that burr that will stick to one. I can’t get it off, yet” (PBS Letters 706, emphasis Shelley’s). Yet, clearly, he was making a conscious effort to do just this – more conscious, perhaps, than had ever previously been the case – and, indeed, as he tells Hunt, is at this moment “on the eve of completing another work, totally different from anything you might conjecture that I should write; of a more popular kind; and, if anything of mine could deserve attention, of higher claims” (PBS Letters 705). He would continue to reinforce these opinions in almost the exact terms in the weeks to follow. While assuring Hunt (on September 3rd) that he has “higher objects in view than fame” (PBS Letters 712) and noting to his publishers the Olliers that “the truth is, I write less for the public than for myself ” (PBS Letters 714), to each he also stresses that The Cenci is “totally different from anything else” (PBS Letters 713), a work “calculated to produce a very popular effect, and totally in a different style from anything I have yet composed” (PBS Letters 715). Emphasizing again and again the singularity of this work with respect to his personal style, and linking this uniqueness to the play’s more broad-based appeal, Shelley reveals his conscious attention to the way in which The Cenci – and with it his entrance into the popular theatrical arena – was radically challenging his sense of aesthetic authority.33 Shelley obviously connected this challenge to the imperatives of treating his source material accurately. He notes in the Preface to the play that The Cenci “is a tragedy which has already received, from its capacity of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men, approbation and success” (Preface 239). Why, in other words, mess with a good thing? His material had already earned the approval of the masses, and was in fact eminently suitable for Covent Garden for just this reason (even if potentially problematic due to its incest theme). To render “the exhibition subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose,” he stresses in the Preface, would corrupt its integrity. He wanted the story to speak for itself. Suppressing his own political/philosophical opinions (at least in the play proper, if not in the Preface) in deference to that which he has been “given,” clearly forced him to play a more passive authorial role, which necessitated his allowing the “magic” of the story work its own charm (240, 239). He explains in his “Dedication to Leigh Hunt”: “The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality. I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content to paint, with such colors as my own heart furnishes, that which has been” (237). Shelley was well aware, nonetheless, of the distance between himself and “that which has been,” and was conscious of the difficulties he faced in

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presenting an accurate account of Beatrice’s history. He notes in the first lines of his Preface that his source manuscript was itself merely an “account of the horrors” Beatrice Cenci had suffered – a textual interpretation of events, if a “detailed” one. He recognizes that he is a “stranger” to these events (242), and that his version of Beatrice’s story will necessarily be “colored” by his own feelings. Nevertheless, he insists that works of art enable us to see correspondences between past cultures and those which we inhabit in the present. He turns to another surviving representation of Beatrice (then attributed to Guido) for support: I endeavoured whilst at Rome to observe such monuments of this story as might be accessible to a stranger. The portrait of Beatrice at the Colonna Palace is admirable as a work of art: It was taken by Guido during her confinement in prison. But it is most interesting as a just representation of one of the loveliest specimens of the workmanship of Nature. (242)

We could read the assessment of Beatrice’s character which follows as representative of the kind of appropriation of otherness so characteristic of Shelley’s earlier writings, were it not for the highly qualified language of this passage. In describing the painting he repeatedly uses the present tense form of the verb “to be”: “Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes . . . are swollen with weeping and lustreless.” Yet in interpreting these signs Shelley employs less exact terms: “[S]he seems sad and stricken down in spirit”; it “seems as if death scarcely could extinguish [that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility betrayed by her lips]”; she “appears to be one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together” (242, all emphases mine). The truth is that appearances are all the portrait bespeaks, and that in this sense, the painting mirrors life. Thus, Shelley’s insistence that the woman in the painting was herself an imposter, an “actor”: “The crimes and miseries in which [Beatrice] was an actor and a sufferer are as the mask and mantle in which circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the world” (242). The “real” Beatrice, he suggests, is as unavailable to us as she was to her contemporaries, who witnessed only a performance – the script of which is, of course, irrecoverable. What can be gauged, Shelley insists, is the response of the Roman public to that performance. He stresses in the play’s Preface, that he has only conceived of the fitness of this subject for dramatic purposes because he recognizes the “national and universal interest which the story produces and has produced for two centuries and among all ranks of people in a great city, where the imagination is kept forever alive and awake” (239). Beatrice’s history could not:

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be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a deep and breathless interest . . . the feelings of the company never failed to incline to a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a passionate exculpation of the horrible deeds to which they urged her, who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust. All ranks of people knew the outlines of this history and participated in the overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of exciting in the human heart. (239)

The only “Beatrice” now available to Shelley is one who lives in the communal mind of the masses; “she” is an image that has been kept alive in the hearts of the members of the Roman community – one which has worked a kind of magic in those hearts by virtue of encouraging their sympathetic responses. Moreover, this shared idea of Beatrice produces in Shelley’s eyes a particular kind of national body composed of “all ranks of people” – the “character” of which is subsequently defined by the very capacity for imaginative experience which has brought it into being. Shelley’s intent, he confesses, is merely to extend this community across territorial borders – to work a similar magic on the hearts of Englishmen: “Nothing remained as I imagined, but to clothe [the story] to the apprehensions of my countrymen in such language and action as would bring it home to their hearts” (239). Just as the sympathetic response of generations of Romans to Beatrice Cenci’s story has helped keep “alive and awake” the imagination of that great city, so, too, the dramatizing of that story in London might revitalize English hearts and so awaken the nation’s slumbering imaginations. James Chandler’s understanding of Shelley’s historicism helps illuminate the ways in which the poet envisioned this process happening. The imperative for Shelley, as Chandler sees it, was double in nature: to demonstrate the relationship of a character from the past to the culture that produces him/her, and to do so in such a way as to render this relationship fully intelligible to a modern audience. Shelley is concerned with two sets of parallel relations, in other words: “past character to past culture, on the one hand, and present audience to that past character–culture relationship, on the other.”34 What is at issue is less historical accuracy than the sympathetic recognition of a pattern of correspondences in which the audience is implicated. Shelley’s aim, Chandler maintains, is: to show that the sympathy of the spectator with Beatrice has its basis in a two-fold recognition: the first phase is the spectator’s recognition of himself or herself in Beatrice . . . The second phase of this recognition is that the spectator and the tragic subject (Beatrice, in this case) are alike in being agents largely determined by the particular historical situation in which each appears.35

For Shelley, the very possibility of such a recognition on the part of the audience becomes that which might distinguish the present historical

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moment from the world of 1599. To understand that one is an actor, playing out a part that is predetermined by institutional forces, constitutes the first step, so to speak, in changing the terms of the script. In this sense the type of sympathy that Shelley wants to inspire in his audience is differentiated radically from that inherent in Adam Smith’s model, to which Shelley had earlier appealed. Sympathy in this present case is born of distance and of the acceptance of the fact that we are in fact but “strangers to ourselves,” to borrow Kristeva’s terms, rather than being grounded in a more simplistic quest for likeness. Shelley held that such a revised understanding of sympathetic relationship might produce, in turn, a new understanding of community, which is really grounded in a recognition of both the otherness of the self and of the sympathetic connection of all individuals who share in this recognition. The acceptance of an individual’s singularities, as these are determined by contingent circumstances, historical placement, and cultural environment, is an inevitable by-product of such an aesthetic vision. These singularities need not, indeed cannot, be necessarily harmonized, as homogeneity, the obliteration of difference in the interest of a political totality, constitutes an unnatural ideal, in which the contingencies of individual circumstance are denied or suppressed, just as for Beatrice at her trial. Shelley’s positing of an ideality is thus essentially anti-nationalist in nature; the nation’s legislative burden is transposed in this scheme into a borderless philosophical system. The type of national character he hopes to produce is, in this sense, little more than a return to the Enlightenment concept of liberal cosmopolitanism or internationalism. Hume, for example, in “Of National Character,” had defined the essence of English national character in terms of the absence of any one defining national characteristic, and rooted this distinction in the social and political traditions of England, that is, England after 1689: i.e., in the nation’s more egalitarian political structure, representative system of government, and tradition of social tolerance. For Hume, the emergence of any exclusively definitive national disposition points to oppression, a stifling of cultivated sensibility.36 So, too, for Shelley, a decided Hellenist who held that the century which preceded the death of Socrates was the “epoch memorable above all others,” and for whom the republican virtues of the Athenians represented “the dictates of the beautiful and true.” The narrow patriotism expressed in England during the reign of Charles II, by contrast, produced in his view “the grossest degradation” of dramatic arts, given that poetry expressive of “liberty and virtue” gave way to “hymns to the triumph of kingly power” (A Defence of Poetry 488, 491). So, too, post-Napoleonic England demonstrates the same tendency toward decline. Shelley’s growing sense of the present state of crisis in

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England during the period which saw the composition of The Cenci and in the months that followed (which saw the Perterloo crisis) is captured in a sonnet he sent to Leigh Hunt in December, 1819, entitled “England in 1819,” which I quote here in its entirety: An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King; Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn, – mud from a muddy spring; Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting country cling Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field; An army, whom liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield; Gold and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless – a book sealed; A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed – Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. (311)

This catalogue of bitter invectives denouncing the present state of affairs in England ends with a prophecy of sorts: though England lies in darkness, enlightenment need not merely remain a “glorious Phantom” – its spirit might be raised from the dead. This poem speaks directly to Shelley’s intentions for The Cenci. He notes in the Preface that if rendered faithfully according to the facts, the play might function “as a light to make apparent some of the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart” (239). This is indeed the ultimate end of poetic drama as he represents it (in terms which echo those of Joanna Baillie), its highest moral purpose being “the teaching of the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself ” (240). Given that we function as actors within historical dramas not of our own scripting, social change depends on our confronting the self unknown, the stranger within as without. To this end, in dramatic productions lie the seeds of nothing short of a national awakening: [T]he connexion of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than in whatever other form: and it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. (A Defence of Poetry 492)

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In no small part, Shelley links the moral efficacy of drama, like Baillie, to its tangible immediacy; he makes explicit in A Defence of Poetry the “connexion [between] scenic exhibitions [and] the improvement or corruption of the manners of men” (490). Endowing the ephemeral “Beatrice” with material substance becomes the means through which imagination, like “the immortal God,” might “assume flesh for the redemption of mortal passion” (Preface 241). This act of transubstantiation is realized in stage drama specifically through performance, which lends fleshy substance to the poet’s “illustration of strong feeling” (241). Yet the success of the dramatic artist of course remains entirely dependent upon the specific means through which the poetic vision is embodied. The capacity of drama to spur social change, in other words, depends largely upon the materialization of the artist’s vision in the mutable context of the theater – an arena marked in the early decades of the nineteenth century by riotous excess on the part of the audience only heightened by the melodramatics on stage.37 While Shelley would ideally inspire self-knowledge by triggering the historical consciousness of his audience members with The Cenci, he felt that he would necessarily have to appeal to the most common denominator in order for the play to produce the desired result. Thus his insistence that he has written “more carelessly; that is, without an overfastidious and learned choice of words,” and his advice to other dramatists of his age to employ the “real language of men in general and not that of any particular class to whose society the writer happens to belong” (Preface 241–42). This attention to and concern for class differences betrays Shelley’s anxieties about his viewers’ abilities to sympathize with and understand the implications of his display of the deeds of a crumbling aristocratic order. Daniel Watkins has recently argued that this type of anxiety is characteristic of Romantic drama, in so far as it served as a register of “the difficult struggle that marked the [period’s] transition from an aristocratic to a bourgeois worldview.”38 Shelley himself seems well aware of these limitations, and was indeed vocal about his own aristocratic distaste for the more conventionally bourgeois theatre productions of the day.39 He notes expressly that his has been merely an attempt at a more egalitarian poetics: “I need not be assured,” he concedes, “that success is a very different matter” (Preface 242). Success in the theater, of course, is highly dependent, too, on the quality of individual performances. While the presence of bodies on the stage may lend concreteness to the suffering of otherwise opaque characters, the temporal nature of the theater necessarily challenges the monumental permanence of an artist’s textual representation. A play is born anew with each performance; the “brain child” of the dramatist takes on a life of its

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own in this sense. Moreover, the playwright’s unique personal conception might not be realized, even when the work is presented with some consistency. Thus Shelley provides advice on the staging in his Preface, by way of warning: The story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous: anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of these events, so that the pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring. (239–40)

In Shelley’s mind, moreover, the successful reception of The Cenci depended in large measure on securing the talents of the popular London stage actress, Eliza O’Neil, for whom the part of Beatrice was expressly designed: “The principal character,” he wrote to Peacock, “is precisely fitted for Miss O’Neil, and might even seem to have been written for her (God forbid that I should see her play it – it would tear my nerves to pieces)” (quoted in Mary Shelley’s “Note on The Cenci” 365). Julie Carlson reads the apprehension which Shelley here betrays as a sign of his reluctance to see The Cenci staged at all, despite his (and Mary Shelley’s) repeated insistences to the contrary.40 Yet this sense of ambivalence suggests more than a dread of the embodiment of dangerous feminine agency in the public arena of Covent Garden, as Carlson suggests. His is also, more particularly, the anxiety of the creator who must necessarily abandon control of the creation, hand over the reins to another, so to speak, sacrifice his own authority for the sake of the life of his object. Miss O’Neill’s performance, particularly, was one which Shelley felt would require great subtlety, though the actress, as Curren has noted, had “a penchant for scenes of madness and distracted grief that was sometimes indulged to excess.”41 Shelley is clearly anxious, along these lines, about the possibility that he might be misrepresented as well as misunderstood – about his lack of control over his “creation” as well as his lack of authority over those who will be “exposed” to it. To put this another way, Shelley recognizes that the survival of his own dramatic progeny entails a self-effacement on his part which, if not unwilling, is at best embraced ambivalently. In the Preface to the play, he stresses that his goal is “to present to the reader all the feelings of those who once acted [this story], their hopes and fears, their confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions and opinions acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one tremendous end” (239). Recognizing nonetheless the ways in which the impulse to infiltrate the psyche of the

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other implicates him in the tyranny he wants to expose, he must struggle to allow these characters to speak in their own voices: “I have endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the characters as they probably were,” he explains, “and have sought to avoid the error of making them actuated by my own conceptions of right and wrong, false and true, thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of the sixteenth century into cold impersonations of my own mind” (240). The only way to avoid misrepresenting those “who once acted” this drama, in short, is to become (like a mother) a passive medium through which the story passes, and from which it must necessarily separate – to present, rather than aim to represent the feelings of those parties involved. Shelley thus explains the primary importance of the theater’s display of bodies – its visual immediacy: “Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected on that which it resembles” (A Defence of Poetry 491). Staged drama functions as a “prismatic and many-sided mirror” in which the audience beholds itself “under a thin disguise of circumstance” (491, 490). As a mirror of life, drama brings together essential elements of “human nature,” divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall. (491)

The reproductive imagery of this passage is inescapable. Foregrounding the materiality of the dramatist’s work allows Shelley to emphasize the inherent naturalness of drama’s ability to “propagate” images that reveal the otherness within ourselves – and this, for Shelley, proves the key to social transformation. To be so transformed by the object of contemplation, however, is to occupy the imagined position of Beatrice, looking into the eyes of a child who is both self and that which is most alien to self, confronting in that which is most familiar that which is also most horrific. In this sense, Shelley clearly conflated Beatrice’s crisis with his own. The dramatist whom he aspires to be must not only function as the “bearer” of the mirror, in other words, but must necessarily turn that reflective surface upon himself, confront the limitations of his creative faculties, recognize that his highly subjective aesthetic vision contained the seeds of Cenci-like monstrosity. Shelley is not only the “reflector” in this work, in other words; like both Cenci and Beatrice he is also transfigured by his own “creation,” subject and object of the gaze at once. It was an authorial position, Mary would later stress, that he found all but unbearable. Like his heroine, he endures a trial with The Cenci, the writing of which was therapeutic, as he notes to Hunt upon the play’s conclusion,

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only in so far as it “kept up, I think, the pain in my side, as sticks do a fire” (PBS Letters 710).42 As Mary explained, Shelley shrunk instinctively from portraying human passion, with its mixture of good and evil, of disappointment and disquiet. Such opened again the wounds of his own heart; and he loved to shelter himself rather in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting love and hate, and regret and lost hope. (“Note on The Witch of Atlas” 462)

Mary admits, however, that she saw The Cenci as a new beginning for her husband, which made her “greatly desire that Shelley should increase his popularity by adopting subjects that would more suit the popular taste than a poem conceived in the abstract . . . Even now I believe that I was in the right” (462). She accentuates here the differences between her aesthetic vision and Percy’s, but also underscores that, with respect to The Cenci, her vision prevailed. Although Mary stresses the singularity of this occasion, Percy’s later prose works suggest that he was, indeed, moving toward an authorial perspective which admitted of the limitations of his own, highly subjective pointof-view. “How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being,” he notes, for example, in “On Life” (also written late in 1819). “Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is much” (475–76). Moving away from a perspective that seeks to “penetrate,” toward one which allows that the “[m]ind . . . cannot create, it can only perceive” (478), the mature Shelley assumes the necessity of the sympathetic poet’s “active” passivity. In A Defence of Poetry he would extend this theme, explicitly comparing the labor of the artist to the gestation of a child: “[A] picture should grow under the power of the artist as a child in the mother’s womb” (504). The maternal body of The Defence is no longer a static object of the gaze, but rather signifies an alternative creative process. Shelley moves consciously away from the imagery articulated in “On Love,” (from an aesthetics grounded in a quest for likeness), toward a vision of the “pregnant” artist who is, like a mother, created by and contingent upon the creation. While this movement betrays his continued reliance on appeals to woman’s nature as natural “evidence” of his evolving poetic theories, in the later writings the mother–child bond signifies the necessity of allowing for and, in fact, maintaining difference; it represents a form of “union” which tends, nevertheless, toward release, separation, freedom. As such, it testifies to Shelley’s recognition of the limits of his own poetic authority, to his acknowledgment that he is “unbound” of his poetic creations in ways that he must accept or pervert.

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Although The Cenci marks a significant shift in Percy Shelley’s understanding of the gender-based issues which underwrite his poetics, it is worth emphasizing that there were limits to his commitment to a more egalitarian authorial position. While his insistence in his later work on a more dialectical “maternal” aesthetic is evidenced by his turn to Mary for advice and instruction (rather than simply for secretarial assistance), we should note, too, that he never explicitly acknowledges the influence of his wife on his evolving conception of authorship. It seems all the more important for current scholars to fill in these gaps, not only so as to give credit where it is due, but because our inattentiveness to the impact of female (and especially to “maternal”) role-models on Romantic-period writers betrays our (still dominant) critical tendency to look almost exclusively to paternal predecessor-figures when considering the lines of literary influence. This tendency not only obscures Percy Shelley’s examination of his own “sympathetic” engagements with feminine otherness in The Cenci and veils his growing anxieties about the potentially colonizing nature of Shelleyan sympathy, it also limits our understanding of the complex ways in which the appropriation of maternalized subject positions could be negotiated by canonical writers of the Romantic period.

Postscript

Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and of an other, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech. This fundamental challenge to identity is then accompanied by a fantasy of totality – narcissistic completeness – a sort of instituted, socialized, natural psychosis. The arrival of the child, on the other hand, leads the mother into the labyrinths of an experience that, without the child, she would only rarely encounter: love for an other. Not for herself, nor for an identical human being, and still less for another person with whom “I” fuse (love or sexual passion). But the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one’s affective, intellectual, and professional personality – such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time”1

You marvel at the age, at the ferment of its gigantic power, at its violent convulsions, and don’t know what new births to expect. Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas 52

Personal as well as professional interests informed this project from the outset. Indeed, I believe that this monograph began to germinate long before I found a vehicle through which to convey my thoughts about historical shifts in the “invention of maternity,” to adopt Susan Greenfield’s and Carol Barash’s terms.3 My first pregnancies, in the early eighties, came to fruition during a period when public attitudes about the period of gestation were undergoing rapid changes. I was “policed” in ways that my mother had not been: those things that I put into my body seemed to be matters of widespread concern, and, while I remain grateful for the technological advances that linked smoking to low birth weights and the consumption of alcohol or caffeine to birth defects and other neonatal disorders, I was disarmed somewhat by the public scrutiny of this most private of experiences. 183

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I found it curious, too, that during my pregnancies people – even strangers – frequently placed their hands on me in ways that would have seemed highly inappropriate under different circumstances. I was somewhat unsettled by the ways in which this body, my body, did not quite “belong” to me any longer, and this was an aspect of pregnancy that the “you’re having a baby” advice books did not pursue. I did not find a language for these impressions until I went to graduate school. The disorientation I had felt during my pregnancies and the recovery of “self ” that happened almost immediately after I gave birth began to take shape within something of a theoretical framework, though one which would undergo many transmutations in the decade that followed, years which saw my transition from a mostly stay-at-home married mom who squeezed-in studying, teaching, and writing before my husband went to work and after my children were in bed, to a full-time working single mother. I have defended myself in a number of trials along the way, but remain fully conscious that these are dwarfed by the experiences of other women, who need to be understood not as “case studies” but as individuals sometimes negotiating extraordinary, and often acutely painful, circumstances. As I write this, courtroom trials involving mothers who killed their children are making banner headlines across the country. One of these occurred close to home, in neighboring Zeeland, Michigan, last year. Six months ago, the close friend of a close friend threw herself in front of an oncoming train months after the birth of her first child. She was thrilled about her pregnancy and had no history of any type of mental disorder whatsoever, but experienced such severe, unanticipated postpartum depression that she took her life – and in this extremely violent way. I know women who continue to struggle with the pain of having undergone abortions and others who have moved on, one woman so devastated over having given up a child for adoption that she faces an imminent breakdown and others who were strengthened by the same experience, women who long to have children and do not, and others who feel an ethical compulsion to remain childless in a world so fraught with danger, hunger, terror. I know women who entirely lost themselves when they became mothers and others who found their best calling and are joyfully raising well-loved children; I know men who are better “mothers” than I could ever be. I myself have two mothers: my mom, who raised me as her brightest and shiniest star and Joyce, who gave me my life and then gave me my best chance by gifting me to my mom. When I think of these things I find myself again at a loss for words, but I know that they are connected in some intimate way to the concerns of this book, to the ways in which maternity has been constructed in the past and must be reconstructed again and again and again.

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One of the tasks that faces feminist scholars involves maintaining a degree of objectivity; another involves naming and claiming our highly personal and subjective experiences, speaking the previously unspoken word, trying to sort through the mess of what we have been taught overtly and what we have absorbed unconsciously, what we think we know and what we know we think. And, while I understand that what it “means” to be a mother cannot be disassociated from the network of institutional structures through which maternal experiences are filtered, while I believe that any claim to transhistorical maternal instinct is not only misguided but also highly dangerous, while I know that my alternating feelings of radical dislocation and anxious doubt, fierce mother love and blissful motherly security do not belie universal truths about motherhood, I understand, too, that how maternity is written and spoken bears heavily on how it is lived. And I believe that how we mother and how we are mothered remain issues of the utmost importance – not simply because we like to cling to the belief that “children are our future” and represent our best hopes and most romanticized investments, but because motherhood remains one of the most highly charged, culturally complex, dangerously undertheorized occupations facing women who continue to reproduce, to be socially reproduced, or to resist either or both of these processes. Although we still tend to invest heavily in the idea that motherhood is the most “natural” of destinies available to women, clearly the tide is turning. Sara Ruddick, for example, describes the processes of mothering in terms of ongoing “negotiations.” While she appeals to the benevolence of mothers, Ruddick’s version of maternal “disinterestedness” veers significantly from Hume’s: [W]hat is striking about mothers is their commitment to nonviolent action in precisely those situations where they are undeniably powerful, however powerless they may feel – namely, in their battles with their children. Children are vulnerable creatures and as such elicit either aggression or care. Recalcitrance and anger tend to provoke aggression, and children can be angrily recalcitrant. Typically, the mother who confronts her children is herself young, hassled if not harassed by officials in an outside world, usually by her own employers, and often by adults she lives with. She brings to confrontations with her children psychological and physical strengths which are potentially lethal. Her ability to damage her children increases the more she is alone with them, the less others are available to go to the children’s aid . . . I can think of no other situation in which someone subject to resentments at her social powerlessness, under enormous pressures of time and anger, faces a recalcitrant but helpless combatant with so much restraint. This is the nonviolence of the powerful.4

Ruddick’s “mother” is not defined by her capacity for sympathy; her “battles” are marked not only by nonviolent actions but by the suppression

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of the impulse for violence. Ruddick targets, in other words, women’s historical capacities to cope with the presence of others who threaten their freedom, sanity, autonomy. But so, too, she paints a vivid picture of the extraordinary pressures facing women who may be less able or willing to so cope – a picture increasingly familiar in a society still haunted by the prevalence of infanticide, child neglect, severe abuse. Attempts like this to make visible and comprehensible “new” maternal narratives mirror those we have examined during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – even if they approach motherhood from a slightly different angle. We might spend less time debating whether such narratives are representative of some sort of universal experience of motherhood, and attend rather more specifically to the ends such “mothers’ tales” might and, in fact, do serve. It is important to recognize, in other words, that representations of maternal “experience” continue to both draw upon and feed specific political interests, which are not always apparent at surface glance. We should be attentive, for example, to the ways in which alternative representations of motherhood and maternal bodies, like those offered by Ruddick, can help expose the extraordinary difficulties which many women face in raising children. Yet so too, more sublime (less harmonious) descriptions of the maternal body and of the processes of motherhood might be (and have been) packaged and marketed so as to seemingly “testify” more broadly to the incivility which marks Western civil relations – to the supposed breakdown of “family values” in contemporary society. This supposed collapse in standards, suggestively, is all too often blamed on working women, welfare mothers, etc. – those more easily targeted as unconventional in their maternity, as potential over- or under-reproducers. Recent critical interest in the subject of infanticide provides a case in point. In considering the various strategies writers in the past adopted in dealing with the issue of child murder, in all its literal and figurative senses, it is worth considering where our own sympathies lie. Infanticide is a topic which on many levels we are still very uncomfortable talking about, though one which we continue to confront in newspapers or on the nightly news (at least in the United States) on a nearly daily basis. As in the past, representations of infanticidal mothers today tend to be demarcated strongly along class and racial lines; white, middle-to-upperclass mothers charged with this crime often get the most press coverage – possibly because they unsettle established authority the most by appearing to be, on the surface, “normal.” Lower-class women (welfare mothers) are still frequently “tried” in the public imagination for the crime of excessive love (i.e. for staying home with children who consequently have to be

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supported by the state), while professional women working outside of their homes are targeted for “abandoning” their children to the care of others. We need to be attentive to the ways in which assumptions about the nature of maternal “nature” thoroughly inform these accounts, and continue to lock women in the same kinds of double binds facing mothers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An historical consideration of the literal as well as figurative trials of mothers might help us to move beyond questions of what is instinctual or enlightened, enabling us better to address the circumstances that might factor into a woman’s rejection (or, for that matter, her acceptance) of the role of mother, while de-romanticizing the concept of idealized motherhood that so much contemporary criticism still seems to endorse. That motherhood is a condition not always experienced as a state of perfect sympathy with another need not be considered aberrant or monstrous. Yet we want to be attentive to the fact that sympathetic responses to maternal ambivalence frequently accentuate the pathology of the maternal body or the innate instability of women’s (especially pregnant or postpartum) psychologies – and so continue to reinforce the suggestion that the female body, in and of itself, requires “treatment.” We need to recognize that women’s violent impulses toward their children are often conditioned by both external and internal forces, by environments as well as by physiologies. Moreover, to invoke physiology need not entail a wholesale dismissal of issues of accountability. To the contrary, in recognizing that the body is something over which we may exercise a large degree of control, we foreground questions of responsibility, on a number of levels. Mothers (especially new mothers) are prone to extraordinary physical fatigue, for example, which even in the best of circumstances may surface as resentment toward the child whose demands seem at times virtually inexhaustible. Yet certainly this is due, at least in part, to the fact that many women continue to assume full responsibility for the care of newborns – to the fact that “outside” help is often unavailable, unaffordable, or inadequate. Perhaps the questions we need to ask when confronting the issue of infanticide are not simply how or why this might happen, but rather: what prevents this from happening? Under what conditions are women best able to cope with the demands of children who threaten their mobility, autonomy, and (sometimes) sanity? And, finally, how might we work in the future to better protect both mothers and children from the harsh conditions in which violence flourishes? Most importantly, perhaps we need to address these questions more frequently in the future to mothers themselves. Those mother’s tales from the past which have the most resonance for us today,

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I want to argue, regardless of the politics of their narrators, are those which acknowledge both the benefits and the limits of attempting to account objectively for any experience to which we are not privy; those which suggest that the task at hand is both to listen and to speak out. My hope is that this book will offer some insight into the complexities of the historical trials of mothers, and serve as a bridge toward forging new maternal frontiers. I do not see the future in terms of progress or advancement, but rather in terms of an ongoing “state of emergency,” to invoke Walter Benjamin’s term, one which is connected in an intimate dialogic relation to that which has come before. Benjamin famously speaks of the Paul Klee painting “Angelus Novus,” which he sees as depicting the “angel of history”: face turned to the past, viewing a pile of wreckage building upon wreckage, desirous to stay, “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed” but propelled irresistibly into a future, the wind of which catches in the great outspread wings “with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.” To be amazed that the pile of debris continues to grow, that the things we experience are “still,” possible, Benjamin tells us, “is not philosophical.”5 Perhaps it may be possible to see the wreckage and yet learn to recycle, to dance on the landfill of a maternal history shot through with pain and pleasure, love and horror, milk and blood. I make no claims to being an instructor in the steps of the dance, acknowledging only that many differing kinds of rhythms ruffle the feathers of our wings and move our bodies to variously sway. But my hope is that, in the future, women who do choose to mother might embrace more readily that which Kristeva calls a “guiltless maternity” – which functions not only as a “slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself,” but as the basis for the establishment of “another standard,” to invoke Antonio Gramsci’s terms, “whereby the woman is no longer just the female who nurses her newborn and feels for them a love made up of spasms of the flesh and palpitations of the heart, but is a human creature in herself, with her own awareness, her own inner needs, a human personality entirely her own, and the dignity of an independent being.”6

Notes

i n t ro d u c t i o n n atu rally bad or dan gero us ly go o d: ro m a n tic- period m oth ers “on t rial” 1. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London: 1799), i:59. 2. Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), v:226, note 2. 3. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 32. 4. England in 1819. The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 203, 209–9. 5. See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 50–67 for a good overview of early “woman-centered” feminist criticisms. 6. Cf. Butler’s Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990). Butler’s critique of Julia Kristeva’s appeals to the maternal body, for example, centers on the assumption that the female body to which Kristeva refers is itself a construct produced by the very law she seeks to undermine (see especially pp. 81–98). 7. “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Critical Theory Since 1965, eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1986), p. 312. 8. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse,” in Feminisms. An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 390. 9. “Substitution,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 94–95. 10. Sara Ruddick, “Thinking Mothers / Conceiving Birth,” in Representations of Motherhood, eds. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Merle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 11. See Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge 1988), pp. 89–114, for a good analysis of these issues in Frankenstein. 12. Mary O’Brien, “State Power and Reproductive Freedom,” in Reproducing the World: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. O’Brien (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), p. 24. 189

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13. Michel Foucault, “The Body of the Condemned,” from Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, repr. in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 175–76. 14. Michel Foucault, “The Means of Correct Training,” from Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, repr. in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 202–4. 15. Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 42. 16. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 339. 17. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “To a Little Invisible Being Who is Expected Soon to Become Visible” (1825), repr. in British Women Writers, eds. Dale Spender and Janet Todd (New York: P. Bedick Books, 1989), pp. 180–81. 18. See Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynacology in Tudor and Stuart England (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), pp. 125–30, for data on maternal mortality rates. 19. See James McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility. A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 66–68, for an alternative reading of this poem. McGann suggests that Barbauld’s “perceived inability to control [the poem’s maternal energies] is suggestive of a new kind of artist (one who ‘watches and receives’)” (p. 67). 20. See The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), where de Beauvoir stresses that “biological considerations are extremely important” as in the history of woman “they play a part of the first rank and constitute an essential element in her situation”: “For, the body being one instrument of our grasp upon the world, the world is bound to seem a very different thing when apprehended in one manner or another.” Nevertheless, biological facts do not “establish for her a fixed and inevitable destiny. They are insufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes; they fail to explain why woman is the Other; they do not condemn her to remain in this subordinate role forever” (pp. 32–33). 21. My reading of Barbauld’s poem is indebted to ideas sparked by Toril Moi’s series of lectures, entitled “What is a Woman?,” delivered at the University of Notre Dame, October 14–16, 1998. 22. Cf. Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge, 1981); and Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex ( New York: Morrow, 1970). 23. Susan Greenfield argues that texts which engage eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury debates about mother–child bonding tend to “reflect the gradual development of a cultural consensus about childhood needs that psychoanalysis inherits and elaborates” (“Introduction” to Inventing Maternity. Politics, Science, and Literature 1650–1865, eds. Susan Greenfield and Carol Barash [Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999], p. 20). Similarly Carolyn Dever, in Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge University Press, 1998), maintains that the “Victorian

Notes to pages 9–12

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

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concern with maternal loss offers psychoanalysis its most basic vocabulary for human development” (p. 3). “And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other,” quoted in “Women–mothers, the Silent Substratum,” in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 51. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 182, 178–79, 183; and “Women’s Time,” in The Kristeva Reader, 206. Luce Irigaray, “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother,” trans. David Macey, in The Irigaray Reader, p. 35. Luce Irigaray, “On the Maternal Order,” in je, tu, nous. Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993). Irigaray appeals to recent scientific research to support her insistence on the fact that the placenta “isn’t some sort of automatic protection system, which would suppress all the mother’s reaction [the reaction, that is, of her immune system to a foreign body] by preventing it from recognizing the embryo–fetus as other. On the contrary . . . [t]he difference between the ‘self ’ and other is, so to speak, continually negotiated” (p. 41). Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 129, emphasis Kristeva’s. Ibid., p. 132. I am indebted on this front to Jennifer Thorn, whose sound advice helped shape my understanding of what was at issue in this book on Romantic motherhood. Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 3. Mellor’s model, I would stress, is a highly useful beginning for considering ways to negotiate the new terrain of Romantic studies, and it is important to recognize that she herself resists the urge to solidify the terms of discussion and cautions against their rigid application, noting that “a model based on polarity is both theoretically dubious and critically confining” (p. 3). The problem, as I see it, lies not with Mellor’s ground-breaking work on gender constructions during the Romantic period, but with the appropriation of this model in ways which do become dubious and confining. Critics following Mellor, in other words, are often less self-conscious about her model than is she. See Mellor’s more recent Mothers of the Nation. Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), for her argument that women writers of the Romantic period “participated fully in the public sphere as Habermas defined it” (p. 3). She goes on to reiterate, however: “I see the values of the private sphere associated primarily with women – moral virtue and an ethic of care – infiltrating and finally dominating the discursive public sphere during the Romantic era” (p. 11). Note that Carol Gilligan’s theories of mother–daughter relationships and of a feminine “ethic of care” (see In A Different Voice [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982])

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33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Notes to pages 12–16 have been adopted by numerous feminist critics. Gilligan herself draws on Nancy Chodorow’s influential object-relations study, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). The “big six” Romantic writers are, of course, William Blake, Lord Byron, S. T. Coleridge, John Keats, Percy B. Shelley, and William Wordsworth. “Introduction,” Inventing Maternity, p. 1. Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 119. The Poetics of Sensibility, p. 65. See also, for similar positions, Meena Alexander, Women in Romanticism (Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1989) and Laurie Langbauer, “An Early Romance: Motherhood and Women’s Writing in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 208–19. Stuart Curran, by contrast, stresses that women’s writings of the period are marked by a sense of “alienated sensibility,” but does not tie the experience of alienation to that of motherhood (“Romantic Poetry: The I Altered,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Mellor, p. 203). See Barbara Gelpi, “Significant Exposure: The Turn-of-the-Century Breast,” in Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20.2 (1997): 125–45. “Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Mellor, p. 15. Cf. Barbara Gelpi’s Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Diane Hoeveler’s Romantic Androgyny. The Woman Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990); and Barbara Shapiro’s The Romantic Mother: Narcissistic Patterns in Romantic Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Cf. Felicity Nussbaum’s Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood. British Writing and Culture, 1680–1760 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 20–21. Bowers similarly notes that the “too-indulgent mother makes frequent appearances in eighteenth-century writing in many genres” (ibid., p. 159). J. J. Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), p. 8. All references to Emile hereafter will be cited parenthetically in the text. Josephine McDonagh, “Infanticide and the Boundaries of Culture from Hume to Arnold,” in Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650–1865, eds. Susan Greenfield and Carol Barash, pp. 216, 221. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, in Mary, Maria, and Matilda, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 65. References to Wrongs hereafter will be cited parenthetically in the text. See “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 176–204.

Notes to pages 19–24

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46. David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 123. Anne Mellor further notes that “[t]he success of lending libraries, which spread rapidly throughout England during the late eighteenth century, ensured that women dominated both the production and the consumption of literature” (Mothers of the Nation, p. 3). 47. “Stabat Mater,” p. 174. 1 revo lu t i o ns in m oth erin g: th eory and pract ice 1. “To Mrs. Moore, On the Birth of the First Child Ever Born in Lambeth Palace. October 13, 1786,” in British Women Writers, eds. Dale Spender and Janet Todd (New York: P. Bedick Books, 1989), pp. 165–66. 2. Jimack, P. D., “Introduction,” in Emile, pp. xl, xviii. 3. See, for example, Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and the Enlightenment in England 1789–1832 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 6–11; William Kessen, “Rousseau’s Children,” Daedalus 107 (1978): 155; and Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 74–92. 4. Mary Sheriff, “Fragonard’s Mothers and the Politics of Reproduction,” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 22. 5. See Carol Mossman, Politics and Narratives of Birth. Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola (Cambridge University Press, 1993) for an extensive treatment of Rousseau’s attitudes toward mothers and motherhood. 6. Felicity Nussbaum explains that the “invention of the ‘other’ woman of empire enabled the consolidation of the cult of domesticity in England and, at the same time, the association of the sexualized woman at home with the exotic, or ‘savage,’ non-European woman.” Nussbaum stresses that “a particular kind of national imperative to control women’s sexuality and fecundity emerged [during the eighteenth century] when the increasing demands of trade and colonization required a large, able-bodied citizenry,” and that “women’s reproductive labor was harnessed to this task” (p. 1). See also Bowers, Politics of Motherhood, on representations of deviant eighteenth-century British mothers. 7. As Mary Poovey notes, the rise of capitalism in the late eighteenth century worked to further challenge traditional ways of understanding the gendered dimensions of interpersonal and societal relationships, as “competition and confrontation replaced the old paternalistic alliances of responsibilities and dependencies” (The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austin [University of Chicago Press, 1984], p. xv). 8. Mossman, Politics, p. 184. 9. Toni Bowers traces the simultaneous trend during the eighteenth century to “extol virtuous maternal influence” and to subordinate “the power of mothers to that of fathers” (Politics of Motherhood, p. 166).

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Notes to pages 24–28

10. Sheriff, “Fragonard’s Mothers,” p. 22. 11. See “Incorruptible Milk: Breast-feeding and the French Revolution,” in Rebel Daughters. Women and the French Revolution, eds. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 54–75. 12. Mossman, Politics, p. 187. 13. [Nougaret], attr. to John O’Connor and John Mary, trans., in Anecdotes of the Reign of Louis XVIth, The Present King of France (New York: F. Childs, 1787), pp. 85–86. 14. Strangers to Ourselves, p. 171. 15. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 24–25. Eagleton explains the function of the aesthetic object, as constructed by eighteenth-century theorists: “[E]ach of its sensuous parts, while appearing wholly autonomous, incarnates the ‘law’ of the totality. Each aesthetic particular, in the very act of determining itself, regulates and is regulated by all self-determining particulars” (p. 25). 16. For an excellent analysis of British writers’ rejection of abstract theory and rationalist methodology during the Enlightenment period, see Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory, pp. 40–62. 17. See Deane on Hutcheson’s influence on Edmund Burke and on Burke’s understanding of “local affections as the basis for the social and political system” (The French Revolution and the Enlightenment in England 1789–1832, pp. 14–18); Eagleton on Hutcheson’s aesthetic politics (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture [London: Verso, 1995], pp. 104–23); and McFarland on Hutcheson’s role in the exchange of ideas between Ulster and Scotland during the eighteenth century (Ireland and Scotland in the Age of Revolution [Edinburgh University Press, 1994], pp. 12–18). 18. See Francis Hutcheson, “An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil,” in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 2nd edn. (New York: Garland, 1971), p. 205. References to this essay hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 19. See The Facts of Life: The Creation Of Sexual Knowledge in Britain 1650–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 18. 20. The growth of interest during the eighteenth century in the body as a source of empirical knowledge certainly influenced this trend in philosophical writings of the period. Many excellent studies of the impact of scientific discourse on theories regarding the “nature” of the sexes have appeared in the last decades. See, for example, Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in The Making of the Modern Body, eds. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 1–41; Ludmilla Jordanova, “Sex and Gender,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth Century Domains, eds. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 152–83; Roy Porter, “Bodies of Thought: Thoughts about the Body in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Interpretation and Cultural History, eds. Joan H. Pittock and Andrew Wear (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), pp. 82–108; Porter and Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation Of Sexual Knowledge in Britain 1650–1950; and Londa

Notes to pages 29–32

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

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Scheibinger, Nature’s Body: Gender and the Making of Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 118. All references to Hume hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1947); “My Own Life,” in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; and “Of National Characters,” in Essays Literary, Moral, and Political (London: Routledge, n.d.). Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 9. All references hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. These are standard themes in Gothic literatures of the period. Eugenia DeLamotte stresses that “Gothic romance is especially a woman’s genre because, in all sorts of ways, it is about the nightmare of trying to ‘speak “I”’ in a world in which the ‘I’ in question is uncomprehending of and incomprehensible to the dominant power structure” (Perils of the Night. A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic [Oxford University Press, 1990], p. 166. George Haggerty maintains similarly that many eighteenth-century heroines are punished for expressing feelings of sympathy and that “women learned early on that to survive as an independent individual meant to resist feelings” (Unnatural Affections. Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998], p. 110). In Principles of Morals Hume conversely notes that “barrenness is a species of inutility” (p. 70). See T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; or A View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially pp. 132–45; and Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Random House, 1937), especially pp. 70–83. Colin Kidd stresses that a tradition of ethnic pluralism governed socio-political relations in Scotland before the “twin influences of romanticism and racialism forged the modern myth of the Celt, and contributed to the emergence of related phenomena such as the idea of pan-Celtic nationalism” (British Identities Before Nationalism. Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 [Cambridge University Press, 1999], p. 185). Strangers to Ourselves, p. 132. “The martial aspects of clanship [in the Highlands] were abolished in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, while the ’45 was followed by a spate of initiatives, including the abolition of Scottish warholding vassalage and feudal courts (which tended to be at their most arbitrary and oppressive in the Highlands), a new bout of reforms on forfeited estates, and the proscription of the tartan” (Kidd, British Identities, p. 134). Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, p. 38. See David Simpson on Shaftesbury’s similar argument for methodological license, and its “aristocratic” components, which presuppose a sense of “middleclass prudence” (Romanticism, p. 48). Nationalism in Hume’s scheme, Simpson notes further, is “prescribed as a natural and not merely a cultural attitude” (p. 49).

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Notes to pages 32–39

31. Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in Reflections on the Revolution in France and The Rights of Man (New York: Anchor Books, 1973) 45. All references to Burke hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, including Tracts Relative to the Laws against Popery in Ireland (1765), in vol. 4 of the Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 8 vols. (London, 1881); and On the Sublime and Beautiful, in The Harvard Classics: Edmund Burke, ed. Charles Eliot (Danbury, CT: Grolier Enterprises, 1980). 32. The harsh penal laws directed against Irish Catholics were the target of numerous writers’ censure during the period. See also Deane’s The French Revolution and the Enlightenment in England on Burke’s “defense of affection against [both] the subversions of the Enlightenment and the attacks of the Revolution” (p. 9), as well as on Burke’s attack on Rousseau (pp. 6–11). 33. Ibid., p. 12. 34. Critique of Judgment, trans. J. C. Merideth in Philosophical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1986), p. 87. All references to Kant hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, including Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn in Philosophical Writings; Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981); Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwaite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); and Perpetual Peace, ed. and trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). 35. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 14–15. 36. See Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Mary Lindemann, “Love For Hire: The Regulation of the Wet-Nursing Business in Eighteenth-Century Hamburg,” Journal of Family History 6 (Winter 1981): 379–95; and Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, trans. Stuart McKinnon-Evans (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 46–47. 37. Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914, p. 20. 38. Ann Taylor Allen stresses that the central purpose of the Prussian State’s increased intervention in child-rearing practices was to this end “not the empowerment of mothers, but their exploitation as docile servants of family and state” (p. 22). 39. See especially Bowers, Politics of Motherhood, pp. 156–67; Valerie Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies. A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh University Press, 1986); Gelpi, “Significant Exposure”; Jacobus, “Incorruptible Milk”; Ruth Perry, “Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in EighteenthCentury England,” Studies in the Eighteenth-Century 16.1 (1992): 185–213; and Londa Scheibinger, “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals,” in Nature’s Body, pp. 40–72. 40. An Essay Upon Nursing and the Management of Children from Their Birth to Three Years of Age, 10th ed. (London, 1772), pp. 6–7. In a letter to John Milner, Esq. Vice-President of the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children, dated October 28, 1748, the Irish physician Sir Hans Sloane similarly stressed the benefits of early

Notes to pages 39–41

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

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breastfeeding as compared to the dangers of hand-feeding, citing the London Foundling Hospital’s records between March 25 and May 8, 1841: “Total children admitted, 90. Total to wett nurses, 26; dyed, 5. Total to dry nurses, 63; dyed, 34. Taken out, 1” (cited in John Brownlow’s 1847 M e m o r a n d a ; or, Chronicles of the Foundling Hospital [London, 1847], p. 211). Breasts, Bottles and Babies, p. 116. See ibid., pp. 85–86. William Godwin recounts, in his memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft, that, as Mary was forbidden to breastfeed during the illness which followed the birth of her second daughter (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Shelley), “we therefore procured puppies to draw off the milk” (Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [New York: Garland, 1974], p. 183). A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (London, 1752), p. 418. Dr. Hugh Downman, Infancy. A Poem (London: 1774–6). Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln, recounted in 1622 the extent of such pressure: “I know & acknowledge that I should have [breastfed my children]; it was not for want of will in myself, but partly I was overruled by anothers authority, and partly deceived by somes ill counsell, & partly I had not so well considered of my duty in this motherly office” (The Countesse of Lincoln’s Nurserie [Oxford, 1622], pp. 15–16 Clinton’s emphases). Breasts, Bottles and Babies, p. 106. Edward Shorter argues that the only injury “that can be reliably attributed to tight lacing [of corsets] is ‘hiatus hernia,’ in which a portion of the stomach slides up into the lower chest. The other symptoms [of injury attributable to corsets] were probably all either coincidence or the work of overactive medical imaginations” (A History of Women’s Bodies [New York: Basic Books, 1982], p. 30). Valerie Fildes, however, cites numerous instances of reported injuries due to tight lacing (Breasts, Bottles and Babies, pp. 101–3), and Barbara Gelpi’s study of late-eighteenth-century fashion trends supports this view (see “Significant Exposure”). “It was apparently not atypical for women who breastfed to lose their nipples entirely, either because of repeated cuts which became infected and left disfiguring scar tissue, or because hungry older children (equipped with teeth) chewed them off” (Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, p. 101). McLaren further connects “variations in attitude toward nursing” to shifts in “the employment of contraceptives.” The prevalence of wet nursing in France, for example, may have led to “French notables turn[ing] in the eighteenth century to contraception” (A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990], pp. 162–63). See also Jean-Pierre Bardet, “Political Revolution and Contraceptive Revolution,” in The French Revolution in Culture and Society, eds. David G. Troyansky, Alfred Cismaru, and Norwood Adams, Jr. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 175–87, on the French Revolution’s impact on the contraceptive revolution; Clive Wood and Beryl Sutters, The Fight for Acceptance. A History of Contraception (Aylesbury: Medical and Technical Publishing, 1970), especially pp. 76–156, on

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50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

Notes to pages 41–45 the history of contraception; and Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, pp. 88–89, on infant mortality rates during the eighteenth century. William Roscoe, The Nurse, A Poem, translated from the Italian of Luigi Tansillo (London: 1798), pp. 7–9. “The Infant’s Petition to be Nursed at Home” (1800) in British Women Writers, eds. Spender and Todd, pp. 78–79. Elizabeth Clinton had argued almost two centuries earlier that to deny one’s child the breast was to “goe against Nature,” and become “more savage than the Dragons, and as cruel to [one’s] little ones as the Ostrichs” (The Countesse of Lincoln’s Nurserie, p. 8). William Roscoe’s The Nurse, A Poem, makes a similar point, suggesting that even the wildest of beasts suckles its offspring: “the wolf, [or] tyger fierce and strong,” and even “the feather’d tenants of the air” demonstrate more compassion than the modern mother (p. 19). Scheibinger notes that “within Linnaean terminology, a female characteristic (the lactating mamma) ties humans to brutes, while a traditionally male characteristic (reason) marks our separateness” (Nature’s Body, p. 55). Linnaeus’s 1752 pamphlet, “Step Nurse,” further “sounded the themes of the Enlightenment attack on wet-nursing” (Scheibinger, Nature’s Body, p. 67). An Essay Upon Nursing and the Management of Children from Their Birth to Three Years of Age, p. 21. Letters on Education: With Observations on Religion and Metaphysical Subjects (New York and London: Garland, 1974), pp. 32–33. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), pp. 36–37. See Susan Greenfield’s “At Home and Abroad: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda,” PMLA 122.2 (March, 1997): 214–28, on Lady Delacour’s problematic maternity. Letters on Education, p. 33. Quoted in Mettler, History of Medicine: A Correlative Text Arranged According to Subjects (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1947), p. 629. Barbara Dunlap, “The Problem of Syphilitic Children in Eighteenth-Century France and England,” in The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in EighteenthCentury France and England, ed. Linda E. Merians (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), p. 119. Downman, Infancy, pp. 164–68. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, pp. 85–86, 278–79. “The Problem of Syphilitic Children in Eighteenth-Century France and England,” p. 119. “The Translator to the Reader,” in Francis Mauriceau’s The Diseases of Women with Child, And in Childbed : As also the best Means of helping them in Natural and Unnatural Labours [1688], 3rd edn., trans. Hugh Chamberlen (London, 1697), pp. 350–51. The Diseases of Women with Child, And in Childbed , pp. 348–49. The Ladies Dispensatory or, Every Woman her own Physician (London: 1739), p. ix. Roscoe, The Nurse, a Poem, p. 29.

Notes to pages 46–48

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68. Adrienne Rich locates the “beginning of the transformation of obstetrics into a male province” in 1663 (the year which marked the attendance of the court physician, Boucher, on the favorite mistress of Louis XIV, Louise de la Valli`ere) (Of Woman Born. Motherhood as Experience and Institution [New York: Norton, 1986], p. 139), while John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) is often cited as a transitional mark in children’s educational theory (cf. Marilyn Gaul, English Romanticism: The Human Context [New York: Norton, 1988], p. 50). Dr. Hugh Downman’s Infancy stresses that Locke takes up his theme because “Desirous to behold our British Youth / out-rival ancient fame” (Book II, lines 44–45). See Alan Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1994), for a comprehensive study of educational theories and themes during the Romantic period. 69. Ann Oakley and Susanne Hood, Helpers in Childbirth: Midwifery Today (New York: Hemisphere Publishing, 1990), p. 30. 70. Jean Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men: A History of Inter-Professional Rivalries and Women’s Rights (New York: Shocken Books, 1977), p. 22. 71. Donnison cites numerous instances as early as the fifteenth century of ecclesiastical legislation that dealt specifically with midwifery practices (ibid., pp. 4–7). 72. Ibid., p. 4. 73. Shorter, A History, p. 42; Peter Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558–1803 (New York University Press, 1981), pp. 156–57. 74. Porter, “Bodies of Thought,” p. 97. 75. Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Tudor and Stuart England (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), p. 37. 76. See Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation and the Politics of Reproductive Biology.” 77. “Bodies of Thought,” p. 97. 78. “If she belonged to the upper or middle classes, she was likely to engage a doctor, a specialist or a general accoucheur, whose fee she could afford and who would in most cases attend her at home or in a few cases in a maternity hospital, if she lived in a town where there was one suitable. . . . If her family was less affluent or if she belonged to the working class or lived in the country, she was likely to engage a midwife; the more she could afford to pay, the more likely was her midwife to be well trained. . . . If she could afford to pay nothing at all, her attendants, if any, would be relations or friends” (Marjorie Tew, Safer Childbirth? A Critical History of Maternity Care [London: Chapman and Hall, 1990], p. 50). 79. In “To the Midwives of England,” Jane Sharp stressed, by way of establishing her own authority as instructor to male midwives, that “when men have need of us they will yield the Priority to us” (The Midwives Book. Or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered. Directing Childbearing Women How to Behave Themselves in their Conception, Breeding, Bearing and Nursing of Children [London, 1671], p. 4). The inexperience of men in the birthing room was acknowledged by male

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80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

97.

Notes to pages 48–52 authors of the period as well. Mauriceau, for example, argued that most male physicians “(having never practised what they undertake to teach) resemble (in my opinion) those Geographers, who give us the Description of Countries they never saw” (The Diseases of Women with Child, and in Childbirth, p. vii). As late as 1775, Dr. Hugh Downman still found it necessary to note that his medical advice was directed “not alone to Women” (Infancy, Book II, line 21). Chamberlen, “The Translator to the Reader,” pp. xiv, xii. Tew, Safer Childbirth?, p. 41. Mauriceau, The Diseases of Women with Child, and in Childbed, p. xv; Smellie, Theory and Practice of Midwifery, p. 166. See Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men, pp. 23–25; Oakley and Hood, Helpers in Childbirth, pp. 28–32; Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynecology, pp. 101–108; and Walter Radcliff, Milestones in Midwifery (Bristol: John Wright & Sons, 1976), pp. 57–68. Smellie, Theory and Practice of Midwifery, pp. 448–49. Shorter, A History, pp. 36–40. William Cadogan targets specifically, for example, those women subject to the “transmitted customs of their Great grandmothers, who were taught by the Physicians of their unenlightened days,” attacking “the effects of ignorance” as much as “the artifices of designing Quacks,” who impose on “the credulous” (Essay upon Nursing, p. 4). Mears, The Midwife’s Candid Advice to the Fair Sex; or the Pupil of Nature (London, c.1805), pp. 1, 3. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., pp. 3–5. Smellie, Theory and Practice of Midwifery, pp. 171, 143. Tew, Safer Childbirth? pp. 45–46. Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 15. Shorter, A History, pp. 49–50 and 58–65. Ibid., pp. 71–88. Shorter explains that rickets develops when a lack of vitamin D causes insufficient amounts of calcium and phosphorous to be absorbed by the bones, hence lack of exposure to the sun (as vitamin D is synthesized in the skin through exposure to sunlight) causes rickets in children. The disease is most common in Northern countries, in regions where infant swaddling is practiced, and in industrial areas (ibid., pp. 22–28). Adrienne Rich stresses that the spread of puerperal fever was directly related to the rise of obstetric medicine, as male physicians transmitted the deadly bacteria unawares to their laboring patients, and notes further that the disease reached epidemic proportions due to the growth of lying-in hospitals in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though midwives, too, were potential carriers of bacteria, the physician or surgeon “often came directly from cases of disease to cases of childbirth, and the chance for communication of infection was much higher” (Of Woman Born, p. 151). Eclampsia is a disorder of late pregnancy, characterized by edema (swelling) and high blood-pressure, which may produce convulsions and cardiac arrest.

Notes to pages 52–68

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98. Quoted in Finney, The Story of Motherhood (New York: Liveright, 1937), p. 218. 99. See Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge University Press, 1998) on the theme of the dead mother in Victorian literature. 2 a love too th ick: goth ic m oth ers and m on strou s sym path ies 1. Downman, Infancy, (Book II, lines 319–23). 2. Beloved (New York: Plume, 1988), p. 164. 3. Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy (London: J. Dodsley, 1781) and Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Oxford University Press, 1980), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 4. Chamberlen, “The Translator to the Reader,” p. vi. 5. See, for example, Stephen Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Eugenia DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic; Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London: Routledge, 1995); Eve Kosovsky Sedgewick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986). 6. Critics do emphasize the importance of mother–daughter relationships in women’s Gothic fiction, but tend to stress the positive aspects of these relationships. Eleanor Ty, for example, stresses that this motif points to women writers’ “concern with female identity and bonding” (Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993], p. xii). For a more general discussion of imprisonment and escape themes in women’s Gothic fictions, see DeLamotte, Perils of the Night, pp. 178–89. 7. Nancy Goulder, “Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: Uncanny Desire and the Devil of Law,” in “The Legacy of the Gothic Novel: The Uncanny and the Logic of the Law,” Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia University, 1984, p. 74. 8. See, for example, Bruhm, Gothic Bodies, pp. 129–36; Ellis, Contested Castle, pp. 131–50; Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction, pp. 182–238; and Kilgour, Rise of the Gothic Novel, pp. 142–76. 9. For a psychoanalytic reading of these visual themes, see Goulder, “Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.” 10. See Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 72, 69. 11. Ibid., p. 69. 12. Quoted in Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. xxi–xxii. 13. Ann Radcliff, A Sicilian Romance (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 175. 14. The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 5–6, emphases Smith’s. All references to Smith’s work are taken from

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

Notes to pages 69–80

this edition. Line numbers are cited parenthetically in the text; page references refer to prefaces to various editions of her work. “Introduction” to The Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. xxi. Ty stresses that Smith’s Gothic novels were also tributes to “radicalism, to revolution or change” (Unsex’d Revolutionaries, p. 143). Judith Pascoe suggests that this lone female is an “oblique figure” of Marie Antoinette (Romantic Theatricality. Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997], p. 106). See Pascoe (ibid., pp. 104–10) for a somewhat different reading of Smith’s portrait of the Queen, which emphasizes similarly her role as suffering mother, but suggests that her maternal status “exonerates her from any past failings” (p. 105). Ibid., pp. 104–5. The Recess; or, a Tale of Other Times (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. In the preface to her last novel, The Life of a Lover (1804), Lee critiques the “Jacobin feminism” of the 1790s represented by writers like Wollstonecraft: “The revolutionary system has pervaded all literature, even in the humblest of its classes – novels! The rights and character of woman have been placed in lights by which the delicacy of the sex has often been wholly sacrificed to the assertion of a hardy equality with man, that, even if it assured to us an increase of esteem, would cause an unequal deduction of tenderness: a bad exchange for the sex upon the great scale” (Quoted in April Alliston’s “Introduction” to The Recess, pp. xxxv–xxxvi). The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria in Mary, Maria, and Matilda, ed. Todd, pp. 57–148. All references to Wollstonecraft’s work hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, including Mary. A Fiction, in Mary, Maria, and Matilda, ed. Todd, pp. 3–56; “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,” in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (New York University Press, 1989), iv:1–52 ; and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Todd and Butler, v:79–266. Kilgour stresses that motherhood provides Wollstonecraft with “an image for female authority,” though notes that “women’s conditioning often makes them inadequate mothers” and that many of Wollstonecraft’s characters “have either weak or neglectful mothers” (p. 92). She also stresses that “Mothering and writing are thus both parallel and sequential acts of creation which demonstrate how disorderly, regressive passions can be channeled and made progressive” (p. 94). See also Anne Mellor’s “Righting the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19.4 (1996): 413–24. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Garland, 1974), pp. 173–74. Ibid., pp. 176–82. The Nurse, A Poem, p. 11. The anonymous author of The Ladies Dispensatory or, Every Woman her own Physician (1739) makes much the same point, directly targeting those mothers who, “for the sake of Beauty and Shape, use Arts

Notes to pages 80–88

27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

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to suppress and stifle the Birth in the Womb . . . thus to destroy the Man in Embryo” (p. viii). Eleanor Ty suggests that this detail may have been drawn from the similar experience of Wollstonecraft’s sister Eliza, who suffered a postpartum breakdown (Unsex’d Revolutionaries, p. 40). Gender Trouble, p. 146. Butler stresses that the gendered body is performative, in the sense that “it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (p. 136). Moreover, “[i]f gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured” (p. 141). For elaborations of this point see Tilottama Rajan’s “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,” Studies in Romanticism 27: 221–51, and Mitzi Myers’s “Unfinished Business: Wollstonecraft’s Maria,” Wordsworth Circle 11.2 (1980): 107–14. George Haggerty, Unnatural Affections. Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 117. Wollstonecraft makes similar analogies elsewhere: “[T]he mind of a woman,” she tells us in an advertisement for Mary, a Fiction (1788) is in actuality her most fruitful “female orga[n].” Her own fiction is not “subjugated to opinion; but drawn . . . from [that] original source” (Mary, Maria, and Matilda, p. 3). The “maternalized” narrative in Wrongs thus breaks substantially with those strategies deployed in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Poovey notes of the former text, for example, that “unsure of how to credit personal feeling, uncomfortable with the physical forms in which her imagination projects its gratifications, [Wollstonecraft] retreats into the masculine literary conventions whose artifice she claims to despise” (pp. 67–68). “Mary Wollstonecraft: Styles of Radical Maternity,” in Inventing Maternity, eds. Greenfield and Brash, pp. 164, 166. See ibid., for a more extensive reading of the fragmentary ending of Wrongs as a rejection of the heterosexual romance plot. “Generally speaking,” Kristeva asks, “how are those who are not citizens of a sovereign state to be considered? Does one belong to mankind, is one entitled to the ‘rights of man’ when one is not a citizen?” (Strangers to Ourselves, p. 150). Nanora Sweet, “History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful: Hemans and the Post-Napoleonic Moment,” in At the Limits of Romanticism. Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, eds. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 172. See Sweet, ibid., more generally on the politics of Hemans’s “aesthetics of the beautiful” and Ross, Contours of Masculine Desire, pp. 232–316, for a good analysis of Hemans’s themes and of the critical response to her work. The longer political odes and some of Hemans’s occasional verse constitute important exceptions. The Complete Works of Mrs. Hemans, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1847), ii:121–22. All references to Hemans’s work will hereafter be cited by line

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39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Notes to pages 89–97

number parenthetically in the text, with endnotes designating page and volume numbers from this edition. The Complete Works of Mrs. Hemans (ii:181–22). McGann reads this poem somewhat differently, stressing that “mother and child transcend the Pompeiian world” which saw their final moments. “For Hemans, catastrophe is finally what Byron famously called ‘home desolation,’ and world-historical events are important only because they help us to recall that fact” (Poetics of Sensibility, pp. 71–72). The Complete Works of Mrs. Hemans (ii:117–18). Ibid., (i:540–41). “Infanticide and the Boundaries of Culture from Hume to Arnold,” p. 216. See Dever for a good overview of Freud’s theories of infantile differentiation and melancholia (Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud , pp. 3–6). See Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. See In A Different Voice. Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 84. “History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful,” pp. 182, 180. See Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” pp. 680–85. 3 t h e i r i sh wet n u rse: edgeworth’s e n n u i

1. Pudd’nhead Wilson (Toronto: Airmont, 1966), p. 21. 2. “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother,” p. 44. 3. Everyday Cookery and Housekeeping Book (London: Ward, Lock & Co., n.d), p. iv. 4. Cadogan, Essay upon Nursing, p. 9. 5. Kevin Whelan suggested to me the need for caution in applying these terms, stressing that Edgeworth would not have used the term Anglo-Irish but would have thought of herself simply as Irish. I will use the term Anglo-Irish, however, in referring to Ascendency landlords like the Edgeworths, and the term Irish to designate those whom Edgeworth thought of as Hibernian by descent. 6. Ennui (New York: Garland, 1978), p. 102. All references to Edgeworth’s writings hereafter will be cited parenthetically in the text, including Castle Rackrent (New York: The Century Co., 1906); Maria Edgeworth: Chosen Letters, ed. F. V. Barry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979); Orlandino (Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1848); and Practical Education, vol. 1 (London: J. Johnson, 1798). 7. For histories and economic studies of the Famine and pre-Famine years, see Austin Bourke, “The Visitation of God?” The Potato and the Great Irish Famine (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993); Mary E. Daly, The Famine in Ireland (Dundalk: Dublin Historical Association with Dundalgan Press, 1986); R. D. Edwards and T. D. Williams, The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History (Dublin: Lilliput, 1994); Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity. The Irish Famine 1845–52

Notes to pages 97–99

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

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(Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994); Helen Litton, The Irish Famine. An Illustrated History (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1994); Cormac O’Grada, The Great Irish Famine (London: Macmillan, 1989) and Ireland. A New Economic History 1780–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Rita Rhodes, Women and the Family in Post-Famine Ireland. Status and Opportunity in a Patriarchal State (New York: Garland, 1992); and Cecil Woodham-Smith’s recently reissued The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849 (New York: Penguin, 1992). Quoted in Hurst, Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene. Intellect, Fine Feeling and Landlordism in the Age of Reform (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1969), p. 134. Note that the term “thug” was starting to come into use at this time to refer to British colonialists in India. My thanks to Kevin Whelan for pointing this out to me. Quoted in Hurst, Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene, p. 167. See also other letters quoted in ibid., pp. 103, 134, 157, 165. The Act of Union abolished the Irish Parliament, and annexed Ireland to the “body” of Great Britain. The bill was passed in 1800 and went into effect in 1801. Their Fathers’ Daughters. Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 172. Kowaleski-Wallace argues that Edgeworth betrayed an attraction to the lifestyle of the Irish peasantry which ran counter to her policy of reform. She stresses, however, that Edgeworth necessarily had to suppress her attraction to the “excessively physical” embrace of Ireland so as to maintain her “defense of Anglo-Irish privilege” (p. 166). Most postcolonial critics of Edgeworth’s work have focused, however, on her understanding of duty in terms of intellectual, rather than physical influence. Michael Hurst claims, for example, that Edgeworth had a “social gospel” (Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene, p. 104), which was spurred by her “passion for justice under the rule of the best educated” (ibid., p. 148), though it contained the elements of which “the potentials of autocracy [were] made and, with certain more modern accretions, Fascism too” (ibid., p. 123). See also Corbett, “Another Tale to Tell: Postcolonial Theory and the Case of Castle Rackrent,” in Criticism 36.3 (Summer 1994): 383–400. Anne Mellor, in a somewhat different vein, notes that Edgeworth’s colonial model was familial, and that her Irish peasants were rhetorically assigned to the category of children, “who need to be well treated, with justice and benevolence and understanding” (Romanticism and Gender, p. 78). She does not consider specifically, however, the ways in which “justice” and “benevolence” might operate at cross purposes within this maternalized frame of influence. For a comprehensive and even-handed treatment of Edgeworth’s life, politics, and writings, Marilyn Butler’s Maria Edgeworth. A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972) remains indispensable. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 216, 214. Seamus Deane makes a similar case with respect to Castle Rackrent (1800), arguing that Edgeworth confronts in this earlier novel a version of what Deane

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14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

Notes to pages 99–101

identifies as the “Burke problem” – that is, “the reconciliation of sensibility with economics” (Strange Country. Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 [ Oxford University Press, 1997], p. 38). Bicentenary commemorations of the ’98 rebellion largely spurred this recent interest. My thoughts on this subject have been influenced by a number of papers delivered at the University of Notre Dame’s 1998 conference, The Great Rebellion of ’98. Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), the plot of which turns, like Ennui, on a nurse’s switching of babies in their cradles, makes much the same point. In the case of Twain’s novel, the usurping “heir” becomes, literally, the “master” of his mother. Ellinor, of course, resembles, in this sense, another of Edgeworth’s most ambiguous characters, Thady Quirk (Castle Rackrent). Terry Eagleton makes a similar point: “There is a question with Edgeworth . . . of how near to or distant from a situation you need to be in order to pass judgement on it” (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, p. 172). “Review of Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy – No. III,” Dublin University Magazine (October 1834): 452. Ferguson stresses the acutely physical nature of the threat posed by the fostering system to British cultural identity: [C]ertainly no institution could be better calculated for incorporating foreign families with the greater body of the people; so that, when we consider the danger to English interests attending on the admission of a custom thus destructive of the whole scheme of conquest, we can readily find an excuse for laws against communication with the Irish, which, if not justified by the existence of a contagion so catching, would appear unnecessarily and atrociously cruel. (p. 452)

19. See Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 127–28. 20. See Derek J. Oddy and John Burnett, “British Diet Since Industrialization: A Bibliographic Study,” in European Food History. A Research Review, ed. H. J. Teuteberg (Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 28–32; and Teuteberg, “The General Relationship Between Diet and Industrialization,” in European Diet From Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, eds. Elborg Forster and Robert Forster (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 58–73. 21. Sheridan estimates, for example, a twentyfold increase in sugar consumption in Great Britain between 1663–1775 (Sugar and Slavery [Eagle Hall, Barbados: Caribbean Universities Press, 1974]). For a more extensive analysis of the changing roles of sugar, coffee, and tea in Great Britain, see Sydney W. Mintz, “The Changing Roles of Food in the Study of Consumption,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 261–73. 22. Teuteberg stresses that “[f]or the first time in human history, food no longer was simply grown where people lived, but had to be planned for in some unified fashion and purchased with money” (“General Relationship,” p. 72). Oddy and Burnett note that, in the 1790s, even rural laborers in England were

Notes to pages 101–103

23.

24. 25. 26.

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spending an estimated 69% of their annual income on food and drink (“British Diet,” p. 29). “Fat is a Fictional Issue: The Novel and the Rise of Weight-Watching,” in Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century, eds. W. F. Byrum and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 171. See Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food. Eating and Taste in England and France From the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 134–65, on the role played by professional chefs in this process, and on the rise of the restaurant industry in France and England after the French Revolution. See “A Vindication of Natural Diet,” in The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Verse and Prose, ed. Harry Buxton Forman, 8 vols. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880) vi:15, 13. The Politics of Reproduction, p. 163. Cookbooks of the period often contained specific “recipes” which would make homemakers themselves more “appetizing” to their husbands. Amelia Chambers, author of The Ladies Best Companion; or, A Golden Treasury for the Fair Sex (1800) promised, for example, that her work contained recipes which would “delay the Ravages of Time on the Features of the Fair Sex”: Here Cooks may learn with wond’rous Ease The longing Appetite to please; The Art of Beauty how to reach, By skilful Methods too we teach; The Fair who with our Rules comply, May catch the Heart, and charm the eye.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

Quoted in Eric Quayle, Old Cook Books: An Illustrated History (New York: Dutton, 1978), p. 115. Mennell, All Manners of Food , p. 202. Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction. A Political History of the Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) is the obvious example. Toni Bowers recently observed that Armstrong’s study “virtually omits consideration of the eighteenth-century domestic woman as mother, obscuring motherhood’s central status in Augustan women’s lives” (Politics of Motherhood, p. 21). The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy (London, 1747), p. ii. Ibid. Educational guides written by women betray the same preoccupation. Catharine Macaulay, in her Letters on Education: With Observations on Religion and Metaphysical Subjects (1790), drew on evidence from past civilizations to support her claim that overindulgence in “luxuries which belonged only to opulence” signaled the weakening of “a robust habit of body,” leading to an affliction of “mental powers,” and consequently giving “a taint to the morals” (pp. 24, 25). Macaulay linked “those refinements of sense which are only mischievous in their excess” to the increasing “ostentation of the table” (p. 301).

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Notes to pages 103–108

32. The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy, p. 130. 33. A New System of Domestic Cookery; Formed on Principles of Economy, and Adapted to the Use of Private Families, 2nd edn. (London, 1807), p. 432. 34. Ibid., pp. 432, 433. 35. Ibid., pp. 431–32. 36. Quoted in Hurst, Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene, p. 165. 37. The Irish Journals of Elizabeth Smith 1840–1850, ed. David Thomson, with Moyra McGusty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 101. 38. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, p. 4. 39. See ibid., p. 5 and Daly, The Famine, p. 8. 40. See Daly, ibid., pp. 13–19. 41. Bourke, “The Visitation of God? ” p. 94. 42. Essay on the Principle of Population; or A View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 127–28. 43. Ibid., p. 127, note 4. 44. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, pp. 5, 2. 45. Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 15. 46. See Ludmilla Jordanova’s “Sex and Gender,” especially pp. 172–6, on representations of maternity in the theories of eighteenth-century political economists. 47. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, p. 162. 48. See ibid., pp. 107–9 and Scheibinger, Nature’s Body, p. 66. 49. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, p. 105. 50. Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 176. Irigaray holds that mothers, “as both natural value and use value . . . cannot circulate in the form of commodities without threatening the very existence of the social order” (p. 185). 51. The 1790s, Eagleton argues, constituted “a decisive turning point” in relations between the gentry and their tenantry: “The newly militant Catholic Committee broke with the obsequiousness of its predecessors, and if some of the tenantry still respected the Big Houses, an increasing number had taken to plundering them” (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, p. 56). The Edgeworths had, in fact, been forced to flee their estate during the 1798 Rebellion. See also Mitzie Myers on Edgeworth’s allusions to the Rebellion in Ennui (“‘Like Pictures in a Magic Lantern’: Gender, History, and Edgeworth’s Rebellion Narratives,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19.4 [1996]: 373–412); and Jim Smyth (The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century [New York: St. Martin’s, 1992]) and Kevin Whelan (The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760–1830 [Cork University Press, 1997]) on the political turbulence of the 1790s. 52. A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 68. 53. Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued . . . Exp. in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day, 1991), i:216.

Notes to pages 108–122

209

54. “Representations of Women in Some Early-Modern English Tracts on the Colonization of Ireland,” Albion 25.3 (Fall 1993): 384. 55. “Women–mothers, the Silent Substratum,” pp. 51–52. 56. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, pp. 214–16. 57. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story. The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 275, 263. See also Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority. Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 58. Ennui confronts more overtly in this sense the provocative question which concludes Castle Rackrent: “Did the Warwickshire militia, who were chiefly artisans, teach the Irish to drink beer? or did they learn from the Irish to drink whiskey?” (p. 70). See Deane’s Strange Country, pp. 28–48, for a good analysis of the problem of national character in Edgeworth’s fiction. 59. “Honest Thady” is the narrator of Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. Although he is insistent throughout the novel that his concerns and loyalties lie with the Rackrent family, over the course of the novel his son Jason assumes control of the Rackrent estate. 60. Willa Murphy suggests that: “It might be argued that Ellinor is not so free of worldly thoughts as she insists. What she recognizes in a flash is the power of the secret to change her son’s future, and so change history. For an Irish tenant locked into an unjust system, honesty is perhaps not the best policy” (“Maria Edgeworth and the Aesthetics of Secrecy” in Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Tadhg Foley and Se´an Ryder [Dublin: Four Courts, 1998], p. 51). 61. Whelan, The Tree of Liberty, p. 59. 62. “The State of Ireland in 1798” from The Autobiography of Theobald Wolfe Tone, repr. in Irish Literature, ed. Justin McCarthy (Chicago: Debower-Elliot, 1904), ix:3424–25. 63. See Romanticism and Gender, p. 3. Mellor borrows this concept from Carol Gilligan’s In A Different Voice. 64. Quoted in O’Farrell, Green and Chaste and Foolish. Irish Literary and Theatrical Anecdotes (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1994), pp. 61–62. 65. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. 261. 4 i n fa n t i c ide in an age of en ligh te nme nt: s cot t’s t h e h e a rt o f m i d l o t h i a n 1. Quoted in Anna Kinsella, “Nineteenth-Century Perspectives: The Women of 1798 in Folk Memory and Ballads,” in The Women of ’98, ed. Daire Keogh (Dublin, Four Courts, 1998), p. 197. 2. The Heart of Midlothian (London: J. M. Dent, 1956), p. 464. All references to Scott’s works, including Waverley (London: Penguin, 1985), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 3. Scott details the effects of the punitive legislation following the 1745 insurrection in his “A Postscript, Which Should Have Been a Preface” to Waverley: “the

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4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

Notes to pages 123–125 destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs – the abolition of the heritable jurisdictions of the Lowland nobility and barons – the total eradication of the Jacobite party, which, adverse to intermingle with the English, or adopt their customs, long continued to pride themselves upon maintaining ancient Scottish manners and customs” (p. 492). See The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels, especially pp. 79–133. For analyses of the relationship between Edgeworth’s “national tales” and Scott’s “historical novels” see Deane, Strange Country, pp. 32–40 and Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism, pp. 128–57. Luk´acs’s The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1963) remains the authoritative voice on Scott and the historical novel. The infanticidal undercurrents which run throughout The Heart of Midlothian – especially as they relate to Scott’s examination of the union of national bodies – surprisingly have received little attention in recent criticism of the novel. Scholars have focused largely on the legal problematics of the 1690 Scots Concealment Statute, under which Effie is tried. See, for example, Bruce Beiderwell, Power and Punishment in Scott’s Novels (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 62–80. Ledwon’s reading comes closer to mine, yet while our thoughts converge on many points, we reach strikingly different conclusions. Ledwon sees the novel ultimately operating (like the statute) as a “persecution text,” which “elicits sympathy for Effie as a scapegoat, at the same time it creates its own concealed scapegoat figure of the mother in Meg Murdockson” (“Legal Fictions: Constructions of the Female Legal Subject in Nineteenth-Century Law and Literature” [Doctoral Dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1992], p. 46). I argue in a somewhat different vein that Scott links Meg’s savagery to her excessive, uncontrollable, and ultimately “natural” maternal affection. Andrea Henderson’s recent analysis of motherhood in The Heart of Midlothian likewise takes a different tack. Henderson argues that the novel “makes use of a variety of strategies for managing its knowledge that the heart of personal identity and the heart of society are not stable entities but merely the nodal points of circulation.” One such strategy is “the employment of childbirth metaphors that represent circulatory energy as reproductive” (p. 131). The uterus, for Henderson, “appears at times to be, like the heart, an organ of circulation” (p. 153). See Romantic Identities (Cambridge University Press, 1996). McDonagh, “Infanticide and the Boundaries of Culture,” p. 216. The Stuart Bastard Neonaticide Act of 1624 was, as Ledwon notes, “directed solely at the unmarried woman who concealed the death of her illegitimate child. If the child died, the woman was presumptively guilty, unless she could produce a witness to swear that the child had been born dead” (“Legal Fictions,” p. 21). The 1690 Scots statute, under which Effie is tried in The Heart of Midlothian, similarly punished concealment, but focused “on the concealment of pregnancy and birth, rather than the concealment of death . . . If a woman (1) conceals her pregnancy, (2) does not call for and make use of help in the

Notes to pages 126–133

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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delivery and (3) cannot produce a living child, the mother is presumed guilty of murdering her child” (ibid., pp. 22–23). Hoffer and Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558–1803 (New York: New York University Press, 1981), pp. ix–x, 100, 65–66. Hoffer and Hull, p. 69. See Ledwon, “Legal Fictions,” for a good summery of these events and their relation to the plot of The Heart of Midlothian. Ledwon explains, following Marshall (“Point of View and Structure in The Heart of Midlothian,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.3 [December 1961]: 127), that in 1803 “a new statute substituted banishment in place of death as the punishment and in 1809 this ‘presumptive murder’ was abolished pursuant to 49 Geo III, Chapter 14, which lessened the crime to simple concealment of pregnancy, with a maximum sentence of two years imprisonment” (p. 23). The text of Chamblit’s confession, “The Declaration, Dying Warning and Advice of Rebekah Chamblit” (Boston 1733), is available on Evans microcard and is not paginated. A Sermon: Preached at the Execution of Abiel Converse for the Murder of her Bastard Child (Northampton: 1788), p. 19. Ibid., pp. 19, 22. “On the Uncertainty of the Signs of Murder in the Case of Bastard Children,” in Elements of Medical Jurisprudence; or, A Succinct and Compendious Description of Such Tokens in the Human Body as are requisite to determine the Judgement of a Coroner, and Courts of Law, in cases of Divorce, Rape, Murder, & etc. (3rd edn.), ed. Samuel Farr, M.D. (London: 1815), p. 155. Ibid., pp. 156, 152–53. Ibid., pp. 162–63. See “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative.” The record of this proceeding is available on Evans microcard. I have omitted the page references contained in the original account. “A Probationary Essay on Infanticide” (Edinburgh, 1825), p. 5. An Essay on the Signs of Murder in New Born Children (Lancaster, 1813), pp. xii–xiii. (Unpaginated) Preface to The Proofs of Infanticide Considered: Including Dr. Hunter’s Tract on Child Murder, With Illustrative Notes; and a Summery of the Present State of Medico-Legal Knowledge of that Subject (London: 1836). First Lines on the Practice of Midwifery: To Which Are Added Remarks on the Forensic Evidence requisite in Cases of Foeticide and Infanticide (London: 1831), p. 136. Man A Machine [1748], ed. and trans. Gertrude Carmen Bussey (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1912) pp. 118–19. The Wealth of Nations, pp. lviii, 72. Thoughts Occasioned by the perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermons in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1993), ii:200, 201.

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Notes to pages 133–145

27. “Letter to the Editor of the Monthly Magazine,” in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, p. 212. 28. An Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 71, note 8. 29. Ibid., p. 71. 30. See McDonagh, Infanticide and the Boundaries of Culture, pp. 221–24, for a different take on the debate between Godwin and Malthus. 31. An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), p. 209. 32. Cadogan, Essay upon Nursing, p. 3. 33. See Ian Campell Ross, “The Early Years of the Dublin Lying-in Hospital,” in Public Virtue, Public Love: The Early Years of the Dublin Lying-in Hospital, ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 1986), p. 27. 34. Cadogan’s contemporaries, at any rate, had decided opinions on the subject. In his M e m o r a n d a ; or, Chronicles of the Foundling Hospital (1847), John Brownlow, one of the founders, stressed that instead of becoming a means of saving lives, “the institution became . . . a charnel-house for the dead!” He claims that, of the 14,934 infants received during one four year period, only 4,400 lived to be apprenticed out – a more than 70% mortality rate (p. 175). Brownlow also notes that, after the hospital began receiving all children tendered for admission (on June 2, 1756), flagrant abuses were common: fathers taking newborn babies away from their helpless mothers, men- and women-for-hire transporting children to the hospital from remote towns and villages, and so forth (pp. 169–70). 35. Infancy, Book II, lines 319–23, 106–7 and 352–57. 36. Infancy, Book III, lines 89–90, emphasis mine. 37. “The Thorn,” in William Wordsworth. Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 70–76. 38. Power and Punishment in Scott’s Novels, p. 80. 39. See Ledwon, “Legal Fictions,” for a detailed analysis of the “concealed texts” in The Heart of Midlothian. 40. W. S. Crockett, The Scott Originals: An Account of Notables & Worthies. The Originals of Characters in the Waverley Novels (New York: Scribner’s, 1912), pp. 233–35. 41. Adam Bede (London: Penguin, 1985). 42. It was “difficult for [this] man of affection, humanity, and a quiet disposition, to struggle with [his wife] on the point of her over-indulgence to an only child” (The Heart of Midlothian, p. 368). 43. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 58. 44. Such anxieties about the transmission of the nurse’s “soul” to her nursling were becoming outdated by the late eighteenth century. 45. Scott, in fact, opens his narrative, and thus identifies its origins, with a “birth” scene which is significantly described as a “sort of summary and Caesarean process of delivery.” (The occupants of an upset carriage are “extricated” by the “forcing [of] the hinges from one of the doors which they could not open otherwise. In this manner were two disconsolate damsels set at liberty from

Notes to pages 145–155

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

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the womb of the leathern conveniency” [p. 18].) Scott’s description sounds as much like a forceps delivery, in fact, as it does a cesarian section – both were, of course the providence of the male midwife, with whom Scott here identifies himself. Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men, p. 4. As Ledwon notes (“Legal Fictions,” p. 31), Meg is the only character in this novel who ends up with a broadsheet confession. Shorter, A History, p. 42. Hoffer and Hull, Murdering Mothers, pp. 156–57. Ibid., pp. 73–74, 156–57. Adrienne Rich chronicles, for example, the case of Anne Hutchinson in Puritan New England as representative of the way in which “wisewomen, healers, and midwives were especially singled out by the witch-hunters” (Of Woman Born, pp. 135–37). See Coleman O. Parsons, Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott’s Fiction (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1964), pp. 138–41, on witchcraft in The Heart of Midlothian. See Luk´acs’s treatment of Scott’s historicism in The Historical Novel (pp. 19–88); Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 49–77 and especially Chandler, England in 1819 (pp. 303–49) on Scott’s debt to the Scottish Enlightenment school and on the political and economic ramifications of his stadial theory of cultural development. Note that Madge, too, likes Jeanie because Jeanie once gave her milk to drink (p. 321). “Review of Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelry,” p. 448. Ibid., pp. 448–50. See, for example, Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Jeanie’s “life had been spent in the quiet, uniform, and regular seclusion of their peaceful and monotonous household” (The Heart of Midlothian, p. 163). Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves. The Novels of Walter Scott (University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 136. Ibid., p. 126. See James Kerr, Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 461. See Deane’s The French Revolution and the Enlightenment in England , pp. 12–20, on Burke’s defense of tradition. I am especially grateful for Willa Murphy’s thoughts on colonialism and secrecy, which have substantially informed my own. 5 t h e c a s e o f th e sh elleys: m atern al s ympat hy an d t h e c e n c i

1. Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, ed. and trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 200.

214

Notes to pages 155–158

2. The Dawn of the Day in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), ix:385. 3. Quoted in Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynacology, p. 41. 4. “On Love” [1818], p. 473. All references to Percy Shelley’s works in this chapter are taken from Reiman and Powers’ edition of Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 1977), except “On Frankenstein,” which is quoted in Mary Shelley’s, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus [1818 edition], ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 1996). Prose citations and short poems will refer to the page numbers of the Reiman and Powers’ edition. References to The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound will be cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. References to Shelley’s letters are drawn from The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 2, ed. Roger Ingpen (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1909) and will be cited parenthetically as PBS Letters. 5. See Richardson’s “Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine.” See also Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess and Mellor, Mary Shelley. See Hoeveler’s Romantic Androgyny on Shelley’s use of maternal images in “Alastor.” 6. See Powers of Horror. 7. See Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). Shelley’s acknowledgments indeed encourage Bloomian readings; he mentions a number of “paternal” influences on his dramatic theory in the Preface to The Cenci and elsewhere (Shakespeare, Sophocles, Calderon). 8. Annette Wheeler Caferelli recently argued that “we should regard Shelley’s views . . . as well intentioned, but as nevertheless sharing the blindness to gender-based issues that bedeviled the sexual ideology of the men of the era” (“The Transgressive Double Standard: Shelleyan Utopianism and Feminist Social History,” in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, eds. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996], p. 96). See also Anne Janowitz on Shelley’s more egalitarian treatment of class and gender in “The Mask of Anarchy” (“‘A Voice From Across the Sea’: Communitarianism at the Limits of Romanticism”) and Greg Kucich’s reading of Catharine Macaulay’s influence on Shelley in “‘This Horrid Theatre of Human Sufferings’: Gendering the Stages of History in Catharine Macaulay and Percy Bysshe Shelley,” in The Lessons of Romanticism, eds. Thomas Pfau and Robert Gleckner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) pp. 448–65. 9. Jerrold Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 153; Erika Gottlieb, Lost Angels of a Ruined Paradise: Themes of Cosmic Strife in Romantic Tragedy (Victoria, BC: Sono Nis Press, 1981), p. 114. 10. Stuart Curran, whose Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton University Press, 1970) remains the most comprehensive analysis of the play, argues that Beatrice murders her father “not out of revenge, but imperative selfdefense; not because he raped her body, but because he poisoned her spirit.” Curran stresses that the Cenci legend “posed for Shelley a physical situation – perhaps the only possible one – in which good was not merely made to suffer

Notes to pages 158–159

11. 12. 13.

14.

215

from evil, but was subjected to it so completely that it literally embodied evil” (pp. 139–40). Seamus Deane also offers a fascinating materialist reading of Shelley’s confrontation with the problem of evil in The Cenci, but contends that Beatrice’s action is an “imprisoning reaction” which is self-defeating, in so far as it “pretends to a freedom which it does not possess” (The French Revolution and the Enlightenment in England , p. 126). Jerrold Hogle supports this position, stressing that characters in The Cenci “reflect the destructive methods by which we are still tempted to mirror ourselves or let ourselves be used as reflectors by tyrants who need us (as audience) to achieve their stagings of domination” (Shelley’s Process, p. 150). William Ulmer agrees that “mimetic desire [in The Cenci] ends in addiction and futility, in the accelerating exchanges of mastery and abjection” (“The Politics of Reception [The Cenci],” in Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill [London: Longman, 1993], p. 111). Alan Richardson, like Ulmer, stresses that these exchanges exemplify “the unbalanced process of recognition that Hegel expresses as a ‘master and servant’ relation” (A Mental Theater. Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988], p. 105). Richardson argues that The Cenci stages the “tragic limitations of self-consciousness” (p. 100), but contends that it is all but impossible to fail to sympathize with Beatrice’s predicament: “Rather, the impossibility of either condemning or refraining to condemn Beatrice’s actions is integral to Shelley’s strategy for implicating the reader in the process of self-anatomy” (p. 118). Curran makes a similar point: the imperatives of tragedy render necessary both Beatrice’s response to her father, and our sympathies for that response (Shelley’s Cenci, pp. 140–41). Erika Gottlieb stresses, alternatively, that the central dilemma of The Cenci is not Beatrice’s moral or psychological credibility, but Cenci’s motivation for his crime: “[T]he poet accuses the Deity of having created, and, through the act of Creation, also having doomed, the innocent creature to be fallible and subject ‘to the misery of the commission of error’” (Lost Angels of a Ruined Paradise, p. 139). Julie Carlson, following Laurence Lockridge, takes yet another approach, stressing that “critical efforts to judge Beatrice either as moral agent or self-conscious character are misguided” because Beatrice’s duplicity relates less to her psychology than to her status as actor (In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women [Cambridge University Press 1994], p. 194). Carlson, ibid., p. 195. Ibid., p. 194. See Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism; Jeffery Cox, In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987); and Daniel P. Watkins, A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993). See also the special issue of the Wordsworth Circle 23.2 (Spring 1992): “Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays” (1993), eds. Terence Hoagwood and Daniel Watkins. “‘A Voice From Across the Sea’: Communitarianism at the Limits of Romanticism,” pp. 89–90.

216

Notes to pages 159–165

15. Strangers to Ourselves, p. 132. 16. Mary Shelley, “‘Note’ on The Cenci,” in The Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 363. All references to Mary Shelley hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, including Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus [1818]; The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, eds. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); The Letters Of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, vol. 1, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), cited as MWS Letters; Matilda, in Mary, Maria, and Matilda; and “Note on ‘The Witch of Atlas,’” in The Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley. 17. Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism, p. 209. See also Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, and Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality. Ina Ferris’s The Achievement of Literary Authority also offers a good overview of the gendering of authors and readers during the Romantic period. Greg Kucich argues, in an appositional vein to that provided by Carlson, that Romantic era male writers were extremely keen for popular success on the stage (“A Haunted Ruin: Romantic Drama, Renaissance Tradition, and the Critical Establishment,” The Wordsworth Circle 23.2 [Spring 1992]). For a fuller discussion of this issue, see other articles in the same 1992 Wordsworth Circle – a special issue titled “Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays” (edited by Hoagwood and Watkins). Steven Behrendt notes that Shelley also wrote ballads and short poems targeted specifically at popular male audiences (e.g. “Song to the Men of England”) – see Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 18. See Catherine B. Burroughs, “The English Romantic Closet: Women Theatre Artists, Joanna Baillie, and Basil,” in Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19.2 (1995): 125–49, for an excellent account of Baillie’s dramatic theory. Curran also suggests a connection between Percy’s developing dramatic theories and those of Baillie (Shelley’s Cenci, pp. 173–75). 19. The Dramatic and Poetic Works of Joanna Baillie (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1996), p. 4; further references to Baillie cited parenthetically. 20. Anne Mellor, among others, has argued persuasively that the Creature in Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as an allegory of the French Revolution: born of enlightened ideals which rapidly degenerate into a solipsistic masculine quest to dominate nature and usurp the generative powers of the maternal body, the Creature is initially benevolent but in the end is bent on pursuing a Reign of Terror. See Mellor, Mary Shelley, pp. 70–88. 21. Mary’s journals record that she was reading The Monk in September, 1814. The Shelleys met Matthew Lewis at Villa Diodati in Switzerland in August, 1816. 22. Mary had expressed similar sentiments to Thomas Hogg upon losing her first daughter in March, 1815: “I am no longer a mother now” (MWS Letters 11). Her journal entry for March 13th echoes this thought: “this is foolish I suppose yet whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts & do not read to divert them they always come back to the same point – that I was a mother & am so no longer” (p. 69). 23. Shelley’s Cenci (p. xiv).

Notes to pages 165–178

217

24. Note that Mary and Percy read together several of Wollstonecraft’s works, including Wrongs, en route to England from Switzerland in October, 1814. 25. Mellor notes that Godwin’s financial dependency on Percy Shelley originated from their shared view that “the greatest justice is done when he who possesses money gives it to whoever has greatest need of it,” but stresses that as a consequence, “Godwin had no compunction about taking as much money as Shelley would give him” (Mary Shelley, p. 19). 26. Beatrice’s casuistical line of reasoning is well noted. James Chandler recently maintains that the “gradual immersion of [Beatrice’s] conscience in the murky medium of casuistry amounts to nothing less than the play’s primary line of development” (England in 1819, p. 505). 27. See, for example, Deane (The French Revolution and the Enlightenment in England , p. 126); Hogle (Shelley’s Process, pp. 154–56); John V. Murphy, Gothic Elements in Shelley’s Works (London: Associated University Presses, 1975), pp. 172–73; and Richardson (A Mental Theatre, pp. 112–18). 28. Shelley’s Goddess, p. 272. 29. Cox, In the Shadows of Romance, p. 143. 30. The Gisbournes kept daily company with the Shelleys during their stay in Livorno. Maria tutored Percy in Spanish and introduced him to the work of Calderon. In a letter from Florence in October, Percy calls her “Madonna mia,” and, in November, laments: “Madonna, I have been lately voyaging in a sea without my pilot . . . I have been reading Calderon without you” (PBS Letters, pp. 734, 749; emphasis Shelley’s). She, he stresses, has been steering him. 31. As Mary’s journal falls silent between May 4 and August 4, 1819, it is impossible to discern with certainty when she actually started Matilda. She appears to have been working on the story during the first week of August. On August 4 her journal entry contains the following notations, “Write – Read Lucan & the Bible – S. writes the Cenci & reads Plutarch’s lives . . . S. reads Paradise Lost to me” (p. 294). (Recall, too, that Plutarch’s Lives of the Saints and Milton’s Paradise Lost were two texts studied carefully by Victor Frankenstein’s creature.) 32. See Gelpi’s Shelley’s Goddess, pp. 236–73, for a sustained treatment of the maternal imagery of Act III of Prometheus Unbound . 33. Behrendt argues in Shelley and His Audiences that Shelley exaggerates this claim, and stresses that he wrote an entire series of shorter works for popular audiences around 1819. 34. England in 1819, p. 502. 35. Ibid., p. 510. 36. See Simpson, Romanticism, pp. 40–63, for an overview of Enlightenment attitudes about English national character, and for a more comprehensive analysis of Hume’s “Of National Character.” 37. See, for example, Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism, and especially Curran, Shelley’s Cenci, pp. 157–82. 38. A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama, p. 8. In Watkins’s view, the “clash between ideologies – that is, aristocratic and bourgeois” which is enacted in much drama of the period, does not confront the very real rupture within

218

39.

40.

41. 42.

Notes to pages 178–188 early nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology which is reflected in, for example, the emergent form of the novel (pp. 8–9). This helps account, in Watkins’s view (following Raymond Williams) for the marginalization of literary drama during the period: “[I]t carried within it too much ideological baggage from the past that denied the new content and consciousness of social life, and was thus formally unable to envision that past – or the present – in terms of the bourgeois ideology that had become dominant” (p. 9). “[I]n periods of the decay of social life,” Shelley notes in A Defence of Poetry, “the drama sympathizes with that decay . . . Hence what has been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison’s ‘Cato’ is a specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other!” (p. 491). Carlson argues that, while addressing in their plays “more than in any other kinds of writing . . . the issue of women’s roles and their representation in the body politic,” and generally portraying women “as commanding action in the public sphere,” Romantic-period writers nevertheless questioned the very visibility of women in theater and the diffusion of sexual power in the aesthetic realm. The inefficacy or insufficiency of Beatrice’s, and other romantic heroines’ responses to extreme crises, demonstrates most specifically for Carlson the inherent gender biases of Romantic theatre projects, which seek to limit or contain subversive female “performances” so as to carry the greater point, that social change depends more upon broader political mobilization than on the moral agency of individuals (In the Theatre of Romanticism, p. 195). Shelley’s Cenci, p. 170. Ulmer argues specifically that in The Cenci “it is not so much Beatrice as the author himself who is up for judgment” (Politics of Reception, p. 114). p ostscrip t

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

“Women’s Time,” p. 206. Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments. See Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, Literature 1650–1865. “Thinking Mothers / Conceiving Birth,” p. 166. “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 682. Selections from Cultural Writings, in Avanti 22 (March 1917): 71.

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Index

abortion 47, 80, 133, 145–46, 184, 189 Abraham, Nicolas; and Maria Torok 100, 206 Act of Union (1707) 31 Act of Union (1800) 98, 205 Alexander, Meena 192 Allen, Ann Taylor 196 Anderson, Benedict 86, 143, 212 Armstrong, Nancy 207 Baillie, Joanna 161–62, 216 “Introductory Discourse” 161–62 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 6, 190 “To a Little Invisible Being Who is Expected Soon to Become Visible” 6–7, 9, 190 Bardet, Jean-Pierre 197 Bascom, Aaron 127, 211 A Sermon: Preached at the Execution of Abiel Converse for the Murder of her Bastard Child 127, 211 Beauvoir, Simone de 7, 190, 201 Beeton, Isabella 96 Everyday Cookery and Housekeeping Book 96, 204 Behrendt, Steven 216, 217 Beiderwell, Bruce 138, 210, 212 benevolence theory 28–31, 65 Benjamin, Walter 94, 188, 189, 204, 218 big six 12 birth control 40–41, 107, 110 Bloom, Harold 214 Blum, Carol 193 Boswell, James 189 Bourke, Austin 204, 208 Bowers, Toni 13–14, 18, 192, 193, 196 breastfeeding 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 38–46, 50, 79, 82–83, 135–36, 155–56, 163, 172; colostrum 39 Brownlow, John 197, 212 MEMORANDA; or, Chronicles of the Foundling Hospital 197, 212 Bruhm, Stephen 201

Burke, Edmund 13, 32–34, 37, 56, 61, 69, 72–73, 83, 85, 152, 196 On the Sublime and Beautiful 33, 196 Reflections on the Revolution in France 33–34, 195 Tracts Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland 33, 196 Burroughs, Catherine B. 216 Butler, Judith 3, 5, 82, 187, 188, 189, 203 Butler, Marilyn 205 Byron, Lord 204 Cadogan, Dr. William 39, 42, 96–97, 135–36, 145, 212 An Essay upon Nursing and the Management of Children from Their Birth to Three Years of Age 145, 196, 198, 200, 204, 212 Caferelli, Annette Wheeler 214 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro 217 Carlson, Julie 158, 159, 160, 215, 216, 218 Carroll, Clare 108, 208–9 Chamberlen, Hugh 44, 48 “The Translator to the Reader” in Mauriceau’s The Diseases of Women with Child, And in Childbed: As also the best Means of helping them in Natural and Unnatural Labours 198, 200, 201 Chambers, Amelia 207 The Ladies Best Companion; or, A Golden Treasury for the Fair Sex 207 Chamblit, Rebekah 126–27, 211 “The Declaration, Dying Warning and Advice of Rebekah Chamblit” 126, 211 Chandler, James 2, 3, 5, 57, 175–76, 177, 185, 189, 213, 217 Charles II 177 Chodorow, Nancy 92, 192, 204 Cixous, H´el`ene 3, 189 Clifton, Alice 3, 129–30 Clinton, Elizabeth, Countess of Lincoln 197 The Countess of Lincoln’s Nurserie 197, 198

232

Index colonialism 18, 99, 115, 117, 153 conduct literature 5, 102 cookbooks 5, 96–97, 102–4 Corbett, Mary Jean 205 corsets 197 Corn Laws 105 Cox, Jeffrey 159, 169, 215, 217 Crockett, W. S. 212 Cummin, Dr. William 131 “Preface” to The Proofs Considered: Including Dr. Hunter’s Tract on Child Murder, With Illustrative Notes; And a Summary of the Present State of the Medico-Legal Knowledge on that Subject 211 Curran, Stuart 69, 165, 179, 192, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 Daly, Mary E. 204, 207, 208 dangerously good mothers 11, 18, 25–26, 54, 124–25, 157 Davies, Sir John 108, 109, 110, 208 A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was Never Entirely Subdued 208 Deane, Seamus 28–33, 193, 194, 196, 205, 206, 209, 210, 213, 215, 217 de la Barre, Poulain 66, 205 deconstruction 12 DeLamotte, Eugenia 195, 201 Dever, Carolyn 190, 195, 201, 204 Dickens, Charles 68 Bleak House 68 Donnison, Jean 199, 200, 213 Downman, Dr. Hugh 39, 40, 44, 55, 136, 145, 197, 199 Infancy. A Poem 39–40, 44, 55, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 212 Dublin Lying-in Hospital 135 Dunlap, Barbara 44, 198 Eagleton, Terry 32, 37, 107, 194, 195, 196, 206, 208 Eccles, Audrey 190, 199, 200, 214 eclampsia 52, 200 Edgeworth, Maria 15, 17, 18, 42–43, 53, 95, 97–101, 104–5, 107–21, 122–24, 143, 147, 150, 153, 198 Belinda 15, 42–43, 198 Castle Rackrent 108, 110, 204, 205, 206, 209 Ennui 97, 98–101, 107–19, 120, 124, 143, 204, 206, 209 Maria Edgeworth: Chosen Letters 120, 204 Orlandino 120–21, 204 Practical Education 100, 104–5, 204 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 100, 119 education of women 75, 77, 86

233

Edwards, R. D. and T. D. Williams 204 Eliot, George 141 Adam Bede 141, 212 Elizabeth I 76, 77, 123 Elizabethan Age 123 Ellis, Kate Ferguson 201 Enlightenment Age of Reason 58 cosmopolitanism 10, 11, 27, 65, 159 German Enlightenment 35 Scottish Enlightenment 27, 31, 35, 38, 156 Ensor, George 132, 134–35 An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations 212 Father Matthew 120 Ferguson, Samuel 99, 147–48, 206, 213 “Review of Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy” 206, 213 Ferris, Ina 109, 123, 209, 210, 216 Fildes, Valerie 39, 40, 106–7, 196, 197, 198, 208 Finney, R. P. 201 Firestone, Shulamith 8, 190 Fleishman, Avrom 213 formal realism 2 Foucault, Michel 5, 6, 189, 190 French Revolution 23, 24, 61, 64–65, 70–74, 85, 101, 162, 197, 207, 216 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen 86 Louis, Dauphin of France 72–74 Marie Antionette 3, 34, 72–74 Robespierre 101 Freud, Sigmund 91–92 Freudian theory 9 mother–child symbiosis 91 psychoanalysis 91–92 Frevert, Ute 196 Friedman, Susan Stanford 3, 189 Gallagher, Catherine 109, 120, 160, 209, 216 Gaul, Marilyn 199 Gelpi, Barbara 13, 169, 192, 196, 197, 214, 217 the cult of motherhood 13 Gilligan, Carol 12, 92, 191, 204, 209 Gisbourne, Maria 169 Glasse, Hannah 102–3, 109 The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy 102–3, 207 Godwin, William 78, 84, 132, 133–34, 166, 170 “Letter to the editor of the Monthly Magazine” 134–35, 212 Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 78, 197, 202

234

Index

Godwin, William (cont.) Thoughts Occasioned by the perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermons 211 Gothic novels 17, 55–95, 162 plays 17, 55–95, 155–82 Gottlieb, Erika 158, 214, 215 Goulder, Nancy 61, 201 Gramsci, Antonio 188, 218 Grayzel, Susan 93, 204 Greenfield, Susan 190, 198 Greenfield, Susan and Carol Barash 12, 183, 192, 218 Haggerty, George 84, 195, 203 Hale, Mrs. 21, 41 “The Infant’s Petition to be Nursed at Home” 41–42, 198 “To Mrs. Moore, On the Birth of the First Child Ever Born in Lambeth Palace October 13, 1786” 21, 193 Harvey, William 47, 155 Anatomical exertions, concerning the generation of living creatures. To which are added, particular discourses of births, and of conceptions, etc. 155–56 Hemans, Felicia 15, 56–57, 87–94, 137, 172, 203, 204 “The Image in Lava” 89–90 “Indian Woman’s Death-Song” 15, 90, 93 “Pauline” 87–89 The Records of Women 87 “The Suliote Mother” 15, 90–91, 93–94 Henderson, Andrea 210 Hoagwood, Terence and Daniel Watkins 215, 216 Hoeveler, Diane Long 192, 214 Hoffer, Peter C. and N. E. H. Hull 125–26, 129, 146, 199, 211, 213 Hogg, Thomas 164, 216 Hogle, Jerrold 158, 214, 215, 217 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 52 housekeeping guides 5 Howard, Jacqueline 201 Howes, Marjorie 64, 65, 199, 201 mob mentality 64 Hume, David 17, 28–32, 35, 37, 65, 66, 132, 165, 176–77, 185, 189, 195, 217 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion 29, 31, 195 An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals 28, 195 “My Own Life” 29, 195 “Of National Characters” 32, 176, 195, 201, 217 “Of Self-Love” 28 Hunt, Leigh 164–66, 173, 174, 177, 181

Hunt, Marianne 164–65 Hunter, Dr. William 127–29, 130–31, 132, 140 “On the Uncertainty of the Signs of Murder in the Case of Bastard Children” 127–29, 211 Hurst, Michael 119, 205, 208 Hutcheson, Francis 27–29, 32, 65, 194 “An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil” 194 imperialism 93–94, 102 incest 59–61, 144, 156–82 infanticide 15, 16, 28–33, 90, 91, 93–94, 124–54, 186–87, 189 concealment of pregnancy 125–26, 129, 137, 138–40, 150 The Infanticide Statute of 1803 139 The Scots Concealment Statute of 1690 125, 137, 138–40, 210 Irigaray, Luce 8, 9, 10, 96, 108, 191, 208 “And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other” 191 “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother” 96, 191, 204 “On the Maternal Order” 191 “Women–Mothers, the silent substratum of the social order” 209 “Women on the Market” 208 Jacobus, Mary 24, 194, 196 Janowitz, Anne 159, 214, 215 Jimack, P. D. 193 John, Christopher 130 Johnson, Claudia 84–85, 203 Johnson, Samuel 1 Jolles, Andre 2 Jones, Rev. Richard 97–98 Jordanova, Ludmilla 194, 208 Kant, Immanuel 27, 35–38, 160, 196 Critique of Judgment 35, 196 Critique of Pure Reason 36–37, 196 Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals 36–37 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime 35–36, 196 Perpetual Peace 37, 196 Kerr, James 152, 213 Kessen, William 193 Kidd, Colin 31, 195 Kilgour, Maggie 201, 202 Kinealy, Christine 105, 106, 204–5, 208 Kinsella, Anna 209 Klee, Paul 188, 189 “Angelus Novus” 188 Kristeva, Julia 8, 9–11, 20, 22, 27, 31, 86, 157, 159, 176, 183, 188, 189, 191

Index Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection 9, 191, 214 “Stabat Mater” 191, 193 Strangers to Ourselves 191, 194, 195, 203, 216 “Women’s Time” 183, 191, 218 Kucich, Greg 214, 216 Lacan, Jacques 91 The Ladies’ Dispensatory or, Every Woman her own Physician 45, 198, 202 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 131–32 Man A Machine 211 Langbauer, Laurie 192 Laqueur, Thomas 16, 128, 192, 194, 199, 211 laws of coverture 83 Ledwon, Lenora 210, 211, 212, 213 Lee, Sophia 56–57, 74–77, 86, 87, 202 The Life of a Lover 202 The Recess; or, a Tale of Other Times 75–77, 202 Levasseur, Th´er`ese 21 Levinas, Emmanuel 3–4, 189 Lewis, Matthew 56–57, 61–66, 92, 163, 201, 216 The Monk 56, 61–66, 92, 201, 216 Lindemann, Mary 196 Linnaeus, Carolus 42, 198 “Step Nurse” 198 literature of sensibility 66 Litton, Helen 205 Locke, John 199 Some Thoughts Concerning Education 199 Lockridge, Laurence 215 London Foundling Hospital 39, 44, 135, 197, 212 Luk´acs, Georg 210, 213 Macaulay, Catherine 42, 43, 207 Letters on Education: With Observations on Religion and Metaphysical Subjects 198, 207 Mahon, Dr. P. A. O. 130 An Essay on the Signs of Murder in New Born Children 130–31, 211 Malthus, Thomas 31, 105–6, 132, 133–35, 195 An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, A View of its past and present Effects on Human Happiness 105–6, 133–34, 195, 208, 212 man of feeling 13 Marshall, William H. 211 Mary, Queen of Scots 3, 75–77 maternal sympathy 22–39, 54, 55, 56, 59, 62, 63, 65, 67, 73, 87, 90, 94 Mauriceau, Francis 44–45, 48, 52 The Diseases of Women with Child, And in Childbed: As also the best Means of Helping them in Natural and Unnatural Labours 44–45, 48, 198, 200

235

McDonagh, Josephine 15, 91, 124, 192, 204, 210, 212 McFarland, E. W. 194 McGann, Jerome 12–13, 190, 192, 204 McLaren, Angus 197 McMaster, Graham 213 Mears, Martha 49–50, 52, 78, 200 The Midwife’s Candid Advice to the Fair Sex; or the Pupil of Nature (In which the Latin Terms are Entirely Omitted) 49–50, 78, 200 medical issues 7, 16, 22, 38–54, 96–97, 125–32, 135–37 debates 8, 16, 17, 25–26, 46–54 manuals 5, 16, 38–54, 60 milk fever 39, 52 technology 4, 8, 47, 48, 51–52, 183–84, 189 reproductive technology 4 Mellor, Anne 13, 115, 189, 191, 193, 202, 205, 209, 214, 216, 217 Mennell, Stephen 207 Mettler, Cecilia 198 midwives 46–47, 48–54, 78, 141, 145–47, 199 accoucheurs 199–200 male midwives 46, 48–54, 78, 128–29, 199 The Midwife Act of 1902 49 Milton, John Paradise Lost 217 Mintz, Sydney W. 206 Moi, Toril 186–87, 189, 190 More, Hannah 1 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education 1, 189 Morrison, Toni 55, 93 Beloved 55, 93 mortality rates 6, 41, 44, 52, 135, 212 Bills of Mortality 39 Moss, Bartholomew 135 Mossman, Carol 23, 193, 194 mother–child bonds 1, 6, 10, 12, 18, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 39, 54, 59, 74, 75, 76, 82, 91, 118, 120, 124, 132, 137, 156, 166 Murphy, John V. 217 Murphy, Willa 209, 213 Myers, Mitzi 203, 208 nationalism 10, 14, 16, 18, 19, 45, 56, 93, 109, 147–49, 153, 176 naturally bad mothers 11, 18, 23–24, 25, 54, 77, 124–25, 157 Nietzsche, Friedrich 155, 213 “Ideal Selfishness” 155 Nougaret 26, 88, 89, 194 Anecdotes of the Reign of Louis XVIth, The Present King of France 26, 194 Nussbaum, Felicity 192, 193

236

Index

Oakley, Ann and Susanne Hood 46, 199, 200 O’Brien, Mary 4, 8, 101–2, 189, 190, 207 Oddy, Derek J. and John Burnett 206 O’Doherty, Mrs. K. I. 107, 122 “The Patriot Mother” 122 O’Farrell, Padraic 209 O’Grada, Cormac 205 O’Neil, Eliza 179–80 ovum theory 47, 48 Parsons, Coleman O. 213 Pascoe, Judith 74, 160, 202, 216 penal laws 114, 196 Perry, Ruth 196 Peterloo Crisis 177 Plutarch 217 Lives of the Saints 217 political bodies 1, 5, 35 Poovey, Mary 193, 203 Pope, Alexander 49 Porter, Roy 47, 194, 199 Porter, Roy and Leslie Hall 28, 194 poststructuralism 9, 10 prenatal care 51 psychoanalytic theory 8–9 psychosis 10 Radcliff, Anne 66–67, 75, 201 A Sicilian Romance 66–67, 201 Radcliff, Walter 200 Rajan, Tilottama 203 rape 90, 168, 169 Rebellion of 1715 195 Rebellion of 1745 122, 195 Rebellion of 1798 70, 99, 107, 113–15, 206, 208–9 reproductive body 4, 23, 51 Rhodes, Rita M. 205 Rich, Adrienne 50–51, 198, 199, 200, 213 Richardson, Alan 13, 156, 192, 199, 214, 215, 217 Rogers, Pat 101, 207 Roscoe, William 41, 45, 198 The Nurse, A Poem 198, 202 Ross, Ian Campell 212 Ross, Marlon 12–13, 191, 192, 203 Rouch, Helene 10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14, 16, 21–26, 33, 35, 44, 46, 47, 53, 82, 85, 107, 109, 135–36, 145–46, 192, 196 Emile 21–26, 44, 46, 107, 136, 192 Ruddick, Sara 4, 185–86, 189, 218 Rundell, Maria 103–4, 109 A New System of Domestic Cookery; Formed on Principles of Economy and Adapted to the Use of Private Families 103–4, 208

Scheibinger, Londa 42, 195, 196, 198, 208 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 155 Schlegel, Friedrich 183, 213, 218 Scott, Joan 5, 190 Scott, Walter 3, 10, 17–18, 118, 122, 137–54, 160 “Child Murder” 139 “General Preface to the 1829 Edition of Waverley” 122 The Heart of Midlothian 3, 18, 122, 124, 137–54, 209, 210, 212 “A Postscript, Which Should Have Been a Preface” to Waverley 123, 209–10 “The Real History of Jeanie Deans” 141 The Waverley Novels 18, 122–23, 137, 160 Sedgewick, Eve Kosovsky 201 Severn, Charles 131, 132 First Lines on the Practice of Midwifery: To Which Are Added Remarks on the Forensic Evidence Requisite in Cases of Foeticide and Infanticide 211 Shaftesbury, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper 195 Shapiro, Barbara 192 Sharp, Jane 199 “To the Midwives of England” 199 The Midwives Book. Or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered. Directing Childbearing Women How to Behave Themselves in their Conception, Breeding, Bearing and Nursing of Children 199 Shelley, Mary Godwin 4, 19–20, 77, 157, 159, 160–66, 170–71, 172, 179, 181–82 “Author’s Introduction to Frankenstein” 163 Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus 4, 162, 163–64, 189, 216 The Journals of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1814–1844 216 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 164–65, 216 Matilda 170–71, 172, 216, 217 “Note on The Cenci” 160, 179, 216 “Note on ‘The Witch of Atlas’” 181, 216 Shelley, Percy 3, 19–20, 101, 155–82 “Alastor” 156 The Cenci 3, 19–20, 156–82, 214 “A Defense of Poetry” 177, 178, 180, 181–82, 218 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley 164–66, 170, 173, 181, 214, 217 “On Life” 181 “On Love” 156, 160, 163, 170, 182, 214 “The Mask of Anarchy” 159 “Notes On Frankenstein” 162, 214 Percy Florence Shelley 165 “Preface to The Cenci” 158, 168, 173–75, 177–80

Index Prometheus Unbound 157, 158, 162, 168–69, 170–71, 214, 217 “The Retrospect” 156 “A Vindication of Natural Diet” 101, 207 William Shelley 157, 164, 172 Sheridan, R. 206 Sheriff, Mary 193 Shorter, Edward 49, 197, 199, 200, 213 Simpson, David 19, 192, 193, 194, 195, 217 Simson, Dr. James 130 “A Probationary Essay on Infanticide” 211 Sloane, Sir Hans 196 Smellie, Dr. William 39, 48–49, 50, 52 Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery 39, 197, 200 Smith, Adam 17, 29–32, 37, 60, 66, 70, 73, 106, 116, 120, 132–33, 134, 176, 195 Theory of Moral Sentiments 29–30, 120, 195 The Wealth of Nations 132, 195, 211 Smith, Charlotte 3, 56–57, 67–74, 75, 83, 87, 93, 94, 201, 202 Desmond 69 Elegiac Sonnets 67–70 The Emigrants 70–74 Emmeline; or the Orphan of the Castle 69 “The Female Exile. Written at Brighthelmstone in November 1792” 70 “Preface to the 1797 Edition” 69 “Preface to the Sixth Edition” 67–68 “Preface to Volume II” 68 The Young Philosopher 69 Smith, Elizabeth 105, 208 Smyth, Jim 208 social contract 24 Socrates 176 Spanish Inquisition 64 Spenser, Edmund 107–8, 109, 110 A View of the Present State of Ireland 107, 208 Stuart, Prince Charles 123 Sutters, Beryl 197 Sweet, Nanora 94, 203, 204 syphilis 43–44 Tansillo, Luigi 41, 198 The Nurse, A Poem 41, 45, 198

237

Teuteberg, H. J. 206 Tew, Marjorie 48, 199, 200 Thorn, Jennifer 191 Tone, Theobald Wolfe 114 “The State of Ireland in 1798” 114, 209 Torella, Gaspara 43 travel literature 22 Trumpener, Katie 98, 108–9, 205, 209, 210 Twain, Mark 55, 96, 206 Pudd’nhead Wilson 96, 204, 206 Ty, Eleanor 201, 202, 203 Ulmer, William 215, 218 Victorian period 52 Walker, Helen 153 Walker, Isobel 141 Wallace, Elizabeth Kowaleski 98, 118–19, 205 Walpole, Horrace 56–57, 58–61, 64, 65–66, 92, 163, 170–71, 201 The Mysterious Mother 56, 58–61, 92, 170, 201 Watkins, David 159, 178–79, 215, 217 Watt, Ian 2, 3, 5, 11, 84, 185–86, 189 reader as juror 2, 11, 84 wet nurse 18, 21, 23, 38–46, 53, 81, 135–36, 144, 197 Irish 98–101, 106–19 Whelan, Kevin 107, 122, 204, 205, 208, 209 Williams, Raymond 218 Wilt, Judith 149–50, 151, 213 witchcraft 146 Wollstonecraft, Mary 3, 15, 17, 19, 40, 52, 56–57, 74, 77–86, 87, 93, 165–66, 192, 197, 203 Mary. A Fiction 202, 203 “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters” 82, 202 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 40, 79–81, 82, 202, 203 The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria 3, 15, 17, 77–78, 81–86, 91, 165, 169, 192, 202, 203 womb 1, 6, 48, 91 Wood, Clive 197 Woodham-Smith, Cecil 205 Wordsworth, William 137 “The Thorn” 137, 212

c a m b ridge studi es i n romant i c i s m general editors marilyn butler, University of Oxford james chandl er, University of Chicago 1. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters m ary a. fav ret 2. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire n igel leask 3. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution tom fu rn iss 4. Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830 peter m u rph y 5. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women ju lie a. carlson 6. Keats, Narrative and Audience an drew ben n et t 7. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre dav id du ff 8. Literature, Education, and Romanticism Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 al an ric h ardson 9. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 edward copel an d 10. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World tim oth y m orton 11. William Cobbett: The Politics of Style leon ora n at trass 12. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 e. j. c lery 13. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 eliz abeth a. boh ls 14. Napoleon and English Romanticism sim on bain bridge

15. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom c eleste l an gan 16. Wordsworth and the Geologists joh n wyat t 17. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography robert j. griff in 18. The Politics of Sensibility Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel m arkm an ellis 19. Reading Daughters’ Fictions,1709–1834 Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth carolin e gon da 20. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 an drea k. h en derson 21. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England kev in gilm artin 22. Reinventing Allegory th eresa m . kelley 23. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 gary dyer 24. The Romantic Reformation Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 robert m . ryan 25. De Quincey’s Romanticism Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission m argaret ru sset t 26. Coleridge on Dreaming Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination jen n ifer ford 27. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity saree m akdisi 28. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake n ic h ol as m . william s 29. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author son ia h ofkosh

30. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition an n e jan owitz 31. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle jeffrey n . cox 32. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism gregory dart 33. Contesting the Gothic Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 jam es wat t 34. Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism dav id aram kaiser 35. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity an drew ben n et t 36. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s Print Culture and the Public Sphere pau l keen 37. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 m artin p riestm an 38. Romanticism and Slave Narratives Transatlantic Testimonies h elen th om as 39. Imagination Under Pressure, 1789–1832 Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility joh n wh ale 40. Romanticism and the Gothic Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, 1790–1820 m ich ael gam er 41. Romanticism and the Human Sciences Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species m au reen n . m c l an e 42. The Poetics of Spice Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic tim oth y m orton 43. British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 m iran da j. bu rgess 44. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s an gel a kean e

45. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism m ark parker 46. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800 betsy bolton 47. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind al an rich ardson 48. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution m . o. gren by 49. Romantic Austen Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon cl ara tu ite 50. Byron and Romanticism j e ro me m c gan n ed. jam es soderho lm 51. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland in a ferris 52. Byron, Poetics and History jan e stabler 53. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 m ark c an u el 54. Fatal Women of Romanticism adrian a c rac iu n 55. Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose tim m iln es 56. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination barbara taylor 57. Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic ju lie kip p