Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England. Columbus
Lisa Zunshine’s study provides an engaging and cogent account of the figures of the bastard and the foundling in eighteenth-century literature. Noting that the distinction between bastards (illegitimate) and foundlings (legitimate but unacknowledged or lost) has often been overlooked in criticism, Zunshine traces the evolution of both subjects, contextualizing her literary analysis in a broader consideration of illegitimacy as a topic to which the period returned over and over again. The eighteenth century’s preoccupation with illegitimacy, Zunshine argues, had its roots in the period’s obsession with the transmission of property. In the British Enlightenment this obsession became intimately linked to issues of propriety. The property-propriety connection gave a particular cast to English representations of bastards and foundlings; namely, bastard narratives most often focused their attention on boys, foundling stories on girls. The emphasis on the foundling story as a narrative particularly suited to female protagonists, Zunshine claims, marked the period’s attentiveness to the sexual character of women and the evolving economics of the marriage market. Zunshine’s reading of the conservative dimension of both economic and gender considerations allows her study to challenge the association of illegitimacy with “progressive” politics that has been drawn by critics interested in the powerful fantasies of individualism often attached to the illegitimate child. Only the replacement of an obsession with the transmission of property by a focus on individuals’ wage-earning potential late in the period allowed the bastard to escape the stigma of social and economic pariah, Zunshine suggests.
Each of the chapters that follow Zunshine’s lucid introduction focuses on one or two plays and novels, although the book’s thesis is governed by reading that encompasses a broad range of texts (the study’s bibliography serves as a helpful guide to the subject material, both primary and secondary). The close-readings of plays and narratives allow Zunshine to tackle the representational practices governing the period’s representations of bastards and foundlings, as well as to consider the difference that genre makes. In particular, Zunshine grants the novel pride of place as the form most suited to exposing the contradictions and conflicts that appear when literature tries to ameliorate or sanitize the subject of bastardy through the medium of the foundling plot. Tantalizingly, Clarissa appears a foundling in relation to her unnatural and uncaring family, a metaphoric association that places her in close proximity with the dangerous offspring of an illicit libertine union between Lovelace’s friend Belton and his mistress. And, in the case of a bastard like Tom Jones, whose plot remains resolutely illegitimate, we discover “a fantastic hybrid partaking of competing cultural attempts to reimagine bastardy without committing to any of them” (100). Jane Austen’s “common sense” resolution to the problem of bastardy–to own it, rather than translate it into a Cinderella-like foundling romance–casts a progressive light on Austen’s narrative practice. Both foundlings and bastards, then, provide a window into the novel’s ability to entertain multiple points of view and to resist ideological closure in its attempts to represent this complex subject.
The majority of eighteenth-century bastards and foundlings, Zunshine argues, came from the middling ranks, and the narratives that write their stories express the view of what we loosely describe as “the middle class.” “A character could be presented as a daughter of a baronet,” Zunshine writes, “but her own and her family’s perspective of her (presumable) bastardy would unmistakably reflect the concerns of middle-class readers, whose experience of illegitimacy was very different from that of [the] aristocracy” (3). Zunshine’s focus on the economic and sexual preoccupations of the middling ranks prevents her from recognizing the extent to which aristocratic concerns about bastards took on a particularly marked character in the wake of the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, the revolution of 1688/89, and the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. The Whig regimes that fought off the Jacobite insurgency after 1689 engaged in a long and relentless campaign against the displaced Stuart kings by adopting a language of illegitimacy both symbolic and literal–the son of James II was deemed a bastard by Whig opponents to the regime even before he was born. The bastard stands at the crossroads of politics and gender in the long eighteenth century, and to deny the relevance of the political aspect of Tom Jones, most obviously, and Clarissa, more subtly, is to ignore a subject as urgent as the economic and social transformations of the period.
Better care should have been taken, both by Zunshine and by her editors at the Ohio State University Press, in preparing this book for publication. For example, the status of the 1862 source Zunshine draws upon to characterize the appearance of infanticide in the urban landscape of early modern urban London remains unclear. No note accompanies this citation of William Burke Ryan’ Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention and History, and he is quoted as though he is a contemporary, rather than a nineteenth-century, historian. Zunshine draws citations from sources other than the original (“Theodore Albert qtd in Zomchick”, p.186n61, for example; Derrida is presented through a quotation provided by Marie MacLean’s The Name of the Mother: Writing Illegitimacy.) Citations are repeated (the book’s epigraph is repeated in the introduction, and then again on page 39; Thomas Bray’s remark about bastards appears both on page 4 and page 29, Mandeville’s on page 5 and page 47); index page references contain errors and fail to list citations (Bray first appears on page 4, not page 5, as listed in the Index; the note page reference for the Derrida citation does not appear in the Index; Zomchick appears on page 65, for which there is no citation in the index).
