Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650-1865

The essays in Inventing Maternity are arranged in chronological order, and by happy coincidence, the strongest essays open and close the volume. The book ends with Ann Gelder's poetically written "Reforming the Body: 'Experience' and the Architecture of the Imagination in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Gelder shows that a beautifully constructed close reading of slave narratives is still worth doing, especially when nuanced by Hazel Carby, Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, and Andrew Jackson Downing's Architecture of Country Houses (1852). Gelder's reading of vines and tendrils on the southern home as metonymic of an idealized white femininity's silent support of antebellum patriarchy shows just the kind of passion for language that makes cultural studies and new criticism speak to one another (254-55). Similarly, Eve Keller's "Making up for Losses: The Workings of Gender in William Harvey's de Generatione animalium" is a scholarly and delightfully witty tour de force of medical historiography and rhetorical close reading. Keller reads Harvey's extended medical study of the role of the female body in conception as "a compensatory drama in which an inviolable male agency and an autonomous masculine identity emerge in the face of threatened loss to male sexual and political power" (35). Positing the ova as "a full subject from its first appearance", which must therefore "be understood to make itself," Harvey is left "enraptured before the egg"--stunned by its autonomy and wholeness. Yet, Harvey's ovalatry is not truly a feminist position, nor does it improve on the homunculus theory of earlier writers, for Harvey's prejudices against the female body lead him to posit gestation as "the work of the fetus not the mother" and birth as the triumph of an autonomous superhero "fighting its way from death into life" (46-8). In her study, Keller demonstrates that Harvey identifies so closely with the egg that he usurps its place in the womb, taking on "the role of hero-adventurer, a role commonly assumed by early modern scientists, in which the experimenter explores and seeks to control some uncharted and typically feminized territory" (51).

Rounding out the seventeenth-century contributions are essays on Anne Bradstreet's poetry by Kimberley Latta and Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel" by Susan C. Greenfield. I found these two pieces very scrupulously researched and argued, but less vivacious and compelling than Keller's essay; although, to be fair, when one's primary texts are by Bradstreet and Dryden, rather than the richly symptomatic Harvey, one does what one can. Toni Bower's "A Point of Conscience: Breastfeeding and Maternal Authority in Pamela, Part Two," revisits materials found in Ruth Perry's groundbreaking essay, "Colonizing the Breast," and in Felicity Nussbaum's chapter on Pamela, Part Two in Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire (1996). Claudia L. Johnson, who can always be counted on for exemplary readings that confront the paradoxical values of contradictory misogynist/feminist figures such as Jane Austen, contributes "Styles of Radical Maternity," an essay on Mary Wollstonecraft's private letters and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. Johnson, who believes that Joan Landes "greatly exaggerates the importance of maternity in Wollstonecraft's political thought," sees Wollstonecraft "celebrating a vision of republican masculinity into which women too could be invited" (172; 160). Johnson finds that in Maria, "the female body is accepted in all of its creatureliness"--which, if true, would constitute a sharp contrast to the rhetoric of A Vindication, which is ever resolute in positing the desiring body as the enemy of rationality.

While I admire the elegance of Anita Levy's "Reproductive Urges: Literacy, Sexuality, and Eighteenth-Century Englishness," I disagree with her conclusion that "it is fair to say that mid-eighteenth-century intellectuals were not preoccupied with the possibility of prolix authors writing too many books or fertile people having too many children" (197). Using chiefly the author Hannah More, Levy claims that at the end of the eighteenth century writers were suddenly "alarmed by 'that profusion of little, amusing, sentimental books with which the library overflows'" (198). Many authors before More, however, were consumed with the shift from intensive to extensive reading caused by such reverberations of the Protestant Reformation as the printing press, publication in vulgate languages, and burgeoning literacy. More importantly, seventeenth and early-to-mid-eighteenth-century writers associate those changes with another aspect of the Reformation: the exhortation to maternity that followed the closing of the nunneries and the end of institutional support for female intellectual life. Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) prefigures 1790's arguments by More and Wollstonecraft about misapplied female learning: "there is a sort of learning indeed which is worse than the greatest ignorance." Observing that "a woman may study Plays and Romances all her days and be a great deal more knowing and never a jot the wiser" (83), Astell hopes that her proposed "monastery" for female learning will undo the work of the Reformation. She aims, for example, to reverse the shift to extensive reading made possible by the printing press, "for it is not intended that [the novitiate] shou'd ... trouble herself in turning over a huge number of Books, but take care to understand and digest a few well-chosen and good ones" (77). Astell, long before More, offers to women the notion that an institution devoted to solitude and intensive reading will aid those women "overstock'd with children" to see another possibility for female endeavor besides generating "a race of beggarly children" (160; 158; 161). Even more explicit about the symbolic connection between overproductive, laboring female bodies and "groaning" printing presses is Bernard Mandeville's A Modest Defense of the Publick Stews (1724). Implicit in Mandeville's utopian project to establish a kind of socialized prostitution is the argument that whoring and publication (both "peccant humours in the body politic") are leaving a burden of fatherless books and babies on the public's hands; Mandeville's text even categorizes itself as a bastard child left at the reader's doorstep, one who, "if it be defective, why let the charge of raising it fall on the Parish." Mandeville connects the "loveless, joyless, unindear'd casual fruition" to the mania for scribbling that caused "four hundred thousand religious books [to be] distributed about Gratis (not to mention the numberless threepenny jobs daily publish'd to no ends, or purpose but the author's" (preface, n.p.). Mandeville actually thinks that all this mad procreating and publishing actually yields fewer strong survivors because the sexually and literarily prolific "beget a most wretched, feeble, and sickly offspring" (5). In sum, both Astell and Mandeville undermine Levy's argument that the connection between "prolix authors" and overproductive mothers is a newly minted bête noire particular to the late eighteenth century.

I can appreciate Levy's position, for I have known the seductiveness of a Virginia Woolf-style argument --"On or about 1918, human nature changed"--a claim echoed in Levy's opening sentence: "this essay takes the period in eighteenth-century England when the power of words changed profoundly and writing took on unprecedented authority in a field of symbolic practices" (193). Most authors making such claims mean not to echo Woolf but Foucault, whose patented claims to historical discontinuity are founded in his "before and after" pictures of public torture, immersion treatment of hysterics, and the like, which open each of his books. Karen Newman has noted that "recent historicist work that might best be termed pseudo-Foucauldian has taken the critique of … teleology to mean that there can be no diachronic arguments. Ironically, the claim on behalf of a rupture, break, or shift, separating one episteme from another and foreclosing any diachronic possibility is teleology with a vengeance" (Fetal Positions, 2). There are diachronic arguments in other essays in Inventing Maternity, however. Julie Costello's reading of Maria Edgeworth's Ennui and Julia Epstein's "The Pregnant Imagination, Women's Bodies, and Fetal Rights," both put early texts in dialogue with later events. Costello sees the fixation on hunger, gluttony, and wetnursing in Ennui as a prophecy about "the concerns that would trouble [Edgeworth] during the [Great Famine] of the 1830's and 1840's" (173). Epstein reads 1990's legal opinions on "fetal abuse" by mothers as "harkening back" to the eighteenth-century debate over maternal impressions in medical writers such as Malebranche, Blondel, Turner, and Mauclerc. Our recent conundrum over the rights of pregnant women to privacy and those of fetuses to a healthy gestation revisits the ovism of Harvey and the desire to call the mother simply the house of the fetus. "Crack baby" phantasms of the 1990's and "Rabbit-breeder" rumors of the 1700's are both consumed with the question of "unbridled appetites" in the passive incubator we call "the mother." Constituting women as "the major threat to the health of the newborns, and the womb as the most dangerous place a child will ever inhabit" is "not such a new question," Epstein shows us, enlarging our view of both ourselves and of our eighteenth-century predecessors (123).

Even if it did not have several excellent articles, Inventing Maternity would be worth having for Susan C. Greenfield's "Introduction" alone. Greenfield's wide-ranging remarks refine the influential ideas of Lawrence Stone (The Family, Sex and Marriage, 1977) and Randolph Trumbach (The Rise of the Egalitarian Family, 1978), who both argued that in the eighteenth century, a new conception of "devoted motherhood fostered the development of intense personal attachments unavailable in previous generations" (3). Following Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction in positing enormous hegemonic power in the novels of the day, Greenfield attributes such an influence to "texts such as Pamela, Part 2, The Wrongs of Woman, Ennui, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which tentatively imply that a child's happiness and health depend on maternal presence and affection … [These novels] reflect the gradual development of a cultural consensus about childhood needs that psychoanalysis inherits and elaborates" (20). Greenfield's "Introduction" very wisely commemorates a 1992 issue of Eighteenth-Century Life that contained both Felicity Nussbaum's "Savage Mothers" and Ruth Perry's "Colonizing the Breast," two works that have been enormously enabling to many critics. For a critic, such as myself, who has been tracking down essays on maternity, medicine, and the family through a method akin to hunt-and-peck typing, Inventing Maternity is an invaluable collection.