Despised Creatures: The Illusion of Maternal Self-Effacement in Seventeenth-Century Child Loss Poetry

Abstract

Despised Creatures: The Illusion of Maternal Self-Effacement in Seventeenth-Century Child Loss Poetry Pamela Hammons* Of her there bred A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed, Sucking vpon her poisonous dugs, each one Of sundry shapes, yet all ill fauored. Spenser, The Faerie Queene 1 I. Miscreating Mothers The cultural context of seventeenth-century England brought women’s physically creative abilities into a potentially dangerous association with their intellectually creative ones, thereby allowing a mother-poet’s agency in writing a poem on child loss to be conflated with her supposed agency in ensuring (or not) the life of her child. The association of a mother’s inappropriate intellectual activity with the death of her child makes writing a poem about that loss paradoxical. 2 Such a bereaved mother-poet encounters a culturally sanctioned opportunity to write a poem—a limited occurrence for a seventeenth-century English woman—but must use that occasion to renounce or disprove any seemingly improper attempt at creative intellectual agency. She may write a poem but must erase herself as poet. This double bind, however, results in some mothers’ composition of poems that resist the literary and social conventions blaming the mother for the death of her child by interrogating, and thereby invigorating, the commonplaces associated with elegies and epitaphs for children. Few members of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society were more likely to be demonized than mothers. 3 Spenser’s Errour and Milton’s Sin frame the period and serve as telling measures of just how monstrous representations of mothers could become. Errour and Sin are not hideous merely because they personify spiritual depravity or because they bring men to their destruction. They are repulsive because they are mothers whose offspring reflect and multiply their evil and [End Page 25] ugliness. 4 As Deborah Willis indicates, Renaissance depictions of witches similarly rely upon the demonization of the mother. 5 In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, witch-like Lady Macbeth invokes hellish powers to replace her mother’s milk with poison and incites Macbeth to murder by claiming that she could kill her own children had she sworn—as has Macbeth to kill Duncan—to do so. 6 In Jacobean pamphlets such as The Wonderful Discovery of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Philippa Flower, peasant women are represented as witches who not only conspired to kill the local nobleman’s children and to render his wife barren, but who confessed to suckling satanic familiars at the very breasts that should nurture children. 7 While one might assume that early modern English mothers were represented as witches to express the degree to which those particular mothers were poor examples of proper maternity, historian Phyllis Mack observes the opposite: a foolproof method for making a horrible figure of any kind more horrific was to make it a mother. “In fact, the most potent image of woman’s spiritual marginality,” Mack asserts, “was not the deviant witch brewing potions or stroking her familiars but the ordinary mother.” A pregnant woman’s interaction with the world around her was believed to be so fragile and so subject to influence that what she saw could shape—and potentially deform—her unborn child. So suspect was the female imagination that, according to Mack, “a prime explanation for the birth of a deformed child was that . . . a woman’s volatile imagination, infused by evil forces, was sufficient to transform the fetus into a monster.” 8 A prominent example of the female imagination’s susceptibility to spiritual misconception is Milton’s depiction in Paradise Lost of Eve’s vulnerability to Satan’s influence when he whispers in her ear to affect her dreams. Ithuriel and Zephon find Satan “Assaying by his devilish art to reach / The organs of her fancy” with which he hopes to “forge / Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams” (PL, 4.801–2, 4.802–3). Milton makes Satan’s first direct assault on the human couple in Paradise an attempt to manipulate Eve’s “fancy”; ultimately, the devil hopes to “raise [in her] . . . inordinate desires / Blown up with high conceits engendering pride” (PL, 4.806–9), as if to impregnate her with the sin of pride itself...