Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650-1865 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 113 The project is a useful one, and Empowering the Feminine contains some sharp critical insights. Yet it is seriously flawed by a pervasive sense of unsureness, suggested by its heavy reliance on the verb seems; by the author's irritating habit of explaining in advance, over and over, exactly what she proposes to do (and then doing no more); and especially by what I found a rather bizarre critical eclecticism. Virtually every recently fashionable critical name makes its appearance : Foucault, Bakhtin, Cixous, Irigaray, Lacan, Judith Butler, even Marjorie Garber. Ty explicitly justifies her reliance on "poststructuralist and feminist theories " by a slightly obscure claim that "as long as women and men assume their subjectivity through language that is gendered, then issues of identity, sexuality , and power remain problematic regardless of historical conditions" (p. ix). But her own lack of theoretical consistency makes her invocation of the disparate theories appear random reaching after authority. Thus Ty observes of one of Opie's heroines, "Her ability to make herself useful gives her a kind of dignity and power that puts the concept of the seduced maiden under 'erasure,' to use a Derridian term" (p. 142). One must wonder why she thinks she needs a Derridian term. Often the critic uses current terminology to evade critical difficulties . When, for example, on three successive pages she observes that the notion of the tale is "problematic," that the state of marriage is "problematic," and that ideals of femininty are "problematic for women" (pp. 148-50), she fails to explain the nature ofthe "problem" in any instance. I kept wishing for less rhetorical posturing and more of the direct exegesis that Eleanor Ty performs at her best. Patricia Meyer Spacks University of Virginia Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash, eds. Inventing Maternity: Politics , Science, and Literature, 1650-1865. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. viii + 274pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-8131-2078-0. Motherhood is currently a "hot" topic. Witness the recent appearance of books on the subject by popular writers from Erica Jong to Cokie Roberts and of psychoanalytic works by French maternal theorists, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, and by their American counterparts, Madelon Sprengnether and Marianne Hirsch. Complementing this work is the more historical research of scholars such as Patricia Meyer Spacks, Ruth Perry, Toni Bowers, and Felicity Nussbaum. Inventing Maternity is a welcome addition to cultural studies of motherhood. The essays analyse from eleven perspectives early modern constructions of maternity, procreation, and the gendered body. While almost half these articles have appeared elsewhere, they benefit from ajuxtaposition that defines the way in which the maternal body is culturally constructed for political purposes. Examining a wide variety of English, American, and Irish sources including religious and political tracts, medical texts, domestic conduct-books, cookbooks, and literature, together these pieces demonstrate that our respect for the devoted 114 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:1 maternal figure (which, ironically, may elevate women even as it restricts them) developed during the long eighteenth century. In her sweeping introduction, which is both useful and perceptive, Susan Greenfield argues that it was in the eighteenth century that "the still powerful image of the tender mother took root" (p. 1). Although Greenfield acknowledges critics such as Linda Pollock, who contend that maternal attachment was not a new phenomenon in the eighteenth century, this volume is informed by the work of Lawrence Stone and Randolph Trumbach, who, in the late 1970s, argued that during the long eighteenth century, full-time affectionate motherhood was "invented," along with companionate marriage and affective individualism. The mother-child bond intensified, as mothers, whose lives were increasingly defined by childbearing and rearing, became the central figures in the lives of their offspring. Such assumptions, which continue to be debated by scholars of family history, affect not only the title but also the organization of the volume. As a whole, the collection attempts to demonstrate the transition from a generative to a reproductive model of creation, as the emphasis shifted from lineage and patriarchal creation to maternal procreation, that is, from father to mother. Essays are arranged chronologically to cover the period 1650 to 1865, "when the idea of the...