Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney to Jane Austen (review)

Abstract

132 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION17:1 to be definite and limited, but evidence from the South Seas brought back by Philibert Commerson and later by Darwin bore out the intuitions of Monboddo, who had foretold that the metamorphosis of species would be confirmed by austral discoveries. In a book with that very title, Restii de la Bretonne celebrated the community of humans and orangutans. It seems to be a fundamental point ofdifference between the giants ofthe Enlightenmentwhether humans and the human character could be changed by circumstances of climate, geography, transplantion, or solitude, and whether speciation was a perpetual process or the basic outlines of humans and all odier species were settled and immutable. Montesquieu, Monboddo, Raynal, and Diderot stand on one side; Hume, ThomasJefferson, de Sade, and Linnaeus on the other. Douthwaite is to be praised for setting this difference in such a broad spectrum ofcontexts, so well detailed and so full ofhints for further reading. The narrative she offers, however, is necessarily circular, from Gulliver's Yahoos to Frankenstein's monster. Once it became possible for enlightened human beings to consider their capacity for change, and the degree that change might be controlled by themselves, the myth of original innocence seems to mock, and be mocked by, the dream ofperfectible humanity. It is perhaps not surprising that the century should witness the rise of theriophily, now known as animal rights, a movement in favour of sympathy with animals that seems coincident with the most profound doubts about die humanity of humans. Jonathan Lamb Vanderbilt University Susan C. Greenfield. Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney toJane Austen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002. 227pp. US$34.95. ISBN 0-8143-2992-6. The essays that made up Susan Greenfield's (co-edited) InventingMaternity (1999) demonstrated die malleability of the sentimental, devoted maternal figure. Besides convincing us that one of our richest cultural symbols, the maternal body, is perpetually reinvented, this analysis influentially maintained that motherhood remains a contested site of political discourse. Addressing the representation of the mother-daughter bond in early novels, the volume under discussion here is a natural extension of this argument. Again Greenfield proceeds from the assumption—which has become codified, partially owing to her own earlier work—that the maternal body is culturally constructed for political purposes. Mothering Daughters REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS133 furthers her argument against a static, conservative model ofmaternity. This study is concerned with the flexible and ambiguous representation of maternity, with the emergence ofearly modern constructions ofmotherhood and the gendered body, and with the way in which the mother-daughter plot in women's novels affected modern motherhood. To this end, Greenfield considers the ideological implications ofwomen's representations ofmotherdaughter relationships in terms of a variety of issues such as gender, class, sexuality, pregnancy, homoerotic and incestuous desire, maternal breastfeeding , and legal, racial, and colonial discourse. Greenfield connects the development of the novel with die development of the nuclear family, focusing on the idealization of modierhood. She provides a historical, political and cultural context for the mother-daughter bond in the fiction oflate eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women. From a feminist psychoanalytic approach that is heavily influenced by Freud, Kristeva, and Lacan, Greenfield analyses Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798), Maria Edgewordi's Belinda (1801), AmeliaAlderson Opie's AdelineMowbray, or TheMotherandDaughter (1804), andJane Austen's Emma (1816). In these works, which feature missing mothers and suffering daughters, maternal absence emphasizes the importance ofmotherhood and the mother-daughter bond: "In novel after novel, the mother's absence highlights her indispensability, the daughter's pain bears witness to her love" (13) . Besides documenting the contribution of the mother-daughter plot to the development ofthe novel and to the construction ofmodern maternal ideals, Greenfield makes claims for its contribution to psychoanalytic theory. Although Marianne Hirsch earlier took on psychoanalytic theory directly in The Mother/Daughter Plot (1989), she deals with Austen and later novelists, while Toni Bowers's novelists in ThePolitics ofMotherhood (1996) predate Greenfield's, as do those of Felicity Nussbaum, whose Torrid Zones (1995) also emphasizes other cultural texts. Greenfield both incorporates...