Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative: Representations of Breast-feeding in Nineteenth-Century France by Lisa Algazi Marcus

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative: Representations of Breast-feeding in Nineteenth-Century France by Lisa Algazi Marcus Tessa Ashlin Nunn Marcus, Lisa Algazi. Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative: Representations of Breast-feeding in Nineteenth-Century France. Liverpool UP, 2022. ISBN 978-1-802-07064-4. Pp. viii + 176. This monograph examines representations of breast-feeding in literature, art, politics, and medical treaties from the late eighteenth century to 1900. Comparing depictions of nursing from various literary genres to statistics on wet-nursing, Marcus shows how male writers represented breast-feeding as a cultural signifier of motherhood despite the paucity of Frenchwomen actually nursing their own children. Marcus explains how Rousseau's writings on breast-feeding as a cure for social problems influenced authors' idealization of breast-feeding mothers. Contrasting men's texts with the midwife Marie-Angélique Le Rebours's 1767 breast-feeding manual, Marcus asserts that likening breast-feeding to a patriotic duty aimed to confine women to the domestic sphere without imparting any practical knowledge about nursing. With the rise of Romanticism, literary and visual descriptions of breast-feeding became rare. Marcus attributes this change to the Napoleonic Code's reduction of women to reproductive machines and the disappearance of the maternal icon of the Republic in favor of the masculine symbols of the Empire. Works by Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Alphonse de Lamartine represent nursing mothers as marginal, racialized, or grieving, and portray motherhood as superseding women's selfhood. In realist and naturalist novels, breast-feeding is associated with sexual pleasure or political agendas. Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola depict nursing through the male gaze either to present maternal nursing as crucial for the infant or to reveal a regressive identification with the suckling child. Drawing on the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, Marcus considers what is at stake when the male gaze constructs and controls maternal desire. The monograph offers an in-depth analysis of how Balzac compares motherhood to sexual gratification in Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (1841) and how Zola separates sexuality from motherhood in Fécondité (1899). In these novels, maternal jouissance, Marcus argues, exists for the pleasure of the male spectator. During the Third Republic, moralists, politicians, and novelists reclaimed the nursing mother as a symbol of Republican virtues and censured mercenary nursing as immoral and unsafe, though wet-nursing remained the norm in France until 1918 when pasteurized milk became readily available. Marcus examines the intertextuality between Fécondité and lesser-known texts, namely Alexandre Hepp's 1891 novel Le lait d'une autre, François Coppée's 1872 poem "La nourrice," and Eugène Brieux's 1901 play Les Remplaçantes, to investigate how these texts took part in political dialogues on depopulation, women's civic roles, and public assistance programs. The monograph's analysis of Marianne's breast as a Republican icon highlights how literature and art idealize or demonize the female body to advance political [End Page 282] goals. Though this book focuses predominantly on male authors, it points out that late-nineteenth-century feminists advocated for maternal breast-feeding and George Sand, who nursed her two children, represented breast-feeding as a normal aspect of life in three novels. Scholars researching or teaching the relationship between literature and politics in the nineteenth century as well as scholars in feminist studies will find this book a valuable resource. This accessible monograph could serve as supplemental reading for undergraduates studying Rousseau, Zola, or Balzac. [End Page 283] Tessa Ashlin Nunn Independent Scholar Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French