Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic by Julie Kipp (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.4, 2005 1097 major Scottish poets of the earlier twentieth century, Sydney Goodsir Smith's 1952 collection Robert Fergusson 1750-1774: Essays by Various Hands (London: Nelson) remains indispensable. However, since 'Heaven-Taught Fergusson' is the only booksized essay collection since then, it is a valuable attempt to reintroduce Fergusson to our contemporaries. General assessments of eighteenth-century literature need to include him more centrally. Moreover, the book is worth having just for the informa? tion Janet Sorenson provides about the word 'wow' (p. 117). University of Glasgow Alan Riach Romanticism, Maternity, and theBody Politic. By Julie Kipp. (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. xiii + 237pp. ?40; $60. ISBN 0-521-81455-3. This study explores a range of representations of maternity in the Romantic period, representations linked by their engagement with a paradox which, according to Kipp, lies at the heart ofRomantic-era motherhood, whereby mothers were encouraged both to follow their affectionate 'natures' and to subordinate their affections to the best interests of the child and the state. Thus, she suggests, maternity was structured as an almost untenable subject-position: mothers were 'dangerously good' ifthey loved their children indiscriminately yet 'naturally bad' if they did not love them enough. The boundaries between 'good' and 'bad' motherhood threatened to dissolve under the pressure of a doubly contradictory construction of motherhood: not only must the ideal mother identify closely with her child and also promote his or her develop? ment as an autonomous subject; she must negotiate too her own confinement to the domestic sphere and a compromised civic identity No wonder that mothers might become too closely involved with their children to act objectively and that maternal love might become 'a savage impulse'. As Kipp demonstrates, many post-Enlightenment literarytexts invoke the motherchild bond, earlier utilized by Kant, Rousseau, and Hume as a figure forwider social relations, as a means of naturalizing or critiquing other forms of social interaction. The figureof the Irish wet-nurse in Maria Edgeworth's Ennui is a telling example. As Kipp demonstrates, Ellinor's divided position as both natural and foster mother en? ables Edgeworth to explore the conflicted subjectivity of the Irish people, dependent politically and economically on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy (of which Edgeworth was herself a part). Moreover, Ellinor's indiscriminate feeding of her natural and foster child, and her success in substituting one for the other, suggest the fragilityand permeability of the boundaries between the Irish and Anglo-Irish peoples. Similarly, in The Heart of Midlothian the representation of distracted or infanticidal mothers allows Scott to explore the dangerous nature of passionate local (Scottish) attachments , which threatened the stability of what was, in his view, the progressive and enlightened Act of Union. This suggestive study also explores images of motherhood in the novels of Matthew Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft and in the poetry of Charlotte Smith and Percy Shelley. Yet the question which it does not quite ask or answer is why maternity was figured in such strikingly ambivalent terms in the literature of the period. In this re? spect Kipp's study might have benefited from closer attention to the socio-economic and medical contexts of motherhood in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. This was a period of significant change in class structure and in patterns of inheritance. A powerful middle class favoured more equitable systems of inheri? tance than the landed gentry,but was equally anxious to make absolute distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children. In recognizing only church marriages, 1098 Reviews Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753 not only firmed up the concept of legi? timacy but tied it more closely to the middle classes. Informal betrothal customs lost much of their coercive power, illegitimacy rates rose among the poor, and con? cerns about infanticide and abortion led to the criminalizing of abortion in 1803. Reproduction, like production, was thus increasingly regulated by the nation state, with sanctions against 'improper' motherhood increasing the risks of maternity. The rise of obstetric medicine created additional pressures. In order to account for the physiological changes which took place in pregnancy, influential accoucheurs such as Thomas Denman developed existing...