Making Mother Obsolete: Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and the Masculine Appropriation of Maternity Meghan L. Burke (bio) The titular “secret” of Eliza Fenwick’s 1795 novel Secresy, or The Ruin on the Rock is one of hidden maternity.1 On multiple conceptual levels, this secret both creates and destroys. Quite literally, the clandestine pregnancy of the imprisoned heiress Sibella Valmont involves the creation of an illegitimate offspring, the physical and emotional turmoil of which destroys the illfated young mother. Additionally, Sibella’s pregnancy is an embodiment of an intangible yet more powerful “creation,” that of female agency and community. In a departure from the typical, tragic, illegitimate births of literary convention, Sibella’s maternity represents free female will. The bond it cements between the pregnant woman and her female confidante, Caroline Ashburn, also signifies the ways in which maternity serves as a site of communal power and authority for women. This sense of community is evident when Caroline rushes to aide Sibella in the concealment and control of her new maternity, particularly when patriarchal authority threatens to reclaim and effectively check the girl’s transgressive reproduction. That a “secret” experience of pregnancy—a mysterious gestation occuring in the unseen dark of the woman’s womb—serves to bind the two heroines of Secresy together in an alliance of female authority is not a radical notion. Throughout centuries [End Page 357] of European society, childbirth and reproduction were viewed as completely within the realm of female control and solidarity, as women—mothers, midwives, other female relatives, and friends—gathered together to share their knowledge and support from the earliest stages of pregnancy through the parturition and postnatal “lying-in.” Not only would these women share their expertise and advice with one another, but also, as men were almost completely excluded from scenes of birth, women were the sole proprietors of the facts of what exactly happened during each specific birthing-room incident. These were their secrets to keep. Secresy is also generally understood as a novel of the failures of female communities, and, in a seeming paradox, pregnancy lies at the heart of the most tragic of these failures as women are persecuted for the same agency and solidarity that maternity afforded them. In this manner, the events of Secresy reflect the era’s dominant perceptions of how a “secret” female childbirth culture could exist dangerously outside the realm of rational, patriarchal control and become a palpable source of anxiety. If creation itself is seen as fundamentally located within feminine processes unavailable to men, male claims to cultural and biological dominance do not appear impervious to challenges; the seeming supremacy of female reproductive biology can generate insidious doubt in men’s ability to reproduce and create anything. The collective nature of women’s power over reproduction is perhaps most threatening to male hegemony, as control over the facts of childbirth essentially results in control over social systems as a whole: because physical sites of reproduction such as wombs and childbeds appear secreted from men, the fearful possibility exists that the true identity and legitimacy of every infant, from the nation’s lowest newborn to its future king, could be either maintained or masked by the manoeuvrings of scheming mothers and their midwife collaborators. Lisa Forman Cody describes this historical fear that “women gathered alone together were outside the reach of patriarchal control and that when these women succumbed to their innate desire to deceive and rule men, they were acting politically.”2 When secrecy surrounds female reproductive practices, women have the ability to conceal illegitimate class [End Page 358] infiltration and disrupt the proper flow of paternal inheritance and authority. The “lesser” sex thereby gains incalculable influence over important patriarchal structures. In the eighteenth century, changes occurred in England that began to actively combat this apparent weakness in the patriarchal social order: male authorities set about demystifying woman’s natural, invisible procreative power—which, by virtue of its invisibility and exclusion from male subjective experience, had already gradually been painted as “unnatural” in the dominant masculine discourse of the culture—and began conquering the world of birth. Both eighteenth-century commentators and modern-day scholars have offered a number of motivations...
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Nov 9, 2024
Jin‐Hwan Kim + 3
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Open Access