Motherhood, Mother Country, and Migrant Maternity

Leonardi, Barbara

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_2

Barbara Leonardi³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

Leonardi discusses the idea of the well-managed, middle-class, domestic household as symbol for the politically successful government of the British nation and the pivotal role of the mother figure in the family metaphor for the “continuation of the nation.” This chapter draws attention to how some nineteenth-century literary texts challenged such discourses by portraying out-of-wedlock pregnancy, prostitution, and infanticide. It contends that Mary Wollstonecraft contradicted her conservative ideas about motherhood in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by depicting a familial nucleus of only women in her two novels Mary: A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman: or Maria. A Fragment (1798). The chapter also explores the treatment of infanticide in Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and in James Hogg’s Mador of the Moor (1816).

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Notes

1.
The Dublin Saturday Magazine 2, no. 45, 1865–67, p. 276.
2.
Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 38.
3.
See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 22.
4.
Ibid., 17.
5.
Ibid., 20.
6.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Ashley Tauchert (London: Everyman, 1995 [1792]), 25.
7.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia: Or, a New System of Education (London: T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1763), 10, available from HathiTrust, accessed April 3, 2017.
8.
Julie Kipp, Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 22.
9.
Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia, 19.
10.
John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (Philadelphia: Robert Campbell, 1795), 23, available from HathiTrust, last accessed April 4, 2017.
11.
Wollstonecraft, The Rights of Woman, 4 (see note 6).
12.
Gregory, A Father’s Legacy, 14 (see note 10).
13.
Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, 29 (see note 2).
14.
Ibid., 91.
15.
Laura Kirkley, “‘Original Spirit’: Literary Translations and Translational Literature in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft,” in Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory, ed. Robin Truth Goodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 16.
16.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event, ed. and intr. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982 [1790]), 119–20.
17.
Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, 31 (see note 2).
18.
Ibid., 25.
19.
Ibid., 25–26.
20.
Ibid., 30.
21.
Mitzi Myers, “Sensibility and the ‘Walk of Reason’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique,” in Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics, ed. Sydney McMillen Conger (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989), 120–44, cited in Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, 90 (see note 2).
22.
Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, 90 (see note 2).
23.
Rajani Sudan, “Mothering and National Identity in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 75.
24.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Fiction, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler with Emma Rees-Mogg (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989 [1788]), 5.
25.
Ibid., 10.
26.
Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s – Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 47.
27.
Ibid., 48.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Ibid., 50, 53.
30.
Ibid., 53.
31.
Ibid.
32.
Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Fiction, 25 (see note 24).
33.
Sudan, “Mothering and National Identity,” 80 (see note 23).
34.
Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Fiction, 25 (see note 24).
35.
Ibid.
36.
Sudan, “Mothering and National Identity,” 80 (see note 23).
37.
Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Fiction, 41 (see note 24).
38.
Ibid., 55.
39.
Ibid., 72.
40.
Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 54 (see note 26).
41.
Ibid.
42.
Judith Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 1.
43.
Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Fiction, 73 (see note 24).
44.
Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 66 (see note 26).
45.
Burke, Reflections, 120 (see note 16).
46.
Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, 30 (see note 2).
47.
Irish Farmers’ Journal and Weekly Intelligencer, “Foundling Hospital—Prevalence of Infanticide,” 14, no. 20, December 31, 1825, p. 158, emphasis original.
48.
Jean R. Freedman, “With Child: Illegitimate Pregnancy in Scottish Traditional Ballads,” Folklore Forum 24, no. 1 (1991): 4.
49.
David Atkinson, “History, Symbol, and Meaning in ‘The Cruel Mother’,” Folk Music Journal 6, no. 3 (1992): 376.
50.
Ann Wierda Rowland, “‘The fause nourice sang’: Childhood, Child Murder, and the Formalism of the Scottish Ballad Revival,” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Ian Duncan, with Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 226, 227.
51.
Ibid., 240.
52.
Ibid., 227.
53.
R. W. Malcolmson, “Infanticide in the Eighteenth Century,” in Crime in England 1555–1800, ed. J. S. Cockburn (London: Methuen, 1977), 189.
54.
Deborah A. Symonds, Weep not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 5, 9.
55.
Ibid., 5.
56.
Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian, ed. Claire Lamont, Oxford’s World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 [1818]), 300.
57.
Ibid., 293.
58.
Ibid., 173–74.
59.
For a detailed analysis of Walter Scott’s strategic use of Scottishness in The Heart of Midlothian, see Barbara Leonardi, “James Hogg’s and Walter Scott’s Scottishness: Varying Perceptions of (Im)Politeness in Negotiating Englishness,” in Pragmatics and Literature, ed. Siobhan Chapman and Billy Clark (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2019).
60.
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, “[Review of] Tales of my Landlord,” 3, no. 17, August 1818, 572, emphasis original.
61.
John Thompson, “Sir Walter Scott and Madge Wildfire: Strategies of Containment in The Heart of Midlothian,” Literature and History 13, no. 2 (1987): 188.
62.
Ibid., 189.
63.
Ibid., 192.
64.
Ibid., 195.
65.
Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Thinking about Women’s Violence in Global Politics, 2nd edn (London: Zed Books, 2015), 12, 13.
66.
Scott, The Heart of Midlothian, 166, 175 (see note 56).
67.
Ibid., 306.
68.
Lori Branch, “Plain Style, or the High Fashion of Empire: Colonialism, Resistance and Assimilation in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,” Studies in Scottish Literature 33, no. 1 (2004): 438.
69.
Asif Agha, “The Social Life of Cultural Value,” Language & Communication 23 (2003): 253, 254.
70.
Scott, The Heart of Midlothian, 308 (see note 56).
71.
Scots Magazine, “[Review of] Mador of the Moor,” 78, June 1816, p. 449.
72.
Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12.
73.
“The Cruel Mother (20B),” in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols, ed. Francis James Child (New York: The Folklore Press in Association with Pageant Book Company, 1957), vol. 1, 220.
74.
James Hogg, Mador of the Moor, ed. James E. Barcus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005 [1816]), lines 303–15, 69–70.
75.
Critical Review; or Annals of Literature, “[Review of] Mador of the Moor; a Poem,” 5th ser., 4, Aug. 1816, p. 140.
76.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 [1759]), 209–10.
77.
Work on this chapter has been supported by grants in 2010 and 2014 from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council in support of my PhD research and the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of James Hogg.

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Leonardi, B. (2018). Motherhood, Mother Country, and Migrant Maternity. In: Leonardi, B. (eds) Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_2
Published: 30 December 2018
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