Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Naturally bad or dangerously good: Romantic-period mothers “on trial”
- 1 Revolutions in mothering: theory and practice
- 2 A love too thick: Gothic mothers and monstrous sympathies
- 3 The Irish wet nurse: Edgeworth's Ennui
- 4 Infanticide in an age of enlightenment: Scott's The Heart of Midlothian
- 5 The case of the Shelleys: maternal sympathy and The Cenci
- Postscript
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
5 - The case of the Shelleys: maternal sympathy and The Cenci
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Naturally bad or dangerously good: Romantic-period mothers “on trial”
- 1 Revolutions in mothering: theory and practice
- 2 A love too thick: Gothic mothers and monstrous sympathies
- 3 The Irish wet nurse: Edgeworth's Ennui
- 4 Infanticide in an age of enlightenment: Scott's The Heart of Midlothian
- 5 The case of the Shelleys: maternal sympathy and The Cenci
- Postscript
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
W. [August Wilhelm Schlegel] said of a young philosopher: he has a theory ovarium in the brain and, like a hen, lays a theory every day.
August Wilhelm Schlegel, Atheneum Fragment 269Whether what we are looking forward to is a thought or a deed, our relationship to every essential achievement is none other than that of pregnancy, and all our vain-glorious boasting about “willing” and “creating” should be cast to the winds! … And even when this phenomenon becomes dangerous and evil we must not show less respect to that which is generating within us or others than ordinary worldly justice, which does not allow the judge or the hangman to interfere with a pregnant woman.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Ideal Selfishness”Thus far, I have primarily looked to ways in which Romantic-era writers utilized representations of mother–child bonds as a means to variously critique or endorse seemingly natural constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations. In this final chapter, I want to examine a somewhat different deployment of maternal imagery in the essays and poetry of Percy Shelley, who frequently described the work of the creative artist through reference to analogies of pregnancy and breastfeeding. To be sure, such comparisons were not unique, either to the Romantic period or to writers who were strongly influenced by Romantic discourses and themes, as the above quotations illustrate. Nor were appeals to the affinities between intellectual and maternal labor the sole province of poets and philosophers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic , pp. 155 - 182Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003