Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The great disinheritance
- 2 Fathers and daughters
- 3 Sister-right and the bonds of consanguinity
- 4 Brotherly love in life and literature
- 5 Privatized marriage and property relations
- 6 Sexualized marriage and property in the person
- 7 Farming fiction: Arthur Young and the problem of representation
- 8 The importance of aunts
- 9 Family feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - The importance of aunts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The great disinheritance
- 2 Fathers and daughters
- 3 Sister-right and the bonds of consanguinity
- 4 Brotherly love in life and literature
- 5 Privatized marriage and property relations
- 6 Sexualized marriage and property in the person
- 7 Farming fiction: Arthur Young and the problem of representation
- 8 The importance of aunts
- 9 Family feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The sentimental ideal of motherhood is the product of the historical separation of public and private spheres that gave gender polarity its present form as an institutionalized opposition between male rationality and maternal nurturance.
Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, p. 206.As late as the seventeenth century there were different words in German for aunt and uncle depending on whether one was referring to the mother's or the father's siblings … Not only does it show an awareness of a two-sided kinship, but when one pair of terms was dropped, it was the one for paternal kin (Vetter and Base). Oheim and Muhme were transferred to all aunts and uncles. The mother's kin must have been extremely important for those terms to have prevailed.
Beatrice Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, pp. 186–7.But the maternal office was supplied by my aunt, Mrs. Catherine Porten … the true mother of my mind as well as of my health.
Edward Gibbon, The Memoirs of the Life of Edward Gibbon, pp. 30, 37.I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible.
Jane Austen to Caroline Austen, October 30, 1815.Despite the emphasis on marriage and motherhood in late eighteenth-century society, mothers in novels of the period are notoriously absent – dead or otherwise missing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Novel RelationsThe Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818, pp. 336 - 371Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004