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
Introduction Naturally bad or dangerously good: Romantic-period mothers “on trial”
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
[I]n the case of our children we are responsible for the exercise of acknowledged power: a power wide in its extent, indefinite in its effects, and inestimable in its importance.
Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female EducationNature has given women so much power, that law has wisely given them little.
Samuel Johnson, “Letter to Dr. Taylor” (18 August 1763)This book deals with the trials and errors of Romantic-period mothers, the politicizing of maternal bodies and the maternalizing of political bodies, and the authoring of mothers and the mothering of texts. In the chapters to follow, I identify abstract theories and material practices associated with motherhood during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and consider especially ways these were negotiated discursively by writers attempting to make legible the seemingly self-disclosing, but often highly mysterious maternal body. My primary concern is to trace ways that writers deployed representations of mother–child bonds as a means to naturalize various constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations, but I also want to consider some of the fault lines between writing motherhood and reading the bodies of mothers, between books about birth and the birthing of books. I view Romantic writers' treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies especially through the lens of the legal, medical, educational, and socioeconomic debates about motherhood so popular during the period, discussions that rendered the physical processes associated with mothering matters of national importance.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic , pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003