Ties that Bind: Motherhood, Economy and State in La Nouvelle Héloïse

Ties that Bind: Motherhood, Economy and State in La Nouvelle Héloïse Annie Smart WHY SPEAK OF MOTHERHOOD, economy and the State together? The vocation of motherhood—that is, the assumption that mothering extends beyond the obvious nine months—seems timeless. A creature of the intimate sphere, the mother seems to exist outside of the circle of exchange, the site not of production but of reproduction. Although the idea of motherhood as vocation was not new to the Enlightenment , the eighteenth century does reflect a newly defined and valorized role for mothers. The eighteenth century marks the birth of the cult of domestic motherhood as well as transitions in both structures of domination and in modes of production (from feudalism to mercantilism to capitalism). As France shifts from a pre-modem to a modern economy, from an absolutist to a bourgeois public sphere, and from feudal privilege to social contract, both the concept and the practice of motherhood undergo a radical transformation. As Elisabeth Badinter comments in her innovative study of the history of mother love, L'Amour en plus, in the eighteenth century "ce qui est nouveau, par rapport aux deux siècles précédents, c'est qu'on exalte l'amour maternel comme une valeur à la fois naturelle et sociale, favorable à l'espèce et à la société.'" If Badinter highlights the construction of mother love, and the mother's role to produce "des êtres humains qui seront la richesse de l'État" (188), this essay brings to the fore the mother's role in reproducing social bonds. As we shall see in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Julie generates the ties that bind the community together, thus linking the concepts of motherhood, economy, and State. Although the link between motherhood and social transformation is perhaps most evident in Rousseau's Emile (1762), I would like to focus on his earlier novel for several reasons. First, the image of domestic motherhood Julie bodies forth greatly influenced both how motherhood was perceived and indeed how women learned to mother in Rousseau's generation.2 Second, if Julie incarnates the ideal mother (or the woman devoted to the maternal function of bearing and raising children), she also is the locus of production, not of goods, but of values, and specifically a seemingly non-capitalist network of social relations.3 In his vision of the virtuous society, Rousseau anchors social relations in neither the feudal compact nor a mercantilist/capitalist system of 64 Summer 1999 Smart exchange, but in what I shall term a maternallgift economy, in which value and bonds are determined by mother love, a "commodity" neither bought nor sold. Finally, whereas most studies view motherhood and economy as oil and vinegar—works on economy in Julie tend to leave out a theory of motherhood , and works on motherhood tend to exclude economy4—I argue that theories of motherhood, economy, and State are interrelated and thus must be brought together. The political and economic importance of motherhood lies not only in the reproduction of citizens, but in reconceptualizing and in structuring the values and bonds of attachment that underpin the non-absolutist public sphere.5 Due to the constraints of this essay, I will be concentrating primarily on economy in Rousseau's novel. I will first turn to the definition of gift economy as presented in Marcel Mauss's Essai sur le don (1924), translated as 27ie Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Julie's maternal/gift economy (and by "economy" I mean a broader notion of system of exchange, not just the circulation of goods and money) reflects not mercantilist or capitalist social relations, but rather the gift economy described in Marcel Mauss's essay. In Fruits of Merchant Capital, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese define capitalist social relations as hinging on the mobility and the commodification of labor: "As a mode of production , capitalism implied the prevalence of bourgeois property, with its claims to being absolute, and of free labor or, as it were, a labor system in which labor-power itself had been transformed into a commodity."6 But in Mauss' "archaic...