Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (review)

This generous collection of sixteen essays, well worth looking into, offers new insights and especially new information about maternity in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The editors make their case for freshness by arguing that the essays "offer a consideration of maternity as explicitly performative, with specific focus on the performance of pregnancy, maternal suffering, maternal authority and maternal erasure" (3). Despite this claim, I do not think that the collection contributes a new theoretical perspective to scholarship on gender or motherhood in early modern texts; nor do I think that it matters. The essays provide much in the way of local insights and detailed considerations of various historical phenomena that have been noted but never closely inspected, as well as new analyses of little-noticed aspects of otherwise well-explored works—far from complete—and they meticulously continue the valuable work of recovering early modern women's texts.

The editors argue that maternity is both public and private, physically embodied and enacted and, as such, "must be considered performative and that the maternal body as a result, functions as a potent space for cultural conflict, a site of imagination and contest" (1; emphasis added). I am not sure of the logical inevitability here; nor, theoretically speaking, is it clear why the emphasis on performativity illuminates what is known about the cultural ambivalence surrounding early modern motherhood. Nevertheless, some of the most powerful essays in the collection, including those by the editors, newly engage the complexities generated by the visibility of motherhood. In "'Show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to': Pregnancy, Paternity and the Problem of Evidence in All's Well That Ends Well," Kathryn M. Moncrief very usefully explores the anxiety created by the public presence of the pregnant body in early modern England, pointing to the importance of the visibility of pregnancy as it is evoked in such terms as "big-bellied" or "great-bellied" (30). She reminds the reader that what is actually visible in Helena's pregnancy is open to debate, the momentous event depending upon what Helena feels and reports that she is feeling, not on what can be clearly seen. In Boccaccio's source tale, Giletta presents Beltramo with twins. But as Moncrief argues, Shakespeare stops short of such certainty. Helena's "pregnancy remains, at the end, a contested sign that does not signal the regenerative ending necessary given the generic expectations of comedy but serves rather to emphasize its ambiguity" (41). Thus, Moncrief makes clear how Helena's pregnancy, supposed to be determinative, in fact becomes the vehicle of the play's notorious, unsettling weirdness.

Michelle Ephraim continues the theme of the potential duplicity of the female pregnant body. In "Hermione's Suspicious Body: Adultery and Superfetation in The Winter's Tale," she explores the idea of superfetation, the belief that a pregnant woman could conceive again while pregnant and thus hide her adulterous activity. She argues that the idea that the early modern woman might use her pregnant body to deceive powerfully informs The Winter's Tale. That "the married Hermione's 'public' status as a legitimately sexually active woman might function as a cloak for unsanctioned sexual activity" (49) provides an interesting twist on Leontes's more perverse imagery about Hermione's body and suggests an intriguing cultural explanation of why he sees himself as an enabler of his wife's adultery—precisely because he has impregnated her.

Donna C. Woodford's thoughtful essay, "Nursing and Influence in Pandosto and The Winter's Tale," focuses on the relationship between female nursing and male control. Reviewing the early modern beliefs that the nursing child drinks in his or her nature from the nurse's milk, Woodford emphasizes the ways in which children in the play are removed from the sphere of nurturing maternal influence. Expanding her analysis to include both the play's source, Robert Greene's Pandosto, and Shakespeare...