The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture 1680-1760 (review)

230 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:2 and the general reader will find this an illuminating mosaic that shows to advantage the range and depth of current scholarship in eighteenth-century French studies. John A. Fleming University of Toronto Toni Bowers. The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture 1680-1760. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xiv + 262pp. US$54.95. ISBN 0-521-55174-9. Near the opening of her impressively researched, passionately argued, and eloquently written study, 77¡e Politics ofMotherhood: British Writing and Culture 1680-1760, Toni Bowers implicates her modern readers and colleagues, accusing us of turning a blind eye to representations of the plot of maternal failure—"one of the most obsessive and significant plots of Augustan narrative " (p. 1)—because of our continuing investment in the very same maternal mythology produced in the Augustan period. I cannot agree more. During the week last winter when I began reading Bowers's book, a headline screamed from the Sunday Times, "Children of Working Mothers Face Exam Failure," while a lower key article in the Guardian Weekly had the contradictory leader, "Blair Offers Lone Parents Work"; a film on British television, "Falsely Accused," presented the maddening case of an American woman wrongly imprisoned, until the last reel, for poisoning her child, and inevitably called to my mind the similar (and similarly true) scenario of "A Cry in the Dark"; and a recent bestseller I encountered, 77ie Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans, scapegoated an ambitious professional mother, who, after being implicated in varying degrees for several miscarriages, for a daughter's horrific accident, and for the violent death of her extramarital lover, winds up resigning her job and retiring to the family rural retreat, where she is last seen trying to write in between sessions of breast-feeding her new baby—like Charlotte Grandison in Richardson's last novel. Our culture is still drenched in mother-blame, and Bowers exposes (one of her favourite words) its origin in the culture of her chosen period by focusing in on a queen's representational campaign and several narrative texts which, she claims—along with a great range of other media, more briefly treated, from paintings to conduct-books—functioned as "technologies of motherhood" (p. 21). The first two chapters are the most original and theoretical. "Introduction: Historicizing Motherhood," with its new historicist and feminist perspective laced with deconstructionism, contrasts the Augustan "myth of eternally changeless motherhood" (p. 19)—ironically shared, she claims, by the modern psychoanalytic discourse on motherhood (which she consequentially eschews)—with REVIEWS 231 her own take on motherhood as "a moving plurality of potential behaviors always undergoing supervision, revision, and contest, constructed in particularity" (p. 19). The middle-class ideology of the full-time housewife/mother—tender, self-sacrificing, sexless, passive, constricted to domestic space, and invisibly supporting the newly reductive system of wage labour—was, she asserts, the unique contribution of this period, 1680-1760 (and not the second half of the century, as other recent discussions of early modern motherhood have claimed), an ideology still responsible for the dilemma of the modern middle-class mother. What the myth excludes is "maternal difference—differences within mothers, differences between and among them" (p. 21), and Bowers, in an almost apocalyptic passage, asserts her ambition to revise even the myth of difference itself, substituting a construction of difference not as hierarchical, dyadic, and exclusive but rather fluid, interpenetrative, multiple. Historicizing motherhood, for Bowers , also means connecting that institution with broader political events, that is, with the Glorious Revolution and its attendant ambiguities (was it an abdication or a usurpation?). Motherhood became a site for contesting notions of agency and responsibility, and its newly restricted definition was, Bowers claims, a response to the troubled and problematic reconceptions of patriarchical authority resulting from two recent revolutions. Even this generalizing chapter, however, demonstrates a penetrating and interdisciplinary power of close analysis that illuminates the larger scene—for example, her interweaving of social and aesthetic history in a discussion of the Foundling Hospital and Hogarth's donation to it, the painting Moses Brought to Pharoah's Daughter, in which the critique of the painting becomes a critique of the hospital (p. 13...