"A Point of Conscience": Breastfeeding and Maternal Authority in Pamela 2

"A Point of Conscience": Breastfeeding and Maternal Authority in Pamela 2 Toni Bowers Could you ever have thought, Miss, that Husbands have a Dispensing Power over their Wives, which Kings are not allowed over the Law? ... Did you ever hear ofsuch a Notion before, Miss? Ofsuch a Prerogative in a Husband? Would you care to subscribe to it?1 Pamela to Miss Darnford Pamela's outraged description of her husband's domestic tyranny signals the onset of the first conflict in her married life, and introduces the reader to a crucial episode in the sequel to Richardson's phenomenally popular first novel. Pamela 1 (1740) had been occupied with the violent sexual pursuit of a young servant girl by her wealthy and more experienced master; it ended, disturbingly for some readers, with the sudden repentance of the master, Mr B., who condescends at last to marry the girl he had hoped to rape. Part 2 (1741) takes up where Part 1 left off, and follows Pamela and Mr B. into their married life. What this means for the heroine, of course, is that the continuation is largely a record of maternal experience: Pamela is pregnant virtually throughout the sequel (seven times in all), adopts an illegitimate daughter of Mr B.'s from a former liaison, and gives considerable attention in her correspondence to the care and education of her children. 1 Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, Parts 1 and 2, 4 vols (London, 1742), 3:389-90. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 3, April 1995 260 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Pamela's impassioned complaint to Miss Darnford is also occasioned by her motherhood: she and Mr B. have disagreed over whether Pamela should breastfeed their first child herself, as she believes is her Christian duty, or hire a wet nurse, as Mr B. insists. The episode carries significant narrative weight in Pamela 2: Pamela recounts each argument between herself and Mr B. in detail, adding her own ruminations all along, and soliciting the advice of various correspondents. Despite all this palaver, it is hardly surprising to readers familiar with Part 1 when Mr B.'s tyrannical "prerogative" eventually wins the day, and baby Billy is placed in the hands of a wet nurse. What does seem odd, however, is the dissonance between the inevitable subordination of Pamela's desires to her husband's and the language the text uses to represent it. For despite the fact that Mr B. eventually prevails, Pamela's arguments for maternal breastfeeding are represented as powerful and persuasive. All correspondents except Mr B. agree that maternal breastfeeding is clearly preferable to wet-nursing, all things being equal; and Mr B.'s arguments, as we shall see, are deliberately cast as unconvincing and poorly motivated. So clearly does the text support Pamela's position , in fact, that the dispute over maternal breastfeeding comes to seem only superficially about the matters ostensibly being debated: the relative merits of mother's and nurse's milk, the practical aspects of maternal breastfeeding (the physical and emotional commitment, the investment of time), and so on. Instead, the struggle to determine whether Pamela should breastfeed is a struggle to define the relative authority of husband and wife over maternal behaviour and the status of maternal subjectivity within marriage; most fundamentally, what is being contested between Pamela and Mr B. is the source of authority over a mother's body. The vigorous arguments of a generation of conduct books and the increasing enclosure of women in domestic space were finally, by the 1740s, convincing large numbers of parents that maternal breastfeeding was preferable to hiring the services of a nurse.2 In Pamela's central 2 For the enclosure of women in domestic space, see especially Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History ofthe Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Blackwell, 1989). For changing trends in infant feeding during the first half of the eighteenth century, see pp. 266-68, below. The conduct-books with which I am mainly concerned are behaviour handbooks addressed to women and published before...