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CHAPTER THREE. Pregnancy and the New Birth: Reproduction, Performance, and Infantilizing Republican Mothers
- University of Georgia Press
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97 chapter three Pregnancy and the New Birth Reproduction, Performance, and Infantilizing Republican Mothers thomas paine’s uneasy fusion of mother and child in the 1783 American Crisis XIII reveals anxieties about reproducing the republic: Never, I say, had a country so many openings to happiness as this. Her setting out in life, like the rising of a fair morning, was unclouded and promising. Her cause was good. Her principles just and liberal. Her temper serene and firm. Her conduct regulated by the nicest steps, and everything about her wore the mark of honor. It is not every country (perhaps there is not another in the world) that can boast so fair an origin. Even the first settlement of America corresponds with the character of the revolution. Rome, once the proud mistress of the universe, was originally a band of ruffians. Plunder and rapine made her rich and her oppression of millions made her great. But America need never be ashamed to tell her birth, nor relate the stages by which she rose to empire. Paine’s metaphors of mother and child clash in provocative ways. According to his model, the newly born nation mothers herself into being. Invested with the agency of a modest young woman (capable of taking nice steps and wearing a mark of honor), America seems able to bring about her own birth (of which she need not be ashamed, precisely because it was brought about through her own nice steps and honor). Effectively, mother and child are one and the same: the mother’s virtuous actions morph imperceptibly 98 chapter three into the child whose future will embrace those same virtues. Much like the authors of captivity narratives, Paine reflects a desire to align interior virtues with clear, identifiable action. In this case, however, the relationship between inner life and outer manifestation strains the boundaries of the individual. Unable to trace the means through which a fully independent identity can be generated, Paine makes his subject do double duty as both the child and the parent, leaving us unsure how to envision the process, or product, of such a“fair origin.” Like Paine, and like the Indian captivity narratives I discuss in the first half of this book, the American seduction novel of the late eighteenth century sought to navigate the proper boundaries between feeling and virtue. The heroine of the seduction novel, after all, navigated a world where outer appearances often did not line up with hidden intentions. Hannah Foster’s 1797 The Coquette and Susannah Rowson’s 1791 Charlotte Temple sought to solve the problem of untrustworthy appearances by juxtaposing their deceitful heroines with ephemeral infants-to-be that ultimately reveal their mother ’s hidden sins. In doing so, they tap into the same conflicted metaphor that Paine does. In both texts, the line between woman and child becomes irredeemably blurred as pregnancy dismantles the heretofore autonomous and unreadable female body. The American seduction novel has traditionally been read either as an allegory for a young nation yearning for independence amid the bonds of sympathy or as an exploration of female agency in a patriarchal society. As critics such as Cathy Davidson, Gillian Brown, and C. Leiren Mower have argued, these texts are deeply concerned with the struggle of a young woman to control the dispensation of her own body in a patriarchal society. But what few critics have noted is that these novels’ending focus on a female pregnant body actually vexes the ideal of Lockean self-possession to which the heroines allegedly aspire. When we place pregnancy at the center of the analysis of these novels , we find a vacillating investment in Enlightenment thinking and Great Awakening theology that leaves us with a model akin to Paine’s wishful, but confused, desire for a sinless birth for a nation that turned against its colonial mother. Lingering to admonish, and perhaps admire, the dangerous performativity of both the rakes and the heroines who fall prey to them, these novels tap into emerging medical definitions of parturition and Great [3.235.120.24] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:29 GMT) Pregnancy and the New Birth 99 Awakening notions of the“new birth” to create a portrait of pregnancy that renders deceptive white women utterly transparent and childlike. Through its attention to pregnancy, a deeply provocative process for a nation working to defend its own unusual conception and birth, the seduction novel advances a vision of motherhood...