Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity

7 But She’s Not There: The Rise of the Spectral Mother

As the previous chapters have shown, empowered mothers, infanticidal mothers , and stepmothers signal the recurrent concerns regarding motherhood and the enactment of domestic ideology. Their narratives repeatedly express the cultural fear of maternal agency and authority, which competes with and more often overturns patriarchal power. The unpredictable fertility and unknown physiology of the maternal body make it a constant source of anxiety, as does the mother’s access to the child’s body, for the fear of the child’s death looms large, as mothers inadequately care for, lose, or murder children. Maternal sexuality is equally troubling, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and problematic because of the responses it elicits from men and its effects on the family. The very conditions of motherhood—physical, psychological, marital, familial—seem to call out for maternal policing, as the competing obligations to self, husband, and child make the enactment of motherhood difficult, if not impossible. Domestic ideology serves that admonitory function, and these mothers are demonized for failing to enact the ideals of maternal nurturance, self-control, self-sacrifice, and deference. But just as these monstrous mothers demonstrate themanywaysandreasonstobea“bad”mother,theyalsoenactideologicalcritique . Monstrous mothers locate the challenges and obstacles to “good” motherhoodthatsocietyandculturerefusetoacknowledge :thedemandingphysical and psychological work of motherhood; patriarchs who fail to support mothers and children; economic circumstances that impinge on mothers and mothering ; the lack of recognition of maternal authority, work, and effort within the familyandsocietyatlarge,whicherodesmaternaldesiretosucceed.1 Domestic ideology advocates a maternal ideal but does not necessarily enable it. Spectral motherhood responds to the fears, hopes, and anxieties that mothers elicit through a paradoxical fulfillment of the agenda of domestic ideology. As an absent presence the spectral mother seemingly achieves the internalizaBut She’s Not There The Rise of the Spectral Mother chapter seven but she’s not there 171 tion of maternal policing: in her physical absence the anxieties attendant upon the maternal body and sexuality evaporate. Maternal power can be acknowledged because it is limited by her status as a spectral mother; whether she is spectral because she is absent, incognito, or dead, the effects of her spectral motherhood are necessarily bound—by the mother’s return, the revelation of her identity, or her unchangeable, past narrative. Since the spectral mother generates a wide range of narratives that help justify domestic ideology and the maternal ideal, a cultural preference for spectral motherhood makes sense. But the spectral mother is more like her monstrous sisters than she appears to be at first glance, for she too raises questions about what constitutes the “good” mother and whether such a role can be realized. Like all monstrous mothers, the spectral mother manifests agency and choice, and paradoxically she often acquires more power and authority than her living, present counterparts . Often the spectral mother’s decisions privilege self over her children, echoing the choices of the empowered mother; like the infanticidal mother, the spectral mother can “pass” in society, as the benefits of her social reincorporation outweigh the liabilities of focusing on her mistakes or her past. The spectralmother ’snarrativeisthenecessaryinverseofthestepmother’sstory,which is predicated upon an unspoken maternal absence. Most importantly, the spectral mother brings to the forefront the issue of haunting, which marks the ideological work of all of these narratives: whether it is mothers who are haunted by lost children or a preferred motherhood they cannot enact; children who are haunted by a maternal ideal that their mothers fail to embody; or a society that is haunted by an ever-desired, seemingly ever-receding maternal ideal that domestic ideology cannot bring into being. Spectral motherhood is perhaps the most powerful and subtle of the monstrous mothers’ cultural interrogations of domestic ideology and the maternal ideal. There is no “good” or “bad” spectral mother, so the cultural shorthand for classifying and containing mothers—for valorizing or demonizing their motherhood—is circumvented. The domestic critique of the spectral mother cannot be dismissed, precisely because she fulfills much of the domestic agenda. In essence, the spectral mother subverts domestic ideology within its established narratives, much like the stepmother’s subversion of the family from within. In this final chapter, I define the forms and mechanisms of spectralmotherhoodinordertoclarifythewaysthespectralmotherchallengesand embodies the expectations of motherhood and domesticity in the period. I turn to two novels, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) and Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749), to demonstrate that spectral motherhood was presented as 172 monstrous...