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

Notes

introduction 1. See Armstrong, Desire; Davidoff and Hall; Poovey; and Bowers. 2. Armstrong, Desire 73. Elsewhere she writes that “the distinction between conduct books and domestic economies changed so that each reached out to the other’s reader” (61) and that “the female character and that of the home became one and the same as she translated her husband’s income into the objects and personnel comprising his household” (83). 3. For Habermas, property ownership is crucial to participation in the bourgeois public sphere, and most women could not meet this criterion. Habermas tends to define the individual ,the“humanbeing,”asmale:“Thestatusofprivatemancombinedtheroleofownerof commodities with that of head of the family, that of property owner with that of ‘human being ’ per se” (28–29). See also 55: “As a privatized individual, the bourgeois was two things in one: owner of goods and persons and one human being among others, i.e., bourgeois and homme.” McKeon comments that “Habermas has been chided both for ignoring women’s exclusion from the public sphere and for ignoring their access to it—or to alternative publics, counterpublics, or ‘subaltern counterpublics’” (Secret History 73). Habermas does acknowledgetheexclusionofwomenfromthepoliticalpublicsphereandtheiractivityintheliterary public sphere, as McKeon notes, but such acknowledgment does not fully respond to the feminist critique of Habermas’s work. 4. Poovey argues that the proper lady was empowered by her status in the home, as she provided comfort and support to her husband for his efforts in the (public) workplace and prepared the next generation by teaching her children discipline and self-control (10). Davido ff and Hall concur: “Wives who would adopt the modest self, who could accept that their fulfillment must be won through service to others, would find their compensation in the exercise of moral influence. Power was for men, influence for women. Through their example in life women could hope to make those around them, in their family circles, better people. It was moral influence which was to allow a reassertion of self for women” (170, emphasis in the original). For Armstrong, the separation of spheres enabled the domestic woman’s power, for as women were removed from the public realm of political power, they acquired the powerofsubjectivity,surveillance,andeconomy:“Thedomesticwomanexecutesherrolein the household by regulating her own desire. On her ‘feeling and principle’ depends the economic behavior that alone ensures prosperity. So conceived, self-regulation alone gave a woman authority over the field of domestic objects and personnel where her supervision constituted a form of value in its own right and was therefore capable of enhancing the value of other people and things” (Desire 81). Notes 204 notes to pages 3–5 5. McKeon, Secret History 182. For McKeon, the notion of woman as governor of the household also signals ideological and functional continuity between public and private, male and female: “Women’s inside duties are not only like men’s outside duties; they also make them possible” (190). 6. For the development of separate spheres scholarship in British and American studies, see Vickery, “Golden Age.” Dena Goodman raises similar issues regarding the application of Habermas’s ideas to issues in eighteenth-century France. For a recent reading of Habermas that uses his work and the scholarly critique of it, see the discussion of Habermas and Charlotte Smith’s novel Emmeline in Nixon 84–91. 7. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter 288; see also 161–94 on women as consumers, 195–223 on women as hostesses, and 225–84 on women and public diversions, such as balls, clubs, performances,andthetheater.Guestalsoquestionsthepublic/privatebinaryandtheostensible exclusion of women from the public sphere, particularly in her analyses of domesticity and nationalism (chaps. 8 and 9) and gender and shopping (chap. 3). 8. Scholarship on women in the literary marketplace, in particular, challenges the exclusion of women from the bourgeois public sphere, for Habermas envisions participation as being fueled by literature, reading, and the circulation of texts. (If one qualifies to enter the bourgeois public sphere based on property ownership, one engages with that sphere based on literacy.) See Staves; Shevelow; McDowell; and Schellenberg. The careers of salon hostesses (including Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey, and Hester Thrale), entertainers (Elizabeth Barry, Sarah Siddons, Kitty Clive), moralists (Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, Hester Chapone), and political theorists (Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Astell) provide a sampling of some of the ways that women engaged with the public sphere in the period. 9. Klein 104–5. See McKeon’s discussion of domestic architecture, in which he analyzes public spaces within...