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

Introduction: The Ideology of Domesticity Reexamined

Motherhood is characterized by multiple discourses—biological, psychological , social, economic, and legal—but in eighteenth-century Britain the representation and assessment of motherhood was most strongly shaped by the discourse of domesticity. Eighteenth-century British society insisted upon domesticity as the most appropriate venue for the fulfillment of a woman’s duties to God, society, and herself. Conduct manuals, educational tracts, and politicaltractsprescribedtheimageofthedomesticwoman ,particularlyasawife and mother: caring for her children, supervising the servants, and deferring to her husband; dutiful, religious, economical (but not parsimonious), modest, chaste, well behaved, charitable, and sensitive to the needs of others. Works of fiction reinforced the gender codes of the period, valorizing women who embodied the characteristics of the domestic woman and demonizing those who did not. Based on such evidence, as well as diaries, journals, and correspondence , many scholars, including Nancy Armstrong, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Mary Poovey, and Toni Bowers, have argued that domestic discourse became codified and culturally dominant during the long eighteenth century.1 Although domestic discourse was central to eighteenth-century British society and culture, scholars debate the process, timing, and meaning of this ideological imperative. In Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), Armstrong argues that domestic discourse began its assent circa 1740, with the publication of Richardson’s novel Pamela. Bowers locates the emergence of ideal, domestic motherhood earlier, among the political and social discourses of the late Restoration and Augustan periods. Poovey and Davidoff and Hall claim that domestic ideology was firmly in place in the 1780s and 1790s—precisely when Eve TavorBannetargues,inTheDomesticRevolution(2000),thattherewereconsiderable radical and conservative challenges to domestic ideology. In The Making The Ideology of Domesticity Reexamined introduction 2 monstrous motherhood of the Modern Self (2004), Dror Wahrman characterizes gender roles (including femininity and motherhood) as being in flux in Britain until the American Revolution , after which they become fixed; Harriet Guest envisions incremental changes in gender roles during the same period in Small Change (2000). While the chronology of domestic ideology may be disputed, there are two points of general consensus: first, that the idealized image of the domestic woman served as a cultural shorthand for standards of female behavior, applicable to all women regardless of specific situation or subject position; and second, that domestic discourse relied upon a gendered geography of space. In a broad sense, domesticity and femininity were perceived to be synonymous in eighteenth-century society. As Armstrong writes, “It is important to note that the qualities of the desirable woman—her discretion, modesty, and frugality—described the objectives of an educational program in terms that spelled out a coherent set of economic policies for the management of the household.”2 Yet some women were feminine but not domestic in any formal sense, while some women were domestic but not particularly feminine in their behavior. Nor did all women experience domesticity in the same way, as different class and subject positions make evident. Upper-class women were more likely to delegate their domestic work than working-class women or even their middle-class or gentry counterparts. Not all domestic women were mothers or wives; sisters and other female relatives could be called upon to run an unmarriedmalerelative ’shousehold.Andnotallwomenathomeranhouseholds,asin the cases of elderly mothers living with their adult children or dependent spinster sisters living with married siblings. But they were all expected to adhere to the gender profile exemplified by the domestic code: modest, chaste, pious, compassionate,andvirtuous.Theconflationofcodesoffemininityanddomesticity signals a cultural consensus about women’s position in society and uni- fied a female population divided by age, class, region, ability, and character. In general, domesticity could be read as a prescription of desired female behaviors , adaptable to circumstances, rather than a specific subject position that a woman enacted. This conflation of the domestic and the feminine assumed a spatial and social geography for women, which emphasized the importance of women to the household and the propriety of their presence in (and as a caretaker of) the private sphere. That domestic discourse was situated primarily in the home is not surprising, as the etymology of the word domesticity from the Latin domus (house) suggests. Yet the inscription of the home as a private, female space aligns domesticity with arguments regarding class, cultural capital, and indi- the ideology of domesticit y 3 vidualism that characterize the separation of the spheres in eighteenthcentury society. According to Jürgen Habermas, the...