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  • Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity by Marilyn Francus
  • Natalie Roxburgh (bio)
Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity by Marilyn Francus Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. xiv+298pp. US$55. ISBN 978-1-4214-0737-1.

As the story goes, being a mother was counted among the domestic ideals of the eighteenth-century woman. A woman’s place was in the (then somewhat novel) private realm of the home, and one of her hallmark duties was that of raising the children of the family, an institution that was becoming increasingly important for the nation state. However, this role was fraught with tension, for eighteenth-century mothers had the sole capacity of producing the nation’s offspring-citizens but simultaneously had to contend with prohibited female power. Marilyn Francus proceeds from this interesting discrepancy, exposing a problematic disjunction between maternal experience in the eighteenth century and the cultural representation thereof. Francus complicates discourses on domesticity prevalent in literary and historical contexts by analyzing texts in various genres written by both male and female authors. In so doing, she rightly asks us to rethink what critics and theorists have called “domestic ideology.”

Monstrous Motherhood situates itself within the past three decades of scholarship on female identity in the context of the family. Domesticity, essentially a prescription for desired female behaviour, includes maintaining the household and should (at least according to contemporary conduct books) encompass the practice of motherhood, which also belonged to the private realm. Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) set the groundwork for understanding the role that conduct books played in cultivating female subjects who were capable of reigning in the household. According to Armstrong, domesticity originated around the time of the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740. But, as Toni Bowers points out nearly a decade later, Armstrong’s lack of attention to motherhood ironically reveals the denial of the political relevance of maternity. Bowers, in The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), argues that the primary female task came to be seen as reproduction, a duty that ensured women would have to submit to men. Francus takes this discussion a timely step further by focusing on written accounts of motherhood when such representation implies grudgingly acknowledging female power.

Whether eighteenth-century mothers are consistently “monstrous” is the question the reader of this monograph is forced to confront. While [End Page 500] the reader easily follows the concept of “monstrous motherhood” in Francus’s first and second chapters, later chapters feature mothers who murder their offspring, stepmothers, and mothers who are missing or spectral. While early chapters clearly explain what is so monstrous about the represented mothers, later chapters suggest a post-monster reality, after domestic ideology has done its work of normalizing the subject. In other words, Francus’s analysis suggests a more nuanced concept of the monster than she herself provides: the mother sometimes seems less of a monster and more of a necessary evil to the power structure, a figure whose representation is tellingly reluctant.

The allegorical figures of “Criticism” in Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1704) and “Dulness” in Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728) offer the most compelling (and perhaps most obvious) examples of monstrosity. The procreative body of the fertile woman is a ready parallel to the threatening contemporary proliferation of print, an overproduction that is itself a site of swelling outside of categorical norms. This threat to norms and values helps us to see what Foucault meant when he said that the monster provides us with an account (albeit through caricature) of the genesis of differences: a new form of power came into existence with the capacity to destabilize authorial hierarchies, and it must simultaneously be acknowledged but also contested. This sort of monstrosity fits well with the chapter that presents a key example of an actual, biological “monstrous” mother in Hester Thrale, who was perpetually pregnant for more than a decade (much to the chagrin of her family and friends). In both of these chapters...

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