Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal (review)

"As the sanctification of motherhood gained its full ideological force in the nineteenth century, the successful or failed performance of maternity became the ubiquitous subject of social debate and textual representation" (1). Thus write Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia Klaver in their introduction to Other Mothers, a collection of essays that explores Victorian maternal experience "beyond the maternal ideal." So too has the maternal ideal become ubiquitous in modern critical scholarship, which tends to use as its point of reference that most visible, idealized version of motherhood (which, as the authors of this volume point out, has very little to do with the reality of Victorian maternal experience). Rosenman and Klaver introduce Other Mothers by assessing the field in its current state and proposing that Victorian maternity should not only be discussed within the cultural and ideological structures (such as gender, class, race, nation, femininity, and domesticity) that often subsume it, but also as a "distinct conception or experience" (2). Their aim, quite simply, is to open a conversation about Victorian motherhood, the result of which proves the Victorian maternal ideal to be "at once more complex, less stable, less coherent, and less universal than the simplicity it connoted" (12). This editorial statement is overly modest; what the collection really does is reconceptualize the critical categories of motherhood and maternity, showing that, in relation to the Victorian maternal ideal, all mothers are "other mothers."

While the collection does not foreground its study of Victorian maternity in periodicals research, it suggests exciting avenues for further research into maternity and its representations in the periodical press. VPR readers will find that many essays engage meaningfully with periodicals in some way. Notable among these is Laura Green's "Long, Long Disappointment: Maternal Failure and Masculine Exhaustion in Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography," a compelling discussion of Oliphant's conflicting maternal and professional writing responsibilities. In "Violence and Unwed Mothers in Victorian England," Ginger Frost turns from the oft-discussed issue of infanticide, instead focusing her analysis on news reports of working-class mothers who neglected or harmed older children and on the effect of the maternal ideal on the outcome of their legal trials. Lucy Sussex mines periodical reports in the Age, Argus, Weekly Times, Bulletin, and Australian Law Times in "A Murdering Mother: Frances Knorr," using Knorr as a case study to illuminate the classed practice of baby farming and to assess public perceptions of poor women who perpetrated the crime of infanticide.

Each of the collection's fifteen essays (grouped thematically) makes a fresh, valuable contribution to the existing body of scholarship on maternity, drawing on a wide-ranging assortment of familiar and unfamiliar texts. Essays by Deirdre D'Albertis, Laura Green, Heather Milton, and Teresa Mangum show, through well-known works such as Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Oliphant's Autobiography, Eliot's Felix Holt, and Dickens's Dombey and Son, that the maternal ideal was not only unattainable, but also potentially destructive. Of these, Teresa Mangum's and Heather Milton's essays are especially interesting when read in conversation: Mangum adeptly demonstrates the implications of maternal failure in her study of middle-aged daughters and elderly mothers, while Milton discusses the ideal mother's potential for destruction. Deborah Denenholz Morse, Dara Rossman Regaignon, Ginger Frost, and Lucy Sussex take on "bad" mothers, identifying and discussing the class implications of maternal violence and failure in Victorian England through analysis of didactic literature, news reports, and court cases. These essays provide an especially nuanced discussion of class and maternity as it relates to spectacular departures from the maternal ideal. Deirdre McMahon, Deirdre Osborne, Mary Jean Corbett, and Cara Murray discuss motherhood within the context of race and nation, including absent and adoptive mothers, mothering from afar through letters, and the discursive construction of symbolic maternity through autobiography. Each of these contributions is essential reading in understanding "other mothers" within the Victorian imperial and colonial contexts. Essays by Brenda...