"For want of Clelia": Re-placing the Maternal Body in The Twin-Rivals

In his preface to the 1702 comedy The Twin-Rivals, George Farquhar speculates that the play failed in part because Clelia, the pregnant woman for whom the midwife-bawd in the play attempts to secure a husband, never actually appears onstage; he claims that spectators found "the Design … defective for want of Clelia's Appearance in the Scene" (Preface 500).¹ While the midwife, Mother Midnight, is a central character in this play, mothers and midwives were both notably absent from the period's comedies in general²—an omission which stands in stark contrast to the sometimes quite lively debates of which they were the subject in the culture at large. Ironically, this dramatic lack signals the important social, cultural, and economic roles of mothers and midwives; the importance of these historical roles for women requires more compelling female characters to represent them in the period's comedy. These mothers and midwives on the stage, as a result, prove too dynamic to be easily circumscribed into the comic world that would control them at the end of the play. In this essay I argue that the power that Mother Midnight, and through her, Clelia, still command at the end of Farquhar's play exposes the risks of staging such characters, and suggests why they are largely absent from the period's comedy.

Even here, the mother herself—Clelia—is a victim of a double elision: Farquhar never allows her character to appear on the stage or to speak for herself; the character who stands in for her, Mother Midnight, is played by a male actor. This double erasure of Clelia's pregnant body highlights its potential to disrupt the play's thematic and ideological closure. Instead, the midwife character—a mother to all mothers—speaks and acts on Clelia's behalf, attempting to dupe a suitor into marrying Clelia and fathering her illegitimate child. Although the mother never appears on the stage, then, Mother Midnight effectively represents the corruption of all mothers; she facilitates their inherent duplicity, which threatens the patriarchal inheritance that depends upon the body of the mother for its transmission.

Several critics have identified the agency and self-determination displayed by the witty heroines of comedy as crucial characteristics which allow strong female characters to avoid being entirely controlled by the male forces that attempt to contain or direct their power. Misty Anderson argues that female playwrights, specifically, exploit the conventions of witty heroines in comedy to change the very assumptions of a comic ending, and Pat Gill's study of the restoration comedy of manners argues that the wit exercised by these female characters allows them a greater space for self-determination and self-definition.³ The subversive potential of these generally more powerful roles for women becomes infinitely compounded, I argue, in Farquhar's play, which departs from typical comic fare in the person of Mother Midnight, an exemplar of female duplicity. Although she lacks the wit and attractiveness of the kinds of characters Anderson and Gill discuss, this does not strip her of her power; instead, the midwife's ability to directly and tangibly corrupt families' heirs, and through those heirs the future of English masculinity, grants her a much more threatening potential that—like the wit of the heroines discussed by these critics—cannot be shut down within the comic structures of the play.

The powerful image of the midwife figure was, of course, not new, and Robert Erickson has constructed a history of the figure dating back to Socrates which shows that the midwife can serve as an overwhelmingly positive figure. However, he finds that as a rhetorical figure the midwife can proliferate negative associations, as well; most commonly, she acts as a witch and a bawd,⁴ and is "an enigmatic figure of mystery and power, at once strange and familiar, an uncanny creature."⁵ He goes on to argue that "in a sense [she is] beyond time and thus [has] a godlike status" because she mediates life and death, but is herself too old to bear children.⁶

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