A Mother's Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France (review)

Lesley H. Walker's book A Mother's Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France brings the scholar closer to a fuller comprehension of the mother, not simply as a symbol of the domestic front, but as a purveyor of Enlightenment values of motherhood. Walker claims that "feminine virtue" has been undervalued and often misunderstood by scholars of eighteenth-century culture who unfortunately "other" the pre-modern woman as "not-us" (19). Domestic virtue has historically been presented and understood as women's unwilling retreat into the domestic hearth of husband, children, and family. However, Walker argues, some women embraced "domesticity as a powerful tool of social reform" (19).

In rethinking the mother in the domestic sphere under the ancien régime, Walker advocates how mother figures in both literature and art were doing what was expected of them, that is, contributing to an "enlightened maternal discourse" (16) as "producers of culture" (19). As mothers were expected to instill Christian virtues in children under the cultish frame of maternité as the idealized, good eighteenth-century mother, triangulations of mother-daughter-other developed in literature as lessons for the daughter on the ideals of feminine virtue. With such triangulations in literature, Walker posits, head-scratching plots developed alongside perplexing resolutions, all of which exhibit the cultural power of the mother. Exemplified by works by Genlis (151-61) and Le Prince de Beaumont (62-7), the author identifies why and how daughters preferred their mothers to "any would-be suitor" (35), why daughters did as their mothers asked of them, even when it was self-sacrificial and caused suffering (153), and why husbands as love-objects were practically absent in the fiction of the time (35). According to Walker's close reading, daughters privileged their mother-daughter relationship alongside the marriage relationship by means of continuous and inexorable maternal discourse via metonymic letter-exchange à la Sévigné (34-5).

In the end, Walker uncovers a psychoanalytic understanding of the triangular relationship between mother, daughter, and male other (be it husband, father, or lover) (133). She unveils that eighteenth-century women novelists often understood passion in a triangular mode in which the two women vied for the same love object (133), which ultimately created an interdependence of the three parties involved. With an in-depth knowledge of Freud and psychoanalysis, Walker's reading of the triangulation of passion and desire in the notion of maternité in literature is truly stunning.

The pre-Revolution mother, according to Walker, held a position of omniscience and omnipresence in the family home, a position almost "god-like" (26); she taught virtues to her daughters by way of maternal sacrifice, suffering, and reward. In fact, Walker claims, Rousseau had nothing new to say about motherhood or domestic life (70). Rather, his work simply quenched the public's ever-increasing thirst for works about mothers, feminine virtue, and maternité (72). Walker argues that later novelists simply reiterated that the notion of virtue must be taught to the daughter via a reciprocal sacrifice for both mother and daughter.

Walker's focus on artistic works in the French eighteenth century as tools for teaching virtue in the domestic sphere is refreshing. Her reading of art confirms that just as tableaux were legible then, so they are today. She interestingly points to details of works by both women and men to show how the theme of motherhood and virtue was persistently amiss in the works of male painters, whereas women painters easily transferred images of eroticism into loving sensuality of the mother-daughter relationship (113). In examining the maternité trend by women artists such as Gérard and Vigée Lebrun, the critic further explains the public disapproval of mother Marie-Antoinette as well as the incongruent and ill-timed attempts at the queen's revival in Vigée Lebrun portraits.

Walker's complex argument on the mother as a significant wielder of cultural power in both art and literature of...