The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture 1680–1760 by Toni Bowers (review)

74 Take Montagu’s ‘‘Turkish Embassy Letters,’’for example. Whether read asan amusing ‘‘trifle,’’ an indicative trend of the period, or a politically charged document , as is the current tendency, what remains uncommented on, according to Ms. Looser, is how this work functions as history. What obscures the point for us is that Montagu recognized no strict division between the romantic and historical , our own legacy from the nineteenth century. Hence, we read its romantic elements as mere amusement or fodder for our own political agendas, and fail to note what mattered to Montagu herself: how in these letters she self-consciously positions herself as a writer of women’s history . The same misreading appliestoHutchinson . Mistaking thepersonalanddomestic elements of this memoir as novelistic (once again, a trend that takes hold in the nineteenth century), we fail to recognize their consistency with the providential aims of Restoration histories.Hutchinson then is not an early novelist; rather, her attention to personality is a sign of the character-driven nature of seventeenthcentury historical narrative. What we view as innovative in this text can, in fact, be read as mainstream. This admirable attention to local context , however, ultimately underminesMs. Looser’s own project. In arguing that the historical practices of these women were consistent with those of the time, she awkwardly has to claim that there is nothing unusual or unique here. Hence, Lennox ’s innovative critiques of both romance and history in The Female Quixote can be read as mere ‘‘authorial selfpreservation ’’ in a literary marketplace obsessed with these issues. Not surprisingly then, Ms. Looser largely abandons this emphasis on the conventional in the latter half of the book, instead focusing on more marginalized and indeed ‘‘novel’’ works: Macaulay’s sole epistolary text, History in Letters; Piozzi’s‘‘anecdotal popular history,’’ Retrospection; and Austen’s juvenilia. By contrast, these works emerge as experiments in form, conscious attempts to blur the boundaries between history and fiction. Radical in form they may have been but, as Ms. Looser frequently reminds us, not in content. To paraphrase the author, they were not her stories, deliberate attempts to recover a neglected female experience . Yet in emphasizing what they were not (and one should never expect these works to correspond to contemporary feminist agendas), Ms. Looser ultimately fails to identify what they are— what makes these works distinctive as a group—and, in not doing so, fails fully to explain how indeed these women were making history. Cynthia Richards Wittenberg University TONI BOWERS. The Politics of Motherhood : British Writing and Culture 1680– 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996. Pp. xvi ⫹ 262. £65; $85. Rousseau and late eighteenth-century sentimentalismareoftencreditedwith(or blamed for) creating a powerful new maternal ideal: the breastfeeding, affectionate , domestic mother whose authority is confined to the privacy of family life, the direct forerunner of the Victorian woman in her separate sphere. This has always been an oversimplified story, for the domestic mother was no sooner established than she was being used to legitimate a limited form of public authority for women . In The Politics of Motherhood, Ms. Bowers challengesthisestablishedmodel not by questioning the narrative of increasingly private motherhood, but by 75 placing the changes in maternal ideals a generation earlier, in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Augustan preoccupation with motherhood, she argues, reflected anxieties about patriarchal control in the years following the 1688 Revolution , and new, narrower definitions of maternal virtue were used to contain the perceived threat of matriarchal power. Queen Anne’s attempttorepresentherself as the ‘‘nursing mother’’of the nation is the focus of the first part. Anne’s maternal potential was a political threat to her estranged father and a potential challenge to patriarchy, but by the time she came to the throne, her (at least) seventeen pregnancies had left her with no living heirs, and she was reduced to projecting herself as a symbolic mother. Even here, Ms. Bowers contends, she failed to link this maternity to royal authority , unlike that powerful manipulator of symbols, Elizabeth I. The differences between them—Elizabeth the Virgin Queen whose symbolic maternity set her apart from other women, Anne the failed mother who was famous as a very ordinary woman despite her royalty—reflect...