English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority by Carol Barash (review)

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 not just different situations but a decline in the popular power of symbolism. More tenuously, Ms. Bowers also suggests that the representation of Queen Anne helped construct ‘‘a normative definition of maternity as a kind of failure.’’ Parts Two and Three are concerned with the representation of motherhood in novels. Moll Flanders and Roxana are illuminated by placing them in and against an Augustan tradition of ‘‘monstrous motherhood’’—fiction, drama, and reportage concerning cold-hearted and ‘‘unnatural ’’ mothers that defined by opposition what good motherhood ought tobe. Haywood’s stories show how subversive this still-neglected author could be, with her multiple representationsofwomenattempting (sympathetically if not always successfully) to circumvent the patriarchal system and mother outsidemarriage. Part Three, which examines the clash between emergent ideals of maternal virtue and the patriarchalauthoritythattended to oppose the newly emphasized maternal prerogatives/duties, focuses on Richardson. In Pamela II, Pamela capitulates to Mr. B’s husbandly authority on the question of breastfeeding, a maternal duty he denies to her, in contrast to her successful resistance to his illicit sexual demands in the first part of the novel. Clarissa takes a more troubled look at the subordination of maternal authority, blaming the heroine’s tragedy in large part on the failure of Mrs. Harlowe to defend her daughter from the rest of the family. While The Politics of Motherhood determinedly fits all readings into a narrative of ever-reducing maternal agency, it richly rewards those interested in the powerful and contradictory ideologies surrounding motherhood in the eighteenth century and today. Jane Spencer University of Exeter CAROL BARASH. English Women’s Poetry , 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority. Oxford: Clarendon , 1996. Pp. xii ⫹ 345. $55. Ms. Barash’s book is a capable survey of poetry produced by English women during a volatile period in English history . Drawing liberally on the first great wave of earlier feminist scholarship (some of whose adroit surfers are conspicuously unacknowledged by Ms. Barash ), the principal strength of this book is its Talmudic scrutiny of the evolution of women’s verse withinthreerelatedcategories : English politics, female com- 76 munity, and the ‘‘linguistic authority’’ within the poems. This dense, if congested , overview of so much rich and diverse material, with its strong apparatus of footnotes, Bibliography, and valuable Appendices, is best appreciated as an indispensable reference volume. Its manifest strengths are compromised on a few grounds, however, beginning importantly with organization. The title (tremendously strategic in such a study) promises the reader a generic and chronological treatment of the poetry; yet this promise is not kept. The range of material , after all, does cover as many as five very different political administrations (those of Cromwell, Charles II, James II, William and Mary, and Queen Anne), but the book is divided into only two large and somewhat overlapping sections, neither of which is particularly chronological or generic. For example, Part I, ‘‘Origins ,’’ consists of three chapters: the political contexts, both English and Continental , of women’s poetry, and then chapters on Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn, which have little to do with ‘‘origins ,’’ per se, chapters one would expect to see later. The study’s organization clearly...