Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book by Rebecca Davies (review)

Eighteenth-century novels and conduct literature created a paradigm of sentimental maternity that tended both to designate the special authority of mothers and to reinforce the belief in women’s natural inferiority to men. Ms. Davies’s insightful book closely scrutinizes the conceptual impasses of eighteenth-century maternity in its complex relation to emergent models of education. Not only were mothers regarded as the perfect first teachers for their sons and daughters, but maternity itself was defined in terms of an educative potential common to all women, stemming from their newly ascribed rationality and selfcontrol, as well as from their nurturance. In imaginatively dispelling patriarchal influence from education, this diverse body of writing became a limited force for feminism during the period Ms. Davies examines (1740–1820). She traces the development of the authoritative discourse of maternal education from a phase of contradiction and self-questioning (in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, part II) to one of coherent codification and implicit power (in maternal advice manuals by Ann Martin Taylor, and in two novels by Jane Austen).

The value of Ms. Davies’s approach stems from its thoroughgoing exploration of the double-edged authority she sees as both momentum and product of the texts she studies. The authority is problematic because it exists in writing: the implications of writing itself are continually pursued in her closely argued readings. The term “writing” designates attributes of the discourse of maternal education, including its abstraction from physical aspects of motherhood, its coherence, and its cerebral nature. Its range does not extend to print culture in her treatment, nor does it entail a Derridean focus on textuality. Ms. Davies’s analyses of writing emphasize its hardening into stable permanency and codification. Given the recurrent finding that authoritative maternal discourse perpetuates itself but does not tolerate physicality, variable performance, or even interpretation of its codes, the readings indicate that those empowered by its strictures are writers or governesses, not individual mothers.

The reading of Pamela, part II is especially insightful in its focus on the heroine’s performance of ideal maternity by means of her authorship of an educational tract, a commentary on Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Ms. Davies emphasizes the “contradictions” and “formal tensions” faced by Richardson in his attempts to fashion a maternal paragon from conduct-book models, and to depict an ideal of early education mediated by the surveillance of Mr. B. To position Richardson as the point of departure for this study of women writers is bold. Given the epistolary novelist’s advocacy of the purity and deliberation fostered by written communication, and also given the ambivalent nature of female paragons in his narratives, Richardson is a highly appropriate figure to introduce the contradictions that trouble the discourse of exemplary maternal education.

Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, a children’s novel that depicts a “femitopian” community of girls at a boarding school under the tutelage of a privileged “nonbiological mother substitute,” is, for Ms. Davies, a flawed solution to idealized maternity. In the absence of direct patriarchal influence, the female intellectual authority of the governess is dignified and idealized. In preparation for their subordinate marital lives, the authoritative mechanisms of the text are a kind of “governess” that prompts self-surveillance in the female readers.

Ms. Davies’s strength—the development of a flexible tradition of maternal educative writing that accommodates a range of genres, political orientations, and religious purposes—is also her limitation. In pursuing an overarching “voice” of maternal guidance that combines various texts into a single discourse, Ms. Davies fails to distinguish meaningfully between the voices of the treatise-writer and the novelist (or, for that matter, between those of author and narrator). She acknowledges that “mimetic novels” introduce additional complexities to her paradigm, but she does not sort through the complexities of narration or reception in ways that might allow for a less restrictive picture of...