An Impossible Ideal: Motherhood in Eighteenth-Century Britain

In Monstrous Motherhood, Marilyn Francus explores the anxieties about mothers and motherhood that lurk within portrayals of mothers in eighteenth-century British culture. A static vision of ideal femininity and the related ideal of domesticity had considerable purchase in the eighteenth century, and, accordingly, an ideal of virtuous motherhood was well established. In Monstrous Motherhood, Francus endeavors to account for why, in a period where such prescriptions were ubiquitous, mothers who enact the ideal are so conspicuously absent from literary texts. Much of her discussion is devoted to analysis of the many representations of openly deviant mothers in eighteenth-century literature: mothers depicted as monstrous, violent, negligent, or even infanticidal. She also examines at length the many literary narratives in which absent, silenced, marginalized, and spectral mothers haunt the spaces in texts where "good" mothers should be. As Francus develops her study, a picture emerges of a cultural ideal of motherhood that can be neither embodied nor represented.

Although Francus foregrounds her argument about eighteenth-century representations of motherhood with a look at maternal archetypes in classical literature, biblical narratives, and early modern works, she avoids forcing her findings into a chronological genealogy from that point forward. Rather than a linear trajectory over time, Monstrous Motherhood develops more as an exploration of maternal narratives and perceptions from most intrusive (monstrous) to least substantial (spectral) mothers. In so doing, Francus identifies a number of distinct patterns among the diffuse and diverse depictions of maternity and maternal relationships in the eighteenth-century literary corpus, and she organizes her study so as to illuminate how each of these trends exposes a persistent cultural anxiety over very inconsistent and permeable ideologies of domesticity and motherhood.

In her introduction, Francus establishes the terms of her discussion of "good" and "bad" mothers, offers historical and literary context for the constructions of motherhood she examines, and summarizes the evolution of the discourses that inform her study. In particular, she discusses the ideology of separate public and private spheres and the way that ideology foregrounds the period's discourses of gender, femininity, domesticity, and maternity. Francus then clearly establishes her central concern with narratives of motherhood in eighteenth-century literature. These, she finds, fail to reflect or embody those discourses or their ideologies. Hardly an ideal mother is anywhere to be found. By establishing that British literature presents narratives of motherhood that focus on "maternal deviance and absence" (10) rather than the prescribed ideal of domesticity, Francus seeks to account for the observation that such an ideal is unrepresented and apparently unrepresentable in eighteenth-century culture. This "disjunction between ideology and representation" (9) guides Monstrous Motherhood's inquiries.

In her first chapter, Francus discusses the literary history of the fecund female's representation as monstrous and repulsive, both excessively consumptive and excessively productive, her uncontained power a source of terror and disgust. Moving from Charybdis and Scylla to Spenser's Errour, Milton's Sin, Swift's Criticism, and Pope's Dulness, Francus discusses the way that anxiety surrounding women's—and especially mothers'—sexuality is reflected in literature. She explores the literary demonization of the fertile female and authors' attempts to "justify female containment as a social and moral imperative by depicting the catastrophic results of maternal agency and reproduction that await otherwise" (26). She reads these allegories of fecundity and reproduction (both physical and literary) against historical conceptions of female sexuality and fertility. In doing so, Francus identifies a persistent cultural fear of the maternal power and authority that inhere in reproduction and mothering. She revisits this fear and the resulting demonization of the autonomous mother in the second chapter, which examines the life of Hester Thrale Piozzi by way of Thrale's construction—in diaries and letters—of her own narrative of maternity, as well as extensive reconstruction of Thrale's reputation among her friends, family, and correspondents. Francus grounds her observations about the eighteenth century's impossible ideal of motherhood with a...