"Nature's Founts": Breastmilk in Victorian Popular Culture

In victorian fiction, breastfeeding fulfills a range of different narrative functions, from comic relief to strategic device in social problem fiction. By mid-century, maternal breastfeeding was both medically recommended and socially sanctioned. It featured throughout popular culture as a common sight, a part of everyday life that was also sentimentalized as a central aspect of the mother-child bond. In fact, the Victorians generally codified the baby at the breast as a domestic icon. Comical scenes are evidence of—rather than undermine—the growing prevalence of this association of breastfeeding with middle-class domesticity.¹ However, as a sentimentalized image of breastfeeding became appropriated for specific social agendas, the discourse surrounding breast milk became newly problematized. Simultaneously, the second half of the century saw an increasing medicalization of breastfeeding. In stressing the nutritional qualities of breast milk, scientists asserted medical control over this body fluid in a new clinical and often inconsistent terminology, and child-rearing manuals popularized the concept of baby care as expert knowledge. Fiction participated in topical debates on shifting, class-bound practices, weighing in on the changing role that breast milk played in these debates.

Describing the changing habits of his twin babies with characteristic pomposity, Mr. Micawber, a comical character in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1850), utilizes a stilted euphemism for breastfeeding: "'The twins no longer derive their sustenance from Nature's founts—in short,' said Mr. Micawber, in one of his bursts of confidence, 'they are weaned'" (250). Micawber's inflated diction when he talks about breast milk generates humour. Euphemisms, assumed gentility, and "bursts of confidence" create a comedy of the everyday in which breastfeeding infants are part and parcel of daily life, and hyperbolic expressions about their activities are funny. At one point, Mrs. Micawber is found "lying (of course with a twin) under the grate in a swoon" (154). Yet, while containing some of the most comical scenes featuring suckling babies, David Copperfield also produces a domestic vignette involving David's baby brother, his proxy in a vicarious return to his happy infancy—a portrayal that is reinforced by Phiz's illustration for chapter 8, "My Holidays. Especially One Happy Afternoon": David's mother is suckling the baby as David enters, unseen, as if he were stepping back into his early childhood. His later identification with his mother's dead baby, "hushed forever on her bosom" (104), strengthens the idealization of breastfeeding as restful (at least for the baby). This coexistence of comical and sentimental treatments encapsulates prevailing representations in mid-Victorian culture. Breastfeeding jokes likewise featured in political cartoons and as social satire. Such comical evocations testify to the pervasiveness of references—jocular or otherwise—to suckling babies without undercutting their sentimentalization.²

However, if the sentimental view of maternal breastfeeding was a commonplace in popular culture, this sentimentalization also lent itself to strategic appropriations in novels with a particular social agenda. Mid-Victorian novels as different as Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1853) and Wilkie Collins's Hide and Seek (1854) evoke sympathy for illegitimate infants and their mothers by harnessing such sentimental associations. In Ruth, an unmarried teenager is scolded by a homely servant not to weep over her breastfeeding baby because this is unlucky, and as the narrative thus intermingles comedy (the superstitious servant) and sentimentality (tears falling on a newborn), Ruth asserts a new maternal dignity. Gaskell indeed powerfully evokes the emotional experience of breastfeeding in several of her novels, describing it in Sylvia's Lovers (1863), for example, as soothing to an unhappily married mother: "But the touch of [the baby's] waxen fingers, the hold of its little mouth, made her relax" (375). Longing to be with her child more than middle-class society allows, she escapes the nursemaid by taking the breastfed baby along for walks, "warm pillowed on her breast": "So Sylvia contrived to get her baby as much as possible to herself, in spite of the nursemaid" (359). Similarly, Collins's Hide and Seek challenges attitudes to public breastfeeding and wet-nursing as much as to illegitimacy and child-rescue by depicting a clown...