Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity

2 All Too Human: Maternal Monstrosity and Hester Thrale

According to Lawrence Stone, Hester Thrale was a monstrous mother, breeding disaster in her wake: What conclusions are we to draw from this story? It concerns a woman who directed all her driving ambition on to her children, for lack of any serious support from, or interest shown in her by, her husband. Dominant, authoritarian, demanding, possessive, and wholly selfish in her pursuit of ego-gratification through her children, as a mother Mrs. Thrale/Piozzi was a total failure. She had not succeeded in turning any of her children into intellectual prodigies, and she had not attracted their affection. . . . The combination of the physically repressive parental mode of the seventeenth century with the child-oriented obsessions of the eighteenth, and the high intellectual ambitions of the contemporary female blue-stocking, together formed an altogether disastrous mix.1 While I contest the notion that Hester Thrale was a “total failure” as a parent, what interests me is Stone’s criticism of maternal ego, the expectation of selfless motherhood, and the urge to pass judgment on mothers. For Stone, there is too much Hester in the Thrale family story. Many of her contemporaries would have agreed. Like Swift’s Criticism and Pope’s Dulness, Hester Thrale manifested agency, will, and ego. And like those allegorical monstrous mothers, Hester Thrale was an excessively fertile figure who triggered anxieties about maternal sexuality, (re)production, and the inability to control maternal behaviors . Yet as Hester Thrale’s maternal history shows, to mother requires will, judgment, and authority—all of which require a self. Because society judged mothers by their children, the maternal ego was inevitably invested in children andtheprocessofmothering.Thelogisticsofmotheringdefiedtheeighteenthcentury ideology of motherhood and self-effacing female conduct, a conflict All Too Human Maternal Monstrosity and Hester Thrale chapter two all too hum a n 47 more likely to result in criticism of mothers than in the reconciliation of divergent imperatives. Unlike most mothers, Hester Thrale constantly wrote of her experiences, providing extensive documentation of an unmediated maternal voice. To the extent that motherhood is a role, Hester Thrale was constantly assessing her performance, and she was acutely aware that she was being assessed by others as well. But rather than determining whether Hester Thrale was a “good” or “bad” mother, I want to focus on her perceptions of motherhood and those that she elicited from others, to analyze the ideology of motherhood in eighteenth-century England. Admittedly, Hester Thrale’s experience was not typical of all mothers of the age or of her class; no woman can represent the experience of all mothers. But the issues that she grappled with—fertility, childcare, relationships with her children, commentary about her fertility and parenting, sexual desire—confronted all mothers in the period. Hester Thrale’s narrative demonstrates the social expectations of mothers, the desire to be a good mother, and the difficulties in trying to do so. That actual maternal performance and circumstance had no effect on social expectations suggests the rigidity of maternal stereotypes and the insistence upon controlling maternal narrative. Hester Thrale’s refusal to be a passive, quiet female—to cede the limelight to the Johnsonian coterie at Streatham or to accept a mantle of scandal and exile after marrying Gabriel Piozzi—reveals the social stigmas attached to maternal presence, agency, and self-invention. Hester Thrale’s primary model for the performance of motherhood was her mother, Hester Maria Cotton Salusbury. An only child, she claimed all of her mother’s attention; she stated that she had been apart from her mother for no more than twelve hours before her marriage and no more than twelve days afterward .2 Hester’s aunt and uncle doted upon her, and all three ensured that Hester’s education was extensive, including Latin lessons with Dr. Arthur Collier.3 Hester was “half a prodigy”4 and achieved a degree of eminence, as James L. Clifford writes: Harris in 1760 sent the young student [nineteen-year old Hester] a copy of his Hermes, or a Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Grammar, interleaved with blank pages so that she might write down her remarks and questions as she read. . . . SarahFieldingsentversesfullofhighcomplement;thefamousDr.OliverofBath, when shown one of her poems, was moved to dash off eight four-line stanzas of unstinted praise; the Rev. Edward Clarke sent her Spanish books; Dr. Mather 48 monstrous motherhood explained astronomical observations; and Dr. Bernard Wilson criticized one...