Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

English

Advisor

Talia Schaffer

Committee Members

Carrie Hintz

Stephanie Hershinow

Subject Categories

Literature in English, British Isles | Women's Studies

Keywords

History of the British Novel, Maternal Theory, Maternal Protagonists, Narrative Theory, Psychoanalytic Theory, Female British Authors

Abstract

How is the maternal subjectivity narrated in the pages of the 18th and 19th century British novel? This dissertation examines this question. The novel’s close connection to the child’s subjectivity and perspective is something woven into its very fabric, and so the mother is often a side character, an object in the story. She is an obstacle to be overcome, a distant idea, an absent figure, or even someone too perfect to be represented on the page. The novel often reflects or mirrors this culturally and psychologically accepted way of viewing the mother. The tracing of the narratives in which this is challenged- where the rare maternal subjectivity is highlighted and developed in its own right- is the work of this project. There are no current books historicizing the trajectory of representations of maternal protagonists from the rise of the novel to successive 18th and 19th century British novels, although there are an increasing number of works that examine and recover maternal figures in the literature in a less systematic way through the lens of feminist, psychoanalytic, and maternal theory. By looking at these protagonists both through informed close readings and through contextual, biographical and historical lenses, this work traces an evolution of the representation of the maternal subjectivity within this specific literary genre.

The novel begins in its incipience by only featuring mothers behaving badly- “monstrous mothers”- mothers who deny their maternity and therefore narratively live out a more traditional protagonist’s story of adventure, scandal, and romance. Daniel Defoe’s heroines, Moll Flanders and Roxana, are perfect examples. The fact that this distorted and unpleasant portrayal of the mother is embedded into the novel’s birth and rise makes it understandable that the mother providing good care for her children is largely omitted and will not be featured textually until more than a century later.

Novels by Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in the Romantic period enact a dramatization of the tug between the mother’s subjectivity and the child’s. Despite the real tragedy that separated this mother and daughter, their works exist in fascinating overlap and conversation. Both authors employ extreme plots and create much narrative drama around the relation of parent to child, producing unusual circumstances of devastating and unhealthy separation. The commitment of the authors to giving significant narrative space to voices of both the parent and the child indicates their sense of the importance of each perspective for a peaceful and productive co-existence.

In Lady Susan by Jane Austen and Belinda by Maria Edgeworth we see the portrayal of more monstrous mothers, who are thoroughly dominant, wiley, and fascinating figures. As aristocrats, their adventures are circumscribed within the social realm. Both maternal subjects neglect their daughters for their own interests and amusements. Lady Susan is presented as powerfully wielding words to her advantage, and Lady Delacour emerges as a stage director, seizing the role of determining the conclusion of the text. Despite their flaws, Austen and Edgeworth recognize not only a personal but also a type of artistic and narrative vigor located within the maternal subject.

The novel eventually features “good mothers” like Helen Huntingdon and Ruth Hilton, but only because the narrative interest is kept up by their transgressions against patriarchal law, Helen’s in leaving an abusive husband, and Ruth’s in having a child out of wedlock. These mothers successfully raise their boys in healthy environments secluded from the corrupting influence of wayward fathers. Brontё and Gaskell imply that these arrangements are not simply in the benefit of the child, but that the talents and skills of the mothers themselves are actually activated by the necessity of this care. Helen’s maternal subjectivity is wrapped up also in her identity as an artist. Ruth’s maternal subjectivity is entwined in her role as a teacher and eventually as a nurse. Despite the somber nature of Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the tragic conclusion of Ruth, both novels present optimistic portraits of the deep meaning of motherhood in the lives of these protagonists.

Surrogate and adoptive mothers take on the subjectivity of the mother just as biological mothers do, as we see in the examples of Albinia Kendal of The Young Step-Mother and Nettie Underwood of The Doctor’s Family. In fact, these examples of mothers who step in to care for children who are not their own are also defined in the novels as desirous of and deeply committed to lives of incredible energy and activity dedicated to the children in their care. They are characterized as something like superheroes, while the blame for wayward children is placed, at least partly, with biological mothers (and fathers). As the novel approaches modernity, however, it also evokes the randomness that affects even the best intentioned mother/child relationships. There are actual limits to the care that mothers can take of children, both with respect to the ultimate outcome of their lives, which is outside their control, as well as with respect to their own maternal subjectivity, which can be damaged when it does not recognize a need to care for and preserve itself.

Andrea O’Reilly, in her contributions to maternal theory and in her call for a matricentric feminism, paves a path to an innovative and expansive way of reading our mother characters. The 18th and 19th century novels often built around the bildungsroman or marriage plot limit the subjective relationality of the maternal. In fact, the novel asks of mothers what families often do: that they defer their needs to those of others, that they sacrifice self. This dissertation’s work in digging deeply into the varied, interesting, multi-dimensional maternal subjectivities that made it to prominence joins in the movement to revise our literary critical practices when it comes to understanding the mother’s role in narrative.

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