Performing Maternity in Early Modern England

Kathryn R. McPherson, Kathryn M. Moncrief

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351912075
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Performing Maternity in Early Modern England features essays that share a common concern with exploring maternity's cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences in the period from 1540-1690. The essays interrogate how early modern texts depict fertility, conception, delivery and gendered constructions of maternity by analyzing a wealth of historical documents and images in conjunction with dramatic and non-dramatic literary texts. They emphasize that the embodied, repeated and public nature of maternity defines it as inherently performative and ultimately central to the production of gender identity during the early modern period.

Chapter 1

Embodied and Enacted: Performances of Maternity in Early Modern England

Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson

Performance describes certain embodied acts, in specific sites, witnessed by others (and/ or the watching self).

Performance and Cultural Politics¹

Ideologically and practically, early modern maternity extended far beyond the obvious areas of pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing and domestic government to include spirituality, medicine and health, politics, the supernatural, as well as the many and complex facets of gender. Maternity occupied much of women’s lives, conveying social and spiritual status, but many of its aspects remained hidden from view. Yet pregnancy is, in its late stages, an obviously visible condition. Witness, for instance, the stunning Portrait of an Unknown Lady, c. 1595 by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (Figure 1.1) that also graces the cover of this volume. The woman’s pose, combined with what Karen Hearn notes is her ‘sumptuous costume’, richly laden with pearls, prominently displays her ‘advanced pregnancy’;² the portrait thus comments on the unknown sitter’s multiple statuses as wealthy noblewoman, chaste wife and incipient mother. The dramatic presentation of her ‘great belly’, highlighted not only by its centrality in the portrait but also by the woman’s delicate hand resting on it, emphasizes the worth maternity conveyed on women, as well as its performative qualities.

In this volume we argue that maternity – both public and private, physically embodied and enacted – must be considered performative and that the maternal body, as a result, functions as a potent space for cultural conflict, a site of imagination and contest. Texts and performances by male playwrights creating scripts for playhouses, boy actors performing women’s parts on stage, men and women writing for publication, and women penning diaries and prayers in their closets, work in dialogue to reveal the culture’s intricacies, complexities and anxieties about maternity.

Figure 1.1 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. Portrait of an Unknown Lady, circa 1595

To elucidate these intersections, Performing Maternity in Early Modern England features essays that share a common concern with exploring maternity’s cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences in the period from 1540–1690.

Despite arguments that the eighteenth century served as a formative period in the creation of modern notions of maternity and mothering,³ the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth century manifested intensive social, cultural, and religious concern about maternity and the maternal subject and, as a result, yielded a dense field of texts that participate in the ‘construction of maternity’.⁴ Scholars have stressed that ‘far from being a purely natural experience, motherhood was also socially and historically constructed’.⁵ The essays here give sustained attention to the nuances of social construction in the numerous dramatic, medical, autobiographical, polemical and literary texts they address, but their freshness lies in their consideration of maternity as explicitly performative, with specific focus on the performance of pregnancy, maternal suffering, maternal authority and maternal erasure.

The essays in this volume, as they consider the construction and representation of maternity and the maternal body, make clear that maternity is performed and performative, both on stage and off. Our consideration of performativity, particularly when applied to the gendered aspects of maternity so apparent in the early modern period, draws on the work of Judith Butler, who contends that gender must be considered ‘as a corporeal style, an “act”, as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning’.⁶ Butler also stresses that ‘the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated’ and public.⁷ Elin Diamond further clarifies Butler’s conception of gender as performative, noting that it is culturally determined and historically contingent but also that it is necessarily ‘both a thing doing – a performance that puts conventional gender attributes into possibly disruptive play – and a thing done, – a preexisting oppressive category’.⁸ The analyses in this collection consider many of the intentional, disruptive, or oppressive aspects of maternity as they appear in plays, pamphlets and private writing.⁹ Like the Gheerhaerts portrait, they show that early modern maternity, shaped by cultural dictates, conventions and expectations, remains visible, available for viewing and open to interpretation. They emphasize that the embodied, repeated and public nature of maternity helps define it as inherently performative.

In labeling early modern maternity ‘peformative’, we connect with theorists of performance and cultural studies who explore performativity by actors on stage and by individuals within a society as cultural practice. These cultural practices, according to Elin Diamond, ‘conservatively reinscribe or passionately reinvent the ideas, symbols, and gestures that shape social life’.¹⁰ She later notes that performance is a ‘risky and dangerous negotiation between … someone’s body and the conventions of embodiment’.¹¹ The enaction, regulation and exploration of maternity that the essays in this volume address make clear that early modern authors frequently negotiated between the norms governing the maternal body and its representation. Belinda Johnson, using Butler’s work as a ‘framework for thinking through the gendering that operates in the representation of female witches’ suggests that ‘[t]he witch body is thus the outcome of an intersection of visual spectacle and discursive process’.¹² The maternal body, both visible and continually subject to discursive processes, may be similarly understood. Authors crafting fictions for the public stage and writers creating frameworks for their own experiences engage in discursive negotiations regarding motherhood in the period. The dramatists, pamphleteers, practitioners and diarists discussed in this volume often spectacularly reinscribe cultural ideas about maternity at the same time they reinvent maternal roles through the process of performance.

Scholars such as Valerie Wayne have noted that the early modern English maternal role offered a subject position more empowered than other female roles (an idea many dramatists seem to have banked on), although mothers were still limited by patriarchal economic and religious strictures.¹³ Although Wayne uses the term ‘role’ casually, its anthropological sense cannot be ignored.¹⁴ Certainly, many writers attempted consciously to fabricate maternal roles, attitudes and gestures by regulating their physical, spiritual and ideological manifestations. Some of the most accessible representations of maternity, and clearest attempts to regulate maternal behavior, appear in the numerous midwifery manuals published in the period, beginning with 1540 the publication of Thomas Raynalde’s translation of The Birth of Mankynde, which is the first book for midwives published in English. Continuing through the seventeenth century, the early modern press produced a profusion of documents that grapple with the material conditions of maternity; these texts address, among other issues, fertility and conception (how to achieve and how to identify pregnancy), pregnancy (including how to unlock the secrets of the pregnant body), the management of the body in its gravid state (what women should wear and eat, as well as how they should govern themselves during pregnancy), marital fidelity, paternity, and the wrenching experiences of childbirth and child-loss.¹⁵

Take for example, the mid-seventeenth century Nonconformist preacher, John Oliver’s comment about the value of ‘breeding’ women:

Women in this condition have their peculiar duties, and their peculiar motives to diligence in them; and their number is considerable. They are a worthy part of the community, then especially, when breeding, for much of the comfort of the present generation, and the honour of God, and future being of his Church in succeeding generations, is concerned in those Infants un-borne.¹⁶

Oliver stresses the specialized roles established for mothers, their ‘peculiar duties’, which he explicitly ties to their maternal status. He links their social worth and spiritual contributions to the breeding and bearing of children. We must note, however, that Oliver’s comments, like most made by prescriptive writers of the time, might be defensive: to attempt to regulate a behavior reveals its contested status.¹⁷ The heightened attention to minute workings of maternity evident in manuscript and printed texts also appears on stage in the dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Carol Chillington Rutter asks, in the preface to Enter the Body, ‘How does the body play on Shakespeare’s stage?’ She continues, ‘What work does it do?’¹⁸ Refining her questions, we ask: How does the maternal body play on stage? And what is its effect and significance? The importance of the stage as a visible and enacted entity in the representation and performance of maternity and its meanings, as well as its status as a central cultural institution, cannot be underestimated. The early modern theatre functioned through conscious, physical display of the maternal body to articulate and negotiate, create and comment on, as well as reflect and circulate the preoccupations, anxieties and desires of the community.¹⁹

Playwrights including William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson and John Webster constructed dramatized visions of maternal behavior that relied on a careful combination of compliant and disruptive motherhood. The fact that all female roles were played by boys further highlights the constructed and performative nature of maternity. Staging the maternal body must have depended upon costume, prosthetics and, as is clear in pregnancy portraits, an understanding of the symbolic gestures (like a hand resting on the belly) related to maternity. Both playwrights and actors crafted maternity as a role; as a result theatre would have reflected early modern understanding of maternity but also, certainly, it would have participated in producing that understanding. From Webster’s child-bearing Duchess to Shakepeare’s heavily pregnant Queen Hermione, the dramas of the early modern period frequently appropriate, but also sometimes question, the rhetoric present in other popular forms, both reinforcing and redefining prevalent cultural assumptions about women and women as mothers.

Women writers, too, perform maternity their private writings. Drawing on Wendy Wall’s understanding that ‘plays not only license strong expression of affect but are particularly well-suited for airing incompatible social discourses since they imagine a wide range of positions put in conversation with each other’,²⁰ we broaden Wall’s formulation of social discourse and the importance of the stage to include the prose of writing mothers reflecting on childbirth, childrearing and child loss as the representation of maternity must necessarily include the voices of women. Women’s texts about maternity, although not intended for staged performance or even, in most cases, for publication, were nevertheless not fully private texts. With cultural norms (for instance, in sermons and conduct books) weighing upon them, women knew the appropriate parameters of the maternal role; they watched themselves, even as they were watched by their relations and their neighbors. Women crafted exemplary roles for themselves in their personal writing, often intending it for circulation within the family – witness the ‘mother’s legacy’ phenomenon. Literate gentlewomen, like Dorothy Leigh, display awareness of their potential influence on subsequent generations as they write about motherhood in their memoirs, diaries and spiritual autobiographies. Both obviously dramatic and more subtly performative types of discourse address the performance of maternity to provide a fuller perspective on the significance, complexity and enculturation of maternity during the rich and turbulent later Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, and Commonwealth eras.

The four groups of essays that follow, ‘The Performance of Pregnancy’, ‘The Performance of Maternal Authority’, ‘The Performance of Maternal Suffering’ and ‘The Performance of Maternal Erasure’ explore fictional, dramatic, didactic, prescriptive, autobiographical, poetic and even architectural representations of the maternal. ‘The Performance of Pregnancy’ addresses the complex representation of the pregnant female body on the early modern stage, including analysis of how pregnancy both defined and defied early modern definitions of femininity. ‘The Performance of Maternal Authority’ speaks to the variety of ways maternal status was reclaimed, both by women and by male playwrights in a period heavily dependent upon the assumed inferiority of maternity to paternity, feminine to masculine and female to male. ‘The Performance of Maternal Suffering’ analyzes the numerous ways maternal identity intersected with suffering, grief and death, while ‘The Performance of Maternal Erasure’ interrogates the permeable definitions of maternity and the ways early modern texts push against gendered restrictions. In all four sections, essays explore how a pregnant, nursing, or maternal character, writer, or speaker’s femininity is suppressed or revealed, how popular printed materials describe and attempt to police the pregnant body, how literary and non-literary texts are invested in the performance of maternity and how representations of maternity are appropriated, interpreted and reinvented.

The Performance of Pregnancy

The early modern popular press evidences particular interest in displaying and regulating the pregnant body. Prevalent topics in the prescriptive literature include ways to identify a woman’s potential fertility, methods for discovering if conception has taken place and tests for determining the sex of the unborn chil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• General Editor’s Preface
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Embodied and Enacted: Performances of Maternity in Early Modern England
• Part I The Performance of Pregnancy
• Part II The Performance of Maternal Authority
• Part III The Performance of Maternal Suffering
• Part IV The Performance of Maternal Erasure
• Selected Bibliography
• Index