Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain

Educating by the Book

Rebecca Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409451686
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134788781
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Examining writing for and about education in the period from 1740 to 1820, Rebecca Davies's book plots the formation of a written paradigm of maternal education that associates maternity with educational authority. Examining novels, fiction for children, conduct literature and educative and political tracts by Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Martin Taylor and Jane Austen, Davies identifies an authoritative feminine educational voice. She shows how the function of the discourse of maternal authority is modified in different genres, arguing that both the female writers and the fictional mothers adopt maternal authority and produce their own formulations of ideal educational methods. The location of idealised maternity for women, Davies proposes, is in the act of writing educational discourse rather than in the physical performance of the maternal role. Her book contextualizes the development of a written discourse of maternal education that emerged in the enlightenment period and explores the empowerment achieved by women writing within this discourse, albeit through a notion of authority that is circumscribed by the 'rules' of a discipline.

Chapter 1 Samuel Richardson's Novelistic Maternity¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315546117-2

¹ A shorter version of this chapter has been published as ‘The Maternal Contradiction: Representing the Fictional Mother in Richardson’s Pamela II (1741).’ Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 33.3 (2010): 381–97. I am beholden to the anonymous reviewer and to Christina Lupton for their helpful suggestions and comments.

Part One of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) famously embodied idealised femininity through the eponymous heroine, with great critical success. Pamela fulfilled the role of exemplar primarily as the traditional feminine figure of the martyred virgin, albeit with a domesticated happy ending to her trials. However, when Richardson attempted to represent exemplary maternity in Part Two of the novel he encountered contradictory models of maternal and marital duty. As Pamela is recognised as a pivotal novel, the lack of a consistent aspirational model of maternity in the sequel indicates the broader difficulties in representing maternal authority in the conduct novel form. This opened a fissure between physical and intellectual identities for women associated with their performance of maternal duty. Richardson’s solution to inconsistent models of femininity was to remove Pamela from the physical duties of motherhood and locate her ideal maternity in her authorship of a written maternal project. Richardson thus provided a narrative model for exploring maternal authority outside of the domestic plot and suggested that exemplary femininity existed in a written maternal voice, which allowed the other writers explored in this project to claim implicit authority through assumed maternal identity. Although Richardson’s authoritative mother is a character in a novel, rather than an actual author of an educational text, he was contributing to a broader literary construction of maternal authority and indicating that female authority was contained within published written maternity. Passively facing a profusion of conflicting advice, a mother can regain active control by writing her own authoritative directions and removing her body from the text. This incorporeal notion of maternity as authority or social function is potentially empowering for literate women because it removes them from purely sexualised physicality, but it does also enact the loss of self that still concerns mothers today.

The lack of a consistent representation of a maternal paragon in the critically maligned second part of Pamela has been conventionally read as a failure of Richardson’s authorial control of the novel form. This chapter denies that Richardson’s inability to locate a plausible, sustained, idealised image of maternity is attributable, as Terry Castle has argued, to his ‘imaginative failure’ (132). The difficulties encountered by Richardson in transferring his paragon from written lover to written mother were actually due to formal tensions inherent in eighteenth-century literary discussions of motherhood. These tensions led later writers exploring maternal models to remove husbands from their educational texts, across all literary genres. Very few positive paternal figures appear in the work of most of the writers explored in this book. Selected for their influential position in the development of written maternal authority in different literary genres and from different political perspectives, I trace explicit and implicit authority through the writing of Sarah Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Martin Taylor and Jane Austen. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, advice on maternal conduct created a contradictory model identifying mothers biologically, but simultaneously prioritizing and idealizing a theoretical maternal educator.² Moreover, when this contradictory model of maternity is transferred from conduct books to the developing novel form, it is further problematised by the mimetic function, resulting in what Jennie Batchelor has termed Pamela’s ‘interpretive complexity’ (28). As Madeleine Kahn has observed, ‘the novel epitomizes generic instability in the conceptual and explanatory paradigms that used to provide an authoritative structure for literature’ (4). Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos has argued that in this period, ‘Conduct books, didactic tracts, and romances narrated women’s education as a behavioural script for winning a partner in the marriage market.’ However, against this masculinist agenda, ‘female plots in educational texts give alternate and competing narratives of how women’s lives were envisioned beyond marriage (Sotiropoulos 13). Richardson endeavoured to simultaneously present these opposing rhetorical stances in the novel, which he had previously plotted purely around the former function.

² Ruth Perry has offered a convincing and wide-ranging examination of the literary (and, she believes, concurrent social) change in conceptions of motherhood throughout the eighteenth century, a change which she identifies as an incompatibility between the physical wife and the chaste mother (Novel Relations).

Although Pamela II has been critically perceived as an authorial failure, Pamela as mother is generally presented as an early example of the morally irreproachable mother figure that developed throughout the eighteenth century. Ruth Bloch, for example, argues that ‘[t]he second volume of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela more than any other work first heralded the new, idealized conception of motherhood’ (65). In this chapter, I establish that Richardson’s influential treatment of motherhood actually exemplifies the impossible representational task of assimilating conflicting notions of ‘ideal’ mothers. Throughout the course of the novel the eponymous heroine is either pregnant or the mother of a newborn infant, and her status as a clearly defined exemplary virgin seems to have led critics to assume that she has carried this status of perfection into her new role. Even Ruth Perry, who argues that this novel serves ‘to separate Pamela’s maternal self from her sexual self, that is, to redefine her as an ardent mother and not as Mr. B.’s sexual object’, ultimately perceives the separation as complete and successful by the end of the novel (‘Colonizing the Breast’ 226). Perry sees Pamela as ‘a model bourgeois mother and wife’ (‘Colonizing the Breast’ 227). However, the necessarily physical aspects of her new ‘condition’ disturb and humiliate the paragon. Pamela’s examination of desirable maternity consequently places an increased emphasis on her proper reading and interpretation of written mothers, often involving correct identification of good maternal models rather than focusing on Pamela’s own behaviour. Richardson thus emphasises the gap between the perfect written mother and the actions of a real woman, which could always be open to misinterpretation or constrained by social realities. Pamela moves from being the perfect mother to writing the perfect mother, and thus cannot fully embody virtuous maternity. This exemplary written maternal project presents women writers with the opportunity for emulation regardless of their biological maternal status.

Susan C. Greenfield associates the ‘fallacy of contemporary maternal ideals’, which presented ‘proliferating images’ of unachievable maternal perfection, with an absence of mothers in the eighteenth-century novel more generally. Authors could not present ‘successful motherhood’, Greenfield suggests, because such an ideal is impossible to achieve; therefore, they removed the figure from their novels (Mothering Daughters 18). This contradictory modelling of ideal motherhood can also be traced in conduct literature and is manifest in the conduct book The Young Lady’s Companion; or, beauty’s looking-glass (1740). The addressee of this book is informed by the author – an anonymous ‘Person of Quality’ – that ‘the Government of your House, Family, and Children […] is the Province allotted to your Sex, and […] discharging it well, will, for that Reason, be expected from you’ (31).³ The reader is given the impression that a woman’s whole duty and concern in married life should be her familial duties. However, a few pages later, she learns that ‘A Woman’s Tenderness to her Children is one of the least deceitful Evidences of her Virtue; but yet the Way of expressing it, must be subject to the Rules of good Breeding’. The author provides no clear instruction as to how a good mother of quality should behave towards her children. The reader is simply counselled against spending too much time in their presence: ‘You may love your Children without living in the Nursery, and you may have a competent and discreet Care of them without letting it break out upon the company’ (34).⁴ Lady Davers upholds this opinion when she advises Pamela to ‘consider, child, the station you are raised to does not require you to be quite a domestic animal’ (Pamela II 25).

³ This work takes the form of a letter, supposedly from a father to his motherless daughter; therefore, it reinforces the contradictory sense of female identity contained in patriarchal advice. ⁴ The book explicates the roles of attentive wife and mother in separate sections and therefore does not clarify for the reader how the two key feminine duties can be successfully combined.

Medical literature provided further conflicting models for the novelist attempting to construct an exemplary maternal character. Although works such as The Young Lady’s Companion urged women of quality not to devote too much time or attention to their infants, medical texts generally presented breastfeeding as an essential maternal duty. Gaius Seius, in The Mothers Looking Glass (1702), offered a common opinion when he cited the ‘learned’ seventeenth-century Frenchman Peter de la Primaudaye: ‘Mothers ought to take greater delight in nourishing their own Children, than in Committing them to the Hands of Strangers, and hired Nurses’ (5). Moreover, while mothers were being urged to focus their attention and energy on the development of their children’s minds, they were also being examined purely through their physical anatomy in the proliferating market of midwifery manuals, such as John Maubray’s Midwifery Brought to Perfection by Manual Operation (1725).

Richardson’s solution to the inconsistent and conflicting models of motherhood offered in conduct literature and medical texts, as I perceive it, was to remove his paragon from what I term the ‘physical’ realm of the mimetic novel. Women’s elevated role in the cognitive development of future citizens was in conflict with, although intimately connected to, the basic physical duties a mother had to perform. Pamela is an early literary example of the irreconcilable nature of these two aspects of motherhood. As a mother of ‘quality’ she should not become too involved in the physical duties of the nursery. However, if Pamela is to continue as the paradigmatic virtuous woman in her marital state she must be a tender and concerned mother. In the second half of Pamela II, Richardson transferred his heroine’s instructional writing from the moral psychological interiority of the first novel to an abstracted educational tract, presenting her thoughts on rational education rather than on the ideal mother. Only through this written project does Pamela achieve exemplarity. The ideal rational maternal educator in the eighteenth century was a written mother whose biological functions were, consequently, no longer relevant. Pamela’s time in the course of the novel is almost entirely consumed with describing her intellectual mothering in writing, leaving little space in the novel for description, or presumably performance, of her physical maternal duties.

Richardson openly acknowledges Pamela’s inability to be both a real, physical woman and a paragon when he has her plead with Lady Davers to allow her some human physical failings:

I know not how to descend all at once from the height to which you have raised me […] I naturally sink into body again. – And will not your ladyship confine your expectations from me within narrower limits? – For, O, I cannot even with my wishes, so swiftly follow your expectations, if such they are! (Pamela II 23)

Pamela’s realisation that she is physically bound in a ‘body’ that she cannot fully control is connected to a fear of social performance. In her interiority she is confident that she is following a ‘true’ path in life, through her conversations with her God. Through her reading, play-visiting and broad education at the hands of her husband, Pamela discovers her own shortcomings as a mother and those of physical maternity generally. Her focus on her role as wife and mother subsumes her sense of self, with which she once dazzled her readers with a show of inner strength and virtue. As a mother, Pamela no longer has a sense of self, to the extent that, as Toni Bowers has noted, she sacrifices her religious conscience regarding the wish to nurse her own child to her social conscience in obeying her husband’s desire to employ a wet-nurse.⁵ Although this sublimation of self has been read as an essential element of the creation of the perfect mother, it actually serves to undermine the very qualities that made Pamela a paradigm in the original novel.

⁵ For a detailed discussion of this incident see Toni Bowers, ‘A Point of Conscience’. Because Bowers has so thoroughly addressed the issues of maternal authority that the breastfeeding debate raises in Pamela II, I have not devoted much of this chapter to the matter.

Pamela is gratefully subordinate to patriarchal control, but is simultaneously presented through the discourse of maternal conduct literature ‘directed to mothers themselves’, which provided an autonomous space for intellectual improvement (Greenfield, Mothering Daughters 1). Whereas writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth gradually took advantage of this autonomy to argue for greater educational equality for women, they tended to employ only the aspects of maternity that suited their political agenda, that of maternal education.⁶ As discussed in Chapter 3, Wollstonecraft does address the issue of breastfeeding in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), but Ruth Perry has noted that she ‘reinscribes […] the mutually exclusive nature of sexuality and maternity’ (‘Colonizing the Breast’ 217). Wollstonecraft simply instructs husbands to prefer the de-sexualised, natural maternal figure. Richardson’s novel, lacking this radical feminist cause, ends up in a confused position which attempts, and inevitably fails, to follow two models for women: the maternal educator displaying rationality and self-awareness, and a biologically determined woman as mother and sexualised wife.

⁶ I refer here only to Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘educational’ writings. See Chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion of Wollstonecraft’s writing.

The Exalted Mother

The extent to which the exemplary literary mother of conduct literature was unattainable for mortal women is thus evidenced in the difficulties faced by one of the eighteenth century’s most famous perfect female novel characters. Richardson’s Pamela ironically became more physically and emotionally realistic once she had reached ‘her exalted condition’.

Martha J. Koehler has examined the reader’s sense of ‘shame’ in response to the unobtainable example offered by written paragons in her study Models of Reading: Paragons and Parasites in Richardson, Burney and Laclos (2005). However, whereas Koehler argues that eighteenth-century female readers suffered embarrassment in reaction to their realisation that they could not equal Richardson’s inimitable models in what she terms ‘Richardson’s shame-based didacticism’, it is apparent in Pamela II that Richardson actually acknowledged the limitations experienced by real women in their efforts to obtain the status of ideal motherhood (19). It is surprising that Richardson achieves this recognition of the inability of women to transcend physical maternity to achieve what Koehler has termed ‘paragonizing’ through the struggles of one of his most enduring exemplars, Pamela. As a mother, ultimately, Pamela’s amour de soi is sacrificed to her amourpropre. This sublimation of her private, spiritual self is most notoriously realised in Pamela’s crisis of conscience when she is forced to relinquish the nursing of her child – which she believes is her duty under God – in response to her husband’s direction.

As evidenced in the unsatisfactory conclusion of the breastfeeding debate between Pamela and her husband, there is a constant tension between the natural understanding displayed by the mother and her performance of the role of a good, subservient wife willingly receiving instruction from her husband. For this reason, Pamela’s education at the hands of her husband exemplifies the conflict which ultimately makes this novel an unsatisfying fictional treatment of female education, leading to its critical reputation as an ‘imaginative failure’ and raising questions regarding its value as a novel of conduct (Castle 132). The work’s failure as an exemplum is especially problematic as, partly in response to the lack of a plot, Bowers has suggested that the work is less a novel and more a conduct book (Politics of Motherhood). Pamela as a character is in the same position as the female readers of the novel. She is not sure whether she should follow her own reading of ideal literary motherhood or turn to her flawed husband for advice in her behaviour, and ultimately an undecided heroine is not a suitable exemplary character. Richardson’s decision to represent this imperfect performance of maternity in his previously paradigmatic character indicates that he is aware of the literary contradictions presented to mothers.

One way in which Richardson’s novel could be viewed as instructive is as an educational treatise, offering directives regarding the development of children’s minds. Margaret Doody has noted the significance of the topic of educating with nature as explored by Richardson through the educational manual that Pamela creates, concluding that this ‘topic is not without possibilities, but Richardson’s treatment is largely stodgy and unimaginative’ (82). This view appears reasonable if one views the ‘educational manuals’ as Richardson’s only a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Samuel Richardson’s Novelistic Maternity
• 2 Sarah Fielding’s Narrative Maternity
• 3 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Political Maternity
• 4 Maria Edgeworth’s Empirical Maternity
• 5 Ann Martin Taylor’s Dissenting Maternity
• 6 Jane Austen’s Didactic Maternity
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index