Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature

The Maternal Imagination

Jenifer Buckley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319538341
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319538358
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book reveals the cultural significance of the pregnant woman by examining major eighteenth-century debates concerning separate spheres, man-midwifery, performance, marriage, the body, education, and creative imagination. Exploring medical, economic, moral, and literary ramifications, this book engages critically with the notion that a pregnant woman could alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings. Eighteenth-century authors sought urgently to define, understand and control the concept of maternal imagination as they responded to and provoked fundamental questions about female intellect and the relationship between mind and body. Interrogating the multiple models of maternal imagination both separately and as a holistic set of socio-cultural components, the author uncovers the discourse of maternal imagination across eighteenth-century drama, popular print, medical texts, poetry and novels. This overdue rehabilitation of the pregnant woman in literature is essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth century, gender and literary history.

© The Author(s) 2017

J. BuckleyGender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century LiteraturePalgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53835-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jenifer Buckley¹

(1)

Brighton, United Kingdom

End Abstract

§ The Discourse of Maternal Imagination

What is the discourse of maternal imagination? To begin to answer this question, we must first examine conceptions of maternal imagination itself. In 1714 a doctor named Daniel Turner did just that: he incorporated a chapter entitled “Of Spots and Marks of a diverse resemblance imprest upon the skin of the foetus, by the Force of the Mother’s Fancy” into his treatise on the skin, De Morbis Cutaneis. This chapter included an extensive list of examples of maternal imagination, a phenomenon widely understood to be the case in which a pregnant woman’s mind affected her unborn child in some way. In his book, Turner described “the case of a man born without arms, and living to a great age, which was occasioned by his mother’s surprise at the sight of a mendicant, in the same unhappy condition” (1714, 116). Turner further claimed that his belief in this model of maternal imagination had been cemented with the occurrence of the same event in contemporary London, to the wife of “Sir J B”. The case of the one-armed beggar is significant because it functions as an archetype of maternal imagination throughout the eighteenth century and is frequently cited by medical professionals and by popular literature.¹ The tale had social ramifications as individuals who had the misfortune to have malformed or missing limbs were shunned on the basis that their presence might cause local pregnant women to give birth to similarly deformed bodies. Carolyn Williams describes how deformed beggars “used their unsightliness to extort money” (2011, 23), by threatening to present themselves in front of pregnant women.

The case of the one-armed beggar suggests that women who suffer fright or surprise give birth to misshapen children. However another of Turner’s examples indicates that these principles did not apply to all instances of maternal imagination. He refers to a story,

Of a woman longing to bite the naked shoulder of a baker passing by her, which rather than she should lose, the good natured husband hires the baker at a certain price; accordingly when the big-bellied lady had taken two morsels, the poor man, unable to hold out a third, would not suffer her to bite again, for want of which she bore (as the story goes) one dead child with two living. (Turner 1714, 119)

When compared to the case of the one-armed beggar, the affair of the baker’s shoulder displays a completely different paradigm of maternal imagination. Whereas one woman was frightened, the other had a fierce “longing” or craving.² In the former case, the child is congenitally deformed; in the latter case, the woman gives birth to triplets, one of whom is stillborn. Curiously, while Turner is happy to credit the case of the one-armed beggar and substantiates the report with an example from his own experience, he seems to doubt the veracity of the baker’s shoulder incident when he includes a parenthetical caveat, “as the story goes”. Finally, whereas the woman surprised by the beggar mimetically reproduces what she has seen, the other woman’s body absorbs and creatively interprets the abstract nature of her longing. Despite these considerable differences, both stories are retold over several centuries as classic examples of maternal imagination.³

I include one more of Turner’s examples to underscore the number of variables present in the discourse of maternal imagination. Turner repeats the following story:

An honest woman, who about ten years since, being great with child, and quarrelling with another woman, put her self [sic] into such a passion that she was unable to contain her self; after which falling into labour she was brought to bed of a daughter of courageous and heroick [sic] mind, but her feet and hands contracted as if ready to fight. (1714, 116)

This pregnant woman becomes angry, rather than frightened or full of longing. Turner’s phrasing suggests that in this case, the pregnant woman possessed a degree of agency as she “put her self into such a passion” (my italics), unlike the involuntary reactions of the women in the case of the one-armed beggar or the baker’s shoulder.⁴ Valeria Finnuci (2003, 140–141) has discussed this aspect of the discourse and explored the medico-philosophical debate regarding a woman’s conscious use of her maternal imagination. Popular folklore suggested that if a woman deliberately pictured her husband during sex with another man, her infidelity would be hidden, as her maternal imagination would still imprint the husband’s image onto the baby, even if he were not the biological father. The story of the angry woman also reveals yet another facet to the discourse of maternal imagination as it describes the way the mother’s anger affected the foetus’ mental, as well as physical, development.⁵ This idea was historically tenacious and advocated by figures such as the philosopher Nicholas Malebranche and the early man-midwife John Maubray.⁶

Turner’s examples indicate the complex nature of the discourse of maternal imagination during the early eighteenth century. Throughout this book I shall be referring to the idea that a pregnant woman could influence the development of her foetus through her thoughts and feelings as “maternal imagination”. English writers have employed a range of terms such as maternal imprinting, congenital deformity, maternal fleshmark, maternal impressions and maternal imagination. I have chosen to use the term “maternal imagination” rather than “maternal impressions” throughout this book because the dramatic eighteenth-century transformation of the word “imagination” is so significant for the period’s medicine, fiction and culture.⁷ Eighteenth-century understandings of imagination gradually changed from mimetic to creative, and as I shall go on to explain, the notion of maternal imagination played a role in this shift. “Imagination” is also the earliest and most frequently employed term used by writers of the material included within this book.⁸

I want to demonstrate the way that the apparently distinct instances described above are actually all part of a protean “discourse” of maternal imagination. As I shall discuss in more detail below, examining maternal imagination as a discourse will facilitate a more interdisciplinary examination of the topic, rather than merely localised histories within medicine, religion, folklore or fiction.⁹ Agency, or more specifically, the denial of the human subject as an agent of change, is considered throughout my study as I am interested in the ways that discourse penetrates different genres, shapes experience, and regulates discursive practice.¹⁰ My argument does not pretend to resolve the complex matter of agency, but rather tests agency through discourse – through my tracing of continuities and transformations across genres and time. This Introduction will outline the state of the discourse of maternal imagination at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in order to provide a point of orientation for later developments. By providing both the critical and historical context, I hope to highlight the value of examining the discourse for literary criticism, eighteenth-century studies and women’s history.

The case of the one-armed beggar, the affair of the baker’s shoulder and the story of the angry woman are only three of twenty-five examples listed by Turner, each suggesting a slightly different model of maternal imagination. Further examples were reported in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, broadsides, almanacks, popular texts full of monstrous images known as “wonder books”, or passed on through the oral tradition.¹¹ As Turner’s examples demonstrate, maternal imagination could take the form of longing, fright, or anger. However other sources maintained that pregnant women could also affect their foetuses for better or for worse with dreams, exercise, or excitement; by deliberately or accidentally fixing their attention upon a certain object or even with a simple yawn.¹² The discourse included any theory or belief that suggested a direct link between the mother’s mind and the foetus; for example “chirapsy” constituted the belief that a woman could avoid marking her infant if she immediately wiped clean the part of her body affected by her imagination.¹³ Although examples of maternal imagination were often presented in negative terms of involuntary accidents, there was also a sense that a mother could choose to improve the appearance or character of her foetus. The eighteenth-century midwife Martha Mears published her own pregnancy guide and addressed “the fair sex” with medical advice and directives.¹⁴ Mears encouraged pregnant women to engage in “the delightful recreation of music” (1797, 36) as often as possible for the sake of the baby in utero.¹⁵ One might also tentatively include the hypothesis of Jean Astruc, a French professor of medicine, as an advocate of the beneficial effects of prenatal influence. Astruc (1762, 47–48) postulated that a minute image of a woman was sculpted into a concave niche of her womb, which shaped the developing foetus into a likeness of its mother, like jelly in a mould.¹⁶

Clearly the discourse of maternal imagination played a defining role within an extraordinary range of incidents and outcomes. As with all discourses, knowledge about maternal imagination was generated, shaped and regulated by discrete, localised and period-specific discursive practices. That is to say, a belief circulated by local wisdom in early eighteenth-century Cornwall that maternal dreams could alter a foetus, was a different kind of knowledge from a midwifery text of the 1780s that claimed a sudden shock could destroy the infant embryo. Nevertheless, there were continuities and overlaps between these different types of knowledge across the century. Medical texts offered specialist “knowledge” of the female body and imagination, and yet it was a speculative, fantastical type of knowledge. As contemporary physicians and philosophers admitted, when empirical evidence failed, as it so often did when it came to the female body, one relied upon imagination for altern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Mary Toft’s Performance: Imagining Powerful Pregnancies in Pantomime and Pamphlets
• 3. “For One Would be Loath to Spoil a Son and Heir”: The Power of Maternal Imagination in Fiction of the Mid Eighteenth-Century
• 4. “’Tis My Father’s Fault”: Tristram Shandy and Paternal Imagination
• 5. “I’ll Repress the Rising Anguish/Till Thine Eyes Behold the Light”: Passionate Responsibility in Maternal Poetry
• 6. Romantic Imagination and Maternal Guilt in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• 7. Afterbirth: The Discourse of Maternal Imagination After the Eighteenth Century
• Back Matter