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University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting LIVING LABOR: MOTHERHOOD AS EXCHANGE IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL By FRANCESCA M. MARINARO A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1 © 2014 Francesca M. Marinaro 2 To my family, whose love and support made this possible 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my director, Pamela Gilbert, for her patient guidance and encouragement. I would also like to thank Judy Page, Chris Snodgrass, and Trysh Travis for generously volunteering their time, expertise, and support. I am forever indebted to Kayley Thomas and Anastasia Ulanowicz, for laughing with me, crying with me, and never letting me quit. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not thank my beloved "Peanuts" for being a constant source of encouragement, not to mention midnight editors. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 8 2 MAKING A MODEL FAMILY: COMPANIONATE PARENTING IN THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL .............................................................................................. 28 3 CONSUMING THE CHILD: THE FEMALE MONSTER AND THE MOTHER FIGURE .................................................................................................................. 64 The Disempowered Daughter: Cathy Earnshaw and Maternal Abandonment ........ 68 Mother Most Monstrous: Lucy Westenra as Victorian Anti-Mother ......................... 75 Carmilla the Creator: Lesbianism and Procreative Power....................................... 81 "Let her go back to her mother": Good Lady Ducayne and Maternal Compensation ..................................................................................................... 87 Mother Mina and the Family as Community ............................................................ 96 4 "AN EXTRAORDINARILY WELL MADE BABY": MOTHER AS ARTIST IN OUIDA'S MOTHS ................................................................................................. 106 5 I COME TO DEFEND MY STORY: NARRATIVE AND MATERNAL AGENCY IN GEORGE MOORE'S ESTHER WATERS ............................................................. 141 6 CONFRONTING THE FACE OF RACE: PROGRESSIVE MOTHERING AND THE FAMILY AS RACIAL UNIFIER ...................................................................... 176 Anna Lombard ...................................................................................................... 181 The Yellow Face ................................................................................................... 202 7 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 217 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 227 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 233 5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy LIVING LABOR: MOTHERHOOD AS EXCHANGE IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL By Francesca M. Marinaro May 2014 Chair: Pamela K. Gilbert Major: English This study combines feminist theory with exchange and gift theory to analyze Victorian texts that map the cultural construction of the figure of the Victorian mother through the language of production and consumption. My work joins feminist scholarship on the maternal body with Viviana A. Zelizer's work on child value in the nineteenth century and Jill Rappoport's study of Victorian women's relationship to gift economy, introducing what I term the regressive versus progressive maternal narrative to reveal the impact of nineteenth-century practices of production and consumption on constructing the figure of the Victorian mother. I define the regressive maternal narrative as one in which motherhood operates as compensatory exchange—the "later return," in Rappoport's terms, for a husband's "initial outlay" of offering a woman security and stability in marriage. Conversely, in the progressive maternal narrative, woman appropriates her motherhood not as mere remuneration, but as a vehicle of empowerment which she directs onto her community—whether family, nation, or race. I argue that examining this shift from the regressive to the progressive maternal narrative through the language of exchange allows us to consider how viewing mothers 6 alternately as producers and commodities impacted the ways that Victorian women influenced networks of family, industry, and empire. 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation combines feminist scholarship on the maternal body with exchange and gift theory to analyze Victorian texts that map the cultural construction of the figure of the Victorian mother through the language of production and consumption. A considerable body of nineteenth-century scholarship links the concept of the Victorian woman as mother and center of the family with England's changing industrial and imperial landscape, constructing the home as both the source from which the nation's captains of industry and leaders of empire arose and a sanctuary from such labors. Anna Davin, for instance, in an essay on motherhood and imperialism in Victorian England, writes that during this period, "infant life and child health took on a new importance in public discussion, reinforced by the notion of a healthy and numerous population as a national resource…and if the nation needed healthy future citizens (and soldiers and laborers), then mothers must improve" (10; 13). I argue that, set against the backdrop of this construct of family as national resource, the literature of the period often appropriated the language of production and consumption to galvanize discussions that packaged the work of motherhood within nationalist rhetoric to extend (and sometimes to control) women's active participation in England's growth as a nation. In Maternal Impressions: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Literature and Theory, Cristina Mazzoni undertakes an examination of the meaning of pregnancy in which she argues that the act of conceiving a child carries with it an implication of choice—what she terms "an active undertaking on the mother's part" (185). Yet historically the maternal body has been a site of contradiction—a conundrum of choice and 8 responsibility, of freedom and regulation. Feminist scholars have commented extensively on the conflicting representations to which the maternal body has been subject throughout history. In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich argues that "there is an inescapable correlation between the idea of motherhood and the idea of power…The power of the mother is, first and foremost…to give or withhold survival itself" (72; 68). Similarly, Cristina Mazzoni views motherhood as "the situation in which [woman] is socially authorized and culturally empowered to activate her body, its drives, and can exercise an active part in social relations" (6). Thus even if physiologically possessing the capacity to bear children, the woman nonetheless, according to this interpretation, maintains a degree of agency over the processes of pregnancy and childbirth because those processes are localized within her own body. Conversely, Lauren Berlant argues that the moment a child's sex is determined to be female—a moment that occurs even before she has left the womb— she is immediately located within a predetermined, "natural narrative of the movement of the body," a narrative that signifies "her inscription in public heterosexuality, her ascension into reproduction, and her commitment to performing the abstract values of instrumental empathy and service that have characterized norms of female fulfillment" (99). Each of these scholars points to a crucial element in the process of becoming a mother—that of the distinction between physiological predestination for motherhood and the ability to choose whether or not to act upon that capacity. Scholars have often gestured toward the extent to which notions of production and "sourcing" the nation with children informed Victorian ideas about motherhood; Ruth Perry, for instance, argues that "the invention of childhood and the invention of 9 motherhood can be seen as adaptations of an existing social system to the new political and economic imperatives of an expanding English empire" (205). Prior to this historical moment, Perry observes, "childhood was not recognized as a stage of life distinct and separable from the rest of life. Children rather were assumed to be, and were treated as miniature adults" (204). Viviana A. Zelizer's work on the evolving definition of childhood during the nineteenth century reveals the extent to which such shifts demanded a reevaluation of the role of the mother. The newly-emerging concept of childhood as a separate life stage—what Zelizer terms the "sentimentalization of childhood" evolved largely in response to the changing roles of women—in particular the rising cult of domesticity and the doctrine of separate spheres (9). As men's professional pursuits increasingly carried them outside the home, women's responsibilities
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