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When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", University of Southampton, name of the University School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination http://eprints.soton.ac.uk UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON FACULTY OF HUMANTIES English Volume 1of 1 Maternal Impressions: The Discourse of Maternal Imagination in the Eighteenth Century by Jenifer Buckley Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2014 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON ABSTRACT Maternal imagination is the notion that a pregnant woman could alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings. At the beginning of the long eighteenth century this notion circulated in both medical and popular understandings of pregnancy, however by the nineteenth century the concept was largely dismissed in the medico-scientific community. This thesis charts the discursive migration of the concept of maternal imagination in a way that complicates the standard chronology. I argue that the discourse was widely dispersed and played a role in significant cultural debates concerning man- midwifery, politeness, domestic hierarchy, gender roles, and the philosophy of creative imagination. Exploring the rich interplay of medicine and literature, the thesis examines a range of print material such as newspapers, pamphlets, novels, popular health guides, midwifery treatises and poetry. This broad scope has demonstrated contradictions inherent within the discourse, such as the increasing sense that imagination was at once both creative and destructive. Those who employed the discourse appropriated the concept of maternal imagination to support a range of agendas; to satirise or support man-midwives, to create distrust or sympathy for women, or to ascribe either authority or culpability to the power of imagination. Metamorphosing through the age of politeness, the culture of sensibility and the related glorification of maternity, the discourse of maternal imagination, rather than diminishing as has often been assumed, reaches an apex in the late eighteenth-century assimilation of its physiological aspects into the language of Romantic creativity. In a duality typical of its complex evolution, the discourse both contributes to the nineteenth-century view of a fragile female intellect, and to a peculiarly pathological version of the imagination process that could apply to both women and men. FACULTY OF HUMANITIES English Literature Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy MATERNAL IMPRESSIONS: THE DISCOURSE OF MATERNAL IMAGINATION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Jenifer Claire Buckley Table of Contents ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... i Table of Contents ..................................................................................................... iii DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP ............................................................................... vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. ix Definitions and Abbreviations ................................................................................. 10 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 11 § What is the discourse of maternal imagination? ................................................... 11 § The History of Maternal Imagination ..................................................................... 25 § The History of Imagination ..................................................................................... 37 § The Discourse of Maternal Imagination in the Eighteenth Century ....................... 42 Chapter 1 Breeding like Rabbits: Mary Toft and Polite Medicine .............................................. 47 § A Stable Discourse? ............................................................................................... 48 § The Tale of Mary Toft ............................................................................................. 57 § ‘Have I my fingers? And have I my eyes?’: Sensory Evidence in the Toft Affair ..... 64 § Avoiding Dirty Details, ‘Instead of encouraging a Publick Blab’ ............................ 72 § Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 81 Chapter 2 ‘For one would be loath to spoil a son and heir’: the Power of Maternal Imagination in Fiction of the Mid Eighteenth-Century .................................................. 85 § Mrs. Pickle .............................................................................................................. 87 § Medical Perspectives: Maternal Longing vs. Maternal Passion ............................. 97 § Marriage ............................................................................................................... 108 § Pamela II ............................................................................................................... 117 § Pamela’s Profits .................................................................................................... 123 § The Consequences of Maternal Passion .............................................................. 128 § Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 132 iii Chapter 3 ‘’Tis My Father’s Fault’: Tristram Shandy and Paternal Imagination ....................... 137 § ‘’Tis My Father’s Fault’ ......................................................................................... 139 § Paternal Imagination ............................................................................................ 144 § ‘’Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause, – and of obstinacy in a bad one’: Walter’s Belief in Paternal Imagination ......................................... 155 § Elizabeth Shandy .................................................................................................. 166 § ‘What a teasing life did she lead herself, and consequently her foetus too’: Elizabeth’s Maternal Imagination .................................................................. 173 § Alternatives to Imagination ................................................................................. 178 § ‘So little power does the bare act of begetting give a man over his issue’: The Paternal Role in the Eighteenth Century ....................................................... 183 § Laurence Sterne: Cultural Father ......................................................................... 188 § Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 195 Chapter 4: ‘I’ll repress the rising anguish/Till thine eyes behold the light’: Passionate Responsibility in Maternal Poetry .......................................................... 199 § Maternal Poetry ................................................................................................... 201 § Imagination and Maternal Imagination Late Eighteenth-Century Culture .......... 206 § Maternal Poetry in the 1790s .............................................................................. 219 § ‘Sad case for such a brain to hold/Communion with a stirring child’: The Thorn 229 § Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 246 Chapter 5 Romantic Imagination and Maternal Guilt in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ............ 251 § Frankenstein’s Critical History .............................................................................. 255 § Victor Frankenstein’s Maternity .......................................................................... 261 § Conception, Gestation and Repression: The Experience of Maternal Imagination ....................................................................................................................... 263 § The Creature ........................................................................................................ 270 § Frankenstein and the Discourse of Maternal Imagination .................................. 278 § Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 284 iv Afterbirth: The Discourse of Maternal Imagination After the Eighteenth Century .................... 287 Bibliography .......................................................................................................... 295 Primary Sources ...................................................................................................... 295 Secondary Sources .................................................................................................. 301 Filmography ...........................................................................................................