Copyright by Lindsey Marlene Powers Gay 2017 THE DISSERTATION COMMITTEE FOR LINDSEY MARLENE POWERS GAY CERTIFIES THAT THIS IS THE APPROVED VERSION OF THE FOLLOWING DISSERTATION: PREGNANT POETICS AND GESTATIONAL NARRATIVES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE Committee: Lisa Moore, Co-Supervisor Lance Bertelsen, Co-Supervisor Samuel Baker Mark Longaker Megan Seaholm PREGNANT POETICS AND GESTATIONAL NARRATIVES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE BY LINDSEY MARLENE POWERS GAY, B.A., M.A. DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN MAY 2017 Acknowledgements A million random, mostly invisible chances governed my environment and abilities as I wrote this dissertation. But I do not feel their influence as keenly as I do the generous support of my faculty, colleagues, friends, and family, all of whom are in their own ways present in this document. I completed this dissertation with the assistance of an Excellence Fellowship from the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Professional Development Awards from the Office of Graduate Studies at UT. Portions of this work have been presented at the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2017 annual meeting, as well as at the 2015 Historical Poetics graduate symposium sponsored by the English department at UT. My co-supervisors, Lisa Moore and Lance Bertelsen, have each provided direct, encouraging, unflinching, and at times harsh (but necessary!) feedback at every stage of this project. I thank them for their patience and belief in me, and I will always be indebted to them for their work on my behalf. My committee members Mark Longaker, Samuel Baker, and Megan Seaholm have each provided crucial insight and advice at various points in my writing process. Mark in particular has helped me learn to manage the combined demands of teaching, research, and administrative labor. The writing group in which I participated, expertly managed by Lisa Moore, consistently animated my work. I thank my colleagues Stephanie Rosen, Nicholas Spinelli, Drea Brown, Jeffrey Boruszak, and Carolyn Davis for their invaluable contributions in this group—and for their patience during fickle video conferences. The friends I’ve made during my career in higher education have been pillars of moral and practical reassurance, not just in Seattle, Boulder, or Austin but all over the country. If you consider me a friend, know that you have lifted my spirits and challenged me to meet your intellectual level. In particular I thank Joanna Turner for her undimmed iv enthusiasm as she and I reviewed early drafts of each other’s work. And without Thomas and Stephanie Spitzer-Hanks’s gentle humor and warm support, I could not have navigated the tempestuous waters of new parenthood. I must also acknowledge the feminine collectives which shepherded me through my most trying times. My doctor and nurses at Texas Oncology made diagnosis, chemotherapy, and follow-ups less awful than they could have been. The midwives and staff at Austin Area Birthing Center, as well as the doulas at AustinBorn, cared for and empowered me for months on end. The fellow- travelers in my AABC Centering group and in the postpartum groups at AustinBorn were indispensable sources of humor and healing. I am exceptionally grateful to my therapist Illysa Foster and the special women of her Creative Mothers group. Without her validating care and attention, and without the group’s spiritual and somatic reinforcement, I would not have found the power to continue my work as a scholar, mother, or human being. My most persistent gratitude is for my family. My parents, sister, grandparents, in-laws, extended family, and beloved friends who are as close as family—none have ever wavered in their confidence. Thank you for believing in me. Though he himself is only beginning to learn about gratitude, I offer special thanks to my son, Rainier. More than any other experience, being your mother has taught me perseverance, patience, self- examination, self-forgiveness, and new capacities for love. Finally, nothing can top the unyielding love and thankfulness I feel for my spouse and partner, Bradford. You have accompanied me around the country, sacrificed your stability for my career, and buoyed me through profound ups and downs on these personal and professional journeys. Your devotion has been tireless; your patience, superhuman; your tender affection, incomparable. My accomplishments are yours too. v PREGNANT POETICS AND GESTATIONAL NARRATIVES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE Lindsey Marlene Powers Gay, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017 Supervisors: Lisa Moore and Lance Bertelsen In this project I examine eighteenth-century literary representations of the pregnant or birthing female body—the woman who herself straddles the line between subject and object, Self and Other, life and death—and what she signifies in the Enlightenment cultural imagination. Throughout the project, I examine how the overriding metaphors of gestation and birth inhabit the act of writing itself, as well as the structures underpinning these authors’ narrative and verse. The works I examine propose that reproductive women have a special relationship to metaphor—both in the specific representation of writing-as-birth, and the figurative function of metaphor in general. Combining affect theory, feminist psychoanalysis, medical and scientific history, and formal literary analysis, I investigate what the eighteenth century tells us about what it means to be human, and the Enlightenment encouraged us to perceive human subjectivity as intimately bound with feminine reproduction. In my first chapter, I discuss the Enlightenment’s embryological debates and the monstrous maternal imagination as they appear in The Dunciad and elsewhere in vi Alexander Pope’s life and works. In my second chapter, I consider how knowledge exclusive to reproductive women joins with narrative structures of concealment in Eliza Haywood’s 1720s short fiction. Her representations of pregnant women’s bodies and minds first convey, then challenge the abjection of pregnancy and parturition. My third chapter explores how Mary Wollstonecraft translates abject reproductive imagery into a affective scrutiny of the maternal mind in Maria and elsewhere. Wollstonecraft shows how the reproductive woman is susceptible to socioeconomic, material, and emotional pressures that can make her an object without agency. I end by offering an overview of representations of reproduction in agrarian and industrial environments. The authors I examine participated in the emerging science of embryology and in the gendered discourses of sensibility and sentiment. Their works demonstrate the political uses of pregnancy and birth. I participate in the ongoing critical reclamation of feminist history by probing literary representations of one of the most ostensibly appreciated—but oft-derided—times in a woman’s life: the transformative, dangerous, confusing, contradictory, metaphor-rich events of pregnancy and childbirth. vii Table of Contents List of Figures ........................................................................................................ ix Introduction Scrutinizing the Maternal Mind .........................................................1 Eighteenth-Century Histories of Pregnancy and Parturition .....................10 The Maternal Abject ..................................................................................28 Composition and the Birth Metaphor ........................................................37 Chapter 1 “No more…than a Midwife”: Alexander Pope’s Womb Envy ............42 An Ontogeny of Dunces.............................................................................48 Embryology, the Maternal Imagination, and Monstrous Births ................57 Monstrous Births and the Animal Abject in the Dunciad..........................70 Alexander Pope’s Womb Envy ..................................................................78 Chapter 2 Eliza Haywood’s Gestational Narratives .............................................91 Resisting the Maternal Abject ....................................................................98 Narrative Structures of Concealment and Knowledge .............................115 Narrative Escalation and Gestational Development ................................127 Chapter 3 Birth, Death, and Madness in Wollstonecraft’s Maria and Godwin’s Memoirs.............................................................................139 “I am nourishing a creature who will soon be sensible of my care” ........148 “The natural, the dreaded consequence” ..................................................161 “‘Consider, dear madam, I was famishing: wonder not that I became a wolf!’” ......................................................................................168 “The sentiments I have embodied” ..........................................................175 “She went up to her chamber,—never more to descend.” .......................187 Epilogue Reproduction in Agrarian Labor and the Industrial Age .....................206 Class Conflict and the Reproductive Woman ..........................................207 Mechanical Reproduction in the Industrial Age ......................................214 Bibliography ........................................................................................................224