Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Nora Doyle’s study of motherhood, childbirth, and discourses of maternity is a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex social life of reproduction in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Maternal Bodies joins a wealth of historical scholarship that documents the fraught depiction of motherhood during this period, including Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America (1977); Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (2009); Katy S. Smith, We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750–1835 (2013); and Jennifer L. Morgan’s indispensable Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004). In keeping with more recent historical investigations, Doyle’s study attends to early American maternity’s gendered delineations—as documented by women and men alike—and, crucially, to the divergent realities of white middle- and upper-class maternal experience with Black women’s reproductive labour under the conditions of slavery. Employing personal letters, diary entries, archival photos, and newsprint illustrations to explore “lived” and “imagined maternal bod[ies]” (5), Doyle’s book has already been recognized for its historical value. Its further interweaving of anatomical illustrations, bawdy midwifery manuals, and “prescriptive” medical writings (115)— which sought to divorce the physiology of childbearing from its compromising proximity to pleasure, sexuality, and coarse animality—yields a dynamic archive that conveys just how contested motherhood and maternity as disciplinary territories were (and, indeed, remain).

It is Doyle’s close attention to language and a substantial treatment of poetry that makes Maternal Bodies an especially rich interdisciplinary resource, with added value for scholars in the history of medicine, medical/health humanities, and literary studies who are invested in the exploration of “motherhood both as a lived identity and as a cultural symbol in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America” (1). Its methodology illustrates the clarifying power of juxtaposition: be it of textual sources, gendered experience, racial disparities, and the enduring pasts and present(s) that continue to articulate maternal discourse. As Doyle writes, “historians ... tend to bring to life the thoughts and feelings of the women and men of the past, while allowing the flesh to remain dead and forgotten. In order to find the historical body, we must peer imaginatively at every source, for inevitably the body is present just [End Page 469] below the surface” (13). Chapter 1 explores the maternal body as an emergent concern for early eighteenth-century medical professionals, which would eventually supplant earlier corporeal vernaculars of the woman’s body with the uterus “as the primary agent in childbearing” (9). Increasingly aligned with the male professional’s outlook, such texts foregrounded fragments of the woman’s body—the pelvis, the uterus—to dissociate the embodied woman from childbirth and certain unsettling moral challenges induced by pain and fear. Chapter 2 contrasts such “prescriptive” texts with “discursive,” albeit fragmented, glances into women’s own descriptive testimonies of childbirth in diaries and personal writings: the stock language and narrative structures that consistently conveyed, even as they veiled, middle-class and elite white practices of contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, and its aftermath. By contrast, the conditions of slavery meant that Black women’s firsthand narratives of childbearing were “most profoundly shaped by the commodification of their bodies as mothers” (9); for example, key episodes in Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) depict how white women’s collusion with the institution of slavery “destroyed what should have been an empathic community of mothers” (80).

In her book In the Wake: On Being and Blackness (2016), Christina Sharpe describes the structural history of ungendering that has long worked to “dis/figure Black maternity ... turn[ing] the womb into a factory producing blackness as abjection much like the slave ship’s hold” (74). Such “orthographies” of Blackness (to use Sharpe’s term) proliferate today—often in the form of a digital archive of...