Revolutionary burdens: The reproduction of political agents in Britain, 1790-1826.

Abstract

"Revolutionary Burdens" investigates the construction of political agency in Britain by looking at how gendered narratives of reproduction inform understandings of political power during the French revolutionary period. It examines political treatises by Edmund Burke, the poetry of William Blake, and novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, and Mary Shelley, as well as diverse non-literary texts. As both a biological process and a metaphor for sociopolitical processes, reproduction is crucial to conceptions of political power at this time. Analyzing how writers manipulate reproductive narratives, I demonstrate how they negotiate the boundaries of political discourse and redefine political agency so as to alter the very basis of political power. The theoretical and historical contours of the project develop through analysis of Blake's Song of Los. The first half of the dissertation examines narratives that center on the corporeal and ideological potency of the paternal body. Exploring the fathering of political states and political agents in Burke's writings on the French Revolution, particularly Reflections on the Revolution in France, I illustrate the resilience of traditional reproductive political narratives and the institutions they sustain. Turning to narratives of maternity, I complicate assumptions about gender difference and political activity by exploring the mother's role in reproductive politics. Analyzing configurations of maternal agency, I demonstrate how the logic of abortion implicates the political and narrative ends of Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman and Opie's Adeline Mowbray. My reading of Shelley's The Last Man, a novel about the end of humanity, art, and history that is haunted by reproductive impulses and gendered issues of inheritance, manifests the legacies of reproductive narratives for Romanticism and British culture. "Revolutionary Burdens" revises current thinking on the relationship between romantic ideology and the French Revolution. Recent critics maintain that the revolution functioned as an epistemic shift, altering not only how writers responded to political events and ideals, but also how entire cultures reconceived their structures of power. I contend that prerevolutionary paradigms, particularly those dependent on inscriptions of gender, continued to shape imaginings of power in revolutionary states, revealing the ideological kinship between seemingly opposed political camps and modes of political thought.