Loss made literal: Nineteenth-century maternal figures.

Abstract

This project, which focuses on the figure of the mother in the nineteenth-century literary and professional discourses, is at once theoretical and historical. I read motherhood's status as material fact and fatherhood's as the theoretical fiction against a psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory of language that assigns the word to fathers, relegates mothers to a prelinguistic realm, and predicates meaning on absence. At the same time, I aim to show how novels, popular periodicals, legal pamphlets, and case studies contributed to an ongoing national debate about nineteenth-century motherhood that has suffered critical neglect in this century. My analysis begins with a paradox. On the one hand, nineteenth-century mothers were associated with embodiment and figured as the literal; on the other hand, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate, Victorian conceptions of motherhood were inextricably bound up with an idea of loss. A mother's presence is a function of her corporeal identity; it is her body, not her word, that guarantees a mother's relation to her child, yet Victorian texts repeatedly figure mothers as subjects constituted by and through loss. In the last century, then, the figure of the mother was aligned simultaneously with presence and with absence. Earlier feminist and literary critical treatments of nineteenth-century motherhood theorize it as institution, write its social history, or analyze its politics from within a domestic framework. Departing from that framework even as I build on this work, I argue that theories of motherhood served as an organizing, albeit implicit, paradigm for four professional disciplines---law, anthropology, nursing, and psychoanalysis. Two chapters focus on individual women, Caroline Norton and Mary Seacole, while two more match nascent disciplines (mother-right anthropology and psychoanalysis) with literary genres (sensation fiction's maternal melodramas and New Woman fiction, respectively) that, I argue, were occupied with similar concerns. What these readings aim to show is how a certain way of conceiving of motherhood not only governed ideologies of domesticity, but organized a culture's understanding of itself. It is my contention that mothers' status as figures of the literal---powerful representations of materiality---both grew out of and fueled a myth of progress in which mothers' alignment with embodiment and the literal required their loss.