Rocking the Cradle / Features / Untitled Books

“The economic hierarchy of motherhood is apparent in the first novels to explore the experience of maternity.”

Photograph: ©Simon Burt

Rocking the Cradle

Sarah Moss is a British writer and academic. She is the Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Exeter. Inspired by her own pregnancy, Moss looked into the literature of maternity. Night Waking, her second novel, is about maternal ambivalence.

There are a lot of books telling women how to be pregnant. It's not, of course, difficult; you conceive and time passes and eventually enough time has passed and you have a baby. But we still spend a lot of money reading about it. I started to notice the pregnancies and babies in eighteenth-century literature when I was pregnant myself, writing my doctoral thesis and hating myself for getting distracted by modern pregnancy books.

Pregnancy books have been bestsellers since the advent of mass-market publishing. The publishing industry expanded rapidly in the mid-eighteenth century, for reasons including cheaper and faster printing processes, an improved transport and communication network, higher literacy levels and more disposable income in an increasingly urban population and (maybe) cheaper candles allowing more reading at night. This era used to be called "The Rise of the Novel" in English Literature departments, but we're increasingly aware that it was even more The Rise of Travel Writing and The Rise of the Gardening Manual and, I discovered, The Rise of the Pregnancy Handbook. There were fewer than a dozen pregnancy books in print in English in 1700, and several hundred by 1800. I find it unlikely that reproductive biology became so much more complicated in one century that people started to need instructions for gestation.

The books all claim to be solving a problem, mostly the same problem. Bryan Cornwell, writing in 1784, describes the symptoms of pregnancy, which include increasing girth and foetal movement, and then points out that:

many of the laborious part of the lower class of life, go through their whole time in the midst of fatigue and trouble, and that without any of these symptoms, so that they are in great measure to be attributed to the course of life, not the course of nature, in the pregnant women of better fortunes. Those women who are most subject to them are of... an idle life, or given to intemperance, or subject to passions of various kinds, fear, grief, anger, or the like.

So it's all your own fault, idle, intemperate, passionate reader. Poor women, the sort who don't buy pregnancy books, don't have any trouble. (A lot of modern pregnancy books have a "traditional woman", often found in Africa or "the olden days", who finds things similarly straightforward.) Sylvester Mahon's Every Lady her Own Physician (1788) takes the same line:

Women who are naturally healthy and active, who labour, live moderately, and observe a proper regimen, experience but very little of these complaints. They are considerable only to women of a delicate constitution, who eat too much, observe no regulations with respect to diet, or who lead an inactive life.

"Labour" in this case means "manual work". Women who work hard and don't overeat are untroubled by pregnancy. The kinds of pregnancies that need books result from women's greed and laziness - the stereotypical vices of the aristocracy - while working women, economically active women, are rewarded by reproductive function. I find this fascinating because it's the opposite of the modern view that work and motherhood are in conflict. Good workers, in the eighteenth-century formulation, are good mothers. Women who don't work need books to tell them how to eat, how to be active and how to pass nine months while a baby grows. Books are a prescription for the economically dysfunctional, a remedy for the stay-at-home-mum.

The economic hierarchy of motherhood is apparent in the first novels to explore the experience of maternity. Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, first published in 1801, shows a parade of adult women, from whom the heroine learns to discriminate good and bad kinds of femininity. Belinda stays with the aristocratic Lady Delacour, who spends her time shopping, flirting and gossiping with similarly idle friends. Lady Delacour has a young daughter, Helena, who has been sent away to live with an aunt because her mother finds it too much trouble to have a child in the house. The chapter describing the aunt's house, away from the distractions of London, is called "Domestic Happiness" and this household is clearly the model for Belinda's (and, implicitly, the reader's) adult life. At Oakly Park, "the elder and younger part of the family were not separated from each other; even the youngest child in the house seemed to form part of the society, to have some share and interest in the general occupations or amusements." This is noteworthy because, at the beginning of the nineteenth century and for some decades afterwards, it was normal for the children of wealthy parents to spend all but a couple of hours a day in their own part of the house with their own staff to care for them. Belinda is written just as this was changing, in the years when modern ideals of parenthood as an activity rather than a biological fact were becoming current. Lady Anne and Mr Percival enjoy a companionate marriage and are both involved in the home education of their children. The Percivals are, I think, the first full-time parents in English literature, entirely fulfilled by the company of each other and their children, requiring no stimulus beyond the gates of their own park. Belinda learns that "domestic life was that which alone could make her really and permanently happy." Nota bene, reader.

But - and for modern parents, it's quite a big but - there are servants at Oakly Park. There are tutors, music teachers, anonymous maids and butlers who appear at the touch of a bell. Lady Percival is able to go out leaving some or all of her children at any time, and regards it as an important part of her duties as wife and mother to maintain an up-to-date knowledge of art, literature and enough science to keep up with her husband's research. Again, work of some kind - in this case, the intellectual labour of reading and writing - is the precondition of the good mother.

And so, in fact, it continues through the nineteenth century. George Eliot's heroines are childless, only partly because the drama of the Victorian novel ends at marriage, but her models of female happiness are working mothers. Mrs Poyser, the farmer's wife in Adam Bede, runs a happy and productive household. When we first meet her, it is the middle of the afternoon and Mrs Poyser is managing her staff, instructing the maids in spinning and time-management while she checks on the butter-making and finishes the ironing. She's also talking to her daughter Totty, one of few toddlers in English fiction, telling her not go into the muddy barn to watch the leather-workers but instead to go see her cousin in the dairy. We follow Totty for a foreshadowing of her cousin Hetty's fate; Hetty is so busy flirting with the lord of the manor that she ignores both the butter-making and the three-year-old. Hetty never learns to work, and never takes responsibility for her actions; she leaves her own illegitimate infant to die in the woods. Good women, across the nineteenth century, are mothers who work.

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Night Waking by Sarah Moss is published by Granta.
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Thursday, 24 February, 2011