Why Novels Make Bad MothersAuthor(s): Jessamyn JacksonSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter, 1994), pp. 161-174Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345819Accessed: 24/03/2009 13:45

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Why Novels Make Bad Mothers

JESSAMYN JACKSON

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, various influential writers were engaged in the project of defining "the novel" as a literary form and establishing a canon for the genre. In the process of doing so, they defined the novel as "masculine" writing-a definition by no means obvious from a survey of the most prominent novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Burney, Radcliffe, and Edgeworth were then widely acknowledged as the authoritative practitioners of the form, commanding respect from the critical establishment as well as inspiring schools of imitators. The status of women novelists, however, altered quite abruptly in the 1810s.

The early novel criticism of that powerful literary arbiter, The Edinburgh Review, reflects (and helped to effect) that change of "climate ... for women writers" (Johnson xv). From its inception in 1802, the quarterly reviewed very few novels as part of its effort to set a tone superior to that of other reviews. But all the fiction the Edinburgh did review until 1814 was written by women- among them, Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, Hannah More, and, most notably, Maria Edgeworth. The Edinburgh singles her out for high praise, promoting her novels' didactic authority. A review of Waverly in the November 1814 issue marks the beginning of Scott's rise to dominance. The critical turning point, however, is an article in the next issue listed in the table of contents as a review of Burney's The Wanderer. But the page header throughout the article, which gives The Wanderer short shrift, is "Standard Novels and Romances." This essay on the genre defines the canon as male, naming Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne the great British artists of the form. The writer downplays the contributions of such female authors as Radcliffe and Burney; indeed, one of Burney's weaknesses as a novelist is that she writes as "a very woman" (336). Even Edgeworth, the former favorite, is relegated to the insignificance of the woman writer. From this point on, the Edinburgh treats her work less respectfully, and it is Scott and Maturin who dominate the quarterly's fiction reviews into the 1820s.

This essay gives a reading of an almost-forgotten work that supplies special insight into the cultural logic of the redefinition of the novel as a preserve of masculine authority at a crucial point in the formation of the early novel canon. Eaton Stannard Barrett's The Heroine, first published in 1813, is an energetic burlesque of the sentimental and gothic novels so popular-and so strongly associated with women writers and readers-in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book's protagonist, Cherry Wilkinson, dissatisfied with the comfortable routine of her life as the daughter of a solid country squire, rechristens herself Cherubina de Willoughby and sets out for the adventures of a heroine. A resourceful young woman, she generally finds-or fabricates-what she is looking for. In the book's central episode, however, she meets with a shocking disappointment. Thrilled by a mysterious note informing

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her, "YOUR MOTHER LIVES!" (206), Cherry hurries to meet her-only to be revolted by a red-faced, corpulent, and coarse creature. Later, Cherry reads what she thinks is the history of her purported mother, "II Castello di Grimgothico, or Memoirs of Lady Hysterica Belamour. A Novel," a pointed parody of Radcliffe.' Although the "plot, sentiment, diction, and pictures of nature, differ little from what we find in other novels" (206), Cherry dislikes the "Memoirs" because she detests the person whose story they supposedly tell.

What is this grotesque mother figure doing at the heart of Barrett's burlesque? Why seek to discredit novels by association with this bizarre character? Focusing on The Heroine's treatment of issues of female authority, maternal and literary, I will argue that an increasing investment in maternal authority contributed significantly to a reaction against women's authority to write-not because writing threatened to interfere with the performance of maternal duties (though that was held against female authorship, too), but because reconceptions of maternal authority ultimately had highly disturbing implications for the role of female literary authority in a patriarchal society.

Motherhood took on increasing importance as a responsibility and a source of authority for women through the organization of British life into supposedly separate spheres, an organization commonly associated with the Victorian period, but whose doctrines and practices were developed earlier in the eighteenth century. The promulgation of separate spheres served the rise of capitalism and the middle class, reorganizing practices of production and, through the privatization of women's roles, providing a means for a shared identity that bound together groups whose men's activities in the public male sphere could vary greatly. Women were responsible for producing in the home a domesticity recognizable across such differences-and for producing the next generation to reproduce this domesticity.2 In her study of changing childbirth practices among the British aristocracy from 1760 to 1860, Judith Schneid Lewis describes the influence of the new ideology on conceptions of motherhood. "Under the traditional patriarchal regime," she writes, "the responsibilities of [aristocratic] women toward their children-like their rights-scarcely existed beyond the cutting of the umbilical cord." Over the century, however, "the primary function of motherhood shifted from ... the biological function of childbearing to ... the nurturant function of childrearing" (62, 58). This new motherhood entails not just the reproduction of babies, but the production of properly acculturated members of society. William Buchan, a popular advice writer, asserts:

The more I reflect on the situation of a mother, the more I am struck with the extent of her powers, and the inestimable value of her services. In the language of love, women are called angels; but this is a weak and silly compliment; they

1 Radcliffe is not "II Castello"'s only target; its author's name, AnnaMaria Marianne Matilda Pottingen, evokes silly imitators of the German school of horror. But the "novel" itself is a pastiche of Radcliffean characters and plots. For unknown

reasons, Barrett cut "11 Castello" from The Heroine's third edition.

2 My sense of these developments has been shaped by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes. In her discussion of the gentry culture of Austen's time, Deborah Kaplan also notes the importance of the mother's role of

"transmit[ting] the cultural identity of the gentry" 30.

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approach nearer to our idea of the Deity: they not only create, but sustain their creation, and hold its future destiny in their hands: every man is what his mother has made him.... (507)

To be sure, Buchan's rhetoric is just as adulatory as the "language of love"- and just as manipulative in its idealization of a mother's duties. Yet his attribution of God-like powers to mothers cannot be discounted as mere flattery. A conception of women as "manifestly intended to be mothers and formers of a rational and immortal offspring" necessitates ascribing to them "emotional, intellectual, and moral talents that they were traditionally thought to lack" (Fordyce 1:208, Lewis 62). Assigning mothers such great responsibility also requires investing them with authority over their children. "[N]othing," declares Jane West, "can be so detrimental to domestic good government as maternal insignificance" (3:237).

As the status of motherhood rose, female authorship became increasingly respectable, a trend marked by a rise in the number of women authors. Cheryl Turner's analysis of women's output of fiction between 1696 and 1796 shows a gradual increase over the second half of the century "culminating in a dramatic, unparalleled surge in the 1780s which incorporated not only an increase in the number of authors but also, proportionally, a rise in their rate of production."3 The reconceptualization of women's emotional and mental capacities necessitated by the redefinition of motherhood contributed to women's authority as writers in certain genres, especially didactic writing and the novel.4 The novel in particular became an arena of female authority. The genre was closely associated with women, whose predominance among its readers and writers was widely remarked.5 Hostile commentators accused novels of exerting a bad influence over readers, but a number of women writers after Bumey won recognition for the novel as a vehicle of legitimate female authority.

These two kinds of female authority were interconnected not just by conceptions of female character that influenced the development of both but also by an analogy with profound implications for both terms. John Locke's seminal representation of the newborn's mind as "white Paper, void of all Characters" (104), recurs frequently in the writings of preceptors anxious to impress on mothers the critical importance of their performance. Hugh Smith, for example, explaining why it "behoves every mother to be watchful of her own conduct, and perfectly satisfied of the dispositions of such servants as she entrusts with the care of her children," writes:

The human mind, in its infant opening, has justly been compared to a blank sheet of paper, susceptible of every impression: whence it may be supposed, children receive their prejudices and inclinations from the dispositions of those

3 Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992), 39.

For discussions of this development, see Spencer, 11-22, 75-103; Turner, 31-59.

Turner cautions that "the contemporary preoccupation with female readers should not be interpreted literally as describing a nunmerical dominance. Rather, it should be seen as an expression of an apprehensive and at times openly hostile reaction to substantial changes in female behavior," 136-37.

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persons to whose care they are entrusted, in like manner as these letters convey the sentiments of the author. (147, 145)

Significantly, Smith draws his analogy between motherhood and authorship through a printed book. Authorship was traditionally a prerogative of male writers, the masculine nature of the writer's authority exemplified by that old pen-penis pun. But in the proliferation of printing that paves the way for the rise of the novel and female authorship, the press that imprints characters on the page, as a mother does on her children, displaces the phallic pen as the instrument of textual transmission.

If a mother authors her child, an author mothers her book. "I have got my own darling child from London," Austen writes to her sister of the newly published Pride and Prejudice (297). While Austen's metaphor bespeaks her pride in her creation, other writers use this figure of speech to portray female novel authorship as monstrous. In her 1831 preface's uneasy account of how a girl came to write Frankenstein, Mary Shelley refers to the novel as her "hideous progeny" (xii). Of course, the novel's central character is a monster, but the term also reflects Shelley's anxiety over female authorship as a monstrous labor. What makes the mothering of female authorship seem so monstrous, I will argue, is that writers not only mother books, they mother other people through those books. Those characters on the page compose the characters of the novel, who come to life in the reader's imagination, impressing themselves in her mind, and forming her character in turn. Envisioned thus, the reproductive process of novels begs the question of whose daughters their readers are. The Heroine's answer: not their fathers'.

The Heroine opens by establishing a problematic connection between the "maternal" and novels. Writing to her governess Biddy Grimes, who has just been dismissed for kissing the butler, Cherry assures her, "I am well persuaded that the kiss was maternal, not amorous, and that the interesting Butler, Simon Snaggs, is your son." Cherry then outlines a romance, including a secret marriage, a baby-stealing gypsy, and an "improbable concurrence of events" by which the "[h]appy, happy mother" finally recognizes her long-lost son (29). Cherry's father, on the other hand, tells a story of low heterosexual romance, of a "pair of wrinkled sweethearts" caught at a lusty "kissing match" in the pantry (32). Cherry's nostalgic description of her governess at breakfast with "a novel in one hand, a cup in the other, and tears springing from your eyes, at the tale too tender, or the tea too hot" (29) has already cued the reader to recognize the father's story as the right one, and Cherry's as the product of her nurture on her governess's inflammatory reading material.

Cherry's displacement of a heterosexual romance by a mother-child one is proleptic of her own plot as a heroine. After sacking the governess and burning all the novels in the house (only one volume of Udolpho escapes the conflagration), Cherry's father tries to redirect her to paternally authorized romance. Announcing a visit from his ward, Robert Stuart, he exults, "if I have deprived you of an old woman, I have got you a young man. Large estates, you know;-handsome, fashionable;-come, pluck up a heart, my girl; ay, egad, and steal one too" (39). At Biddy Grimes's instigation, however, Cherry rejects

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both Wilkinson as her father and the suitor he has chosen for her. Declaring herself an "illustrious heiress ... snatched from her parents in infancy;- snatched by thee [Wilkinson], vile agent of diabolical conspiracy!" (35), she sets out to enact the child's role in the romance she had sketched for her governess. Cherry expects to marry in the end, of course, but she is shocked by a suitor's lack of judgment "in urging [her] to matrimony before [she] had undergone adventures for four volumes" (93); she cannot plot her novel without postponing this conclusion.

For all that Barrett's (anti)novel purports to represent the cure of Cherry's aspiration to star in her own novel, the book concedes to her many elements of the heroine's plot. Cherry herself points out this irony: "There, Stuart ... after all your pains to prevent me from imitating romances, see how you have made me terminate my adventures, like every romance-in a marriage" (355). Of course, she has had to learn that she was not in control of her plot, that other characters, particularly the libertine Betterton and the actor Grundy, only played along with her plotting in order to pursue their own dark designs. And she cannot find her own hero, but must eventually accept the one assigned her in the first place. Nevertheless, Cherry (like the heroine of an earlier anti- romance, The Female Quixote) does get her villains and her hero who comes to the rescue. These romance plot conventions left intact reflect those of "common life"; in both worlds, predatory scoundrels serve to reinforce a girl's need to submit herself to a man who can protect her from them. The Heroine, then, endorses the elements of Cherry's plot that coincide with the one her father proposed in the first place-but not those of the mother-child romance she had envisioned.

Beginning with her discovery of a portrait she assumes to be her mother's, Cherry's quest to establish her identity as a heroine revolves around questions of maternity. She cannot dispense entirely with fathers; the document (a fragment of a lease of lives) that she takes as evidence of Wilkinson's villainy provides her with a new paternal candidate, Theodore de Willoughby. Yet while Cherry must lay claim to a father in order to lay claim to his estates, Theodore de Willoughby plays only a marginal role in her plot. He never appears, like Cherry's supposed mother, as a character in her story. "The Memoirs of Lady Hysterica Belamour" sideline him further, reducing his story to two sentences and portraying him as a most ineffectual hero. (He cannot even manage to rescue Lady Hysterica from a snowdrift.) Hysterica-and her mother-take central stage in this "Memoir," which represents heroines' descent as a matrilineal matter.

The matrifocality of the construction of Cherubina de Willoughby's identity, The Heroine's structure suggests, is just as crucial a problem as Cherry's addiction to novels. I am not arguing that Barrett seeks to criticize the role of "real-life" mothers; one could argue that Cherry's main problem is that she is "[m]otherless" (29). Had her mother not died, presumably, Cherry would not have been entrusted to the care of the unsuitable creature she calls her "more than mother" (29). (It is also possible, however, to infer from the absence of the mother here, as in so many other novels, that the only good mother is a dead

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one.) The Heroine assaults novelistic constructions of the mother's meaning and what the book's opening scene sets up as novels' usurpation of the maternal role.

More specifically, The Heroine attacks Radcliffe's representation of mother- daughter relations. Installed in the home of Lady Gwyn, current holder of the estates Cherry believes belong to her, she sets out to "discover some place of retreat, or some ragged record of [her] birth" (176). Almost immediately she finds what she seeks:

I stopped before one of our family pictures. It represented a lady, pale, pensive and interesting; with flaxen hair and azure eyes, like my own. Was that not enough?

"Gentle image of my departed mother!" ejaculated I, kneeling before it, "may thy sainted original repose in peace!" (176)

Here is a shorthand sketch of those portraits of melancholy ladies that appear so frequently with maternal associations in Radcliffe's novels. Of course, Radcliffe is not the only novelist to use portraits as evidence of a heroine's lineage, but Cherry's allusions to other Radcliffe characters immediately before and after this incident establish that her Radcliffe reading conditions her notions concerning this picture. Two of Radcliffe's heroines, Adeline of The Romance of the Forest and Ellena of The Italian, provide particularly a propos models for Cherry's emulation; like her, they are heroines whose entitlement to the position by high birth remains to be authenticated over the course of their adventures. In both cases, the proof of high ancestry comes through the mother. The discovery of Adeline's birth is "effected by means of a seal, bearing the arms of her mother's family" (344) and confirmed by her close resemblance to a portrait of her deceased mother. In The Italian, Olivia herself resolves the mystery of Ellena's parentage when she recognizes and claims her daughter. Daughters' identification through-and with-their mothers bears much thematic significance in Radcliffe's novels. Like their daughters, mothers are figures of suffering female virtue oppressed by men who abuse the power patriarchy invests in them (and often, it must be added, by the women who encourage those men to do so). As these mothers are reconnected with their daughters by various means, however, their recovered histories play a crucial role in circumventing that oppression, enabling their daughters to assume their rightful high positions.6

Barrett's treatment of Radcliffe's mothers contrasts sharply with that of her better-known parodist, Austen. While Mrs. Tilney's sufferings do not take the literally gothic form in which Catherine Morland imagines them, they are nonetheless real, and they play an important role (along with Catherine's own experience of General Tilney's temper) in Northanger Abbey's lesson about the ways in which Radcliffe's gothic does indeed figure facts of eighteenth-century

6 I should note that The Mysteries of Udolpho

is an important exception in this respect. It is crucial that Emily not be the daughter of the woman whose portraits she so closely resembles, the melancholy Marchioness who was poisoned by her husband. Udolpho explores negative aspects of identifying daughters with passively virtuous-and victimized-mothers. Not coincidentally, in Radcliffe's next and last novel, The Italian, the heroine's mother takes an active part in her daughter's plot. Susan C. Greenfield, "Veiled Desire: Mother-Daughter Love and Sexual Imagery in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian,"makes a point similar to mine about the incompatibility of mother-daughter and heterosexual romances.

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life. Barrett, on the other hand, deploys all the trappings of Radcliffean mother-daughter relations only to deprive them of the significance with which Radcliffe's novels invest them. In "II Castello di Grimgothico," Hysterica discovers a fragment penned by her mother, Fascinante Peggina Belamour, recounting the persecutions of Count Stiletto, who abducted her from her husband, sent away her infant daughter, and then poisoned her. This maternal revelation, "elucidat[ing], beyond dispute, the mysteries which had hitherto hung over [Hysterica's] birth" (214), is sandwiched unceremoniously between the events of the heroine's discovery of her lover, Theodore de Willoughby, imprisoned downstairs. Displaced from the end, the revelation does not serve to resolve the plot, and Fascinante's sufferings appear merely irrelevant in this parody, which stops to dwell on nothing.

However much "The Memoirs of Lady Hysterica Belamour" distorts its sources, they are still recognizable, but the "mother" Cherry meets in the "dismal cell" to which Lady Gwyn's men conduct her exceeds parody. Expecting an emaciated, refined, and long-suffering mother like the one Julia finds in A Sicilian Romance, Cherry is confronted with "a woman suffering under a corpulency unparalleled in the memoirs of human monsters" (186). Her dress is grotesque, her language is vulgar, she keeps an "enormous spotted toad" in her bosom, and she suffers from nothing except the dulness of her diet. Rather than narrating a history to prove Cherry's identity as a heroine, she recounts her dream of "the Genius of dinner" with "a crown of golden fishes" and a "flight of little tartlets flutter[ing] about him" (187). After this meeting, Cherry has had enough of this mother-but that redoubtable character is not through with her. At the height of Cherry's triumph at Lady Gwyn's ball, the creature appears to mortify her. She eats and drinks like a pig, whirls a little man around in an anarchic waltz, and keels over in a drunken swoon. A final humiliation still awaits Cherry: the revelation that her "mother" was no woman at all, but Lady Gwyn's nephew dressed up to entertain the company at Cherry's expense.

Pushed beyond endurance by her supposed mother's disgraceful conduct at the ball, Cherry announces to the assembled public:

I hate her, I dread her; and I now declare unequivocally that I do not believe this woman my mother at all.... I thus publicly renounce her, disown her, and wash my hands of her, now, now, and for ever, and for ever! (203)

Cherry's rejection of this "mother," however, does not constitute a renunciation of the authority of the texts that formed the expectations "this woman" explodes. Indeed, another novel, The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors, provides the precedent for Cherry's conclusion that this horror cannot be her real mother. Cherry adheres to the notion that her mother is the woman in the portrait. Leaving Lady Gwyn's house, she takes a diamond-encrusted miniature of this woman, which she decides belongs rightfully to her as one of the "memorials of [her] birth" (225). But when Cherry produces this miniature at a later moment of crisis, it fails to have the effect she expects. Rather than recognizing it as confirmation of her high birth, the householders who have apprehended her confiscate it as evidence that she is a common thief.

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Ironically, the miniature identifies her correctly; she has indeed stolen it. Plot conventions here turn against Cherry's would-be plot, obstructing her quest for a place in a matriliny of heroines.

Similarly, the text seems to plot against Cherry's rejection of a mother who in person (if not on the page) is no credit to a daughter. While Cherry seeks desperately to establish that she has absolutely nothing in common with this "living mountain of human horror" (89), parallel details suggest an identification between the two. Both Cherry and Hysterica, for example, lose their surrogate mothers at fifteen (29, Cherry's narrative, 210, Hysterica's "Memoirs"). Both dream about food. Before setting out to be a heroine, Cherry happens to peruse "the story which Ludovico read, of a spectre that beckons a Baron from his castle, and leading him into a forest, points out its own corpse, and bids him bury it."7 Hoping for a dream "portentous of [her] future fate" (38), she dreams the following:

Methought a delicious odour of viands attracted me into the kitchen, where I found an iron pot upon the fire. As I looked at it, the lid began to rise, and I beheld a half-boiled turkey hop forth. It beckoned me with its claw. I followed. It led me into the yard, and pointed out its own head and feathers, which were lying there. (38)

This "vulgar ... disgusting vision" (38) comes back to haunt Cherry in the form of her "mother's" food fantasies and consumption: in prison, she dwells on her "favorite pullets" and at Lady Gwyn's ball, she demolishes a "cold turkey" (187, 202). Clearly, one function of both dream and "mother" is simply to amuse the reader by disconcerting Cherry, but the two also work together at a deeper symbolic level as a critique of her desire to be a heroine. Despite Cherry's denial of this "mother," the reappearance of her own dream material in these scenes casts this figure of gluttony as a parodic embodiment, rather than a negation, of Cherry's desire. Her excessive appetite mirrors Cherry's own exorbitant thirst for the admiration and adventures due to a heroine.

Barrett, unlike more solemn moralists, does not dwell darkly on the dire consequences of Cherry's indulgence of this desire. As her own narrator, she blithely laughs off the effects of her adventures on herself and others. Indeed, the lively text invites readers to take pleasure in the ingenuity and extravagance of her pursuit of heroinehood; no editor intervenes to deplore her blowing up one house and sacking another. There is, however, one major exception to Cherry's general disregard for the consequences of her actions. When her father's appearance at her lodgings in London jeopardizes the progress of her romance with "Montmorenci" (the hero Cherry first selects, played by Grundy), she goes along with Grundy's plan to incarcerate him in a madhouse. For once she is affected, breaking down in tears at her father's pleas as Grundy tears her away. A later encounter with an old man calling for his daughter as he expires causes an uncharacteristic spasm of remorse. Cherry has gone beyond the bounds of the permissibly funny or inconsequential, plotting

7 This is from the one volume surviving the book burning ordered by Cherrys father. See 552-57.

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against the father whose paternity she has wrongly denied, betraying him to the very man who would usurp his authority and property. She had better feel guilty if she is to be a recuperable character and an example to readers.

Similarly, the strength of the effect Cherry's purported mother has on her is essential to the logic of The Heroine's plot, its design on female readers. The near-hysteria of Cherry's uncontrolledly repetitive renunciation of this "mother" does not, as I have noted, apparently represent progress toward the goal of curing her of the notion that she is a novel heroine. Yet, contrary to Cherry's conviction that she will find a mother true to novel type, this grotesque figure is the only candidate provided her. Her visceral revulsion toward this "living mountain of human horror" marks the crucial turning point of what I will call The Heroine's metaplot, the redirecting of Cherry from maternal to paternal affiliation. Her reunion with her father in the madhouse resolves this plot. In the reverse of the dungeon encounter in which Cherry tried to evade a crushing embrace in "maternal arms" (186), she is overwhelmed by her father's refusal at first to acknowledge her. When she pleads, "Oh, my sweet, my beloved father, look up, look up, and see with what joy your daughter can embrace you!" (347), he relents, and Cherry is restored to her father's arms.

I have presented this metaplot and the "main" plot of curing Cherry's novel- formed notions as separate elements of The Heroine's design on its readers. Through much of the book these plots do progress separately. They operate at different levels, one at a symbolic level and one at an explicitly didactic level. Each advances at a different pace; movement on Cherry's cure does not even begin until near the end when Stuart takes her in hand. The two plots come together, however, at Cherry's reunion with her father. This meeting triggers the violent fever that initiates the standard treatment of the delusions fostered by novels and romances (cf. The Female Quixote and Sense and Sensibility). Resolution of the plot of parental affiliation, this coincidence suggests, is necessary to the progress of the plot of curing Cherry's allegiance to novels.

One particular phrase will serve as a useful point of departure for discussion of why displacement of maternal authority figures in Barrett's book as an essential step in the displacement of novels from a position of control over the heroine. Feeling herself "bound to do the duties of a daughter," Cherry kneels at the feet of her "mother" and exclaims, "Ever respected, ever venerable author of my being, I beg thy maternal blessing!" (187). In the phrase "author of my being," issues of maternal and literary authority converge, as it plays on different meanings of "author," each of which is problematic in the context of this work. As a description of a parent, the phrase invests that parent with the God-like power to create another self in his own image. (Indeed, this phrase often refers to God himself.) I use the masculine possessive pronoun advisedly; the phrase commonly refers to the father.8 Cherry, however, echoing The Recess

8 The best-known example is the address to her father with which Burney prefaced Evelina.

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(a novel even more concerned with the significance of mother-daughter connections than Radcliffe's), addresses this phrase to her supposed mother.9

Cherry's redirection of the epithet has some scientific justification. There were two main competing theories of conception in the eighteenth century; animalculists held that the sperm contained within itself the preformed human being, and their opponents held that the ovum did. According to Randolph Trumbach, the ovist theory prevailed during the second half of the century (167). Angus McLaren warns against a facile feminist reading of this trend, noting that ovist theorists tend to emphasize women's passivity in conception (25). Nevertheless, ovist theories reinforce the notion of women's tremendous control over the process of reproducing human beings; not only does the mother make the crucial first impressions on a child's mind, she provides the child's human identity in the first place. Cherry's rejection of her father's paternity in favor of a maternal "author of [her] being," then, parallels the movement of medical and educational theory over the century toward a diminishment of the role ascribed to the father in the authoring of children.

In making Cherry's "mother" a character she meets as well as a character in a book, Barrett literalizes a commonplace hostile figuration of books, those inanimate objects, as having a dangerous life of their own. An early conduct book warns:

they [romances] often leave ill impressions behind them. Those amorous passions, which 'tis their design to paint to the utmost Life, are apt to insinuate themselves into their unwary readers, and by an unhappy inversion, a Copy shall produce an Original. (159)

The phrase, "a Copy shall produce an Original," refers to the reader's being on the scene of "Life," which the book merely "paints," but the process of reading imagined here reverses what these terms suggest is the proper relation between reader and book. By an "unhappy inversion," the "Copy," or the book, comes to occupy the position of the "Original." The reader, or the "Original," from the impressions made on her, becomes merely a copy-and goes on to copy the behavior of the character represented in the book.

This anxiety about the impressions a book makes, paralleling concern about the impressions a mother makes, suggests the analogy between novel-writing and mothering that Hannah More makes explicit at the end of the century:

S9 ophia Lee's fascinating The Recess: or, A Tale of Other Times purports to be the rnemoirs of two daughters of Mary Queen of Scots. The offspring of Mary's clandestine marriage to the Duke of Norfolk, Matilda and Ellinor are born and raised in secret. The sisters' father has almost no importance to their story. It is their mother whose royal blood defines both the personal and political significance of their identity. Lee's novel is an influential pre-text of Radcliffe's treatment of mother- daughter relations.

The usage Cherry echoes occurs when Matilda finally decides to publish the secret of her birth. Meeting with King James to claim her kinship with him, she exclaims, "Oh, sainted Mary! dear author of my being, look down from heaven, and touch the heart of your son, in favor of the desolate sister who now stands before him" (3:282). It is not clear whether Barrett deliberately draws on The Recess here. He knew the novel; the notes he appended to The Heroine's third edition cite an earlier borrowing from it. That he does not note this echo may mean that it is not conscious, or it may be that his citations, which generally involve questions of style, do not appear at moments of deeper engagement with the texts he

parodies.

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Who are those ever-multiplying authors, that with unparalleled fecundity are overstocking the world with their quick-succeeding progeny? They are novel writers; the easiness of whose productions is at once the cause of their own fruitfulness, and of the almost infinitely numerous race of imitators to whom they give birth.... The glutted imagination [of the novel reading Miss] soon overflows with the redundance of cheap sentiment and plentiful incident, and by a sort of arithmetical proportion, is enabled by the perusal of any three novels to produce a fourth.... (2:169-70)

The analogous relationship between mothering and female authorship has potentially disturbing implications for both. Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray, or, The Mother and Daughter (1804) explores the dangers of unchecked maternal authority. Mrs. Mowbray is a woman of literary ambitions. Disdaining, however, to disgrace her family "by turning professed author" (2), she redirects her energies to the education of the daughter unwisely left in her sole control by her deceased husband. From Mrs. Mowbray, Adeline inherits radical principles, principles on which the mother is too timid to act, but which have ruinous effects on the life of the daughter who puts them into practice. Ultimately, however, this analogy has more problematic implications for female authorship than it does for mothering. Unlike Mrs. Mowbray, after all, most mothers do not operate independently. The reproduction of children is organized into individual homes, over each of which some paternal figure generally presides. While the father does not oversee the day-to-day process of the children's upbringing, he holds legal and economic control over both mother and children. The reproduction of authors described by More, on the other hand, is a far more amorphous process, crossing the boundaries between public and private, and between the separate households that contain mothers. Authors' works, for sale at the book sellers, for loan at the circulating libraries, move among many homes. And those readers who will themselves become authors consume many books by different authors. Various institutions do exert some control over the reproduction of female novelists; reviewers patrol their works, and fathers can forbid their perusal-or even burn them, as Cherry's father does. But there are always more where they came from. The horror of the monstrous maternity that female authorship constitutes in More's account is not just that its "fecundity" is out of control, but also that it is beyond patriarchal control: novels and female writers engage in a mutual mothering, a process of reproduction from which fathers are eliminated. In Cherry's consignment of her father to a madhouse, Barrett plays out the implications of More's representation of female authorship, dramatizing the disruption of patriarchal authority threatened by a line of exclusively female reproduction.

While increasing attention to the importance of maternal authority, with the reconceptualization of the female character it involved, contributes at first to the rise of women's authority to write, it eventually contributes to a reaction against that authority. The Lockean conception of the individual's character as not predetermined but subject to formation through the impressions made on it invests the mother with tremendous influence, as well as the author, whose texts can impress themselves on the reader's character. The analogies drawn

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between mothering and authorship raise the stakes of women writers' authority by underlining their influence over readers. To take the analogies' implications to their logical conclusion is to ascribe to female authors the power to appropriate readers to their own reproductive line, seducing them from reproduction of the patriarchal order.

The Heroine suggests that anxieties about female authorship as a form of mothering that displaces fathers play an important role in the reaction against women's authority as writers during the second decade of the nineteenth century, particularly their authority as writers in that most problematic genre, the novel. While critics such as the Edinburgh's minimize the authority of various mothers of the novel, Barrett takes aim at their would-be daughters. Unlike the protagonists of other contemporary satires on the novel, Cherry sees herself literally as a heroine. She does not just model her behavior on that of the heroines she has read about; she understands the end of her own adventures to be the generation of material for the text of which she will be the heroine. As she tells her governess, the "grand criterion" of her conduct is, "how will it read?" (45). Cherry plans her story for publication as yet another authority for the behavior of succeeding generations of heroines. But The Heroine effectively cancels Cherry's authorial ambitions. At marriage, her writing stops, and what is published is not her novel, but Barrett's. Like Lady Gwyn's nephew, cross- dressed to confound Cherry's notion of the maternal author of her being, Barrett narrates The Heroine through a female voice only to break readers of their identification with the heroine and their aspirations to participate in a dangerous literary matriarchy.

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