Deviant Inheritances: Anxieties about Maternal Transmission in Nineteenth-century Fiction
Open Access
- Author:
- Messuri, Kristin Marie
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 16, 2014
- Committee Members:
- Robert Lougy, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Nicholas A Joukovsky, Committee Member
Emily Harrington, Committee Member
Susan Merrill Squier, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Victorian
nineteenth century
novel
fiction
medical humanities
maternity
inheritance
transmission - Abstract:
- This dissertation explores how the burgeoning nineteenth-century biomedical discourses surrounding mother-child transmission become sites of anxiety for Victorian fiction writers. Traditionally, the Victorians are viewed as celebrating the “cult of motherhood,” in which women’s highest callings are giving birth and exerting moral influences on their children. However, my examination of nineteenth-century medical and fictional texts reveals profound anxieties about the possibility that maternal inheritance and influence could be pathological and depraved instead of healthful and enlightening. For the Victorians, biological inheritance signified not only the passage of traits from one generation to the next, but also the transmission of physical, moral, and affective qualities through pregnancy and birth, breastfeeding, and interpersonal contact. This dissertation argues that the nineteenth-century novel is particularly concerned with deviant mothers, those who problematize assumptions about the sanctity of motherhood because of their associations with illicit sexuality, prostitution, violence, crime, or disease. Victorian novelists were deeply interested in the threatening possibility that transgression, in both its literal manifestations (disease, madness, deformity) and figurative manifestation (morality), could be transferred interpersonally—primarily between mother and child, but also potentially between the mother and the community and, moreover, the entire human species. This project examines how these anxieties are manifested and mobilized in fictional texts written by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Sarah Grand.