"This Affecting Subject": An "Interested" Reading of Childbearing in Two Novels by Samuel Richardson

Abstract

"This Affecting Subject": An "Interested" Reading of Childbearing in Two Novels by Samuel RichardsonLois a. Chaber The manner in which birth is conducted in any given culture serves as an index of social values and reflects community beliefs about women, men, bodies, and babies.1 Joan Raphael-Leff Samuel Richardson's extraordinary preoccupation wim die female experience of birth has been demonstrated by Robert A. Erickson in his study of the "Mother Midnight" figure. Whereas Erickson has examined the symbolic deployment of birth in Clarissa and Pamela, I will explore the ambivalent depiction of literal childbearing in Pamela 2 (1741) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54). These two novels, in their mutual focus on "unconventional post-nuptial narrative space," include multiple instances of pregnancy, parturition, and lactation. Pamela's matronly adventures consist largely of breeding seven children; in Grandison, the marriages, pregnancies, and "crying[s]-out" of Sir Charles's two sisters , Lady L. and Charlotte, constitute important subplots, and me novel ends with the troubled pregnancy of Harriet, the woman who has resolved Sir Charles's long crisis of "divided or double Love" (3:76). These gynaecological events are seen from medical, social, psychological 1 Joan Raphael-Leff, Psychological Processes of Child-Bearing (London and New York: Chapman and Hall, 1991), p. 258. This essay is a revision and an expansion of a paper originally delivered at the Eighth International Congress of the Enlightenment, 25 July 1991, University of Bristol; for advice in the revision I am indebted to Adrian Wilson, Robert A. Erickson, and Isobel Grundy. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 2, January 1996 194 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION and theological perspectives, but ultimately resolve into the political— expressing "relations of power and authority." It is my hope that tìiis focus on childbearing will further illuminate Richardson's beliefs about "women, men, bodies and babies" mat have been the subject of ongoing feminist debate.2 Richardson's status (in the main) as a "Women's Liberator" (Ellen Moers) and "a radical feminist" (Kamerine Rogers) in me criticism of me 1970s and 1980s has led even me recent biographer of Fielding to concede that "feminist critics revere Richardson as the androgynous champion of their cause," but Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor rightly declare that "Richardson's role as a 'champion and protector' ... of women is now coming into question." In accord with mis questioning, I posit an "ideological formation" in which Richardson's representations of childbearing veer between a backward-looking ideology of patriarchal authoritarianism and a forward-looking one of sentimental domesticity which has equally sinister and constrictive implications for women. This "formation," with its "contradictory aspects," does indeed make available "an oppositional space" for a subversive, proto-feminist discourse on maternity, which is, however, ultimately checked by the ideologies of narrative event.3 2 Robert A. Erickson, "Pamela's Book of Fate," and "Clarissa and "The Womb of Fate'," in Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne) (New York: AMS Press, 1986), pp. 71-104, 105-94; the term "unconventional postnuptial " is from John Allen Stevenson, '"A Geometry of His Own': Richardson and the Marriage Ending," Studies in English Literature 26 (1986), 478; "crying[s]-out": Samuel Richardson, The History ofSir Charles Grandison, 3 vols, ed. Jocelyn Harris (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 3:202. References are to this edition. "Power" is defined thus by Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images ofGender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 50. 3 See Moers, "Women's Liberator," review of T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography, New York Review ofBooks, 10 Feb. 1972, p. 27 and Rogers, "Sensitive Feminism vs Conventional Sympathy: Richardson and Fielding on Women," Novel 9 (1976), 257; Martin C. Battestin, review of Angela J. Smallwood, Fielding and the Woman Question, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 (1990), 264; for a summary of the role feminist criticism of an earlier period played in the Richardsonian revival, and a list of its major proponents, see Siobhán Kilfeather, "The Rise of Richardson Criticism," in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor...

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