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(2) 28. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. “formula” (a term borrowed from modern industry of infant diet) that enables her exploration into the characters whose reformation centers on the bosom of women. Keywords: breast-feeding, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ennui, Belinda.
(3) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 29. 玷汙的奶水或稀釋的主體： 《憂鬱》與《柏玲達》中的哺育情結 吳雅鳳 國立臺灣大學外國語文學系副教授 摘 要 隨著家庭逐漸成為社會經濟與情感道德的基本單位，有關天生或養育的辯論 激化了母親哺乳運動，啟蒙論述重要的一環—教育—更加集中焦點在女性的胸 部。此論文企圖釐清在愛爾蘭作家愛芝渥斯兩部小說《憂鬱》與《柏玲達》中哺 育造成小孩與母親的複雜情結。這兩部小說均勾勒出主角如何認清並接受自身角 色的曲折過程。兩部小說均創作於法國大革命之後，愛芝渥斯承認中產階級的工 作倫理與母親的社會職責，確是國家健康與穩定的雙重支柱。但女性哺育的主 題允許愛芝渥斯從內部挑戰啟蒙論述。透過此主題，愛芝渥斯與女性主義的先 驅渥斯東克麗芙特展開對話，愛芝渥斯在《憂鬱》中將理性與其逆反成分相互揉 雜，並在《柏玲達》中呈現母性的表演本質。這兩部小說似乎製造出「嬰兒處 方奶」，幫助愛芝渥斯探究書中角色在文化、社會、與私我層面的改革過程中如 何調適自我。 關鍵詞：哺育、愛芝渥斯、渥斯東克麗芙特、憂鬱、柏玲達.
(4) 30. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject: Breast-feeding in Ennui and Belinda Ya-feng Wu 1. Introduction Milk receives its first major discursive highlight in the Enlightenment. J.-J. Rousseau’s Émile (1762) remains one of the seminal treatises on maternal breast-feeding against wet-nursing. Hiring wet nurse, common to well-to-do families well into the mid-eighteenth century, helps to reserve the body and affection of aristocratic mothers to the monopoly of their husbands. However, the potential contamination, physical and mental, from the peasant nurse renders maternal breast-feeding a sacred mission defining the women of bourgeois family, which is seen as the bastion of the modern state. But for the upper-class women, maternal breast-feeding asks them to sacrifice their privileges. As the infant imbibes milk, affection and moral virtues from its mother, the mother feels her freedom and subjectivity infringed upon by its incessant demands. Counter arguments inevitably arise. Isabella Beeton in her best-selling Book of Household Management (1859) compares the suckling baby to a “vampire” and recommends early weaning to cultivate independence of both parties (qtd. in Shuttleworth 42). Maternal breast-feeding continues to stimulate heated debate. Despite his promotion of mother’s milk, Rousseau designs a wet nurse for Émile in order to better supervise the process of nurturing. Émile thus spells out the central paradox in the campaign—the mother’s capability to feed their children is first naturalized as woman’s duty to the state but her propensity to indulge needs to be monitored. The debate between nature and nurture is emblazoned, as it were, on the bosom of woman. This paper aims to gauge the implications of breast-feeding as they are presented in Maria Edgeworth’s novels, on the child and the nation in Ennui and on the mother in Belinda.1 These two novels are chosen for investigation for four-fold connections. Firstly, their titles belie the protagonist of the central story, the Irish wet nurse, Ellinor O’Donoghoe, in Ennui, who with-holds 1. Quotations from these texts are hereafter referred to as E and B respectively, followed by page numbers..
(5) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 31. the secret to Glenthorn’s real identity, and Lady Delacour in Belinda, who withholds milk and affection from her daughter. Secondly, they both focus on the issues of breast-feeding though set in different social, cultural and national contexts, Irish and English respectively. The focus on mother’s breast offers Edgeworth a special leverage point to pry open the Enlightenment discourse. Thirdly, they both feature similar symptoms of melancholy: Lord Glenthorn is reluctant to emerge from ennui which proves to be an illness associated with the lordship that he finds himself wrongly inherited; Lady Delacour hesitates to be cured of her breast cancer which turns out be wrongly diagnosed. Fourthly, the self-reflexive quality of both novels, blending miscellaneous elements and allowing different viewpoints to qualify each other, foregrounds Edgeworth’s investigation of the performative nature of identity. These two novels chart the protagonists’ journey toward reconciliation with their true selves: the Anglo-Irish Lord Glenthorn, after recognizing the Irish nurse as his real mother, turns into the self-made lawyer and truly Irish bred Mr. Christy (O’Donoghoe) Delamere and then regains his title in Ennui and Lady Delacour recovers from her breast wound while coming to terms with her true mission as the heart of the sentimental network in Belinda. Written in the wake of the French Revolution, these two works acknowledge the bourgeois ethics of work and motherhood as twin pillars of national health and security while lamenting the loss of the liberal (if “aristocratic”) subjectivity. In Ennui, Edgeworth neutralizes the contamination of milk/speech/ blood by revealing the wet nurse as the mother and by validating individual transformation; in Belinda, she allows Lady Delacour to retain her subjectivity from complete compromise or “dilution” though ensconced within domestic ideology. This paper seeks to show how Maria Edgeworth negotiates her attitudes toward women’s obligations in a dialogue with Mary Wollstonecraft by refracting the rational dictum via blending contradictory proponents in Ennui and foregrounding self-conscious performativity in Belinda. Through a paired reading of the two novels, we see how Edgeworth deploys maternal issues to pry open the Enlightenment discourse and inquire into the wish-fulfilling quality of her blueprint for modern Ireland. These two novels are read in this anachronistic order with a view to making them yield a conceptual dynamism charging through the national arena to the individual register. Departing from her first novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), which inaugurates the Anglo-Irish novel, these two novels, written after Maria Edgeworth returned from the visits to England, Scotland and France in 1802, show her endeavor to reach a cosmopolitan readership, as Marilyn Butler notes in her introduction to the novel (23). Ennui, the first in.
(6) 32. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. the series of Tales of Fashionable Life (1809-12), chronicles how Lord of Glenthorn rises from his hypochondria, discovers his Irish roots, becomes Mr. Delamere by marriage and prospers on his moral integrity and professional excellence, and eventually regains his title and estate. The series of shifts in fortune and identity hinges on the Irish wet nurse, Ellinor O’Donoghe, who exchanged the sickly heir to the Earl of Glenthorn with her own healthy baby. The changeling incident highlights the historical background of colonial Ireland. The fostering system, implemented in Ireland ever since the twelfth century, to “foster” a coherent society between gentry and peasants, collided with the European wet-nursing practices in the eighteenth century. The result complicated the Anglo-Irish ascendancy in the wake of Irish uprisings in the 1790s. In this context, Ennui explores the “schismatic nature” of modern Irishness, while adopting the framing device of Castle Rackrent, that is, the annals (Butler, Introduction 25; 27). As Edmund Spenser observes in 1596, the milk of the local nurse supports the bloodline of the Anglo-Irish gentry but also provides language and sentiment to them and fundamentally affects their allegiance. Edgeworth’s novel thus provides a contemporary gloss on the English anxiety over Ireland since the Renaissance. At the end of the novel, Lord Glenthorn after having abdicated his title and estate to the rightful heir, his foster brother, Christy O’Donoghe, and having proved himself a competent lawyer, is qualified to marry Lady Cecilia Delamere. She turns out to be the next heiress to the Glenthorn estate, which has been then squandered off by the reinstated Earl and his indolent son. In a sense, the tortuous course of the novel is to prove Glenthorn worthy of being restored the property that he relinquished on the basis of justice and honesty. The poetic justice underscores the utopian ideals which look forward to a future when titles and riches are earned through merits and when the Anglo-Irish patricians would align, if not identify, themselves with their local providers. Risks of contamination are thus averted because the Irish nurse is reinstated as the real mother of the true Lord Glenthorn who regains his title by merit. The progress of Glenthorn at the time of social transition seems a paradigm carried on from Belinda, Maria Edgeworth’s first English society novel, which marks her earliest attempt to move beyond the Irish perimeter. This novel records the reform of Lady Delacour in adopting the bourgeois ideals of domestic virtue with the assistance of Belinda. Her transformation hinges on the breast. Following the “fashion” of maternal breast-feeding, Lady Delacour partly causes the death of her second baby for not being able to produce.
(7) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 33. enough milk. Therefore, she sends her third child to a wet nurse in the country while resuming her social engagements. Her bosom thus bears a double scar: first, the injury suffered in a masked duel; second, the guilt of shirking her maternal duties. The twofold trauma and the secrecy that it entails make her boudoir a “sanctuary,” combining vanity chest with medicine cabinet. As her French name indicates, the root of her problem lies in her heart, leading us to examine the psychological consequences of foiled motherhood on the mother. The focus on breast-feeding allows Edgeworth to challenge the Enlightenment discourse from within by having the mechanism of transformation hinge on Glenthorn’s recognizing the bosom that nursed him as that of his mother’s and on Lady Delacour’s overcoming her guilt at not producing sufficient milk. The maternal act of breast-feeding, the catalyst of change in both novels, is transcended as Lady Delacour assumes her role as the heart of sentimental network. Edgeworth probes into the psyche of the drifting child (in Ennui) and of the withholding mother (in Belinda) in order to investigate the effects of breast-feeding in the social and cultural registers, without emphasizing the breast as a material (physical) symbol of femininity. In Ennui, the focus is placed on the self-discovery of the son, whose reform serves as the linchpin of an idealized modern Ireland. In Belinda, Lady Delacour’s extravagant lifestyle is at once the cause and effect of her breast injury. Her boudoir registers her masochistic intention to purge her guilt by confiding first in her maid and later in Belinda. Her breast injury thus stands for a symptom of her will to power, which needs to be chastened. However, by allowing Lady Delacour to stage-manage the tableau vivant of domestic bliss, Edgeworth seems to privilege feminine individuality and question the terms of reform. Critics of Maria Edgeworth may be divided according to their emphases. Some critics regard her strength chiefly in helping to establish the Irish literature in Big House series (Chandler), and in writings for children (O’Connor). Some critics argue that her political views, though showing sympathy for the Irish, in essence seek to consolidate Anglo-Irish ascendance (Butler, “Edgeworth’s Ireland”). Furthermore, being a woman writer under the tutelage of her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Maria Edgeworth has been criticized for not being forthright on women’s issues. Her novels pay tribute to the eighteenth century conduct manuals and educational tracts which, as Nancy Armstrong argues, see domesticity as a counterpoint to the errors of an aristocratic culture (Armstrong 59-95). Unfortunately, Nancy Armstrong does not assess Maria Edgeworth in a substantial way (McCann 183). Recent scholarship has come to re-examine her works along the line of.
(8) 34. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. a deeper engagement with the Irish tradition and a subtler reflection of women’s condition (Myers, “Shot”; Gallagher; Gallchoir).2 Marilyn Butler judges that “the high degree of artifice” in the second half of Ennui turns it from a “fictionalized travel narrative” into what must be read as an allegory involving all the Irish characters together (Introduction 43). This paper advances on her view by arguing that the Enlightenment scheme of reform in Edgeworth’s novels is frequently refracted by contradictory proponents, such as folk tale, sentimental vignette, Gothic convention, in Ennui and by self-conscious performativity patched up of masquerades and portraits in Belinda. This reflexive quality of her work requires us to examine her style as integral to her message. The blended textuality upsets any complacent reading of her novels as simply revolutionary that sees Ireland reserved for the truly Irish as in Ennui or didactic that sees the aristocratic lady rehabilitated as in Belinda. With this blended textuality, Edgeworth conducts a self-reflexive critique on Enlightenment dictum on identity and femininity. 2. The Campaign of Maternal Suckling The eighteenth century campaign of maternal breast-feeding is grounded in the Enlightenment project. It is the central plank in the discourse of motherhood that has gathered momentum in the second half of eighteenth century.3 The campaign shows its ramifications in the realm of politics, economics, and education, with support from medical professions. William Cadogan, one of the foremost authorities on child nurturing, wrote in An Essay upon Nursing and the Management of Children, from their Birth to Three Years of Age (1748): I would earnestly recommend it to every father to have his child nursed under his own eye, to make use of his own reason and sense in superintending and directing the management of it; . . . I would advise every mother that can . . . to suckle it. It she be a healthy woman, it will confirm her health; if weakly, in most cases it will restore her. (qtd. in Fildes, Wet Nursing 114) 2. 3. For recent approaches to Edgeworth’s works, please see Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske, eds., An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Context (Newark: U of Delaware Press, 2004). Valerie A. Fildes provides us with the most established authority on the history of wet nursing and breast-feeding. Please see Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) and Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1986)..
(9) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 35. Cadogan also clarifies several misunderstandings concerning child care. For example, colostrum is a salutary purgative for both mother and child; swaddling clothes constricts infant’s growth, etc. His book went through eleven editions in French and English by the end of eighteenth century, and became the official guidelines for London Foundling Hospital. He advises to choose wet nurse between the age of twenty and thirty and who has newly lactated for two or three months. Her diet is to be supervised like a valued livestock: “proper Mixture of Flesh and Vegetables . . . with a good deal of Garden Stuff, and Bread. . . . She was to be prohibited from drinking wine or strong liquors” (qtd. in Perry 198). On the whole, his recommendations are aimed at enlightened men: “it is with great Pleasure I see at last the Preservation of Children become the Care of Men of Sense” (qtd. in Perry 197). Ruth Perry points out that Cadogan’s promotion of maternal suckling is based on the opposition between maternal joy and duty against female vanity. Wet-nursing, being a common practice among the well-to-do families as well as in the aristocratic circle and an institution set up by the English and French governments for orphans, increasingly became associated with the ancient regime toward the end of the eighteenth century (Jacobus 54). Rousseau in Émile begins his comprehensive reflection on education with issues related to breast-feeding.4 As P. D. Jimack explains in the introduction to the book, Rousseau aims to unite the two ideals, the natural man and the social man. Émile will become a natural man, not in the historical/theoretical sense of his second Discourse, but a man whose natural goodness has been allowed to develop uncontaminated. Furthermore, he will be a member of the society (Jimack x). However, if mothers still refuse to nurse their young, Rousseau warns that the whole society would remain “Prisonniers de la nourrice,” with reference to those Parisian parents who were detained for not paying their country nurses (qtd. in Blackwell 356). He emphasizes that the emancipation of human kind depends on mother’s coming to terms with their divine mission. Rousseau probes into the “unnatural” phenomenon of wet-nursing: The woman who nurses another’s child in place of her own is a bad mother; how can she be a good nurse? She may become one 4. Similar ideas were advocated before 1762. As Comte de Buffon, a well-know naturalist of the eighteenth century, was reputed to have answered: “Yes, we all said it . . . but M. Rousseau alone commanded it and made people obey him” (Jimack xxv)..
(10) 36. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. in time; use will overcome nature, but the child may perish a hundred times before his nurse has developed a mother’s affection for him. And this affection when developed has its drawbacks, which should make any feeling woman afraid to put her child out to nurse. . . . Is [the mother] prepared to divide her mother’s rights, or rather to abdicate them in favor of a stranger; . . . to feel that the affection he retains for his own mother is a favor, while his love for his foster-mother is a duty; . . . To remove this difficulty, children are taught to look down on their nurses, . . . she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; . . . she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse. . . . Every evil follows in the train of this first sin; the whole moral order is disturbed, nature is quenched in every breast, . . . When the home is a gloomy solitude pleasure will be sought elsewhere. But when mothers deign to nurse their own children, then will be a reform in morals; natural feeling will revive in every heart; there will be no lack of citizens for the state; this first step by itself will restore mutual affection. (Rousseau 13, my emphasis) This passage addresses to women about the “first sin” against nature. Mixed with emotional blackmail, coercive caution, and promise of social esteem, it provides a discursive framework for this paper. Rousseau exhorts women to stop being the “slaves of fashion” (14) and take up their sacred charge. The child should have his mother for the nurse and his father for the tutor. Rousseau thus succeeds in forging an enduring Romantic ideology, which weds the suckling of infants with “Jacobean (sic) sentiments” which values bourgeois nuclear family (Blackwell 357). However, most ironically, despite all these fervent persuasions of maternal suckling as the first stage of social reform, Rousseau designs for Émile a tutor, (the best of whom is a friend of the father, rather than a paid servant), who has the right and sense to choose a nurse from the country for her mainly vegetarian diet and simple living (Rousseau 23-24). Rousseau explains his reason offhand: “The new-born infant must have a nurse. If his mother will do her duty, so much the better; her instructions will be given her in writing, but this advantage has its drawbacks, it removes the tutor from his charge” (23). In other words, Rousseau concurs with William Cadogan on the male control of the process of nurturing..
(11) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 37. Regardless of the contradiction in Rousseau’s program, his recommendations on education became so powerful that many well-educated ladies were willing to comply with. As Madame de Staël wrote in 1788, “everyone has adopted Rousseau’s physical system of education. . . . he has succeeded in restoring happiness to children. . . .” (qtd. in Jimack xxv). Unfortunately, her own mother, Suzanne Necker, was among those unhappy enlightened mothers who felt an enduring guilt at hiring a wet nurse after failing to produce sufficient milk for her daughter (Gutwirth 17-40). This provides evidence that Émile enjoyed a cult following. The “slaves of fashion,” namely, those ladies declining to nurse their infants as mentioned in Émile, succumbed to the new fashion of breast-feeding, as Lady Delacour in Belinda does for her second baby. The campaign of maternal breast- feeding is endorsed enthusiastically by Mary Wollstonecraft, despite her critique of the chauvinist strictures for girls sanctioned in Émile. Wollstonecraft adopts a two-pronged tactic aimed at both men and women. First, she pinpoints boarding schools and wet nurses as responsible for men’s “little respect paid to chastity” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 164) which, as Bonnie Blackwell explains, contribute to their ill adjustment to monogamy and various forms of bodily self-discipline. Wet nursing teaches the male child the first rule of patriarchy: women are for circulating (Blackwell 360).Wollstonecraft then challenges women especially those who “neither suckles nor educates her children, scarcely deserves the name of a wife, and has no right to that of a citizen. But take away natural rights, and duties become null” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 146). She then proceeds to provoke men: “there are many husbands so devoid of sense and parental affection, that during the first effervescence of voluptuous fondness they refuse to let their wives suckle their children. They are only to dress and live to please them: and love—even innocent love, soon sinks into lasciviousness when the exercise of a duty is sacrificed to its indulgence” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 73, my emphasis). The word, “fondness,” indicates Wollstonecraft’s agreement with William Cadogan, who calls aristocratic ladies “fond” mothers whose indulgence enervates the child (qtd. in Perry 198). Here Wollstonecraft is admonishing the husband whose mistaken notion of love indulges the wife but in the end degrades her and ruins the child and their family. All in all, the premise of her advocacy of maternal suckling is women’s entitlement to their natural rights, equality and rationality. In her first fiction, Mary, the mother of the eponymous character, a lady of fashion, refuses to breast-feed her children and chooses to play with puppies instead. She is duly.
(12) 38. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. punished with milk-fever. In real life, Mary Wollstonecraft herself had harrowing experience at giving birth to Mary Godwin. Contracting puerperal fever, she was prescribed to have puppies draw her milk (Wollstonecraft, Memoirs 183-84). In Edgeworth’s Ennui, the death of Lord Glenthorn’s putative mother might also be related to milk fever, an illness usually thought to inflict those women who do not breast-feed. According to Ellinor, the physicians and servants do not know how to “manage” her (E 274), meaning subjecting her to similar treatment as those undergone by Wollstonecraft (Blackwell 359). These cases attest to the power of popular, sometimes unverified, conceptions about the breast and birth-related illness.5 These renditions of medical cases, fictive or not, present nightmarish scenarios of “retribution” meted out to mothers who hold out on the regime of breast-feeding. The regime itself is part and parcel of the rise of women’s social position in the second half of the eighteenth century. Scholars have produced various theories to explicate such a shift in cultural history.6 Nancy Armstrong sees the ascendancy of sensibility and domesticity endowing women with authority which comes with restraints (3-27). As if to modify Armstrong’s position, Ruth Perry builds upon Valerie A. Fildes’s historical studies to chart the “construction of bourgeois motherhood” as a process of colonialization, which is the domestic, familial counterpart to land enclosure at home and imperialism abroad (Perry 185). Ruth Perry contends that the breast encapsulates the “colonization” of the female body for women’s bodies were purchased in the form of wet nurses in the early eighteenth century, whereas in the second half of the century, those services were redefined as duties that women owed to their husband, families and the state (123). The political implications of the breast are also explored by Mary Jacobus, who leads us to investigate the “semiotics of the breast” as it has been variously mobilized before and after the French Revolution. Jabocus’s arguments are further developed by Sally Shuttleworth who grounds them in medical and scientific discourses. Julie Kipp draws on these scholars and further explores the ramifications of Romantic motherhood. She investigates how writers deploy the representations of mother-child bonds as a means to naturalize various constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations (1). Kipp bases her studies on Foucault’s view of the body politic to examine the “intersec5. 6. These seemingly ill-founded associations were in fact confirmed by experiments in the lying-in hospitals that the breastfeeding of infants from the first day protected mothers from contracting milk fever (Fildes, Wet Nursing 86). For a succinct account of the discourse of motherhood, please see Bowers 1-33..
(13) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 39. tions and divergences between theories of motherhood and material practices” (5). These studies, based on various emphasis of history, provide crucial foundation of my exploration into the subject. Motherhood has always been an important aspect of feminist theories. Early feminist critics, such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, regard the female experiences as a platform of female consolidation.7 However, many recent feminists start to question such essentialist standpoints. For example, Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble, criticizes Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s various formations of the “maternalist discourse” that has come to occupy a “hegemonic position” within the canon of feminist theory and that tends to “reinforce” precisely the “binary, heterosexist framework” that they seek to undermine. Instead, Judith Butler focuses on examining the cultural production of the “natural” to destabilize those experiences which authorize themselves via appeals to the body (84-85). Drawing on historical scholarship, this paper emulates the physio-psychological approach of the French feminists on the material act of childrearing but on a whole adopts a similar position as that of Judith Butler in order to lay bare the very performative fabric of the solely feminine practice, maternal breast-feeding. Judith Butler’s theory of performativity facilitates our probe into Lady Delacour’s stage-managed reform. On the other hand, her views on identity formation, though feminist-based, shed light on Lord Glenthorn’s transformation from the mistaken English lordship to the hard-won Irish identity. By unraveling the thematic and stylistic connections of these two novels, this paper seeks to delineate Edgeworth’s self-reflexive critique on her blueprint of a modern Ireland that is wholly Irish but incorporating English professionalism and on the Enlightenment dictum of femininity by enlarging the nurturing function of the breast to the comprehensive commanding role of the heart. 3. Ennui, or Memoirs of the Earl of Glenthorn As its long title announces, Ennui is at once an Enlightenment case study of the illness and an account of history told from the lens of a specific individual. The combination of the two modes of writing allows Edgeworth to amass miscellaneous materials from history, politics, medical cases, literature, 7. For Kristeva’s ideas on mothering and writing, please see Suleiman 367-69. For Irigaray’s ideas on interactive dependence between mother and child, which is seen embodied in the placenta, please see Kipp 10..
(14) 40. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. travelogue, folk lore and fairy tale, etc., and supplement them with sometimes ironic hindsight. The novel chronicles the journey of the Earl of Glenthorn traveling from England to Ireland where he discovers his true identity, Christy O’Donoghoe, the son of his Irish wet nurse, and to England where he receives training as a lawyer, and back to Ireland where he re-gains the title and estate by marrying Lady Delamere. The transformation from Earl of Glenthorn back to Earl of Glenthorn, centering on the revelation of the wet nurse as the mother, turns a full circle as he takes on the name of his wife, Delamere (literally translated as “of the mother”). She is the heirless to the estate and their marriage permits him to reclaim the title after his foster brother loses the estate due to dissipation. Lord Glenthorn’s reconciliation with his Irish roots is accomplished through a triad milk/speech/blood, which is cleansed by Maria Edgeworth of the English anxiety over reverse-assimilation. In the end, the Anglo-Irish lord regains the title by reinstating the Irish nurse as his real mother and by proving himself worthy of the Irish estate. In this way, Maria Edgeworth, coming from a well-established Anglo-Irish family with the estate Edgeworthtown, presents her formula of resolving the political crisis of her time. 3.1 Ennui, “moral indigestion” In this novel, the illness, ennui, (associated with boredom, melancholia, and hypochondria) is seen inextricable from the privileged class, as both holders of the title, Earl of Glenthorn, suffer the illness. This view conforms to the diagnosis of the Scottish physician Dr. William Cullen in First Lines of the practice of physic (sic) (1796) as recorded by the first Earl of Glenthorn (the one who makes the “first” appearance in the novel) in his memoirs (E 250; 359 n. 70). Lord Glenthorn admits that this disease has become an “occupation” to him (E 165). As Patricia Meyer Spacks explains, boredom, in the typical eighteenth century representations, provides “an emblem of helplessness” (33). Bonnie Blackwell adds a psychological dimension to this insight by pointing out that this condition may result from an involuntary return to the childhood state of apathy caused by being subjected to others (Blackwell 354). This illness thus reflects an unresolved childhood problem. An emergent understanding of this connection is illustrated as Lord Glenthorn sinks to his old melancholia after being rejected by Lady Geraldine whom he admires:.
(15) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 41. . . .; but I knew that if I declared myself ill, no power would keep my old nurse Ellinor from coming to moan over me; and I was not in a humor to listen to stories of the Irish Black Beard, or the ghost of king O’Donoghoe; nor could I, however troublesome, have repulsed the simplicity of her affection. (E 242; my emphasis) This passage, amounting to a self-diagnosis and prescription, reveals two crucial ideas. First, it registers a pattern of substitution as the object of his desire, Lady Geraldine, is replaced by his Irish nurse, Ellior O’Donoghoe, who comes to England to see him and later whose death precipitates the next replacement—Lady Delamere. Second, it reveals the true cause of his melancholia—some unresolved childhood conflict. If health is “the ultimate form of consent” as Jacqueline Rose points out (Rose 220), Glenthorn is registering a complaint about the particular way in which he was raised by refusing to grow up and be cured (Blackwell 356). At this moment of crisis, he desires the nurse to come and “feed” him with stories which he will recognize in due course as fables of his ancestors. The regressive self-indulgence seems to proffer a case study for Freudian theory of oral personality. In the first phase of child development, gaining pleasure mainly through the mouth, the child develops a strong attachment to the source of nourishment and comfort, be it the mother or wet nurse. As Freud expounds: The first of these [phases of development] is the oral or, as it might be called, cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization. Here sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food; nor are opposite currents within the activity differentiated. The object of both activities is the same; the sexual aim consists in the incorporation of the object—the prototype of a process which, in the form of identification, is later to play such an important psychological part. (Freud 337, my emphasis) In this early stage, the infant gains pleasure by taking in the milk and symbolically incorporates the breast and the mother through suckling. The moment of conflict occurs when the infant has to be weaned in order to move on to the next stage—taking solid food. The child may resist the care-taker’s arrangement by refusing to eat or by spitting up. If the child cannot overcome the conflict, a fixation on the mouth may be developed. Even if a psychoanalytical reading of Ennui is not intended here, Freudian insights shed light on.
(16) 42. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. the issues related to feeding, weaning and ensuing anxieties which are pivotal to our understanding of this novel. Glenthorn’s relapse to melancholia suggests a deep-rooted refusal to be weaned from the nurse’s care. His self-indulgence is thus revealed to originate from complications of being subjected to a twofold weaning, from the material milk of the nurse who later turns out to be his real mother, and from the symbolic nutrient of the Irish roots. His melancholia has grown to Epicureanism, since food seems the only thing that can sustain his interest for any stretch of time (E 144-48), which offers transference for the real object of his desire. Literally, what keeps him drifting from one thing to the next is his ignorance about his real mother. Only in his illness, he can re-live the childhood pleasure of incorporating within himself the object of his desire. Lord Glenthorn’s self-diagnosis suggests embarrassment of regression and unacknowledged guilt over not wanting to hear any more of those Irish folk stories. The fables reiterated by Ellinor O’Donoghoe include gothic tales such as Irish version of the Blue Beard, the “Black Beard” and “the ghost of king O’Donoghoe.” The latter carries a special meaning as being related to Ellinor and therefore to Lord Glenthorn himself. As the provider of milk and stories, the nurse together with the mother has been highly regarded by both the German and British Romantic writers for embodying the voice of the collective unconsciousness that has been repressed in the process of ruthless industrialization (Trumpener 197). By a double move, Edgeworth radically advances on what Katie Trumpener sees as an effort especially of the German Romanticists to recuperate the oral tradition: first conflating the nurse and the mother, second “neutralizing” the Anglo part of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Lord Glenthorn’s guilt not wanting to hear Ellinor’s reiterating the story of “the ghost of king O’Donoghoe” proves to be similar to the guilt of the inactive Prince of Denmark who is requested by the ghost of old Hamlet to revenge his murder. In the present case, the usurper of the estate, and in extension the state, turns out to be the English colonizers. Edgeworth explores the consequences of being cut adrift from one’s roots and losing a proper self-understanding whose overall symptom is ennui, in two tiers, the Anglo-Irish Glenthorn and the uprising tenants. Firstly, Glenthorn’s ennui breeds jealousy of power, similar to how King of Prussia reputedly wanted to “regulate all the mouse-traps in his dominions” (E 184). The excess love of power also contributes to his decision to stop being an absentee landlord by traveling to Ireland, a country described to him by Ellinor as a large fiefdom willing to satisfy his lordship’s every whim. Bonnie Blackwell.
(17) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 43. (363) therefore insists that Glenthorn best illustrates what Mary Wollstonecraft fears about the man being weaned by nurses for Glenthorn displays “an insatiable longing for something new, and a childish love of locomotion” (E 144). This description, given by the reformed Lord Glenthorn in his memoirs, provides a parody of Byronic insatiety and eternal wandering. But Edgeworth advances on Mary Wollstonecraft’s insights by having Glenthorn weaned by his own mother who was thought to be his nurse. Therefore, the agent of weaning is not the problem. What causes ennui is his lack of self-knowledge. Clióna Ó. Gallchoir notices the larger consequences of ennui—his failed first marriage due to his lack of interest to understand others and “household insurrection” for his inertia gives free reign to servants (91). Secondly, ennui also triggers social unrest. During the Irish rebellion, Glenthorn finds himself aroused from ennui as he takes up the cause of his foster-brother, Christy O’Donoghue, who is injured by those uprising tenants. Later the case is generally referred to as “Lord Glenthorn’s cause.” He comments: “Party spirit is an effectual cure for ennui, and perhaps it is for this reason that so many are addicted to its intemperance” (E 247). Even if his “first public exertions” come to nothing as his assailants of his foster brother are acquitted and his own reputation and even life are in danger, he feels “relieved” effectually from the intolerable burden of ennui (248). The revolution ends and he finds himself back in the grip of hypochondria. Meanwhile, “[t]hings and persons settled to their natural level. The influence of men of property, and birth, and education, and character, once more prevailed. The spirit of party ceased to operate; . . . ” (E 248). He reasons that “ennui may have a share in creating revolutions. A French author pronounces ennui to be ‘a moral indigestion, caused by a monotony of situations’” (E 249). The exact reference of this French statement is not traceable. But the general idea of ennui being a “moral,” as opposed to “physical” indigestion may be drawn from the French Enlightenment philosopher, Claude Adrien Helvétius. In De l’Esprit, or Essays on the Mind, and Its Several Faculties (1758), Helvétius follows Blaise Pascal in defining ennui as the “uneasiness which befalls us when we do not have an active awareness of our existence through pleasure.” The uneasiness contains “the principle of the inconstancy and perfectibility of the human mind.” This principle compels the mind to agitate itself in all directions and it is the source of the gradual perfection of the arts and sciences and ultimately of the “décadence du gout” (qtd. in Voegelin 43). Helvétius continues to explain that ennui only contributes to minor but never grand achievement. Though this French reference is set in the context of Lord.
(18) 44. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. Glenthorn’s sinking to inertia after the excitement of revolution, the local people are implicated as they shift their attitude from deadly enmity to apologetic exculpation after the rebellion. The connection between ennui and revolution breaks down the class prejudice which assigns ennui only to the leisured class. Edgeworth seems to suggest a double-edged irony that Lord Glenthorn is prone to melancholia for not knowing his true identity and that the lower orders are prone to indolence and unrest for not knowing the true source of their empowerment. This insight runs close to that of the French philosophy as Pascal expresses it, “But men do not admit the escapist character of their divertissements and thereby they demonstrate that they do not know themselves” (qtd. in Voegelin 54). 3.2 The Triad: Milk/Speech/Blood Maria Edgeworth’s recipe for cure needs to be examined in the historical context of the anxiety over the triad, milk/speech/blood, in two aspects: first polluted language and incestuous cannibalism, second degeneracy and metamorphosis. First, the mixed sense of nostalgia and guilt in Glenthorn’s diagnosis belies the dark side of the triad as it is explored by Anglo-Irish officials in the Renaissance era. Edmund Spenser in A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596, published in 1633), a fictive dialogue between Irenius and Eudoxus, points out the corrupt state of the English language in Ireland as resulted from two evils, fostering system and intermarriage with the local inhabitants: the Childe that sucketh the milke of the nurse, must of necessity learne his first speache of her, . . . for besides that young Children be like Apes which will affecte and ymitate what they see done before them speciallye by theire nurses whom they love so well, they moreouer drawe into themselues together with theire sucke even the nature and disposition of their nurse . . . So that the speache being Irish, the harte must needs be Irish . . . (Spenser 10: 119-20) The symbiosis of milk and speech, which underscores the melancholic longing of Glenthorn, is shown here in a sinister light. Ireland in the Elizabethan time was contested among three main groups: the “New English”—Protestant settlers in Ireland, the “Old English”—the Gaels and the Hibernicized English.
(19) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 45. living in Ireland since the Norman invasion of the twelfth century, and the “Mere Irish”—the local inhabitants (Feerick 85; 92). As a member of New English colonial administrators and plantation makers, Spenser found himself doubly alienated. At this period when national identity was seen dangerously reversible, Spenser envisions a Protestant conquest of Ireland whose earlier subjugation has left it “in the throes of an aggravated, cross-bred barbarity” (Gregerson 89; my emphasis). Spenser here seems to harbor a fear of contamination in the form of reverse-assimilation, which sees the English people assimilated into the Irish culture. However, to admit the influence of the Irish fosterage, as Julie Costello explains, is at once to affirm the inferiority of Irish character and to concede the vulnerability of English identity (182). The milk/speech symbiosis gains one more ghastly dimension as Irenius, the authority on Irish affairs, recounts his witnessing of an execution to Eudoxus: . . at the execution of A notable Traitour at Limericke Called murrogh Obrien I sawe an olde woman which was his foster mother take vp his heade whilste he was quartered and sucked vp all the blodd rvnninge theareout Sayinge that the earthe was not worthie to drinke it and thearewith also steped her face, and breste and torne heare Cryinge and shrikinge out moste terrible / (Spenser 10: 112) The nurse, once a provider of milk to the child, in grieving, turns herself into a consumer of his blood and thus closes a circle of milk/speech /blood triad. In this passage, the fostering mother, for Joanne Craig, embodies the “resilient power” as well as the “virulent aggression of the female survivor.” Craig sees that this scene feminizes the Irish which prepares for Spenser’s advocacy of masculine authority (2-4). Bonnie Blackwell contends, with a different focus, that this passage encapsulates the legitimizing logic of conquest—the nurse’s outrageous act of grieving “negates, even justifies,” any cruelty at work within the execution itself (376-7), and within colonization in general. However, both critics fail to address the complex associations of milk with blood that are pertinent to Edgeworth’s novel. Maria Edgeworth deploys two historical sources in order to present her revisionist blueprint for modern Ireland. A note inserted in the novel at the time when Lord Glenthorn fondly remembers Ellinor’s care during his convalescence shows opinions from the other side of this controversy. As the note records, Sir John Davies in A Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was.
(20) 46. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. never entirely subdued . . . until . . . James I (Dublin 1761), printed exactly from the [first] edition in 1612 remarks: “For fostering, I did never hear or read, that it was in use or reputation in any country, . . as it has been, and yet is, in Ireland . . . In the opinion of this people, fostering hath always been a stronger alliance than blood: . . .” To validate this observation, Edgeworth continues in the note with an account from Lodge’s Peerage of Ireland about an old Irish nurse travelling to Milan to warn her foster-son, Lord Thomas Fitzmaurice, that his estate was in danger. She then died on her way back (E 159; E 354, n. 17; 18, my emphasis). This anecdote provides a prototype for Ellinor O’Donoghoe, the embodiment of selfless affection and loyalty. In this way, Edgeworth’s note prepares for Katie Trumpener’s view of the nurse as instrumental in building a bardic utopia: “[T]he nurse and the fostering system guarantee simultaneously the survival of the indigenous, the promulgation of transcultural tolerance, and the emergence of a new hybrid imperial/national culture.” Trumpener thus turns Ennui from a boring lecture on self-discipline for aristocrats into the “nationalist reclamation of the fostering system as a means of transcultural reconciliation” (214). However, Edgeworth’s seamless deployment of these two sources belies her anxiety to skip the sinister note in Davies’s report. Trumpener points out that Edgeworth truncates Davies’ treaties on the Irish discontents, emphasizing only the “stronger alliance than blood,” according to “the opinion of this people.” And Lodge’s anecdote is used to strengthen the impression that the Irish people willingly and affectionately support their English rulers. What’s been suppressed is Davies’s disparage of the effect of such “alliance” that runs deeper than blood, that brings out the second dimension of the reverse-assimilation: These were the Irish Customes, which the English Colonies did embrace and use, after they had rejected the Civill and Honorable Lawes and Customes of England, whereby they became degenerate and metamorphosed like Nebuchadnezzar: who although he had the face of a man, had the heart of a Beast; or like those who had drunke of Circes Cuppe, and were turned into very Beasts; . . . For, as they did not only forget the English Language, and scorn the use thereof, but grew to be ashamed of their very English Names, though they were noble and of great Antiquity. (qtd. in Trumpener 215, my emphasis) In fact, John Davies’ opinions run closer to those of Spenser than Edgeworth and Katie Trumpener would like to admit. The combined picture of the can-.
(21) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 47. nibalistic nurse in Spenser and the metamorphosed English settlers in Davies invite a comparison with Freudian theory of the oral fixation and its cultural implications. As Anna Freud annotates the section on superego by cross-referencing to Totem and Taboo (1912-13): An interesting parallel to the replacement of object-choice by identification is to be found in the belief of primitive peoples, and in the prohibitions based upon it, that the attributes of animals which are incorporated as nourishment persists as part of the character of those who eat them. As is well known, this belief is one of the roots of cannibalism and its effects have continued through the series of usages of the totem meal down to Holy Communion. . . . (Freud 453; my emphasis) The English settlers, through incorporating the milk, the Irish language and local customs, had turned themselves into degenerate hybrids. Davies’s passage further points out a deep-rooted fear of non-Christian alliance as the nurse performs a ritual parodying that of Eucharist by drinking the blood of her foster son in protest to the English trial. Davies spells out the English anxiety over this Circe-like primitive woman that has claims on the sentiment and loyalty of the English patrician class. The different attitudes toward the nurse held by Davies and Edgeworth, as Katie Trumpener explains, lie in their historical circumstances: On the eve of the Ulster Plantation Uprising, Davies saw “cultural hybridization” equal to a renunciation of civilization, whereas Edgeworth, writing in the aftermath of the United Irishmen rebellion and the Act of Union, felt compelled to actively envision reconciliation (Trumperner 215). However, Trumpener’s explanation sounds circular in logic for her premises is placed on a redemptive figure of the nurse. In fact, the expunged passage of Davies alerts us to an age-old association between blood and milk. The nurse’s taking back the blood of her foster-son indicates a popular belief that the mother transmits her own blood in suckling the infant as portrayed in a medieval romance, Roman de Mélusine. Catherine Léglu explains that women’s milk was thought to be formed of menstrual blood, acting after conception as “gestational fluid,” which was cleansed of its poisonous content by bodily “cooking” upon its transmission to the mother’s breast after “birthing.” Thus women transmitted simultaneously their own blood, both arterial and menstrual, and the father’s seed, as co-determinants of conception. Therefore Léglu puts forth the ideological construction of milk.
(22) 48. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. as a substance that “moulds its recipient both physically and societally” (75). This medieval view on the physiological affinity between milk and blood helps to elucidate the anxiety over wet-nursing in its full spectrum, which includes hybridization and miscegenation, etc. Against this multifaceted anxiety, Maria Edgeworth makes the triad yield constructive foundation for her blueprint of modern Ireland. In the wake of the French Revolution, Edgeworth re-forges Lord Glenthorn’s identity by recognizing his true Irish bloodline, which is cleansed of contamination and purged of hybridization. Her way to resolve the crisis between the English patricians and the Irish subalterns proves to be more radical than what Katie Trumpener eulogizes her as “revisioning transcultural reconciliation.” What Edgeworth envisions is a nation incorporating the professional training offered in England and an all-Irish bloodline, with highlight placed on the mother’s contribution. Being aware of the wish-fulfilling element to such a blueprint, she inserts a self-reflexive dimension of the twofold peripateia (sudden change of fortune) by having the news of changeling spread in the form of high-society small talk, as Lady Y—shares the gossip with Miss Delamere: “One hears of such things in novels, . . .” (E 298). Furthermore, Edgeworth endeavors to resolve the political and cultural crisis in four phases: maternal model of political-economy, “reverted” piggery, new national allegory, and fairy tale denouement. 3.3 Four-phase resolution 3.3.1 Maternal model of political economy In the novel, Maria Edgeworth engages with the contemporary political-economic theory that has provided a pertinent framework to examine the colonial governance in Ireland.8 Julie Costello maintains that Edgeworth’s focus on the “physical dynamics of mothering” helps her to confront the difficulties in reconciling maternal sensibility with sound economic practice (174). Although Ellinor O’Donoghoe is a wet nurse for the gentry, the social and economic problems related to wet nursing for foundlings needs to be included in the discussion in order to better gauge Edgeworth’s insights. Measured against the political-economic paradigm, wet nursing for foundlings is a product of outmoded benevolence and muddled calculation. Glenthorn’s 8. For a nuanced and thorough discussion of Edgeworth’s thoughts on political economy, see Gallagher 257-327..
(23) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 49. Scottish agent, M’Leod, offers an apt analogy not only for the fostering system but for governance in general: Pity for one class of beings sometimes makes us cruel to others. I am told that there are some Indian Brahmins so very compassionate, that they hire beggars to let fleas feed upon them: I doubt whether it might not be better to let the fleas starve. (E 189-90) This crude figure, rooted in Smithian-Malthusian model, is an example of M’Leod’s “cold reasoning” to educate Glenthorn in the new science of governance. M’Leod uses this figure to explain Glenthorn’s folly of “reliev[ing] [him]self from the uneasy feeling of pity, by indiscriminate donations to objects apparently the most miserable” (E 189). Bonnie Blackwell elucidates how this analogy demonstrates the folly of institutionalized charity, which includes employing wet nurses for foundlings, for it encourages population growth and thus perpetuates rural poverty (373). For the Smithian agent, compassion for the poor is so unnecessary and counter-productive that it lends itself to a comparison with an outlandish and misplaced sympathy of the Indian Brahmins for the fleas. The economy based on skewed compassion which asks beggars to remain squalid to keep fleas alive does nothing but deepening beggars’ poverty. It is against this old regime that M’Leod proposes schemes based on profit, industry, and general applicability. As Julie Costello interprets succinctly, Brahmin’s philanthropy disguises his “displaced consumption” of the beggar, whose body is the only commodity that the beggar can sell, and who must be eaten so as to satisfy his own hunger temporarily. The same confusion between consuming and being consumed is equally true of the wet nurse (Costello 187). But the actual function of the wet nurse in patrician household questions the validity of any quasi-scientific economic model. M’Leod’s analogy problematizes the over-emphasis on supply. Bonnie Blackwell notices that the metaphorics of lactation is frequently referred to in the discourse of political economics because milk, according to Deanna Kreisel, is “the only product whose supply is completely determined by, and entirely dependent upon, demand,” and which is used to “debunk the central article of faith of classical political economy” that “supply created its own demand, and that therefore, a crisis of underconsumption was impossible” (qtd. in Blackwell 373). In other words, wet nursing brings in a new dimension to political-economical theory. By having an incredulous M’Leod, whose methodic approaches to estate management constantly irritate.
(24) 50. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. Lord Glenthorn, Edgeworth conveys her own skepticism about the applications of both classical and Smithian models of economy to human affairs. Apart from her institutionalized function of charity which causes controversy, the wet nurse also embodies the contradictions of maternity in colonial Ireland: the wet nurse guarantees the healthy continuation of the Anglo-Irish class while curtailing the growth of local population since women in lactation are advised to refrain from sexual activity and the act of suckling itself is usually contraceptive (Blackwell 377). Julie Costello further argues that the relationship between the aristocratic mother, her child and the nurse constitutes a kind of self-contained economy of mutual benefits and rewards (180). With this triad, Costello explains how the Irish wet nurse challenges the assumptions of Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith who worry that the excessive productivity of the Irish women turns them into conspicuous consumers and therefore depletes the already scarce resources (175). In practice, just like the middle-class women author of manuals for home economics, the wet nurse, channels surplus into profit—in both financial and demographic terms (Costello 181). But Maria Edgeworth designs a twist to this “recuperative” reading of the wet nurse by literally conflating the nurse with the mother. 3.3.2 Reverted piggery Lord Glenthorn has to prepare himself for a full acceptance of his Irish origins. Having moved back to Ireland, he starts to reconnect with his past. When Ellinor comes to England, Lord Glenthorn relives, as it were, a childhood trauma. Her passionate greeting causes him to fall from the horse. In a coma he overhears servants’ cold-hearted arrangement of his affairs, a knowledge which jolts him from inertia. In other words, Ellinor triggers his awakening. Later on, Ellinor reveals that the scar on his foster brother left from the fall in his infancy serves as the mark of his true identity. Lord Glenthorn’s own fall allows him to experience that near-death condition, which serves as a prelude to a new identity. In the process, Ellinor functions as a catalyst for his transformation, the preliminary part of which develops via her new farm house. The cottage is designed by Glenthorn in the style of elegant English cottage to replace her old one which shocks him at his first visit (E 186). That experience amounts to an uncanny re-visit to his earliest dwelling place. And ironically, the squalid old cottage is where the true heir of Earl of Glenthorn, his foster brother, gets proper nourishment and survives. Furthermore, the tortuous process of building the house humorously conforms to the.
(25) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 51. English stereotype of the idle and unruly Irish people. While visiting the new cottage, fondly called Ellinor’s “installation” (E 189), Glenthorn is appalled to see how it has reverted back to a piggery. Ellinor is found singing while weaving at her wheel: There was a lady lov’d by a swine: Honey, says she, I’ll give ye a silver trough. Hunk! Says he. (E 199) Glenthorn might presume that he is the fine lady who has loved the swinish Ellinor and has given her a “silver trough,” which fails to alter her piggish nature. Nevertheless, his aversion and frustration at the transformed cottage are somehow dispelled by her singing. Eventually he learns to take her on her own terms. Furthermore, Glenthorn’s identification with the lady turns out to be ironically false. In the note, Marilyn Butler tells us this song is listed in Edgeworth’s notebook as “song for nurse’ (E 356, n. 35). Therefore, this song may uncannily trigger Glenthorn’s childhood memory which has been submerged beneath his English finery. Glenthorn in fact was once the pig that is being fondly cuddled by the nurse. Nevertheless, the association of pigs with nurslings complicates this seemingly innocent vignette. Bonnie Blackwell points out that in nursery stories babies were commonly lost due to two accidents, crawling or falling into danger or being attacked by animals, especially pigs. Blackwell further explains how the fear of the pig lies at the centre of Stephen Daedalus’s rage as “the old sow [Ireland] that eats her farrow” (qtd. in Blackwell 387-88). Bonnie Blackwell therefore argues that the nurse/mother as sow suckling her piglets which would soon be devoured by her is a phantasm of “grotesque nationalized maternity” (388). The scenario of the piggery spells out the subconscious recognition of his origins and the fear of being once more engulfed back into them. But the fear and disgust seem to be dismissed by the nurse’s singing. Rather than joining the rage against so-called “grotesque nationalized maternity,” Edgeworth allows the English cottage happily relapse back to an Irish piggery in order to counter the phantasmagoric fear of miscegenation and metamorphoses expressed by Spenser and Davies. Ellinor indeed possesses qualities of the archetype, “shan van vocht” (poor old woman), a stock nationalist figure whom Stephen Tifft calls a “nostalgic trope for a victimized Ireland as the maternal object of nationalist devotion” (qtd. in Blackwell 377). But Edgeworth aims more than.
(26) 52. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. the recuperation of the Irish culture through the wet nurse. Lord Glenthorn’s acceptance of Ellinor and her piggery prepares him for a fuller recognition of his own origin, which is more than a nostalgic looking backward, but moving ahead to build a modern Ireland. 3.3.3 The Modern Ireland, a national allegory Lord Glenthorn learns about his true identity at the time of the Irish uprising (1798),9 as political and personal crises intertwine. Ellinor reports that some of the plotters praise Glenthorn’s largess whereas others belittle him for being made of “milk and water” (E 263). This note of dismissal by the Irish locals spells out the risks involved in wet nursing, amounting to the flip side of Spenser’s fear of diluted English character. Judged from the Irish perspective, Glenthorn is “neither beef nor vael” (E 263) and his mixed identity and dilly-dally inertia are rooted in his infant diet, “milk and water.” Reported by his wet nurse, this comment is doubly ironic. She alone holds the secret to his Irish pedigree. Bonnie Blackwell judiciously points out that Glenthorn’s insufficiencies as a ruler refers back to an “unsatisfactorily resolved” scene of nursing (358). What Blackwell does not notice is how this trauma impacts on three parties: Glenthorn, the Irish community and the nurse/mother. It’s difficult even for the native plotters to resolve their split allegiance, for Glenthorn has been benevolent but he is a class (and race) enemy. Their slur, drawn from the food analogy, suggests a primitive model of identity. Glenthorn is philanthropic but his putative English blood dilutes the Irish milk and therefore he remains an outsider to the Irish community. The specter of contamination continues to haunt when it comes from Ellinor again, this time, blaming her own doing. When Glenthorn refuses to bail out her younger son Owen who is believed to have been detained with the conspirators, she proclaims “’Tis a judgment upon me . . . But you shall feel too, . . . Yes, your heart is harder than the marble: you want the natural touch, you do; for your mother has knelt at your feet, and you have denied her prayer” (E 271, my emphasis). She then reveals that the true Lord Glenthorn is Christy the blacksmith who was placed in her care after a fatal fall from his original nurse. The true Lord Glenthorn grew so sick that Ellinor thought he would not have recovered. Therefore, she exchanged her own robust son with the ill heir. But the sickly 9. For more detailed explanation of this rare reference of Irish rebellion in Edgeworth’s works, see Myers, “War,” 74-91..
(27) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 53. heir survived in her household. Now Ellinor despairingly believes that God has meted out punishment for her own son refuses to save his true sibling. Fortunately, Owen is discovered somewhere else, not among the detainees. After honestly returning the title and estate to his foster brother, Christy O’Donoghoe (formerly known as Lord Glenthorn) embarks on a journey of self-discovery. The fear of contamination is resolved for Christy O’Donoghoe is a pure-bred Irish but he is to prove himself worthy of the estate by establishing himself as a rising lawyer after the vigorous training in London and winning the hand of Lady Delamere who is the next heir in line to the estate. His dramatic development from an indolent lord to a motivated professional also demonstrates Edgeworth’s belief in circumstance rather than genetics that exerts a greater power in shaping one’s character and fortune. This tale, from riches to rags and back to riches again, amounts to a national allegory for modern Ireland. In the end, the Irish subject, cleansed of his dilution and taint, can lawfully and morally claim his title and land. It is a utopian vision for the Irish nation. But this national allegory, triggered by the nurse, needs to be achieved through the endeavor of Glenthorn and through a full acknowledgement of the mother’s contribution. 3.3.4. Denouement, a fairy tale Edgeworth’s blueprint for reconciliation contains its own critique. The revelation of the changeling episode, accounted to Lord Glenthron at the time of the Irish rebellion, presents the revolution of fates for the two foster brothers, Glenthorn and Christy. The changeling act, usually associated with fairy tale, suggests the possible abuse of power on the part of the nurse/mother. As Bonnie Blackwell explains, Lord Glenthorn “recovers” a lost woman whom he has “never managed to replace,” only to be told that she has “substituted” him (361). The figure of Ellinor, both victim and victimizer, provides a symbol for the blended texture of the novel as a whole. After returning the title and estate to his foster brother, Glenthorn is subjected to a series of tests under the guidance of his “godfather,” Lord Y—until the latter finally pronounces, “Your trial is over” (E 319). This reference to fairy tale formula alerts us to the utopian nature of Edgeworth’s design. Besides, the way in which his real identity becomes public knowledge is presented in a self-reflexive manner, as gossips circulated among the ladies at Lord Y—’s place as happening only in novels (E 298). It is this constant referring to various modes of representation, including that of the novel, which disproves.
(28) 54. NTU Studies in Language and Literature. any straightforward reading of Ennui. Clióna Ó. Gallchoir contends that Edgeworth presents political revolution in the form of a folktale (96-102), which begins with changeling at nurse and ends with the formation of Mr. Delamere who will become Lord Glenthorn again. In fact, the veneer of fairy tale belies the self-aware wish-fulfillment of Edgeworth’s blueprint for Ireland. It is also this self-reflexive denouement that structurally connects Ennui with Belinda. 4. Belinda (originally titled, Abroad and At Home)10 In Belinda, her first English society novel, though preferred to be called, a “moral tale,”11Edgeworth chronicles the reform of Lady Delacour following the framework of the Enlightenment medical case study, a framework that connects Ennui and Belinda in structural and thematic terms. Both Lord Glenthorn and Lady Delacour suffer from ennui with similar reluctance to get cured. But their causes are different: the former is removed from his mother and his true identity; the latter divests herself of maternal duties. They are both cut adrift from the source that best anchors their identities. They are thus driven to narcissistic performance of their illness. Lady Delacour, the “spoiled actress” off stage (B 10), which is a living legacy from the Restoration drama, bears the complications of mothering on her body. The literal translation of her French name, “of the heart,” draws our attention to the gap between her flamboyant appearance and her discordant family life, a gap that is externalized in her injured breast. This is the name she carries through marriage that eventually facilitates her recognition of her pivotal role in the society, as the “heart” of sentimental network. Furthermore, as in Ennui, Edgeworth in Belinda draws proponents from other genres, styles, and literary traditions, etc. In the end, we have a magic formula of moral story blending fantasy such as, fairy tale, folklore (ranging from European, Middle-East, and West Indies), and charged with keen psychological representation that enhances our examination of issues related to romance, education, political economy, and revolution. With Belinda, Maria Edgeworth explores the effects of dictum on maternal breast feeding especially on the mother and proposes to go beyond. 10. 11. The original title contains a dichotomy that lends itself to a post-colonial reading of Belinda, which goes beyond the focus of this paper. For details, please see Greenfield 214-28. Marilyn Butler notes that the three-volume Belinda is intended by Edgeworth as a moral tale, not didactic, but in the French style, “lightness, contrast, subversiveness and surprise” (Introduction 7)..
(29) Tainted Milk or Diluted Subject. 55. the nurturing function of the breast by retaining independence while fully reconciling with one’s responsibilities. The title of the novel belies the fact that Lady Delacour is the protagonist. Belinda, the ingénue, is sent to Lady Delacour for a proper introduction to the high society. But conversely, Lady Delacour learns, with her assistance, to come to terms with her own role as mother and wife. Lady Delacour reveals her breast injury in a spectacle tinged with Gothic terror and sentimental bonding, which foreshadows the tableau vivant in the denouement under her direction. With these two spectacles, and masquerades and role-plays interspersed in the novel, Edgeworth conducts a dialogue with Mary Wollstonecraft, who, in a scene of domestic bliss, advocates maternal breast feeding while emphasizing on equality and independence as the necessary condition for women to fulfill their duties. In the end, Edgeworth seems to allow Lady Delacour to “out-perform” the “rational” mother in Wollstonecraft’s treatise. 4.1 Gothic spectacle and sentimental vignette Lady Delacour endeavors to befriend Belinda by revealing her innermost secret. After the masquerade in which Lady Delacour deliberately swaps her tragic mask with the comic one of Belinda, Lady Delacour agrees to reveal her secret to the latter as in a gesture of compensation. Her secret is told in a way that foregrounds the blended texture of the novel as a whole. From the outset, Coleridge’s “Christabel” is evoked as the whimsical and volatile Lady Delacour bares one of her breasts to Belinda: She then, with a species of fury, wiped the paint from her face, and returning to Belinda, held the candle so as to throw the light full upon her livid feature.—Her eyes were sunk, her cheeks hollow—no trace of youth or beauty remained on her death-like countenance, which formed a horrid contrast with her gay fantastic dress. “You are shocked, Belinda,” said she, “but as yet you have seen nothing—look here,”—and baring one half of her bosom, she revealed a hideous spectacle. (B 31-32) The Gothic horror of this sight is immediately diluted, if not dismissed, by her wish to bond with Belinda, for as “Belinda sunk back into a chair—lady Delacour flung herself on her knees before her” (B 32). The juxtaposition of these two scenarios visually registers the melodramatic shift from a Gothic.
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