An Interesting Condition: Reproduction and the Un-Domestication of the Victorian Novel

Sarah Elizabeth Roth

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/N28471

Work

An Interesting Condition: Reproduction and the Un-Domestication of the Victorian Novel

Public Deposited

Download PDF

Victorian novels’ characteristic preoccupation with marriage and inheritance has led scholars to view the form as socially conservative in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet contemporary commentators feared what young women might conceive as a result of reading. The key to this dilemma, I argue, is the usual consequence of nineteenth-century marriage and the necessary precursor to inheritance: human reproduction. The events of the reproductive matrix – pregnancy, birth, and lactation – are neither prominent in nor absent from novels’ plots. Rather, these events are subject to what I call circumnarration. That is, they are hidden, imperfectly: depictions are displaced and distorted, but also ubiquitous, appearing constantly if elliptically, always fraught with danger and displeasure. This dissertation marshals cultural context in order to theorize this curious half-obscurity and how Victorian readers understood it. I juxtapose the novel’s accounts with those of obstetric advice manuals, women’s letters and diaries, and housekeeping and domestic etiquette books in order to suggest that Victorian stories of reproduction disrupt not only narrative but women’s subjective identity and status. These linked fiction and nonfiction archives use the female body and women’s affective responses to reproduction – what I call subjunctive agency – to argue that reproduction is neither monolithic nor hegemonic, and cannot be understood fully in terms of discursive power. Stories of reproduction in fact tend to collapse key cultural distinctions (between the “fallen woman” and the respectable wife, between public and private, between the normative and the “queer”) while thus multiplying possibilities. The project thus offers a more nuanced understanding of Victorian gender and the Victorian novel, as well as of our own assumptions about women’s reproductive desires and choices.

Last modified