Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre
Autor Dara Rossman Regaignonen Paperback – 4 mar 2024 – vârsta ani
When did mothers start worrying so much? Why do they keep worrying so? Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre answers these questions by identifying the nineteenth-century rhetorical origins of maternal anxiety, inviting readers to think about worrying not as something individual mothers do but as an affect that since Victorian times has defined middle-class motherhood itself. In this book, Dara Rossman Regaignon offers the first comprehensive study of child-rearing advice literature from early-nineteenth-century Britain and argues that the historical emergence of that genre catalyzed a durable shift in which maternal care was identified as maternal anxiety. Tracing the rhetorical circulation of this affect from advice literature through the memoirs of Mary Martha Sherwood (1775–1851) and Catharine Tait (1819–1878), as well as fiction by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, and Charlotte Mary Yonge, Regaignon gives maternal anxiety a literary-rhetorical history. She does this by bringing concepts such as uptake and genre ecology into literary studies from rhetorical genre theory, making a case for a mobile and culturally influential notion of genre. Examining specific case studies on child death, paid childcare, and infant doping, among others, Regaignon argues that the ideology of nurturing motherhood was predicated upon the rhetorical cultivation of maternal anxiety—which has had significant consequences for the experience of motherhood and maternal feeling.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814257890
ISBN-10: 0814257895
Pagini: 204
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814257895
Pagini: 204
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“[Writing Maternity] is impressively succinct, packing a carefully nuanced study of the rhetorical effect of various literary genres (childrearing advice literature, memoir, and popular fiction) on maternal emotion in Victorian-era Britain.…Compellingly, Regaignon’s study aids in illuminating a direct connection between mothering, class, and nation-building.…It provides an important basis for thinking about the part women have played and continue to play in the development of nations (not just symbolically) and the psychological impacts of that role.” —Amber Gill, H-Net
“Regainon has written an enjoyable and informative monograph that provides both theoretical food for thought, especially regarding rhetorical genre theory as a path to social action, and evidence of some hard yards in the library examining hundreds of advice manuals. Most importantly, she has shown the crucial role that literary works can play in the production of medical knowledge as well as patient, or more specifically maternal, experience.” —Clark Lawlor, Victorian Studies
“[A] distinct methodological approach yields valuable insights for periodical studies scholars about motherhood, child-rearing, and babyhood.” —Kristin E. Kondrlik, Victorian Periodicals Review
“Regaignon’s critical engagement with constructions of motherhood and paid care provides an insightful read for those interested in the middle-class family of the 19th century, in the history of paid care, and, most importantly, for those interested in Victorian constructions of motherhood and its medicalisation. ... Writing Maternity is not just of historical but also present relevance and opens pathways to engage with these 21st-century iterations of advice and the role they continue to play in structuring maternal experiences.” —Madeline Becker, Journal for the Study of British Cultures
“Writing Maternity has much to offer to anyone with an interest in women’s writing, gender roles, or literature and medicine and will keep readers engaged from the first page to the last.” —Ashleigh Blackwood, Women’s Writing
“Regaignon’s valuable and convincing book historicizes the anxious affects of middle-class motherhood. Attentive to material conditions and historical readerships, Regaignon illuminates the links among embodiment, affect, and genre in this elegant and engagingly written study.” —Risa Applegarth, author of Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science
Notă biografică
Dara Rossman Regaignon is Associate Professor of English at New York University.
Extras
In Writing Maternity, I argue that historically if not personally, maternal anxiety is a rhetorically catalyzed and perpetuated affect, a naturalized aspect of normative modern motherhood. Rather than marking the neurosis or failure of particular women, this emotion is precisely attached to the arrangement and control over temporal and spatial processes that is the managerial role in the neoliberal economy. Focusing the attention of those who identify as mothers on the future of the Child and the space of the domestic sphere, maternal anxiety is an essential, affective component of patriarchal capitalism, engineering its production and (re)production through genres and generations. The emotion, I contend, became an essential motivating component of the ideology of nurturing motherhood as that formation rose to dominance in newly industrialized Britain. Like that ideology, maternal anxiety inheres in and grounds the formations of the emergent middle class and its attendant systems of bourgeois individualism, patriarchal familiality, gendered separate spheres, and global capitalism.
Childrearing advice literature emerged as a distinct genre in the 1820s and ’30s. This development reimagined the relationship between mothers and medical men (physicians, surgeons, apothecaries) and, in doing so, interpellated its maternal readers as ignorant, inexpert, and afraid. In confidently elevating emergent medical knowledge about childhood illness and well-baby care over the experiential wisdom of female caregivers, this genre not only contributed significantly to the development of pediatrics as a medical specialty but also participated in a sentimentalized idealization of motherhood that simultaneously elevated its symbolic importance and evacuated it of all but moral authority. Operating by rhetorically cultivating uncertainty and self-doubt in its addressees, the genre invokes an anxious reader—an anxious maternal subjectivity.
This invocation operates in stochastic concert with other early and mid-nineteenth-century genres concerned with the domestic sphere and familial reproduction. While the emergence of childrearing advice literature was central to the formation of maternal anxiety, that emotion could not have become dominant if advice literature were the only genre repetitively invoking a worrying mother. I therefore expand my focus to examine a schematic ecology of genres, tracing how the narrative patternings of memoir and domestic fiction extend, reinforce, precede, reiterate, and transform those of advice literature. Serial fiction, the multiplot novel, and fictional autobiography reveal the ways in which maternal anxiety is proleptic—experiencing future possibility in the present moment—and paraliptic—invoking alternatives by denying their relevance or force. Childrearing advice literature takes up these logics but also repatterns them through the forms of the prescription and warning. Narrating lived experience for public consumption, published memoir not only individualizes this felt sense of danger but also authenticates it, lending it the force of an affective-social fact. Focusing on the three genres together allows us to see the contours and operations of this rhetorical emotion more clearly, mapping its temporal and spatial logics and ultimately its contribution to the felt experience of fragility that helped underwrite, justify, and maintain British colonial expansion.
Childrearing advice literature emerged as a distinct genre in the 1820s and ’30s. This development reimagined the relationship between mothers and medical men (physicians, surgeons, apothecaries) and, in doing so, interpellated its maternal readers as ignorant, inexpert, and afraid. In confidently elevating emergent medical knowledge about childhood illness and well-baby care over the experiential wisdom of female caregivers, this genre not only contributed significantly to the development of pediatrics as a medical specialty but also participated in a sentimentalized idealization of motherhood that simultaneously elevated its symbolic importance and evacuated it of all but moral authority. Operating by rhetorically cultivating uncertainty and self-doubt in its addressees, the genre invokes an anxious reader—an anxious maternal subjectivity.
This invocation operates in stochastic concert with other early and mid-nineteenth-century genres concerned with the domestic sphere and familial reproduction. While the emergence of childrearing advice literature was central to the formation of maternal anxiety, that emotion could not have become dominant if advice literature were the only genre repetitively invoking a worrying mother. I therefore expand my focus to examine a schematic ecology of genres, tracing how the narrative patternings of memoir and domestic fiction extend, reinforce, precede, reiterate, and transform those of advice literature. Serial fiction, the multiplot novel, and fictional autobiography reveal the ways in which maternal anxiety is proleptic—experiencing future possibility in the present moment—and paraliptic—invoking alternatives by denying their relevance or force. Childrearing advice literature takes up these logics but also repatterns them through the forms of the prescription and warning. Narrating lived experience for public consumption, published memoir not only individualizes this felt sense of danger but also authenticates it, lending it the force of an affective-social fact. Focusing on the three genres together allows us to see the contours and operations of this rhetorical emotion more clearly, mapping its temporal and spatial logics and ultimately its contribution to the felt experience of fragility that helped underwrite, justify, and maintain British colonial expansion.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations Preface Historicizing Maternal Anxiety Acknowledgments Chapter 1 The Rhetorical Origins of Maternal Anxiety Chapter 2 Of Mothers and Medical Men: Advice as Genre Chapter 3 Probability and Premature Death: Child Mortality, Prolepsis, and the Serial Novel Chapter 4 Supervisory Attention and Maternal Management: Paralipsis, Paid Childcare, and Novelistic Perspective Chapter 5 Godfrey’s Cordial and an Opium Pill: Empire, Family, and Maternal Attention Coda Genre as Advice Works Cited Index
Descriere
Traces the rhetorical origins of maternal anxiety in Victorian literature, bringing uptake and genre ecology into literary studies.