Abstract
Though nineteenth-century fiction is generally marked by somatic and sexual reticence that relegates conditions like pregnancy and syphilis to the realm of euphemism, fears about the power of “disordered” bodies to shape futurity rise to trouble literature of the fin-de-siècle explicitly. This chapter demonstrates that in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) pregnancy is the site at which disorders of the social body are expressed. Edith’s syphilitic pregnancy signals—as Evadne’s bouts of sexually frustrated hysteria and post-partum mania confirm—that social illness becomes legible on the reproductive bodies of women. I argue that maternal impression theories that emphasize the susceptibility of generational bodies offer useful frameworks for thinking through anxieties about threatening somatic agency in the fin-de-siècle and more broadly.
All [the doctor’s] endeavor seems to be not to say what is the matter exactly.
—Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins
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Notes
- 1.
William Driscoll connects syphilis as metaphor with women’s reproductive bodies: As a result the medical community, despite extensive scientific evidence to the contrary, repeatedly portrayed female reproductive organs as the site of contamination, a portrayal that reinforced, both in law and social taboos, the double standard that simultaneously allowed male profligacy while enforcing feminine virtue (2009).
- 2.
Mazzoni also employs this passage from Oakley.
- 3.
Though Marie-Helene Huet traces maternal impression theories from the classical age though the modern one, Mazzoni cautions that such a lineage conflates maternal impression with a “different, ancient theory” that what a couple or woman saw during conception marked the fetus (1993, 16).
- 4.
Wilson writes about the influence of notions of maternal impression on Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett: the maternally derived birthmark in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews ultimately reveals the true identity of a main character. Jonathan Wild, Fielding’s protagonist in his 1745 novel of the same name, has his whole criminal future impressed upon him by his mother’s “violent desires to acquire all sorts of property” during her pregnancy. Sterne’s novel, Tristam Shandy, also concerns an individual whose life is marked via in utero influence, a point that readers learn from the opening pages of the work. Tobias Smollett, a trained surgeon and physician, presents a more elaborate account of the action of maternal impression upon the character development of his protagonist, Peregrine Pickle. Smollett’s attention to maternal matters in this work is understandable given that, while composing Peregrine Pickle, he was concurrently editing and annotating a Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery for the Edinburgh physician and male midwife, William Smellie, to whom he had served as an apprentice (Wilson 2002, 10).
- 5.
Two notable exceptions to the lack of scholarly work on Victorian representations of pregnancy are Clare Hanson’s (2004) A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy Medicine and Culture (1750–2000) and Cynthia Northcutt Malone’s (2000) “Near Confinement: Pregnant Women in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel” both of which treat the general tendency of Victorian novels to elide the representation of pregnancy to associate it with immorality .
- 6.
This is an argument I make at more length in my dissertation, “Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel” and in “Now You See It: Concealing and Revealing Pregnancy in Wuthering Heights and the Clever Woman of the Family” (2015).
- 7.
The revelation that Vanessa Ryan plagiarized sections of her influential Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel troubles the debt this chapter owes to her work on what she calls the “not wholly agential or wholly conscious” thinking that occurs in Victorian fiction, thinking Ryan’s book demonstrates “is not confined solely to the brain” (2012, 13). That the plagiarism in the book seems to have been in sections dealing with the details of Victorian scientific thinking supports Ryan’s claims, I think, that the argumentative thrust of her book is legitimate—this argumentative thrust is certainly one with which this chapter is in conversation. This is a conversation, however, that need hardly rely wholly upon Ryan’s work as Elisha Cohn’s forthcoming Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel and Anne McCarthy’s work on suspension in nineteenth-century poetry attest.
- 8.
See Mary Wilson Carpenter’s Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England for more on these shifts.
- 9.
For an example of prevalent Victorian assumptions regarding the relationship between “medicine and morality,” Matus points to Elizabeth Blackwell’s 1884 assertion that “medicine and morality being relation to function and use, are therefore inseparable in a Christian State” (2009, 2).
- 10.
This vocabulary of “see” and “say” is drawn, as is much of the scholarship with which this chapter engages, from Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic in which he treats shifts in ways of seeing and saying that follow the codification of medical education in the eighteenth century. Foucault argues that “a new alliance was forged between words and things, enabling one to see and to say” (1994, xii; emphasis Foucault’s ). The ability of a specialized few to see and to say enabled, in turn says Foucault , the development of a medical gaze that codified separations of mind and body.
- 11.
In addition to the work of Meegan Kennedy, William Driscoll, and Clare Hanson I draw upon here, see also, for example, Emma Liggins “Writing against the ‘husband-fiend’: syphilis and male sexual vice in the new woman novel” and Carol A. Senf’s “Introduction” to the 1992 edition of The Heavenly Twins.
- 12.
Malone (2000) has noted that the reticent narration of Celia’s pregnancy in Middlemarch in contrast with the more direct narration of Rosamond’s can be ascribed to the “narrative zone of the doctor-husband”; I draw here on this terminology.
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Woods, L.A. (2018). Not-So-Great Expectations: Pregnancy and Syphilis in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins . In: Nixon, K., Servitje, L. (eds) Syphilis and Subjectivity . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66367-8_6
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