Maternity

Maternity: The qualities or conduct characteristic of a mother; motherliness (now rare).

One of the main questions I get when I tell anyone about the subject of my PhD research is, overwhelmingly, ‘oh, do you have children?’ When I respond with a definite and absolute ‘no’ they often follow-up by questioning, ‘well, why are you writing about motherhood, then?’ I suppose it’s a fair question, but the answer is not necessarily a simple one. After all, in my examinations of maternity in early modern England, the main task I set out for myself is to completely deconstruct the idea of what exactly it meant to be a mother during the time. 

Today, we like to believe that our understandings and conceptions (no pun intended) of motherhood have developed past the idea that to be a mother means giving birth to a child (through the union of a husband and wife). Advancements in science and technology have meant that the definition of maternity is more open to reinterpretation and re-inscription than ever. However, as I have discovered through my research and my own experiences, many people (whether they realise it or not) still ascribe traditional values to the term – ones that dominated early modern life and discourse.

Anthony van Dyck. Virgin and Child. c. 1620. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

If you were asked to sum up what maternity was intended to connote in early modern England, you could do worse than refer to Anthony van Dyck’s c. 1620 painting of the Virgin and Child. Depicting the Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus, this image demonstrates exactly what traditional motherhood was meant to be — nurturing and, above all, biological. The only true mother was one who both gave birth to her child and who breastfed them. Of course, the Virgin Mary was an ideal, and the realities of lived experience were, in fact, radically different.

In my research, I don’t examine this ‘traditional’ maternity, the kind depicted in the Virgin and Child and similar images, but rather the embodiments of the role that have long been largely ignored in critical discourse. Just as today, there were numerous ways in which maternity could be embodied, many of which rejected the belief that motherhood had to be predicated on a biological bond. And, just as today, such women were often vilified and portrayed as uncaring of their surrogate children in attempts to demonstrate the supposed superiority of biological maternity. When we think of stepmothers, for example, even now the automatic cultural understanding remains the ‘wicked’ stepmothers of Cinderella or Snow White (and their many adaptions) all the way through to Olivia Colman’s (delightfully) malicious turn in Fleabag. ‘Maternal’ is not a word that we would use to describe these women, and yet we know that, in reality, the experience of stepmothers is far more varied. This was no different in early modern England than it is today.

Like pretty much all forms of identity, maternity is a culturally constructed role, and its definition cannot be neatly tied up, no matter how much the OED might try. Adoptive mothers, foster mothers, nurses, and stepmothers were roles that permeated early modern English society and drama, but perhaps the reason such roles have so often been minimised is precisely because they trouble and reject the traditional definition of maternity. When Cymbeline’s Queen tells her stepdaughter, in Shakespeare’s 1610-11 play, ‘be assured you shall not find me, daughter / [a]fter the slander of most stepmothers’, she is speaking to dominant cultural assumptions, and knowingly and clearly lying about her true intentions (1.1.71-72). These assumptions were often direct responses to anxieties raised by even the mere possibility that maternity was not dependent upon the patriarchal values that sought to uphold traditional motherhood. To suggest that maternity was open to redefinition was to destabilise a hierarchy that kept women largely confined to the domestic sphere and focused on their main role, their sole identity — motherhood. So pervasive were these early cultural conventions that they became stereotypes that still invade modern thought.

It was not only through these surrogate roles that maternity could be redefined; even within the confines of biological motherhood, there were a myriad of ways in which its definitions could be troubled. Women who lost children, who experienced infertility, or who simply did not entirely meet the ideal of the ‘good’ mother all contradict and oppose strict definition. Compare, for example, depictions of Cleopatra’s suicide, such as those by Guido Cagnacci, with the image of the Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus. In a clear subversion of maternal nurture, Cleopatra holds the asp to her breast, perverting the traditional scene between mother and child – instead of providing for the child, it is the child who poisons her.

Guido Cagnacci. The Death of Cleopatra. c. 1645-55. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Ultimately, I don’t seek to fully answer the question ‘what did it mean to be a mother in early modern England?’ but merely to demonstrate that maternity was in fact not so easily defined. While contemporary sources (mostly – but not entirely – written by men) suggested, almost exclusively, that women were created solely for motherhood (and specifically traditional motherhood) the reality was far more nuanced. The beliefs of writers such as — to choose a random example — Ludovic Mercatius, who wrote in 1587 that woman was created and ‘given to man’ for the ‘sole function of generation’, are contradicted and troubled by the existence of these maternal figures who function outside of such patriarchal ideals (Common, 52). My main goal, then, is to push back on definition completely; to show how, perhaps, motherhood and its performances were in fact not so different from those that exist today – and, perhaps, that we’ve not made as much progress in our own cultural understandings of the subject as we’d like to believe.

Coco Farinet-Brenner is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at King’s College London.

Selected Bibliography.

Mercatius, Ludovic. On The Common Conditions of Women (1587)

Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford, 2008).

5 March 2021.