The monstrous mother: reproductive anxiety in Swift and Pope.

In the West, the image of the fecund female has often been associated with monstrosity. This characterization was established with the creation of Scylla in Homer's Odyssey: encoded as an emblem of lust, the fecund female and her yelping, parasitic progeny evoke the seemingly uncontrollable nature of femininity, and not surprisingly, the image functions as a locus of male disgust with, and fear of, sexuality and reproduction. The Christian tradition continued the negative reading of fertility; the female body as the site of reproduction is the sign of sin, for reproduction evokes, if not reenacts, the initial fall from grace. Even though the first injunction to mankind in Genesis is "Be fruitful, and multiply" (1:28), the favored females in the Bible (and those given significant narrative time after Eve) have difficulty conceiving (Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth), circumvent the standard conception process (the Virgin Mary), or are not shown as mothers (Miriam, Deborah, and Ruth).(1) Positive images of reproductive sexuality recede as both the childless matron and the excessively fertile mother receive disproportionate attention and criticism for their failure to fulfill societal expectations of appropriate sexual behavior.

The problematics of maternal sexuality become central in the recurrent image of the fertile female in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.(2) In particular, the representations of Errour in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Sin in Paradise Lost, Criticism in Swift's Battle of the Books, and Dulness in Pope's Dunciad exemplify the authority that women derive from their reproductive capacity, the patriarchal fear of that female power, and the responding strategy of demonization, which looks to justify female containment as a social and moral imperative.(3) As a group, Errour, Sin, Criticism, and Dulness constitute a pattern of maternal misogyny that becomes encoded in English culture in an attempt to exorcise anxieties regarding desire, power, and chaos.(4) Not only is this pattern significant as the prehistory of the domestication of motherhood in the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in its developmental aspects as well, for there is a decided intensification of misogyny in the evolution of the monstrous mother in Swift and Pope. This acceleration of maternal misogyny is largely a function of the politics of literary culture, in which mass publication, literary paternity and female authorship are sites of conflict. Swift and Pope manifest their fears of the reproductive "feminization" of literature in their increasing anxieties regarding the authority of authorship, and how that authority seemingly disappears in the face of mass reproduction. As publishing writers, Swift and Pope are inevitably implicated in the processes of production and reproduction, but they attempt to redefine the literary marketplace through their invocation of the maternal producer and the literature of maternity, so that they can reject that which they cannot condone about modern literary production.

The definitive characteristics of the fertile monster are easily identified.(5) Errour, Sin, Criticism and Dulness all appear as mothers with numerous progeny, which distinguishes them from characters like Grendel's mother, who is monstrous, but who does not evince unusual fertility. They all perform acts of mothering that are presented as physically disgusting or psychologically damaging, and often both. Thus they are monstrous not only because they reproduce often, but because they are had nurturers. Since the monstrous mother refuses to be sexually and socially passive, she violates the codes of proper female behavior, which leads to a condemnation of the quality and quantity of her actions.(6) The teratological nature of these mothers is also manifested by their appearance, for they have the physical characteristics of animals, particularly dragons, dogs, and asses, which link them to female fiends like the Medusa. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they all function within the context of allegory, in which their maternal and monstrous attributes acquire theological and literary significance.

This literary rendering of fertile maternity is in accordance with then-contemporary thought regarding female sexuality, in which the inability to control her fertility (and the lack of desire to repress her sexuality) makes woman monstrous. The negative inscription of the female reflects both the tendency to revise in favor of the male and the oppositional relationship between the sexes; what constitutes strength in the female weakens the male, and therefore female power must be reinterpreted in order to be subjugated. According to the Renaissance commonplace, sex debilitated men, with ejaculation functioning as a literalized metaphor for life passing out of the body of the male; the "dying" puns in the love poetry of Shakespeare and Donne are perhaps the most famous instances of this sexual epistemology. Consequently, contemporary sexual manuals advocated moderate sexual activity for men, while warning of the deadly insatiability of female sexual desire.(7) The male's sexual authority also decreases after conception, for he is largely marginalized as the female takes over the biological and nurturing processes. Despite this sexual ideology of female reproductive dominance, cognitive dissonance regarding sex always grants power to the male, so that society insisted upon the patriarchal authority of men, particularly those with many children. By redefining progeny in terms of the patriarchal imperatives of masculine inheritance and social authority, man is able to contain the fecund female by controlling her products.(8)

Yet the logical conclusion of Renaissance reproductive mythology is that multiple progeny signify the debilitation of the male and the power of the female, for the male is weakened as his sperm is spent on children. What is striking about the maternal monster in these texts is that she plays out the original implications of this sexual narrative: as one moves from the death of Errour to the triumph of Dulness, it is the emergence of female power that becomes apparent. However, this narrative is enacted in order to invalidate female authority, for as the mother becomes the central actor in the text, the largely negative ramifications of maternity become the central issue. In The Faerie Queene, the male protagonist accidentally meets the fecund mother, and their confrontation provides him an opportunity to prove his worth and to demonstrate his independent authority. At the end of the evolutionary sequence, in The Dunciad, the maternal monster is the protagonist, and there is no triumphant test of the male, and no challenge to maternal authority--rather, armageddon occurs.

Accordingly, the diminution of the patriarchal male is manifested repeatedly in these texts, and each incarnation is more debilitating than its predecessor. While the heroic Redcrosse needs the wisdom of Una to defeat Errour, Satan requires not only Sin's knowledge but her power in order to continue his journey to Earth. Although in theological terms the paternal divine triumphs in Paradise Lost, he fails in narrative terms--unlike The Faerie Queene, where the patriarchal imperative succeeds on both theological and narrative levels. While the paternalism of the ancients is favored in The Battle of the Books, Swift gives no indication that they will win the battle; once again the success of the patriarchal male is stymied at the narrative level, and ideologically, paternal authority is significantly less secure than in Milton. In The Dunclad, the female appropriation of male hierarchy is the centerpiece of the text, as the now absent father is replaced completely by subservient, incompetent sons. By marginalizing the patriarchal male, the traditional patterns of hierarchy and law are undermined, which not only confuses the maintenance and transmission of power, but for these authors, also eliminates the possibility of any system of order: when the traditional hierarchy breaks down, the only alternative is chaos.

The female body is a convenient site for chaos, as it is located between the created and the uncreated. The chaos of the female in these works is signified by the womb and its products, which embody darkness and void; the womb also generates anxieties attendant upon the inability to fill or illuminate such a space.(9) The darkness of the maternal womb echoes the primordial darkness that is a precondition of divine creation, which invokes light (Gen. 1:3). As light is established as a masculine positive associated with order and reason, darkness is construed as its devilish opposite: a feminine force associated with chaos and the imagination. Accordingly, the maternal body is situated in darkness throughout these works: Errour lives in a darkened cave (itself a metaphorical womb) and shuns the light, as do her children.(10) Sin, as a denizen of hell, exists in darkness visible; Criticism, though less clearly identified with physical darkness than with perpetuation of intellectual dimness, lives in a den (BB, 240).(11) Dulness, the daughter of Chaos and Night, not only lives in darkness, but is a purveyor of darkness, as she parodies divine creation by reversing it. In her reign "Universal Darkness buries All," as she induces the world to sleep--and into the realm of the unconscious and the imagination, where reason loses its hold on artistic and intellectual accountability. Like the Platonic caves that they invoke, the shadowy wombs and dens of the monstrous mother ...