Julie Kipp. Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic.(Book review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-05

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Julie Kipp. Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 256. $70.00.

To look at the scrutiny of mothers by men and women writing during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is to discern a painful duplicity: we find here in abundance representations of irrational mothers who harm, or even kill, the children to whom they are ardently devoted, and of beneficent mothers whose natural maternal sympathy turns bad in particular political circumstances. Julie Kipp's Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic argues that Romantic-era representations of mothers are significantly new in their emphasis on "maternal ambivalence and self-division," a phrase that Kipp uses with reference specifically to Anna Letitia Barbauld. The doubleness that marked Romantic motherhood was, Kipp writes, "alternatively celebrated and demonized by writers attempting to decode the mysteries of the female body" (20); and this doubleness crucially informs the ways that the theorization of motherhood intersected with formulations of civic ideals, nationhood, and authorship. The book's five chapters track "motherhood on trial" in gothic literary production, in Maria Edgeworth's and Sir Walter Scott's novels of nation, and, most originally, through the writing and contemporary reception of Shelley's play The Cenci. Even as Kipp attends closely to the specificities of genre and reception that differentiate these works, she persuasively discerns in them all a suspicion of maternal nature: mothers threaten social order both in their bodily-derived and unreasoning devotion to their offspring and when, turning violent, they fail...

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