|
COPYRIGHT 1995 Johns Hopkins University Press
Although critics have discussed the connections between fatherhood and kingship in Absalom and Achitophel, nobody has yet attended to the poem's less obvious, but equally important and politically-charged representations of maternity.(1) Absalom and Achitophel begins and ends with references to mothers: the opening describes how, despite the queen's infertility, the lustful David has still managed to create "several Mothers" (13), and the poem concludes with David's' stunning image of a "Viper-like" destruction of the "Mother Plot" against him (1013). Indeed, the shift between these framing images of maternity is a central mechanism in the poem's royalist resolution. For if the text initially suggests that David has so actively turned women into mothers that he bears at least some responsibility for the birth of the rebel son, it ends by transferring the blame for the insurrection onto the Mother Plot, as if only the female power of generation threatens familial and political order and must be suppressed. The shift works because by the time David redeems himself in his speech, the poem's emphasis on his promiscuity has been effaced by increasing references to a feminine sexual desire and productivity so dangerous that the king appears politically reliable by contrast.(2)
Before considering the poem closely it is useful to review the cultural - and specifically political and medical - context for its familial and sexual details. Much has been written about the way the king was viewed as the ultimate patriarch of a family of subjects. But to appreciate Dryden's attack on maternity, it is also important to recognize that the most popular patriarchal political theory of the period - best articulated in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha (1680) - was fundamentally structured around the erasure of the mother? In trying to prove that "the first kings were fathers of families" and that "kings now are the fathers of their people," for instance, Filmer points out that "the law which enjoins obedience to kings is delivered in the terms of 'honour thy father' . . . as if all power were originally in the father."(4)
As Locke later suggests time and again in his Two Treatises of Government (1690), Filmer is clearly manipulative here, "for God [actually] says, Honour thy Father and Mother; but our Author . . . leaves out thy Mother quite, as little serviceable to his purpose."(5) Locke here is neither especially interested in biblical accuracy nor in the question of women's rights but rather in the dynamics of political rhetoric. Arguing against unconditional and exclusive monarchal authority, he understands that in general the paternal argument can work only if the role of the mother is denied, because to acknowledge her would suggest that the father-king does not have an inherent right to unilateral control. It thus logically follows that to introduce the idea of mother is to disrupt the patriarchal justification of kingship:
It will but very ill serve the turn of those Men who contend so much for the Absolute Power and Authority of the Fatherhood . . . that the Mother should have any share in it. And it would have but ill supported the Monarchy they contend for, when by the very name it appeared that the Fundamental Authority from whence they would derive their Government of a single Person only, was not plac'd in one, but two Persons joyntly.(6)
Critics have pointed out that this is hardly a feminist argument since Locke "uses the mother's 'equal Title' as a reductio ad absurdum to refute the derivation of political from parental authority."(7) That is, he uses her to prove the inherent separateness of parenthood and state. Nevertheless, it is worth noting how, by concentrating on the threat maternity poses to any conservative understanding of monarchy, Locke ironically demonstrates the mother's political utility.(8)
The Two Treatises, composed during the 1680s but published anonymously nearly a decade after Absalom and Achitophel, did not have a direct influence on the poem. But, as Steven Zwicker suggests, Locke's and Dryden's texts are usefully read in relation to each other (as well as to Filmer's Patriarcha) "as contemporary rhetorical and political events, as competing interpretations of the origins of government, the nature of royal authority, and the political meaning of paternity and patriarchy."(9) Locke is particularly useful in the context of the present discussion about maternity because he articulates an implicit tension in patriarchal theory that was already long evident, clarifying one position about motherhood in an ongoing debate about the relationship between political and familial power. In both De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651), for instance, Hobbes had already implied that fatherhood could not be the ultimate grounds upon which sovereignty is based because "the originall Dominion over children belongs to the Mother. . . . The birth followes the belly."(10) If in many political systems the father acquired control over the mother and young, that was simply the consequence of "Civill Law[s]" that privileged him, resulting from the fact that "for the most part Commonwealths have been erected by the Fathers, not by the Mothers of families."(11) Thus, paternal power was a sign of conquest but not unquestionable governmental entitlement. Fully understanding that any successful argument about the mother's natural authority could dismantle his defense of monarchy, Filmer challenged Hobbes in his Observations Concerning the Originall of Government (1652) by countering: "But we know that God at the creation gave the sovereignty to the man over the woman, as being the nobler and principal agent in generation."(12)
Significantly, Filmer here promotes not just the idea of paternal power, but also a specific theory of conception, maintaining that the father plays the more active role in generation and refusing "any acknowledgement of the capacity and creativity that is unique to women."(13) Hobbes was not alone in deconstructing such arguments by suggesting that the mother was the more important creator. John Hall in his Of Government and Obedience as They Stand Directed and Determined by Scripture and Reason (1654) reminds his readers that the mother "hath part of her own substance imployed in nourishment of the young whilst it is within her."(14) And Locke is even more explicit:
For no body can deny but that the Woman hath an equal share, if not the greater as nourishing the Child a long time in her own Body out of her own Substance. There it is fashion'd, and from her it receives the Materials and Principles of its Constitution; And it is so hard to imagine the rational Soul should presently Inhabit the yet unformed Embrio, as soon as the Father has done his part in the Act of Generation, that if it must be supposed to derive any thing from the Parents, it must certainly owe most to the Mother.(15)
There is something else at stake here in addition to the problem of governmental succession. Whether or not the authors were deliberately referring to specific medical theories (and Locke, originally trained in medicine, may well have been), the contrast between their accounts of generation is also characteristic of contemporary scientific debates. Filmer's emphasis on paternal agency evokes the then still popular Aristotelian notion that the female contributes the matter or passive principle in conception and the male the efficient or active one that creates the movement necessary for the embryo to develop.(16) Like a sculptor "the male model[s] or mould[s] this [female] material into a form like itself."(17) Aristotle himself explains: "the female always provides the material, the male that which fashions it. . . . While the body is from the female, it is the soul that is from the male."(18)
In his pathbreaking De Generatione Animalium (1651), William Harvey challenged Aristotle's emphasis on female subordination and argued that both the mother and father provided the efficient cause of generation.(19) It is unclear exactly how much influence he believed the female primordium had, but Harvey did argue that the material carried by the mother contained its own "power to develop," that was then ignited by the semen (by contagion, not direct contact).(20) Harvey also suggested that the womb functioned as a kind of brain that "conceived" the fetus like an idea, but this was not necessarily evidence of maternal power since Harvey considered the uterus an independent organism and also believed that the fetus's life did not depend on the mother's.(21) Those scientists who, unlike Harvey, favored preformation theory (believing that the offspring existed fully formed at conception) were much more willing to credit a single parent with the power to shape the child, insisting that "only one sex could donate the true embryo."(21) By the end of the seventeenth century there were two competing groups in this category of thinkers: the ovists, who argued that the whole embryo existed preformed in the ovary, and the animalculists, who claimed the same for the sperm.(23)
Locke's account of generation blends and revises a number of these medical theories. He never questions the Aristotelian idea that the woman supplies the matter for the embryo, but Locke does insist that it is primarily the work of pregnancy - and not the act of the sperm - that fashions the female material into a child. Contesting both the notion that the father gives the soul, and those who had begun to claim that the embryo exists fully formed in either the sperm or the egg, Locke emphasizes the process of development, reasoning that because the embryo grows in the mother, she most influences the child's outcome.(24)
Despite their very different scientific assumptions, both Filmer and Locke, like Hobbes and Hall, assume that discourses about the body and state overlap, and they recognize that any representation of conception is thus a political act. This sense of integration was obviously influenced by their own system of government, figured in the body of a ruler who passed his power through genetic descent. At the same time, though, recent historical events - most importantly the execution of Charles I - had proved that the royal succession could be broken.(25) The classic seventeenth-century patriarchalism that linked monarchal and paternal procreative power would not endure. As Carole Pateman explains, "Filmer's father . . . stands at the end of a very long history of traditional patriarchal argument in which the creation of political society has been seen as a masculine act of birth."(26) In challenging the logic of a political theory based on paternal procreation, Locke's arguments articulate and anticipate permanent changes in the understanding of the origin of government.
Absalom and Achitophel is situated at the crossroads of this change. As he seeks to develop a pragmatic and contemporary defense of monarchal authority, Dryden appropriates and discards various procreation narratives along the way, moving from a story of paternal conception reminiscent of Filmer's, to an account of maternal creativity that anticipates Locke's. When Dryden finally abandons the model of patriarchal generation at...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
