Romantic Motherhood

Ubiquitous in Romantic literature are issues of female social roles, including their rights, privileges, and political constrictions compared to men’s. More specific, though, and more common throughout the many poets and themes we have discussed this semester is the role of women as mothers. Whether serving as servants of God in Bürger’s “Lenora” or as fiery instigators of extreme emotion in Hemans’ “Wife of Asdrubal,” maternal figures are crucial to Romanticism. In the broader scope of the period’s literature, mothers acts as catalysts for change amidst threatening landscapes common to Romantic poets, and, though often times acting in the shadows, incite the principal action of the poem, providing moral and religious guidance to their surrounding characters.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the ideals of the French Revolution gradually declined in fervor and Napoleon Bonaparte gained immense power. In fact, in 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte became the First Life Consul of France, effectively making himself the most powerful man in Europe (http://english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono/). Romantic poets took this opportunity to comment critically on his character as an individual and a ruler. William Wordsworth’s piece from the same year, “I Griev’d For Buonaparte,” is especially noteworthy for his attack on the emperor’s upbringing. Indeed, he blames Bonaparte’s childhood, especially the way his mother raised him, for his overly militant characteristics. Wordsworth claims that “‘Tis not in battles that from youth we train the Governor who must be wise and good.” Rather, he suggests “Books, leisure, perfect freedom…” are more apt means of raising children effectively. As Aly posits in her post entitled “Silly Napoleon,” the poet brings forth “the idea that a true leader must work for the citizens of the nation, not for himself (much like a mother does everything for her children).” Thus, on one level Wordsworth attacks Bonaparte’s mother for failing to raise him correctly and on another, suggests that rulers must embody maternal characteristics, namely that of selfishness. Indeed, he claims that “Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood” are paramount, and “Wisdom doth live with children round her knees.” This Wisdom is referred to using a feminine pronoun, further contributing to the poet’s argument that virtue and intellect, though they can be present in both sexes, are inherently feminine. Aly continues to draw a parallel between this feminist invocation and the ideal nation as a reproductive one, saying that a nation with a maternal ruler will naturally be a “continually thriving” one, just as a good mother is the prototype for a giver of life.

Also prototypically Romantic is Wordsworth’s mention of female power in the final line of this piece. He claims, “this is the stalk/ True Power doth grow on,” suggesting that motherly characteristics are the one genuine means of reaching actual influence, that is, the antithesis of military violence Bonaparte allegedly embodied. A similar type of universal female power exists in Bürger’s “Lenora,” published before Wordsworth’s poem in 1796. Amidst the two Gothic extremes of violence and love present throughout the piece, Lenora’s mother embodies a sort of divine rationality as she urges her daughter to call on God rather than mourn the presumed death of her husband William. As a hysterical Lenora demands in a frenzy, “Go out, go out, my lampe of life…There is no mercye, sure, above!,” her stable mother begs God not to judge her and instructs her daughter to “Go take the holy sacrament/ So shall thy grief grow milde.” However, as S-Cat summarizes in her post entitled “Ladies’ Fairy Tales,” Lenora “deviates both spiritually and physically from [her] private sphere with [her] family in pursuit of other things such as love in Lenora's case.” No matter how much her mother encourages her to place her burdens on God and remain in her proper sphere, Lenora agrees to flee with her husband’s ghost, only to meet an accordingly gruesome death. Her mother’s didactic message and the greater message of the poem are revealed as the main character almost immediately proceeds “onward to the judgment seat,/ Thro’ myste and moonlight dreare.” By a “gostlie crewe,” then, she is led to death. Thus, as soon as Lenora deviates from her mother’s urgings, as S-Cat explains, she is doomed to a horrific death. Furthermore, just like Buonaparte’s mother in Wordsworth’s poem, the maternal figure in “Lenora” is highly responsible for influencing her offspring, though both fail to some degree in their efforts as their children ultimately meet grim fates.

 

Louis Boulanger’s depiction of Bürger’s poem aptly portrays the extreme effects of Lenora’s decision to disobey her mother’s suggestions through its immense darkness and physical depictions of gothic horrors. Rather than remain with her righteous and emotionally grounded mother, Lenora is thrown into utter darkness as Boulanger’s piece exhibits. Furthermore, her purity, which the artist depicts through his use of whiteness in forming Lenora’s figure, is engulfed in the darkness of the horse and the ominous figures that follow them.

A further invocation of religion maternalism appears in Percy Shelley’s Adonais, through which the poet memorializes John Keats. One crucial instance to understanding Romantic motherhood occurs in the beginning of Shelley’s piece. Here, the poet makes a religious comparison of Keats to the recently crucified Christ, whose virgin mother distantly mourns the death of her child. As Carly mentions in her post entitled “Mother and Son Imagery in Adonais,” lines like “Where wert thou mighty Mother, when he lay,/ When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies/ In darkness?” Carly quite accurately posits that Shelley’s diction here “suggests the sense of the divine, as well as a sense of universality as the Mother and Son of mankind.” This evokes a similar idea as the poets previously discussed, namely one of maternal duty to her offspring. As Adonais’ mother, Urania is obligated to “wake and weep,” Shelley is seemingly surprised that she is not on site to witness her son’s death. The implication is that women, despite their difficultly in creating a fulfilling life in the public sphere, are actually quite able to perform the work of the world. In fact, as Gelpi claims in Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity, the figure of Urania here “functions as a true guiding force in a social system constantly put at risk by men’s irresponsibility at best, depravity at worst” (Gelpi, 60). Women are moral guides for their offspring, and for the greater world for that matter, despite their confinement to private lives.

This calls to mind the artistic motif of the Pietà, or the mourning Madonna cradling the deceased Christ. Michelangelo’s rendering of this scene is especially akin to Shelley’s depiction of it in Adonais, although it was completed over three centuries before Shelley’s poem.  

 Particularly interesting in this Pietà is the physical equality between Christ and the Virgin Mary. Christ is just as large as his mother and, despite his adulthood, continues to depend on her for physical support. Through this physical parallel between the two figures, Michelangelo suggests that Mary is equally as important as her divine son. Similarly, in Adonais and many other poets we have discussed, the maternal figure shares equal if not greater importance as their offspring through their roles as catalysts for change in the latter.

Another example of maternal figures acting as responsible for their offspring’s moral character appears in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Particularly worth noting in discussing Romantic motherhood are the two poems, “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow,” the former published in 1789, the latter in 1796. As C. says in their post, “In Infant Joy, the baby finds happiness at the bosom of his mother, while in Infant Sorrow, the father is a source of distress.” Indeed, the former invokes charming feelings of maternal care and comfort, as the newborn’s mother “sing[s] the while/ Sweet joy befall thee.” On the other hand, “Infant Sorrow” opens with the baby’s parents groaning and weeping as the child leaps into “the dangerous world.” Here, the mother serves as a comforting shelter from the dangers of the world, as, “Bound and weary I thought best/ To sulk upon my mother’s breast.” In both poems, then, the maternal figure provides protection for her child, although the world is simply more threatening in “Infant Sorrow.”

      The constancy of Blake’s mother figures is further apparent in the coinciding illuminated plates for the two poems. The most telling plates of these are from Copy T from the British Museum.

 The mother in “Infant Joy” wears a blue dress and, enclosed inside a budding flower, shields the baby from the world, while in “Infant Sorrow,” the blue hue of her dress is much darker and the surrounding nursery is red and fiery. Blake’s choice of color in the mother’s dress invokes the religious motif of the Virgin Mary’s blue mantel as a symbol of divine purity. Thus, although the world around the mother and child becomes more harsh in the latter plate, the mother retains her protective spirit as an almost divine shield for her child.

Heretofore, maternal figures appear as grounded and steadfast moral guides for their children. To be sure, though, this designation is not necessarily consistent throughout Romantic poetry in its entirety. On the other hand, some examples of Romantic mothers serve to incite extreme emotions, though retaining their didactic character all the while. Felicia Hemans’ “The Wife of Asdrubal” serves as an apt example of this diverging role of the maternal. At the time of its publication, 1819, feminist sentiment had gained considerable momentum. Mary Wollstonecraft had published Vindication on the Rights of Woman in 1792 and efforts to provide more adequate education for females were underway (http://english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono/).  According to the increasing fervor among women at the time, Hemans’ maternal character in “The Wife of Asdrubal” exhibits extreme power through her “daring spirit, in its woes elate, Mightier than death, untameable by fate.” Her opposition to her corrupt husband result in her killing her own children in order to spare them from being burned alive. Although this may appear as a complete abandonment of maternal duties, Aly points out in her post that “By acting unmaternally she is being maternal” since, in killing them, their “woes and passion soon shall be at rest.” Furthermore, as the windhover claims, “Hemans recognizes the courage it takes to perform such an act, and she defends the wife's efforts” to spare her children. Ultimately, Hemans makes a profound statement through this piece about the necessity for mothers to act rashly in order to protect their offspring. Thus, though Asdrubal’s wife is depicted as an emotionally unstable and frenzied woman, her maternal sacrifice is at the root of her extreme actions.

One counterargument to this appears in Romantic Maternity and the Body Politic, where Kipp posits, “many popular writers of the period, suggested not only that maternal sympathy frequently rendered women sacrificial victims, but that sympathy might be transmuted in pathological obsession, turning mothers themselves into oppressive victimizers” (Kipp, 55). In the case of Hemans’ piece, however, the maternal figure is the victim of her husband’s oppression and must kill her own children to protect them from the same threat. Her character is not pathological, but rather simply maternal as her extreme reaction to oppression seeks to teach the audience that vindication against such male oppression is acceptable and even necessary in the present society.

Though Hemans’ maternal figure stands distanced from the many other examples of Romantic motherhood we have discussed this semester through her appalling and rash emotion, all of these figures have a certain didactic purpose. Though the mothers of “Lenora” and “I Griev’d For Buonaparte” ultimately fail in providing moral guidance for their offspring, Romantic motherhood clearly involved having the best interest of their children in mind through exhibiting unprecedented selflessness toward them. In the prototypical Romantic style, all of these works feature a destructive, dangerous, and morally corrupt world whose wrath to which females seem especially vulnerable. However, in order to counteract this, mothers take an active and protective stance, though often veiled in societal structure, in forming the moral framework for their children and the poets’ wider audiences.

Bibliography

Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth. Shelley's Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.

Kipp, Julie. Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print

British Literature, 1780-1830. Ed. Mellor and Matlak. Harcourt Brace, 1996.