Stillborn Plots: Revolution, Imagination, and the Failure of Romanticism - UC Press Journals
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Stillborn Plots:
Revolution, Imagination,
and the Failure
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of Romanticism
CLAYTON CARLYLE TARR
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain.
—Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to Her Book” (1678)
Dead children, like dead men, can tell no tales; . . . still-births are
occasional and unavoidable occurrences in the practice of the
most consummate professors of the art.
—David D. Davis, Elements of Operative Midwifery (1825)
I
n April 1817, John Wilson Croker pub-
lished his infamously scathing criticism
of Lady Morgan’s France (1817) in the Quarterly Review.1 Mor-
gan’s account of the nascent Bourbon Restoration was
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 74, No. 4, pp. 415–447, ISSN: 0891–9356, online ISSN:
1067–8352, © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through
the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.
edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2020.74.4.415.
1
Sydney Owenson (1781–1859) became Lady Morgan following her marriage to
Sir Thomas Charles Morgan in 1812.
415416 nin e teenth-century literatu re
“vagueness, bombast, and affectation.”2 Croker reacted with
such vitriol, in great part, because Morgan had taken issue with
Croker’s negative review of her novel Woman: or, Ida of Athens
(1809). The back-and-forth extended to Morgan’s next work,
titled Italy (1821), which was banned in several Italian territo-
ries, but called a “fearless and excellent work” by Lord Byron.3
Croker, reviewing Italy in July 1821, refused to provide either
excerpts or summary, claiming that “the work, notwithstanding
the obstetric skill of Sir Charles Morgan, (who, we believe, is
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a manmidwife,) ‘dropt all but still-born from the press.’”4 Cro-
ker’s metaphor suggests that Morgan’s husband, who wrote the
appendix, helped deliver a text that was lifeless from the
moment of its publication. That Sir Thomas Charles Morgan
was a physician lowers the criticism to the level of personal
attack, particularly through the dual meaning of appendix as
textual and anatomical; the latter (as in the vermiform appen-
dix or cæcal) was defined as an appendage whose “uses have
never yet been ascertained.”5
At least since Alexander Pope’s claim that “All, all but
Truth, drops dead-born from the Press,” critics had compared
unsuccessful literary productions to stillbirths.6 But Romantic-
era reviewers exercised the metaphor with the most frequency
and enthusiasm.7 In 1827, one reviewer noted: “It has been said
2
[John Wilson Croker], rev. of France, by Lady Morgan, Quarterly Review, 17 (1817),
260. Croker divides the review into subheadings: “Bad Taste,” “Bombast and Non-
sense,” “Blunders,” “Ignorance of French Language and Manners,” “General Ignor-
ance,” “Jacobinism,” “Falsehood,” “Licentiousness,” and “Impiety.”
3
Lord Byron, Appendix to The Two Foscari, An Historical Tragedy (1821), in Lord
Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann et al., 7 vols. (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1980–93), VI, 222.
4
[John Wilson Croker], rev. of Italy, by Lady Morgan, Quarterly Review, 25 (1821),
530.
5
Samuel Foart Simmons, Elements of Anatomy and the Anicam Oeconomy. From the
French of M. Person (London: J. Wilkie, 1775), p. 170.
6
Alexander Pope, Epilogue to The Satires (1738), in The Poems of Alexander Pope: A
One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text, with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt
(London: Methuen and Co., 1963), p. 702, l. 226.
7
The examples are too numerous to list, but noteworthy specimens are worth
including. The Imperial Magazine used the metaphor most frequently. In 1823, one
reviewer praised a text: “it is not a literary abortion, and . . . it has not ‘dropped still-born
from the press.’ In its aspect it looks healthful and promising; but time, which brings all
things to maturity, can alone demonstrate its strength” ([Anon.], rev. of Lectures on thestillborn plots 417
that no criticism can be more severe than that which an-
nounces a work ‘to have dropped still-born from the press.’”8
Many reviewers extended the parturition metaphor to detailed
and macabre ends. In 1815, for example, a critic for the
Monthly Review lambasted a recent stage parody: “all is cold and
comfortless, feeble, straggling, and uncompressed: labouring
to be something, and yet turning out nothing; striving to pro-
duce a healthy vigorous offspring, yet bringing forth at last,
with pain and anguish, a still-born deformity.”9 The frequency
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of the metaphor in Romantic-era reviews is perhaps a reaction
to the propensity of Romantic writers to conceive their texts as
children: look no further than Mary Shelley’s “hideous
progeny,” Frankenstein (1818).10 Unlike Anne Bradstreet’s per-
sonified book, however, these texts were often born dead—
a trope that Shelley enlarges to horrific ends.
-
Art of Writing, by J. Carstairs, Imperial Magazine, 5 [1823], 766). Seven years later, the
same periodical warned that the current “age” was “so overstocked with poetry” that
“many volumes which we could mention have dropped still-born from the press; and
several others, after uttering a feeble cry, have retired silently into the shades of obliv-
ion, where they enjoy undisturbed repose” ([Anon.], rev. of The Drama of Nature, by
Joseph Mitchell Burton, Imperial Magazine, 12 [1830], 666). The same year, another
writer observed of the “literature of Leadenhall Street” that “the occasional romance
falling still-born from the press, is now the only proof that it still lives” ([Anon.], rev. of
Perkin Warbeck, by Alexander Campbell, Edinburgh Literary Journal, 29 May 1830, p. 309).
In 1828 a reviewer complained, “some of the best books that appear drop still-born
from the press” ([Anon.], “On Playing Punch,” New Monthly Magazine, 23 [1828], 379).
Another writer in 1835 lamented the state of the “gentle art” of poetry, in which “verses
come still-born from the press, and a canto, now-a-days, is avoided like a country
cousin” ([Anon.], rev. of The Avenged Bride, by Alexander Markham, Dublin University
Magazine, 6 [1835], 164).
8
[Anon.], rev. of The Age Reviewed, a Satire, Imperial Magazine, 9 (1827), 766.
9
[Anon.], rev. of The Lay of the Poor Fiddler, Monthly Review, 78 (1815), 215.
10
See Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1831),
in Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism. Second Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter
(New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1996, 2012), p. 169. Alan Bewell argues that Shelley
“made obstetrics the master-code of her aesthetics” (Bewell, “An Issue of Monstrous
Desire: Frankenstein and Obstetrics,” Yale Journal of Criticism, 2, no. 1 [1988], 107). Nicola
Healey observes that Frankenstein is “one of the most infamous obstetric metaphors in
literature” (Healey, Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship
[New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012], p. 37). Ellen Moers has called the novel “a birth
myth” (Moers, Literary Women [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976], p. 92); while San-
dra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar consider it Shelley’s “birth myth—her myth of origins”
(Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination, 2d ed. [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000], p. 224).418 nin e teenth-century literatu re
By examining stillbirth scenes in Romantic literature,
I demonstrate in this essay that the period’s authors expressed
the failure of both revolutionary and imaginative ideals
through representations of children who died either in the
womb or shortly after birth. The dual modes of stillborn
plots—metaphors of failed revolution and imagination—gen-
erally divide along generic lines. For Romantic novelists, still-
birth scenes signal the defeat of radical theories.11 Characters
with grand—though typically rushed or mismanaged—designs
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face the disappointment of their conceptions through stillborn
children. This is the case in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy; or, The Ruin
on the Rock (1795) and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, or the
Mother and Daughter: A Tale (1805). Romantic poets, in contrast,
engage stillbirth as a metaphor to express the failure of the
imagination. In William Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” (1798)
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (1817), indirect
references to stillborn children symbolize the inability of the
poet’s imagination to conceive fully realized textual products.
This generic division between stillbirth scenes in novels and
poems might also be divided along gender lines. Although
anomalies exist, the tendency is that women writers represent
stillbirth to signal the defeat of revolutionary principles, while
men evoke stillbirth to indicate the failure of the poetic imag-
ination.12 In either case, these metaphors of failed parturition
demonstrate Romantic writers’ fascination with contemporary
obstetrics, which encouraged them to imagine their texts
11
Jennifer Golightly observes that “images of reproduction” in early Romantic
novels “serve as a kind of indicator of the novel’s attitudes towards society and the
possibility of reforming that society” (Golightly, “Reproduction in British Women’s
Novels of the 1790s,” in The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth
Century, ed. Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto
Press, 2015], pp. 279–80).
12
Two such anomalies are worth noting, though neither seems particularly con-
cerned with either revolution or imagination. In Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), the
Prioress lies about Agnes’s death, telling her brother Lorenzo that “she was deliver-
ed . . . of a still-born Child, whom She immediately followed to the Grave” (Lewis, The
Monk, ed. James Kinsley and Howard Anderson [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980],
p. 221). And in Canto 4 of Byron’s Don Juan (1821), Haidee dies “but not alone; she
held within / A second principle of life” (Don Juan, in Complete Poetical Works, V, 225, ll.
553–54).stillborn plots 419
through stillborn plots—offspring that were conceived and ges-
tated, but ultimately born lifeless.
The frequency of stillborn plots in Romantic literature is
perhaps a reaction to the increasing attention that stillbirth
rates and remedies commanded in late-eighteenth-century
medical texts.13 Manuals on the practice of midwifery had been
published since the sixteenth century, beginning with Euchar-
ius Rösslin’s Der Rosengarten (1513). Midwives were important
figures during the birthing process, not only assisting women
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during the delivery and the anxious first days of motherhood,
but also serving as a privacy barrier between the sexes. Over the
course of the next two centuries, however, the practice and the
actors shifted dramatically, as men began to operate as mid-
wives. Adrian Wilson attributes the change to “childbirth
bec[oming] part of medicine” between 1720 and 1770.14
Another factor was the distrust of female midwives, who were
often accused of aiding abortions, disposing of dead fetuses,
and shuttering illegitimate children. One final cause for the
shift was the increasing trust that the medical community com-
manded; families became comfortable with educated men,
rather than practiced women.15 Eve Keller cautions against such
readings of a “gender conflict,” noting that “the threat posed by
the emergence of male midwifery was understood to be a threat
to the preserve of midwifery as a distinct profession.”16 Being a
woman midwife, moreover, did not mean exercising ignorance
13
In 1792, Alexander Hamilton, professor of midwifery at Edinburgh University,
outlined (with 1809 revisions from his son James) a complex system to restore still-
births based on “three different states” of pulsation in the umbilical cord (see Alex-
ander Hamilton, A Treatise on the Management of Female Complaints, 6th ed., revised James
Hamilton [Edinburgh: Peter Hill, 1809], p. 224).
14
Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660–1770
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), p. 3.
15
Alan Bewell observes that men “asserted their dominance over traditional mid-
wives, first, by claiming that the profession required extensive medical expertise, and
second, through their exclusive right to use surgical instruments, such as hooks,
crotchets, extractors, and crutches, in delivery” (“An Issue of Monstrous Desire,” p. 107).
16
Eve Keller, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early
Modern England (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2007), pp. 160, 163. Complaints
about the rise of man-midwifery were frequent, including The Danger and Immodesty of the
Present Too General Custom of Unnecessarily Employing Men-Midwives (London: J. Wilkie,
1772).420 nin e teenth-century literatu re
or denial of current medical practices. As Isobel Grundy points
out, Sarah Stone, author of the influential A Complete Practice of
Midwifery (1737), was “both a champion of her sex and a disciple
and advocate of the Enlightenment.”17 Regardless of gender
dynamics, by the end of the eighteenth century, “midwifery had
advanced so quickly that it could reasonably claim a position as
an academic discipline on a par with physic and surgery.”18
Increased attention to obstetrics by medical professionals
meant that maternal deaths and stillbirths gradually decreased
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throughout the eighteenth century. Robert Woods and Chris
Galley observe that the stillbirth rate was 56 out of 1,000 births
between 1700 and 1724, while the rate fell to 49 between 1775
and 1799.19 (The maternal mortality rate dropped from 13.4
percent to 9.0 percent during the same period.)20 Irvine
Loudon attributes these changing rates to the “number, status,
skill, and efficiency of English midwives” (Death in Childbirth,
p. 161). Improved midwifery skills, coupled with detailed med-
ical knowledge of the gravid uterus, meant that the eighteenth
century witnessed a “phenomenal growth in obstetric knowl-
edge, teaching, and practice” (Loudon, Death in Childbirth,
p. 171). These advancements went hand-in-hand with the
development of parturition statistics, which were gathered pri-
marily from lying-in hospitals, themselves “notorious as sources
of puerperal fever and poor maternal survival.”21 For the first
time, unofficial reports on birth anomalies were recorded and
disseminated. Stillbirths were a particular concern for midwives
17
Isobel Grundy, “Sarah Stone: Enlightenment Midwife,” in Medicine in the
Enlightenment, ed. Roy Porter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), p. 129.
18
Irvine Loudon, Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternal Care and
Maternal Mortality 1800–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 171.
19
E. Anthony Wrigley in his estimates begins with a higher stillbirth rate in the
seventeenth century, so the decline he observes at the beginning of the nineteenth
century is more dramatic than the numbers Woods estimates. For more on the dis-
crepancy, see Richard Smith and Jim Oeppen, “Place and Status as Determinants of
Infant Mortality in England c. 1550–1837,” in Infant Mortality: A Continuing Social
Problem, ed. Eilidh Garrett, Chris Galley, Nicola Shelton, and Robert Woods (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006), pp. 53–78.
20
See Robert Woods and Chris Galley, Mrs Stone & Dr Smellie: Eighteenth-Century
Midwives and Their Patients (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2014), p. 30.
21
Robert Woods, Death before Birth: Fetal Health and Mortality in Historical Perspective
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), p. 90.stillborn plots 421
and medical professionals alike because they were subjects—
and potentially productive citizens—that were delivered lifeless
at the dawn of life. In addition, stillbirths cursed women from
all walks of life. In the early nineteenth century, two shocking
maternal deaths from stillbirth deliveries captured the public
consciousness: Princess Charlotte of Wales died 6 November
1817, and the Scottish novelist Mary Brunton died 7 December
1818.22 These deaths signal the beginning of a disappointing
period for the progress of obstetric practice. As Loudon ob-
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serves, the nineteenth century witnessed more “stagnation than
progress in maternal care” (Death in Childbirth, p. 172).
In 1773, Thomas Percival made the first sustained argu-
ment for civil registration, primarily to encourage recording
causes of death. Neither parish registers nor Bills of Mortality
could supply “the most important advantages, medical, politi-
cal, and moral.”23 Percival was especially concerned with track-
ing stillbirths: “It is of importance that the still born children,
and those who die before baptism, should also be registered;
and the midwives should be desired to deliver an account of
them. Perhaps the sextons may assist in ascertaining their num-
ber, as they are usually interred in church yards, or other public
burial grounds” (Percival, “Proposals,” p. 244).24 Percival’s ef-
forts were largely ignored: England and Wales did not adopt
civil registration until 1837, just months after Victoria took the
22
In Canto 4 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), Byron eulogizes Princess Char-
lotte: “lovely, with maternal grief / She clasps a babe, to whom her breast yields no
relief” (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, A Romaunt, in Complete Poetical Works, II, 180, ll. 1502–
3). Early biographers claim that the poet Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) was born pre-
maturely, while her twin sister was stillborn.
23
Thomas Percival, “Proposals for Establishing More Accurate and Comprehensive
Bills of Mortality in Manchester,” in his Essays Medical and Experimental, 2 vols. (London:
Joseph Johnson, 1773), II, 239.
24
In 1865, William Farr observed that “there is a great temptation to inter the
bodies of children living only a short time as still-born” (Farr, “Letter to the Registrar
General on the Causes of Death in England,” in Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the
Registrar-General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in England [London: George E. Eyre
and William Spottiswoode, 1865], p. 182). Robert Woods notes that stillbirths were not
required to be certified in England and Wales until 1874 and were not registered until
1927. Before then, “it is likely that large numbers of stillborn were disposed of without
formal certification” (Woods, Death before Birth, p. 69). In several European countries,
Woods notes, “registered live births were those infants born with vital signs (respiration
especially) and who survived for at least 1–3 days” (Death before Birth, p. 77).422 nin e teenth-century literatu re
throne. Due to the lack of centralized registration, stillbirth
statistics were usually confined to city, parish, or even individual
hospital records. Significantly, many European countries did
not differentiate between babies that were born dead or that
died within the first several hours. Both were labeled stillborn,
or sometimes “dead-born,” which has made gathering concrete
numbers difficult. This muddled definition also led to
“emergency baptism[s],” which were undertaken so that the
bodies could be buried in the consecrated grounds of a church-
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yard (Woods, Death before Birth, p. 78).25 In 1781, Robert Bland
denounced “the great mortality of the human species, particu-
larly in infancy,” based on four years of statistics gathered from
Westminster General Dispensary. Bland ultimately came to the
conclusion that “1 in 23 . . . were dead-born” out of a total of
nearly two thousand births.26 Thomas Denman, author of the
popular An Introduction to the Practice of Midwifery (1794), com-
piled birth statistics at Middlesex Hospital, noting that “310
were still born” out of 8,636 births.27 The percentages are
remarkably similar, and far better than the nineteen fetal
deaths out of forty-seven births that Sarah Stone mentions half
a century earlier in A Complete Practice of Midwifery (1737).
Although stillbirth rates fell throughout the eighteenth
century, the decline was slow, and the percentage remained
high. Woods estimates that the numbers went from roughly five
percent at the beginning of the century to four percent by the
early nineteenth century.28 Eighteenth-century midwifery texts
routinely promoted new techniques and new tools (namely the
25
In 1804, William Bingley asserts that the north side of the churchyard became
“a kind of refuse spot, only paupers, still-born infants, or persons guilty of some crime,
were buried there” (Bingley, North Wales: Including Its Scenery, Antiquities, Customs, and
Some Sketches of Its Natural History, 2 vols. [London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1804],
II, 289).
26
Robert Bland, Some Calculations on the Number of Accidents or Deaths Which Happen in
Consequence of Parturition (London: J. Nichols, 1781), pp. 4, 11.
27
Thomas Denman, An Introduction to the Practice of Midwifery, 2 vols. (London: J.
Johnson, 1795), II, 434. According to the author of an essay on Bartholomew Mosse, an
eminent eighteenth-century Irish surgeon, the stillbirth rate in Dublin between 1757
and 1846 was “about one to seventeen” ([Anon.], “Illustrious Physicians and Surgeons
in Ireland. No. II. Bartholomew Mosse,” Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, 2
[1846], 595).
28
See Woods, Death before Birth, p. 100.stillborn plots 423
forceps) to deal with abnormal deliveries.29 Accompanying
more knowledge on stillbirths was increased suspicion concern-
ing the mother’s role in the death of the baby.30 Courts were
obligated to find evidence whether the child’s death was natu-
ral or infanticide. The “lung test,” which began in the early
eighteenth century and gained popularity in the middle dec-
ades, required that the dead child’s lungs be removed and
placed in water. If the lungs floated, it was proof that the child
had been murdered; if they sank, the child had been stillborn,
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and the mother was acquitted. The practice not only resembles
the “ordeal by water” allegedly deployed to identify witches, but
also “exemplifies the novel concern with the body as a source of
evidence.”31 Samuel Farr’s Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, first
published in 1788, lists twenty-three “signs by which we can in
some measure determine that an infant was brought into the
world dead.”32 Lungs that were denser, redder, and that sank in
water were evidence of stillbirth. By the early nineteenth cen-
tury, the procedure had been largely discredited, but debates
continued over the point at which a child was considered via-
ble. In 1832, Michael Ryan outlined the laws concerning
whether a child was stillborn: in England and Wales, the child
was alive if it “evince[d] the slightest voluntary motion,” while
in Scotland the child had to cry for proof of life.33
Legislation concerning infant viability is crucial to under-
standing stillbirth plots in Romantic literature. Ryan notes that
English law “makes no distinction between the murder of an
29
Adrian Wilson understands the spread of male midwifery as the result of “fashion
and the forceps,” the latter of which became widely available in the 1730s (The Making
of Man-Midwifery, p. 3).
30
Lisa Forman Cody notes a 1680 Act that “reassert[ed] Parliament’s 1624 law that
any single woman claiming her child was stillborn should be assumed to have actually
murdered it until she could prove her innocence” (Cody, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Sci-
ence, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005],
p. 61).
31
Mark Jackson, New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in
Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1996), p. 93; see
also Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (London and
New York: Routledge, 1889), p. 113.
32
[Samuel Farr], Elements of Medical Jurisprudence (London: T. Becket, 1788), p. 55.
33
Michael Ryan, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea,
1832), p. 148.424 nin e teenth-century literatu re
infant not viable, that cannot live, and one that is viable,” but
nonetheless argues that “a woman who destroys her infant not
likely to live . . . is assuredly less criminal than one who destroys it
at a later period” (A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, p. 137).
Romantic stillbirths are often immediately preceded by plots
that place mothers in desperate, irredeemable situations—ones
in which the child’s hope for prosperity and happiness, if not
survival, is unlikely. Tilottama Rajan reads the stillbirth of Sibella
Valmont’s child in Secresy as “a willed infanticide, a refusal to
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cede her unborn desire to existing discourses of shame, betrayal,
or repentance.”34 This interpretation suggests that Sibella’s dis-
traught mind directly leads to the stillbirth of her child. William
Smellie, author of the popular Treatise on the Theory and Practice of
Midwifery (1752), asserts that “the fœtus may suffer death from
diseases and accidents that happen to the mother; from violent
passions of joy, fear, or anger.”35 The potential for a woman’s
beliefs, desires, and passions to generate divergent physical fea-
tures—ranging from birthmarks to “monstrous” deformities—
led to a contentious debate between London physicians Daniel
Turner and James Blondel in the 1720s.36
By the late eighteenth century, the concept of the
“maternal imagination,” which claimed that the pregnant wo-
man’s mind influenced her child’s development, had contin-
ued to gain credence, despite the misgivings of midwifery
professionals such as Denman. In 1788, for example, Samuel
Farr argues that the “imagination has a great power over the
body of a female, especially during gestation” (Elements of Med-
ical Jurisprudence, p. 18).37 Jenifer Buckley observes that the
34
Tilottama Rajan, “Dis-Figuring Reproduction: Natural History, Community, and
the 1790s Novel,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 2, no. 3 (2002), 228.
35
W[illiam] Smellie, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (London: D.
Wilson, 1752), p. 166.
36
See Philip K. Wilson, “Eighteenth-Century ‘Monsters’ and Nineteenth-Century
‘Freaks’: Reading the Maternally Marked Child,” Literature and Medicine, 21 (2002), 5.
Marie-Hélène Huet argues that “the monster . . . erased paternity and proclaimed the
dangerous power of the female imagination” (Huet, Monstrous Imagination [Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993], p. 1).
37
Samuel Farr maintains in his 1787 preface that the text is a translation and an
abridgement of a work by Johann Friedrich Faselius published in 1767 (see Elements of
Medical Jurisprudence, p. iii).stillborn plots 425
“maternal imagination manifests an uneasy sense of transgres-
sion, as the private area of reproduction, feminine power and
female genitalia is exposed.”38 Making women the sole agents
responsible for the outcome of their offspring was another way
that men gained control over the processes of pregnancy and
birth.39 Paul-Gabriel Boucé labels the proponents of the mater-
nal imagination as “imaginationists,” who “thought that they
held the carnal proof . . . that Man is possessed of a tiny fraction
of mysterious freedom and power over his own body.”40 Still-
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birth plots in Romantic literature make a similar claim: char-
acters who have been constrained, ostracized, or dehumanized
give birth to stillborn children, suggesting that subjects preg-
nant with grand aspirations ultimately produce dead forms.
Romantic novelists, including Eliza Fen-
wick and Amelia Opie, composed stillborn plots to represent
the failure of revolutionary movements in England. The French
Revolution promised a new age of egalitarian policy based on
republican principles rather than monarchial whims. Jon Mee
reads the radical movement in England as a cultural phenom-
enon decades in the making.41 But the events of 1789 might be
considered the spark that ignited the radical fire of the early
1790s. Friedrich Schlegel, using language resembling a sort of
disastrous parturition that results in a deformed product,
describes the Revolution’s complex dichotomy:
38
Jenifer Buckley, Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The
Maternal Imagination (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 6–7.
39
Meghan L. Burke argues that “men’s physical penetration of the secret world of
the birthing room” demonstrates “their hopes of ultimately infiltrating the secret
workings of women’s reproductive capacity” (Burke, “Making Mother Obsolete: Eliza
Fenwick’s Secresy and the Masculine Appropriation of Maternity,” Eighteenth-Century
Fiction, 21 [2009], 359).
40
Paul-Gabriel Bouc é, “Imagination, Pregnant Women, and Monsters, in
Eighteenth-Century England and France,” in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment,
ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1987), p. 96.
41
See Jon Mee, “Political Radical Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to British
Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s, ed. Pamela Clemit (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 2011), p. 117.426 nin e teenth-century literatu re
The French Revolution may be regarded as the greatest and most
remarkable phenomenon in the history of states, as an almost
universal earthquake, an immeasurable flood in the political
world; or as a prototype of revolutions, as the absolute revolution
per se. . . . But one can also see it as the center and apex of the
French national character, where all its paradoxes are thrust
together; as the most frightful grotesque of the age, where the
most profound prejudices and their most brutal punishments
are mixed up in a fearful chaos and woven as bizarrely as possible
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into a monstrous human tragicomedy.42
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
prompted passionate reactions from liberal activists, including
Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. But the bloody after-
math of the French Revolution ultimately triggered reactionary
conservatism by both the English Parliament and private citi-
zens who once styled themselves as revolutionaries. In Biogra-
phia Literaria (1817), Coleridge distills the context of these
anxious reactions:
The youthful enthusiasts who, flattered by the morning rainbow
of the French revolution, had made a boast of expatriating their
hopes and fears, now disciplined by the succeeding storms and
sobered by increase of years, had been taught to prize and honor
the spirit of nationality as the best safeguard of national inde-
pendence, and this again as the absolute pre-requisite and nec-
essary basis of popular rights.43
The combined forces of the monarchy and the Prime Minister
sought to strangle dissident voices. William Pitt’s “campaign of
repression” motivated both the 1792 Royal Proclamation
against Seditious Writings and the 1794 Treason Trials.44 As
a result of the latter, three radical activists were charged with
high treason, becoming martyrs for the revolutionary cause.
42
Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, in Friedrich Schlegel’s “ Lucinde” and the
Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 233.
43
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary
Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols., vol. 7 of The Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983, I, 190.
44
See H. T. Dickinson, “The Political Context,” in The Cambridge Companion to
British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s, p. 11.stillborn plots 427
Thomas Hardy, founder of the London Corresponding Society,
was arrested on 12 May 1794 and spent six months in prison.
During his incarceration, Hardy’s wife died following a still-
birth. Her heart-wrenching final letter to him, composed on
27 August 1794, concludes mid-sentence: “My dear, you have it
not in——.”45 This letter encapsulates the way that stillbirth
intersects with the failure of revolution. Both Fenwick’s Secresy
and Opie’s Adeline Mowbray feature heroines whose unwavering
commitment to revolutionary ideals encourages them to enter
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into tragic relationships with men who are either unwilling or
unable to provide support. The stillbirths that both women
suffer represent the failure of revolution in the hands of mis-
guided, overzealous women who put faith in the promises of
dishonorable, cowardly men.
Fenwick’s Secresy inaugurates Romanticism’s engagement
with stillbirth as a metaphor for the failure of revolution. Sibel-
la Valmont experiences “utter seclusion” in the castle of her
secretive, tyrannical uncle, George Valmont.46 Clement Mont-
gomery, Valmont’s illegitimate son, develops a quick bond with
Sibella, and the lovers form a verbal contract of marriage.
Whereas Clement understands the contract as pretense, how-
ever, Sibella considers it binding. The sham marriage leads to
the principal secret of Secresy—Sibella’s pregnancy. Shortly
after Sibella learns that Clement has married another woman,
she experiences a stillbirth: “She was conveyed to her friend’s
chamber; and in three hours delivered of a dead child” (Secresy,
p. 347). Sibella herself dies shortly thereafter, full of regret,
telling her friend Caroline Ashburn: “My uncle’s secrets could
have done me but a temporary harm, it was mine own secrets
destroyed me” (p. 358). Isobel Grundy notes Secresy’s “world of
idealism,” which she traces to Fenwick’s own radical principles
drawn from her association with Mary Wollstonecraft.47 That
45
Thomas Hardy, Memoir of Thomas Hardy, Founder of, and Secretary to, the London
Corresponding Society (London: James Ridgway, 1832), p. 38.
46
Eliza Fenwick, Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock, ed. Isobel Grundy (Peterborough,
Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), p. 40. Further references are to this edition and
appear in the text.
47
See Isobel Grundy, introduction to Secresy, ed. Grundy, p. 25. Fenwick helped to
nurse Wollstonecraft through the birth of Mary Godwin and the subsequent four-day
illness until Wollstonecraft’s death on 10 September 1797.428 nin e teenth-century literatu re
Sibella’s resolve would be so thoroughly crushed in the novel
suggests that Fenwick presaged the impending failure of revo-
lutionary ideals in the face of not only the tyranny represented
by figures like Valmont, but also the apathy, ignorance, and
complicity embodied by other characters.
One result of Sibella’s seclusion is that she functions as
a tabula rasa on which other characters write their own values
and insecurities. That her name is a corruption of “Isabella”—
meaning that she is missing an “I”—suggests that she is shaped
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not only by Valmont’s strict regimen, but also by the characters
who covertly access her. She considers her marriage to Clement
another step on her path to freedom, and their child represents
the productivity of her new independence. Meghan Burke
writes that “Sibella’s pregnancy is an embodiment of an intan-
gible yet more powerful ‘creation,’ that of female agency and
community” (“Making Mother Obsolete,” p. 357). But Clem-
ent’s infidelity—or, in Sibella’s mind, his bigamy—dashes these
hopes. The dispersal of Sibella’s revolutionary dreams means
the death of her child. Catherine Packham observes that Sibel-
la’s stillborn child “offer[s] a negative meaning” and “signals the
deathly, fruitless outcome of [Valmont’s] various tyrannies.”48
Tilottama Rajan similarly argues that “the child cathects both
the potential and the trauma of a Romantic idealism that must
inevitably miscarry” (“Dis-Figuring Reproduction,” p. 226). The
egalitarian embryos of the French Revolution, for example, ulti-
mately gestated into the monstrous Reign of Terror. William
Hazlitt’s description of the Revolution as the “remote but inev-
itable result of the invention of the art of printing” implicates
promiscuous texts in both the hopeful uprising and its bloody
aftermath.49 Ambiguous language sparks misshapen revolu-
tions. In Secresy, Caroline Ashburn’s blustery letters oxygenate
Sibella’s unchecked imaginative fire, and the “fatal contract”
between Sibella and Clement remains an oral pledge, missing
48
Catherine Packham, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 191.
49
William Hazlitt, The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte Volume One (1828), in The
Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent,
1930–34), XIII, 38.stillborn plots 429
the precise legal language of official clerical paperwork
(Secresy, p. 358).50
That Sibella and “sibyl” are nearly homophones is further
telling. The Cumaean Sibyl reads the future on leaves, whereas
Sibella’s future is determined by letters. And yet Fenwick
remarks in the novel’s dedication that “a letter is a sort of cor-
ruptible substance” (Secresy, p. 37). Indeed, Sibella fades from
the text while her pregnancy comes to full term. Whereas she
writes only four letters in the entirety of volumes 2 and 3, Janetta
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Lundy, perhaps the novel’s most minor character, writes
six. Readers lose their heroine during her most vulnerable
time because her narrative identity is tied to the letters she
sends. Rajan’s analysis of the novel’s epistolary form is signif-
icant: “collectively these letters construct communication as
incomplete, decentered, and inaccessible to any totalizing
hermeneutic” (“Dis-Figuring Reproduction,” pp. 226–27).
Without the coalescing power of a narrator, the scattered
leaves of Secresy engender a fragmentary structure that functions
as a formal stillbirth. If Sibella is a sibyl, then her prophecy is
doom. The prospect of a revolutionary future, represented by
her child and her radical letters to Caroline, dies under the
influence of men who idealize her form and corrupt her sub-
stance. Her story becomes a stillborn plot.
The tragic conclusion of Secresy provides a particularly
despondent representation of revolutionary ruin. Amelia
Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, although potentially more hopeful in
its closing scenes, similarly draws on death to represent the
failure of revolution. Adeline, the novel’s intelligent and stub-
born heroine, faces the defeat of her radical ideals through
a series of traumas, including the stillbirth of her child, a disas-
trous marriage, and a bout with smallpox. Adeline Mowbray has
been read as a roman à clef that criticizes the 1790s revolutionary
groups with which Opie had formerly associated. In particular,
William Godwin’s 1797 marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft was
considered hypocritical given Godwin’s earlier criticism of the
50
For more on Secresy and the 1753 Marriage Act, see Eve Tavor Bannet, The
Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 94–124.430 nin e teenth-century literatu re
institution. “The abolition of marriage,” Godwin writes in Polit-
ical Justice (1793), “will be attended with no evils.”51 Yet the
association remains relatively tenuous, given not only that Ade-
line never marries Glenmurray, the Godwin-figure in the novel,
but also that her subsequent capitulation to marry Berrendale
proves disastrous.52 Nevertheless, examining the circumstances
of Adeline Mowbray’s central stillbirth might demonstrate that
Opie, at the very least, had her old associates in mind when she
composed the novel.53
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Adeline Mowbray begins by tracing the generational discre-
pancies of education. Although Editha, Adeline’s mother,
“scrupulously confined herself to theory,” “her practice was
ever in opposition to her opinions” (Adeline Mowbray, p. 5). She
devotes herself to “perfect[ing] a system of education” rather
than raising her daughter directly (p. 8). Thus, Adeline is
largely educated by books of philosophy and fantasy, through
which she forms “the rules of her practice” (p. 14). One such
philosophical text, which offers “new and singular opinions on
the subject of moral duty,” proves particularly persuasive
(p. 14). Among its other radical theories, Frederick Glenmur-
ray’s treatise “attacked the institution of marriage” (p. 14).
Entranced by the treatise, Adeline enters society under the
influence of “the rules laid down by this writer” (p. 15). Sparks
fly when Adeline meets Glenmurray during a soiree in Bath,
but the union cannot proceed because Glenmurray’s theories
prohibit marriage. Editha criticizes Adeline’s inability to
51
William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General
Virtue and Happiness, 2 vols. (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1793), II, 850.
52
For another discrepancy, the novel takes place when “the American war was the
object of attention to all Europe,” which would suggest that its events predate the
Godwin/Wollstonecraft marriage by some two decades (Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray,
ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999], p. 15.
Further references are to this edition and appear in the text).
53
Godwin had expressed flirtatious affection for Opie. In a June 1795 letter, Opie
(then Alderson) recalls that Godwin lingered awkwardly after a dinner: “‘Will you give
me nothing to keep for your sake, and console me during my absence,’ murmured out
the philosopher, ‘not even your slipper? I had it in my possession once, and need not
have returned it!’ This was true; my shoe had come off, and he had put it in his pocket
for some time” (Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, Selected and Arranged from Her Letters,
Diaries, and Other Manuscripts, ed. Cecilia Lucy Brightwell [Norwich: Fletcher and
Alexander, 1854], p. 60).stillborn plots 431
understand the “difference between amusing one’s imagina-
tion with new theories and new systems, and acting upon them
in defiance of common custom, and the received usages of
society” (pp. 40–41). Heartbroken over her mother’s impru-
dent marriage, Adeline runs off with Glenmurray.
Opie provides several clues about the disaster to come.54
The most telling sign of Adeline’s impeding trauma is that
“Glenmurray on principle was an enemy to marriage, and con-
sequently not likely to have a child born in wedlock” (Adeline
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Mowbray, p. 20). Although Glenmurray attempts on several
occasions to convince Adeline to marry, she refuses. Under the
prospect of poverty, Adeline appeals to her mother. The con-
versation initially goes smoothly until Editha’s “eyes glanced
from [Adeline’s] face to her shape” (p. 105). The “proof of
[Adeline’s] infamy” (p. 105) prompts Editha to abdicate moth-
erhood. Glenmurray thereafter becomes ill, and Adeline braces
for ruin. When she witnesses scenes of homelessness and bul-
lying, Adeline presages her future motherhood without Glen-
murray. The prospect of either destitution or social rejection
for her child proves irreversibly distressing: “Anxiety and agita-
tion had had a fatal effect on the health of Adeline; and the day
after her rencounter on the terrace she brought forth a dead
child” (p. 132). Roxanne Eberle argues that “Adeline’s preg-
nant body serves as a marker for her sexual relationship with
Glenmurray, [and] the stillbirth of her child acts as an indict-
ment of that relationship.”55 One could go further: the still-
birth is not only literal in its physical trauma, but also
symbolic of the anguished termination of Adeline’s mental
impregnation. “Would to God I never had published!” Glen-
murray earlier decries (Adeline Mowbray, p. 70), seeming to
acknowledge his pernicious fertility.
After she recovers from Glenmurray’s death, Adeline even-
tually agrees to his “dying request” to marry his cousin, Charles
54
Before he marries Editha, Sir Patrick O’Carrol engages in a duel with Glen-
murray, in spite of Glenmurray’s authorship of “a volume to prove the absurdity of the
custom” (Adeline Mowbray, p. 30). Godwin criticized dueling in Book II of An Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice.
55
Roxanne Eberle, “Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray: Diverting the Libertine Gaze;
or, The Vindication of a Fallen Woman,” Studies in the Novel, 26 (1994), 138.432 nin e teenth-century literatu re
Berrendale (Adeline Mowbray, p. 152). In spite of her new sur-
name, Adeline’s subsequent conceptions survive birth. She
publishes “a little volume” of children’s “hymns and tales,” and
her child with Berrendale, whom she names Editha, “thrive[s]
even beyond her expectations” (pp. 174, 175, 186). Berren-
dale, however, becomes unbearably cruel, and absconds to
Jamaica, where he bigamously marries and eventually dies.
Unburdened by his death, Adeline finally acknowledges the
error of her early prejudices against marriage, based “on a con-
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sideration of the interest of children” (p. 237). She reunites
with Editha on her deathbed, amid what Anne Mellor has
called a “feminotopia.”56 Adeline’s final conclusion on mar-
riage appears to be a direct refutation of Godwin’s theories,
but she ultimately errs in her binary thinking. Although mar-
riage could have saved her traumatic relationship with Glen-
murray, her marriage to Berrendale proves equally disastrous.
In fact, if Glenmurray’s criticism of marriage is similar to God-
win’s, then he would have championed friendship, which God-
win holds as the most virtuous and egalitarian connection
between the sexes. Thus, Adeline should have understood that
friendship, rather than a relationship of idolatry and a marriage
of necessity, was her correct course for life. The discrepancies
between the plot of Adeline Mowbray and the contexts of the
Godwin circle remain irreconcilable. Nevertheless, a portion
of these disconnected strands might intertwine, however
loosely, through the context of stillbirth.
In December 1801, Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont,
and the following spring she suffered a stillbirth. Whether Opie
knew of this stillbirth is up for debate, but she would have
known that Godwin had, for the second time, defied his own
principles out of social necessity—both Wollstonecraft and
Clairmont were pregnant during their wedding ceremonies.
Opie’s 1797 words on Godwin’s first marriage are telling:
“Heigho! what charming things would sublime theories be, if
one could make one’s practice keep up with them; but I am
56
Anne K. Mellor, “‘Am I Not a Woman, and a Sister?’: Slavery, Romanticism, and
Gender,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and
Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996), p. 323.stillborn plots 433
convinced it is impossible, and am resolved to make the best of
every-day nature.”57 The discrepancy between theory and prac-
tice gives grounding to a novel that Cecily Erin Hill calls “rife
with inconsistencies.”58 Glenmurray and Adeline decay and die
in similar fashions because neither can hold the revolutionary
line against the attacking front of conservative social customs.
That “sublime theories” are “impossible” suggests that Glenmur-
ray’s book, regardless of readership, is stillborn from the press.
These same theories, which gestated malformed in Adeline’s
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mind, lead directly to the stillbirth of his child. Although both
Secresy and Adeline Mowbray punish every character with radical
beliefs, only the women suffer the trauma of full-term mental
and physical parturitions that conclude in stillborn plots.59
Whereas Romantic novelists represent
failed revolution through stillborn plots, Romantic poets use
stillbirth as a metaphor to express anxiety over the limits of the
imagination.60 The fear of failure—the wrenching doubt of
being unequipped to solve material, mental, and ontological
mysteries—simultaneously drove and stalled Romantic poets.61
57
Amelia Opie, 1797 letter, in Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, p. 63.
58
Cecily Erin Hill, “Narrative Didacticism in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray,” SEL:
Studies in English Literature, 55 (2015), 731.
59
Eleanor Ty observes that Opie “attempts to show how Godwin’s theories were
problematic when applied to women” (Ty, Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of
Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press,
1998], p. 151).
60
Sigmund Freud differentiated between three types of anxiety—reality, neurotic,
and moral—in his essay “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926). Romantic writers
seem most affected by moral anxiety, which occurs when the castration complex be-
comes “depersonalized” and “transformed into an undefined social or moral anxiety”
(Sigmund Freud, “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols.
[London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74], XX, 128).
61
Any discussion of anxiety in the Romantic period must acknowledge both Harold
Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” and Lucy Newlyn’s “anxiety of reception,” the latter of
which traces the “symbiotic development of creativity and criticism” to examine the
“paranoia” that caused writers to develop a “widespread hostility . . . towards their
readerships” (Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception [New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000], pp. xii, 4). See also Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of
Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).434 nin e teenth-century literatu re
Two of the period’s most regurgitated concepts, both of which
were articulated in 1817, speak to this paradox. Coleridge’s
“willing suspension of disbelief” momentarily permits supernat-
ural elements formed in the “shadows of imagination” to find
“human interest and a semblance of truth” (Biographia Literaria,
II, 6). And John Keats’s “Negative Capability” emerges “when
man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”62 But
Romantic writers were seemingly unable to practice what they
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preached. The sheer number of unfinished Romantic proj-
ects—Wordsworth’s The Recluse, Coleridge’s Magnum Opus,
Keats’s Hyperion poems, Byron’s Don Juan—seems to suggest
that poets struggled to balance ambition with realization.63 In
his classic study The Romantic Ventriloquists (1963), Edward Bos-
tetter outlines the shared apprehension of Romantic poets:
The ultimate impression left by the poetry is of gradual loss of
a vitality and confidence too easily won and precariously held; of
diminishing faith in the power of man; of a growing gap between
the material and the spiritual and a deepening doubt; or affir-
mation hardening into an incantatory rhetoric sharply at odds
with the perceptions and experiences it conveys.64
Bostetter doubles down on his disheartening thesis: “Do not all
human efforts become futile? What can the thinking man do
other than withdraw within himself to wait in a state of stoical
repose for the stillness of death?” (The Romantic Ventriloquists, p.
7). Indeed, Keats seemed “half in love with easeful Death.”65
Perhaps stillbirth was, in some sense, cathartic—the ultimate
62
John Keats, letter to George and Tom Keats, 22 December 1818, in John Keats:
Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings and Jon Mee (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002),
pp. 41–42.
63
This frustration was potentially true for novelists as well. Maria Edgeworth revised
Belinda (1801) for Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s British Novelists in 1809; Walter Scott
returned to his novels, just three years before his death, to overlay narrative frame over
narrative frame; Mary Shelley, at the behest of publishers Henry Colburn and Richard
Bentley, modified Frankenstein late in her career; and Byron never finished his vampire
“Fragment of a Novel” (1819).
64
Edward E. Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley,
Byron (Tacoma: Univ. of Washington Press, 1963), p. 5.
65
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” (1820), in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack
Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), p. 371, l. 52.You can also read
