‘It Was Ugly’: Maternal Instinct on Stage at the Fin de Siècle

Abstract

This article explores how plays in the 1890s engaged with an aspect of evolutionary theory that had become particularly vexed—namely, the idea of gender essentialism: whether motherhood was the true calling for women; whether the bond with the infant was inevitable and instinctive; whether, as Shaw's teleological, progressive vision would have it, the woman's evolutionary role was to be the ‘life force’, selecting the superior mate for the continued improvement of the species. Considering this question can deepen our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in this period, and also usefully complicate the narrative often told about the figure of the New Woman in drama. Two plays of this period address particularly well the question of what is ‘natural’ maternal behaviour: James A. Herne's Margaret Fleming (first staged in 1890) and Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell's Alan's Wife (first staged and published in 1893).

Keywords:

• breastfeeding on stage
• biological determinism and gender on stage
• infanticide and theatre
• New Woman drama
• James A. Herne
• Elizabeth Robins
• Florence Bell
• Margaret Fleming, Alan's Wife

Notes

¹Studies of Herne and Margaret Fleming include John Perry, James A. Herne: The American Ibsen, Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978; Dorothy S. Bucks and Arthur H. Nethercot, ‘Ibsen and Herne's Margaret Fleming: A Study of the Early Ibsen Movement in America’, American Literature 17:4, 1946, pp. 311–33; Donald Pizer, ‘The Radical Drama in Boston 1889–1891’, New England Quarterly 31:3, 1958, pp. 361–74; Bernard Hewitt, ‘Margaret Fleming in Chickering Hall: The First Little Theatre in America?’, Theatre Journal 34:2, 1982, pp. 165–71; Herbert J. Edwards and Julie A. Herne, James A. Herne: The Rise of Realism in the American Drama, Orono: University of Maine Press, 1964; and Arthur Hobson Quinn (ed.), ‘Introduction to Margaret Fleming’, in Representative American Plays, 7th edn, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957[1929], pp. 515–18

²Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 461.

³Theodore Hatlen, ‘Margaret Fleming and the Boston Independent Theatre’, Educational Theatre Journal 8:1, 1956, pp. 17–21.

⁴Hamlin Garland, ‘On the Road with James A. Herne’, Century Magazine new ser. 88, 1914, p. 577; quoted in Hatlen, ‘Margaret Fleming’, pp. 17–21 (p. 18, my emphasis).

⁵Edwards and Herne, James A. Herne, p. 161n11, n13.

⁶Despite the introduction of better copyright laws for dramatic authors in this period, ‘Herne did not publish his plays, fearing that they would be performed without his consent’. See Arthur Hobson Quinn, ‘Act III of James A. Herne's Griffith Davenport’, American Literature 24:3, 1952, pp. 330–51 (p. 330).

⁷Gary A. Richardson, American Drama from the Colonial Period through World War I: A Critical History, New York: Twayne, 1993, p. 195.

⁸See, for example, Donald Pizer, ‘An 1890 Account of Margaret Fleming’, American Literature 27:2, 1955, pp. 264–7, which reprints and discusses Hamlin Garland's detailed plot synopsis of the play.

⁹Don Wilmeth and C.W.E. Bigsby (eds), The Cambridge History of American Theatre. Volume 2: 1870–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 254.

¹⁰James A. Herne, Margaret Fleming [1929], rev. and ed. by Mrs James A. Herne, in Quinn, Representative American Plays, pp. 521–55 (p. 544).

¹¹Eugene Brieux's 1901 play Les Remplaçantes is a play entirely about wet-nursing but its only scene of breastfeeding takes place discreetly behind a screen.

¹²Bucks and Nethercot, ‘Ibsen’, p. 317.

¹³Herne, Margaret Fleming, p. 540 (my emphasis).

¹⁴Marc Robinson offers a persuasive analysis of this moment in light of Herne's innovative realist aesthetics in his book The American Play, 1787–1900, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 117–25, arguing that this moment in particular exemplifies the play's ‘hesitating realism’ (p. 124).

¹⁵As Harry W. Paul notes: ‘in the United States, the public's prudery makes breastfeeding difficult except in protected areas’, yet ‘breastfeeding is [still] strongly related to society's image of the mother’. See Harry W. Paul, Henri de Rothschild, 1872–1947, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011, p. 167. For recent evidence that public breastfeeding is still a contentious issue in the United States, see New York Times, 21 October 2003 and 7 June 2005.

¹⁶Bucks and Nethercot, ‘Ibsen’, p. 318.

¹⁷William Winter, quoted in Bucks and Nethercot, ‘Ibsen’, p. 318.

¹⁸Don Wilmeth (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 426.

¹⁹Herne, Margaret Fleming, pp. 526–7.

²⁰Herne, Margaret Fleming, p. 527.

²¹Garland, quoted in Pizer, ‘An 1890 Account’, p. 266.

²²Richardson, American Drama, p. 190.

²³Richardson, American Drama, p. 193.

²⁴Hatlen, ‘Margaret Fleming’, p. 19.

²⁵Matthew Arnold, ‘The French Play in London,’ The Nineteenth Century (August 1879), p. 243; quoted in John Stokes, Resistible Theatres: Enterprise and Experiment in the Late Nineteenth Century, London: Paul Elek Books, 1972, p. 4.

²⁶Jeffrey D. Mason, ‘“Affront or Alarm”: Performance, the Law and the “Female Breast” from Janet Jackson to Crazy Girls’, New Theatre Quarterly 21:2, 2005: pp. 178–94 (p. 179).

²⁷Jeffrey D. Mason, ‘“Affront or Alarm”: Performance, the Law and the “Female Breast” from Janet Jackson to Crazy Girls’, New Theatre Quarterly 21:2, 2005: p. 192n7.

²⁸Anne Varty, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Stage Baby’, New Theatre Quarterly 21:3, 2005, pp. 218–29 (p. 218).

²⁹Quoted in Anne Varty, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Stage Baby’, New Theatre Quarterly 21:3, 2005., p. 218.

³⁰Quoted in Anne Varty, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Stage Baby’, New Theatre Quarterly 21:3, 2005., p. 218.

³¹Varty, ‘The Rise and Fall’, p. 228.

³²Varty, ‘The Rise and Fall’, p. 224.

³³Varty, ‘The Rise and Fall’, passim.

³⁴Alex Roe in an email to Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, 4 September 2010.

³⁵Alex Roe in an email to Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, 2 September 2010.

³⁶Martin Denton, review at www.nytheatre.com/Show/Review/marg5772, 24 September 2007. Note that Denton does not mention the breastfeeding.

³⁷Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 125. See also Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.

³⁸Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 131.

³⁹See especially Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Demonic Mothers: Ideologies of Bourgeois Motherhood in the Mid-Victorian Era,’ in Linda M. Shires, ed., Rewriting the Victorians, London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 31–51. The discourse on these competing roles for women has hardly abated; see for example Elisabeth Badinter, Le Conflit, la mere et la femme, Paris: Flammarion, 2010 and The Myth of Motherhood: An Historical Overview of the Maternal Instinct, trans. Roger DeGaris, London: Souvenir Press, 1981, which seeks to uncouple maternal love from maternal instinct, questioning the existence of the latter.

⁴⁰Anne Varty, Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 15.

⁴¹See for example Janet Golden, A Social History of Wet-Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

⁴²Golden p. 98.

⁴³Golden p. 102.

⁴⁴Golden p. 127.

⁴⁵Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Tickling Babies: Gender, Authority, and “Baby Science”’, in Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Graeme Gooday, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth and Jonathan R. Topham (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 199–215 (p. 201). As Darwin's biographers have observed, Darwin experimented frequently on his own babies—for instance, deliberately startling them into crying to note their instinctive physiological responses. See, for example, Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: A Biography. Volume 1: Voyaging, London: Pimlico, 2003 and Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, especially chapter 12, ‘Experiments on Babies.’

⁴⁶Joseph Jacob, quoted in Shuttleworth, ‘Tickling Babies’, p. 205.

⁴⁷Shuttleworth, ‘Tickling Babies’, p. 209.

⁴⁸Shuttleworth, ‘Tickling Babies’, p. 206.

⁵¹Kerry Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 136.

⁴⁹Herne, Margaret Fleming, p. 541.

⁵⁰Kerry Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 136.

⁵²Quoted in Kerry Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 138.

⁵³Jean Chothia, ed., The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. xi.

⁵⁴Marion Shaw and Lyssa Randolph, New Woman Writers of the Late Nineteenth Century, London: Northcote/British Council, 2007, p. 77.

⁵⁵Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 65.

⁵⁶Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 141.

⁵⁷Fenton, quoted in Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 297.

⁵⁸Darwin, The Descent, p. 660.

⁵⁹William Archer, Introduction, Alan's Wife. A Dramatic Study in Three Scenes. First acted at the Independent Theatre in London, London: Henry and Co., 1893, pp. ix–lii.

⁶⁰Angela V. John, Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 127.

⁶¹Katherine E. Kelly, ‘Alan's Wife: Mother Love and Theatrical Sociability in London of the 1890s’, Modernism/Modernity 11:3, 2004, pp. 539–60 (p. 550).

⁶²Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture 1720–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 179.

⁶⁴Linda Fitzsimmons and Viv Gardner (eds), New Woman Plays, London: Methuen, 1991, p. 5.

⁶³Kelly, ‘Alan's Wife’, p. 558.

⁶⁵Henrik Ibsen, Samlede Digterverker, vol. 5, Kristiania: Gyldendal, 1922, p. 378 (my translation). Note that Hedda does not shout these words gleefully but whispers them to herself.

⁶⁶Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre, London: Virago, 1981, p. 44.

⁶⁷McDonagh, Child Murder, p. 180.

⁶⁸Garland, ‘On the Road’, quoted in Hatlen, ‘Margaret Fleming’, p. 19.

⁶⁹Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robins, Alan's Wife, in Fitzsimmons and Gardner, New Woman Plays, 3–25 pp. (pp. 10–11).

⁷⁰Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robins, Alan's Wife, in Fitzsimmons and Gardner, New Woman Plays, 3–25, pp. 9–14.

⁷¹I am grateful to James Wood for pointing this out in his lecture on Tolstoy at the University of Oxford on 24 May 2011.

⁷²Hatlen, ‘Margaret Fleming’, p. 17.

⁷³Angelique Richardson, ‘The Life Sciences: “Everybody Nowadays Talks about Evolution”’, in David Bradshaw (ed.), A Concise Companion to Modernism, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 6–33 (p. 18). See also Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

⁷⁴For a persuasive recent critique of this trend, see Anna Farkas, ‘Between Orthodoxy and Rebellion: Women's Drama in England, 1890–1918’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford, 2010.

This article arises from research funded by the John Fell Oxford University Press Research Fund.