Suzanne Necker's Legacy: Breastfeeding as Metonym in Germaine de Staël's Delphine
| Autor: | Madelyn Gutwirth |
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| Rok vydání: | 2004 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Eighteenth-Century Life. 28:17-40 |
| ISSN: | 1086-3192 0098-2601 |
| Popis: | The sole treatment of maternal nursing in her fiction makes a surprising entry into the later stages of Germaine de Stael’s long epistolary novel Delphine (Geneva, 1802). What explains its unexpected appearance and its resonance within the novel? Perhaps Stael’s own family history— particularly her mother’s experiences of birth and nursing her daughter at the breast— may help answer the question, and that history is recorded in her mother’s published correspondence. Suzanne Necker’s treatment of birth and nursing in these letters in turn provokes scrutiny of a number of little-explored issues surrounding the impact of conceptions of maternity on French women. If we recognize the clash between conflicting conceptions of mothering, namely an older “cultural” model coming to grips with the ostensible “natural” one proposed by the “new” maternalists of the mid-eighteenth century, how do we see this conflict played out?1 What was the nature of the pressures exerted on women to embrace the vogue of the maternal bond in the last half of the eighteenth century? What maternal style did Germaine’s mother adopt, and what relation did it bear to evolving ideas concerning maternity around her? For what variety of ideas of motherhood did the breast serve as metonym? Along with the family story of her infancy, what did ambient ideas concerning breastfeeding contribute to Germaine de Stael’s |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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