英文摘要 |
The Enlightenment discourse of education centers on the bosom of woman as the family gradually becomes a basic sentimental and moral unit of the society and the debate between nature and nurture fuels the campaign of maternal suckling. This paper aims to gauge the implications of breast-feeding as they are presented in Maria Edgeworth’s novels, on the child and the nation in Ennui and on the mother in Belinda. These two novels are chosen for investigation for four-fold connections: protagonist in disguise, issues related to breast-feeding, medical case study and self-reflexivity. The two novels chart the protagonists’ journey toward reconciliation with their true selves: the Anglo-Irish Lord Glenthorn, after recognizing the Irish nurse as his real mother, relinquishes and regains his title and estate in Ennui; Lady Delacour recovers from her breast wound while coming to terms with her true mission as the heart of the sentimental network in Belinda. Written in the wake of the French Revolution, these two novels acknowledge the bourgeois ethics of work and motherhood as twin pillars of national health and security. The focus on breast-feeding allows Edgeworth to challenge the Enlightenment discourse from within. In Ennui, Edgeworth neutralizes the contamination of milk/speech/blood by revealing the wet nurse as the mother. The conflation of nurse and mother prepares her blueprint of the modern Ireland, in which the purely bred Irish gentry incorporates English professionalism. On the other hand, in Belinda, she allows Lady Delacour to retain her subjectivity from complete compromise or “dilution” though ensconced within domestic ideology. This paper seeks to show how Maria Edgeworth negotiates her attitudes toward women’s obligations in a dialogue with Mary Wollstonecraft by refracting the rational dictum via blending contradictory proponents in Ennui and by foregrounding self-conscious performativity in Belinda. It is this magic “formula” (a term borrowed from modern industry of infant diet) that enables her exploration into the characters whose reformation centers on the bosom of women. |