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Murdering the Monstrous Ideal: The “Hysterical Mother” in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins

By Jennifer Givhan

“It isn’t safe to be an exquisite womanly creature in this rotten world!”
—Angelica, from The Heavenly Twins

Evadne came “rapidly on to the final conclusion that women had originally no congenital defect of inferiority, and that, although they have still much way to make up, it now rests with themselves to be inferior or not, as they choose.”
—The Heavenly Twins

On the cusp of modernity, the New Woman novel began exploring previously taboo issues for women such as women’s sexuality, birth control, patriarchally defined female hysteria, and sexually transmitted disease. However, as Anna Maria Jones notes, “the difficulty of defining” the New Women novel “has produced conflicting accounts of [its] political efficacy” and “artistic merit” (218). Accordingly, while “[c]ritics such as Ann Ardis, Jane Eldridge Miller, Lyn Pykett, and Rita Felski stress the ‘newness’ of the New Woman” and have “underscored the genre’s innovations and its connections to modernism, highlighting [. . .] its ‘intertextual dynamic’ and ‘def[iance of] formalist assumptions about the ‘unity’ of literary work,’” conversely, “scholars such as Marilyn Bonnell and Ann Heilman emphasize the ‘womanliness’ of the New Woman, arguing that the New Woman writers’ political commitment to converting readers conflicted with modernist and decadent experimentation” (qtd. in Jones 218). Indeed, there is much critical debate as to the goals of the New Woman novel, both politically and artistically, which is perhaps why “[o]ften critics articulate the genre’s difficulties as its ‘falling short’ of a feminist, political goal” (ibid. 218). As Sally Ledger writes, for example, of The Heavenly Twins, “‘[w]hilst it is undoubtedly a transgressive novel, residual elements of Victorian sexual ideology mark it as a transitional text, caught, like the New Woman of the 1890s, herself, between the old and the new, the Victorian and the modern’” (qtd. in Jones 218).  I suggest that it is precisely this instability in The New Woman novel that allows its writers to point out the insufficiencies with traditional mandates of womanhood and, more specifically, motherhood. New Women blur the lines between “witches” and moralizing mothers—they are both, and this fluidity is where their power lies because it is outside the patriarchal understanding of women as static and unchanging. Thus, I argue, the New Woman novel is neither new or womanly; like the New Woman herself, it is a powerful amalgamation that reaches toward a specifically feminist goal of overturning patriarchal definitions of womanhood.

New Woman writer Sarah Grand uses the idea of the hysterical mother—a radical reappropriation of two opposing patriarchal ideologies—in The Heavenly Twins to overturn the gendered binary that has confined women to the limited role of ideal mother, thereby undermining the domestic fiction from which her novel arises. By applying the theory of the hysterical mother to Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, I will demonstrate the ways in which Grand critiques domestic fiction and undermines cultural conceptions of motherhood as transcendent. I argue that Grand relocates hysteria in a liminal space between the occult and the medico-scientific by scripting the hysteric’s enactment on the body of the mother (or mother-to-be, in the case of Evadne). The discursive space opened here allows Grand’s narrative to question traditional definitions of womanhood without forcing her to reify any new definitions. Thus, Grand’s narrative (which might on the surface seem to reinscribe patriarchal norms, since the three female protagonists either die or retreat into domesticity) proves its radically feminist goal of deconstructing crystallized, reified concepts that contain within themselves the ability to become oppressive. Many critics have focused on the transgressive role of Angelica through her homoerotic interlude with the Tenor, asserting that hers is the only real triumph to be found in Grand’s “three caskets” novel; indeed, Teresa Mangum notes that “Grand’s cross-dressing heroine Angelica ‘alone possesses the potential for resistance’ through her gender-bending masquerade” (qtd. in Jones 219). 1 However, I argue that the mother-protagonists of the novel likewise accomplish their fair share of resistance precisely through their hysteria, and, in this essay, I will focus specifically on the ways in which Edith and Evadne act out their hysterical motherhood, especially through fantasies of infanticide and murder/suicide. Finally, I will point out places in the text where Grand most explicitly undermines domestic fiction and the idea of the idealized mother, again, through a radical reappropriation of what it means to be an hysterical mother at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Victorian and New Woman Views of Maternity/Domesticity

In order to understand why the “hysterical mother” becomes a feminist reappropriation in Grand’s text, is it important to understand how the concepts of “mother” and “hysteric” worked individually in Victorian and fin-de-siécle culture.  Nineteenth-century British culture perpetuated the Cult of True Womanhood, which espoused the idea that women were nurturing, mothering Angels in the House whose true calling was found within the domestic realm. Darwin’s The Descent of Man—written thirty years after Coventry Patmore’s poem “The Angel in the House”—gave the “essentialist separatist doctrine” of separate spheres a “scientific history by arguing that women had evolved differently from men, that their nurturant capacities naturally fitted them for home and hearth, while men had evolved aggressive abilities that suited them for competition in the public arena” (Kahane 5). Thus, according to both representations, women were naturally self-sacrificing mothers whose biological duty it was to moralize the family.

Though certainly not all, many Victorian feminists claimed this essentialist argument of womanhood for their own purposes, rooting each woman’s source of strength and social power in her ability to bear and raise children: she had a claim to the political world as the “morally pure mother” who would educate and mold the nation’s children into respectable, moral adults (Caine 52, 250). As Elizabeth Langland asserts, “[e]ven if Victorians did not subscribe to the idea of the Angel in the House, they were attracted to the implicit ideal of woman’s redemptive or salvatory potential” (382). The reasoning behind the adoption of a view that asserted women were fundamentally physically different than men is that it provided a framework for gaining an influential voice within a patriarchal society without being fully subversive to the entire structure. In other words, Victorian feminists used men’s own reasoning—that conceptions of womanhood were embedded in their biology—for women’s own interests, namely more political and public freedom. However, as Barbara Caine points out, “the proponents of Victorian domestic ideology equated women’s purity with their innocence and hence with their confinement in the home” (52). Thus, this argument reinscribed the separate spheres ideology, which asserted that “influence” as “wives and mothers” was both the “secret of women’s power” and “meant that they did need to seek other kinds of legitimation” (Davidoff and Hall 77). While at once offering women one form of empowerment, this essentialist doctrine lent itself to a limiting of womanhood, which located a woman’s worth explicitly in her ability to bear children and perform mothering duties.

Separate spheres ideology maintained both that women were empowered by their roles as household managers and that they were protected from the sordid public sphere. 2 However, not all Victorian fiction subscribed to this ideology. According to Tamara Wagner, “[i]t has become a critical commonplace that midcentury sensation fiction” of the 1860s and which preceded the New Woman novel “provided a crucial conduit for the Victorian novel’s development as a self-consciously middle-class form of cultural expression that renegotiated representations of the domestic” (211). Further, Wagner asserts that “the overlaps and interchanges between domestic realism and sensationalism” and  “the presence of sensation at home, which was to become the defining element of the domestic Gothic, engendered a self-reflexivity that specifically addressed the confines of domestic fiction. Popular writers of the time negotiated the idea of the home in fiction and its shifting representational value” (Wagner 213). 3 Thus, while the New Woman novel was not the first to undermine the separate spheres ideology, it does dissociate itself from its predecessor sensationalist fiction because of its polemic, didactic nature. Sensationalist fiction sought to shock the senses, whereas the New Woman novel sought to tame them and, more importantly, to educate the mind, elevating it above the senses.

Furthermore, many New Women writers like Grand contested the use of domestic fiction and its separate spheres as a form of empowerment for women, arguing instead its potential to cover up the insidious naturalization and subsequent veneration of motherhood as the only correct role for women. In other words, as Grand’s novel demonstrates, it seems strange and somewhat sinister that women’s only form of power would be attained through performing a male-sanctioned role that shut women up in the house where they could not become directly involved in political life. Moreover, mothers are not protected by the patriarchal ideology of separate spheres but hurt and damaged by it. By misrecognizing the ideology as empowering, Grand’s novel suggests, women fail to see the danger in a belief that the home is a sacred, safe space for women when this is not always the case. Thus, within the New Women novel, the “violation of women, especially in marriage, where they were expected always to meet a husband’s demands” even at the risk of becoming “innocent victims of diseases given to them by profligate husbands” became a major concern (Caine 257). Grand takes up this issue in her fiction by directing her focus on one of the most contested figures of the late nineteenth-century: the New Woman mother. Consequently, Grand’s own trenchant critique of domestic fiction, written from within the genre itself, exposes the ways in which nineteenth-century domestic discourse had masked the realities of motherhood.

While many New Women writers did continue to idealize motherhood and its regenerative potential, others insisted on representing a fuller, more realistic picture of motherhood, replete with its burdens and dissatisfactions. Indeed, Nicola Thompson reminds us of the “ideological complexities of women’s writing” in her introduction to Victorian Women Writers and The Woman Question: “Novels by Victorian women writers tend to be melting pots of ideological conflict and exploration of attitudes towards women’s nature and role, full of the dialogic interplay of voices that Bakhtin identifies as central to the novel’s genre” (qtd. in Liggins and Maunder 5). Grand is no exception. While on the one hand she acknowledges the importance and validity of maternity and domesticity (which she, like many New Women writers of the time, believed were crucial for their Darwinian and eugenic applications for the health of the “nation”) 4 she certainly does not whitewash the domestic realities often underlying the shiny ideological surface. Domesticity is not the ultimate goal for all women in the novel, and Grand’s narrator asserts that it is dangerous and misleading to encourage girls to idealize domesticity because it makes them unwittingly susceptible to needless suffering. Further, and crucial to Grand’s depiction of motherhood in The Heavenly Twins, just because maternity and domesticity have practical and positive applications for generating a healthy society, this does not mean that they are immune to contamination. The home is not safer than the world “out there” in Grand’s fiction, which differentiates her “home epic” 5 from earlier domestic fiction (aside from sensationalist fiction) and even from other fin-de-siécle fiction that embraced the hegemonic view of motherhood and seemed content to rely on the separate spheres ideology. As Iveta Jusová observes, “[t]he New Woman movement, with its insistence on presenting sexual relations explicitly as a political issue and on moving sex outside the ‘private sphere,’ would seem to wish to break with the traditions of domestic fiction in this respect” (22). Jusová goes on to claim that Grand’s novel does not break with domestic fiction but relies on it by presenting only the domestic realm and remaining silent on issues of race and class. While Jusová makes a good point about Grand’s quiet approval of Imperialism, I strongly disagree that her novel reinscribes the domestic novel. I argue instead that Grand specifically undermines the domestic novel by pointing out the ways in which domestic discourse narrowly limits women within socially prescribed gender roles. Thus, Grand’s novel motions toward a constructionist view of motherhood, even as she asserts its overall importance within society.

The Hysterical Woman in Victorian Culture

Traditionally depicted as the antithesis to proper womanhood, the hysterical woman in Victorian culture represented a radical deviation from socially acceptable female behavior. Classically, the term “hysteria” has been inextricably linked to femininity, “from the Greek depiction of hysterics as lazy women with wandering wombs, through the demonically possessed women of the Middle Ages, to the nineteenth-century hysterics that fascinated Freud” (Kahane 9). Specifically in the context of Victorian culture, the hysteric came to be known as the rebellious daughter who used her physical body to speak out against the patriarchal rule of the father. According to Elaine Showalter, the emergence of the New Woman and her desire for equality in education and employment outside of the home were seen as threats to the patriarchal order and the essentialist separatist doctrine of Darwinian psychology; thus, fin-de-siécle doctors warned women of the dangerous link between “New Woman ambition” and hysteria (Female Malady 121).

Herbert Spencer argued that human development depended on a fixed amount of energy, and since women used their energy in reproductive function, they had little or no energy left for intellectual or political pursuits (ibid. 122). Further, Darwinian psychology accepted this view and—utilizing the theory of sexual difference that locates women’s natural outlet of mental energy in the domestic realm—argued that women who tried to use any mental energy toward activities outside the home would suffer psychologically. Thus, according to Showalter, “mental breakdowns” would result from women defying their “nature” either by trying to “compete” with men in the public sphere instead of “serving” men or by adding any unnecessary “additions to their maternal functions” (ibid. 123). Patriarchal Victorian representations of hysteria, then, rested on the social function of motherhood, which became a highly controversial topic within the New Women debates. If a woman was not biologically linked to her domestic role, neither could her hysteria be organically linked to her rejection of that role. By delineating a clear, stable distinction between the proper woman who performed her domestic functions and the pathological, hysterical woman who disregarded her maternal and marital duties, Victorian medical and political patriarchal authority created a punitive cultural atmosphere that ensured its misogynistic ideology would perpetuate. Consequently, the hysterical woman figure in literature at the fin de siècle became politically charged.

When Discourses Converge: Theorizing the Hysterical Mother

As a shift in thinking about maternal femininity and feminist rebellion as mutually exclusive categories, I propose that the figure of the hysterical mother connects these two opposing discourses (i.e. “hysterical woman” versus the “obedient/good mother”) in order to overturn the dominant ideology, which asserts that the two discoursesare diametrically opposed. In fact, the dominant ideology has used the separation of these two discourses as fuel to its patriarchal fire. By converging the rebellious hysteric—who does not submit to her role as “mother”—with the mother herself, the very paradoxical nature of this purportedly opposing duality within one woman serves to explode the hegemonic ideology that has declared women to be one or the other. Paradoxically, the hysterical mother represents both the mother and the non-mother in one person. She is both the one and the “other,” forming her own dialectic. 6 As a feminist symbol, she embodies the fundamental error upon which patriarchal control of women through their reproductive functions has been built: that women are their reproductive functions and have no rights or responsibilities outside of these functions. A woman can be both a mother and a non-mother and still be a woman. In other words, a woman does not have to fulfill her function as a reproducer in order to properly “do” womanhood. Neither is there a biologically grounded way to “do” motherhood. Motherhood then is a cultural construction. In this way, the hysterical mother serves as an impetus that allows for the questioning of the “structurality of the very structure” 7 of motherhood itself. She is the rupture in patriarchal discourse that allows for the deconstruction of the transcendental signified “mother”.

In order to understand the ideology out of which the hysterical mother emerges, it is necessary to look back to its historical antecedent, which is actually its antithesis. According to its first usage, the hysterical woman was defined as a non-mother with a case of the “Mother—meaning that she had a possessed or diseased womb. The term “Mother” here ironically signified its repulsive opposite. The barren/sterile/un-sexed woman (often associated in the fin-de-siécle with the radical New Woman) was capable of becoming psychologically disturbed (hysterical) because her womb was not being properly utilized to bear children. Thus, it could become possessed with the horrible anti-child—the demonic “other,” or “Mother.” 8

Used specifically in the context of Puritan England, this term was devised by Edward Jorden, a 17th-century British physician and author of Brief Discourse of A Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother. Jorden’s conception of the hysterical woman with a case of the “Mother” established a new category within medical literature, “one that offered unruly sexual desire and corrupted maternity as a rational answer to—and extension of—traditional demonology” (Levin 25). 9 I turn to 17th-century theory here in my formulation of the hysterical mother as she is represented in fin-de-siècle literature because of the explicit connection Joanna Levin makes between Edward Jorden’s etiology of the hysteric as located within the “possessed womb” (the “Mother”), and Sigmund Freud’s own late-Victorian/early-Modernist conception of the hysteric, the unconscious, and psychoanalysis. Freud writes:

What would you say [. . .] if I told you that all of my brand-new prehistory of hysteria is already known and was published. . . several centuries ago? Do you remember that I always said that the medieval theory of possession held by the ecclesiastical courts was identical with our theory of a foreign body and the splitting consciousness? But why did the devil who took possession of the poor things invariably abuse them sexually and in a loathsome manner? Why are their confessions under torture so like the communications made by my patients in psychic treatment? Sometime soon I must delve into the literature on this subject. (Levin 21)

That Grand was writing her feminist case study of a hysterical Evadne in The Heavenly Twins while Freud and Breuer were conducting their famous first case study of a hysterical patient whom they called Anna O., which was published two years after Grand’s novel, seems to form a reasonable link between Grand and Jorden (at least in the cultural remnants of Jorden’s theory that had apparently influenced Grand’s contemporaries). If in their cultural moment Freud was formulating what turned out to be a patriarchal reinscription of Jorden’s hysterical “Mother”, then it seems possible that Grand’s novel was a feminist response to that same argument. 10 According to Renaissance scholar Joanna Levin, Jorden’s etiology, which was constructed as “a rational alternative to the occult,” maintained that the “hysterica passio,” or, as it was more commonly known, the “Mother”, was a “natural disease that could mimic the signs of demonic vexation” (ibid. 22). Thus, she concludes that the “satanic force animating both the bewitched and witches alike could thereafter be relocated within the female body, especially within her sexual and reproductive functions” (ibid.). The “Mother” (in Jorden’s sense) is located within the female body, i.e. her reproductive organs; it is a natural disease or a demonic possession; she is essentially controlled and defined by her womb. The “Mother” thus represents a noxious or malevolent uterus. Consequently, as a patriarchal medical re-inscription of the witch, who was said to have been possessed by the devil, the hysteric in question was possessed by her own womb (the “Mother”). Accordingly, the hysterical woman becomes the disempowered witch, with a subordinate place in marriage and domesticity. As Levin argues, the “hegemonic cooptation” of the witch transformed her into the hysteric, a label that consigned women to “an involuted private sphere of sentiment, morality, and nurture” (24-5). Moreover, she “consents to her own subjection through the insidious workings of ideological belief” (ibid. 25). By internalizing this harmful ideology, she becomes an unwitting accomplice to the punitive measures acted out on her own body. The witch—like the rebellious woman—gives up her power in becoming the hysterical woman. This label, once stamped on a powerful, outspoken woman, renders her virtually useless to inspire political change because she is deemed irrational and therefore without credibility.

From a cultural studies perspective, the hysteric’s rebellion has been appropriated and undermined by patriarchy. Since a mother—a woman with a healthy reproductive life who had properly borne children—was precisely what a woman with a case of the “Mother” was not, this “disease-concept of hysteria” may have engendered fears about the wandering and potentially noxious uterus; hence, the fears would have been relocated away from the “reproducers of a patriarchal lineage” (Levin 43). This oppressive ideology suggests that it is the hysteric who is diseased, not the mother. Historically, patriarchal ideology has enforced motherhood and maternity by declaring that women would not become hysterical if their wombs were properly functioning (i.e. if they were bearing children), and that if they were not having children (if they were “unnaturally celibate” or deviated from the acceptable path of motherhood) then their wombs could become diseased with the “Mother”—hysterica passio. This reasoning is precisely why, I argue, Grand would utilize the concept of the hysterical mother: by paralleling the terms, she is converging the two ideologies—conflating opposing or binary discourses for her political purpose. The hysteric and the mother are not separate categories, because there is no such thing as separate spheres. It is an ideology created by patriarchy to keep women confined both within their own bodies and in the home—or, it constructs women’s bodies as homes. It was taken up by early feminists as a (limited) form of female empowerment and perpetuated in domestic discourse. These factors, I suggest, have served to cover up the fundamental error upon which separate spheres ideology was formed: that all women are naturally meant to be mothers, and that gender is not a construction but a biological fact.

By utilizing the amalgamation of the “hysterical mother,” I argue that Grand’s text ultimately serves to deconstruct the social position of motherhood. Patriarchal ideology (“the rule of the father”) has put motherhood on a pedestal as a way to control, limit and diminish its importance anywhere other than the private, domestic sphere. Grand is essentially taking motherhood down from that (imaginary, male created) condescending place of “transcendence” in order to demonstrate how it can actually affect positive societal change. Its value reaches outside the bounds of the domestic sphere. Conversely, it is affected—often negatively, as the syphilitic contamination of the wife/mother by the (dis)eased husband illustrates—by the public sphere as well. In this way, Grand is tearing down strictly imposed binary distinctions and opening up a space of freeplay and ambiguity in the definition of motherhood and maternity. Motherhood is real; it is not simply a discourse. However, by revealing the ways in which it has been constructed by hegemonic ideology that supports patriarchal aims, Grand demonstrates the (potentially or positively dangerous) ways the concept of motherhood has been (ab)used as discourse—while concomitantly disguised as transcendent—as a form of insidious social control of women. Thus, by deconstructing the ideological position of motherhood, she is able to restore its real (not imaginary) social application, revealing instead a truly actualized and empowering potential for motherhood.

Deconstructing the Ideal Mother in The Heavenly Twins: The Hysterical Mother Applied

As a base from which to launch her critique, Grand’s text clearly manifests the prevalent cultural attitudes toward motherhood as idealized. Evadne, as a young bride-to-be, fantasizes her future domestic life. Upon seeing a village woman with her infant, Evadne receives her “first foretaste of maternity” and is filled with “the most womanly joys” as she imagines “her own house, her own husband, her own children” (58). Although Evadne is able to critique the domestic novel as a youth, noting in her Commonplace Book that the wife in “The Vicar of Wakefield” is devalued and overworked in her harsh domestic life (17), the cultural mythos surrounding domesticity is so strong that Evadne apparently is not immune to it, despite her assertion that the wife’s “day’s work is never done” (17). As a young girl, Evadne is able to astutely perceive the potential for women’s oppression within the domestic sphere. However, she fails to see the wife of the vicar as more than an isolated case of oppression and therefore does not relate her own situation to the critique she makes of the literature she reads.

As a strong social force, the family reasserts the naturalization of domesticity. When Evadne refuses to remain the wife of Colquhoun because of his sordid sexual past since she fears the threat of contracting a venereal disease by consummating the marriage, her mother writes to her and reprimands her for being “unnatural” (90). Mrs. Frayling rebukes Evadne’s decision to claim autonomy and self-respect in her marital situation, and tells her that all “right minded women have submitted” to their husbands and have “suffered patiently” in order to be “rewarded” (91). Evadne ultimately concedes to her mother’s plea, moved by Mrs. Frayling’s emotional appeal. While Mrs. Frayling on the one hand demonstrates the “power” women possess in the domestic realm, since she “had done what the whole bench of bishops could not have done—nor that remarkable man, her husband” (109) in persuading Evadne to relent, it is ironic (and somewhat disturbing) that her power manifests itself in her ability to make her daughter conform to a domestic life within which she herself has been so unhappy. In fact, she tells Evadne that she must not ever have imagined her difficulties (as a wife/mother) or Evadne never would have been so selfish in refusing to submit to the domestic system (107). Here, the text points to a clear example of the insidious under-workings of domestic discourse: women feel empowered, but this pseudo-power serves only to perpetuate patriarchal aims (keeping women in the home as wives and mothers). 11 Angelica clearly articulates the idea that patriarchy has set up a false consciousness that claims women have power in the domestic realm, thereby hiding the true conditions of their oppression when she replies to the tenor’s statement that there is a “grave responsibility which attaches to all women.” Angelica cuts him off and says: “In the abstract [. . .] I know if things go wrong they are blamed for it; if they go right the Church takes credit. The value attached to the influence of women is purely fictitious, as individuals usually find when they come to demand a recognition of their personal power” (453). Patriarchal ideology pretends that women have power in the domestic realm only to placate them so that they will not try to do anything else (meaningful) outside the limited space that patriarchal authority has allowed them. In other words, men have placed women on imaginary pedestals as goddess mothers with “grave responsibilit[ies]” in order to keep them from realizing the extent of their subjugation. When a woman does not fulfill her role as (silent, patient, “good”) mother/wife, she is punished—or “blamed”, as Angelica puts it.

Moreover, the medical community idealizes motherhood as a sacred role for women. Dr. Galbraith—arguably one of the novel’s most likeable and sympathetic male characters who truly seems to desire to help women, although this idea starts to unravel a bit as we examine his actions and attitudes toward the end of the text—believes that motherhood is a key component of feminism. When discussing Evadne with Mrs. Orton Beg, Galbraith says that Evadne’s power will be for her “daughter’s daughter” and that she must “suffer” now (98), the implication being that she can work toward change but must not give up a self-sacrificial life of mothering. Further, change seems to depend on the very fact that she gives birth—after all, Galbraith links a woman’s power with her procreative ability. Later in the novel, Galbraith’s conception of a model wife seems to clash with his supposed feminist beliefs. He says, of Evadne’s relationship with Colquhoun before he knows the true circumstances, “[s]he responded always—or tried to—when he was genial; and when he was morose, she was dumb. I thought her a model wife” (584). When Galbraith finds out the deception inherent in Evadne’s marriage and the extent to which it has caused her mental suffering, he concludes that “had she been happily married she would undoubtedly have been one the first to distinguish herself, one of the foremost in the battle which women are waging against iniquity of every kind” (645). Again, his brand of feminism relies on the traditional view of women as inherently domestic, and he declares that Evadne’s “most beautiful instincts of her being” include “her affection, her unselfishness, even her modest reserve and womanly self-restraint” (645). Galbraith, then, seems to fully embrace the essentialist view of womanhood, asserting that women can do the most good as wives and mothers because of their supposedly natural nurturing qualities. Finally, he boldly asserts that he hopes a child in her new marriage with him will “cure her of all morbid moods forever” (660). Motherhood will save Evadne, according to Galbraith’s essentialist medical view. 12

The reality of motherhood for both Evadne and Edith turns out to be very different than its idealization, however—promulgated by the family, the church, and the medical community. Evadne tries to commit suicide while she is nine-months pregnant and hence abort her baby, and Edith contemplates infanticide in a hysterical rage. Both ending up hysterical mothers of sorts, Evadne’s and Edith’s stories parallel each other in interesting ways, ultimately supporting the theory that the hysterical mother breaks down binary conceptions of womanhood (non-mother/hysteric versus traditional mother). Evadne starts out as the rebellious New Woman. She “wanted to know” the “truth” of the world and “demanded instruction as a right” (3). She educated herself and disagreed with misogynistic views of women as “inferior” beings upon whom knowledge and education are wasted, as her father purported (12). In fact, Grand makes clear through her early portrayal of Evadne, that it was traditional, patriarchal stereotyping of women that mandated what “they were fit for” that “set her mind off on a long and patient inquiry into the condition and capacity of women, and made her, in the end of the nineteenth century, essentially herself” (13). Grand is describing the formation of a self-defined woman, the New Woman, whom Evadne represents. Importantly, it is Evadne’s ability to critically evaluate previous definitions of herself that enable her to begin shaping her own self-definition. Still, Evadne is described by society as “insane” and “evil” for not conforming to social norms. Her parents call her “mad”—a label applied to socially deviant women—for leaving Colquhoun (68). Moreover, Colquhoun reinscribes the gendered binary of women when he claims, “[s]he’s worse than mad. She’s clever. You can do something with a mad woman; you can lock her up; but a clever woman’s the devil” (103). Colquhoun sees the powerful woman as a threat to his phallocentric power. He relies on the stereotype of rebellious women as witches—a concept that goes back again to Jorden’s etiology of hysteria. According to Levin, “both the witch and the hysteric” were represented as “antimothers” because they “negatively sanctioned patriarchal control over female generativity and nurture” (34). Through Colquhoun’s parallelisms, Grand’s text links conceptions of hysteria back to 17th-century conceptions of the occult and demon possession.

After promising Colquhoun that she would stay out of political life and thus relegating herself to a useless, silent domestic life that ultimately leads to the deterioration of her mental health, Evadne demonstrates the ways in which “the hysteric signifies the woman who fulfills patriarchal expectations and suffers for it: she is an ‘ailing nurturer,’ asexual, domesticated, and non-threatening” (Levin 23). Evadne internalizes suffering, thereby punishing herself: self-control is an effective means of social control, which is how the patriarchy practices its regulation over women’s bodies. Women have internalized a false consciousness, hence buying into the lie that any free thought is hysterical. Any behavior that deviates from the social norm is labeled as hysterical. Consider, for example, Evadne’s own social control over herself through the burning of her books. Keeping in mind Colquhoun’s comment that a clever woman is (or, we can say, is possessed by) the devil, Evadne seems to impose her own witch hunt or religious inquisition on herself when she burns her books and decides to “soothe” herself without “healing” through the “time-honoured anodyne of her sex”—a quiet domestic life (349). Evadne here has figuratively crossed over from the witch to the madwoman—from demon-possession to the hysteric with a case of the “Mother” (hysterica passio). She is “unnaturally celibate,” and thus her womb is susceptible to disease. However, Grand goes on to undermine this idea because Evadne is not “cured” by proper submission to domesticity and motherhood. As a pregnant woman, she tries to commit suicide and kill the proper possessor of her uterus—the progeny of patriarchy. Thus, Evadne becomes a kind of hysterical mother who explodes the idea of ideal motherhood. Motherhood does not save Evadne from hysteria. She is still both a mother and a non-mother; even after she becomes the good, silent, submissive wife/mother, she is still a danger and a threat to patriarchy.

In a sort of backwards parallel to Evadne, Edith begins as the feminine ideal, yet eventually becomes the hysterical mother as well. Before her marriage, Edith represents the ideal of femininity; she symbolizes the Cult of True Womanhood. She is her parents’ “white child, their pearl,” and is a “lovely specimen of a well-bred English girl” (155). She lives in a castle “in an atmosphere of dreams and of mystic old associations” and is described in terms of “brightness,” “sunshine,” “treasure,” and “Christian charity” (155). There is a mystical, religious aura surrounding the saint-like Edith. She is a model of the transcendent woman and dreams of domestic bliss. However, as her dream of the syphilitic baby immediately following this description in the narrative foreshadows, the idea that mother-women are goddesses is an illusion. The dream of her child “deformed” and “covered in sores” represents both her imminent future as the mother of a syphilitic child and her impending emersion into the dark truth of life: her beautiful, illusory ignorance will be her downfall. The very traits that make her the cultural ideal of womanhood will lead both to her madness and her death. As the narrator asserts, Edith “might have done great good in the world had she known of the evil; she would have fought for the right in the defiance of every prejudice, as women do. But she had never been allowed to see the enemy. She had been fitted by education to move in the society of saints and angels only” (158-9). Here Grand suggests that women have it in their power to affect positive social change, but they need to become aware that change is necessary. Women need to realize that the domestic discourse is a myth that covers up the truth of their lives; they can start fighting against oppression once they realize that the ideal they have been set up for (and strive to attain) is the major source of their oppression.

As a non-mother Edith was radiant, but as a mother she is infected and possessed by syphilis. Motherhood does not keep her safe from outside contamination. Moreover, she has “no smile” for her poor, sick child, and she “utters no baby words” to him (288). On one level, this scene seems so unnatural—even if her baby is deformed. According to the dominant ideology of motherhood, shouldn’t Edith still have loved her child? She does not accept the role of nurturing mother. Is it simply because her child is sick? Still, if maternity were a natural role for a mother, wouldn’t she desire to nurse her poor, sick child that much more? The seeming unnaturalness of this scene begins motioning toward the text’s undermining of women’s natural roles as mothers and caregivers. Adrienne Rich, in her seminal work on motherhood Of Woman Born, makes a compelling argument regarding the social dogma surrounding the mother-child relationship. Women, she argues, are socialized to believe that “mother-love” is “continuous” and “unconditional” (46). Women are not supposed to get angry, she says, because culturally “love and anger cannot coexist” within the mother (ibid. 46). However, Rich goes on to deconstruct that destructive and misguided social view of mother-love:

The physical and psychic weight of responsibility on the woman with children is by far the heaviest of social burdens. It cannot be compared with slavery or sweated labor because the emotional bonds between a woman and her children make her vulnerable in ways the forced laborer does not know . . . Love and anger can exist concurrently; anger at the conditions of motherhood can become translated into anger at the child, along with the fear that we are not “loving”; grief at all we cannot do for our children in a society so inadequate to meet human needs becomes translated into guilt and self-laceration. (52)

Rich here theorizes what has come to be a key feminist view of motherhood: it is, like anything else, subject to the ambiguities and ambivalences of human emotion and human life. Motherhood cannot be viewed from the social perspective of women’s reproductive labor—it is too finely nuanced to allow for that definition. Women’s bodies and their emotional relationships with their children cannot be mandated by patriarchal norms, and women need to re-evaluate their positions as mothers in light of this realization. Edith does not feel mother-love for her child. In a subtle undermining of strict gender binaries, I propose that the text points out that not all women do feel mother-love. Or, at least, that they do not always have to feel it. As Angelica complains, “I don’t see why I should be severely consistent. Let me be a mixture—not a foul mixture, but one of those which eventually result in something agreeable, after going through a period of fermentation, during which they throw up unpleasant scum that has to be removed” (482). The New Woman is inconsistent; she breaks down separate spheres ideology and deconstructs binary opposites. She recognizes the fluid, liminal spaces for human potential that are not limited by social norms and cultural imperatives. The hysterical mother resides precisely in those liminal, undefined spaces, thus subverting reified concepts of static womanhood.

When Edith becomes a mother, she concomitantly becomes hysterical. She was the angel but  becomes the demented witch; the maternal body turned into the diseased “Mother” (hysterica passio). Edith, then, turns into the figure of the hysterical mother—she bears a child but is the antithesis of a mother because she tries to destroy (or, at least contemplates destroying) the life she has created. In the most brilliantly disturbing scene of the novel, Edith exclaims:

Do you know what I’ve been doing? I’ve been murdering him! I’ve been creeping, creeping with bare feet, to surprise him in his sleep; and I had a tiny knife—very sharp—  and I felt for the artery . . . and then stabbed quickly! and he awoke, and knew he must die—and cowered! and it was all a pleasure to me. Oh, yes! I am quite, quite mad! . . . I want to kill—I want to kill him. I want to kill that monstrous child!” (304)

In order to better understand the implications of this meditation on infanticide, it is important to consider how reproduction has traditionally affected women within patriarchal society. Through their patriarchal ideology, men have controlled women through their female reproductive organs, since this simultaneously serves to control them physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Normally, a woman has a child and is then trapped by her reproductive capabilities. In other words, the hegemony constructs motherhood not only as the ideal for women, but as the only correct way to “do” womanhood—thus creating an atmosphere of compulsory motherhood. 13 Once a woman reproduces a child, she is mandated by society to nurture and care for that child, whether or not she has the desire or capability to do so. Instinct matters less than social mores in the case of patriarchal conceptions of motherhood. If a woman does not possess a natural inclination toward motherhood, she is marginalized or directly punished, which is how the patriarchal authority has controlled and oppressed women; it has contained them within their own bodies. As Adrienne Rich points out in Of Woman Born, “[p]ower is both a primal word and a primal relationship under patriarchy. Through control of the mother, the man assures himself of the possession of his children; through control of his children he insures the disposition of his patrimony and the safe passage of his soul after death” (64). Under patriarchy, women are the necessary receptacles of men’s rightful property; punitive measures are underwritten into the woman’s body, which thus becomes a site of control from which the woman is disconnected. It controls her. When she has her husband’s children, they—extensions of him—will also control her. As Evadne states, “children” are “less” the mother’s and more the shadows of the “husband” (119). In this way, not only is the mother powerless to control the terms of her own body and reproduction, but she is, perhaps even more insidiously, trapped by her reproductive capabilities. When Edith bears Menteith’s child, she reproduces an extension of him. Her monstrous spawn, diseased by Menteith’s blood, represents on a symbolic level the male control, ideology, and authority that has both created Edith’s situation and enforces her entrapment within it. Therefore, her contemplation of infanticide within this context begins to make sense. She wants to kill the male ideology that has oppressed her—that has betrayed her.

According to Josephine Hendin, in her recent work on cultural and literary renderings of women and violence Heartbreakers, “[c]hild murder comes to the fore as a subject of interest when cultural attitudes about motherhood are in crisis” (106). She goes on to argue that conceptions of social order rest on the mother-child relationship. A problem within this dyad could mean political and social instability (107-9). While opponents of the New Woman said that she was a monstrous woman who was defiling motherhood and would give birth to horrible babies (if she gave birth at all), in Grand’s text, it is not the New Woman who is corrupting maternity, since she is “maternal”, if anything (288), but the dangerous symbolic ideology that treats motherhood as transcendent. Motherhood is susceptible to outside corruption; it is not immune. New Women do not reproduce monsters; old men (through women’s unsuspecting bodies) do. Syphilitic men contaminate their wives and bring their diseases into the home. As Elaine Showalter asserts, for feminists like Grand, “syphilitic insanity was the product of man’s viciousness and represented innocent woman’s entrapment and victimization” (“Syphilis” 94).

It is more shocking (and eye-opening) that Edith would contemplate infanticide than if she were to contemplate murdering her profligate husband (an act that misogynistic male authority would already expect of women anyway—consider Eve as the ultimate example of the evil woman who brought the fall of man). However, it is unthinkable to patriarchal culture—whose entire system of female oppression is based on the idea of the loving, self-sacrificing mother—for a Virgin Mary figure to bring the fall of man. This line of thinking is what reified concepts of the virgin/whore, angel/demon, or mother/“other” dichotomies in the first place. The mother who kills her own children is a radical revision of male conceptions of what mothers should be. She betrays her own supposedly natural role, thereby calling into question its naturalness. As a mother whose womb was occupied by a child, how could it have become possessed with the “Mother”? Unless the idea is that a woman can become “possessed” by her demon womb is a patriarchal lie underwriting punishment within women’s own reproductive organs. By positioning Edith’s madness in a liminal space between demonic and pathological, Grand is relocating culpability off of the woman’s body and on to religious and scientific corpuses.

When Edith declares that “God is a demon” (285), she links herself with the image of the creator turning on the creation. Catharine Stimpson makes an interesting point regarding the literary figure of the mother who murders: “Because she has given birth to her victims, when she murders them she is also destroying part of herself. The act of murder and the act of suicide are inseparable” (46). 14 Men need women to have children. By murdering their children, are women protesting this cultural requirement of their bodies? Are they destroying their reproductive capabilities? Or could it be that Edith is destroying the idealized portion of herself (she is not a goddess or an angel), claiming instead a more flawed and ambivalent image of herself? In essence, she is killing the monstrous ideal of motherhood. She is de-centering the idealized “I.” Consider here the connection to Evadne, who literally tries to commit suicide in her third trimester. Her act of indirect abortion (an action arguably linked with infanticide, at least within the nineteenth-century imagination) 15 equates the act of suicide, which she connects to “self-sacrifice” (671). When Galbraith questions Evadne as to whether or not she feels guilt and remorse over the act of murder/suicide, she replies:

I do not feel any regret . . . that kind of suicide [is not a sin]. . . You see, we have the divine example. Christ committed suicide to all intents and purposes by deliberately putting himself into the hands of his executioners; but his motive makes them responsible for the crime; and my motive would place society in a similar position. (671)

Here, Grand complicates Evadne’s attempted suicide-abortion, arguing that the corrupt and oppressive society would be to blame. Thus, culpability is again removed from Evadne.

Further, Evadne’s idea that “God is a demon” recalls the medieval etiology of hysteria as a demonic inhabitation and its subsequent association with a possessed or diseased womb. I believe Grand’s text recalls this etymology in order to overturn it. She recalls the mythos in order to debunk it. By paralleling Edith’s scene of demon-like possession with the scene of a fake exorcism of a baby doll, Grand is demystifying the idea of exorcism. Consider the parallel between Edith’s dream of the syphilitic baby and her subsequent birth to a deformed, diseased infant and the old duke of Morningquest’s description of the baby ghost behind the church altar panel:

I saw it in a dream first . . . But now it appears every service. It comes out. It stretches its baby hands to me. It sobs, it sighs, it begs, it prays; and sometimes it smiles, and thenthere are dimples about its innocent mouth . . . We must exorcise, and purify, and cleanse   this house. (310)

That there is no baby ghost in the wall but only Angelica’s doll parallels Edith’s condition: the demon “Mother” (hysterica passio or noxious womb) in Edith is really syphilis, a disease brought to her by a corrupt male. Further, it is the ideological symbolism of women in the private sphere as protected by their “natural” roles as transcendent mothers that is causing/allowing this infiltration—or possession—to occur.  Patriarchy has set up this ideology, and Grand is re-appropriating it to debunk it. Edith is not sick because of her own diseased body but because of a socially/morally male diseased body. Thus, the nexus of culpability is divested from the site of the woman’s (Edith’s) body.

As a symbol, Edith knows she is mad and believes she must suffer anyway because as the hysterical mother, she must expose the lie of patriarchal culture. Edith asserts that the “same thing may happen now to any mother” as long as we “refuse to know” (304). Her situation is a warning that no girl should envy her domestic position: she says satirically, “I am a great lady too, I suppose! I made a great match. And now I have a lovely little boy—the one thing wanting to complete my happiness. What numbers of girls must envy me! Ah! They don’t know! But tell them—tell them that I’m quite, quite mad!” (304). The mad mother can speak. She is a powerful amalgamation of two divergent concepts—the ironic apotheosis of female power, both positive and negative. She is the dialectic brought into one body—the mother and the anti-mother. It is this radical split of binary conceptions of womanhood that allows Edith to speak out in such an anti-patriarchal manner. She is no longer bound by male-proclaimed definitions of herself, as she is the paradoxical blending of their false definitions.  She is possessed by the monstrous child—figuratively, a demon inhabits her during pregnancy; she is inhabited by an “other,” which in Grand’s work represents the monstrous truth, as her epigraph to the novel suggests:

The time is racked with birth-pangs; every hour
Brings forth some gasping truth, and truth new-born
Looks a misshapen and untimely growth
The terror of the household and its shame,
A monster coiling in its nurse’s lap
That some would strangle, some would starve.

Edith, the hysterical mother, hence brings forth the ugly truth of patriarchal rule—its deceptions and hypocrisy have been unmasked and are transcribed onto the child’s body. The sins of the father affect the child (186)—it is fathers who “transmit their misery-making propensities from generation to generation” (340). Symbolically, fathers here represent male authority, and syphilis “bridges the Victorians’ perceptual divide between the masculine world of intercourse and the Angel in the House, making mother and whore alike with the trace of their common lovers’ contaminated touch” (Kennedy 262). Hence, Grand moves the culpability away from women’s bodies (their reproductive organs are no longer to blame) and relocates it in men’s bodies (the “stigma is in the blood”), in an act of radical revision.

In summary, Sarah Grand critiques the domestic novel and the idealized vision of maternity it represents through the figure of the hysterical mother. Her text is concerned with the realist goal of representing the dark side of domesticity—the underbelly society keeps hidden from its young girls in order to deceive them into joining the ranks with the best of women. Evincing Grand’s realism, Angelica says to herself, “Now, had I been the heroine of a story . . . it would have been left to the reader’s imagination that I had remained forever in the state of blissful exaltation” (540). Angelica’s story, like the other protagonists of the novel, does not end with the marriage plot that dominated mid-Victorian domestic fiction. While each woman does get married, each faces real, and often disturbingly shocking, problems in the domestic sphere. Their stories are a far cry from “happily ever after” at marriage. Grand is trying to point out how (domestic) fiction has gotten the story of women’s real lives wrong. It has made women believe that entering into the domestic sphere is all happiness and contentment. It has given as examples women who suffer for the cause of men and are better off for it. Sometimes, Grand seems to suggest, suffering is just suffering. It is needless. It does not save anyone. In this sense, Evadne’s “retreat into domesticity” is seen as a defeat, not a triumph. She remains hysterical and is not cured. Many feminist writers have pointed out that hysteria, by rendering women silent, helps promote the goals of patriarchy and so undermines its own protest. 16 Still, if the woman in question is not just hysterical (since, after all it would merely be submitting to the patriarchal label that non-mothers and rebellious women are hysterical anyway) but embodies a larger concept, that of the hysterical mother, then her protest begins to truly undermine patriarchal conceptions about what a woman can and cannot be. The figure of the hysterical mother strikes deeply at the heart (and hearth) of patriarchal ideology—she is both mother and anti-mother, a powerful amalgamation of conflicting interests, and she is scary as hell.

Jennifer Givhan teaches composition at the University of New Mexico and Western New Mexico University. Her creative work on motherhood has been published widely, most recently in The Feminist Wire.

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