ABSTRACT
Gail Kern Paster has argued that ‘to write about birth and nurture is necessarily to write within and about the available discourses of power’,1 and indeed, early modern authors whose writings address the upbringing of children are also addressing issues of power: who will determine the character of this child, the future character of this family, or the future character of this nation? Such questions were frequently raised by authors discussing breast-feeding and the custom, common among the wealthy, of employing a wet-nurse to suckle the child. This issue was particularly contentious because of the early modern belief that the nursing child would drink in the nurse’s nature along with her milk. This belief endowed the nursing mother or wet-nurse with a tremendous power over the shaping of the child. Nursing became a means of reproduction in which men played no part. An aristocratic father was forced to empower either his wife or a lower-class surrogate with the shaping of his heir’s character. Anxiety over the empowerment of the wet-nurse or nursing mother is evident not only in the Puritan sermons, humanist pamphlets and conduct books of the period, all of which warn of the danger of wet-nursing, but also in romances such as Robert Greene’s Pandosto and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, which depict aristocratic children fostered away from home by lower-class foster parents. While Greene’s work emphasizes the guilt of the father who places his child with a foster parent and displays a consistent concern with the mixing of classes and the corruption of the aristocratic foundling by the mercenary, lower class foster parents, Shakespeare’s play eliminates these concerns and replaces them with the fear of maternal influence.
