ABSTRACT
A long tradition in Western literature configures the author as the father of his text. As Gilbert and Gubar famously argued in The Madwoman in the Attic, the inherited understanding of author as father and pen as penis presents a problem for women writers (3-14). One solution, although it does not resolve the problem of the woman author’s relation to her pen, is to figure the author as mother, and in nineteenth-century writing, we find the authority of motherhood appealed to again and again, both explicitly and implicitly. As has been noted by many invoking the notion of “Republican motherhood” as an endorsement of female authorship, the author-as-mother was a particularly resonant ideal in the postRevolutionary United States, where a new emphasis on the connection between state and family resulted in a new cultural sense of the importance of mothers’ roles as producers of citizens. Republican motherhood configured a nation of youth in need of education, so that a woman’s maternal role could extend beyond her nuclear and extended family to the imaginary family of the new nation. One result was the nineteenth-century growth in women’s writings specifically for children.1 Such literal transplantation of motherhood to writing was not, however, the only way in which motherhood authorized female authorship. Out of conservative positions such as Republican motherhood emerge writings that at times transgress conservative cultural boundaries. This chapter explores the breadth of the cultural authority that accrued through a positioning of women authors as maternal figures, focusing on the ways in which maternal authorship offered women the unexpected opportunity to engage in the definition of masculinity. Masculinity, of course, was like femininity a construct, produced discursively and performatively, and recent scholarship has begun to explore the ideals and realities of manhood in historical terms.2 Women’s writings on manhood make both conservative and countercultural gestures, using the authority of Republican motherhood and the domestic sphere to assert authority over manhood and the public sphere. As seen in earlier chapters, writings initially manuscript and presumably “private” in nature emerge in print with vestigial traces of the domestic, while moving women’s discourse into the public view. Authorship for many writers treated in this study melds the private and public spheres, and one of the most remarkable results of that melding is the maternal author’s assertion of authority over manhood.
