Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative by Lisa Algazi Marcus (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative by Lisa Algazi Marcus Ryan J. Pilcher Marcus, Lisa Algazi. Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative. Liverpool UP, 2022. Pp. vii-viii; 161. ISBN 978-18027-008-8. 79,20£ (hardcover). 978-18027-064-4. (eBook). Lisa Algazi Marcus's book is well-researched and well-written, offering a sociohistorical analysis of an overlooked phenomenon in nineteenth-century literature: breastfeeding. In clear and concise prose, Marcus answers the question of whether or not literary portrayals of breastfeeding reflected reality, identifying a tension between projected fantasies by male authors and the lives of nursing women. Marcus's first chapter provides the eighteenth-century background that will influence trends analyzed in later chapters on the nineteenth century. She takes Jean-Jacques Rousseau as her starting point because his insistence on "the sentimental benefits [of breastfeeding] to the mother and the family unit" (6) was more convincing to women of the time than his predecessors. At the same time, Marcus argues that the idealization of breastfeeding in literature, visual art, and laws of the Revolutionary period does not reflect reality, as mothers of all socioeconomic statuses continued to avoid breastfeeding for a variety of material, political, and sociocultural reasons. Building on the argument that the melancholy of Romantic heroes is born of their authors being sent away to wet nurses, Marcus's second chapter provides evidence of both confirmations and exceptions to the rule in literature and paintings. Chateaubriand is the exemplar of a Romantic author/hero with maternal separation anxiety, while Hugo and Lamartine, both nursed by their mothers, conflate nursing with risks of physical or mental illness (Hugo), or treat it as fuel for future melancholy necessary to the Romantic hero (Lamartine). Marcus closes with George Sand as the exception of note, for her portrayals of breastfeeding are [End Page 158] "less metaphorical and dramatic and more matter-of-fact than those in the works of other authors" (49). Further exploration in this section might include the eponymous Indiana from Sand's first solo novel (1832) who was nursed by an enslaved African woman on present day Réunion. This avenue might bolster arguments concerning race present in the section on Chateaubriand or provide more evidence of Sand's exceptionality. Chapter Three begins with "mastomania," or sexual pleasure derived from breastfeeding, and traces its usage in realist and naturalist texts from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century. Marcus shows that the Enlightenment period separated motherhood from sexuality, setting the stage for writers like Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, and Alexandre Hepp to play with the boundaries of acceptability. She argues that "the erotic dimension of the breastfeeding mother was tolerated, and even celebrated, in nineteenth-century French realism, but only when the male gaze constructed and controlled the mother's desire" (52). Each novel—Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, Fécondité, and Le lait d'une autre respectively—attempts to persuade readers of the benefits of maternal breastfeeding above the practice of hiring wet nurses. Mothers who take pleasure in breastfeeding their children, such as Balzac's Renée, are seen as fulfilling their "natural duties" and are thus absolved of any judgment for their pleasure, while wet nurses, particularly in Hepp's novel, appear as corrupting influences on children and society at large. The final chapter addresses the question of how aesthetics is woven into politics. In law, literature, and medicine of the Third Republic, the resounding message was that the maternal body was national property. Following the Franco-Prussian War, Marcus notes a resurgence of breastfeeding imagery and imperatives reminiscent of the Revolutionary period, likely in response to casualties of the war and decreasing birth rates (86). At the same time, the symbolic mother of the French Republic, Marianne, reemerged and was instrumentalized by painters and writers alike. The analyses of Zola's and Hepp's novels continue, focusing here on the characters named Marianne, one an "ideal" mother who breastfeeds her children (Zola), and the other, a morally bankrupt wet-nurse that corrupts the child with whom she is charged (Hepp). Marcus argues convincingly that...