Devouring anxiety: Victorian breastfeeding and the modern individual.

摘要

This study investigates the epistemologically interdependent constructions of the breastfeeding mother and the modern individual in Victorian fiction, periodical writing, and advertising. Analyzing Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1850), George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Ada S. Ballin's Baby Magazine (1887-1915) and several advertisements for infant food (1892-1900), the study argues that Victorian discourse constructs the modern individual in terms of psychological and aesthetic differentiation that grant an individual both autonomy and the capability for symbolization. This construction of modernity depends upon an attendant construction of the past as primitive and undifferentiated.;In the anthropologically informed milieu of the late nineteenth century, the relationship between maternity and autonomy becomes rhetorically vital to the self-definition of Victorian England while the infant feeding that emblematizes that relationship becomes a stage on which modernity is performed via displays of differentiation. By examining the breastfeeding mother in conjunction with the modern individual, this study uncovers the discursive means through which breastfeeding has been constructed as natural. It concludes that infant feeding serves for Victorian culture as a controlling metaphor around which that culture conceptualizes its own status as primitive or modern, progressive or degenerate, autonomous or lacking individuality.;As it appears in the works under consideration, the notion of the breastfeeding mother embodies the primitive past from which modernity departs. Thus, the idea of breastfeeding becomes synonymous with the idea of nature while the idea of modernity becomes synonymous with that of artifice as Victorian fiction opposes the autonomous modern individual to the undifferentiated and undifferentiating nursing dyad of breastfeeding mother and nursling child.