Performativity

My examination of shifts that occur in Victorian maternal ideology relies on Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as outlined in Gender Trouble and expanded in Bodies that Matter. Performative theory imagines the performance of a set of prescribed social expectations as a “representation” that serves as “the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true” about an identity category (Butler Gender 2). I use Butler’s notion of performativity to examine the actions, behaviors, and assumptions that both constitute and are the results of Victorian maternal ideology. Specifically, I discover how the performances of mothers and surrogate mothers in fiction both “reveal” and “distort” social conceptions of maternal expectations. By distorting the same norms being enacted, these performances create a situation ripe for subversion or revision, rather than reification.

Butler explains that performativity requires a “reiteration” of “norms,” noting: That this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialization is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled. Indeed, it is the instabilities, the possibilities for

rematerialization . . . That mark one domain in which the force of regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of that very regulatory law. (Bodies 2)

Thus, according to Butler’s notions, it is specifically the constraints on women that expose the vulnerabilities of female and maternal ideologies and allow space for their revision. “‘Sex” is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled,” Butler explains, “and this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices” (Bodies 1). This idea, of course, applies to any socially constructed role, including Victorian motherhood. Indeed, “regulatory ideals” for mothers were very much prescribed, but those ideals were never fully enacted, never fully performed, as they imposed impossible regulations on the maternal body. This inability to live up to the ideal emblematizes the instability of maternal expectations, highlighting the ability of repeated performances of slightly altered norms to revise the

ideological constructions.

Examining familial roles, Butler explains, “the [psychoanalytic] law that refuses the girl’s desire for both her mother and father requires that she take up the emblem of maternity and perpetuate the rules of kinship” (Gender 38). The key word in this statement is “emblem”: while Hirsch suggests that fictive motherless heroines avoid biological maternity at all costs, Butler’s notion coincides with my own; daughters must not necessarily become mothers, but they will take up the “emblem” of maternity by adopting practices and attitudes associated with prevailing maternal norms, despite not being biological mothers. This is exactly what many motherless Victorian heroines do, including Molly Gibson, Olive Rothesay, Lucilla Marjoribanks, Dorothea Brooke, Aurora Leigh, Margaret Hale, and a plethora of others. Fictional daughters perform roles traditionally attributed to mothers, representing the idea of kinship outside the bounds of

biological maternity. This revision produces the possibility for the further reconstitution of normative ideals and values. Through performance, through a repetition of gestures and acts that mimic those ideologically connected to the maternal body, childless women incite a shift in the meaning of the word “mother.” No longer only a noun, “motherhood” comes to describe a process that is actively a verb: it does not describe what someone is; it describes what someone does.

I use Butler’s theory to demonstrate how the performative constructions in Victorian fiction reconstitute the prevailing norms of female and maternal identities. Of course, Victorian authors would have been unaware of these theories, but the very nature of such social theories is that they arise out of examination of cultural and historical practices, not that theory produces those practices. Thus, as nineteenth-century discourse defines and redefines motherhood, as new conduct manuals, journals, and magazines produce new ideas, suggestions, and even definitions of maternity, they simultaneously reiterate the instability of the notions they mean to instill, the terms they mean to define. It is these instabilities that mark the possibility for further

redefinition; bodies that do not match the biological description of motherhood latch on to a role they do not fit, and, as we have seen, “spawn rearticulations” of that role (Butler Bodies 2). I examine these rearticulations—the changes the performance of motherhood by non-biological mothers brings about—the possibility of mothering without ever birthing a child through the option of nurturing as surrogate, possibly professionally.

I claim that the nurturing woman whose body has not been used for procreation incites more change to the ideals of womanhood and motherhood than the biological mother, and it is with this consideration that I suggest they enact agency. Ultimately, I argue that non-biological mothers who perform maternal roles help revise sociocultural notions of womanhood and

motherhood. These revisions separate motherhood from its connection to the female body and reconstitute the maternal role as one not bound to the inherent oppression and silence that psychoanalysts like Hirsch attribute to a body that has given birth. The primary revisions to the role of motherhood relate specifically to the greater freedoms of choice available to middle-class women by the end of the nineteenth century. While still expected to work within a limited set of occupations, the middle-class woman can at least remain single and childless while living

respectably by supporting herself through surrogate maternal occupations.