Expressions of White Ink: Victorian Women's Poetry and the Lactating Breast

Abstract

The period spanning from the late 1850s to the mid-1860s frames a historical moment in Victorian England when lactation and breastfeeding came under intense public scrutiny in both medical and creative writing. While popular domestic author Isabella Beeton wrote on the dangers that an unwary mother’s milk represented for her child and herself in her serial publication, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1859-1861), prominent physicians C.H.F. Routh and William Acton launched a public dispute in medical journals contesting the physiological and moral dangers that the fallen wet nurse posed for the middle-class household (1859). Meanwhile, the medical community catalogued the bizarre long-term physical and dispositional side-effects of an infant’s consumption of “bad milk” – among them, syphilis, swearing, sexual immorality, and death (Matus 161-162). But it is not only medical writers who were latching on to the breastfeeding debate as a means of voicing social and political concerns of the day; recent literary critics have gestured towards the troubling manifestations of lactation in popular mid-century novels like Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) as entry points into Victorian anxieties about classed and gendered embodiment. This project stipulates that the mid-century preoccupation with managing women’s milk represents an intersection of two overlapping cultural paradigms pertaining to female expression: a cultural devaluation of female physiological expression as unconscious if not dangerous leakage, and a deprecation of female linguistic and poetic expression as an analogously unmeditated and potentially disruptive kind of communication. Mid-century manuals, articles, and novels offered public voice to a number of existing anxieties surrounding breastfeeding which accompanied the mid-nineteenth century, a historical moment at the cusp of a waning popularity in wet nursing and at the advent and rise of patented infant formula. This project stipulates that at least three female poets of the mid-nineteenth century employ lactation imagery in their works as a means of recasting a cultural devaluation of female expression – inventing a new critical terminology of feminine poetic signifiers that uses the symbolic medium of breastmilk as its ink. Informed by the medical and cultural context of the High Victorian age, I explore how poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), and Augusta Webster (1837-1894) not only participate in the preoccupation with unstable bodies and fluids, but capitalize on female leakage in an elaborate rhetorical strategy that embarks on a new embodied female poetics. Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and Webster’s Mother and Daughter all enlist the lactating and feeding breast in a series of elaborate metaphors of female identity construction, literary expression, and poetic voice.