Intertexts

Intertexts, Vol. 5, No. 2,2001 Maternal Guardianship by “Nature and “Nurture”: Eighteenth-Century Chancery C o u r t R e c o r d s a n d C l a r i s s a Cheryl L. Nixon B a b s o n C o l l e g e The eighteenth century redefined “woman” by redefining “mother.” As recent scholarship has argued, the mother serves as an obvious locus for the eighteenth century’s changing notions of the social and familial roles of women. For example, Susan Greenfield opens her introduction to Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature 1650-1865 by citing “the scholarly consensus that the idealization of the full-time mother was an early modern development” and providing an excellent summary of the scholarship sup¬ porting the argument “that it was not until the eighteenth century that woman’s social purpose was defined in terms of the bearing, nurturing, and educating of children” (1). This essay examines the eighteenth century’s in¬ vestment in the definition of the mother by examining aspecific type of mother: the maternal guardian. Simply put, amaternal guardian is awidowed mother who has been awarded the legal custody of her children. Defined by hernewlyindependentcontrolofherchildren,thematernalguardianoffers an extreme example of the equation of the female with the domestic and its atP °®®*hilities of either empowerment or confinement. Importantly, thematernalguardianisalegalcreationandthelegaltreatiserecordsthecen¬ tury sfactual articulation of her familial powers. The maternal guardian also proves of interest to literature; she is acentral character in Clarissa, in the figure of Mrs. Howe, the widowed mother ofAnna Howe. Constructed by eighteenth-century fact and fiction, the maternal guardian leaves both legal and literaty records of her confrontation with those definitional attempts. Clarissa’s Mrs. Howe provides acompelling representation of the mater¬ nal guardian; positioned against the ineffective Mrs. Harlowe, Mrs. Howe actsasanunchallengedratherthansuppressedmother,anunfetteredfemesole mther than/me covert, and as both public and private family leader.* Mrs. oweisatrueheadofhousehold,enjoyingnotonlyemotionalbuteconomic responsibility for Anna. On one level, then, Clarissa provides proof of the eighteenth century’s empowerment of the mother. Attempting to connect Clarissa to the legal record quickly calls that conclusion into question. The le¬ gal treatise reveals that the mother had no right to act as her child’s guardian. Awidowed mother was alegally disempowered mother; the claims of aspecial maternal bond, the idea upon which the eighteenth-century’s new ideologies of woman and family rest, did not stand up in acourt of law. The maternal guardian reveals achasm in the eighteenth-century construction of mother¬ hood: while literature gives new importance to the bonds between amother 1 2 8 1 2 9 Nixon—Maternal Guardianship by “Nature” and “Nurture' and her child, the legal treatise discounts the widowed mother’s connection to her child. Mrs. Howe assumes familial powers that the treatises deny her. The maternal guardian can be used to evaluate conflicting claims con¬ cerning the empowerment and disempowerment of women by the eigh¬ teenth-century ideology of motherhood. Importantiy, however, the maternal guardian compounds this conflict with another; she introduces the conflict between the factual and fictional construction of motherhood. Using this es¬ say to resolve the first conflict by way of the second, Icompare and contrast Clarissa's imagined maternal guardian with the treatises’s factual image of maternal guardianship. To determine how Mrs. Howe could be created by a culture whose legal system says she shouldn’t exist, Iquestion not only the imaginative process of the novel, but the fact-producing process of the law, moving beyond the treatise to examine litde Imown case records. To deter¬ mine the “facts” and “fictions” of the maternal guardian, Isurvey over 1900 manuscript case records from the Chancery Court and contrast the cases’s tracesofempoweredmaternalguardianshipwiththetreatises’serasureofma¬ ternal guardianship. Thus, the maternal guardian uncovers yet another con¬ flict: that within the legal record of fact itself. To answer the question of how the eighteenth century defined the maternal guardian, it becomes necessary to asktheevenmorebasicquestionsofhowwereadtherecordofmaternityand which record of maternity we read. I. The Maternal Guardian: The Commentaries^s Feme Covert or Clarissa’s Feme Sole? Intheeighteenthcentury,amotherhadnolegalrighttothecustodyof herchildren.AsWilliamBlackstoneexplainsinhisCommentariefsdescrip¬ tionofthelawsconcerning“parentandchild,”thefatherisgiventhelegal...