Date of Award

Spring 2025

Project Type

Dissertation

Program or Major

English

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

First Advisor

James Krasner

Second Advisor

Robin Hackett

Third Advisor

Monica Chiu

Abstract

Mother-daughter relationships have been of feminist interest for decades as this relationship shifts narrative focus to underrepresented characters. In literature their relationship illustrates and complicates what it means to be ‘woman’ and provides access to educational theories, political understanding, and familial ideologies. Further, examining how these relationships shift and alter through eras of narratives offers tangible patterns for study. My dissertation examines the mother-daughter relationships in late eighteenth-century, early nineteenth-century prose by investigating how social constructions of gender are complicated, critiqued, shaped, and altered as they are passed from parent to child in deathbed scenes. I engage with medical humanities discourse by focusing on the patient testimony of the mother characters to evaluate the cultural failings underneath maternal death and the maternal role in imparting inheritances. The Romantic era produced a cultural preoccupation with what maternity meant and how gender roles within family structures should look. Susan Greenfield examines the ambiguity surrounding maternity at the turn of the nineteenth-century and focuses on a trend of absence within the mother-daughter relationship. This absence, in her argument, articulates and reinforces maternal ideals, values, and traditions. The mother/daughter plot is largely discussed through psychoanalysis, and Marianne Hirsch, like Greenfield, challenges familial patterns in her decentering of the traditional family head. Hirsch deconstructs the singularity of “woman” through maternity and body and rejects essentialist ideals within these contexts. Closely concerned with deconstructing essentialism are disability and illness scholars such as Miriam Bailin and Talia Schaffer. These scholars emphasize time in sickrooms and their functions within plots and communities. My work narrows in on an element of illness studies, the deathbed, and focuses on a necessary voice who is empowered through her time on her deathbed, the maternal voice. I push the boundaries of lived experience in following how a mother’s influence imprints and impacts a daughter’s path. Critical arguments currently situate desire spurred by absence, but neglect to discuss the actual scene of removal which offers the direct throughline of ideologies between generations and promotes the significant social changes believed to be achievable. I offer close reading analyses influenced by medical humanities and feminist illness studies of five romantic texts. The introduction situates my study with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction. This narrative impresses how maternal absence impacts daughters and critiques social structures that remove agency through marriage. The following two chapters, one on Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story, the second on Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, argue for the more direct inheritances from mother figures and demonstrate the complications of maternal control. In the third chapter, analyzing Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, I examine how a mother’s conviction of her death is enough to construct a new identity, but corrupts her legacy. The final chapter argues how mothers cement their place in their family through their controlled deathbed scenes through a close reading of Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray. Each chapter offers a new complication for the legacy and imprint mothers leave upon their deaths and the legacy’s significance for the following generations.

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