Clare Hanson

Mothering the Race

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, reproduction became a highly political issue as it became closely entwined with concerns about the Empire. For the first time in centuries the birth rate was falling: from 153.5 births per 1,000 women aged 15–44 in 1876–80 to 105.3 in 1906–10. At the same time, infant mortality remained relatively high and, if anything, was increasing. Average mortality for the decade 1890–1900 was 154 per 1,000 live births; it had been 142 per 1,000 live births in the 1880s.1 Commentators at the time agreed that ‘population was power’ in the context of a nation-state struggling with other nations for imperial control, and there was real concern that the Empire could not be maintained without ‘the power of a white population, proportionate in numbers, vigour and cohesion to the vast territories which the British democracies in the Mother Country and the Colonies control’.2 Not only was the nation not maintaining its stock, but it was feared that the quality of that stock was declining. The Boer War (1899–1902) brought this second issue into sharp focus. In 1899, a third of the recruits who offered themselves for military service were rejected as unfit. After the war, an influential article by General John Frederick Maurice, entitled ‘Where to Get Men’, described the parlous state of health of the nation’s young men and stimulated the setting up of an Interdepartmental Committee to look into the question of ‘the Physical Deterioration of the Population’.3

Epigenetics, plasticity and identity in Jackie Kay's Red Dust Road

This article argues that Jackie Kays memoir Red Dust Road (2010) is a narrative of origins which engages profoundly with the genetic imaginary and at the same time pushes at the limits of its explanatory power, in ways which anticipate insights from recent research in epigenetics. This research has shown that human beings are not the result of a genetic template fixed before birth but are mobile and dynamic works in process, interacting continuously with their multiple environments. In line with this perspective, Kays memoir probes the psychosocial environments that have (in)formed her identity and draws attention not only to genetic family ties but to the embodied connections forged between adoptive parents and children. Building on an understanding of the dynamic nature of development, the text goes on to develop an ontology which resonates powerfully with Catherine Malabous work on biological and philosophical plasticity, in What Should We Do with Our Brain? (2008) and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (2010). Emphasising the plasticity and mutability of being, Kays memoir also registers the inter-connectedness of biological systems and the complex interdependencies of organisms and environments.

Beyond the gene: epigenetic science in twenty-first century culture

At the turn of the last millennium, the philosopher and historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller argued that the period when the gene was ‘the core explanatory concept of biological structure and fun...

Fiction: From Realism to Postmodernism and Beyond

Over the last four decades, fiction written by women has moved from the margins to the centre of British culture. In 2012, for example, Hilary Mantel dominated the literary landscape, winning the Man Booker prize for the second time with Bring up the Bodies, which also won the Costa Novel and Costa Book of the Year awards. Congratulating Mantel, the chair of the Man Booker panel described her as ‘the greatest modern English prose writer’, an accolade that was widely endorsed.1 What is striking about Mantel’s success is that it came out of her return to the historical novel, a genre which has often been dismissed as popular and escapist.2 Mantel rereads and reinvents the genre, exploiting its ambivalent position between fact and fiction in order to probe the permeable boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead. Taking Mantel’s achievement as its cue, this chapter argues that a self-conscious approach to narrative form is the most salient feature of fiction written by women in this period. The existing conventions of realism came under pressure as such writers probed the limits of representation, aiming to put ‘new wine into old bottles’, as Angela Carter (1940–92) so memorably expressed it.3 Realism is an umbrella term, referring to a disposition rather than a form. As Andrzej Gasiorek has suggested, it signals ‘not so much a set of textual characteristics as a general cognitive stance vis-a-vis the world, which finds different expression at different historical moments’.4

Katherine Mansfield’s Uncanniness

This essay suggests that Katherine Mansfield’s fiction, like that of her contemporary D. H. Lawrence, can productively be read in the light of and alongside Freud’s 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’.2 The uncanny is, by definition, resistant to definition, lying somewhere between a concept and a feeling, confounding attempts to distinguish between imagination and reality, self and other, the familiar and the strange. Its significance can be stretched so widely that it seems to encompass almost everything, as it does for example in Nicholas Royle’s stimulating study, in which the uncanny is located in texts from the fourth century to the present and psychoanalysis itself is read as but one manifestation of it.3 Freud certainly struggled to confine or tame what he had unleashed in his essay, which is of all his texts the one in which, as Robert Young points out, ‘he most thoroughly finds himself caught up in the very processes he seeks to comprehend’.4 Yet, despite its elusive character, it is possible to historicize and contextualize the cultural preoccupation with the uncanny which marked the years immediately following the First World War. Freud alludes to this context at several points in his essay, noting at the beginning that he has been unable to undertake ‘a thorough survey of the literature’ before writing his paper for reasons that are ‘inherent in the times we live in’ (124).

Biopolitics, biological racism and eugenics

This chapter explores the interpretive possibilities offered by Foucault’s concept of biopolitics with specific reference to eugenic thought in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Foucault’s most extended account of biopolitics can be found in the lectures published in Society Must Be Defended, in which he offers a more detailed exploration of issues raised in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality. In the lectures Foucault formulates his argument that biopower emerged as a field of force alongside the development of the modern nation-state, as the older sovereign right ‘to kill and let live’ was complemented by the new right ‘to make live and let die’. This formulation neatly captures the turn towards the active management of life by political and other authorities, which Foucault associates with the rise of the life sciences and clinical medicine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What is new in Society Must Be Defended is the more extended discussion of the second of the two levels on which biopower operates. The first level is through techniques centred on the disciplining of the individual body familiar from Foucault’s earlier work in The Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish; and the second through regularisation, which is not simply a variant form of discipline, but a new technique which infiltrates and encases it. This technique is addressed not to the individual body but to man-as-species, conceived as ‘a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness and so on’.1

Advice to the Fair Sex

There have been several historical studies of the emergence of the man-midwife, or accoucheur, in the eighteenth century and of the gradual supplanting of the female midwife, first in upper-class and then in middle-class households.1 However, the main focus of such accounts has been the struggle over the management of childbirth and the use — and alleged abuse — of obstetric instruments. The debate between midwives and accoucheurs over the management of pregnancy has received less attention. This debate involved not only practice, but also hermeneutics: indeed, the key issues were epistemological. How could pregnancy be known, and who had the authority to speak of it? One of the fiercest exchanges in this respect was between William Smellie and Elizabeth Nihell. The picture is interestingly complicated here in that the quarrel took place, at least in part, by proxy. Elizabeth Nihell’s Treatise on the Art of Midwifery was thought by many to have been written by her husband, while Smellie was defended against Nihell’s attacks by his friend Tobias Smollett. Smellie published the first two volumes of his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery in 1752 and 1754: these, like his Anatomical Tables (1754), concentrated on an ‘accurate’ description of ‘the situation of the parts concerned in parturition’ and also gave practical advice on ‘touching’ to diagnose pregnancy.