Join us for another 19v seminar!
This talk is part of a longer article examining the construction of maternal subjectivity in breastfeeding narratives from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature. As a literary trope, breastfeeding tends to be presented either as the antithesis of violence or as a continuation of embedded structural violence directed against mothers, children, and other vulnerable agents (with examples from Korolenko, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky). In two close readings of Ivan Lazhechnikov’s 1859 novella “My Doctor’s Grimace” and Mikhail Voskresenskii’s 1858 novel Natasha Podgorich, I compare a failed episode of maternal breastfeeding in the first with the second’s depiction of wet-nursing as a woman’s pathway to economic independence. I argue that realist literary depictions of maternal breastfeeding and wet-nursing demonstrate both the social vulnerability of mothers and the temporary autonomy gained through these practices, applying Bourdieu’s definition of “symbolic violence” and Cixous’s notions of “white ink” and “écriture féminine” to the context of Russian maternal fictions. In conclusion, I suggest that the characterization of nursing mothers in Russian realist literature is both revelatory (of female experience) and subversive (of conventional gender norms).
This event will be held virtually on Zoom.
