‘she looks well, but is in her Constitutional Uncertainty’: representing and responding to pregnancy in late Georgian Britain, c.1760-c.1820

<p dir="ltr">This thesis presents a socio-cultural examination of the ways in which pregnancy was represented and responded to in late Georgian Britain. Foregrounding the voices of women and their kin networks, the project pays close attention to the relationships between pregnant women and their families and medical attendants during gestation. Departing from previous scholarship which has consistently foregrounded histories of midwifery and birth, this thesis asserts the importance of approaching pregnancy as a specific state.</p><p dir="ltr">In chapter 1, I examine medical writings on pregnancy that defined the condition in terms of its uncertainty. Alongside this, women’s own descriptions of their symptoms and that of their kin while pregnant are shown to comprise observations and allusions to the condition that spanned the earliest to the latest stages of gestation. These findings challenge prior scholarly assumptions that pregnancy was rarely, if ever, explicitly discussed in correspondence.</p><p dir="ltr">Chapter 2 establishes the ways in which elite women’s bodies were scrutinised in anticipation that they would bear an heir by often impatient kin. Female kin reported on how their pregnant – or suspected pregnant – kin looked and behaved; observations that prompted anxiety among the women who were distinctly aware that they were watched, and who wished to delay the revelation of their pregnancy.</p><p dir="ltr">In chapter 3, the fears of women and their kin are explored, and an argument set forth that previous fears of the maternal imagination had, by the late eighteenth-century, subtly relocated to fears of the maternal emotions and their effects on the mother-to-be and the unborn. This chapter demonstrates that, in addition to discussing the pregnancies and labours of their kin, other reproductive outcomes such as miscarriage and stillbirth were also spoken of between men and women in late Georgian Britain.</p><p dir="ltr">Finally, chapter 4 argues that taking a holistic view of literary, material, and social responses to maternal death is a crucial approach to these shocking and upsetting ends to pregnancies. The evidence presented in chapter 4 disrupts the notion that maternal deaths have been overstated and overexamined, offering a new perspective on these deeply affecting losses.</p>