Maternity, madness and mechanization: The ghastly automaton in James Hogg’s The Three Perils of Woman

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract / Description of output

The ‘ghastly automaton’ of the title is the quasi-autonomous maternal body of Gatty Bell, the heroine of the first ‘peril’ of The Three Perils of Woman (1823). Gatty’s three-year ‘coma’ (during which she gives birth in an asylum) and recovery draws on two discourses that imagined the human body as an automaton, respectively midwifery and galvanism. The recovery period looks back to the ideal maternal body of eighteenth-century obstetric literature, but this recuperative effort is undermined by Gatty’s marked affinity to the violent, electrified body of galvanic experimentation. Gatty is both perfect incubator and repulsive object, an ideal and a fatal possibility.
The awkward coda to Gatty’s ‘peril’ imposes a retroactive explanation for her protracted automatous state: her husband and the narrator attempt to rehabilitate the ghastly automaton by recasting her degeneration as a mysterious process of generation, shifting the mechanical mother from the realm of the monstrous to the sublime. Her abject, automatous body is re-imagined as a superbly functional body that performed its work of reproduction more efficiently than it could have done with the distraction of consciousness. It is an extreme, Gothic reworking of the representation of the maternal body as a complex machine in eighteenth-century midwifery literature and medical illustration. Led by William Smellie, who aimed to reduce childbirth to mechanical principles, British midwifery courses used ‘automata’ (mechanical models of the uterus and pelvis) to train medical students and midwives. There was a reaction against the mechanisation of childbirth in the late eighteenth-century, but Hogg’s novel was published on the cusp of a shift to an interventionist model of midwifery that looked back to earlier mechanical models.
The reinterpretation of Gatty’s ordeal is undercut by echoes of the practices of the anatomy theatre. Hogg’s appropriation of the discourse of galvanism drags the automaton down to the level of an anatomical subject, a dissected electrified corpse. Specifically, Hogg draws on the depiction of the galvanised corpse in Andrew Ure’s experiments in Glasgow in 1818, appropriating Ure’s vocabulary, style and theatrical staging. The mechanistic subtext of Ure’s experiment is implicit, but is made explicit in Hogg’s startling transposition of the objectified corpse of anatomical experimentation onto a maternal body. Gatty’s delivery may be ideal according to the criteria of obstetric literature (she resigns control to the clinician, to whom the work of labour devolves, and she feels no pain), she may wake from her coma ‘improved’, but the perfected wife cannot efface the memory of the ghastly, galvanic automatism that effected the transformation. Gatty’s efficient automatism generates a child and a renovated matriarch, but its visceral representation overshadows her family’s hermeneutic efforts, so that what pervades the novel is not renovation but agonistic degradation. Her automatism haunts the many tales of hazardous maternity in the novel. With the intriguing exception of Katie Rickleton, a transgressive mother, the mad maternal bodies of The Three Perils become pariahs, relegated like Gatty to asylums and the margins of society.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMinds, Bodies, Machines
Subtitle of host publication1770-1930
EditorsDeirdre Coleman, Hilary Fraser
Place of PublicationHoundmills
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages61-82
Number of pages21
ISBN (Print)9780230284678
Publication statusPublished - 12 Apr 2011

Publication series

NamePalgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • James Hogg
  • Andrew Ure
  • William Smellie
  • Galvanism
  • Midwifery
  • Obstetrics
  • Automata
  • Highland Clearances

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Maternity, madness and mechanization: The ghastly automaton in James Hogg’s The Three Perils of Woman'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this