The Impossible Ideal? Fictional Parental Figures from the Long Nineteenth Century Through the Lens of Parenting Advice Literature

Abstract

The continuing influence of diverse forms of advice has its origins in the rhetoric of many of the didactic and moralist types of advice literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which promoted a strictly hierarchical author-reader relationship. Parenting and child education is one of the various fields of advice literature in which these principles become particularly apparent. The recommendations and ideals presented by these advice texts, such as William Cobbett's <em>Advice to Young Men</em> (1829) or Martha Mears's <em>The Pupil of Nature: or, Candid Advice to the Fair Sex</em> (1797), were the result and the expression of underlying social currents which depicted ideal parenting as a necessary element for personal happiness and social stability. The ideal of perfect motherhood and fatherhood promoted by advice texts is also reflected in fictional literary works by female authors of the long nineteenth century, though often in surprising, unstable, or contradictory forms. This thesis therefore examines how fictional parental figures in women's writing of the long nineteenth century reflect, negotiate, and challenge the ideals of parenting promoted by advice literature. Even though the adherence to normative forms of morality was a necessary element to the public recognition of fictional works, many novels struggle to have their parental characters conform to the ideal in its entirety. The sometimes unintentional transgression of the parenting ideal by many fictional parents, especially mother figures, raises the question of whether complete adherence to the demanded parental standard is possible at all, or whether the ideal itself is a paradoxical result of contemporary social anxiety.