Ghostly presences: Edith Wharton's Sanctuary and the issue of maternal sacrifice

College Literature, Spring 1998 by Salas, Angela M

Critics, then, were acquainted with the nature/nurture debate stirred by application of Charles Darwin's theories, and gave no indication that they thought Kate Orme Peyton's decision to marry a man she did not love to protect his as-yet-unconceived offspring was either unusual or alarmingly self-effacing. There was something sufficiently familiar about Kate's notion of maternal self-sacrifice and inherited moral weakness to keep contemporary book reviewers and readers from the guffaws of disbelief that characterize much recent criticism. Thus, Sanctuary is in some ways a fragile ghostly presence, since it deals so particularly and so specifically with the fight between familial purity and evil in a Victorian context, when "[d]omesticity was sentimentalized, assigned redemptive qualities, even made into a fetish" (Thurer 1994).

Kate Orme Peyton's sacrifice may seem to Elizabeth Ammons in 1980 to be "feminine self-sacrifice gone berserk" (1980, 21), but Ammons is viewing the novella from a point of view, informed by a late twentieth-century American feminism and maternal ideal;6 this ideal, Ann Dally asserts, arose in the Victorian era and evolved.7 Some knowledge of European assumptions about mother's duties and obligations to their offspring might bring Wharton's world into focus; remembering that Sanctuary was published in 1903, when the twentieth century had barely begun might also assist in explaining the apparent "peculiarities" of Wharton's text.

French scholar Elisabeth Badinter's Mother Love: Myth and Reality, an explosive analysis of the origins of the myth of natural maternal love and sacrifice, delineates the history of the French mother's role up to the twentieth century. A discussion of Badinter's findings seems relevant because young Edith Jones spent several of her formative years in France. In her study, Badinter pays particular attention to the latter part of the nineteenth century, a time roughly coincident with Edith Jones's first experiences in France. Badinter's analysis created a controversy in France by challenging the myth of the naturally self-sacrificing mother and questioning the notion of a maternal instinct. Badinter asserts what ought to be obvious but is not; namely that "Maternal love is a human feeling. And, like any feeling, it is uncertain, fragile, and imperfect. Contrary to many assumptions, it is not deeply rooted in women's natures" (1984, xxiii). Badinter argues that perceptions of mother love are culturally constructed, and that the concept of "motherhood" was yet another manipulation of women and their concept of their place in the world.

In order to stem the loss represented by childhood mortality, French women were persuaded that their "new kingdom" was in their home, raising their children (1984,179). Many early feminists, fired by Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile, were encouraged to view child rearing as an appropriation of their husbands' former sphere of influence; hence, as liberating and empowering.8 It became proper and necessary for the health of France that girls be educated, not to encourage them to enter into public discourse, but in order that they might grow up and transmit their education and moral values to their children (222). As Badinter writes: