Chapter Three
Family History

What is the virtue of reduction either of scale or in the number of properties? It seems to result from a sort of reversal in the process of understanding. To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it. Reduction in scale reverses this situation. Being smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable. By being quantitatively diminished, it seems to us qualitatively simplified. More exactly, this quantitative transposition extends and diversifies our power over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the latter can be grasped, assessed and apprehended at a glance. A child's doll is no longer an enemy, a rival or even an interlocutor. In it and through it a person is made into a subject. In the case of miniatures ... knowledge of the whole precedes knowledge of the parts.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind

Some common ground among individuals is absolutely essential to the complex ideological cluster we are elaborating. Otherwise, literary and social historians would be left with nothing more than an ensemble of discursive effects with which to account for the most basic categories of modern culture. There is no question that the family provides that common ground. It provides a conceptual space where nature and culture conspire to produce the individuals who write books and engineer revolutions. No matter how extraordinary some individuals turn out to be, they all have mothers and fathers, and they appear to enter into history in much the same way, pulsing with the most ordinary needs, drives, and passions.

The past two decades have seen not only a multifaceted theoretical critique that insists on the productive capability of texts, the agency of writing, and the historicity of precisely those areas where culture appears to be nature rather than culture, but also the explosion of a veritable

industry in the history of the family. The development of such a specialized focus within social history might seem like a good idea. Indeed, one could argue that feminism, poststructuralism, and the new cultural history should converge around the effort to demystify the nuclear family. One might also expect these critical practices to show how and in whose interests the sexual distribution of labor and power has operated, what role writing played in producing the family's distinctively modern shape, and how the family has interacted with other institutions characteristic of cultures undergoing industrialization. But this has not occurred. Rather than seeing the sacred space of human reproduction as the soft but omnipotent center of modern culture, the place where science shakes hands with theology and literature, British historians of the family have settled for common sense and sentimentality. The result has been a burgeoning field within social history that demonstrates either that a particular family formation has always been with us or that any other living arrangement lacks love. In this chapter, we are interested in the political fantasy that is encapsulated and reproduced not only through popular representations of the family but also in the annals of historical scholarship.

Even the most sophisticated scholars and critics tend to assume that consciousness enters history and takes up a definitive relationship with the world by means of the family. Thus it is in the area of the history of the family that history rubs directly up against the very domain of human experience that literature places outside of history, in either the domain of nature or that of God.^[1] It is in this area that historians join the nomenclature of class and status to that of emotion and moral character, hallmarks of the enclosed and individuated consciousness. Where then, if not here, might we find a historical description of the individual in whom literature and history locate the cause of revolutionary change? Such an individual, however, is the last thing the mainstream of Anglo-American social historians have been willing to historicize. Indeed, their whole mission has been to preserve the paradox of continuity (of consciousness) amid revolutionary change (in sociopolitical relations) that binds literature to history.

Even a casual glance at a few of these historical studies of the family shows how consistently they voice the conviction that family feeling has characterized English people and their culture since early modern times, if not well before. One is led to think that family feeling is endemically English. According to Keith Wrightson, the diaries of members of the

gentry show that romantic love was alive and well in England even when marriages were arranged for largely economic and political reasons.^[2] Ralph Houlbrooke finds that parish registers indicate relatively low infant mortality during the early seventeenth century, and he concludes from this evidence that most parents wanted their children and took care of them once they were born.^[3] Michael McDonald, drawing on the records of an early seventeenth-century physician-astrologer, discovers that an early modern wife or parent could become so physically ill from bereavement as to require medical help.^[4] From this evidence, McDonald concludes that early modern people enjoyed a close relationship with their spouses and children. Angus McLaren examines demographic statistics and medical tracts and concludes that from early modern to modern times "the rights of women to experience sexual pleasure were not enhanced, but eroded as an unexpected consequence of the elaboration of more sophisticated models of reproduction."^[5] There are many more studies that share this view that family life is a constant of English culture.^[6] We offer these examples from among the more respected scholarly efforts simply to suggest the kind of argument presently commanding the field of the history of the British family, and to pose the following questions: Against whom do historians feel compelled to defend a culture- and class-specific notion of the family? Why do so by arguing that the family, in contrast with every other institution and social alliance, is in some essential way exempt from history?

To find an answer, one must move backward two decades to one of the earliest and most influential examples of this kind of history. The current desire to rescue the family is first and most superficially an attempt to rescue Peter Laslett's version of the English family, set forth in what has become the foundational work of the history of the British family, The World We Have Lost .^[7] This work began in the 1950s as a series of radio lectures, which were revised and published as a book in 1965; the book was subsequently revised twice more. It went through any number of printings and became one of the most frequently cited books written on the topic.^[8] This pioneering effort to historicize the family married sociology to history in order to determine how ordinary people lived their lives in centuries past. The implications of this move cannot be overestimated. It provided the model for histories of the family. At the same time, it attracted attention to the Cambridge Group for the History of Populations and Social Structures, even though Laslett made it clear in subsequent editions of his book that he did not want his own argument

concerning the family in former times to be identified with the work of the Cambridge Group. The later editions did, however, increasingly rely on the Cambridge Group's demographic findings.

Laslett takes some of his evidence for the affective history of the family from a standard source, the writing of the puritan clergy. He supports his interpretation of what he describes as a "discussion of domestic, economic and social relations by the men of the time" with data from the Cambridge Group's file 3, the Listings File.^[9] Elsewhere he identifies the contents of this file as "every discoverable list of inhabitants which gives evidence of being complete" and specifically as parish records from one hundred communities.^[10] These lists were compiled by "the miscellaneous body of persons living in our country between the years 1574 and 1821 who went to the trouble of counting and describing the inhabitants of the hundred communities whose figures we have recovered and analysed."^[11] Each subsequent edition of The World We Have Lost includes more of these data. On the basis of this evidence, Laslett portrays the family in former times as a small, relatively self-enclosed unit composed mostly of blood relatives with a biological father or his surrogate at their head. In preindustrial societies, according to Laslett, "a man usually lived and worked within the family, the circle of affection, [and] released enough dissatisfaction to account for all the restlessness which has marked the progress of the industrial world" (18).^[12] The kind of dissatisfaction that could be contained within a family exists for Laslett in stark contrast with modern dissatisfaction. Our modern concept of alienation, which he calls part of the "cant of the mid-twentieth century," "began as an attempt to describe the separation of the worker from his world of work" (22). "Time was," as he tells it, "when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever," he laments. "It makes us very different from our ancestors" (22).

Laslett applies his own brand of popular psychology to this statistically reconstructed family. By an almost invisible logic of internalization, he reasons that even "the head of the poorest family was at least the head of something" (54). That each of them was on top of some little heap of humanity apparently made it possible for heads of households to identify with people higher up on the social scale in a way that became impossible once the workplace was detached from the home. In an extension of the same logic, Laslett translates the old family feeling into a collective consciousness that did not break down along class lines until the nineteenth century. "The workers," according to Laslett, "did not

form a million outs facing a handful of ins . They were not in what might be called a mass situation. They could not feel the kind of affiliation we attribute to a class. "For this," by which he means the England of old, "was a one-class society" (54).^[13] From time immemorial, then, Englishmen understood themselves in relation to the nuclear family (although he stops short of saying it in so many words, the family, for Laslett, is the nuclear family).^[14] Englishmen either felt they were parts integrated into an organic whole or else they thought of themselves as parts broken off from that whole. Upon this concept of the family depends Laslett's idea that the loss of such wholeness of being gives human consciousness its modern shape.

The absence or presence of the family divides present from past. With the spread of the factory system, the family unit was no longer the work unit, and the worker-patriarch became mass man, that maelstrom of arbitrarily colliding atoms that Engels encountered in Manchester as the factory doors opened to disgorge their human contents.^[15] On the grounds that no comparable change had previously torn men from their homes and villages or amassed them in factories and cities, Laslett concludes that the upheavals of the 1640s and 50s had very little impact at the level at which ordinary people lived:

The truth is that changes in English society between the reign of Elizabeth and the reign of Anne were not revolutionary. The impression left by an attempt to survey the fundamental framework during these generations is of how little, not of how much, evolution seems to have taken place. Nothing in economic organization or in social arrangements seems to have come about which would have led of itself to political crisis, and the changes that did go on seem to have been gradual over the whole period rather than sudden.^[16]

In an ingenious turn of argument, Laslett insists that the conflicts punctuating the period between the reigns of Elizabeth and Anne did not disrupt, but rather strengthened, affiliations at the local level of village and home. Conflicts at the center of power preserved life as it had been lived by the great majority of Englishmen until the industrial revolution. In thus establishing that English people lived in nuclear families much earlier than social historians had previously imagined, Laslett challenges the assumption that the events of the 1640s and 50s wrought a major change of some kind in the people's sense of who they were and how they were related to one another. Historians who want to identify the mid-seventeenth century as the revolutionary moment in England's political history must therefore deal with the claim that people did not change at the most personal level until much later on.

At first, most historians chose to ignore the implications of Laslett's theory. It was thought that, as one of the founding fathers of the British demographic approach, Laslett had simply established the family as a legitimate area of historical research. He had not made it necessary to integrate that research into political history, an area in which he was already a distinguished scholar. Whether or not Lawrence Stone began his equally influential study of personal life with the idea of defending the English Revolution against Laslett's argument, he was venturing into territory that had already been mapped out by that argument when he entered the debate on the origin of the nuclear family.^[17] And the ahistorical character of Laslett's preindustrial family could not long remain unacknowledged. The thesis that the modern political order emerged as a result of the English Revolution was at stake. Chapter 2 tried to demonstrate that because they are unable to identify a social or economic cause for a revolution during the mid-seventeenth century, both Stone and Christopher Hill must resort to "blocks of ideas," "ideology," or, to use the terms Stone adopts in The Family, Sex and Marriage, 1500–1800, "values and behaviour" (10–11). Their arguments depend entirely on the supposition that a significant number of English people responded with the same emotion when government encroached upon their personal lives, since such emotion is the most important cause as well as a response to the events of the 1640s and 50s.

To challenge Laslett, Stone draws upon what he calls a "rag-bag of evidence," and from this material he tries "to create a coherent composite picture" (11):

Every possible type of evidence has been examined to pick up hints about changes in values and behaviour at the personal level. The greatest reliance has been placed on personal documents, diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, domestic correspondence, and the correspondence columns of newspapers. Other sources which have been used are the more popular and most frequently reprinted handbooks of advice about domestic behaviour, before 1660 written mainly by moral theologians and after 1660 mainly by laymen ...; reports of foreign visitors; imaginative literature, concentrating on the most popular novels, plays and poems of the day; art ...; architectural house plans showing circulation patterns and space use; modes of address within families ...; folk customs such as bundling and wife-sale; legal documents such as wills, inventories, marriage contracts and litigation over divorce or sexual deviation; and finally, demographic statistics about birth, marriage, death, pre-nuptial conceptions and bastardy. (10–11)

Three points ought to be noted in this catalogue of sources. First, it appears that Stone thinks of "changes in values and behaviour at the

personal level" primarily as changes in sexual values and behavior. Second, as Stone himself acknowledges, his research on the family in former times is limited to the families of a relatively small group of people; most of his evidence concerns the mating procedures and domestic practices of families of the gentry and nobility.^[18] Finally, Stone's material overlaps that on which Laslett based The World We Have Lost, but he does not use the demographic findings of the Cambridge group; instead, he relies upon "imaginative literature," "art," and "architectural house plans." Stone uses this material to produce something less like paradise lost and more like paradise found, in order to refute Laslett's theory. To demonstrate that personal life underwent a profound change during the seventeenth century, Stone has to historicize what Laslett relegated to nature. He reworks the material he and Laslett share, to dismantle Laslett's idea that in early modern England there were fewer people in a social unit, that they spent more time together, and that as a result they enjoyed a closer emotional bonding than was the case during the modern period.

From the scant evidence available, Stone concludes that between 1450 and 1630, what he calls the Open Lineage Family was the dominant but not the only pattern. During the last fifty years of this period, affiliations among members of the immediate family apparently began to hold their own against allegiances to outside authorities, and to this intermediate formation he gives the name Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family. But it is only after 1640 that something like the values and behavior of the Closed Domesticated Nuclear Family actually organized people's thoughts and feelings as well as the way they lived. Although these different types of households represent a sequence of three time frames in the history of the family, in fact only two types—the biological family and a household that includes other people—organize Stone's historical narrative, and they boil down to a simple opposition. Laslett imagines that the world was significantly happier when household and workplace were one. What amounts to good company for Laslett is, for Stone, a crowd. Stone does not want extra children, servants, apprentices, aunts and uncles, or grandparents around his house, no matter how limited their numbers, constant their influence, or cohesive their presence in the group. He cannot imagine how a husband and wife could experience true intimacy while other people were looking on; he assumes that a powerful bond between parent and child could only be born out of a relationship that took place in the solitude of a private room. And he concludes that the privatization of the household, like the English Revolution itself, was a permanent change for the better.

Two kinds of relationships—"external" and "affective"—coexist as contraries in Stone's account. Thus, regarding sixteenth-century kinship relations, he writes: "This was a society where neither individual autonomy nor privacy were respected as desirable ideals" (4, Stone's italics). "Relations within the nuclear family, between husband and wife and parents and children, were not much closer than those with neighbors, with relatives, or with 'friends,' " he continues, and marriage itself "was not an intimate association based on personal choice" (5, our italics). During the reign of the Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family the "total amount of the affective feelings was limited" (7) by the authority of church and state. By some natural principle, however, these feelings began to flourish the moment a "series of changes in the state, the society and the Church undermined this patriarchal emphasis, while continuing the decline of external pressures on the increasingly nuclear family" (7). Affective individualism organized the household as soon as "external" interventions in family life disappeared. As Stone explains, "this new type of family was the product of the rise of Affective Individualism. It was a family organized around the principle of personal autonomy, and bound together by strong affective ties" (7, our italics). Our italics are meant to point out Stone's tautological use of "affective."

Stone's account of the modern family suggests that it takes one to make one, and The Family, Sex and Marriage consequently reproduces the figure of the self-producing self whose operations we have been tracing. If, as he claims, "this new type of family was the product of Affective Individualism," then the new type of family structure was responsible for creating such individuals. Stone insists that people could not feel close to one another in a world where "privacy was clearly a rarity, which the rich lacked because of the architectural layout of the houses and the prying ubiquity of their servants, and the poor lacked because of confinement in a one-or-two room hovel" (6). He also insists that restriction of the family to the genealogically related unit and the elimination of "external" influences on its affairs automatically reproduced itself at the level of the individual. Privacy of the family created privacy within the family, as demonstrated both by architectural spaces where the individual body was out of other people's sight and by modes of writing in which the individual mind appeared to constitute a world unto itself.^[19]

Where Laslett's argument proceeded by tropes of fusion or identification, Stone's depends on tropes of enclosure and separation. And where Laslett mobilized the concept of Gemeinschaft to associate the loss of

psychological closeness with the centrifugal force of industrialization, Stone's account is equally dependent on another familiar nineteenth-century theme, that which endorses rather than deplores the modern division of labor. Any reader of nineteenth-century fiction knows that no good can come of a relationship based on money rather than love. According to Stone's definition of the family, affective relations can flourish between man and woman, and between parent and child, only where marriage is not a matter of economic necessity. Only then can personal choice determine the composition of the family. And as for the world we have lost, he arrives at the conclusion that marriage then "was not an intimate association based on personal choice. Among the upper and middling ranks it was primarily a means of tying together two kinship groups.... Among peasants, artisans and labourers, it was an economic necessity" (5).

In Laslett's version, the family began as far back as men and women started living in houses together with their children and a few other people. On this basis, he argues that members of an ordinary English household in the past could experience the same kind of closeness that modern individuals can experience with their spouses and offspring, when not too preoccupied with work. In Stone's version, the family came into being only with the kind of privacy that allowed for sexual intimacy. At least at first, only those few who possessed space, time, and literacy evidently enjoyed such privacy. It is only now, after the separation of home and workplace, that ordinary people can enjoy it. Yet in reading each of these conflicting accounts, one has little doubt that the family is the historian's fantasy before it is anything else. For both Laslett and Stone, the early modern household embodies a feeling that people naturally feel for their spouses and biological offspring, the same feeling that these historians imagine parents and children experience now. Both assume that closeness among a small, enclosed group of people not only makes those people happy but also indicates they are decent, kind, and mature.

This is precisely the difficulty. In writing about personal life, neither Laslett nor Stone has historicized his own idea of what personal life is and should be. Having stressed the point on which they directly disagree with one another, we would now like to suggest that the Stone-Laslett debates are not nearly so important for their diverging positions, however fiercely held, as for the points on which they must concur in order to disagree. Rather than taking sides in the quarrel, we want to show how a single political fantasy—what we are calling a myth—provides a frame-

work for these conflicting histories of the family and is therefore substantiated no matter which side ultimately wins.

To get at this fantasy, let us first work with Laslett. Having demonstrated to his satisfaction that most English households and villages were relatively small until well into the nineteenth century, he delivers up the following conclusion—or wish, or command, depending on how one reads it:

We must imagine our ancestors, therefore, in the perpetual presence of their young offspring. A good 70 per cent of all households contained children.... In the pre-industrial world there were children everywhere.... The perpetual distraction of childish noise and talk must have affected everyone almost all the time, except of course the gentleman in his study or the lady in her boudoir; incessant interruptions to answer questions, quiet fears, rescue from danger or make peace between the quarreling. (109)

The world we have lost turns out to be an extended nursery of noisy needs and relatively undifferentiated individuals, a Munchkin land that could not survive the reality of the industrial cities that tore individuals apart from one another and then piled them together willy-nilly into monstrous slums. But this conception of the world was also the one with which Laslett began, and the one he sought to universalize.

Susan Stewart's wonderful analysis of miniaturization may seem worlds away from British historiography, but it describes precisely the logic that Laslett's description fulfills; a logic that equates smallness—small households, small villages, and small children—with emotional closeness.^[20] As Stewart describes it, the logic of miniaturization begins with a world of things. Resembling the writing of history in this respect, the miniature promises to bring the past back to life. It erases the process of reproduction that presents objects to us, and allows consumers to lose themselves in representation. Although the world in miniature appears to be one of nature pure and simple when compared to present-day reality, it is anything but. Its immaculate precision marks "the inorganic body of the machine and its repetition of a death that is thereby not a death" (69). It is by triumphing over the natural forces of both time and space that the miniature offers its consumer a fantasy of control in which art (or history in this case) appears to master even death: "The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination" (69). Another glance at Laslett's mode of description will reveal its involvement in the great game of cultural control.

Laslett's capacity to imagine the world as one big happy family depends upon his capacity to imagine his ancestors, through a historical inversion, as if from the position of their parent. Where Stone seems appalled by the very lack of privacy to which Laslett attributes the togetherness of premodern family life, Laslett is not the least bit concerned that the world we have lost must have been one in which people were constantly exposed to the prying eyes of their neighbors. The reason for this is clean It is from the perspective of overseer of this brood that he imagines "the perpetual distraction of childish noise and talk ... incessant interruptions to answer questions, quiet fears, rescue from danger or make peace among the quarreling" (109). By his own admission, Laslett's is a paternalistic view: "Immaturity implies authority," he confides, "and those who cannot look after themselves have to be commanded" (111).

Laslett offers us a past that was comparatively gratifying and harmonious, not because individualism flourished there, but because of the constraints placed upon individualism. The preindustrial family may appear to be one that empowered the ordinary individual, but in actuality the individual did not count for very much. Only the father mattered, and one was a father only to the degree that one had a family under his control. Laslett imagines the family as both a single body and one that exists in a feminized relationship to the father. In psychoanalytic terms, this particular configuration resembles the fantasy of the maternal body acted out in the game that Freud calls fort-da, a fantasy arguably specific to Western industrialized cultures and the social groups that dominate them.^[21] The "family" allows Laslett to imagine political authority as analogous to the father's "natural" power over the mother's body. If an individual's identity as father depends upon controlling or manipulating the desires of women and children, then social order depends on subordinating the wish of a (feminine) population to the (masculine) will of the father. The political logic of the fantasy reveals itself early on in Laslett's argument, where he admits, "people came [i.e., existed] not as individuals, but as families" (20). Once the heterogeneous individuals within the preindustrial family unit can be boiled down to just one, then a similar process of reduction can repeat itself at the level of the nation. And so Laslett imagines England of old as

an association between the heads of such families, but an association largely confined to those who were literate, who had wealth and status, those, in fact, who belonged with their families as part of them, to what we called the ruling minority. Almost no woman ever belonged to England as an individual, except it be a queen regnant—scarcely a woman in the ordinary sense—or a

noble widow and heiress or two, a scattering of widows of successful merchants and yeoman. No individual under the age of thirty was likely to be a member, except in the very highest reaches of society, and very few men who had never been married. (20)

The nursery requires an adult world. By miniaturizing the family, Laslett rationalizes the use of marriage to settle economic and political obligations. When business mixed into marriage, it did not oppress children so much as ensure their future. As he explains, "the authoritarianism of traditional social life and educational practice becomes a little easier to understand when the youthfulness of so much of the community is borne in mind" (111). The fantasy of the world as a nursery requires an authoritarian father.

Where the old society greets Laslett with the undifferentiated babble of children, it does not speak to Stone at all. It is strictly from the absence of certain expressions of emotion in memoirs and diaries, as well as from limited data concerning wet nursing, child rearing, and mortality during the early years of childhood that he concludes: "There is no doubt whatever that 'restraint of emotional outpouring characterized infant departures as well as entries into the uncertain temporal scene', an observed psychological fact which stands in striking contrast with the evidence for the very late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries" (105). Should their offspring survive infancy, often in someone else's hands, even those of a stranger, the first duty of parents was ruthlessly "to crush the will of young children." Rather than a bustling and thriving nursery, Stone contends, "England between 1500 and 1660 was relatively cold, suspicious, and violence-prone" (102). On what grounds does he draw a conclusion so much at odds with the extremely influential view that Laslett, writing just twelve years before, had abstracted from some of the very same evidence?

Stone infers a pervasive inhospitality toward children from the demonstrable "frequency with which infants at that period were deprived of a single mothering and nurturing figure to whom they could relate during the first eighteen or twenty years of life" (99). Obviously connected to the lack of any domestic warmth in Stone's mind are the practices of fostering out and of exchanging children. According to Stone, the children of the landed, upper bourgeois, and professional classes were generally fostered out to hired wet nurses for a year or two and then raised by nurses, governesses, and tutors until about the age of ten, when they were sent to boarding school. Lower down the social ladder, children also left home at an early age. As Stone explains, "what one sees at these

middle- and lower middle-class levels is a vast system of exchange by which parents sent their own children away from home ... and the richer families took in the children of others as servants and labourers. As a result of this custom, some very fragmentary census data suggest that from just before puberty until they married some ten years later, about two out of every three boys and three out of every four girls were living away from home" (107). Apparently, then, these practices were common in preindustrial societies, even though it hardly enters into Laslett's picture of that world at all. Children were kept at a distance from their parents at the upper levels of early modern society through the practice of fosterage, and the exchange of children was enough to prevent any family affection from developing at the lower. As a result of these practices, Stone explains, "members of the importing families lived, ate, and, at the lower social levels where rooms were few, even slept in the company of members of another family. Domestic relations must consequently have been more formal and more restrained than they need to be today because of the constant presence in the house of strangers, who were likely to gossip with the neighbors" (108). Stone admits that "it was only when bourgeois demand for privacy developed in the early eighteenth century that this [exportation of children] became a source of complaint" (108). He apparently cannot imagine, as Laslett does, that the presence of other children in the family might have extended the sense of closeness to a community beyond the biological family. Rather, he assumes that anyone coming into the family from outside it cannot be truly family and therefore contaminates it. A world that fails to grant autonomy to the biological family is, by Stone's definition, a world without love.

What appears to be a problem of fathers—the extent of their authority over other members of the family—turns out to be a problem of mothers: a world without love is for Stone a world without "a single mothering and nurturing figure." This world resembles the world Melanie Klein identifies with the "bad breast," a metaphor with which she explains why some people's gratification depends on the illusion of controlling its source, equivalent to an infant's illusion that it has the power to summon the maternal breast.^[22] Laslett's description offers the fantasy of fully possessing the mother, as one might do prior to separation from her; Stone's offers a negative version of this world, a family in which the mother fails to nourish the infant-subject. Before the formation of the kind of family that provided maternal affection, the need was certainly there; "emotion," claims Stone, "was deflected into other channels, pri-

marily into passionate religious enthusiasm.... Tempers were short, and both casual violence and venomous and mutually exhausting litigation against neighbors were extremely common" (99). The use of such terms as "violence," "venomous," and "mutually exhausting" is characteristic of the fantasy of the bad breast. Klein finds that this fantasy colors the world of individuals who felt that their mothers were unresponsive to their needs. Pursuing the logic of the "bad breast," Klein also discovered that these individuals achieve a sense of control over the desired object by regarding it as providing poison rather than milk.

In representing the early modern world as such a world, Stone speaks, not from the perspective of the father, as Laslett did, but from that of the child. However, the fantasy shaping this representation is the same as Laslett's, namely, a wish for control. We have already suggested similarities between Laslett's imagined world and the game of fort-da, by which Freud's grandson staved off fear of abandonment through imaginary control of his mother. And we can do the same with Stone's. In a psychoanalytic interpretation, for one to imagine a depleted world as Stone does is, symbolically, to send one's mother away. One thus fantasizes control of the withdrawal of the breast, much as the little boy did in making a bobbin-like toy disappear behind a piece of furniture in the "fort " part of the game his grandfather happened to observe. Such rejection of the beloved object is the other side of the fantasy that one can induce the mother's reappearance ("da ") simply by pulling the bobbin's string and bringing it back into view.

Let us return momentarily to the concept of miniaturization borrowed from Susan Stewart. In order to historicize the fantasy shared by Laslett and Stone, we must begin to repoliticize what we have just psychologized. It seems to us that something like miniaturization informs the logic on both sides of the argument. A theory that privileges the common household may seem logically at odds with one that makes private rooms the precondition for family feeling; but on a purely ideological level they are quite compatible. Both rely on tropes of miniaturization—smallness and enclosure. Whether it is a toy such as the bobbin or a scholarly description of the family, the miniature offers the promise of a special form of cultural control. Indeed, both Stone and Laslett use the family to perform a kind of embedding that Stewart associates with a dollhouse:

Transcendence and the interiority of history and narrative are the dominant characteristics of the most consummate of miniatures—the dollhouse. A house within a house, the dollhouse not only presents the house's articulation of the tension between inner and outer spheres, of exteriority and interiority—

it also represents the tension between two modes of interiority. Occupying a space within an enclosed space, the dollhouse's aptest analogy is the locket or the secret recesses of the heart: center within center, within within within. The dollhouse is a materialized secret; what we look for is the dollhouse within the dollhouse and its promise of an infinitely profound interiority. (61)

Although the two historians we have been discussing describe the family in mutually contradictory terms, they share a single object of analysis. Like the dollhouse, the family contains "the secret recesses of the heart" which in turn contain "the tension," as Stewart says, "between exteriority and interiority." The family provides the language whereby individuation, and thus the rift between consciousness and history, acquires its naturalizing metaphor, the individual's birth. It is also the place where the foundational metaphor of a body born that stands for an enclosed consciousness single and entire must be protected. This is accomplished whenever historians of the family translate a quantity of biologically related bodies into a quality of feeling.

We have described the argument between Laslett and Stone at some length in order to demonstrate that their positions on the family derive not so much from the historical material surviving from an earlier time as from a set of modern metaphors that are deeply ingrained in the thinking of both men, metaphors that shape their understanding of cultural material at the most basic level. Ecclesiastical court records; county histories; the exhaustive demographic studies by Wrigley and Schofield; diaries; autobiographies; medical tracts on obstetrics, conception, and human anatomy; the voluminous medical practice notes of a seventeenth-century astrological physician; supplemented by accounts of mental disorder and its treatment in coroner's inquests, court records, religious treatises, and popular literature—all are distilled down to signs of the presence or absence of the emotions that bind individuals voluntarily to their mates and to their immediate offspring.^[23] One can arrive at this core of meaning only by pursuing a highly questionable string of assumptions.

The British histories of the family that we have read characteristically reduce a rich variety of kinship relations and domestic practices down to a sentimental discourse that reflects present-day common sense, or popular psychology. When not encrusted with the sociohistorical details of a place and time, definitions of the family have the properties of popular proverbs.^[24] In rural cultures, Barthes explains, such statements "foresee more than they assert, they remain the speech of a humanity which is making itself, not one which is" (154). In modern bourgeois

cultures, however, the same kind of statement is always directed downward as if from parent to child, using the power of knowledge to produce a paternal relationship. Thus translated into the bourgeois aphorism, or maxim, proverbial wisdom takes on many of the qualities Barthes attributes to a "mythology":

Bourgeois aphorisms ... belong to metalanguage; they are a second-order language which bears on objects already prepared. Their classical form is the maxim. Here the statement is no longer directed towards a world to be made; it must overlay one which is already made, bury the traces of this production under a self-evident appearance of eternity: it is a counter-explanation, the decorous equivalent of a tautology, of this peremptory because which parents in need of knowledge hang above the heads of their children. The foundation of the bourgeois statement of fact is common sense, that is, truth when it stops on the arbitrary order of him who speaks it. (154–55)

For our purposes, the family provides the clearest example of this behavior. To discover it in another culture or time is to reproduce what modern industrial cultures take to be the self-evident truths of human nature. For this reason, most modern scholarly representations of the family in former times can be reduced to a few aphorisms and maxims simply by stripping away a scant number of historically specific details.

Laslett, for example, claims that "time was when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors" (22). Who is going to contest this truth, though it fleshes out the barest skeleton of demographic findings? To represent the modern family as a decided improvement, Stone represents the early modern family as one that was hostile to children: "In such a society relations with one's own children were not particularly close. Richer families put their infants out to wet-nurse, and when they returned, the advice of moralists, theologians and writers of domestic advice books was that the first duty of parents was ruthlessly to crush the wills of young children" (6). From there, it is fair to say, both Laslett and Stone proceed according to a logic of emotions that sounds as incontestable as it seems commonplace: a small number of individuals who are together for a long time without outside interference tend to care for one another as for themselves; they are attracted sexually to nonfamily members of the opposite sex; they need their mothers; they obey their fathers; and this is all to the good, for relationships within this unit magically reproduce themselves outside the family as well.^[25] Although Laslett and Stone may disagree about what the family was in the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries, where it came from, how it changed, and what evidence counts most in formulating these answers, both unreflexively accept and transmit every one of these maxims.

Our first chapter argued that the project of literary criticism is to produce the kind of self or "mind" embodied in Milton, a self apart from and in many ways opposed to history per se. Our second chapter tried to illustrate the mutual dependency between self and world, text and context. Every attempt to fix an origin for either self or world sends scholars scurrying back and forth between the internal and external worlds, which consequently appear to be both juxtaposed and mutually embedded in each other. The "family" plays an important part in this collaboration between the disciplines. Historians who write about the family invariably produce a more extreme form of the problem that vexes accounts of either an author or his world. The "family" acts as the semiotic glue that lends coherence to a conceptual world made of such individuated minds and cohesive nations. It is also the mechanism for differentiating personal and psychological phenomena from events in the domain of political history. In other words, the family provides the means of conceptually nesting consciousness within history without tearing the membrane separating self from nonself. In this respect, the family provides the black box where ideology ceases to be an "external" force (e.g., the bourgeois ideas of liberty, affective individualism, or puritan orthodoxy) and becomes instead the "internal" stuff of human consciousness (i.e., sexual attraction and parental concern). For the family is where modern consciousness receives a body through the most natural process of all. It is born of two parents into a place in time where it resides until vanishing from history into the grave. The words and actions performed by the self so embodied—down to its smallest impact on others of its kind—can thus be considered relics of the vanished essence of that self.

Domestic behavior and sexual practices do not exist as historical objects in their own right, at least not yet; but they point to another order of events, which take place on a cultural terrain where the most private and primary emotions exist. This terrain is as close as one comes to sacred ground in a modern secular culture. It surrounds biological reproduction and ensures a place for the sexual practices of a white elite at the center of all its representations, scientific and sentimental alike.^[26] It provides a natural body for the form of consciousness we have identified with the mind of Milton. The moment of embodiment is the utopic moment of a special form of freedom—for "man is," as Rousseau said,

"born free." Biological reproduction allows one to imagine not only a society of free individuals but also the laws of nature that would limit them.^[27] At the same time, the metaphor of tiny bubbles of human consciousness, each within its own skin and having its own distinctive features, makes all human bodies much the same by binding them to the natural facts of birth, desire, insemination, and death. As it naturalizes the difference between inside and outside, self and nonself, subject and object, text and context, however, the same metaphor also establishes hierarchies among them. It is here that God enters into scientific representations of man. As Barthes says of the American exhibition of photography entitled "The Family of Man": "The diversity of men proclaims his [God's] power, his richness; the unity of their gestures demonstrates his will."^[28] For "his will" exerts itself in such facts of nature—birth, death, work, knowledge, play—as people, despite their diversity, invariably display for the camera.

In natural history, reproduction comes before production; and anthropology identifies the moment when history proper began as the moment when economic and political relations first gained ascendancy over the family and organized something like a state—the moment when, as Lévi-Strauss says, culture told nature it shall go no further.^[29] From a literary critical perspective, however, one can see how its very name also places reproduction logically after and in a secondary or derivative relation to production. According to the disciplines of economics and political science, the practices relegated to the category of reproduction perpetuate social relations that are determined, first of all, by the practices classified as productive. If we have overstated the figurative properties of these familiar categories of literary and historical analysis, it is because we feel that reproduction is at once the less theorized and the more problematic concept of the two.

Although it appears to refer to the most self-evident of biological facts, "reproduction" includes a diverse field of practices. It links those activities having to do with information gathering, education, literacy, and the arts with those that surround sexuality—courtship, household management, the ordinary care of the body, childbirth and rearing, and the use of leisure time. "Reproduction" shapes the way middle-class people imagine intellectual life, on the one hand, and personal life, on the other. It also operates as a purely theoretical term to contain both arenas of cultural life without explaining the relationship between them. Anthropology, economics, political science, and history tend to identify mating rules and kinship practices as the first and most powerful orga-

nizing principle both for so-called primitive cultures and for earlier epochs in the history of most Western nations. In describing modern, industrialized cultures, however, these same social sciences privilege the practices surrounding the production and distribution of goods and services over the practices surrounding biological reproduction. Laslett did nothing to challenge this paradox when he demonstrated that the small, self-enclosed family provided the basic module of English society until industrialization put mothers in charge of households and sent fathers off to work in factories.

By suggesting, to the contrary, that the modern household links mother to father in a private heterosexual relationship, Lawrence Stone also suggests that the organization of the family changed significantly during the period immediately following the English Revolution. Indeed, were it not for the fact that his findings apply to a very limited social group, Stone's research would suggest that changes in the practices surrounding reproduction preceded those changes in the British government and economy that indicate the onset of industrial capitalism. Aristocratic kinship practices were "positively reinforced for over a century, from 1530 to 1660, as a buttress against anarchy," Stone contends (659). However, he also contends "that most of the features of the modern family appeared before industrialization and among social groups unaffected by it, and that even those exposed to it responded in different ways"(665).

If judged on the basis of sheer chronology, the tangible change in "sentiment" that Stone identifies as occurring between 1660 and 1780 would have to be considered an effect of a change in family relations following the English Revolution and a precondition for industrialization. Yet Stone is unwilling to draw this conclusion from the chronology of his data, and in the final pages of The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, he reinserts a conflict among various class interests and values, rather than family relations, as the cause for changes in "sentiment" in England. Stone writes, "The key to family change in middle- and upper-class circles is the ebb and flow of battle between competing interests and values represented by various levels of social organization, from the individual up to the nation state" (682). Where it was once the very basis of political relationships, in other words, the family now retires under the sign of secondariness—the "re" in "reproduction"—and reclaims all the innocence that modern cultures attribute to primitive cultures as well as to nature.

The question of when the modern family began—whether during the seventeenth or the nineteenth century—is at heart a controversy over

where it began: Did the kind of affection that modern cultures all but equate with humanity itself begin in the common households and villages of preindustrial England, or did it originate in the privacy of the bedrooms of the manor houses occupied by a social elite at the onset of the modern period? This is the most significant question that British historians of the family have addressed since Laslett began to consider the degree to which biological reproduction and child rearing were subject to history. Since then, the effort of British historians of the family has been to establish the origins of modern personal life in one of two groups, neither of which was a forbear of the modern middle class. In effect, this effort denies that the form of affection we now revere is specific to the modern ruling class, and represents it as a feeling inherited from the past.

To ground modern family feeling in a class of people who preexist the modern middle class is the project of historians of the family, whether like Stone they see modern consciousness as emerging in opposition to external authority among members of a social elite, or whether like Laslett they see that consciousness as the natural temperament of the common people when left to their own devices. Contending schools of British historians of the family set natural affiliations against those compelled by money and politics—though one school represents the opposition as one between rural and urban societies, and the other represents it as an opposition between private and public life. In arguing for the family, each school therefore positions itself outside the ruling class, outside the state. In this respect, their positions are exactly the same, namely, the position of the liberal intellectual—located outside the domain of production, one foot in the sanctuary of reproduction, the other poised in an unspecified relation to it. Stone and Laslett simply emphasize different components of a political fantasy wherein the intellectual imagines himself or herself to be speaking on behalf of the people, empowered to speak because he or she is the trustee and inheritor of a cultural tradition. Does it matter whether this is an elite tradition or a popular one, if each exercises much the same form of authority?