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Dara Rossman Regaignon, Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2021, pp.xvi + 186. Hardback £65.95, ISBN 9780814214695.
Dara Rossman Regaignon's Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre is eerily prescient. The short Preface offers a close reading of a 'mommy-blogger's' viral post from May 2017 about '[t]he "craziness" of contemporary motherhood' (p.x). Not only does the Preface establish Regaignon's effort to 'understand how anxiety was written onto motherhood' (p.xii), but it also complicates a key premise about the temporal dimensions of maternal concern - the collapse of past regret and future fear into present worry. Regaignon and the mommy-blogger may not have anticipated the role that isolation, Zoom school, vaccines, and masks would play in routine childcare but, as this study suggests, the rhetorical mechanisms that produced the anxious mother have been in place since at least the nineteenth century and persist today. Mothers (and all caregivers) must navigate contradictory medical advice, attacks on scientific expertise, and the proliferation of personal anecdotes on social media about the efficacy and safety of various preventive measures. Worry has always been around, but it was during the nineteenth century that maternal feeling and attention shifted 'from authority to influence, from rhetorical confidence to rhetorical anxiety' (p.22).
Regaignon's use of 'rhetorical genre analysis' and her compelling close readings tease out the complex ways that maternal anxiety gets produced within childcare manuals (which rose dramatically during the 1820s-50s), memoir, and domestic fiction. Chapter One outlines how these three genres create a 'genre ecology' in which texts 'read and reread one another from a distance, working in stochastic concert to iteratively develop, perpetuate, and normalise the subject position of the anxious mother' (p.23). Regaignon grounds her readings in Freud's conception of anxiety as 'an anticipatory and a recollecting emotion' (p.6) and Kierkegaard's understanding of anxiety as 'a recognition that infinite options are possible' (p.7).
Chapter Two expands our understanding...