Maternalism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In 1807, the English author James Henry Lawrence (1773-1840) published a romance, entitled L’Empire des Nairs, which he had translated from his own Des Reich der Nairen, published by the Berlin Journal der Romane in 1801. A few years later, he translated it into English and published it in London (1811). Although we seem to have forgotten this utopia, on which we hardly find any specific research, the book was either applauded, as in the Gottingen Review, which wrote that “the ideas which the author wishes to bring into circulation, are truly cosmopolitical”, or taken as “German non sense”, as in The Critical Review or in The Scourge. In France, the book was banned as soon as it appeared in 1807. But a second and a third edition appeared in 1814 and 1817. The Journal des Arts talks of an “inextricable labyrinthe d’absurdités”, making fun of romantics who have as a principle to “let all thing go through Lady nature’s hands”. Schiller, in a letter to a friend, talked about it as a “comical product” that wasn’t without interest. Last but not least, Shelley read it in 1812 and wrote to his author that he had made him “a perfect convert to its doctrines.”
The Empire of the Nairs is made of two parts. First, a long introduction against marriage as it is: an institution made exclusively for the comfort of males. Appealing for a society in which women and men would be equal, Lawrence calls for the abolition of marriage and paternity. Since the latter is never certain, and thus gives rise to jealousy and crime, we should put an end to it and let mothers give their name to their children. Daughters and sons would inherit from them, and from their uncles. There will be no patrilineality anymore. Then, taking the Malabar society of the Nairs as an example, the author draws a romance on the happiness that women and men get from complete sexual freedom, indubitable birth, and a strict gender division of work. Having no family ties, no interest except warfare, men make more valorous soldiers. Women, on the other hand, have no interest except raising and schooling children. There is a strong separation, in the Nair Society, between the private sphere, composed of women paid by the State for taking care of the children, and the public sphere, strictly composed of men. Freed from the family, either as chief, husband or father, men can wander from woman to woman, and keep their sexual energy for love and genius.
Beyond that obvious androcentrism, there might be something more interesting here: freeing both men and women from marriage goes hand-in-hand with a gendered separation of duties, if not rights. Which leads us to the question: why was there no more revolutionary way of thinking equality, at that time, that did not involve abolishing marriage? We’ll answer that question by comparing The Empire of the Nairs with two other radical critiques of marriage during the same period, one in English (Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792) and one in French (Charles Fourier, 1807); and by taking into account the political and the economic context, that is, the fact that marriage is the institutionalized way to bind children to men in societies that revolve around property and its patrilineal transmission.