Abstract
The months of 1792 during which Elizabeth Pilfold Shelley was pregnant with her first child were a time when her condition was so enviable that fashion dictated ‘the sixth-month pad’ as an undergarment for all women, regardless of age or marital status (Werkmeister, 1967, pp. 328–30). The outcry against padding — voiced primarily by men — soon assigned pads to oblivion, but in its brief appearance this humble piece of clothing served as a visible sign of a domestic ideology that was firmly in place at the time of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s birth.
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Notes
Johann Friedrich Pestalozzi’s Leonard and Gertrude, a classic rendition of the theme, was translated into English in 1800, and volume XXXIII (1802) of The Lady’s Magazine carried a serialised translation of Augustus La Fontaine’s ‘The Rigid Father; or, Paternal Authority Too Strictly Enforced’.
As my language suggests, I am reading Shelley’s lines through the lens of Herbert Marcuse’s Chapter 10, ‘The Transformation of Sexuality into Eros’ in Eros and Civilization (Marcuse, 1974, pp. 197–221).
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© 1991 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Gelpi, B.C. (1991). The Nursery Cave: Shelley and the Maternal. In: Blank, G.K. (eds) The New Shelley. Studies in Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21225-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21225-5_4
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