“Nursed under his own Eye”: Co-Nursing Fathers and the Spectacle of Breastfeeding in the British Romantic Period

Abstract

This article offers a critical reading of the representational prevalence of the paternal eye in British eighteenth-century depictions of breastfeeding. I demonstrate how the Romantic period embraced the concept of the father’s gaze as a physiologically intuitive and culturally significant form of participation in the nursing act, one deemed necessary for both infant and spousal well-being. Tracing its evolving ideological legacy from William Cadogan’s foundational An Essay upon Nursing (1748) to late eighteenth-century works, particularly texts authored by Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Burney, this essay reveals how the paternal eye came to signify a means of strengthening emotional bonds between an infant’s parents in the context of breastfeeding. I argue that the British Romantic period came to craft a resonant vision of fatherhood through the depiction of the paternal figure as a breastfeeding “co-nurse,” which provides new insights into the era’s perceptions of familial and marital partnership ideals.