Pricing Parenthood: the Maternal Body as Commodity in George Moore's Esther Waters

Abstract

This essay analyzes George Moore's Esther Waters to illustrate how the commodification of the working-class maternal body in the wet-nursing and baby- farming industries silences the wet-nurse's personhood as mother in favor of her commodity value as a supplier of breast milk. The very liminality of the wet-nurse's position embodies a slippage between the concepts of the working mother and motherhood as work. Employed by and living in another family's home to perform the paid labor of maternal service, the wet-nurse strains the boundaries of the working and domestic spheres. While scholars have sometimes compared Esther's plight as an unwed, single mother to that of similar figures in late-Victorian fiction like Hardy's Tess, this essay argues that Moore distinguishes Esther's story from that of the typical servant girl turned fallen woman by employing his heroine as the mouthpiece through which to give voice to the single, working-class mother's struggle to prove her value as an individual woman beyond that of the labor she provides.