“Women Should Become Thinner When They Are Pregnant”: Corpulency and Women's Reproductive Health in the Long Eighteenth Century

In the long eighteenth century, medical writers were quick to condemn “corpulence” or “corpulency” (the Georgian equivalent terms for “obesity”) in potential or actual mothers. Medical writing from the period criticizes the influence of corpulence on the reproductive health of women, claiming that corpulence's impact on female fertility is either obstructive, or eventually results in abortive maternity. However, this article's examination of fictional “fat” women, alongside contemporary medical opinions on corpulence's effect on female health, reveals that the medical condemnation of the fat woman was as much influenced by social expectations of female reproductiveness as it was made on scientific grounds. By examining a variety of fictional fat women, I hope to demonstrate how popular eighteenth‐century works interacted with medical opinion, sometimes reinforcing but just as often probing, disputing, and rejecting the condemnation with which medical writers treated corpulent women. I will look at several such women in literary and visual culture: James Gillray's caricature of Albinia Hobart, Countess of Buckinghamshire (1737/38 – 1816), Rachel Hodges from Maria Edgeworth's “Angelina: or, L'aime Inconnue” (1801), and Miss Groves from Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752). As Hobart, Hodges, and Groves show, concerns over female fatness are seldom exclusively health related. These characters underscore how the fat woman is not simply a point of satire, or a pathologized and useless body, but can also be fertile, autonomous, and even healthy. Ultimately, I will claim that the fat woman is more than just a cypher of medical opinion: she is also a discordant figure of criticism too.