Wet Nurse - Fiction

Fiction

Wet-nursing is a prominent theme throughout human mythology and fiction. Some include:

• In William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet the character Nurse had been Juliet's wet nurse. "Were not I thine only nurse, I would say thou hadst sucked wisdom from thy teat." 1.3.72
• In Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, the character Natasha Rostov, after changing wet nurses three times, elected to nurse her children herself despite opposition from her husband, mother, and doctors.
• In George Moore's novel Esther Waters, the eponymous heroine works as a wet nurse after the birth of her son while leaving him in the hands of a baby farmer.
• In John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, set in a time of great poverty, a woman whose baby has just died, and consequently whose breasts are engorged with milk, wet-nurses a man at the point of death, as no other nourishment is available, a reference to Roman Charity.
• In Kenji Mizoguchi's film The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, a wet nurse by the name of Otuko is dismissed by a prominent actor's family for telling their adoptive son that he needs to practice more in order to become a good actor. This flies in the face of the insincere flattery he is given by those who pay him lip service in order to ingratiate themselves with his father's family. Given the prospect of her dismissal, she unsuccessfully pleads for the sake of the child she nurses who will have separation anxiety as a result of her departure.
• In the movie Spartacus, Crassus captures Spartacus's wife and baby. Since he wants Varinia as a concubine, he purchases a wet nurse for her baby. Varinia rejects his offer, saying, "I sent her away: I prefer to nurse the child myself."
• In Blackadder II, Nursie, the Queen's childhood nurse, is commonly perceived as being a perpetual wet nurse: “In the old days, it was all difficult choices. Should you have Nursie-milk or moo-cow milk? Of course, it was always Nursie milk….”
• In Darcy & Elizabeth: Nights and Days at Pemberley by Linda Berdoll, Elizabeth Darcy hires a wet nurse, Mrs. Littlepage, for her and Darcy's twins. Owing to the multiple birth, Lizzy and Mrs. Littlepage must share the role, much to the consternation of Mrs. Bennet, who finds it unseemly that Lizzy breastfeeds her children.
• In Samia by Menander the woman of the title loses her baby and wet-nurses the result of a one night stand between her partners adopted son and a girl he fancied. She pretends it is her own actually dead child but the truth is revealed when the real mother fills in for the wet nurse and her father sees her.
• In the 2007 action film Shoot 'Em Up, Smith, the main character, rescues a newborn child while trying to save its mother. However, he succeeds in saving the child instead. Seeing as the birth mother is dead, he gets a lactating prostitute, Donna, to temporarily take care of the baby.
• In the 1992 film Indochine after the French capture Jean-Baptiste with his infant son, various local village women nurse the child as they make their way back to Saigon.
• In the book Ties that Bind, Ties that Break, by Lensey Namioka, the main character makes a reference to her wet nurse.
• In Atlas Shrugged there is a government bureaucrat and industrial spy named Tony, who is often referred to by both Henry Rearden and the narrations as "the wet nurse" for taking on the paternalistic role of the state at Rearden Steel.