Bearing Liminality, Laboring White Ink; Pregnancy and Childbirth in Women's Literature [1 ed.] 1800790139, 9781800790131

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Bearing Liminality, Laboring White Ink Pregnancy and Childbirth in Women’s Literature Francisco José Cortés Vieco

Peter lang

Cultural IdentIty StudIeS

CIS

“In this fascinating and wide-ranging book, Francisco José Cortés Vieco seeks to restore the centrality and even intelligibility of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in classic works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American female writers that he argues structures of patriarchy have denied them. Sparkling with insights and a pleasure to read.” – Professor Elizabeth Lunbeck, Harvard University “This is a historically wide-ranging account of the tropes of pregnancy and childbirth in women’s literature. Cortés Vieco’s learned study combines theoretical expertise and thorough, insightful close readings to revisit the connections between women’s creativity and procreativity, while resisting essentialist equations of maternity and womanhood.” – Dr Karin Koehler, Bangor University (UK) Literature has been a bastion of male creativity, not of female procreativity, which has traditionally inhibited the voices of women and disempowered their self-expression. This book explores the underestimated legacy of women’s fiction and (semi-)autobiographical works about pregnancy and childbirth in Great Britain and North America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, highlighting the symbiosis between the processes of childbearing and writing, problematizing female subjugation to the patriarchal institution of motherhood, and compensating for the silence around the experience of becoming a mother in literature.

Drawing on the anthropological concept of liminality, controversies about maternity within women’s liberation movements, and milestones in French feminist theory, this book discusses pregnancy and childbirth as transformative events that can engender both women’s imaginative responses to procreation and re-creations of memories about their prenatal/natal episodes, as well as therapeutic narratives of self-discovery and recovery from pain. Examining the works of authors such as Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin, Margaret Drabble, and Toni Morrison, this book posits a literary corpus of procreativity, written by women with an empowering white ink to defend their (un)maternal freedom and (life-)writings. Francisco José Cortés Vieco is Associate Professor at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) in Spain, where he lectures on English Literature and Gender Studies. He holds a PhD in Gender Studies (University of Alcalá) and a PhD in Literary Studies (UCM), both recognized with outstanding thesis awards. Thanks to a postdoctoral scholarship, he was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University in 2018. His principal research interest is women’s literature in English-speaking countries, with an emphasis on the female body, sexual violence, maternity and nervous disorders, and on approaches from medical humanities, French feminism, and trauma studies. He is the author of almost forty publications, including peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, critical editions and translations of Victorian poetry into the Spanish language, and a monograph on sexuality and suicide in women’s literature (Alcalá, 2016).

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Bearing Liminality, Laboring White Ink

 

Cultural Identity Studies Volume 34 Series Editors Carmen Zamorano Llena, Dalarna University Billy Gray, Dalarna University Jonas Stier, Mälardalen University

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

 

Francisco José Cortés Vieco

Bearing Liminality, Laboring White Ink Pregnancy and Childbirth in Women’s Literature

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cortés Vieco, Francisco José, author. Title: Bearing liminality, laboring white ink : pregnancy and childbirth in women's literature / Francisco José Cortés Vieco. Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2021] | Series: Cultural identity studies ; vol. 34 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020050323 (print) | LCCN 2020050324 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800790131 (paperback) | ISBN 9781800790148 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800790155 (epub) | ISBN 9781800790162 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: English literature--Women authors--History and criticism. | Pregnancy in literature. | Childbirth in literature. | Liminality in literature. | Women and literature. | Motherhood in literature. | American literature-Women authors--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR111 .C669 2021 (print) | LCC PR111 (ebook) | DDC 820.9/9287--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050323 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050324 Cover image: Gustav Klimt, Hope II © 2020. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. ISSN 1661-3252 ISBN 978-1-80079-013-1 (print) • ISBN 978-1-80079-014-8 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-80079-015-5 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-80079-016-2 (mobi) © Peter Lang Group AG 2021 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Francisco José Cortés Vieco has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

To Susan Olivia Stevens

Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xv

Abbreviations

Introduction The Pregnant/​Birthing Body and Mind of White Ink and Liminality

xvii

1

Chapter 1 The Nineteenth-​Century Threshold for Inkless Liminal Women: Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Mary Anne Evans/​George Eliot

21

Chapter 2 Modern(ist) Liminality for the (Pro)creative Body and Mind: Edith Wharton, Meridel Le Sueur, Jean Rhys, and Anaïs Nin

69

Chapter 3 Toward a Contemporary Unity between Creativity and Procreativity: Margaret Drabble, Elizabeth Baines, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Ilona Karmel, and Cherríe Moraga

125

viii

Contents

Chapter 4 Progression to (In)conclusion, Regression to Margaret Atwood

217

Bibliography

239

Index

251

Preface

Profoundly confessional and introspective, a significant corpus of women’s literature is pregnant with their private lives and intimate experiences. It reproduces narrative offspring that palpate their soma and their psyche toward therapeutic purposes of self-​discovery or recovery from pain. With intense psychological and sociological dimensions, gestation and childbirth occupy a continuum of biological phenomena, exclusively enjoyed or endured by women as non-​fictional, leading dramatis personae. These life episodes can be potentially spoken or penned by first-​hand testimonies in ways to vindicate and celebrate a genuinely distinctive female authorship, only vicariously reproduced by desiring men  –​always ravenous for stories. The patriarchal architecture of the Western world could not deprive women of their reproductive capabilities, but it has traditionally overwhelmed these unique natural powers with an oppressive male cultural production designed to silence embryonic female voices. Beyond the immemorial, forced absence of women as speaking/​writing subjects throughout history, pregnancy and childbirth have rarely been narratives until recently. Naomi Wolf suggests that the information on impending motherhood has remained as “secrets” that new mothers  –​without freedom  –​have only dared to “whisper” (2001: 2). The epistemological quest by male writers and philosophers to unravel the riddle of life contrasts with their censorship of or indifference to exploring the organic processes of pregnancy and childbirth. Instead, women, whether depicted as sexual temptresses or saintly mothers, have been the Manichean obsession of male artistic procreators. Indeed, these authors have reflected the erotic desirability of women’s virginity or their divinity in their role of childrearing. Paradoxically, pregnancy and childbirth –​as realms of in-​betweenness –​have seldom been intellectual or artistic objects worthy of scrutiny and contemplation. Moreover, this deliberate hiatus has been strengthened by language. Childbirth has been referred to as confinement, whereas pregnancy has been a period of

x

Preface

female non-​existence, during which the body must be concealed from the public gaze. Surprisingly, the swollen belly –​what makes a woman more noticeable –​is what makes her disappear from sight (Verhage 2013: 303). Childbirth has also been linked to labor. Viewed as the only active occupation or the mandatory vocation of motherhood for all women from puberty to menopause, the privately owned production and the delivery of human beings to the world have ensured the survival of the species and perpetuated two male-​conceived institutions: marriage and family. Being unconquerable and erasable by men, but mainly being unnarrated by women under a perpetual cultural house arrest  –​without pen and ink –​does not imply that pregnancy and childbirth are unexplorable or unnarratable –​nor unpalatable for readers –​but rather, that they have suffered two patriarchal edicts: unnameability and unintelligibility. The heretofore non-​discursive, non-​literary nature of pregnancy and childbirth resides in two facts. Firstly, these bodily experiences are exclusively known by women with an historically marginal status to (re)produce speech and discourse. Women have also been ontologically defined for their natural capacity to conceive, gestate, and deliver human life, so their anatomical and procreative specificities that differentiate them from men have wrongly conflated the female and the maternal. Secondly, a misconception from the Judeo-​Christian roots of Western civilization has posited the perverse nature of women’s biology and sexuality. The Biblical myth of Original Sin was triggered by the evil Eve seducing the innocent Adam –​as the first woman and man exiled from a blissful existence in Eden –​and brought them the knowledge of sinfulness, or the postlapsarian curse of work, painful childbearing, and mortality. This connection between woman, sex, and evil is a foundational pillar of Western patriarchy, placing the blame on the female only, to be reified as a sexual object (Millett 2000: 54). Such an ancestral dehumanization of women has generated multifarious religious, medical, legal, and sociopolitical dogmas of patriarchal imprint, to convert female physicality and sexuality into unnamable taboos, as well as to set women’s fixed roles as daughters, wives, and mothers against any plea of individual identity and free will. Tied to sexual intercourse, women’s gestating/​birthing bodies have been viewed as dirty, shameful, and impure; prone to insanity; contaminated

Preface

xi

or physically unavailable for men’s pleasure; monstrous in their swelling and shrouded by blood at labor. Out of wedlock, illicit pregnancy leads to the social punishment and murder of single mothers, but as Simone de Beauvoir holds, married women could also be suspected of criminal maternity as a consequence of adultery, or the “crime of high treason” of introducing an illegitimate child into the family (2011: 118). Unnameability and proscription have also affected women’s agency to write about the organic processes of pregnancy and childbirth, because such textual expressions to articulate an unprecedented female subjectivity, could dangerously disarticulate prevailing structures of male supremacy and universal truths of the world as defined by men. Unintelligibility bathes the most ordinary miracle on earth: conceiving human life. The traditionally dominant phallocentric language declares that pregnancy and childbirth are realms of muteness and obscure mystery. Too nebulous, intricate, and cryptic as pre-​Symbolic objects of speculation and artistry, these two physiological phenomena are impossible to be decoded and encoded by semantic, syntactic, and grammatical rules, so they are incompatible with the Symbolic act of writing. Any author daring to write about these experiences recurs to “silences, stammerings, and ambiguities,” due to the clash of language with the darkened screen of a culturally repressed experience (Mazzoni 2002: 90). Nevertheless, such colossal defenses against the mental penetration of female corporeality into speech and literature –​as weapons of male privilege –​are challenged by modern attempts by feminists and women writers to create a genuine corpus of cultural reconceptions with a language of their own, which discovers, uncovers, and recovers the female (procreative) body and its subjectivity, in alliance with Western women’s liberation movements and the so-​called sexual revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. Literature traces a faithful itinerary of our past, plagued with corporal invisibility, sexual unproductivity, gestational silence, and birthing barrenness. This written legacy permeates hegemonic discourses of male supremacy and fixed patriarchal conceptions, proscribing and prescribing compulsory ideas of femininity, sexuality, procreativity, and maternity to women, while obstructing their individual deliveries of plural or dissident subjectivities with ink and pen. To compensate for the abundance of

xii

Preface

torn, forgotten, and blank pages in the history of female (life-​)writings, this study explores women’s literature about pregnancy and childbirth in Great Britain and North America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This enterprise aspires to three purposes. Firstly, to dissolve the male-​led edicts of unnameability and unintelligibility governing pregnancy and childbirth. Secondly, to reconcile the workings of the female body and the mental activity of writing, so that literary authorship embraces biological authority. And thirdly, to unravel the potential artistic creativity of procreativity, while inaugurating new avenues of female empowerment in literature and celebrating embryonic voices –​pregnant with prenatal/​ natal concerns –​as a valuable heirloom for contemporary women writers. The Introduction to this study captures thorny academic debates against the masculinized institution of motherhood, but only partly in favor of female demands of maternal rights and mothering practices, led by antagonistic factions of women’s liberation movements since the second half of the twentieth century. This work heavily relies upon Anglo-​American and French feminist theory. In particular, Hélène Cixous’s Écriture Féminine with white ink –​or feminine writing with the female body –​is used to perform a critical and empathic analysis of women’s procreative narratives in the following chapters of this study. Likewise, it is given prominence to the unexplored relationship between the anthropological concept of liminality and the biological continuum of pregnancy and childbirth, as a transformative and transitory time, space, and identity of in-​betweenness for the materno-​fetal unit and its later division into two separate entities: mother and child. Indeed, women’s narratives of procreativity are explored as liminal experiences of crossing thresholds and becoming a new female self in later sections of this work, with emphasis on social, physiological, and psychological implications, not for (un)born children, but for pregnant/​ birthing women in isolation. Chapter 1 voyages back to the unprecedented creativity of nineteenth-​ century British women writers and to their literary experiments with procreativity. Female conceptions of Gothic monstrosity, mental insanity, body camouflage, and moral (in)decency are scrutinized in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/​31), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), and Mary Anne Evans/​George Eliot’s Adam Bede

Preface

xiii

(1859). It is intended to reflect the paradoxical textual absence of the physical presence of pregnancy and childbirth, yet not the social stigma and emotional barrenness found in liminal/​marginal heroines of literature, in contrast with the narrative profusion of the patriarchal ideal of domestic motherhood. Chapter 2 travels between the United States and Europe to propose new interpretive itineraries for the following Modernist/​ modern progeny: Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917) and Twilight Sleep (1927); Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl (1939); Voyage in the Dark (1934), Good Morning, Midnight (1939), and other life-​writings by Jean Rhys; and Anaïs Nin’s story “Birth” and her diaries from the 1930s. Ellipses and disruptions from these authors’ gestational minds –​when their transatlantic heroines confront or elude to confront pregnancy and parturition –​are discussed, while considering diverse ideological stances, social-​class differences, or the rapid changes in hostile urban contexts during the early twentieth century. Impregnated by white ink, Chapter 3 is an incomplete journey exploring the deliveries of recent or contemporary narratives about liminal episodes from the gestating/​birthing body, together with ambivalent feelings and reverberating patriarchal threats, which still menace the encounters of women (writers) with prenatal, natal and postnatal realities, including trauma, fear, imprisonment, fight, insanity, (self-​)hatred, or male tyranny. This is the candelabra of literary invitations from British and American women writers found in this chapter: Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1965), Elizabeth Baines’s The Birth Machine (1983), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Beloved (1987); Ilona Karmel’s An Estate of Memory (1969); and Cherríe Moraga’s Waiting in the Wings (1997). Oscillating between female empowerment and victimization, progresses in the feminist agenda and subjection to male interventionism, this section shows the good health of women’s creativity to conceive, bear, and labor stories of procreativity, before Chapter 4 –​ as the conclusion of this study –​is sealed or unlocked with Margaret Atwood’s futuristic vision reflected in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Concealed, institutionalized, ritualized, pathologized, or criminalized, pregnancy and childbirth are transformative rites of passage for expectant mothers, who have been traditionally dehumanized or silenced by patriarchal institutions. Today, as individualized experiences, these

xiv

Preface

two biological processes are understood to be not only transcendental episodes in women’s lives, but also compelling sources for inspiring narratives of genuine female subjectivity. Laura Chester holds that once a woman becomes a mother, she is more aware of the fragility of life and the possibility of tragedy, which humanize her writing, because mothering gives a direct access to the greatest themes in literature: birth and death, love and loss, often intertwined (1989: 4). This study captures the artistic significance and potentiality of the mental introspection into gestating/​ birthing bodies, their (re)discovery, homage, and translation into symbolic white ink toward women’s self-​expression and empowerment in life and literature. From nineteenth-​century textual absences to overt nakedness in contemporary times, the narratives of pregnancy and childbirth in Great Britain and North America studied in this work denounce the sexist appropriation of women’s reproductive powers by patriarchal productions of discourse. Nevertheless, these same literary testimonies also become weapons toward gender equality and caresses of motherly/​sisterly solidarity and sympathy for female addressees as rightful reading/​speaking/​writing subjects on procreativity.

Acknowledgments

I could not have written this book without the help of some institutions, mentors, friends, and family members on both sides of the Atlantic. I wish to thank José Julián Bayle Palomino, Evelia Vieco Olivares, and Susan O. Stevens for their love, encouragement, and patience. I owe special thanks to Prof. Mercedes Bengoechea Bartolomé, Prof. Isabel Durán Giménez-​Rico, and Prof. Elizabeth Lunbeck for their generous advice over the years. I would also like to acknowledge the invaluable support of University of Alcalá, Complutense University of Madrid, University of Edinburgh, and Harvard University, particularly the Department of the History of Science and the Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard University. And finally, I  wish to express my gratitude to all women writers, whose literary progeny is explored in this book, for breaking the silence and for courageously writing about pregnancy and childbirth.

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Abbreviations

AB

Mary Anne Evans/​George Eliot, Adam Bede

BD

Toni Morrison, Beloved

BE

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

BI

Anaïs Nin, “Birth”

BM

Elizabeth Baines, The Birth Machine

DI

Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. I: 1931–​4

EM

Ilona Karmel, An Estate of Memory

FR

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

GM

Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

HT

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

LM

Jean Rhys, “Learning to be a Mother”

RU

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth

SU

Edith Wharton, Summer

TG

Meridel Le Sueur, The Girl

TM

Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

TS

Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep

UD

Anaïs Nin, Incest, from ‘A Journal of Love’: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932–​4

VD

Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark

VI

Jean Rhys, “Vienne”

WA

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

WH

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

WW

Cherríe Moraga, Waiting in the Wings

Introduction

The Pregnant/​Birthing Body and Mind of White Ink and Liminality

Pregnancy and childbirth occupy a privileged place in the public arena of feminist theory and debate, particularly since the 1960s and 1970s, when second-​wave feminism and its motto “the personal is political” transform female bodily experiences into weapons of rebellion and social controversy. The non-​exhaustive scholarly review of women’s intelligentsia in this study reveals the lack of consensus on pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing within the feminist community. Heather Maroney argues that movements for gender equality walk “a tightrope strung between offensive and defensive poles,” because they must validate “what a woman does” as a parent, while contesting the patriarchal glorification of her social role as a mother “at the expense of the occupant” (1985: 44). In fact, it can be identified as a binary opposition between the so-​called maternal feminism that exalts women’s free choice to become mothers –​despite oppressive male institutions –​ and anti-​motherhood factions that view the inevitable destiny of maternity as an imposition from the repressive alliance between biology and patriarchy. The reemergent feminism in Europe and America after World War II vindicates professional careers –​including writing –​for women, the decriminalization of abortion, and the eradication of the paradigm of monstrosity when a woman rejects the idea of becoming a mother. In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir pioneers in denouncing that sexual reproduction enslaves women and places them in a position of inferiority to men,

2

Introduction

because their integration to the job market and their active participation in sociopolitical spheres are diminished by childbearing and childrearing. Simone de Beauvoir claims that maternity absorbs women’s energies, and frequently, they are condemned to long periods of inactivity during which they must depend on men’s protection and financial security (2011: 97). This French scholar not only understands pregnancy and parturition as women’s renunciation of their freedom, but also describes them as physically exhausting and unhealthy: Gestation is tiring work that offers woman no benefit as an individual but that demands serious sacrifices. In the early months, it often brings with it appetite loss and vomiting that is not observed in any other domestic female and shows the body’s revolt against the species taking possession of it […] Often serious accidents or at least dangerous disorders occur during pregnancy; and if the woman is not sturdy, […] she will be prematurely misshapen and aged by her pregnancies. […] Childbirth itself is painful; it is dangerous. This crisis shows clearly that the body does not always meet the needs of both the species and the individual; the child sometimes dies, or while coming into life, it kills the mother; or its birth can cause her a chronic illness. (64)

Simone de Beauvoir holds that pregnancy does not epitomize blissful symbiosis between mother and child, but women’s perilous, harmful, and exploitative journey toward birth, death, or ailments. Supported by scientific data, Joan Raphael-​Leff argues that the intrauterine world actually exposes a “ruthless competition over resources” between two –​or more –​ cohabitants, because embryos/​fetuses control the exchange and manipulate the flow of nutrients to serve their own needs, possibly resulting in health complications for the expectant mother, like gestational diabetes or preeclampsia (2016:  176). Moreover, anxiety disorders and maternal antenatal depression are “of equal prevalence to postnatal disturbances” (178). Simone de Beauvoir also describes pregnancy as a threat for the female self: “A drama playing itself out in the woman […] a mutilation; the fetus is part of her body, and it is a parasite exploiting her; she possesses it, and she is possessed by it […] she is tossed about, assaulted” (2011:  612). In addition, she stresses that a woman’s presumed creative powers during childbearing is only an illusion, because she rather becomes “a passive instrument of life” (613). In essence, Simone de Beauvoir is reluctant to integrate the experience of becoming a mother, which she

The Pregnant/Birthing Body and Mind

3

perceives as marked by powerlessness and helplessness, into her postwar feminist agenda because women’s subjection to the social mission of motherhood not only serves the patriarchal interest in the survival of the human species, but also annihilates women’s physical health, mental stability, and their sense of the self. Second-​wave feminists have rejected that being a woman is merely possessing a uterus, or as Linda Zerilli argues, “non-​subjects” because of mute ideals of maternity outside discourse (1992: 131). Some activists have excluded becoming mothers from their life options to be single-​mindedly devoted to fight for gender equality. Many have refused being branded as mothers, in order to undermine the prevailing biological reductivism, which not only equates maternity to femaleness, but also essentializes and universalizes the subjectivity and experiences of all women. More recently, lesbian scholars have stressed the bondage of motherhood for (homosexual) women. Jeffner Allen urges all women not to have children to escape from patriarchy, because the female body is not a resource “to be used by men to produce men and the world of men,” so women must be self-​sufficient and protect themselves from male invasions (1996: 43). In fact, gay theorists and anti-​motherhood feminists agree to attack patriarchal pressures, which (re)produce a (heterosexual) world, ruled by a male-​dominated ideology through pregnancy and childbirth. Allen even contends that alternatives to conventional sexual reproduction, like lesbian mothers or artificial insemination, cannot destroy patriarchal motherhood (42). Rooted in leftist ideologies emerging after the disillusionment with communist alternatives against labor exploitation, Shulamith Firestone’s Dialect of Sex builds an alliance between the proletariat and the women’s war of the sexes toward gender justice, because both groups are under the yoke of the tandem of capitalism and patriarchy. This second-​wave feminist declares that the heart of women’s oppression is childbearing and childrearing (1970: 72). Firestone posits that the world’s sex-​class system, based on reproductive differences between males and females, determines the unequal division of labor and power distribution between men and women, the latter being a discriminated “caste” at the mercy of biology until the advent of birth control (8–​9). Arguing that a natural instinct for pregnancy is a fallacy to ensure men’s mastery of procreation, Firestone

4

Introduction

concludes that women have no reproductive “obligation” to the species, and that if they are not willing to become mothers, artificial methods of conception must be developed as the alternative for gestation and parturition (233). An advocate of extrauterine reproduction already in the 1970s, Firestone envisioned the potential solutions of modern embryology and in-​vitro technology confirmed in later decades of the twentieth century, but not necessarily resulting in women’s liberation from the patriarchal oppression of biological motherhood. Conversely, Adrienne Rich contends in her work Of Woman Born that pregnancy and childbirth are natural and healthy, thus gratifying and beneficial for women, because they are not pathologies to be treated and cured by the medical community, nor a doom from which to escape. Instead, she states that women should freely choose the terms of their non-​maternity or maternity, such as the means of conception, or the place and type of birth (1986: 184). But more importantly, Rich distinguishes between the institution of motherhood and the experience of being a mother. Andrea O’Reilly expands on Rich’s assumptions to denominate the experience of maternity as “gynocentric mothering,” or empowering women-​centered counternarratives to resist, deconstruct, and interrupt the patriarchal narratives about being a mother (2004: 10). For Rich, it is this institution of motherhood –​not the experience of mothering –​that alienates women from their procreative bodies. She explains that the idea of “women-​as-​mothers” has endowed them with respect and awe, but it has also “ghettoized and degraded female potentialities,” or withheld over one-​half of the human species from the decisions affecting their own lives (1986: 13). Hence, Rich holds that the natural acts of gestating and birthing do not determine women’s inferiority or their lack of agency, but rather cultural meanings behind maternal stereotypes, conduct, and rituals within the man-​led cult of domesticity and the high value assigned to maternity by our world –​always in need of human labor resources or the imperative of survival for the human species. Rich even theorizes that the social burdens of motherhood are translated into women’s anger at their babies and grief, when they cannot meet their children’s needs due to patriarchal pressures, leading them to powerlessness, guilt, and self-​laceration (52). She also diagnoses that women’s fate is always to wait for love dates, for

The Pregnant/Birthing Body and Mind

5

their menses, for infants to grow up, and for menopause (39), but equally for childbirth. The repetitive confabulation between patriarchy and etymology is not a coincidence, because the verb typically used to refer to pregnancy is “expecting,” which enforces temporality and female passivity. Accordingly, Rich defines childbearing as women’s waiting –​a time of denial of every active, powerful aspect of their own selves, or a “Sistine tranquility,” causing them boredom and, possibly, also anxiety (39). Therefore, maternal feminism is not to exterminate the string of bodily and mental events in mothering, but instead to destroy the institution of motherhood, as a deeply rooted patriarchal tentacle of oppression. In short, Adrienne Rich’s distinction between motherhood and mothering is vital for the empathic and critical analysis of women’s literature on pregnancy and childbirth in later chapters of this study. In “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), Hélène Cixous exhorts women to write as a transgressive action to destabilize patriarchal constructions of femininity, while she further theorizes about a new practice of writing to assert a distinctive female authorship: Écriture Féminine –​in principle, different from men’s texts.1 Cixous’s experimental invitation encourages women to return and reconquer their lost biological and anatomical selves –​ confiscated by patriarchy –​while listening to their sexual and maternal bodies, and to write them. This French feminist rejects the contamination of the phallic mystification of motherhood as a social role, the imposition of sexual reproduction as the inevitable female fate, and Freudian assumptions about women’s narcissism and jealous desire of the penis to be compensated by a child, because procreation has been fetishized and paternalized by phallocentric cultural meanings, linked to this biological function (1976: 881, 890). Instead, Cixous suggests that women must freely experience pregnancy and childbirth without intromissions from men –​ turning these physiological phenomena into social norms of femininity –​or 1

To nurture the controversy around this new type of writing enunciated in “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Cixous contends that men can also write Écriture Féminine, and she names Jean Genet and James Joyce as examples of the very few male authors who “aren’t afraid of femininity” (1976: 885), because their literary works dare to violate the patriarchal binary opposition between male and female.

6

Introduction

from radical feminists disgusted by maternal femaleness. Cixous declares that no one can deprive women of their “gestation drive” to write and to have a baby for whatever reason they choose: “A desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood” (890–​1). Indeed, Cixous amalgamates the process of conceiving human life and the act of writing woman, when she urges female authors to write “in white ink” (881) –​alluding to breast milk and to women’s maternal bodies –​ against abusive male narrative practices with black ink. Cixous holds that the “unsurpassed pleasures of pregnancy” have been “always exaggerated or conjured away –​or cursed –​in classical texts” (891). Moreover, she does not problematize the event of giving birth as if it meant detachment or loss, but instead she naturalizes this action that would signify “adding to life another” (891). Consequently, labor is not a threat to the female self, but a generous gift. Cixous’s essay “Coming to Writing” vicariously narrates parturition as a climactic, pleasurable, and empowering event –​enriching for the feline mother and fertile for the gluttonous writer. Indeed, Cixous does not compare birthing to authorship, but fuses this biological experience with the act of women writing women in her newly gestated praxis of Écriture Féminine: I give birth. I enjoy giving births. I enjoy birthings […] The woman at the peak of her flesh, her pleasure, her force at last delivered, manifest. Her secret […] She gives birth. With the force of a lioness. Of a plant. Of a cosmogony. Of a woman. She has her source. She draws deeply. She releases. Laughing. And in the wake of the child, a squall of Breath! A longing for text! Confusion! What’s come over her? A child! Paper! Intoxications! I’m brimming over! My breasts are overflowing! Milk. Ink. Nursing time. And me? I’m hungry too. The milky taste of ink! (1991: 30–​1)

Cixous’s scholarship represents the most eloquent defense of the gestating/​birthing body, which has inspired women (writers) since the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, Cixous has been criticized for being an essentialist and accused of connecting femininity to maternity, when she states that, unlike men, women are nourishers and they keep the voice of their own mothers alive within themselves (Hanrahan 2014:  98). Irrespective of academic controversies, later chapters of this study rely upon the potentiality of Cixous’s theoretical corpus of Écriture Féminine,

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and the presence or absence of its symbol of white ink, to retrospectively explore pregnancy and childbirth in women’s literature. Equally within French Feminism, Luce Irigaray calls upon women to refuse to submit to the “desubjectivized” social role of the mother; to recover the creativity forbidden to them for centuries; and to bring back to life the maternal body –​silenced and murdered by the law of the father –​while admonishing women writers to invent their own language on mothering (1993b: 18–​9). Julia Kristeva also voyages across the experience of the gestating/​birthing body of the female self and confesses in an interview that, unlike Simone de Beauvoir who felt that motherhood was slavery, she struggles to seek the meaning of mothering, and to discover “how you can be a mother and still have a life” (qtd. in Midttun 2006: 171). Under the assumptions that women are different from men, and that they must seize their bodies, subjectivity, and discourse around their own femaleness and maternity, Kristeva detects the shortcomings and failures of two dogmas used to understand motherhood: science and Christianity. The maternal body remains a constant factor of social reality, because the woman-​ subject –​swayed by the paternal mission of the reproduction of the species –​is only a filter, “a thoroughfare, a threshold where ‘nature’ confronts ‘culture’,” that becomes the source of religious mystifications (Kristeva 1980: 238). In order to sever the patriarchal conflation of the maternal and the female, this Bulgarian-​French scholar understands maternity as a “function” of the body, as “an adult (male and female) fantasy of a lost continent,” or the “idealization of primary narcissism” for the individual to trace her unlocalizable relationship with her own mother (1985: 133). Kristeva acknowledges that this obscure misinterpretation of a biological reality is what leads “avant-​g arde feminists” to repudiate maternity (133), while she also problematizes the use of phallocentric language to capture the organic processes of pregnancy and childbirth. In compliance with Cixous’s Écriture Féminine, Kristeva invites women to fearlessly call or recall their pregnant anatomies, and to give birth to their own utterances colored by emotions: “Let a body finally venture out of its shelter, expose itself in meaning beneath a veil of words. Word flesh. From one to the other, eternally, fragmented

8

Introduction

visions, metaphors of the invisible” (134). Kristeva sees maternity as a subject matter to empower women’s own voices to the detriment of motherhood as an object of patriarchal discourse and subjugation. In “Women’s Time,” Kristeva shows her breakthrough psychoanalytic theory about pregnancy –​understood as an episode of split subjectivity –​which this study will connect to the concept of liminality and apply to the discussion of women’s literature in subsequent chapters: Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and of an other, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech. This fundamental challenge to identity is then accompanied by a fantasy of totality –​narcissistic completeness –​ a sort of instituted, socialized, natural psychosis. The arrival of the child […] leads the mother into the labyrinths of an experience that, without the child, she would only rarely encounter: love for an other. (1981: 31)

The transformative period of pregnancy until childbirth –​with a plethora of metabolic, hormonal, and anatomical alterations –​confirms the presence of an other within the female body. In line with Kristeva, Cristina Mazzoni stresses that quickening  –​from the second trimester of gestation  –​evidences that there is a new life inside the expectant mother which, although it may bring joy to her, implies the loss of her bodily control and the intrusion of an other (2002: 60–​1). A pregnant woman feels movement that “both is and is not hers” –​as experiencing the inner space of her body as, simultaneously, an outer space for the fetus (Sandford 2016: 56). Both her physical integrity and her notions of female identity are challenged by this new life growing within her uterus, leading the expectant mother to an introspective reassessment of the own self: Her self would not be her self anymore. She is not narcissistically centered around the wellbeing of her own body/​mind, but decentered due to the ambivalent novelty of not being alone. The pregnant woman recognizes that there is otherness within herself; thus, she dwells in alterity. The gestating anatomy is, then, a place of splitting, because it is not only the origin but also the loss of subjectivity, while the expectant mother questions existing categories, because neither she nor the fetus are autonomous selves (Mazzoni 2002: 94–​5). Indeed, Kristeva’s tenets deliver a transitory, third category of in-​betweenness: “the materno-​fetal body” of undifferentiated

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life between mother and child within the womb; a state to be potentially transformed into speech by pregnant women and translated into literature by female authors. Nevertheless, this discovery of an other within the female self may become an ordeal of cohabitation and, later, of traumatic separation between mother and child, or the first instance of maternal love, being not necessarily mutually exclusive. This experience of split subjectivity may result in physical malaise, as Kristeva explains in the narrative of the pregnancy and labor of her own son: “My body is no longer mine, it doubles up, suffers, bleeds, catches cold, puts its teeth in, slobbers, coughs, is covered with pimples” (1985: 138). Here, Kristeva does not identify herself with her newly owned swollen, itchy, and sick anatomy, nor does she recognize her mental self –​being formerly safe and unified –​both potentially leading to mental chaos, fragmentation, and grief. However, Kristeva also confirms a more piercing pain beyond the female soma and psyche that is unconditionally braided with maternity: His suffering –​that I feel inside; that never remains separate or alien but embraces me at once without a moment’s respite. As if I had brought not a child but suffering into the world […] One does not bear children in pain, it is pain that one bears: the child is pain’s representative and once delivered moves in for good […] A mother is also marked by pain, she succumbs to it. “And you, one day a sword will pass through your soul.” (138).

This agony of torn female flesh and the birth injury for mother and child alike persist during childrearing, even through the adulthood of a woman’s offspring, continuing until she dies, and turning into a perpetual masochistic doom for her, in harmony with the patriarchal paradigm of the mother as mater dolorosa in life and art, modelled after the Virgin Mary. But likewise, the blurred distinction between the female self and the other –​the growing fetus within –​can also be beneficial for the mother, her offspring, and the outside world. In Hatred and Forgiveness, Kristeva identifies “the narcissistic withdrawal” of the pregnant woman:  She is her own “object of pleasure, desire and aversion” (2010: 85), because of the temporary self-​absorption with her body. Her ambivalent, fluctuating feelings for her child’s father are replaced by a promise –​the object within her womb –​yet this deviant “phallic mother” cannot recognize

10

Introduction

the existence of her unborn baby separated from her (85). Nevertheless, a miraculous transformation occurs when such a bodily drive of selfish attachment, filtered through (un)conscious mental processes, is sublimated by the human passion of affection, with its correlate of hate (86). Hence, the gestating self, first, learns to love her unborn child, but this passion also enables her to love other people afterwards. By accepting the foreignness within herself  –​or the otherness that makes her who she is –​during pregnancy, the woman begins to open herself to differences in her everyday existence, and to accept or value the strangeness in others (Purcell 2010: 579). Indeed, this discovery of fetal alterity within the female self that leads her to positive interactions with other individuals is what Kristeva coins as “herethics” of maternal love. Moreover, this heretical ethics erases Catholic Marian iconography of “milk and tears” to depict a painful motherhood, and it rather helps women to recover their heretofore non-​existent place as subjects in male-​dominated philosophy and ethics. Despite this hopeful note, it cannot be overlooked that Kristeva also proposes the correlate of hate as a woman’s alternative response to childbearing –​or the self in contact with the other within –​ possibly mediated by her own unmaternal nature, her child’s unloving father, and adverse socioeconomic circumstances for her, as it will be explored in later chapters of this study. In any case, Kristeva’s theories are vital to restore the female reproductive body and its subjectivity to academic and literary discourses. Birth and death are the major passages in life. Nonetheless, there are other transitional phases in between associated with different ages, experiences, and circumstances, when women and men traverse borders or stages to leave one known biological, social, or mental situation to penetrate an unfamiliar, new psychic, physical, or public state, such as puberty, sexual initiation, marriage, parenthood, or a terminal illness. Anthropology explores these rites of passage, together with their magical or religious ceremonies, in prehistoric tribes and Neolithic agrarian communities, to typify primeval forms of human interaction and cultural organization. Arnold Van Gennep’s research not only distinguishes between positive rites and acts of negative volition –​or taboos –​but also formulates their pre-​established sequence of events found in these standardized sacred and profane practices: “rituals of separation, transition and incorporation” (1960: 7, 11).

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Moreover, this Dutch-​French ethnographer categorizes pregnancy and childbirth as rites of passage in primitive tribes, involving a transitional period between the initial phase of rupture from the community and the final reintegration to it. These transcendental episodes in a woman’s life were positive, so her body needed to be protected from evil and was venerated as the vessel of the sacred: a newborn. However, ancestral rituals and interdictions also reveal the negative tinge connected with her procreative functions. The expectant mother was physically separated from society, her family, and her own sex until parturition, when she rejoined the group to which she previously belonged, but she adopted a new public role as a mother (1960: 41). Van Gennep also explains that the birthing woman and her newborn underwent the same sequence of rituals –​separation, transition and incorporation –​after labor, from the cut of the umbilical cord and the first baths to purify the baby, until being named by the father and being welcomed as a new member of the group. Conversely, the still contaminated mother was not immediately permitted to return to her family or to resume her ordinary life within the community. Van Gennep’s studies on the rites of passage, later expanded by the British scholar Victor Turner, essentially theorize about the intermediate stage within this tripartite structure: the transition or “liminal” phase, characterized by ambivalence, contingency, transformations, and even by dangerous physical or mental crises. This temporary period is located between the “preliminal” moment of separation, involving the symbolic death of the fixed identity of the subject –​or her/​his social roles –​and the “postliminal” rites of incorporation, implying her/​his metaphorical public rebirth within the very same group. Overcoming its initially restricted academic use in anthropology to explore the cultural practices of primitive communities from archaic times, liminality currently understands that ritualized dimensions of any transformative phase in human life equally remain in contemporary societies. Consequently, today liminality is a theoretical apparatus transferrable to vertebrate interdisciplinary areas of knowledge, including literary criticism and gender studies. Although etymologically originating from the Latin word limen,2 Arpad Szakolczai 2

Limen means a stone placed at the threshold of a door.

12

Introduction

explains the occurrence of liminality in our lives, thanks to classic Greek sources. The notion of “limit” –​peras –​implies going through and beyond a passage, whereas the term “experience” –​pathos –​denotes the “passive sense of undergoing or literally suffering,” possibly resulting in failure or in destruction of a previous stability; thus, experiencing any liminal event implies “being at the limit” (2015: 20, 22). Furthermore, crossing boundaries does not necessarily mean crossing lines, but rather a dense space with its own dynamics and rules (Achilles 2014: 35). Precisely, liminality is a terra incognita –​temporarily traversed and dwelt in by the individual –​having an impact on her/​his subjectivity and existence in later times. Turner explains that, during this second phase of “margin,” the subject is merely a passenger through “a cultural realm with few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state” (1967: 94), while he also states that liminal episodes are mostly negative in connotation, not yet benefiting from positive traits of the future condition (1974: 72). The contemporary use of liminality insists that this notion equally “captures in-​between situations and conditions characterized by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty about the continuity of tradition and future outcomes” (Horvarth, Thomassen, and Wydra 2015: 2). These threshold areas between boundaries, that belong neither to one zone nor to the other, are territories of ambiguity, undecidability, and conflict, because they are like “filters” that allow certain things through while blocking others (Viljoen and van der Merwe 2007: 10). Plagued with tensions, liminality means a precarious phase between stable states –​marked off by conceptual, spatial, and temporal barriers –​within which individuals are set apart from society and everyday interactions (Skjoldager-​Nielsen and Edelman 2014: 29). Originally, Turner understood that there are not only threshold experiences, times, or spaces, but also that women and men can incarnate “liminal entities […] neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial” (1977: 95). Consequently, individuals lose their previous stable selves or statuses, but they have not yet acquired new identities, biological states, or social roles within the groups they belong to, so the liminal experience of crossing boundaries incurs high costs for the subjects and the heavy burden of temporarily becoming

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outsiders, or marginal beings between two strong centers until they reach their (un)desirable postliminal destination. Indeed, liminal people may suffer the consequences of stigmatization because of being classed as such by others –​voluntarily or not (Thomassen 2015: 50). Similarly, Turner argues that liminal individuals are invisible –​because they are no longer classified and not yet classifiable –​but still pollute others, are unclean and associated with symbols drawn from biological processes with a negative tinge, like death, decomposition, catabolism, or menstruation (1967: 96–​ 7). Traditionally correlated with organic and reproductive functions in male-​dominated discourses, women are, thus, naturally condemned to indetermination, contamination, and invisibility in the margins as prototypical liminal individuals. Bjørn Thomassen articulates a taxonomy of liminality to explore the temporary processes of being at and crossing boundaries in a boundless spectrum of social circumstances, mental states, and bodily experiences in modern times. With that purpose, Thomassen brings into play three types of actors and the time-​space coordinates. There are single individuals, social groups, or even whole communities undergoing transitional events; during concrete moments, short periods, or long epochs; in specific thresholds, areas or zones, and countries or larger territories (2015: 48–​9). Insisting that human life consists of both novel and repetitive situations of in-​betweenness outside normalcy, Thomassen contends that, although we often ritualize and freeze the representation of moments of passage shaping our identity and behavior, liminal experiences are not necessarily embedded within a ritual structure, but they “simply happen to us” (2015: 40–​1). Arpad Szakolczai also stresses that formative and transformative events in today’s world may suddenly question or cancel previously taken-​for-​granted truths, forcing individuals or groups “swept up in this storm” to reflect on their experiences, even on their entire lives, and potentially change not only their conduct, but also their identities (2015: 30). In short, liminality is, broadly speaking, how to deal with changes in (extra)ordinary life situations. This work frames and analyzes the transformative experiences and narratives of pregnancy and childbirth within the existing scholarship on liminality and its modern applicability to women’s literature. Jane Balin diagnoses the power dynamics in a woman’s liminal status during childbearing. The

14

Introduction

sacred, ritual properties of this transition phase –​notably female passivity, humbleness, and obedience to social authorities –​disempower the future mother with such gender expectations, while empowering those guiding her through this rite of passage (Balin 1988: 300). Deliberately excluding the transcendental coming to life for the newborn in isolation,3 this study does not understand pregnancy and childbirth only as ritualized, tabooed processes of impurity, concealment, and confinement in women’s lives stemming from patriarchal ideology, but investigates instead the liminal subject, space, and time involved in these two organic phenomena according to Thomassen’s taxonomy. Firstly, an individual woman with child is a liminal person. Secondly, the maternal womb is a spatial threshold until the ultimate opening of the anatomical limen of the birth canal for a new being to go through it at labor. And thirdly, the demarcated time of physical, mental, and social metamorphoses is, approximately, the nine months between the preliminal stage of separation –​sexual intercourse triggering conception –​and the postliminal destination of social reintegration. Then, the woman retakes control over her body and returns to normalcy, though differently due to the transformative nature of the past liminal phase and to her new public function of motherhood, or to her personal choice of mothering. Moreover, the liminal phase begins immediately after the act of conception, but also when the first symptoms of pregnancy are intuitively sensed by the female self or scientifically confirmed by medical tests. Nonetheless, this temporal period irrevocably ends after the still liminal occurrence of childbirth, when childrearing begins, although breastfeeding can be viewed as a remnant of the intermediate phase of childbearing in postliminal times. Merging studies on liminality and Kristeva’s postulates, pregnancy and childbirth dwell betwixt the self and the other. While cultivating a no woman’s land of in-​betweenness, these biological processes trouble other 3

Although this study focuses on maternal subjectivity as a threshold state, Silja Samerski believes that, traditionally, it was the unborn child which has been considered as a liminal being, whose hidden existence was only revealed at birth (2016: 706). Nevertheless, twentieth-​century imaging technologies enable to visualize and decontextualize the fetus from its mother’s body, whereas the materno-​ fetal unit remains as a liminal subject for speculation.

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boundaries, like visible-​invisible, inside-​outside, known-​unknown, past-​ future, or female-​not necessarily only female. Iris Marion Young posits that the pregnant subject is “decentered, split and doubled”: The woman experiences “her body as herself and not herself,” because of its inner movements belonging to another being, yet they are also hers, because they are located inside her own self and shape her life (2005: 46, 49). In fact, childbearing is a significant, yet an under-​theorized subjective experience with alterity and otherness: What is foreign to the woman, paradoxically, lies at her own body’s center (Smith 2016: 40–​1). Meanwhile, the materno-​fetal body can also be understood as, transitorily, one single space dissolving previous borderlines, or a liminal third entity containing two beings –​the expectant mother and the unborn baby –​that are indivisible until an abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, or a successful delivery when the irretrievable split between these two subjects occurs. The gestational process would be the twofold experience of the formation of an other being –​the child –​and the transformations of an existing being –​the woman –​whose preceding sense of integrality of the self –​her body/​mind unity –​vanishes throughout this liminal phase. Insisting on the fear of change, Adrienne Rich argues that pregnancy symbolizes the extinction of a woman’s earlier identity during the transition toward the unfamiliar or the strange (1986: 167). In turn, the moment of delivery implies the beginning of the child’s new life and the ending of the woman’s liminal time/​space/​being as a gestating subject. Young argues that the birthing process entails the greatest suspension of the bodily distinction between the inner and the outer: “the inside thing” that the woman felt within herself for months suddenly emerges between her legs through pain, blood, and water (2005: 50). However, before childrearing or prior to the unpredictable outcome of death at birth, the expectant mother has no freedom to escape from the contingencies experienced throughout her liminal pregnancy, nor does she have full control over the materno-​fetal body, because it is only partly hers. The physical borderline between the self and the other remains indeterminate, fluid, and vague until parturition, although the placenta and the umbilical cord function as liminal tissues of nurturance and interaction during this transition phase, which protect otherness within the organic unit. Indeed, Luce Irigaray posits that the placenta is a third entity or a space between

16

Introduction

mother and fetus, belonging to neither one or the other –​a mediator separating them and preventing their fusion, while making possible their coexistence (1993a: 38–​9). Claire Drewery holds that liminality can be associated with psychotic borderlands, where the individual receives the status of outsider and is trapped in an isolating space of in-​betweenness, so she/​he may endure alienation, incoherence, silence, mental breakdown, or even death (2011: 4). Nonetheless, not much has been speculated about liminal emotional states and female subjectivity during pregnancy and childbirth in women’s literature. Françoise Cailleau detects that gestation and labor test a woman’s capacity to mature, to accept that she has completely abandoned her infancy, and to embrace a new identity or her change to an older generation, but these are also episodes of vulnerability, potentially awakening unresolved, dormant mental conflicts from earlier times (2009: 82–​3). Indeed, crossing the ritual passage from being childless to becoming childed is a transitional phase of dramatic transformations, fragility, ambivalence, and heightened feelings, involving not only how the woman perceives herself and her fetus within, but also how she is perceived by others. As a period of passive waiting, pregnancy enables the woman’s psychological introspection toward self-​knowledge and her mental adjustment to future challenges: how to become herself a mother and to prepare the unborn child for an autonomous existence. The female self must succeed in sharing the liminal time and space with the other inside her womb, to adapt herself, and to assimilate that, temporarily, they are together one unit. The pregnant subject may, then, begin to love this otherness within, feel sensations of wellbeing, like the pleasurable tactile contact with the fetus, and experience epiphanies of personal discovery and growth. Nevertheless, the gestational period may also be plagued with transient or permanent episodes of emotional turmoil, psychosomatic crisis, or nervous disorders, which can later become narratives of suffering, trauma, and recovery with healing purposes. Bearing in her uterus a new being –​possibly perceived as intrusive –​or simply coming to terms with her newly embodied duality during pregnancy are generally life-​changing events for the expectant mother, challenging the previously stable, known notions of her own identity and individuality, or even intensifying a dangerous sense of self-​loss.

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Preliminally familiar for the woman, pregnancy also breaks cognitive boundaries of understanding her own anatomy, which is invaded and occupied by an other –​first, the inseminating man and, later, the growing embryo and fetus. The mind of the expectant mother does not control or master her body anymore, but instead it becomes an unknown territory of helplessness, as unfamiliar and alien as her future maternal role, or the new world that awaits her after labor. The event of childbirth is as mentally liminal as the process of pregnancy, because according to Deborah Lupton and Virginia Schmied, parturition embodies the ultimate loss of corporeal containment: The woman has no power over what eventually happens, and this can intensify the notion that her body is a separate entity from who she is (2013: 829). This sensation within the birthing mother can result in the psychologically threatening fragmentation of her own self, or in the (ir) reversible dissociation between her upper mind/​heart/​soul and her bottom sexual/​anatomical parts –​mutable, open, incomprehensible, and foreign to her. This antagonism or hostility between the soma and the psyche of the expectant mother can be transferred to the fetus as (un)maternal feelings of anger, frustration, or disappointment, potentially leading to the termination of pregnancy, prenatal or postnatal nervous disorders, and other tragic endings for the two previously united entities. Furthermore, a cascade of different internal and external factors may erupt throughout the liminal continuum of pregnancy and childbirth, and strengthen the woman’s feelings about her child’s undesirability, such as physical illnesses, mental terrors of death at labor, unbearable burdens from institutional motherhood, social marginalization, poverty, emotional vulnerability, or desertion by her sexual partner. The family institution and inquisitive public eyes have, traditionally, transformed the highly visible biological realities of pregnancy and childbirth into targets of social scrutiny, judgment, and final verdict: the status elevation for the sacred, maternal Mary, or the dramatic fall for the reproductively sinful Eve. Childbearing is a time of separation and confinement for the woman, but her liminal social death may anticipate the advent of a glorious resurrection: her postliminal role of childrearing, if her gestational process is publicly welcomed and legitimized by patriarchal justice. Nevertheless, future maternities can be

18

Introduction

declared illicit, marginalized, and obscured by a perpetual decease –​or the death-​in-​life –​if becoming a mother violates male-​dominated codes of female propriety and expectations of women’s procreativity; that is, childbearing and motherhood blessed by marriage. However, as a consequence of the taboo and the erotic dimension from the preliminal phase of sexual intercourse and conception, historically pregnancy and parturition have also been tinged with shame, guilt, or secrecy for women, even when childbearing occurs within the prescribed social status of wifehood. Indeed, the liminality of these two organic processes is not only associated with temporality, transformations, and emotional borderlands, but also with stigma. Erving Goffman defines this term as an undesirable attribute, which deeply taints and discredits its possessor, because it makes her/​him dangerous, evil, weak, or simply different from other people living in the same community (1963: 12–​3). There are three types of stigma: deformities of the body; flaws of character in a person dominated by unnatural passions, treachery, dishonesty, or even by mental disorders; and collective blemishes, which are transmitted to contaminate all members of one family, like race, nationality, or religion (14). Surprisingly, pregnancy and childbirth are phases of social liminality connected with Goffman’s three categories of stigma, because these two biological phenomena always imply physical abnormality throughout nine months; they sometimes reveal the preliminal stage of deviant female sexual behavior; and they are inherent in women as a collectivity. Although Goffman does not categorize the female population as a potentially stigmatized group, patriarchal societies punish the premarital and adulterous sexual reproduction of potential mothers who may pollute others, and then marginalize their illegal offspring during the postliminal childrearing. This factor demonstrates the communal nature of maternity as a positive rite of passage or as a sexual taboo, while also confirming the highly ritualistic dimension of childbearing, even today. Pregnant women are culturally prohibited from engaging in some conduct, such as bad thoughts or harsh feelings, unhealthy ingestion, dangerous activities, improper sights or sounds; whereas they are prescribed other conduct under the authority of reproductive technology and obstetric care (Raphael-​L eff 2016: 159). Trapped in a liminal state

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of confinement and secrecy, expectant mothers may also feel agoraphobia and reluctance to be in public spaces. The fragile boundaries between the female self and the environs may actually dissolve, so they feel “invaded” by unsafe surroundings (Davidson 2001: 286). Pregnant women can even perceive that they risk “soiling” themselves and polluting others with matter produced by their own bodies out of control –​tears, vomit, or urine –​so they are embarrassed and afraid of behaving inappropriately or revolting others (288). Indeed, expectant mothers may develop a heightened awareness of the censorious gazes of others –​notably those of men –​so they can internalize a harmful stigma derived from childbearing and find themselves in marginal space and time coordinates during their liminal state of gestation. Pregnancy and childbirth are two phases of a female biological cycle determined by physical, psychological, and social liminality. For the woman, it is a time of gradual changes to become a mother. Likewise, it is a space of moving from the familiar to contingency, temporarily living in a limen and, eventually, going through a passage to the final destination of maternity: a new life for her and her baby beyond her uterus. For the woman, childbearing also means the occurrence of disrupting her oneness, of doubling her self within the boundaries of her own body, and of experiencing the unique materno-​fetal unit until the final disambiguation at labor, which separates two beings, although the emotional symbiosis between mother and child usually persists. Indeed, Sara Riddick posits that birthing does not dissolve a woman’s self-​consciousness in fusion with her offspring, but it is rather part of the process of interdependent creation, where she keeps the active role of a giver to her child, as her recipient (1990: 210). Pregnancy and childbirth remain as a continuum of biological phenomena and episodes of unique female subjectivity with literary potentiality to be transformed into women’s (life-​)writings of self-​discovery or recovery from traumas, despite having been silenced by misogynist pressures over the female self and her creative authorship. Indeed, pregnancy and childbirth themselves are not problematic as natural thresholds, but women writers must breach the barrier of patriarchal authority over the space, time, and body of liminality imposed upon gestating/​birthing

20

Introduction

mothers since the cradle of the Western world. In the following chapters, this study ultimately reviews the history of women’s literature from the nineteenth century until contemporary times to explore another liminal area: the textual threshold between men’s writings with black ink –​glorifying the institution of motherhood while silencing female body/​mind processes –​and embryonic narratives about pregnancy and childbirth –​ whether with abundant or scarce white ink –​labored by British and North American women writers.

Chapter 1

The Nineteenth-​Century Threshold for Inkless Liminal Women Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Mary Anne Evans/George Eliot

The dominant ideology of patriarchal fertility impregnated the institution of motherhood in nineteenth-​century Great Britain, whereas barrenness was enforced against women to erase potential discourses of procreativity and mothering, notably in Victorian times (1837–​1901). A loyal wife bearing nine children, Queen Victoria became the mother of all her subjects (to be) born in the same Protestant Empire where, centuries before, the Virgin Mary’s sacred powers were defeated and a more docile substitute was employed. “The Angel in the House”1 was the contemporary paradigm of virtuous femininity and propriety, Christian faith and ideal domesticity prescribed to all Victorian women, deprived of formal education, suffrage, custody rights, remunerative professions, and birth control. Although emphasizing women’s moral superiority, this female angel was placed in a role secondary to men (Hogan and Bradstock 1998: 1). This archetype was also conceived as a saintly creature on earth with absent sexual desire, because virginity and chastity ruled her life before and after her divinely appointed mission: married motherhood. A vessel of spirituality and incorporeality, the Angel in the House was praised for nurturing her entire family and for her infinite maternal love. Albeit she was publicly exhibited in her celebrated social roles of preliminal maidenhood –​suitable for marital procreation –​and postliminal childrearing, this angel was confined at home 1

From Coventry Patmore’s poem of homonymous title (1854), it refers to the Victorian ideal of femininity, which designated compulsory roles of domesticity to women as mothers, wives, and nurturers of the Edenic home, while also regulating expected female virtues of self-​denial, unworldliness, and obedience to men.

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until having trespassed the mortal threshold of labor, to protect the prenatal treasure in her womb, and to cover her liminally physical deformity during her pregnancies. In the nineteenth century, the British literary Establishment neither welcomed women as writing subjects nor encouraged male or female authors to narrate the liminal processes of gestation and labor as experienced by the Angel in the House. Indeed, the Victorian novel tends not to depict its heroine’s early years of marriage, so the reader cannot witness her transformation “from virgin to mother” (Engelhardt 1998: 163). However, many works were, paradoxically, intrigued by its erotic, sinful, and procreative antagonist: “The Fallen Woman” –​a mosaic of prostitutes, kept mistresses, adulteresses, and other daughters of Eve. Indeed, male writers were interested in beautiful, naïve young maids destined to remain as angelic creatures, but tempted or forced to trespass the threshold of premarital sexuality and doomed to the narrative sequence of fall, martyrdom, and death; their precious virginity being usurped, being deserted by their blameless inseminators, and becoming unmarried mothers. Punished by double standards of morality and by gender inequality in Victorian times, stories of hidden, monstrous, pathological, or illicit pregnancies and childbirths from The Fallen Woman deserved rivers of black ink from male writers. Marriage and motherhood were defined by social and medical norms during the nineteenth century: Early wedlock, prolific childbearing, and breastfeeding ensured women’s health, whereas deviation of such rules led to institutional and clinical abnormality (Nead 1988: 26). Scientific treatises indicated that becoming a mother was a female physiological need, and that the absence of maternal feelings entailed the disease of “moral madness”2 (Mazzoni 2002: 27, 124). Moreover, Victorian psychiatry linked nervous disorders to the biological crisis of women’s life-​cycle –​including pregnancy and childbirth –​ during which “the mind would be weakened,” and symptoms of lunacy could emerge (Showalter 1987: 55). In fact, nineteenth-​century physicians believed 2

The nineteenth-​century physician James Cowles Prichard defined this condition as “a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses without any remarkable disorder or defect of the intellect [and] any insane illusion,” which denotes a disruptive behavior or the deviance from normal social norms, rather than a mental pathology (qtd. in Showalter 1987: 29).

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that “the event of conception stimulated the womb” and created an excitability during pregnancy affecting other organs, and that such an “irritability of the uterus,” potentially, drove women to “states of despondency bordering on insanity” (Hanson 2004: 24). Hanson and other scholars have gathered evidence from nineteenth-​century scientific writings and social manuals revealing the intention to teach women patterns of compulsory femininity, proving that patriarchy and science were early allies of moral control that sought to pathologize women’s body/​mind in sexual reproduction. Even reading and writing were thought to be activities irreconcilable with childbearing, because a woman’s mental and physical strength must be concentrated on her womb and the growth of her unborn child within. Nevertheless, the nineteenth-​century plethora of scientific and social discussion on procreativity was not translated into literary creativity from either male or female pens. Women’s physicality and emotions during the liminal processes of pregnancy and labor were concealed from the public gaze until childrearing. Cravings, dietary and hygienic routines and interdictions, quickening and the descriptions of the swollen belly, or tender emotions shared between the mother and her embryo/​fetus are, consequently, absent from nineteenth-​century novels, but not necessarily absent are women’s gestational fears and anxieties to be labored as Gothic narratives of monstrosity and mental collapse. Hanson argues that, although many clinical aspects of pregnancy and the causes of fetal death, miscarriage, or deformity at birth, were still unknown in those days, it was cultural pressures –​not the latest developments of medicine –​that diagnosed the so-​called “insanity of pregnancy,” as a condition requiring medical treatment (2004: 46, 4). Gynecologists and obstetricians were prestigious practitioners who attended upper-​class expectant mothers and diagnosed that sexual reproduction was a physically/​mentally debilitating labor for women requiring passivity. The midwifery practice mostly disappeared during Victorian times, while hospitals and male physicians invaded women’s gestating/​birthing bodies, used their forceps, and administered anesthesia by chloroform –​even chosen by Queen Victoria for some of her many childbirths –​to ease the labor pains of wealthy married mothers. However, the English monarch demythologized this physical event in a letter to one of her daughters: “I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic” (qtd. in Korte 1990: 35). Queen Victoria here reveals her sensation of physical degradation at childbirth, as a sacrifice where parturient patients

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are merely helpless victims. Despite male medical interventionism, nineteenth-​ century statistics reveal high mortality rates for both expectant mothers and their children. Puerperal fever massacred many birthing women in Western countries until the twentieth century, because of the proliferation of hospitals reserved to poor mothers, who could not pay an obstetrician to attend their deliveries at home. This condition was, indeed, a harmful consequence of the male control over birth: the systemic blood poisoning caught when surgeons imported germs from corpses to the birthing room (Maroney 1985: 50–​1). Consequently, being with child in the nineteenth century was associated not only with crossing the threshold toward the unknown social role of motherhood for a woman, but also with her panic about pain and, possibly, about dying at labor or right after. In former times, pregnancy and childbirth were genuinely life-​threatening journeys, which heightened episodes of women’s emotional distress and terror. Nevertheless, this ritual passage between life and death, between childlessness and maternity, was paradoxically obscured by silence and unintelligibility in nineteenth-​century literature. Beyond men’s sickening, medicalization, and control over women’s reproductive bodies, social status is also pivotal to fathom antagonistic archetypes of femininity in the nineteenth century, as well as their respective good or evil pregnancies and childbirths. Rural and working-​class women were viewed as fertile, hardy, and robust mothers of large families, capable of bearing and breastfeeding babies from their wedding day until menopause, without the need of interrupting their works in factories, farms, or households in advanced pregnancy or after labor. Pregnancy and childbirth were not considered to be strenuous, dangerous physical experiences, or prone to mental disorders, for unprivileged Victorian women. Being poor, illiterate, unguided by family, and often orphaned, many girls were vulnerable to men’s sexual rapacity, potentially resulting in clandestine pregnancies and tragic deliveries. Gestation and labor were concealed by these unmarried women to avoid suffering social stigmatization, family rejection, or economic struggles; whereas fatherless babies were occasionally murdered or deserted and found dead. Meanwhile, aristocratic and middle-​class ladies, who were the social milieu of nineteenth-​century women writers, were perceived to be frail and sickly; thus, requiring domestic confinement and medical care when expecting a child. Obedient to the patriarchal ideal of angelic asexuality and feminine respectability, these wealthy women often

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gave birth to fewer children, were immune to illicit premarital pregnancies, and exempt from marital sex beyond procreation. In short, the elitist Angel in the House was prescribed chastity to limit the immorality of sexual activities and the curse of pregnant/​birthing sickness and death from the female reproductive anatomy, whereas working-​class women –​fallen or not –​were linked to nature’s procreative powers to be subdued or punished. The advent of generations of nineteenth-​century British women writers is not translated into narratives of pregnancy and childbirth to empower female (pro)creativity. Nonetheless, these foremothers of women’s literature occupy the threshold between barren old times and fertile modernity, so they incarnate sibyls to announce trespassing female writings with white ink in the twentieth century, which will unravel the natural enigma of women’s gestating/​birthing bodies and minds. This chapter explores nineteenth-​century novels that surreptitiously criticize the social imposition of motherhood, vomit gestational anxieties, deliver (un)maternal instincts, and labor alternative mothers against the sovereignty of domestic angels. Whether in Gothic extravaganzas or in realist narratives, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Mary Anne Evans/​George Eliot conceive procreative stories about monstrosity, insanity, body camouflage, and moral (in)decency, where pregnancy and childbirth are not explicit physical experiences, yet they labor within an emotional vortex of revulsion, regret, shame, and concealment from liminal literary heroines or their avatars fallen from grace.

The Gothic Passage of Mother Medusa: Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that nineteenth-​century women writers project their anger and “dis-​ease” into female monsters  –​as dark doubles for their own selves –​to identify with and revisit the self-​ definitions that patriarchal culture has imposed upon them (2000: 79). Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë illustrate this creative transfiguration of female authors into (self-​)destructive Medusas, who reveal the most

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terrifying panic about unfeminine femaleness for men: women’s interrogation of motherhood, through revulsion, guilt, and fear of the unborn and the newborn. The horror and ugliness, indeed, lie in their embryonic female narratives on pregnancy and childbirth, which defy, attack, and petrify male gazers. Thanks to the Gothic genre, Shelley and Brontë intuitively embrace the act of Écriture Féminine with white ink, when they symbolically obey Hélène Cixous’s credo: “Look at the Medusa straight on to see her” (1976: 885), sensing that: “She’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (885). Unconsciously, these two writers honor this self-​assertive  –​yet lawless  –​mythical gorgon punished by men, when their novels surreptitiously tell the untold history of dreadful women since Eve. Shelley and Brontë do not depict prototypical Gothic damsels in distress, who are innocent, pure, and tortured by beastly tyrants, but monstrous/​ghostly heroines or masculine avatars, who ventriloquize their own cacophonous voices as a Mother Medusa, and who are insubordinate to the rule of men over procreation. Yet, the rite of passage of the abhorrent (un)maternal self into writing is scary and only tentative, implying both empowerment and victimization, or as Diane Hoeveler indicates, the redefinition of sexuality and power in fantasies of the so-​ called “Gothic Feminism” denotes that women writers equally collude and conspire with their male oppressors “in a passive-​aggressive dance of rebellion and compliance” (1998: 24). Banishing secondary female characters, three men dwell in Frankenstein (1818/​31): the explorer Robert Walton, the scientist Victor Frankenstein, and his murderous Creature without a name. At first sight, this exclusion of heroines does not presage that this is, eminently, the novel of a monstrous young mother in the dark, who gestates and delivers her own (un)maternal anxieties and herself as a literary woman. Mary Shelley, née Godwin (1797–​1851), had been tutored by her father –​the philosopher William Godwin; her future husband –​the Romantic poet Percy B. Shelley; her literary friends –​Lord Byron and John Polidori; and by her own extensive readings of books of knowledge written only by men, when she joined the testosterone-​loaded competition of her male comrades to write ghost stories in Geneva during the rainy summer of 1816. To kill the boredom, the unmarried Shelleys, Polidori, and Byron speculated on the myth of

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Prometheus, the enigma of the creation of life, and the latest scientific advances during Great Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Unexpectedly, these men also gave life to a future writer –​Mary Shelley, the glamorous daughter of two prominent authors, as pliable clay in patriarchal literary hands? Beyond this androcentric climate, the mother of this young woman had always been absent from her life. The feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was killed by puerperal fever, contracted when a doctor –​not a midwife –​failed to remove the placenta after Mary Godwin Shelley’s birth. In fact, the dead mother uncannily returns and transforms male readers into stone, like Medusa, when this aspiring teenage writer, who wrongly assumes guilty responsibility for the matricide, blurs the not-​so-​fixed boundary between creativity and procreativity thanks to Frankenstein. Mary Shelley expects and labors dying babies but, using her own words in this novel’s “Preface,” she also delivers “[her] hideous progeny” (2003b: 10), that is her surviving first literary work, or the embryo of science fiction, for which she felt “an affection […] for it was the offspring of happy days” (10). Actually, thanks to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley recalls the excitement of the summer 1816, when she entered the liminal process of artistic conception. Frankenstein is a cautionary horror tale to warn man-​led science about the dangers of conceiving monstrous experiments, which degrade our humanness: love, sympathy, and morality. Victor Frankenstein is an ambitious –​yet wounded –​student, who unconsciously wants his beloved dead mother to come back from her grave. This Faustian “over-​reacher” challenges the inviolable laws of Father God and Mother Nature, when he goes to study at the University of Ingolstadt. There, he confines himself in his laboratory to penetrate the inscrutable mysteries of life and death, to usurp the reproductive powers of the female anatomy, and alone, he procreates by himself a monstrous child. In fact, his lack of maternal feelings for his ill-​formed Creature leads to a hemorrhaging narrative of murder, revenge, and (self-​)destruction between himself –​as an unmotherly scientist –​and his wretched offspring. Ellen Moers was the first scholar to examine Mary Shelley’s sex, and to identify the importance of her biography to understand the genesis of Frankenstein: “a birth myth” lodged in its author’s imagination, because “she was herself a mother” (1980: 92). Percy Shelley, then a married man, and Mary Godwin met, fell in love, and eloped

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in 1814, when she was only 16, inaugurating a fecund five-​year genealogy of traumatic pregnancies, deliveries, and dead babies. Bearing the monstrous stigma of premarital sex and illegitimate maternity, she gave birth to a premature daughter in 1815 who, unnamed, died days after and haunted her as an inconsolable teenage mother. Her journal records: “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day” (qtd. in Grylls 1969: 47). Visions of the corpse of an unformed/​deformed child lived in the nightmares and, later, in Gothic stories of a young woman in mourning, who felt guilty for not having loved and protected her baby, whom she might not have wanted after its conception. The liminal process of (pro)creating Frankenstein occurred between 1816 and 1817, when the ludic artistic divertissement of the tandem Shelley-​Byron impregnated her creativity. At that time, the still unwed Mary Godwin is the happy mother of a surviving son, born in January 1816 but dead in 1819. Again, she is pregnant and gives birth to another girl in May 1817 but deceased by 1818 –​the same year when her fetal novel is published. Hence, this infant woman writer could picture herself as a parent of death, not as a mother of life. In those same years, Mary’s drama is intertwined with the tragedies of three other women in her entourage. Her half-​sister Fanny committed suicide when she learned that she was secretly Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter with Gilbert Imlay, conceived before her mother met her non-​biological father William Godwin. Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont was pregnant with Lord Byron’s daughter, also dead in infancy. And finally, her rival Harriet, bearer of healthy babies and the legitimate wife of her lover –​and later husband –​Percy Shelley, drowned herself, because she was expecting the child from an unidentified inseminator. Frankenstein is built upon three concentric circles of liminal pregnancies during nine months and one childbirth without later childrearing: the postnatal life of isolation, self-​education, and unlovability of Victor’s unnamed Creature. Firstly, there is the extra-​diegetic level of Shelley’s literary gestation of Frankenstein from summer 1816 until spring 1817. Secondly, there is the diegetic level of Robert Walton sending letters to his sister in England, from December 11 until September 12 of the next year, when he aborts his expedition to the North Pole and returns to his motherland.

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And thirdly, Shelley creates the hypo-​diegetic level of Victor’s confinement and expectancy in Germany, from February through “winter, spring and summer [that] passed away during [his] labours” (Frankenstein3: 57), until he carries his scientific pregnancy to term and delivers his fetal creation in fall, the season of fruitfulness and harvest: It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning [when] I saw the dull yellow eyes of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. (FR 58)

Before this, Victor “gave up [his] former occupations, set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-​be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge” (43). Indeed, Victor almost discarded his project, until he resumed his former procreative ambitions and entered the liminal phase of his masculine pregnancy. It was the lecture of Prof. Waldman what triggered the asexual conception inside his gestating mind, destined to “explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation” (49). Victor’s wish was to create life from death. Consequently, he studied corpses and organic processes of decomposition, while stealing and collecting anatomical parts from morgues and dissecting rooms during nine long months of frenetic activity and secrecy, to work alone in his laboratory. Clare Hanson posits that Shelley’s novel attacks the potentially destructive power of Victor’s inadequate artificial womb –​lacking light and female nourishment –​as well as his opaque gestating method, whereby the child does not grow, but it develops itself through successive appositions of multifarious elements (2004: 49). As an experienced expectant mother of three dying babies by 1817,4 Shelley warns that the experiment by her novel’s male scientist is manufactured and unhealthy. Victor does not conceive his Creature in his own image and likeness, but instead as an ugly monster of giant stature 3 4

The 1831 edition of Frankenstein is hereafter referred to by FR. In 1819, Mary Shelley –​already married –​gave birth to her only surviving son: Percy Florence.

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detached from his own body, unlike the physical resemblance between the child and her/​his parents commonly found in biological reproduction. Paradoxically, Shelley’s imagination as a gestating woman, who reads male books and later writes a horror tale, is also impregnated by the sickly superimposition of images of fetal aberrations, which reveal the traumatic autobiographical roots of her creativity during her pregnancies. Margaret Homans argues that giving birth to fatherless children was monstrous for Mary Shelley because, whether they could kill their mothers at labor or they must be hidden, these babies condemned women to public shame during motherhood (1986: 111–​12). If we trust the replicas of the author’s irrational guilt for murdering her own mother  –​Wollstonecraft  –​at childbirth, the fear of carrying deformed babies in Mary Shelley’s mind and womb also symptomatizes an invisible mother-​daughter relationship, which erupts when she is with child. However, she fails to identify herself with the maternal ghost of Wollstonecraft, worshipped and mourned for years. Through the hypo-​diegetic level of Victor’s fist-​person account of his gestational experiment, Mary Shelley fearfully records her own pregnancies. Thanks to Frankenstein, she recalls when she learnt the glad tidings of expecting a child: “I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect” (FR 53), because the rite of passage from irresponsible adolescence to adult motherhood is a gigantic threshold to traverse. Similarly, the author remembers the gradual increase of mental and physical discomfort as time passes: “Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow-​creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime” (57). The narration of Victor’s gestational process, indeed, mimics the growing malaise and irritability of some expectant mothers. Nevertheless, the criminal Shelley intensifies the need to conceal her own body –​to be out of sight –​due to the illegitimate offspring of her licentious love within her uterus. Furthermore, the author herself and Victor both hope for the finalization of this liminal stage thanks to an impending childbirth: “The energy of my purpose alone sustained me: my labours would soon end, and I believed that exercise and amusement would then drive away incipient disease; and I promised myself both of these when my creation should be complete.” (57)

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In the nineteenth century, illegitimate children were still regarded as monsters, because God punished their mothers’ sinfulness and uncontrollable power to conceive against patriarchal laws of fathers and husbands. In fact, monstrous births –​babies as formless lumps of flesh, with adult traits or two heads, without mouths, with animal limbs, or half human and half fish –​were thought to be portents of divine Will in many places until modern times, even the result of demonic witchcraft or sexual intercourse with the Devil (Belanus and Langlois 2005: 425). Both folklore and religious scriptures fought against illicit births, but as Lori Haslem indicates, the proliferation of clinical literature with visual materials about monstrous fetuses in women’s uteruses further strengthened the belief that the moral failings of parents, particularly the depraved imagination of mothers, brought about animalistic features in their future babies (2011: 37). Indeed, the theory of maternal impressions5 could have influenced the conception of nightmarish monsters in Mary Shelley’s pregnant brain on account of her several pregnancies. Traced back to classical medicine and early Church Fathers, it was believed that the imagination of a gestating woman functioned mimetically: “An image placed before her eyes and strongly impressed [upon her] would be reproduced on the body of the child,” so the expectant mother had the power to mark or deform a developing fetus (Bewell 1988: 109). Scientific books, oral legends, and ecclesiastical intolerance against maternity out of wedlock –​all this male brainwashing probably shaped Mary Shelley’s understanding of evil sexual reproduction from 1814 to 1819, as she was an avid reader with an impressionable mind and was alone during long months of gestation. Merging creativity and procreativity, she imagined monstrous babies and fictional Gothic creatures. Even the liberal William Godwin rejected his embarrassing daughter Mary after having eloped with Percy Shelley to continental Europe, being unmarried and pregnant. Without family support, the intolerant absent father Godwin –​England’s early ambassador of nonexclusive love –​engendered not only terrors of maternal monstrosity in Mary Shelley, but also curiosity 5

This theory is about how the pregnant woman can influence –​in a bodily and psychological manner –​the child she carries within, primary through the (dis)satisfaction of her food cravings (Mazzoni 2002: 11).

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about her own conception. Marc Rubenstein claims that the Creature in Frankenstein refers to the love letters that Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to William Godwin, which her daughter probably found and perused in the family library (1976: 170–​1). A documented period of courtship and sexual intercourse for the two intellectuals led to Mary Shelley’s conception in November 1796 –​a girl born in August 1797. Instead, the Creature’s birth in the novel occurs in November while Mary Shelley vividly translates her own birthing experience to narrate Victor’s aberrant procreative experiment and the vomit of his monstrous offspring: How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! –​Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes; that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-​white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips […] The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. (FR 58)

Ellen Moers contends that the most feminine aspect of Frankenstein is the trauma of the afterbirth, or the “revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread and flight surrounding birth and its consequences” (1980: 93). A teenage girl with no legitimate husband, no sympathetic father, and not enjoying the love of a mother, Mary Shelley may have suffered a postpartum depression of shame and disgust. Her ugly real baby, which had instigated her calvary of social and family stigmatization, long expectancy, nausea, vomiting during her pregnancy, and labor pains, would not correspond to the beautiful mental child that most married women placidly picture during nine months of gestational liminality. A reader of medical treatises with illustrations of monstrous births; an orphan uninformed about procreation as the disgraceful aftermath of sexual intercourse, and an unprepared young mother to nurse three sickly and dying babies when she completes her novel in spring 1817, Mary Shelley’s uncanny birthing memories reverberate to imagine congenital deformities in her own babies. In Frankenstein, she also expurgates

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her guilt as a supposed bad mother, when she metamorphoses herself into Victor, to somatize the bodily traumas during her pregnancies and the emotional lesions born at labor, as reflected in her Gothic creative ordeal: “I beheld the wretch –​the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes […] were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks” (FR 59). Victor’s imperious desire to conceive his own cadaveric progeny exists only while he is pregnant with his project within the confines of his mind. Nevertheless, the climactic night when he gives birth to an independent –​yet unnurtured –​monstrous body out of his control and with no physical resemblance to him, Victor’s idealized mental offspring becomes infernal, ugly flesh and bones in a postpartum nightmare for a physician who transforms himself into a birthing patient, suffering physical sickness and feverish convulsions: No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived. I passed the night wretchedly. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sank to the ground through languor and extreme weakness. (59)

After this traumatic childbirth of filth, the Creature, not of woman born, sees his selfish –​yet frightened –​runaway mother Victor. Feeling symptoms of a postpartum malaise, the scientist rejects the morally compulsory function of childrearing, so he abandons his newborn in his uterine laboratory after his labors to avoid: “the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which [he] had so miserably given life” (59). Victor even endows himself with the moral right to judge that the child’s other parent is Satan, and that its physical deformity is the condemnatory result of an asexual intercourse with the Devil. Victor sees that his pursuit to trespass the human threshold of death to resurrect a corpse, enrages the only godly Father and all mothers born female, unlike himself. Moreover, if the chameleonic Mary Shelley identified herself with Victor during their shared pregnancies, the postliminal story of his deformed son’s rearing and reading

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of books of knowledge in isolation builds an uncanny likeness between these two neglected, wounded children: the author of Frankenstein and her monstrous, nameless Creature. Victor is prostrated in bed for a long puerperal period of physical infirmity and apathy, that leads him to abandon his studies and suffer an: “agony of [his] nervous symptoms” (69). Without belated maternal feelings, he still refers to his progeny as the “filthy daemon to whom I had given life” (77–​8), or “the wretch whom I had created” (101), when he eventually recovers his health. After his already grown-​up Creature begins his bloodthirsty spiral of revenge and murder against his Creator’s family in Geneva, they unsympathetically meet in the Alps. The hideous son demands his scientific mother to use his procreative power to conceive a female companion for him to mitigate his loneliness and misery. Shelley’s white ink is ejaculated to merge the author’s reluctance to subsequent periods of childbearing with Victor’s lack of “courage to recommence [his] work […] unable to overcome [his] repugnance to the task which was enjoined [him]” (155). Located in Great Britain this time, the liminal period of Victor’s second pregnancy reproduces the same modus operandi of self-​absorptive prenatal industriousness during months, but it lacks the excitement of a debutant expectant mother. Instead, Victor only feels horror, being “sickened at the work of [his] hands [for his] most detestable occupation” (169), and impatience “to arrive at the termination of [his] journey” (167), for which he chooses the camouflage of Scotland’s remote Orkney islands, as “the scene of [his] labours” (168). However, Victor induces a pre-​term labor to himself to abort his second child –​a female. This crime infuriates his first child, who witnesses the surgical intervention from the distance and, later, culminates his revenge plan against his Creator by killing Victor’s future wife Elizabeth. In fact, Mary Shelley suggests that a rejected son can become a homicidal monster when the nuclear family fails to mother its offspring (Mellor 1988: 52). Meanwhile, the negligent scientist describes his aborted daughter as: “The remains of the half-​finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being” (FR 175), after which he throws his second experiment into the sea without any remorse or maternal guilt, nor anticipating any future gestation: “The idea of renewing my labours did not for one instant occur to me” (175). The first

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pregnancy of the tandem Mary-​Victor to deliver the male Creature reflects the candor and unpreparedness of young individuals, but for the second time, to carry to term the female Creature, they both know the consequences of conception: labor pains, the birth of a murderous child for the mother, and her rejection of this baby. Nevertheless, the emotions and sensations of the pregnant writer are more complex and ambiguous than those of the scientist when Mary Shelley recalls the death of her first daughter in 1815. Then, she eventually loved her child after its birth despite her probable initial reticence to become a mother. However, it is too late: A woman has the natural gift to create a new life but suffers the curse of being unable to make it last and contemplates the death of her offspring in sorrow. Mary Shelley’s helplessness leads her to regret the procreative aftermath of sexual intercourse with her lover, and to express her unintelligible wish not to come to term with later pregnancies. It was impossible in the body/​mind of a woman of her time to claim that her offspring –​legitimate or not –​was unwanted, but Mary Shelley could better translate her abortionist secret into her novel as the destruction of the female Creature. Nevertheless, the tandem Mary-​Victor splits because the scientist is a god-​like Creator who births his son –​Adam –​but aborts his daughter –​Eve –​thus, he deliberately stops the potential for “a race of devils [that] would be propagated upon the earth” (170). Victor not only defies the authority of God once, but also desires the perpetual procreative control of Mother Nature. Indeed, the scientist fears that a woman’s sexuality may be free to choose her sexual partner and disobey her lawful husband, so he attacks and rapes his female Creature to reclaim male control over the female body (Mellor 1988: 120). The postlapsarian fear of God; the accusation that science is incapable of assuming the paternal duty of its experimental endeavors; women’s gestational fears of childbirth and then of becoming a bad mother; the human inability to protect children; and the rage of a raped procreative Nature, all breastfeed the novel of Mary Shelley –​the birthing mother of Frankenstein. Gilbert and Gubar were the embryonic voices who compared Victor’s creativity with Mary Shelley’s anxiety and insecurity as a writer to give birth to “the filthy creation [of her] deformed book, a literary abortion or miscarriage” (2000: 233), within the oppressive nineteenth-​ century atmosphere of male writers. In her novel’s “Preface,” Mary Shelley

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also refers to the hardships of entering this liminal stage of intellectual conception: “I felt that blank incapacity of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship” (2003b: 8), and the titanic pressure for a teenager to “prove [herself ] worthy of [her] parentage” (6), having Wollstonecraft and Godwin as her parents to be surpassed in artistic excellence. However, it was Anne Mellor who interpreted that Mary Shelley’s obsession to procreate a healthy normal child manifests itself through the metaphor of her book as her baby, and through the doubts of her legitimacy as a female author, which determined her decision to use male narrators in her Gothic tale, and to submit her work to revision (1988: 52). Due to textual disparities between the 1818 original manuscript and the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, scholarly attention has been centered around Percy Shelley’s probable penetration into his mistress’ womb-​like novel. Mellor analyzed the different versions of Frankenstein and concluded that the formal and thematic improvements and corrections of the Romantic poet “distorted the meaning of the text,” and offered a more sympathetic portrait of Victor as “the victim of evil” (1988: 62–​3). Embarked in a master-​disciple relationship, Percy Shelley –​as a modern Plato –​inseminated the empty receptacle of his lover’s girlish mind to persuade her to write a ghost story, to impregnate her with his own fertile imagination, and to monitor the growth of their mental child –​her novel –​until its birth or publication. So did Percy Shelley pierce Mary’s uterus beyond sexual intercourse in the light of their common readings of a contemporary scientist during the 1810s. Marc Rubenstein argues that Erasmus Darwin’s theories on sexual reproduction, in which the woman is merely a womb that feeds the embryo and the man’s imagination at ejaculation shapes the formation and growth of the fetus, can be equated to Mary Shelley’s passive creativity, which disclaims responsibility for the fantasy of conception and birth of a book or a baby (1976: 181–​2). Nonetheless, the coercive patriarchal rule over women’s creativity and procreativity does not ravage all the white ink from this newly born female author. Writing Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s healing therapy –​the safe act of her gestating mind to mourn her first baby and to recover from her traumatic loss, once she is temporarily a happy mother. (Un)consciously, she also incarnates a flesh-​and-​blood Medusa

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of hatred and fear, engaged in a silent sororal dialogue with other pregnant women, who are also feeling (un)maternal terrors. Hatred against ambitious men of science, who usurp women’s procreative superiority, and fear to gestate and labor a murderous monster, or to be a monstrous mother herself, unable to love her child –​all these anxieties delicately confined in Mary Shelley’s dismembered novel, rendering it more inclusively uterine than exclusively fetal, more natural than supernatural, more real than artificial. A hermit eternally at home, yet unchained to ramble through the barren moors of her native Yorkshire; a pagan priestess summoning the forces of Mother Nature; a young spinster glorifying her infancy and rejecting the marital duty of sexual reproduction; the heretical daughter of an Anglican clergyman with a dead mother, an abusive brother, and two loving sisters –​all these brushstrokes draw an incomplete portrait of Emily Brontë (1818–​48) but reveal some true colors of Wuthering Heights (1847). This Gothic and Romantic tragedy of incessant passion, torment, and revenge dives into the lives of two generations of two old families –​ the Earnshaws and the Lintons –​crossing the threshold of two houses –​ Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange –​and dwelling in several liminal phases, from blissful childhood to hellish adulthood, from life to death, and from carefree childlessness to lethal childbearing, but all without the socially prescribed feminine destiny of motherhood. Surreptitiously, Emily Brontë’s novel unravels a woman’s horror at being pregnant, her rebellion against the patriarchal use of her maternity, and her wish to return to premenarchal girlhood through childbirth and her own death. The name of this Medusa is Catherine Earnshaw. When Nelly Dean –​the housekeeper of Wuthering Heights –​starts to retrospectively remember the infancy of her master’s daughter, Catherine is an unfeminine, opinionated, dictatorial, and naughty girl, who defies the authority of the heads of her family: first, Mr. Earnshaw, and after his decease, her brother Hindley, who envies and abuses Heathcliff: the orphan boy adopted by her father, her ideal twin, and later, a humiliated servant. The vigor of this bold, healthy girl breastfed by Mother Nature begins to weaken when she and her adored playmate Heathcliff spy on their timorous neighbors –​the Lintons –​their bulldog bites her, and

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“her foot bleeds!” (Wuthering Heights6 43). This crucial episode is not only a rite of passage symbolizing the female burden of menstruation and Catherine’s availability for sexual reproduction, but also it announces the irresistible temptations of beauty and social debut for a capricious country girl beyond her convalescence; that is, the novelty of the luxuries, civilities, and domestic attentions from the gentleman Edgar Linton and his upper-​class family, to prepare the still savage child for her inevitable official roles as a future adult woman of her rank: wifehood and motherhood. Partly forgetting her previous androgynous Eden of freedom in the windswept moors with Heathcliff, Catherine succumbs to the “plan of reform by trying to raise her self-​respect with fine clothes and flattery” (WH 46), concocted by her new sister-​in-​law, Frances. Nevertheless, Hindley’s wife dies soon after giving birth to her son Hareton, because she had “been in consumption these many months” (56). For Gilbert and Gubar, “Frances’s fate foreshadows the catastrophes which will follow Catherine’s fall into sexuality”: Sex becomes murderous (2000: 270). However, at that moment, the still unmarried heroine cannot foresee that her procreative future will be harmful to her body and mind, nor the paradoxical final release through death during childbirth, allowing her to escape from the unbearable domestic duties as Mrs. Linton, including expecting a child. Already courted by Edgar, Catherine understands that she can manipulate physical illness to get away with her whims and gain power over her obliging fiancé in any quarrel: “ ‘Go, if you please –​get away! And now I’ll cry –​I’ll cry myself sick!’ ” (WH 63). Nonetheless, it is easier to tame her bad temper than her feelings for her foster brother, when Catherine confesses to Nelly that, although she will marry Edgar for social promotion, she loves Heathcliff: He is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same […] My great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees –​my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rock beneath 6

Wuthering Heights is hereafter referred to by WH.

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[…] Nelly, I am Heathcliff –​he’s always, always in my mind –​not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself –​but, as my own being –​so, don’t talk of our separation again –​it is impracticable. (71, 73)

Within this symbiotic bond between the lover and her beloved, Heathcliff is Catherine’s immaterial essence –​her perennial soul –​while Edgar can only possess her unessential female biology, which mutates due to seasonal organic processes, like sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth, ageing, and death. However, the physical separation between the two constituents tied by this metaphysical unit –​Catherine and Heathcliff –​ is practicable and becomes mortally dangerous due to the heroine’s manipulation of her own anatomy to metabolize her emotional wounds. Without overhearing this declaration of love but only part of the conversation when Catherine reveals that she plans to marry Edgar, Heathcliff is tempestuously furious, abandons Wuthering Heights for three years, and flees with the soul –​the valuable half from his twin sister. Meanwhile, Catherine’s body becomes Mrs. Linton, the mistress of Thrushcross Grange, so her uterus can be possessed by its lawful owner, Edgar. Patsy Stoneman contends that the androgynous unity between Catherine and Heathcliff, born during infancy, is catastrophically split by a process of socialization, growth, and gender polarization into sadistic male and masochistic female, whereby she becomes a prisoner of gentility and admits her inferiority and powerlessness to be compensated by marrying a rich suitor (1998: xix). Despite her apparent conformity with her new social role of wifehood, a heaviness of spirit often invades Catherine when Nelly resumes her narrative. Her soul –​Heathcliff –​has been gone for three years, so her self remains fragmented and is psychologically unprepared for other potential divisions. The heroine begins to undergo Kristeva’s radical ordeal of the splitting of her subject –​or the intrusion of another within her own body –​when she expects a child. Indeed, pregnancy implies a second challenge to Catherine’s identity, while the harrowing bisection between Heathcliff and herself appears to be unresolved when he returns to her life. Since then, Catherine struggles but cannot reunite her amputated two halves, because her anatomy is already occupied by Edgar’s embryo/​fetus, so she will not survive after two incompatible experiences of oneness, doubling, and later splitting: loving/​hating her twin Heathcliff and giving birth to his rival’s offspring, Cathy II.

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Charles Percy Sanger’s chronological reconstruction of the events in Wuthering Heights indicates that Cathy Linton is born –​prematurely –​at 2:00 a.m. on March 20, 1784, eleven months after her parents –​Catherine and Edgar –​married, about seven months after Heathcliff ’s return to their lives, and three months after her mother locks herself up in her bedroom, inducing physical illness and insanity (1972: 292). Nevertheless, this pregnancy in the novel has gone unnoticed by most scholars thanks to Nelly’s complicity. Being vital to understand her mistress’s fall from grace, the housekeeper purposely omits to mention that Catherine is with child until she almost comes to term. Probably unaware of her condition, Mrs. Linton is in the first trimester of her pregnancy when Heathcliff comes back to Wuthering Heights and interrupts her presumed tranquility, because the hostility between her prodigal foster brother and her husband does not encourage the harmonious reunion of Catherine’s body and soul, which jeopardizes the survival of the materno-​fetal unit. The heroine is excitable and disquieted from the moment she learns that Heathcliff has returned to the vicinity, but not to her new domestic life in Thrushcross Grange. Athena Vrettos argues that Victorians pathologized female emotions, because they thought that such emotions were more somatic than men’s, so that they complicated existing diseases or could magnify the production of chronic headaches, brain fever, consumption, anorexia, or hysteria (1995: 23). Catherine’s liminal gestation is plagued with some of these physiological symptoms of increasing severity over the months. Heightened by Heathcliff ’s arrival, “she could neither eat nor drink” (WH 86). Moreover, Catherine experiences agitation when she provokes fights and reconciliations with her husband, which reveal her childish behavior: “ ‘I’ll go make my peace with Edgar instantly […] I’m an angel’ ” (88); and frenzy when she discovers that her sister-​in-​law Isabella is infatuated with her twin Heathcliff: “ ‘We were quarrelling like cats’ ” (93). Clare Hanson argues that Emily Brontë was familiar with nineteenth-​ century medical treatises embracing the patriarchal ideology of the insanity of pregnancy,7 so accordingly, Catherine passes its two stages: firstly, mental 7

Emily Brontë’s knowledge on the insanity of pregnancy comes from reading Thomas Graham’s Modern Domestic Medicine (1827), a popular manual found in her father’s library (Hanson 2015: 90).

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disturbance and secondly, passive melancholy (2004: 69). When Edgar denies the entrance of Heathcliff to his house to avoid violent disputes and the danger of an adulterous rendezvous between his rival and his wife, Catherine’s nerves are already deteriorated, and her hysterical reaction to this prohibition is to blame Isabella and to exploit an instrumental physical illness to torment her husband: This uproar is owing to her; and should she or any one else aggravate my anger at present, I shall get wild […] I’m in danger of being seriously ill –​I wish it may prove true. [Edgar] has startled and distressed me shockingly! I want to frighten him. (WH 103)

After masochistically swearing revenge against her husband and Heathcliff: “ ‘I’ll try to break their hearts by breaking my own’ ” (104), Catherine locks herself up in her room and refuses all meals for three days until she ingests some water and food, because “she believed she was dying” (106). Self-​starvation –​as a lethal ally of female invalidism –​is Catherine’s vindictive stratagem to punish her enemies, both Edgar and her twin Heathcliff, for making war for weeks without seeking a truce to secure her own peace of mind, while selfishly leading a fierce competition to win territorial authority over her body and soul as trophies. Trusting Sanger’s chronology, Catherine enters her second trimester of pregnancy when she begins to fast. Ergo, she surely knows that she is expecting a baby, that her self-​inflicted anorexia is damaging fetal growth, and that the best guerrilla war to attack the patriarchal institution of motherhood is not to have the physical strength to gestate a child, give birth, and become a mother. Her powerlessness to abort the open fire between Edgar and Heathcliff is somatized by the hostility between her mental half and the prenatal half –​the fetus sieging her womb and demanding nourishment –​of her divided self. Catherine confesses to Nelly that she is “ ‘on the brink of the grave!’ ” (107). Therefore, she is lucidly suicidal enough to observe that self-​starvation is effectively destroying her own body and the alien unborn child within, which will successfully injure Heathcliff and her husband, respectively. In fact, Catherine is not self-​absorbed by the materno-​fetal unit, but by the impact of its destruction on her two men at war. It is Nelly who first diagnoses Catherine’s lunacy as “feverish bewilderment to madness” (108), without connecting this mental state with

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her incognito pregnancy. This discovery occurs when Catherine violently tears a pillow with her teeth and wants her servant to open the window in cold winter, a season that confirms her imminent maternity. Then, the heroine recollects a childhood memory through an adult oracular hallucination, while observing the pillow’s scattered feathers: It’s a lapwing’s. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells, and it felt rain coming. This feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot –​we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it, and the old ones dare not to come. I made him promise he’d never shoot a lapwing, after that, and he didn’t […] Did he shoot my lapwings, Nelly? (108)

Despite her (un)maternal naivety, this episode ejaculates Emily Brontë’s white ink that entwines procreativity, victimization, and death. Catherine’s fantasy of regression to infancy is impregnated by her present reality of pregnancy: protecting or not her own body as her unborn baby’s home. Symbolically, Catherine is the desperate bird of the moors while her occupied uterus is the nest. Estranged from her mental self, unnourished, and unprepared to welcome a newborn, this liminal shelter of life is vulnerable prey to be ravaged by inclement Mother Nature and by a human predator, Heathcliff. Steve Lukits argues that, when Catherine finds lapwing feathers, she senses new dangers; and that she is uncertain about the promise of her foster brother not to kill these birds, but this rather means that she does not trust herself because “she is Heathcliff ” (2008:  108–​ 9). The enemy of the famished unborn chicks in the nest is not him, but Catherine’s own self-​destructive choice of anorexia to break a biological law:  Fetal growth requires nutrients. Although this lucid delirium reveals her infanticidal revolt against motherhood, Catherine’s desertion of her uterine nest is tainted by helplessness, maternal guilt, and clairvoyance within her insanity. Edgar has not yet been informed about his wife’s mental collapse, so only Nelly nurses her. The servant associates her mistress’s deranged mental return to infancy –​or her “baby-​work” (WH 108) involving bird feathers –​with palpable physical illness: “Exhaustion of body had entirely subdued her spirit; our fiery Catherine was no better than a wailing child!” (110). Nelly has not disclosed Mrs. Linton’s pregnancy to the reader yet. Instead, it is the novel’s delirious heroine who

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articulates her liminal state of gestation without explicitly using words. She dreams of returning home to Wuthering Heights and delivers a confession of girlish nostalgia and psychological fragmentation, when she visualizes her pregnant body in the mirror with revulsion and nervous agitation: I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors –​I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free … and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills … Open the window again wide, fasten it open! (111)

For Françoise Cailleau, it is not her baby carefully kept in secret within herself, but the girl she used to be, the thoughts of the female mind during pregnancy (2009: 83). In line with this postulate, it is not imagining the fetus inside her womb, but the girl she used to be and her lost childhood innocence that occupy the brain of a pregnant Catherine. However, her speech again reveals the clinical evidence of an identity crisis derived from the split between her gestating body and her absent soul –​Heathcliff –​ when she does not recognize herself in the mirror as an adult woman with a swollen belly, because she rather yearns to see herself as an androgynous child with a lean silhouette. Therefore, Catherine needs to destroy herself as a full-​bosomed expectant mother, because bearing Edgar’s child in her womb is an obstacle to her longed-​for regression to a carefree girlhood with her twin Heathcliff. Gilbert and Gubar argue that Catherine’s impulses of self-​starvation, masochism, and self-​destruction are “the furious power hunger of the powerless” (2000: 284–​5), but connected with maternity as the disguised form of morning sickness “to vomit up an alien intruder,” and “the horror of being enslaved to the species and reduced to a tool of the life process” (286). In essence, the anorexic, pregnant Catherine perceives her distorted bodily image in the mirror as a Gothic monster or a uterine prison, because the patriarchal exploitation of sexual reproduction forces her to accept the traditional role of motherhood, confining her to a golden cage of domestic invalidism, Thrushcross Grange. Catherine yearns for the healthy state of being in transit and outdoors –​ or childless –​and not indoors, passively expecting a child. Consequently, she invokes liminal windows to cross thresholds toward freedom, not

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toward maternity. Cold air in winter is not a mortal trap outside, but her chance to cherish a pre-​sexual life. Although Catherine concludes that her love for Heathcliff is responsible for her disgrace, her unmaternal fury is also delivered against her evil inseminator when Edgar learns about his wife’s insanity: “ ‘You mention that name and I end the matter, instantly, by a spring from the window! What you touch at present, you may have; but my soul will be on that hill-​top before you lay hands on me again. I don’t want you’ ” (WH 113). Suicidal Catherine sees that wifehood ensures that her reproductive body is guarded by her captor-​husband, yet not her indomitable soul dwelling in nature. Peace between Edgar and Heathcliff is unattainable. Only the chimera of Catherine’s newly unmarried/​unpregnant girlish body reunited with her other half –​her twin soul –​could cure the necrotic, swollen wound of her pregnancy reflected in the mirror, certainly not the physician called by Nelly. Without acknowledging that Catherine is with child, his prognosis is that she could not survive a second attack of “brain fever” (118), so he prescribes that she engage in calmness to avoid death. The two months of Nelly’s next narrative silence –​January and February –​coincide with the elopement and unhappy marriage of Isabella and Heathcliff. Meanwhile, Catherine enters the third trimester of her pregnancy and her second phase of passive despondency, recorded by Nelly as: “unearthly beauty in the change […] dreamy and melancholy softness” (137). Thanks to Edgar’s tender cares, Catherine paradoxically becomes the girl she wished to recover mentally. Nonetheless, she is rather an invalid child who lives with resignation, still incarcerated inside her gestating body. As a consequence of prevalent high mortality rates among parturient women in the nineteenth century, Catherine quietly waits, not for her baby, but for her own death at labor, because she has accepted that she will not see another spring when March welcomes early flowers in the fields. While she questionably regains health, Nelly finally announces to the reader that her mistress is pregnant: There was double cause to desire [her recovery], for on her existence depended that of another; we cherished the hope that in a little while, Mr. Linton’s heart would be gladdened, and his lands secured from a stranger’s gripe, by the birth of an heir. (119)

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This declaration reproduces the patriarchal ideology to legitimate the exploitation of the female procreative body –​to gestate a male successor –​and the value of the institution of motherhood to ensure the social survival of the Linton family, as the legal owners of Thrushcross Grange against the claim of a rapacious Heathcliff, who already snatched Wuthering Heights from Hindley’s hands. Unmotherly Nelly lacks empathy and wishes that Catherine recovers only to deliver a son and to adopt the social role of a mother, not to recover her true self or her happiness. To protect against the termination of her mistress’ sacred mission of sexual reproduction, the servant tries to abort Heathcliff ’s attempts to meet Catherine when he returns with his wretched wife Isabella, also pregnant. His reaction to the news of Catherine’s gestation –​clearly excluding him as the father –​is a metaphor against conception, where Edgar’s seed cannot bloom in his wife’s uterine garden: “ ‘[He] might […] plant an oak in a flower-​pot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!’ ” (135), nor can she regain her former robustness by means of patriarchal motherhood. The last clandestine encounter between Heathcliff and Catherine is an adulterous rendezvous between an ardent lover and a mortally wounded woman expecting her husband’s child. Heathcliff disregards her gestating state to engage in a sexual frenzy. He holds his beloved tight, caresses her, covers her with passionate kisses, and leaves “four distinct impressions left blue in [her] colourless skin” (140). Meanwhile, Catherine briefly recovers her genuine brutish self: “She had a wild vindictiveness in its white cheek, and a bloodless lip, and scintillating eye, and she retained, in her closed fingers, a portion of the locks she had been grasping” (140). This nonverbal declaration of intense love/​hate is intertwined with her rebukes to torment Heathcliff: “ ‘You have killed me […] I care nothing for your sufferings’ ” (140), and with physical unease, due to “the violent, unequal throbbing of her heart, which beat visibly and audibly under this excess of agitation” (140). However, it is Catherine’s own pregnant body that injuries her, because it confines her to domesticity and consumes all her energies, while paradoxically also promising the liberating elixir of death at childbirth: “ ‘The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired, tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to

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escape into that glorious world, and to be always there’ ” (141). Being aware that Edgar is about to interrupt the transient reunion between her body and her soul, Catherine vanishes in Heathcliff ’s arms while pronouncing her last words: “ ‘Oh, don’t go, don’t go […] I shall die, I shall die!’ ” (143), shortly after she had asked him to forgive her and leave her alone. The mental confusion and emotional distress from this romantic interlude, together with illness and self-​starvation over months, accelerate Catherine’s pre-​term delivery. As a decorous filter, Nelly does not narrate the childbirth scene but only its doubly tragic aftermath: “That night was born […] a puny, seven months’ [female] child; and two hours after the mother died, having never recovered sufficient consciousness to miss Heathcliff, or know Edgar” (145). Catherine is eventually the bird who perishes while delivering a daughter named after her, not the desired male heir. Brontë’s reproductive reparation is to use childbirth to replenish the plot with a new generation of characters –​Hareton and Cathy II –​for the second part of her novel to successfully conclude with a happy marriage (Geerken 2004: 392). All biological mothers die or are dead in Wuthering Heights –​old Mrs. Linton and Mrs. Earnshaw, Frances, Isabella, and Catherine. Only the childless servant Nelly rears the offspring of rightful successors and Cathy II potentially becomes the matriarch of the symbolic nest deserted in the girlish fantasy of her own mother, to restore the family order and the law of the father. The lineages of the Earnshaws and the Lintons ultimately defeat Heathcliff ’s illicit usurpation, while the male control of procreativity triumphs over Catherine’s revolt against maternity. In her novel, Emily Brontë offers equivocal avenues of interpretation. Among them, the author can favor her heroine’s choices of girlhood and childlessness over invasive, reproductive inseminations. Catherine symbolically dies the night before the spring equinox, so she sabotages the feminine season of fertility, life renewal, and childrearing. She cannot avoid marital sex and pregnancy, but she rejects the ultimate patriarchal imposition on her as a wife –​motherhood –​because she prefers to cross the threshold of childbirth being kissed by Death: “her lips wearing the expression of a smile, no angel in heaven could be more beautiful” (WH 145). However, Catherine’s true victory against adulthood and patriarchal families is to

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regress to the preliminal phase of childhood, as Nelly suggests: “ ‘Quietly as a lamb […] She drew a sigh, and stretched herself, like a child reviving, and sinking again to sleep […] her latest ideas wandered back to pleasant early days. Her life closed in a gentle dream’ ” (147). Elisabeth Bronfen contends that death does not reunite the two lovers in heaven, but love remains “located in between, in the transgressive, liminal position of the ghost” (1992: 310). In fact, Catherine is transfigured into an eerie wraith of a child, who finds no peace but haunts the inhabitants of both houses long after her death, as she declares in a spectral apparition: “ ‘I’m come home. I’d lost my way on the moor! […] I’ve been a waif for twenty years!’ ” (WH 20–​1). Thus, she remains free and savage, in transit, not living dead, but dying alive. Preternaturally empowered, Catherine incarnates a girlish spirit calling for Heathcliff until he dies, and then, the twin souls are finally reunited in Mother Nature’s womb. The ellipsis around pregnancy intensifies its vital importance for this (un)maternal novel. It deciphers the unsolicited, unassimilated, and aberrant dimension of childbearing and motherhood for Catherine Earnshaw, because Nelly’s biased narrative cannot express that the tyrannical fetus in her mistress’s uterus perpetuates her subordination to a loveless marriage and estranges her from Heathcliff and their asexual oneness born in childhood. Later, that robust emotional bond disables the doubling and splitting of Catherine’s self, inevitably required in the adult experience of gestating and birthing a child. As a regressive girl-​author, Emily Brontë exhorts Victorian women not to trespass the disempowering threshold of sexual reproduction, not to suffer the insanity of pregnancy, not to expect the blessing of a mortal hemorrhage at labor, not to submit to husbands and become mothers, and not to abandon orphan children like herself, as Brontë was only 3 years old when her own mother –​Maria Branwell –​died of uterine cancer after six pregnancies and childbirths. Like Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë is a laughing Medusa of blood, rage, and evil, both delighted and terrorized by her literary progeny that inspires other women (writers) and petrifies male gazers who attempt to subjugate female procreativity. Emily Brontë’s (un)maternal anxieties as a (reluctant) spinster are echoed in her only novel as Gothic fear and revulsion against monstrous pregnancy and motherhood, colored by the virginal, healthier, and eternal myth of

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a love at its heights –​a romantic love of unwed passion and childlessness that does not sicken and murder women.

The Fall and Rise of Motherhood: Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Anne Evans/​George Eliot In real life and in fiction, the Fallen Woman generated opposite reactions among Victorians. It was customarily thought that such young girls were sexualized, evil temptresses, who exploited their procreative bodies to emasculate the sacred family institution, and to threaten the patriarchal cult of motherhood within marriage. Their immorality did not lie in the sexual act itself, but in “being caught at it” as proved by illegitimate pregnancies and childbirths (Watt 1984:  2). Meanwhile, social reformers and Evangelical preachers campaigned for the movement of Magdalenism to destigmatize these women associated with criminality and disease. They strove to demonstrate that Fallen Women were genuinely helpless victims of men’s sexual abduction, who could achieve spiritual regeneration and Christian salvation after having trespassed the threshold of mortal sins of the flesh. The cultural debate around the Fallen Woman during the 1850s was also nourished by two women writers’ novels about illicit pregnancy and childbirth. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–​65) was a philanthropist, the dutiful wife of a Unitarian minister, and mother of five children who began to write works like Ruth (1853) to mitigate the pain of her only son’s death. Conversely, Mary Anne Evans (1819–​80) was a Fallen Woman herself and mistress of the philosopher George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for decades, unwed and childless. She hid her sex under a male pen name –​George Eliot –​to ensure that Adam Bede (1859), and her later novels, were valued for their own artistic merits and not deprecated by gender prejudices of Britain’s literary Establishment against women writers. Paradoxically, the domestic Gaskell is a maternal advocate for fallen girls in public, unlike the sexually emancipated Evans/​Eliot incognito.

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The lapsarian act of falling from social grace was, per se, a tabooed rite of passage for sexually transgressive Victorian women, because it gestated a dangerous sequential narrative with the three different phases. First, male seduction and the slippery separation from local communities and the rule of female virginity. Second, the initiation to sex and dwelling in the liminal space-​time-​body of illicit pregnancy and childbirth. And third, the reincorporation to postliminal motherhood or not, but inevitably resulting in the ritual of death –​whether as saints or criminals –​within Victorian moralist literature. Gaskell and Eliot nurture the motherly instinct of teaching their readers to feel sympathy or abhorrence for their fictional pregnant heroines. The ceremonial pattern of sexual fall, maternity, and a deadly epilogue experienced by Ruth in the novel with homonymous title and by Hetty in Adam Bede –​written by these two authors with(out) white ink –​is explored together because of their (dis)similar literary treatment of the gestating/​birthing Fallen Woman. The main female characters in Ruth and Adam Bede are motherless and strikingly beautiful girls living in a small town and in a village from the Midlands respectively, not in sexually perverted urban jungles. Ruth Hilton is the seamstress’s apprentice to the dressmaker Mrs. Mason, who provides house, boarding, and employment to destitute and foundling girls in the town of Fordham. This 16-​year-​old heroine is seduced by a dashing gentleman, Henry Bellingham. She is dismissed when Mrs. Mason accidentally discovers their secret rendezvous and, eventually, she is deserted by her lover during their elopement in Wales. Similarly, Hetty Sorrel is a 17-​ year-​old dairymaid and the orphaned niece of the Poysers, who are farmers in Hayslope. She is courted by Arthur Donnithorne –​the grandson of the local squire. When he realizes that being the rich heir of a prominent upper-​ class family clashes with his desire for Hetty’s voluptuousness, he transfers her for marriage to a man of her same station –​the hardworking carpenter Adam Bede, who truly loves Hetty. Unlike the resilient immaculateness of Angels in the House, the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot reflect that impoverished and parentless working-​class women are easy prey of inter-​class seduction perpetrated by rich young men. Neither Henry nor Arthur have any serious intention to marry their transitory female conquests, and they are incapable of foreseeing the harmful consequences

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of their sexual incontinence: the downfall of these girls to illicit pregnancies, childbirths, and tragic deaths. The physical attractiveness of Ruth and Hetty –​not any trait of their personality or conduct –​seems to be the only attribute to mesmerize these two wealthy gentlemen, as Henry exteriorizes: “Her beauty was all that [he] cared for, and it was supreme. It was all he recognised of her” (Ruth8 64). Hetty’s attractiveness even clouds the judgment of both Arthur and Adam, who confuse infatuation with love. Eliot believes that “[Hetty] had nothing more than her beauty to recommend her” (Adam Bede9 353), and depicts her as a fertile female mammal: “a springtide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things, round-​limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of innocence” (AB 84), to remind the reader of Hetty’s procreative powers and her animal propensity to deceive humans. This coquettish dairymaid also cherishes the effect of her carnal eroticism to charm her multiple suitors while inciting other women’s suspicion. Conversely, Gaskell portrays Ruth, before falling from grace, as “innocent and snow-​pure” (RU 40), unaware of either men’s lust or her own sexual desirability, because she works daily and mourns her beloved dead mother. While her co-​workers spend their leisure time with their families, Ruth’s loneliness and despondency are intensified on Sundays after church and make her vulnerable to male claws in wait. The seemingly analogous narratives of Ruth and Adam Bede irrevocably bifurcate when it comes to depict the (un)maternal instinct of their female protagonists before they become pregnant or learn that they expect a child. When Ruth is already Henry’s concubine in a guest house in Wales, she “who was always fond of children, [goes] up to coo and smile at the little thing” (62) in a shop, where she finds a nurse with a baby and her older brother. However, Ruth cannot anticipate that the boy will aggress her: “She was about to snatch a kiss, when Harry, whose face had been reddening ever since the play began, lifted up his sturdy little right arm and hit [her] a great blow on her face” (62). Indeed, Harry’s violence channels the adult gossips about the unlawful liaison of the Fallen Woman –​ Ruth –​who shows affection for his vulnerable sister, as the boy verbally 8 9

Ruth is hereafter referred to by RU. Adam Bede is hereafter referred to by AB.

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confirms after being scolded by his nurse: “ ‘She is not a lady!’[…] ‘She’s a bad, naughty girl –​mamma said so’ ” (62). In contrast, Hetty is sick of helping her aunt to rear her young Poyser cousins, who are “the very nuisance of her life –​as bad as buzzing insects that will come teasing you on a hot day when you want to be quiet” (AB 155). Her maternal indifference and her apathy at taking care of naughty toddlers and children from her own family foreshadow the future murder of her own illegitimate baby, as Eliot judges before by using animal metaphors: “Hetty would have been glad to hear that she should never see a child again; they were worse than the nasty little lambs that the shepherd was always bringing in to be taken special care of in lambing time” (155). It is not paradoxical that Hetty hates her daily labor with dairy milk –​or the symbolic maternal equivalent of breastfeeding –​and no surprise that she daydreams that Arthur would “make a lady of her” (151). Marrying him would allow Hetty to lead an idle life, with no need to work hard to make butter, with the privilege of wearing the nicest dresses and earrings, being envied by other women and admired by all men. Clare Hanson contends that Adam Bede demonstrates that maternal feelings are a social construction, so Eliot breaks the ties between biological femininity and motherly love thanks to Hetty (2004: 76). In any case, this milkmaid illustrates the Victorian myth of the rustic fertility and procreativity of low-​class women –​fallen or not –​versus the desirable barrenness of angelic middle-​class wives. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth initiates her rite of passage and liminal downfall when she secretly meets Henry alone on Sunday afternoons. Mrs. Mason discovers the inter-​class romance of her subordinate and throws her out onto the streets to avoid community gossips, which could ruin the reputation of her dressmaking business. The novelist describes that Mrs. Mason “was careless about the circumstances of temptation into which the girls entrusted to her as apprentices were thrown, but severely intolerant if their conduct was in any degree influenced by the force of these temptations” (RU 48). Patsy Stoneman holds that, for Victorians, sexual desire was the worst symptom of original sin, and that girls were protected from this “undesirable development by a conspiracy of silence which kept them ignorant of their own sexual nature” (2006: 67). Mrs. Mason reproduces this same Victorian credo against maternal education on female

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sexuality and reproduction, which would have helped the young girls under her custody to navigate through men’s entrapment, preserve their treasurable virginity, and avoid a pregnancy out of wedlock. Therefore, this employer is responsible for not acting like a surrogate mother with orphaned Ruth. Indeed, Mrs. Mason’s negligence not only exposes her apprentice to destitution and beggary, but also stigmatizes Ruth publicly as a Fallen Woman who must abandon Fordham, even before the heroine trespasses the threshold of physical love. Then, as a gentlemanly charlatan, Henry exploits for his own benefit that Ruth has no one else to defend her. His bewitching words persuade her to elope with him to London and live together in Wales: Here you are, an orphan, with only one person to love you, poor child! […] you should throw yourself upon the care of the one who loves you dearly –​who would go through fire and water for you –​who would shelter you from all harm. (RU 50)

Henry uses the paternal authority inherent in his economic affluence and high social rank to infantilize Ruth, who needs family affection and shelter. After hesitating, she childishly says “yes,” because “she was little accustomed to oppose the wishes of any one –​obedient and docile by nature, and unsuspicious and innocent of any harmful consequences” (53). Ruth’s disgrace is, indeed, the result of economic and social forces, rather than her moral depravity, ambition, or impulsiveness, because Henry behaves like a villain who exaggerates his willingness to defend her (Parker 1999: 56). Gaskell realistically describes Ruth’s origins, innate goodness, and hostile life conditions for readers to have an empathic understanding of her actions or inaction in stepping back against her sexual fall. Conversely, Hetty in Adam Bede counts on the protection of her family –​the Poysers; her friend –​the lay-​preacher Dinah Morris; and an honest suitor –​Adam Bede. Therefore, Eliot is an unsympathetic narrator who insists on the dairymaid’s inborn selfish, unnatural femaleness, and she blames Hetty herself for the impending tragedy in her life. Again, choosing non-​human metaphors, the novelist suggests that Hetty is an ungrateful niece with no need of love or advice from her uncle, who gave her a home and protected her from exploitation at another farm as a country servant.

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In fact, she would gladly desert and forget the Poysers to become Mrs. Donnithorne: There are some plants that have hardly any roots: you may tear them from their native nook of rock or wall, and just lay them over your ornamental flower-​pot, and they blossom none the worse. Hetty could have cast all her past life behind her and never cared to be reminded of it again. (AB 154)

Meanwhile, Arthur admires Hetty’s beauty as soon as he visits the Poyser farm and proposes to meet the irresistible dairymaid alone in the woods, not in public places. Both Gaskell and Eliot imitate the Wordsworthian description of natural landscapes and plants to embellish the inenarrable act of deflowering, whereby their two heroines enter the liminal phase of premarital sex and the potential for sinful procreativity. In Adam Bede, Hetty and Arthur do not talk of love, yet their bodies eloquently act. She blossoms like a flower, while they both enlace each other to explore their fruitful carnality: Their eyes met and his arms touched her! Love is such a simple thing when we have only one-​and-​twenty summers and a sweet girl of seventeen trembles under our glance, as if she were a bud first opening her heart with wondering rapture to the morning. Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-​interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-​places. (132)

The two secret lovers are alone in the sexual setting of a forest for several evenings before and after Arthur’s twenty-​first birthday on July 30. Explicitly they only kiss, touch each other, and lie together on the grass. However, as the novel later unfolds, they implicitly consummate their love and Hetty becomes pregnant. In the same manner, Gaskell omits Ruth’s passage to liminal pregnancy when she elopes with Henry to London. As a respectable married woman, the novelist cannot articulate her heroine’s loss of virginity or her sexual pleasure. Nevertheless, Ruth’s bodily sensuality is narratively transferred to the aesthetically exciting observation of the manly endowment and verticality of rugged landscapes in Wales, during her later stay there at an inn with her lover: “Vast ideas of beauty and grandeur filled her mind at the sight of the mountains now

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first beheld in full majesty. She was almost overpowered by the vague and solemn delight” (RU 56). This journey is the honeymoon of hedonism and idleness for an unwed couple, who unquestionably share the same bed: Their breakfast-​hour was late, in accordance with Mr Bellingham’s tastes and habits; but Ruth was up betimes, and out and away, brushing the dewdrops from the short crisp grass; the lark sung high above her head, and she knew not if she moved or stood still, for the grandeur of this beautiful earth absorbed all idea of separate and individual existence. (56)

Ruth’s oneness with the Welsh spring splendor at dawn symbolizes the embers of the erotically/​emotionally delightful symbiosis with Henry, which she experienced the night before. Unlike the heroine’s climbing robustness during her elopement, her lover falls sick and he is in mortal danger after probable little deaths –​or orgasmic peaks –​over the previous weeks. Henry’s mother is summoned to nurse him. The dying son soon recovers and asks the diligent maternal help to dismiss the erotic toy –​ Ruth –​that no longer satisfies his whims because of its lethal sexuality: “ ‘I do not wish to see her again […] Only spare me all this worry while I am so weak. I put myself in your hands. Dismiss her as you wish it’ ” (77). As the true ambassadress of patriarchal misogyny, Mrs. Bellingham writes Ruth a letter to blame her of immorality, to accuse her of being a sexual predator with a collection of male victims, and to prescribe her the punishment of her confinement in an asylum: My son, on recovering from his illness, is […] happily conscious of the sinful way in which he has been living with you […] I wish to exhort you to repentance, and to remind you that you will not have your own guilt alone upon your head, but that of any young man whom you may succeed in entrapping into vice. I shall pray that you may turn into an honest life, and I strongly recommend you, if indeed you are not “dead in trespasses and sins,” to enter some penitentiary. (78)

Henry’s mother refers to Magdalene asylums created with the mission to rehabilitate and reinsert Fallen Women into society, but as years progressed, these institutions became prison-​like places characterized by cruelty (Fusco 2015: 58). After an opening subsection of mental and bodily pleasure –​while trespassing the limen of deflowering and unintended procreation –​Ruth soon dwells in a liminal martyrdom of sexual

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abstinence, sentimental drama, economic destitution, and social stigmatization. These factors are translated into a psychosomatic illness, diagnosed by a medical examination as a “shock on the nerves” (RU 89), which oscillates between the state of sickly unconsciousness and the resolution of self-​destruction during the first trimester of her still undetected pregnancy. However, Ruth’s suicide attempt is thwarted by Thurstan Benson, an elderly crippled clergyman who rescues her. Before bringing her to his home in the English town of Eccleston, he calls for his sister Faith, whose first unfeeling response to Ruth’s downfall –​still infected by the mental agony of her fugitive lover –​is that: “It would be better for her to die at once” (95). In Eliot’s Adam Bede, Hetty’s sexual encounters with Arthur are confirmed by her narcissism and anxiety. She wonders that “people didn’t know how he loved her” (AB 250), which reveals both her voyeuristic desires and the physical intensity of the intimacy between them. Indeed, Hetty wants the villagers to see her as the future Mrs. Donnithorne, and to envy her. Her ambition of not being an insignificant working-​class girl anymore is strengthened during Arthur’s birthday celebration, when she is not with him all the time and even less, she cannot be introduced as his official fiancée. Therefore, Hetty feels miserable and confesses that she is addicted to the proximity of his body: “[He] who had seemed so near to her only a few hours before, was separated from her, as the hero of a great procession is separated from a small outsider in the crowd” (270). Meanwhile, Arthur eventually dances with Hetty and promises her another evening rendezvous in the woods in two days, which he anticipates with: “delicious languor under the influence of a passion” (288), while the dairymaid equally rejoices. By mid-​August, when Adam discovers that Hetty is secretly being kissed by Arthur, he strikes his friend from a higher social rank and warns him not to deceive her anymore. While these two men compete for the sexual availability or for the preservation of the virginity of the Poyser niece, she has already entered the liminal realm of pregnancy, which Eliot narratively elides and hides until the postpartum tragedy. Roughly one month after his birthday, Arthur confirms to Adam that he will not see Hetty again, because he does not intend to marry her. Soon after, he leaves Hayslope to rejoin his militia regiment. Although he promises Hetty to return for Christmas, Arthur’s letter, handed to its addressee by Adam’s hands, unravels

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how he betrays and deserts the Fallen Woman, just as Henry had done in Gaskell’s Ruth. Arthur also reveals his sexual troubles to “resist the longing to be near [her]” (331). His written words: “Since I cannot marry you, we must part –​we must try not to feel like lovers any more” (332), ultimately break Hetty’s dreams of social self-​aggrandizement. The fall season greets Adam’s courtship of the dairymaid without suspecting her recent sexual activities and consequential pregnancy. During the previous summer, he had already misinterpreted Hetty’s socioeconomic and physical attraction for Arthur with signs of love toward himself whenever she blushed near him. Now, the carpenter regularly visits the Poysers and excuses that his beloved is often indisposed to meet him, because he has vanquished his rival, so his exultant happiness blinds him yet again. Adam ignores that Hetty’s frequent confinements are caused by nausea and the typical bodily discomforts from the first months of gestation, in combination with her lovesickness for Arthur and with the fear of expecting an illegitimate child. Tom Winnifrith presumes that the clinical description and accurate timing of Hetty’s gestational period would not conform to George Eliot’s non-​existent personal experience with pregnancy and childbirth, but to her lover Lewes’s scientific training and his paternal observations while his wife was with child (1994: 54). Accordingly, Adam confuses the transformations in Hetty’s countenance –​as a secret expectant mother –​with a woman falling in love with him: “There was a change: the cheeks were as pink as ever, and she smiled as much as she had ever done of late, but there was something different in her eyes, in the expression of her face, in all her movements” (AB 352). In November, Hetty passively accepts her betrothal to Adam and enters the second trimester of her unwanted pregnancy. Meanwhile, the narrator prevents the reader from penetrating the troubled mind of this reluctant expectant mother. Still, Eliot surreptitiously points to Hetty’s swollen belly and the rotundness of her limbs: “There was a more luxuriant womanliness about [her] of late” (359). The novel’s narrative time silently passes from November until February, one month before Hetty, who has already trespassed the third trimester of pregnancy, must marry Adam. Neither her future husband nor the Poysers have detected the growing physical evidence of her sexual fallenness in the meantime. In the nineteenth century, corsetry could disguise pregnancies. In fact, the narrator’s comments on Hetty’s dressing to

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conceal her condition covertly hint her use of corsets, which were discouraged by Victorian advice books for women, due to risk of uterine prolapse and premature childbirth (Hanson 2004: 77). In March, when Hetty’s imminent marital duties to Adam can no longer permit the hiding of her pregnancy, Eliot retrospectively reveals the time when the dairymaid knew that she was with child –​though still unreported to the reader –​and then, the novelist observes Hetty’s emotional ordeal ever since: After the first on-​coming of her great dread, some weeks after her betrothal to Adam, she had waited and waited, in the blind vague hope that something would happen to set her free from her terror; but she could wait no longer. All the force of her nature had been concentrated on the one effort of concealment, and she had shrunk with irresistible dread from every course that could tend towards a betrayal of her miserable secret. (AB 365)

Here, the ignorance about sexual reproduction from the three-​month pregnant Hetty voices her childish belief that the liminal period of her illicit gestation could satisfactorily end in miscarriage, or without her own intervention or any resolution from her side. When she eventually realizes that she cannot evade the procreative call of childbirth from an indifferent Mother Nature and the subsequent social stigma of the Fallen Woman, Hetty acts. She contemplates suicide, like Ruth in Gaskell’s novel. Being seven or eight months pregnant, Hetty decides to escape from shame in Hayslope around mid-​February and find Arthur  –​the father of her unborn child  –​in Windsor. Before departing, Eliot unsympathetically judges that “[her] tears were not for Adam –​not for the anguish that would come upon him when he found she was gone from him for ever. They were for the misery of her own lot” (367), to stress Hetty’s self-​centeredness and her lack of compassion for her bridegroom. Conversely, Deanna Kreisel contends that Eliot creates Écriture Féminine, because Hetty’s uncontainable maternal body subversively defies the alternative male plot for the novel concocted between Arthur and Adam, wherein she is commodified and to be exchanged from repentant lover to unwitting husband, even though the carpenter ignores the fact that he was robbed of his dowry of her virginity (2003: 560–​1). Therefore, Hetty becomes a silent rebellious woman against the patriarchal impositions of serfdom upon her family, same-​class marriage, and motherhood born of wedlock.

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While Ruth is convalescing from her psychosomatic ailment, Gaskell does not allow her heroine to tell herself the discovery of her pregnancy, but this fact is vicariously narrated by Faith Benson. This benefactress is shocked by such news that magnifies the girl’s fall and by the expectant mother’s unexpected positive reaction. Indeed, Ruth’s voice resonates and prevails over patriarchal prejudices against the sinful motherhood of a Fallen Woman: I was just beginning to have a good opinion of her, but I’m afraid she is depraved. After the doctor was gone […] she whispered, quite eagerly, “Did he say I should have a baby?” Of course, I could not keep it from her; but I thought it my duty to look as cold and severe as I could. She did not seem to understand how it ought to be viewed, but took it just as if she had a right to have a baby. She said, “Oh, my God, I thank Thee! Oh, I will be so good!” I had no patience with her then, so I left the room. (RU 99)

Whereas the spinster Miss Benson refers to her protégée’s condition as: “[a]‌disgrace –​[a] badge of shame” (100), Ruth cherishes her scarlet future maternity as a blessing from God, her child’s only Father. She forgets or is unaware of any sexual exchange involved in the conception of her baby, as if her pregnancy were “a miracle of spontaneous generation” (Auerbach 1980: 49). Without suspecting any Catholic undertones from the fervent Unitarian Gaskell, Ruth is not a perpetual Fallen Woman, because her new liminal state rises her to an altar of vestal motherhood, symbolically like the Holy Spirit’s asexual impregnation of Jesus in the womb of Virgin Mary, who devoutly embraced the sacred mission announced by the archangel in the Bible: “I am the Lord’s servant … may it be to me as you have said” (Luke 1: 38). Mr. Benson eloquently attempts to persuade his sister that the power of maternal love will redirect Ruth to the path of regeneration and salvation: [The baby] may be God’s messenger to lead her back to Him. Think again of her first words –​the burst of nature from her heart! Did she not turn to God? […] If her life has hitherto been self-​seeking and wickedly thoughtless, here is the very instrument to make her forget herself, and be thoughtful for another. Teach her (and God will teach her, if man does not come between) to reverence her child; and this reverence will shut out sin, will be purification. (RU 100)

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The messianic embryo soon begins to redeem Ruth’s body and mind. She aborts the sinful ideas of suicide and regains the power to bear her divine procreative calling: “[She] began to sit up (and the strange, new, delicious prospect of becoming a mother seemed to give her some mysterious source of strength, so that her recovery was rapid and swift from that time)” (106). Gaskell demonstrates that pregnancy, per se, is not physically debilitating, but it can be healthy for women. Nonetheless, Ruth emotionally suffers because she cannot forget her earthly inseminator: “[She] remained depressed and languid under the conviction that he no longer loved her” (107), which is also somatized by her gestating body:  “sleepless, weary, restless with the oppression of a sorrow which she dared not face and contemplate bravely, kept her awake all the early part of the night” (117). To conceal her true fallen identity and to avoid her social exclusion as an unlawful expectant mother, the Bensons pass Ruth for a young widow distantly related to them, Mrs. Denbigh. With childish docility, Ruth tolerates that their servant Sally cuts her luxuriant hair, dresses her demurely, and makes her look plain, so that she can also hide her voluptuous body and resemble an asexual, husbandless angel in mourning. Under the wing of a new family that nurses, protects, and economically maintains her, this white lie succeeds in gestating the same public image of the heroine beyond childbirth: a quiet, respectable widow to be pitied and helped by the Christian community of Eccleston. Elizabeth Gaskell does not report the chronology of Ruth’s pregnancy, but simply how time passes and seasons change to greet the advent of a wintry delivery: “The yellow and crimson leaves came floating down on the still October air; November followed, bleak and dreary” (134). Being sometimes indisposed to meet charitable visitors at home, Ruth sits, prays, and waits during her pregnancy, as expected by the Victorian prescription of domesticity. Her maternal thoughts are only focalized on the memories of her own immaculate childhood and on imagining her unborn baby, not on the workings of her womb. Ruth does not appear to enjoy prenatal sensations but defers her bliss until the postnatal period, while visualizing both her suckling treasure and her postliminal role as a lactating mother: “[the] thrill through her, at the thought of the tiny darling who would lie on her breast before long, and whom she would have to cherish and to shelter

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from the storms of the world” (127). Offered to her as gifts by Henry back in London and by the Bradshaw family recently in Eccleston, Ruth turns two costly pieces of fine muslin into garments she delicately sews to dress “the little creature, for whom in its white purity of soul nothing could be too precious” (133). Meanwhile, she humbly intends to wear “the coarsest linen, the homeliest dark blue print” (133). This episode of motherly selflessness –​both material and emotional –​suggests that Ruth’s sacrifice is also physiological because she would devote all her physical resources and her own health to the development of the fetus (Hanson 2004: 74). In any case, the heroine’s maternal instinct to nurture and guard her unborn child foreshadows the redemption of the Fallen Woman as a loving mother. To reinforce the message that this baby is Ruth’s savior, Gaskell amalgamates a passage from John Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity with her own creativity to describe the birth of Ruth’s son Leonard in winter, as the promise of rebirth for his Marian parent and for all humankind: The earth was still “hiding her guilty front with innocent snow,” when a little baby was laid by the side of the pale white mother. It was a boy […] It was her own, her darling, her individual baby, already, though not an hour old, separate and sole in her heart, strangely filling up its measure with love and peace, and even hope. For here was a new, pure, beautiful, innocent life, which she fondly imagined, in that early passion of maternal love, she could guard from every touch of corrupting sin by ever watchful and most tender care. And her mother had thought the same, most probably; and thousands of others think the same, and pray to God to purify and cleanse their souls, that they may be fit guardians for their little children. (RU  134–5​ )

This passage –​partly reproducing the meagre narrative of Virgin Mary’s birthing of Jesus in the gospel of Luke  –​is expanded and colored by Gaskell’s maternal tenderness. Anita Wilson studies the fond descriptions of newborns in letters and diaries of this Victorian novelist, together with her own experience with childbirth and fashionable child-​care publications from her times. To discuss this sentimental account of baby-​worship in the novel, Wilson affirms that Ruth immediately bonds herself to her son, is awed by her new responsibilities in compliance with Victorian motherhood, and despite her precarious circumstances, she also wins herself a place within the sorority of mothers, whose lasting influence positively transforms society (2002: 85–​7). Ruth claims kinship with her son.

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He is part of her self, but the splitting between mother and child at labor was successfully accomplished, because she considers him to be an individual person with his own identity. Ruth also places Leonard on an altar. He is her Jesus when she postnatally talks to him: “ ‘If God will but spare you to me, never mother did more than I will. I have done you a grievous wrong –​but, if I may but live, I will spend my life in serving you!’ ” (RU 135). However, this joyous puerperal adoration of her holy child  –​yet clouded by the stigma of his secret bastardy  –​is interrupted by Faith, who reminds her protégée that her duty is to venerate the Almighty, not to turn Leonard into an earthly idol that could distract her from salvation. In any case, Ruth’s postliminal reincorporation to society is as a mother, whose love for her son allows her to achieve the mercy of the only Father. Nevertheless, her saintly conversion into a Madonna is incomplete. She cannot forget Leonard’s biological father and reproaches herself for having given her son such an unchristian ancestry and a shameful legacy. In contrast, Hetty’s last days of pregnancy in Adam Bede are an unsafe odyssey for the neglected materno-​fetal unit to reach Windsor. Physically exhausted and emotionally anxious to find Arthur’s whereabouts, George Eliot rarely alludes to the dairymaid’s secretly gestating body beyond its paleness and weariness. Instead, the landlady of one of the inns where Hetty stays overnight, notices “her figure, which in her hurried dressing on her journey she had taken no pains to conceal” (AB 376). Meanwhile, the novel’s familiar reader is not permitted to visualize Hetty’s relaxed corset. The discovery of her pregnancy by strangers is confirmed when the landlord of the same lodgings informs her that Arthur and his regiment left for Ireland a fortnight before, after which she faints and resembles “a beautiful corpse […] in need of “loosen[ing] her dress” (377). It is a paradox that the psychosomatic ailment of Hetty’s procreative anatomy mediates to briefly defer her mental agony about her dark future: “The sensations of bodily sickness […] made a sort of respite for her; such a respite as there is in the faint weariness which obliges a man to throw himself on the sand, instead of toiling onward under the scorching sun” (378). Hetty leaves Windsor and, again, she attempts to drown herself in a creek, so that “her body would never be found, and no one should know what had become of her” (383). Here, there is a dangerous dissociation between her soma and

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her psyche because her mental self wants to murder her physical self with child. Nonetheless, the self-​preservation instinct of the materno-​fetal unit triumphally clings to earth: “The very consciousness of her own limbs was a delight to her” (387). Indeed, the unborn child’s material needs prevail over Hetty’s suicidal impulses: “Life was so strong in her! She craved food and rest” (384). George Eliot deserts both the reader and Hetty. She does not narrate her intended return home nor her labor in cold winter. Unlike the merry nativity of a holy son enrobed in pure snow from Gaskell’s Ruth, this season promises no reincorporation to society or the rise of the Fallen Woman in spring thanks to childrearing, but it announces a double death. The author reappears in Adam Bede to ultimately confirm Hetty’s pregnancy and her delivery of an illegitimate baby, when Adam –​after long weeks of despair in Hayslope –​is informed that his bride is confined in the nearby prison of Stoniton for “the murder of her child” (408). Between 1624 and 1803 the law declared that infanticide was a capital crime in Great Britain, not a private matter. Guilt was presumed before innocence while the punishment for the mothers, usually unmarried women, was death by hanging (Greenfield 1999: 16). Although the diegetic time of Adam Bede between 1799 and 1801 occurs before this severe legislation was amended, Josephine McDonagh argues that Eliot writes this novel in “an epidemic of child murder” from the 1850s and 1860s –​a problem caused by lower-​class women, only to be solved by clinical and legal interventions (2003: 123, 125). Nineteenth-​century medical treatises also linked infanticides to homicidal tendencies in nymphomaniac cows and mares to bestialize criminal mothers, who would be closer to female animals than to male human beings (Mazzoni 2002: 171). Although there are no statistics to justify this alarm, child murder was, at that time, a current social problem and the worst violation of the Victorian cult of motherhood, reported in lurid newspaper stories, which in turn impregnated the fertile imaginations of writers, like the (un)maternal George Eliot. Susan Greenfield observes that the infanticidal mother was the object of sympathy after the 1834 Poor Law10 when 10

A relief system to reduce the cost of looking after the paupers and confine them in workhouses, including single mothers and their offspring, who corrupted the ideal of middle-​class families.

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modern society was accused of savagery and the oppression of working-​ class women (1999: 17). Although illegitimacy was common in England, there is no proof of an elevated or growing rate of infanticide in this historical period, and the real “horror” was the then current high mortality rate among children of the poor, notably fatherless babies born in workhouses (Gould 1997: 266). Meanwhile, many Victorians did not oppose the murder of destitute, illegitimate progeny, because no one wanted to see these infants begging in the streets or nourished by local parishes, so the cliché of monstrous infanticidal mothers was domesticated by a narrative of female ignorance, weakness, and fallibility to allow them to be reintegrated into the social order (Francus 2012: 100). Accordingly, legal reforms, decisions by judges and juries, medical and police practices shielded these women from prosecution and punishment (Krueger 1997: 271). Death by hanging was, thus, a sentence from the past when Adam Bede was written. In this novel, the episodes of childbirth and infanticide from pre-​ Victorian days are not narrated by Eliot, but retrospectively reconstructed by doctors and witnesses in the trial against Hetty. On February 27, a widow pities the dairymaid and allows her to sleep in her house, just before she is in labor and delivers a baby of unspecified sex in Stoniton. This report shows that parturition –​maybe attended by a midwife –​was unproblematic: I didn’t send for a doctor, for there seemed no need […] I left the prisoner sitting up by the fire in the kitchen with the baby on her lap. She hadn’t cried or seemed low at all, as she did the night before. I thought she had a strange look with her eyes, and she got a bit flushed towards evening. (AB 432)

This widow’s unmaternal testimony understates Hetty’s panic, alone with labor pains. Nevertheless, it fittingly diverts the trial to the postnatal threat of puerperal insanity before the dairymaid escapes again. Showalter argues that Victorian psychiatry –​allied to legal discourse –​ explained that “after childbirth a woman’s mind was abnormally weak, her constitution depleted, and her control over her behavior diminished,” infanticide being the worst consequence from this female mental illness, occurring mostly in conjunction with illegitimacy or poverty (1987: 58–​9). In the novel, puerperal insanity is ratified by a second witness, a laborer. He briefly meets a vagabond Hetty looking “a bit crazy” (AB 433). Later,

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he discovers a baby’s corpse interred in a woodpile. The next day, he and local authorities find Hetty, scared and sitting next to the same burial spot in the forest. She stubbornly denies that she was ever with child, even though “the doctors’ evidence is heavy on her” (428). Indeed, the focus of the trial is not the baby, or how it died, but to examine the female body and to certify its pregnancy (Harriet Adams 2000: 66). Although concealing the death of an illegitimate baby established the presumption that the mother was guilty of murder, hiding her pregnancy was viewed as a substantiating proof that she intended to do away with her child; thus, perpetuating secrecy about illicit sex, gestation, and parturition was the real crime (Staub 2011: 54). Consequently, Hetty is sentenced to death and hanged just before Arthur can bring her pardon to the gallows. The embryo of Adam Bede was a true story about an infanticidal mother –​named Mary Voce –​told to Eliot by her aunt Samuel, a Methodist preacher who stayed to console Voce in gaol before she was executed in Nottingham in 1802. Hetty’s confession of her pregnancy and child murder, silenced by the masculine public interrogation in the courtroom to inevitably condemn the fallen female sinner, is revealed to her friend Dinah –​ woman to woman, privately in the dark, inside a uterine cell: “ ‘I buried it in the wood … the little baby … and it cried […] all night … and I went back because it cried […] I thought perhaps it wouldn’t die –​there might somebody find it. I didn’t kill it’ ” (AB 451). Hetty’s child could have died from hunger and hypothermia, and also from prematurity aggravated by her use of corsets, according to Eliot’s chronology of the clandestine gestation, also confirmed by Hetty’s own disclosure of a pre-​term delivery that surprised her in Stoniton: I was so near home. And then the little baby was born, when I didn’t expect it; and the thought came into my mind that I might get rid of it; and go home again. The thought came all of a sudden, as I was lying in the bed, and it got stronger and stronger … (452).

Hetty deserted her baby, because she gave birth prematurely, friendless, penniless, unprepared, and scared in a strange place. She wanted to resume her ordinary life and avoid the fate of the Fallen Woman; that is, being socially rejected and confined in an inhuman workhouse for unwed

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mothers. Indeed, Eliot points to economic, social, and psychological factors to explain the infanticide, although such factors would not exonerate the unmaternal dairymaid from guilt. Hetty refuses to trespass the postliminal realm of illicit motherhood and, finally, must cross another threshold as a criminal: death. For Sarah Gilead, this woman’s sufferings do not bring about her own spiritual transformation, but instead inspire Adam’s emotional growth, Arthur’s maturation, and the moral renewal of Hetty’s community (1986: 190). Like child-​sacrifices in primitive cultures, infanticide in the novel is useful and ensures later fertility (190). Accordingly, Adam’s happy ending is to find true love and inner beauty in Dinah, marry her, procreate, and rear a healthy family of legitimate children, as the Victorian ideal of procreative civilization against monstrous single mothers. Conversely, McDonagh argues that Hetty is an early version of the “New Woman” from the 1890s, because she is the “bearer of modernity” and represents progress through female sexual liberation (1999: 229). Such a revolutionary archetype of femininity could be branded by absent maternal love. Narrative truth surely lies betwixt and between. Hetty is tried for child murder under the archaic 1623 legislation, whose punishment of death by hanging Eliot would deplore. Although Adam Bede depicts its heroine with an unflattering portrait of feminine self-​infatuation, animality, “little brain” (AB 319), and unmaternal selfishness before her sexual fall, its author’s literary principle of sympathy prevails during Hetty’s liminal period of pregnancy, childbirth, and puerperium. As a secretly compassionate female writer, Eliot veils the shame of Hetty’s gestating body; she does not violate the privacy of her labor and remains behind her silent disobedience in jail. Thus, this dairymaid behaves as a brave woman resisting patriarchal institutions. Hetty denies her crime before physicians, judges, and clergymen. Meanwhile, Dinah’s sisterly caress guides her to intimately acknowledge her pregnancy, confess her child murder, and repent to reach God’s mercy, far removed from medical examinations, courtrooms, or liturgies. The true story behind Ruth is that of an orphaned 16-​year-​old girl, Pasley, whom a wealthy gentleman seduced and abandoned before she was tricked into prostitution. As a social worker, Elizabeth Gaskell helped her in a penitentiary for Fallen Women in Manchester, and Ruth is conceived

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as the alternative gender role and destiny for Pasley and for other victims of men’s lust within the context of the two immovable archetypes of good and evil Victorian femininity. Ruth is only a mother. She refuses to be the angelic wife of a repentant Henry when he fortuitously returns to her life years after Leonard’s birth. Nonetheless, she does not fall deeper into illicit sexuality and procreation, nor does she end her days in a brothel, workhouse, or prison; on a ship deported to Australia or at the gallows. Gaskell’s novel is impregnated by the ideology of domesticity and the healing power of a home for Ruth at the pastoral residence of the Bensons, because its purity, warmth, and peace is the best ambience to redeem her (Hatano 2000: 635–​6). Therefore, the ambassador of Magdalenism and real savior of this heroine is the clergyman Thurstan Benson (Langridge 2011: 48). He fatherly allows Ruth to be only a loving mother for her son, while he teaches her God’s word and permits her to undertake other exemplary maternal occupations –​first, as the governess for the daughters of the Bradshaw family and, later, as a volunteer hospital nurse. Christianity has incorporated liminality into the notion of martyrdom, which functions as a ritual of transition, whereby the individual endures humiliation, embraces universal values of justice, truth, or altruism, and her/​his spiritual transformation also changes the world (Gilead 1986: 184–​5). After Ruth’s pregnancy, the restoration of her immaculateness is, indeed, a dilated second liminal period of saintly chastity and self-​sacrifice for Leonard and the community, which culminates in her heroic death as the necessary limen to cross toward Christian redemption. Ruth perishes after risking her own life to heal and save her town –​sick with typhus –​including her infected inseminator Henry. Nevertheless, before this closure, Ruth must be punished with the Fallen Woman’s social calvary. Gossip spread to disclose that she is not a widow, but the unwed mother of a fatherless child, after which she is harshly dismissed by Mr. Bradshaw, rejected by the townspeople of Eccleston, and blamed by her son. Gaskell’s Marian instruction is to accuse Victorian townspeople of unchristian intransigence and hypocrisy, because they cannot perceive Ruth’s innate goodness and virtuosity beyond her one-​time sexual transgression provoked by her innocence, orphan status, poverty, and a man’s seduction. However, the novelist mercifully intercedes to atone for the erring community of Eccleston that eventually forgives the

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fallen Ruth, rises her, and bestows funerary honors on this epic nurse as a healer and a martyr. Whereas Hetty in Adam Bede trespasses the limen of death as an unmaternal felon, Ruth dies as a mother “in the attic-​room in which her baby had been born” (RU 366), delivering these last uterine words: “the Light is coming” (366). Her death symbolizes the dormition of a maternal virgin elevated to the heavens, after the almighty Elizabeth Gaskell has gifted her sinful saint with enough lifetime to repent, to thank her surrogate family –​the Bensons; to joyfully rear her son by herself; and to ensure his future formal education. In fact, Leonard will be adopted by the married –​yet childless –​physician Mr. Davis, who was himself an illegitimate child. Elizabeth Gaskell is an Angel in the House, but also an activist with a fertile social agenda to rehabilitate female sexual transgressors, based upon the Unitarian belief that the human soul has a potential for spiritual regeneration because it is not born evil. Meanwhile, it is reductionist to state that George Eliot’s commitment with moral Realism and her birth as a distinguished male author condemn her to female death or imply her ruthless revenge against Fallen Women like herself. Ruth is a revolutionary conduct book for girls, with copies burned in Gaskell’s days, but it conventionally warns against premarital sex and advocates for the patriarchal cult of domestic motherhood, although this dogma is democratized to affiliate, as virtuous mothers, even fallen angels from the margins of society. Like Ruth, Hetty endures the rite of male seduction, illicit pregnancy, and death, but she dwells in a liminal realm of body concealment and social disgrace. The description of her flaws, betrayals, and crimes report that the male writer Eliot is unsympathetic to Hetty. However, in the dark, the woman Mary Anne Evans offers in Adam Bede her choices of unmaternal femaleness and unwed maternity through Hetty’s silent rebellion and passive resistance. The fertile contradictions in these two novels and in their mothers are, ultimately, only a few drops of white ink that still nourish embryonic Victorian narratives of pregnancy and childbirth, and inspire other women’s literary corpus, growing in size and modernity toward the twentieth century.

Chapter 2

Modern(ist) Liminality for the (Pro)creative Body and Mind Edith Wharton, Meridel Le Sueur, Jean Rhys, and Anaïs Nin

Crossing the limen of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century for the narratives of pregnancy and childbirth, involves a transatlantic journey from Europe to North America, and recognizing a fecund dialogue between the public act of speaking by a growing number of better organized feminists and the private act of writing by new generations of female authors, notably in the United States. Increasingly educated and admitted to the male Olympus of literature, white, (upper)middle-​class women undress the female reproductive body and seize men’s pens to (pro)create their own stories on pregnancy and childbirth. Traversing the threshold of World War I, modern(ist) experimentalism, and crusades for women’s suffrage, female authors and their (non-​)fictional heroines are the literary ambassadresses of the paradigm of the “New Woman.”1 The “incompatibility of the demands of marriage and maternity versus those of an artistic vocation or professional career” is actually a common trope in the so-​called “New Woman fiction” (Pykett 2015: 140). These women writers not only contest men’s pseudo realism, with its romantic construction of domestic femininity and its usurpation of female white ink, but also revolt against the concealment and punishment of illicit pregnancies, the criminalization of abortion, and the evils of painful 1

Coined by the Irish feminist Sarah Grand in 1894, the “New Woman” refers to real and fictional middle-​class women, who vindicated their emotional, sexual, financial, and professional emancipation from patriarchal institutions, so men feared, scorned, and mocked them.

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labor. Virginia Woolf even claims that “killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer” (1966: 286), which (in) directly implies an effort to break the antagonism between maternal angels and unmaternal monsters that is directed toward women’s selfhood and freedom to recover, among others, their gestating/​birthing bodies and minds. Nevertheless, since the late nineteenth century, the cautionary messages from the literary Establishment and social institutions rowed in opposite directions. Women’s access to university, public life, politics, and professions outside of domesticity were perceived as hostile to childbearing and childrearing, resulting in fewer children. In an age of economic, urban, and technological progress, the reformist agenda of the New Woman was also viewed as a great threat to destroy the home, through moral and social “contagion” in the form of prostitution, sexual disease, or drunkenness; and because of women’s genetic capacity to pass down either health or disease to future generations, potential mothers became the focus of a campaign to stave off the degeneration of the nation (Seitler 2003: 66–​7). In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt warned that the falling birth rate among American women would lead to a “racial death,” or a rising tide of color against white supremacy, so he lamented women’s deviation from traditional motherhood (Berg 2002: 1). The twenty-​sixth President of the United States was not a rara avis when amalgamating eugenic anxieties about the race’s future with a woman’s worth, or her main public duty to her fatherland, grounded in her biological capacities of gestating and birthing children. Great Britain also called its female subjects to be procreative objects to populate the still large Empire of whiteness. A natural consequence was an anti-​abortion climate in Western countries in the early twentieth century. In previous centuries, abortion was legal if it occurred before quickening, which could only be detected by women, not by physicians. Nevertheless, since the 1880s, most U.S. states had prohibited and publicly stigmatized abortion, associated with low classes or pregnancies out of wedlock, not only to control female bodies and to ensure that white, upper-​class women –​with a growing sociopolitical power –​continued to reproduce, but also to allow male doctors to dominate the field of obstetrics and to limit the number of surgical/​medical practices performed by unlicensed professionals, like midwives (Weingarten 2010: 357–​8).

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Concurrently, the first women’s movements on both sides of the Atlantic equally fuelled the controversy between female rights and duties, motherhood and social class, or the (re)production of the right race. Indeed, late Victorian feminists were full of contradictions and conflicts because, while they celebrated their maternal instincts, they were disgusted by sexual intercourse, felt pregnancy dangerous, and were terrified by childbirth (Showalter 2009: 156). Painless labor was a major factor to encourage wealthy wives to produce offspring à la carte. The twilight sleep method2 of providing pain relief at delivery and wiping “the whole incident of birth-​ giving out of a woman’s life” was a state of semi-​consciousness induced by morphine and scopolamine for upper-​class ladies, who were “particularly sensitive to the nervous shock that resulted from intense suffering,” and risked becoming “neurasthenic invalids” (Sandelowski 1984: 3). This promise of freedom from the nine-​month ordeal of fear during pregnancy and from many hours of pain at childbirth was sought by privileged American expectant mothers as a right long denied to their sex, because they believed that the panic about labor pain retarded women’s development to the position of gender equality to men (4). Accordingly, the twilight sleep challenged God’s ancestral revenge against Eve’s sin, but this panacea of sweet oblivion at childbirth and other maternal choices were not democratic among all women. In fact, rich British and American wives between the two centuries were against state-​supported childcare and the access of working-​class women to factories or to middle-​class professions, because that “would violate the sanctity of the domestic hearth and the decent seclusion of women to private life” (Rich 1986: 49). Some early feminists even glorified the politically empowering role of the mother to improve and regenerate Western nations, whereas others rather rebelled against women’s subjection to the masculinized institution of motherhood, not necessarily to childbearing and childrearing. Suffragettes, particularly Emmeline Pankhurst in England, shared sympathy for poor mothers and sensed that all women were united by their body experiences, and “by the terrible and holy suffering of childbirth” regardless of social rank (Showalter 2

Sandelowski discusses that the Twilight Sleep was first practiced at the Frauenklinik in Freiburg, Germany, in the 1910s. U.S. women travelled to deliver their children there and later reported to national journals the benefits of this type of labor to import it to North America.

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2009: 187). Since the 1910s, Margaret Sanger3 pioneered as the main advocate for the organized movement of birth control in the United States. She urged the spread of knowledge on contraception to replace sexual abstinence, to fight against illiteracy about the female body, and to ensure the right of voluntary motherhood, so that no woman is “a passive instrument of reproduction” (2005: 211). Nonetheless, as late as 1923, pregnancy was still viewed by those in the medical profession, like Robert Armstrong-​ Jones, as a physical/​mental illness: The ordinary digestive troubles, the various forms of neuralgia, the occasional insomnia, the feeling of weight and dizziness are apt to develop into more than the ordinary irritability and restlessness. They sometimes proceed to fractiousness, excitement, or extreme despondency, ending in a complete mental breakdown; the normal affections may turn into suspicion and hatred, the reproductive functions experience a reversal, and the ordinary maternal instincts become so perverted that they are a real […] danger to both mother and child. (qtd. in Marlan 2012: 84)

This chapter discusses autobiographical or fictional, painful or invigorating, abortive or unaltered, elliptical or explicit stories on pregnancy and childbirth, written before World War II, by four modern(ist) women. Privileged lady authors or marginal voices in the dark, Edith Wharton, Meridel Le Sueur, Jean Rhys, and Anaïs Nin explore the soma and psyche of gestating/​birthing women, whether from the perspective of cosmopolitan New  York or the rural Midwest; from in-​transit identities of Caribbean islanders of European ancestry or North American upbringing, but crossing the Atlantic to experience London and Paris as expatriates. Within the intricate sociopolitical climate of a transatlantic war among nations and the first feminist victories of female suffrage, Wharton, Le Sueur, Rhys, and Nin conceive narratives about pregnancy and childbirth as transcendental episodes of emotional crisis and trauma –​yet also of revelation or rebellion –​for the introspection and public exposure of the (un)maternal female body and mind.

3

Being also the founder of the first U.S. birth control clinic, Sanger saw her own mother die at the age of 48, probably as a consequence of having been pregnant eighteen times.

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Rich or Poor: The Public Maternal Self in Edith Wharton and Meridel Le Sueur Childless and divorced with a long-​term male lover, the celebrated lady novelist Edith Wharton (1862–​1937) left behind the repressive expectations of married sexuality and motherhood from her elitist native New York in the nineteenth century to cross the limen of the Atlantic toward her artistically (pro)creative freedom in Europe during the 1900s. However, her novels about wealthy families, social conventions, and gender inequalities were still breastfed by her motherland –​the United States. Wharton’s rebirth as a postliminally modern writer engenders the story of female sexual awakening and an illicit incipient pregnancy in Summer (1917), and the metaphor of emotional anesthesia beyond a painless child labor in Twilight Sleep (1927). In these narratives on pregnancy and childbirth for unwed girls and wives, Edith Wharton’s Realism –​verging on Naturalism and satire –​resides in her undramatic departure from Victorian liminal plots of male seduction, female downfall, and public punishment. Nevertheless, she preserves women’s subjection to stagnation, triviality, and decorum, without encouraging their flight from society’s censorious eye. These two novels also defy the traditional structural pattern of closure –​requiring a female death –​because the lives of Wharton’s gestating and birthing heroines continue … untold to the reader, but without any certainty or promise of a better future with sexual and maternal empowerment. Summer revolves around Charity, who was brought down from the Mountain by her guardian Lawyer Royall and his deceased wife while she was a young girl. When the novella begins, Charity occupies a liminal position. She lives in the remote rural town of North Dormer in New England, “abandoned of men” (Summer4 5), but her roots are in the uncivilized wilderness. She is the ward of the most prominent man of the area, but she is the biological offspring of poor outlaws from the Mountain. She is Royall’s daughter –​though not legally adopted –​yet she had to repel a one-​time 4

Summer is hereafter referred to by SU.

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sexual overture by her lonely foster father and she mocks his repeated marriage proposals: “ ‘You think it would be cheaper to marry me than to keep a hired girl’ ” (SU 17). This insolent outspokenness is a sign of modernity in Charity, who declares that she is not to become a housekeeper, nor the helpless victim of an old villain’s lust or love. She also works at Hatchard Memorial Library, not to depend economically on Royall, and to escape soon from North Dormer. She does not hide that she hates her claustrophobic home and her repulsive father, but her forced acculturation to this prudish town, inevitably, turns into shameful indifference about her disgraceful origins: “She had always thought of her mother as so long dead as to be no more than a nameless pinch on earth” (30). Not being a girl, but not yet a woman, Charity is another motherless heroine who grows up alone –​without maternal counselling and tenderness –​when budding feelings of love and sexual desire suddenly blossom in her summer of youth. Then, she coincidentally meets Lucius Harney, a gallant and handsome architect from New York, who is making a study on eighteenth-​century houses in the district and temporarily stays with his spinster cousin Ms. Hatchard, patroness of North Dormer. Between public civilities and a swelling intimacy, Charity and Lucius enjoy their mutual company regardless of social gossips: “She was not sorry to have the neighbours suspect her of ‘going with’ a young man from the city” (31). Lucius does not demonstrate his appreciation for the heroine beyond curiosity or friendship. Yet, alone at night, Charity already daydreams of marrying him. Particularly, she fantasizes about the erotic narrative of sex that comes after her potential wedding, which is not a secret to her: A clumsy band and button fastened her unbleached night-​gown about the throat. She undid it, freed her thin shoulders, and saw herself a bride in low-​necked satin, walking down an aisle with Lucius Harney. He would kiss her as they left the church … (20)

Charity is instantly infatuated and physically attracted to this transitory newcomer, so Wharton inseminates her heroine’s embryonic passion with a natural force: “There ran an undercurrent as mysterious and potent as the influence that makes the forest break into leaf before the ice is off

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the pools” (38). For Laura Rutland, Charity is socially isolated in North Dormer, so what remains to her is to delight in nature, and the capacity of her body for rich sensory stimuli, through which she can connect with another person and experience love (2009: 434). Allison Berg argues that Edith Wharton rejects the image of white women as naturally nonsexual individuals by creating the heroine of Summer, who does not apologize for her physical desires (2002: 62). Even this lady novelist daringly transforms Lucius’s body into the object of Charity’s autoeroticism: “[He] unbuttoned the low collar of his flannel shirt; she saw the vigorous lines of his young throat, and the root of the muscle where they joined the chest” (SU 53). When Lucius Harney plans to leave North Dormer, Charity spies on him at night and reveals how her new sexual self and her proud mind fight against each other to control her: In every pulse of her rigid body she was aware of the welcome his eyes and lips would give her; but something kept her from moving […] she [knew] what she would feel if Harney should take her in his arms: the melting of palm into palm and mouth on mouth, and the long flame burning her from head to foot. But mixed with this feeling was another: the wondering pride in his liking for her, the startled softness that his sympathy had put into her heart. […] When her youth flushed up in her, she had imagined yielding like other girls to furtive caresses in the twilight; but she could not so cheapen herself to Harney […] If he wanted her he must seek her: he must not be surprised into taking her as girls like Julia Hawes …  (54–​5)

Unlike Eliot’s Hetty or Gaskell’s Ruth, Charity is not naïve. She gained an unmotherly sexual upbringing through stories circulating in town. She knows that talk precedes silence and fondling when a woman and a man secretly meet. Suffered by other local girls, Charity is also aware of the punishable consequences of losing her virginity before marriage –​ unlawful pregnancy, social stigmatization, and prostitution –​which she does not fear, but instead, she acknowledges the “compensations” (54) for such a downfall; that is, experiencing transient sexual orgasms. Indeed, Charity does not surrender yet to carnal consummation, only because she expects Lucius to seduce her and to show his physical attraction to her. Kathy Grafton correlates Charity’s need to experience her sexuality as a clandestine, voyeuristic, and forbidden pleasure, with Lucius’s need of degrading her (1995: 357, 360). Unlike her, the architect unambiguously

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belongs to a high social class and a respectable family lineage. Betrothed to the angelic Ms. Annabel Balch, he does not listen to Charity’s speaking body of desire, but only to two humiliating episodes in her life that confirm both her unsuitability for marriage and her sexual availability. Firstly, Royall confesses to Lucius that Charity’s father was a drunken convict, and that her mother “ ‘was glad enough to have her go. She’d have given her to anybody. They ain’t half human up there. I guess the mother’s dead by now, with the life she was leading’ ” (SU 37). Overheard by Charity, this description of her unknown mother  –​as a liminally unmaternal monster  –​fuels, even more, the call of her own sexual nature:  “What did it matter … whose child she was, when love was dancing in her veins […]?” (40). And secondly, Royall verbally abuses Charity during the celebration of the fourth of July in Nettleton, when she and Lucius are enjoying a secret romantic rendezvous, and they first kiss while contemplating the fireworks. Drunk and escorted by the prostitute Julia Hawes, Royall accidentally runs into the couple. He calls Charity: “ ‘You whore –​ you damn  –​bare-​headed whore, you!’ ” (78), which is propagated the next day throughout North Dormer to officially transform the stainless maid into a fallen woman albeit without having experienced any sexual consummation. Long yearned for, Charity paradoxically loses her virginity and emancipates herself on July 5, in a deserted house –​or a love nest of “drowsy lassitude” (86) –​liminally located between the town and the Mountain, where she and Lucius furtively meet for almost two months. There, she waits for “her short hours with him [that] flamed out like forest fires” (94), because “under his touch things deep down in her struggled to the light and sprang up like flowers in sunshine” (95). Until the festival of the Old Home Week in late August when the novel resumes, nothing else matters to Charity, because “all the rest of life had become a mere cloudy rim about the central glory of their passion” (91). However, the harvest season delivers a ripe fruit after the solar excesses of a summer of fecundation: Charity is with child. She experiences the symptoms of the first trimester of pregnancy at a ball: “She had fainted because the hall was stiflingly hot, and because the speakers had gone on and on …” (104). In her novel, Wharton uses ellipses both to describe Charity’s sexual impulses and to hint her

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still unconfirmed pregnancy. What the heroine does notice at the ball is Lucius’s social intercourse with other girls and, days later, she learns that he will marry Annabel, despite having promised her to return and wed her before he left for the city. Colder nights and the brown leaves of September announce more pregnancy symptoms: One day as she sat alone in the library […] the walls of books began to spin around her, and the rosewood desk to rock under her elbows. The dizziness was followed by a wave of nausea […] Five minutes before she had felt perfectly well; and now it seemed as if she were going to die. (116)

Unlike previous narratives on procreativity, Wharton’s scarce white ink describes and listens as Charity’s gestating body talks, instead of allowing her to drown into emotional victimization, cursing Lucius’s villainy or lamenting his desertion. Nonetheless, the story of Julia’s illicit pregnancy –​also circulating in New Dormer –​draws Charity to Dr. Merkle’s sinister clinic in Nettleton for her mind to cast aside potential perceptual errors about the changes in her physical self: “There’s nothing to be done just yet; but in about a month, if you’ll step round again … I could take you right into my own house for two or three days, and there wouldn’t be a mite of trouble.” […] This woman with the false hair, the false teeth, the false murderous smile –​what was she offering her but immunity from some unthinkable crime? Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-​disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood. She had come to this dreadful place because she knew of no other way of making sure that she was not mistaken about her state; and the woman had taken her for a miserable creature like Julia … (117–​18)

If the reader trusts the heroine and believes that Wharton unconditionally defends unborn life, Charity only wants a physician to confirm that she is expecting a child. Therefore, she is truly appalled by Dr. Merckle’s delinquent proposal of removing the embryo from her uterus, not by the discovery of her own criminal pregnancy. Karen Weingarten discards any ambiguity and argues that, for Charity, an abortion betrays and erases the evidence of her love with Lucius Harney (2010:  356). Accordingly, the heroine returns home without the brooch that this architect offered her on the fourth of July, because she must pawn it to pay off her medical bill,

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but she carries the gift of a baby inside her womb to reconquer him: “She would never again know what it was to feel herself alone. Everything seemed to have grown suddenly clear and simple. She no longer had any difficulty in picturing herself as Harney’s wife now that she was the mother of his child” (SU 119). However, she soon receives the letter from the architect that confirms his impending wedding to Annabel. Then, Charity writes him back to encourage him to do so. In fact, her silence about her pregnancy intends not coerce Lucius into marriage. When all her hopes are gone, her reproductive body and her productive mind embrace each other to concentrate her energies on the unborn baby, not on the lost lover. Without blaming her inseminator or feeling guilt, regret, and death drives, Charity reconciles her recent past of sexual awakening and conception with her uncertain future of maternity, by transforming the love story between a present mother –​herself –​and an absent father –​ Lucius –​into a treasurable heirloom for her baby: All these memories, and a thousand others, hummed through her brain till his nearness grew so vivid that she felt his fingers in her hair, and his warm breath on her cheek as he bent her head back like a flower. These things were hers: they had passed into her blood, and become a part of her, they were building the child in her womb: it was impossible to tear asunder strands of life so interwoven. (121)

The fall season and the looking-​glass announce Charity’s second trimester of pregnancy and an incipient anatomical swollenness, which “would [not] escape the watchful village” (123). She must decide on her future and her child’s safety, but she does not know whether to ask Lucius for help, to expect Royall’s mercy and remain in North Dormer, or to become a prostitute and a single mother in Nettleton, like Julia. Again, Charity’s gestating body talks to abort any sterile mental introspection:  “It was something in her blood that made the Mountain the only answer to her questioning” (122). Enlightened by this biological call, Charity leaves the paternal valley of the town and initiates a spiritual pilgrimage up to the summit, where her disgraceful roots stem from. Indeed, the most vital episode of Summer as a novel about pregnancy is the quest for the lost maternal figure when its heroine expects a child. The Mountain symbolizes not only a totem of Mother Nature and female sexuality, purified by

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the blessing of procreation –​irrespective of the social institution of marriage –​but also the womb of Charity’s outcast mother and, possibly, the heroine’s only true home. Mother-​daughter bonds, not only those to the unborn baby, often occupy the minds of pregnant women. In the specific case of Wharton, Gloria Erlich detects the paramount maternal influence on her life and fiction. Her nannies were the “good mothers” for her who provided love and nurturance, whereas “the bad mother” was her own biological mother, physically distant but terrifyingly omnipresent, harshly judgmental, and inaccessible for emotional support (Erlich 1992: 15, 18, 24). Although Summer does not clarify whether the late Mrs. Royall was an affectionate caretaker or not, Wharton’s remote mother inspires this novel, while her own childlessness does not present an obstacle of artistic barrenness for her to conceive a pregnancy plot within. Moreover, a gestating Charity remembers her unfamiliar, long forgotten mother, while she herself dangles emotionally between being a rock of maternal strength and a single parent victim, falling into a crevasse of social discrimination. The usual fatigue felt by the gestating anatomy prevails over any feelings of joy or sorrow during Charity’s ascension to the Mountain: “Her body seemed to grow heavier with every yard of the way, and she wondered how she would be able to carry her child later, if already he laid such a burden on her …” (SU 125). Even when she comes across Reverend Miles, and he tells her that he is going up to administer the last rites to a woman who is probably her parent, Charity’s pregnancy talks again to monopolize her senses: “the physical relief of finding herself seated in the buggy, and securely on the road to the Mountain, effaced the impression of his words” (126). The dismal terminus of her journey is a dark, filthy shack, where an unmaternal corpse lies like a “dead dog in a ditch” (131). There, Charity mourns her absent mother –​Mary Hyatt –​while she is facing maternity herself. In fact, she does not find maternal protection or solace at the Mountain, but only more stony silence, and the insurmountable distance between the dead and the living. Nonetheless, Charity’s pregnancy inspires her to claim kinship. She names herself as Mary’s daughter without shame, and briefly plans to live there with the rest of her family. But more importantly, Charity reassesses Mary’s decision to give her up when she

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was only a girl. While she is gestating a new life in her womb, her mind engenders forgiveness and sympathy for another woman: her own mother. Whereas Royall had accused Mary of unwomanliness because of her maternal degeneracy, her daughter now restores Mary’s honor, dignity, and right to personhood. Charity imagines her mother’s life in the past and attempts to justify her hard choice of child abandonment, because Charity herself is also struggling to confront the vulnerability and poverty inherent in single parenthood, which is coming to her in a few months. Charity understands that her mother was not a careless, monstrous animal, but rather a suffering woman, who had to sacrifice her maternal love to offer her daughter a better future, far from her own misery: After all, was her mother so much to blame? Charity, since that day, had always thought of her as destitute of all human feeling; now she seemed merely pitiful. What mother would not want to save her child from such a life? Charity thought of the future of her own child, and tears welled into her aching eyes, and ran down over her face. If she had been less exhausted, less burdened with his weight, she would have sprung up then and there and fled away … (137)

Charity’s biological mother is dead; the impenetrable Mountain is not a female divinity gifting uterine protection or nurturance to her and her unborn –​ male –​child, but instead the inhospitable territory of outlaws and outcasts, a state more degenerate than Charity’s own illicit pregnancy in the eyes of respectable men outside this wilderness. Wharton was familiar with the eugenics movement stemming from Darwinism, which maintained that “the best stock should reproduce itself ” to perfect the race, whereas “inferior human beings”  –​with inheritable diseases or defects, criminal or impoverished parents, who were not white, Anglo-​Saxon Protestants  –​should not procreate (Singley 2011:  171). Accordingly, eugenicists could regard the lawless, uncivilized community of the Mountain in Wharton’s novel as dysgenic, and it would cause them fear on account of its engagement in unregulated, undesirable reproduction (Rattray 2015: xxiv). Although Summer is also imbued with Freud’s credo of biology as women’s destiny, Mary Hyatt was unfit to become pregnant, while her offspring  –​Charity  –​genetically inherits her mother’s evil threat of degenerating the right American race. For the

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sake of her unborn child, the heroine dismisses her speculations about the past and begins to think about the future. Charity grasps that she must escape from the curse of her origins, find another home, and return to the valley of the father, where there are only two fitting paradigms of patriarchal femininity: the regulated motherhood of the wife, like Annabel, or the social punishment of single mothers-​prostitutes, like Julia. In fact, Charity plans “to find some quiet place where she would bear her child and give it to decent people to keep” (SU 137), as she knows “girls of that kind [who] made enough [money]” (137). Because she cannot enjoy the financial freedom and high social rank of Ms. Hatchard’s spinsterhood, nor can she afford the modest income of her unmarriageable lame friend Ally as a seamstress, prostitution is Charity’s only option to gestate and rear her child alone. Furthermore, living with her kin would involve not only beastly violence, dirt, poverty, and being a pariah, but also famine. Before leaving the Mountain, Charity’s maternal instinct also speaks. While her young relatives sleep, she steals the only food that her grandmother keeps for them, because “she had her own baby to think of. She broke off a piece of the bread and ate it greedily” (138). In fact, it is “the bodily burden of her child” (139) that impregnates Charity’s drive for self-​ preservation and sense of reality, not to fall into the mental traps of insanity, paralysis, or self-​destruction, but to decide to “get up and struggle on …” (139). Nonetheless, Wharton’s conservative choice of literary Realism in her novel mitigates Charity’s maternal boldness to eventually comply with the institution of motherhood, and to mask her degeneration of the American race. For a second time, Lawyer Royall climbs up the Mountain to rescue his foster daughter from the absent mother but, this time, to marry her. Enfolded by wintry landscapes, only silence and tears of grief or gratitude escort Charity’s journey down to the valley and to the altar, because “she had only a confused sensation of slipping down a smooth irresistible current; and she abandoned herself to the feeling as a refuge from the torment of thought” (144). She follows her father-​husband “passively as a tired child” (145), without the physical and mental vigor that her pregnant body acquired at the Mountain. The rebellious, sexually awakened heroine is “back to sleep,” because she exercises little power over

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her fate and accepts conventional feminine roles, while her silence means a regression to the dependent state of childhood, relieving herself of the burden of thought (Berg 2002: 53, 70). Between heaviness and weightlessness, Charity’s only thoughts after her marriage concern her secret baby and the demands of her gestating anatomy. She recovers Lucius’s brooch from Dr. Merckle’s mercenary hands, as a “talisman” (SU 152) for her future child to remember who his biological father is, thanks to which she feels “a secret lightness of heart” (152). Meanwhile, Charity forces herself to dine with her new husband, although “the thought of food filled her with repugnance” (148), possibly caused by the hormonal changes of pregnancy. During her wedding night, Charity also watches Royall with panic, not for the unconsummated marital sex, but for her consuming doubts: Did he marry her because she is pregnant or does he ignore that his daughter-​wife already lost her virginity? Is he willing to be the father of Lucius’s child or not? Without any certitude, Royall’s patronizing final words: “You’re a good girl, Charity” (153) insinuate that he does accept his double surrogate paternity to protect both his pregnant wife and her unborn baby. Concurrently, the tandem wifehood-​motherhood in the name of this father saves the American race from degeneration, because it hides Charity’s unfit genetic inheritance to procreate, while it gives her the right to a legitimate birth for her progeny despite her outcast parents and her punishable illicit pregnancy. Singley’s Darwinist reading posits that Charity even invigorates her bad bloodline for eugenicists, by choosing to mate with Lucius and, then, by marrying Royall to restore her moral purity as a mother (2011: 172). Edith Wharton’s novel is a rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood. The summer of teenage sexual awakening is merely the vague, dream-​ like remembrance of the man Charity once loved, when the present fall and future winter remind her that the fetal offspring of her rebellion should embody instead the resignation of motherhood; and, consequently, she must surrender her freedom in return for her child’s legitimacy and biological fitness. After this resolution, resulting from Charity’s childish or mature obedience to her fatherly husband and to patriarchal society, Wharton does not need to report the chronology of the third trimester of pregnancy and parturition in Summer. This novel concludes with its heroine perpetually remaining at the same threshold of dormancy, stagnation, and

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confinement in North Dormer beyond the liminal period of childbearing. It is ten years later when Edith Wharton portrays a childbirth scene as the point of departure for Twilight Sleep, whose pervasive influence impregnates this whole novel irrespective of procreativity. Lita Wyatt is the daughter-​ in-​law of Pauline Manford, who is a middle-​aged socialite of New York in the 1920s and the mother of a son –​Jim –​and a daughter –​Nona –​from two different husbands: Arthur and Dexter, respectively. The germ of this novel is to explore the physical and emotional power or powerlessness felt by a parturient woman, submitted to the fashionable treatment of the twilight sleep. However, this drug therapy to relieve pain at the limen of labor is also Wharton’s allegory to diagnose the narcotic numbness and the comatose escapism found in American upper classes who, oblivious to the recent horrors of World War I, are addicted to consumerism, frivolity, and selfish individualism to dodge the injuries, suffering, and defeats in their unsatisfactory lives. A lover of jazz and nightlife, Lita incarnates the feminine cliché of the flapper in the 1920s.5 She desires to become a singer, dancer, or a Hollywood film starlet, not to be the eternally bored wife of a lawyer –​Jim Wyatt –​or the angelic mother of his offspring, pampered with luxury and comfort in a golden cage of domesticity. Nonetheless, Nona notices how Lita liminally relinquishes her glamorous amusements and dreams of fame, to surrender to the rite of her first childbirth and the paraphernalia of prescriptive inertness, confinement, and placid felicity expected during the last phase of her pregnancy: During the two or three months before the baby’s birth, when Lita had been reduced to partial inactivity, Nona had rather feared that her perpetual craving for new “thrills” might lead to some insidious form of time-​killing –​some of the drinking or drugging that went on among the young women of their set; but Lita had sunk into a state of smiling animal patience, as if the mysterious work going on in her tender young body had a sacred significance for her, and it was enough to lie still and let it happen. (Twilight Sleep6  13–​14)

5 6

Flighty, cheerful, and rebellious girls, with boyish features and socially deviant habits, like the garçon hairstyle, short skirts, smoking, drinking alcohol, promiscuity, dancing jazz, and having fun all night long. Twilight Sleep is hereafter referred to by TS.

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Lita is depicted as if she were a female mammal without will or voice, waiting for Mother Nature to take her course. Yet, the advent of the event of labor is boycotted by her mother-​in-​law Pauline –​or the omnipresent family planner –​who invasively orchestrates and presides over the birth of her first grandson: “ ‘Of course there ought to be no Pain … nothing but Beauty … It ought to be one of the loveliest, most poetic things in the world to have a baby’ ” (TS 14). As a cosmopolitan lady of her time and an eager surrogate mother for her daughter-​in-​law, Pauline is familiar with the latest medical advancement of the twilight sleep and its social aptness: highbred, wealthy girls, who are fragile and cannot bear the mental ordeal of labor, unlike robust working-​class women. As such, Lita breaks her silence to beg that “all she asked was that nothing should ‘hurt’ her” (14). Indeed, this method made elitist women less reluctant to have children and solved the declining birth rate among the upper classes (Sandelowski 1984: 15). Twilight sleep advocates even argued that, thanks to this procedure, childbirth was natural and easier because it allowed the physiological functions of a woman’s reproductive system to work unimpeded by her mind, so it separated the physical suffering or the somatic sensation of labor from the mental fear of childbirth, because what was really damaging for a future mother was not the pain itself, but the knowledge of pain before delivering a baby (9, 12). To alleviate prenatal apprehensions, this drug therapy, together with flowers, fruits, novels, and magazines in an opulent suite, indulge Lita to “[drift] into motherhood as lightly and unperceivingly as if the wax doll which suddenly appeared in the cradle at her bedside had been brought there in one of the big bunches of hot-​house roses that she found every morning on her pillow” (TS 14). Nevertheless, the twilight sleep contributed to the split of the parturient woman’s own self, not only of the materno-​fetal unit at labor. Lita’s body was awakened by the procreative forces of nature and by male physicians to deliver a child, whereas her mind slept and felt nothing. In accordance with this praxis, Lita did not “[care] in the least” (15). Ultimately, she did not endure Eve’s curse, but she did not enjoy or blissfully suffer either the personal experience of giving birth. Consequently, the twilight sleep was a deceptively empowering solution for privileged women in times of a newly won female suffrage across the Atlantic. For Mary Ruth Marotte, Wharton’s novel criticizes how, by

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achieving control over their bodies through pain relief, expectant mothers were detaching themselves from worthy life experiences, like pregnancy and childbirth, so that they became captives to an establishment that sought to define or explain their own biological functions for them (2008: 56–​7). Lita’s fear of labor and this crepuscular panacea of unconsciousness –​administered by her skillful mother-​in-​law and by domineering male obstetricians –​irretrievably bisect the umbilical cord of love between mother and son, naturally tied even when they are traumatically severed from each other’s bodies at labor, but emotionally united forever. In Lita’s case, this transitory state of insensitivity and drowsiness at childbirth is dilated beyond parturition and her role as a mother, because it also thwarts her artistic vocations and atrophies her original rebelliousness. She is transfigured into a precious artwork exhibited at home –​hieratic not to flee from her unhappy marriage and dysfunctional family-​in-​law, but also self-​indulgent in her languid poses of ennui and in the motions of escapist social distractions. Between immobility and action, Lita falls into a recreational slumber, not to feel the pain of shallowness or discontent with her life: Lita was on the lounge, one long arm drooping, the other folded behind her in the immemorial attitude of sleeping beauty. Sleep lay on her lightly, as it does on those who summon it at will. It was her habitual escape from the boredom between thrills, and in such intervals of existence as she was now traversing she plunged back into it after every bout of outdoor activity. (TS 283)

The novel’s initial scene of labor is crowned by Wharton’s parody of Taylorism7  –​applied to procreation  –​whereby Lita’s gestating body is only an assembly machine for her mother-​in-​law, so the delivery of the male heir should be effectively “turned out in series like Fords” (15). Dale Bauer posits that, for Pauline, childbirth is a mode of production to be mechanized thanks to the twilight sleep, whereas Wharton detects that this biological event does not empower but instead, inserts women and reproduction into the discourse of capitalism, because obstetrics is merely 7

Adopted by the automobile entrepreneur Henry Ford, the industrialist Frederick W.  Taylor established the principles of mass production and product standardization in assembly-​line factories to maximize the profits of investors and the efficiency of machines, capital, and workers during the 1910s.

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another business (1989: 62). Although she would not admit it, Pauline falls into the consumerist trap of other profitable ventures run by rapacious healers, spiritual mentors, couturiers, dieticians, beauticians, and masseurs, to fill empty days with a frenetic social agenda, and to deceptively soothe her fears: ageing, physical or mental pain, and disharmony at home. Although “all her life she had been used to buying off suffering with money, or denying its existence with words” (TS 307), Pauline’s routine as a pleasure seeker is not idyllic, because her family bliss collapses as a result of Lita’s affair with her second husband Dexter, leading to a crisis in the marriage of Pauline’s own son Jim. Possibly recalling her distant mother in Twilight Sleep, Edith Wharton accuses its charismatic but unfeeling heroine of being a negligent parent to her adult children. Indeed, Pauline does not see Nona’s heartbrokenness after a failed love episode but urges her to marry soon any eligible man; whereas she strives to erase the divorce plot between Jim and Lita, although she herself separated from her first husband in the past. Nonetheless, Wharton also parodies Pauline’s ambiguous stance on controversies about procreation and maternity during the 1920s. She is simultaneously affiliated with the Motherhood committee and the Birth Control committee, without listening to her own contradictory messages as a distinguished speaker in both organizations. Pauline rehearses her speech in defense of unlimited maternity: “ ‘Was there ever a hearth or a heart –​a mother’s heart –​that wasn’t big enough for all the babies God wants it to hold?’ ” (96). However, she finally delivers her other talk about women’s emancipation and contraception by mistake at the National Mothers’ Day: “ ‘Personality –​room to develop in: […] That’s what every human being has a right to. No more effaced wives, no more drudging mothers, no more human slaves crushed by the eternal round of housekeeping and child-​bearing’ ” (113). Nona’s warning and Pauline’s own resourcefulness enable her to improvise, correct her lecture, and eventually attack unmaternal monsters: That’s what our antagonists say –​the women who are afraid to be mothers, ashamed to be mothers, the women who put their enjoyment and their convenience and what they call their happiness before the mysterious heaven-​sent joy, the glorious privilege, of bringing children into the world. (113)

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Nevertheless, Pauline’s brilliant talk, lacking personal conviction, is still applauded and stirs emotions unfelt by her. Indifferent to the disclosure of her duplicity in newspapers, she justifies her speeches for or against motherhood as simply addressed to “different categories of people” (224). Despite Pauline’s attempts to anesthetize her family’s insubordination, the tragedy eventually erupts. Nona is accidentally wounded when Arthur breaks into Lita’s room at night to shoot her lover Dexter, and to defend the honor of his son Jim. Nonetheless, Twilight Sleep’s conclusion is to pretend that this domestic altercation was a burglary; thus avoiding a social scandal and saving the respective marriages of the matriarch and her daughter-​in-​law, and then, as was the custom “when rich people’s nerves are out of gear the pleasant remedy of travel is first prescribed” (362). In spite of illusory rays of modernity, Wharton’s novel exemplifies the dehumanizing state of in-​betweenness in the daily lives of upper-​class women in New York during the 1920s, and their desperate flights from physical and mental suffering. They yearn for professional challenges and public exposure, but they are anchored to the consumption of newness and leisure, or to the economic comfort secured by their official roles as wives and mothers. Rich American women possessed the longed-​for liberation from distressing pregnancies and painful labors thanks to the twilight sleep, but they were dispossessed of genuinely female subjectivity emanating from their own gestating/​birthing bodies. Indeed, Lita rejects the empowering acts of treasuring, recalling, and reproducing her female function of birthing with white ink, so she cannot transform the fear and pain inherent in this biological process into strength and courage in her life beyond her new role as a mother. Edith Wharton’s discontinuous narratives of pregnancy and childbirth in Summer and Twilight Sleep revolve around reproductively (un)fit wives and unwed girls in a big city or a small town, with absent mothers or deprived of solidarity among women. Conversely, Meridel Le Sueur (1900–​96) recomposes, with sororal sympathy, the paradigmatic chronology when narrating the events of gestation and labor to give birth to her novel. Fallen into oblivion until its reappraisal during the 1970s, The Girl (1939) is a proletarian literary work, where female procreativity impregnates Marxist ideology to prove that the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth

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for poor, white Midwestern women during the Great Depression in the United States are more laborious and harrowing than for their upper-​class or middle-​class counterparts. Nevertheless, Le Sueur supports the premise that maternity can be ultimately more empowering and satisfying for destitute gestating/​birthing mothers, thanks to a mystic stream of emotional nurturance and consanguinity with other biological or surrogate mothers of the same social status. The novel’s heroine has no name, because she embodies any country girl from rural Minnesota, who escapes from isolation, misery, and her father’s brutality, when she decides to go to the city and pursue her own “American Dream.” In an oppressive climate of unemployment, severe economic crisis, and open fire between an indifferent capitalist society and associations of angry workers, the Girl is another pariah who only finds gangsters and prostitutes, more poverty and hunger, gender violence and an (un)wanted pregnancy in St. Paul, where she works as a waitress in a bar selling bootleg liquor. Following the assumptions of the writer Michael Gold, Paula Rabinowitz contends that proletarian realist literature and masculinity were inseparable, producing the same narrative plot: A young male industrial worker leading a revolution, a strike, or a march against the oppressor is the hero, who succeeds in unifying the whole working-​class to fight against social injustice, but he is eventually killed (1988: 538–​9). In compliance with Marxism, these labor novels had, therefore, to be political and testosterone-​loaded to tell extraordinary acts of brave workmen, revolted by the subjugation and animalization of poor masses. Meridel Le Sueur became a communist and was active in the Workers Alliance since the 1920s. Though obedient to the Party, she found an heroic epic in ordinary women’s sexual and biological chapters of their lives: losing their virginities, being tempted by prostitution, raped by strangers, or battered by unloving inseminators; becoming pregnant, escaping from coerced abortions and sterilizations, or giving birth to fatherless babies, without the aid of the State, physicians, or their male comrades. Indeed, The Girl is a coming-​of-​age novel, which shows how the reproductive body of this naïve, inexperienced Midwestern girl, her female friends, and their maternal ancestors are systematically exploited and abused by society and their male fellows, the same way these workmen are exploited and abused by productive capitalism.

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Isabel Durán identifies the “strategy of the Other” to define the “I” in many American women’s life-​writings. In these collective chronicles with multiple viewpoints, secondary female characters tell their own stories, interwoven with that of the heroine, whose voice defines itself and is validated by means of other women speaking (Durán 1992: 36). Accordingly, Meridel Le Sueur braids the tale of the Girl with memories and narratives of her own family and female friends. This tactic not only intends to offer a universal dimension to being a poor, white American woman in the 1930s, but also it foreshadows the advent of liminal procreativity in the particular life of the Girl, while indulging her with the caress of maternal guidance throughout the novel. These “others” who fertilize and gestate the Girl’s sense of the self are Belle, Amelia, and Clara. In fact, this sisterhood of women feels that they must protect and nurture this “virgin from the country scared of her shadow” (The Girl8 3). Belle –​the bar owner married to Hoinck –​tells that she had thirteen abortions, because she did not want to condemn her potential offspring to penury and injustice: “This is a rotten stinking world and for women it is worse, and with your insides rotting out of you […] I wouldn’t bring up no kids in it” (TG 12). This resolution contrasts with the impotence and doom of Amelia –​the labor activist –​ who bore six children but saw them all die during infancy. Being the Girl’s closest friend, Clara is her fellow waitress and a prostitute who wrongly believes that men’s lust and the availability of her sexual body empower her, so she will, ultimately, reach her dream of middle-​class respectability by marrying a good man. Clara also tells the procreative story of her own mother, infested with uncontrolled pregnancies, gender violence, and employment struggles. This woman was fired after the birth of her first baby, so a social worker took her son away when her husband also lost his job. When Clara was born fatherless, her mother “used to leave her locked in a room and go out to feed her” (10), but she was dismissed because she gave birth to another child and, after marrying a second man who beat her children, she fled while being pregnant again. The Girl found Clara’s fictive correspondence to her long dead mother, where she confessed her intention to die due to a man’s desertion and an unwanted pregnancy: “By 8

The Girl is hereafter referred to by TG.

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the time you will receive this letter I will be dead […] I hate all the men. What is the use I’ll live on again so it is best to end it all quick […] Before I will have this baby of Jack’s, I will kill myself ” (150). This poignant farewell to her lost mother reflects that Clara is truly the helpless prey of male seducers, not the happy-​go-​lucky prostitute or the mighty Aphrodite that she claims to be. The Girl also prepares herself to navigate through her own biography of sexual discovery, childbearing, and maternity, by looking at the blank paper of her own parents’ narratives before leaving her home on a Minnesotan farm and, later, at her dad’s funeral. Aged 11, her father was sent to work away from home to have “one less mouth to feed” (38), because his mother was expecting her seventh son. Despite this traumatic experience, he repeats the same biological paradigm of a large family, although he constantly reproaches his wife and eleven children that he is their slave, working for them day and night. Lucidly, the Girl explains that it was poverty and powerlessness that drove her father to regularly beat his submissive wife and progeny, “because he saw what we wanted and he couldn’t give” (11). Meanwhile, her sister Stasia claims that she will never marry on account of the bad example of her father, who spent his life “going around giving [Mama] kids” (46). Witnessed by these children, abundant marital sex without contraception transitorily relieves men’s frustration with poverty and overwork. However, husbands do not anticipate that the progeny resulting from such compulsions further damage the harmony and economic survival of the whole family. Blindly exculpating her already dead spouse as a good breadwinner and father, the Girl’s mother tells her that women must obediently assume their duty of sexual reproduction. She encourages her daughters to marry and to procreate, without admitting the enslavement of the maternal body to the angry lust of her male possessor. Although she accepts her destiny of gestating/​birthing babies from her teenage marriage until widowhood, the Girl’s mother cannot bear the pain of seeing her progeny leave home without return or dying in the urban Sodom and Gomorrah, like her daughter Marylyn, “lost in a dope ring” (36). Before the Girl goes back to St. Paul, her mother even tells her that: “If anything happened to [her]… her best child, in that bad city, in those dens of iniquity, she would jump off the bridge and kill herself, or [they] would find

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her some morning dead in bed, dead of grief ” (53). Indeed, this maternal warning against her child’s immoral choices and male predators in the city’s jungle of temptations augurs later events in the novel; that is, the Girl’s involvement in a robbery and her illicit pregnancy, leading to more aggressions against her body and mind. Rabinowitz contends that Le Sueur’s The Girl develops its narrative out of two sources of desire to build female subjectivity: The first half of the novel constructs an economy of heterosexual relations, whereas the second half celebrates maternity and the heroine’s connection to other women as an alternative to men (1988: 542–​3). When her story begins, the Girl is soon scared by but attracted to Butch, a regular client at Belle’s bar. He is a tough guy who says he does not intend to love any woman, because he does not need “any skirt to tell [him] the ropes” (TG 13). His American Dream is to own a gas station, but he is always moneyless, because he cannot find a steady job during the harsh economic crisis. After the murder of his brother, who was involved in blacklegging, Butch plans a bank robbery with the gangster Ganz who, in return for money, offers protection to the same bar where the Girl works. Le Sueur traces the linear chronology of the unromantic love affair between the Girl and her Romeo, from their financial difficulties, to problems finding a place to consummate his sexual hunger until the satiation of her empty womb with a baby. Butch’s strategy to seduce his female victim is to infantilize his “little sweet kid” (35), in order to show her tenderness, to remind her that they are both alone, and to insert paternity into his dreams of a future: “I want meat, bread, children. I am starving […] I am looking to be happy, for a child for myself ” (59–​60), including the Girl as a mother. Ignorant of the transient power of the female anatomy over men, Clara also encourages her friend to have sex with any guy, because they “cry for it” (4). Nevertheless, Linda Ray Pratt argues that the conversation with her mother during her last visit home –​connecting her sexual feelings for her husband with the love for her children –​enables the Girl to understand that a woman’s relationship to life goes beyond her individual body, so these maternal words give her the courage to embrace her desire for Butch (2006: xiv). Anticipating neither guilt nor remorse because she no longer has a father to punish her for premarital sex, the Girl’s only reticence to lose her virginity is the imagined

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ugliness of her starving female body: “If you slept with a man could you turn out the light before so he wouldn’t see how thin you were?” (TG 35). During the fall season, her first night in a cheap hotel room with her lover is violent and painful, but this episode also unravels the mystery around the sexual intimacy of her parents, which was incomprehensible for her in the past as a younger girl: I didn’t feel good. I cried. Butch got mad and slapped me […] Nobody tells you the truth. Now I could see mama and why she was hurt and why she always went back to papa, too, how she loved him in a terrible way […] I remember my father always in anger, putting on his pants and leaving, yelling obscenities and coming back later, drunk, when he often beat mama, and it didn’t sound too different from love-​making.  (61–2)

Here, the Girl believes that her longed-​for initiation to sex with the boy she loves uncannily repeats the story of her own parents, plagued with marital unhappiness, alcohol, and unmet emotional needs. Nevertheless, it is rather her female body that enlightens her understanding of the rite of passage to her sexual life with Butch in physical terms. She bleeds and feels:  “I would never be the same. Something had entered me, broken me open, in some kind of terrible hunger […] I wouldn’t see us flat anymore but great burning balls of fire turning into each other, piercing, breaking, howling, singing, melting together and tearing apart” (62). Her anatomy satiates Butch’s cravings while she intuitively opens herself to the novel chance of sexual reproduction, when she senses that she has joined a sisterhood of maternal wombs: “I feel my own little belly and I know the body of all women and even my mama’s hanging belly that never goes back in shape” (66), including her friends Clara and Amelia, who welcome her back as an adult woman after losing her virginity. It is not accidental that, after the Girl and Butch have just conceived a child, she recalls the birthing body of her own mother, which foreshadows her reproductive destiny: “I felt I became mama […] her children came out of her and papa was so proud and then angry. O it was strange and hidden, terrible and wonderful” (63). Colder weather arrives and the heroine already suspects that she is expecting a baby:

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He said, We’ll have a place in the country and a kid with roses on his cheeks. I was scared. Why should he say that, when I hadn’t had my period now and Clara said one month was nothing, especially when you had just been with a man for the first time. (92)

During weeks of sex, Butch nurtures his beguiling script with the prospect of family bliss and steady employment to have unlimited access to the Girl’s sexual/​procreative body. When symptoms –​without the help of a physician whom she cannot pay –​confirm that she is pregnant, Clara advises her: “Don’t tell him, he’ll just get mad at you” (95). Although her friend also encourages her to abort, the Girl answers: “Get rid of it. I feel wonderful, I said. I don’t want to” (94). This conversation also reveals two patriarchal preconceptions about destitute and illicit pregnancies: Only women are cursed without men’s complicity, and gestation is an ailment to be treated by professional hands. Butch only cares about his own hunger and the desperate sickness in his life, when he associates natality with scarce money, and declares that he cannot become a father: “It’s no thanks to bring a child into the world now. You have to feed them, they’ll die if you don’t, won’t they? Sure, you have to feed them for years and years. They’ll get sick” (96). Whereas the Girl suffers the constant bombardment of the sentence “get rid of it” tormenting her mind, her gestating body is still free to symbolically write with white ink: I felt like bells were ringing in all my flesh. I felt lovely and quick, laughing. It’s not a fault being hungry and it’s not a fault that men hate the hungers in women now that they can’t be filling them, it’s not a fault aching for a child, food, love. (97)

The Girl internally celebrates the plenitude of her pregnancy with joy. This state is a gift despite her starvation –​her budding belly is deprived of food nutrients –​while Butch underfeeds her emotional desires both for him and their unborn child. In this climate of human coldness and famine in St. Paul, she consoles herself only with dreams of maternal fruition and warmth going to a sunny south. During her turbulent pregnancy from autumn to summer, the Girl is constantly degraded by her lover and is raped by his partner Ganz; she secretly escapes from an unwanted abortion; she is coerced to participate

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in a bank robbery, but she hopes that the money to be stolen would allow her to get married and keep the child she is expecting. The assault fails when two of the thieves –​Hoinck and Ganz –​are killed. Together with a badly injured Butch, she runs away in a car without any loot. Her lover soon dies in her arms and, back in the city, the Girl struggles to survive and obtain financial aid from relief agencies. She is confined in a maternity home where she suffers another episode of sexual abuse perpetrated by a policeman. Due to her official indecency and pauperism, local authorities threaten to sterilize her after her baby is born. She suffers hunger, poverty, and coldness throughout her pregnancy, but she enjoys the solidarity from kind surrogate mothers in St. Paul. If Clara, Belle, and Amelia previously warned the Girl against loving Butch because he would inevitably betray, humiliate, and beat her, these three friends conversely show tenderness, loyalty, and sympathy for her, so that she embraces and fights for her right of maternity in later stages of her gestation. In the novel’s first half, the only act of female guerrilla war against male authority is that the Girl does not “get rid of ” her child when Butch leaves her alone with an abortionist. Thanks to the hiatus of the bank robbery and the heroine’s secrecy, Le Sueur maintains the suspense, so the reader assumes that the Girl has aborted. It is not until all male partners are killed that the heroine reveals to her friends that she disobeyed Butch, so she is still pregnant. Then, the novel’s second part begins in an ideal realm of sisterhood and maternal blessing, where women exist, act, and love, in relation to other women and their (unborn) children, not in relation to men. For Alice Adams, these characters create a utopian matriarchy, where a collective mother-​ rule replaces the Marxist vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but brutal capitalism and patriarchy still press on the walls of women’s commune and wombs (1994: 77). After enduring so many dangers and risky events during the first trimester of her pregnancy, the Girl intends to protect her baby. She cannot forget the past, nor hope for a better future, but her mind is also impregnated by the seed of rebellion to embrace a collective march against social injustice: “I’m hungry. I’ll never have the things I want. Nobody can shut me up” (TG 139). Le Sueur opts for a lyric hibernation until spring, during which snow falls, while the Girl is nourished by a feeling of kinship with

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universal earthly mothers: “The breasts of our women are deep with the awful and wonderful life that strikes and swarms and breaks from us” (140). During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the New Deal financially supported farmers, the unemployed, and the disadvantaged, including women and infants. Not alone in joy and misery at home with her female friends, the Girl faces the third trimester of her pregnancy. She succeeds in receiving a small monthly allowance through a relief agency, where the public servant Ms. Rice warns her that: “If you live with a man you ain’t married to then you won’t get relief, we can’t have any immorality around here” (156). Moreover, the Girl looks for the nutritional needs of her unborn child: “I went to the clinic and they told me that to have a good baby you got to have one quart of milk per day and oranges … Well, oranges don’t grow in the fine tropical climate of Minnesota” (143). This medical prescription of a healthy diet is, paradoxically, contradicted by the absence of State funding to ensure that destitute women also receive those vital nutrients during childbearing. Sterilization is, indeed, the only governmental response to those pregnancies unwanted by society, not by expectant mothers. For this eugenic policy, poverty becomes a hereditary disease that curtailed the reproductive rights of a whole segment of population (Leyda 2000: 46). Le Sueur denounced the fact that, during the Depression, many proletarian women could not go to the breadlines for help, but stayed at home to avoid the discovery of their gestational states, because they feared that they would be sterilized (Nuñez 2006: 58). Clara already warned the Girl about police matrons and plainclothesmen in the streets who “pick you up … and give you test and sterilize you” (TG 1). Nevertheless, it is at the relief agency where the heroine discovers the pseudo-​scientific prognosis of a perpetually barren womb for poor fallen women like herself, which was deemed advisable because the morbidity risk of illicit pregnancies was conveniently tied to female lunacy by eugenic patriarchal institutions, such as welfare and medicine: Maladjusted, emotionally unstable, and a difficult problem to approach. A most unfortunate situation. […] In our opinion there should be a referral to a psychiatric clinic if she shows indications of further or aggravated mental and emotional disturbance. She should be tested for sterilization after her baby is born. In our opinion sterilization would be advisable. (158)

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Le Sueur accuses middle-​class professional women of being indifferent to the ordeals of destitute expectant mothers, unprotected by their lack sisterly sympathy, as much as by male comrades or the State. Before recommending the Girl’s reclusion and sterilization, Ms. Rice pretends to be the empathetic friend to whom the heroine confesses her tragic story of male seduction and her procreative crime. Yet, what the public servant plans is to forbid the Girl’s admission to postliminal motherhood. This violation of the heroine’s secret unleashes her reaction of shouting and swearing, which leads her to be confined behind the bars of a maternity home until the completion of her pregnancy. There, the Girl notices that she is not alone. An inarticulate current of solidarity with other thin girls grows when she interacts with them or contemplates how their pregnant bodies “swelled down like a vase” (159). After being battered by a policeman who tries to rape her, the Girl’s physical pain and mental anxiety paradoxically provoke a comforting episode of fetal quickening:  “The first thing I thought of was, I lost my baby, and I put my hand there, and I felt it move slow like a fish under water, like a fish moving” (159), which reinforces the intrauterine communication between her and her fetus. Nevertheless, the Girl’s unborn child cannot soothe her other psychological terrors, triggered by the priest of the maternity home, who reminded her of the sinfulness of her illicit pregnancy; or by the agony and helplessness of other gestating/​birthing inmates of this penitentiary: I could see the girls about to deliver walk slow down the hall. Every night you could hear screams from someone in labor, and day and night the kids squalled in the nursery and the girls would go down the halls trying to see their babies, but they couldn’t. (160)

To strengthen the notion of ordinary female heroism as expectant mothers and the chronological stages of liminal pregnancy according to the four seasons intended by Le Sueur in her novel, Amelia manages to rescue the Girl from the maternity home in summer, so as to take her to the old warehouse, where other poor women and children are equally confined and hidden from the public eye, but where they can be free. The swollen belly at pregnancy, thus, symbolizes a treasure to be protected, a promise of a new life, and an act of disobedience against eugenic practices in Minnesota

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that condemn destitute women to barrenness and maternal loss. The Girl avoids sterilization and being separated from her baby after its birth. However, she cannot evade the tragedy of Clara’s death, due to venereal diseases, famine, and a state-​administered shock treatment to punish a lunatic prostitute for her equally threatening exposure to reproductive degeneracy. The novel’s bittersweet conclusion further illustrates female insubordination against men and patriarchal institutions when Amelia acts as a midwife to attend the Girl to deliver her child, without any intruding male physician, but with the nurturance and protection of homeless –​yet wise –​women. While there is a street demonstration demanding milk and iron pills for workers, this chorale of pagan goddesses in unison breathe solidarity, so their first-​hand experiences as mothers help the Girl to trespass the ultimate limen of parturition: “I felt I would stand there and just drop with child into their hands, the Great Mothers” (179). The episode of birth begins with sweat, sudden pains of growing intensity, no money to call an ambulance, and counting the time to check the periodicity of the contractions: “Now it was six minutes apart. It was exciting. I wanted to see it right away. Maybe it would look like Butch” (177). If the Girl’s busy mind remembers the lost father of her baby, her birthing body focuses on its biological mission and on Amelia’s midwifery instructions: “I could feel my blood like a river inside me, and my breast deep and thigh and womb ready for a new child […] She said I had my teeth in it now for the first time. I could feel it bear down, bear heavy” (177). The novel glides from the comforting guidance of this improvised midwife to the Girl’s own act of white ink, where the intense physical sensations at labor are synchronized with her lyric birthing thoughts to relive the dead Butch and to recall her distant mother at the sight of her newborn: I felt all the river broke in me and poured and gave and opened. Was it my cry, the cry of the women, the cry of a child? The last breath of Butch, the first of a child. Covered with a kind of slime and dark she lay the child on me. A girl, she cried, a girl, and she rubbed the slime and the child let a little gasp and breathed […] She had the tiny face of my mother. Like in a mirror. (181–​2)

Alice Adams argues that this event marks the end of the Girl’s sense of her self as a singular and isolated being, as well as the onset of a collective female identity for her, when she enters a stream of relationships with

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sisters, daughters, and mothers, where each woman flows into others, like when she finds her own mother in herself, her child, and her friends (1994:  76). Named Clara to honor her fallen friend, this newborn is also a female  –​a potentially fertile, gestating, and maternal woman in the future. Concurrently, her mother –​the Girl –​whose body was bereft of dairy nutrients during her gestation, has now breast milk to feed her own child and, symbolically, also the entire colony of starving women at the warehouse. Therefore, the novel celebrates that, thanks to the reproductive powers inherent in their sex, all daughters are destined to become mothers one day, so they are also called to nourish maternal bonds of sympathy, love, and dialogue among different generations of struggling female comrades, irrespective of their indifferent middle-​class counterparts and patriarchal political organizations, like capitalism or communism. The Girl’s ending has no utopian closure, because its heroine and her female friends still have to suffer hunger, gender oppression, and sexual violence. Nonetheless, gestating and birthing dysgenic, fatherless children empower women, despite menaces of abortion and sterilization from men or governmental policies. Clara’s successful birth is, indeed, the climactic victory against the procreative injustice undergone by poor expectant mothers and the promise of their survival, thanks to viable pregnancies in the future. In short, through the communal experiences of physical pain, psychological injury, and maternal bliss, working-​class women engender the anger, strength, and courage to resist misogynist pressures, and to endure in urban jungles, thanks to symbolically peaceful villages of mothers, who glorify the liminal female biological life-​cycle, from conception and pregnancy through labor and maternity.

Limens of Prenatal and Natal Traumas in Jean Rhys and Anaïs Nin Cathy Caruth contends that trauma –​as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind of the victim –​is not only “the encounter with death” but also the ongoing experience of having survived death (2010: 3,

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7). Therefore, the narrative of trauma –​as the account of a painful, belated experience –​constitutes itself as a double telling “between the story of the unbearable nature of a horrific event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (7). In fact, a harrowing episode from the past –​ or that symbolic/​real death –​invades the helpless sufferer of trauma and destructs the ordinary course of her life, because she cannot understand why she is still alive, or why this ordeal uncontrollably repeats itself to torment her soma and psyche periodically. Suzette Henke argues that women often manifest symptoms of post-​traumatic stress disorder after a crisis precipitated by unwanted pregnancy or child loss, which threaten the integrity of their anatomy and the notions of harmonious selfhood (2000:  xii). The biographies of Jean Rhys (1890–​1979) and Anaïs Nin (1903–​77) insinuate that unassimilated, painful memories about pregnancy and childbirth could have haunted their lives incessantly, penetrated the consciousness of each author, and inspired their respective works. Uncontrollable nightmares, hallucinations, flashbacks, and snapshots of traumatic procreative experiences from their pasts could have erupted in their intimate novels, diaries, and short stories. Dissimilar to the collective dimension found in Le Sueur’s The Girl or to the evident fictionality in Wharton’s works, the life-​testimonies of Rhys and Nin do not necessarily reconstruct chronological narratives of pregnancy and childbirth to criticize patriarchal oppression and violence against the female reproductive self. Instead, these authors transcribe a twofold story within the same autobiographical work or split into contiguous accounts: firstly, a traumatic episode in a given moment –​in a present tense or in a past time –​and secondly, its reverberations as dislocated fragments of remembrance in a timeless realm of liminality, plagued with deliberate ellipsis, cryptic enigmas, or with the writers’ obstinate reluctance to unravel the entire history of their traumas on pregnancy and childbirth that, surprisingly, vomit genuine white ink. Liminally located between the nurturing blackness of her native West Indies and the unmaternal Europe of her white ancestors, Dominican-​born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams –​Jean Rhys –​was pregnant, at least, three times, delivered two babies, and became the mother of a girl, in metropolises like London, Amsterdam, Vienna, Budapest or Paris, during the early twentieth century. Before becoming a Creole writer, she was a chorus girl.

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She endured an abortion in 1913 after having been abandoned by her older lover, the wealthy stockbroker Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, who sent her money for years through his lawyer, until she married Jean Lenglet in 1919, with whom she had two children: William Owen, who died some weeks after his birth in 1920, and then her only surviving daughter, Maryvonne, born in 1922, from whom she was estranged most of the time after having divorced her father in 1924 (Savory 2009: 4, 9). These three life episodes with conception, pregnancy, and childbirth often return to Rhys’s writing mind. Then, she retrospectively transcribes them as ordeals set in present times and/​or revisited later through the sinusoidal labyrinth of her fragmented memory and her reticence to articulate such unutterable traumas in her novels, like Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), or in two stories from the collection The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927): “Learning to be a Mother” and “Vienne.” Paradoxically, the experience of motherhood is almost entirely erased from her fiction (Savory 2009: 7). Voyage in the Dark echoes the semi-​autographical overture of Jean Rhys to her own procreativity and pregnancies. Nevertheless, this literary work also dramatizes the inarticulate correlation between the history of the cruel enslavement of black labor in the West Indies –​witnessed by Rhys as a child in Dominica –​and the story of contemporary exploitation suffered by a white, Creole woman in Europe, like herself, as an adult. Rhys was consumed as a young commodity of high erotic desirability by rich British men, but she was later deserted by them and maltreated in the indifferent imperial capital, London. This novel’s first lines illustrate how the (anti-​)heroine Anna Morgan is delivered to the world of England, when she abandons the uterine paradise of her maternal island: “It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again” (Voyage in the Dark9 7). The trauma of her second birth at the age of 18 –​after the death of her infant Caribbean self –​is somatized by constantly feeling cold, lonely, ill, depressed, and suicidal in the unhomely European motherland. There, Anna is an itinerant chorus girl, who had to abort her acting training after her loving father died, because her greedy stepmother Hester and her remaining family from her remote Antillean 9

Voyage in the Dark is hereafter referred to by VD.

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home are negligent caretakers. The heroine’s foreign status, her isolation, her economic precariousness, the socially suspicious status of her mixed race, and the bad reputation of her sexualized profession sentence her to a forced state of in-​betweenness: British versus Creole, white versus black, workingwoman versus idle woman, good girl versus “the tart.” She is not Britain’s true daughter, but a doubly vulnerable liminal woman. Socially, she is an illegitimate working-​class immigrant or an outsider while emotionally, she is easy prey for sexual predators. Seeking protection and tenderness, this fatherless girl is both irresistible and available for older rich men –​like Walter Jeffries –​who long for childish and exotic casual lovers or kept mistresses, but not for equal sexual partners, or future wives and mothers. The novel’s first part narrates the encounter and later the romance between this chorus girl and Walter, presided over by money exchanges and the loss of her virginity. Underpaid and periodically struggling to pay her rent, Anna leads a parasitic existence. For days, she waits on the letters from this (un)fatherly gentleman to arrange meeting times, and depends on his economic support, but she also falls in love with him. Meanwhile, this sexual affair is purely a transient divertissement or merely a commercial transaction for Walter. When he travels to New York for business and leaves her behind for a long time, Anna only fasts, smokes, drinks, and sleeps. She remains depressed and confined in her room for weeks. Nonetheless, the (anti-​)heroine’s downward spiral of alcoholism, prostitution, depression, and self-​destruction is triggered when Walter gets tired of her and abandons her forever. Instead of facing Anna with his decision in person, he sends her a letter and a cheque through his cousin Vincent who informs her: He doesn’t love you like that anymore, and after all you must always have known that the thing could not go on for ever and you must remember too that he is nearly twenty years older than you are […] you are young and youth as everybody says is … the greatest gift of all. (VD 79–80)

Anna finds new lodgings and an occupation as a manicurist with Ethel –​ a masseuse  –​who expects her employee to be “a bit nice to people” (124). Male clients visit Anna’s bed, like the American Carl Redman –​ met thanks to her friend Laurie –​with whom the (anti-​)heroine repeats the same modus operandi of casual sex in exchange for money and the

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illusion of a future together. Anna also has encounters with an indeterminate “he,” referring to any customer at Ethel’s business, where she is lured into prostitution: “Going up the stairs it was pretty bad but when we got into the bedroom and had drinks it was better” (137). Anna’s robotic actions and her dilated mental numbness are, however, interrupted by the abrupt call of her gestating body: “like seasickness, only worse, and everything heaving up and down. And vomiting. And thinking, ‘It can’t be that, it can’t be that. Oh, it can’t be that. Pull yourself together, it can’t be that […] it’s never happened before. Why should it happen now?’ ” (138). Indeed, morning sickness announces an unwanted pregnancy from an unidentified inseminator and provokes Anna’s violent rejection of one of her male visitors at Ethel’s. Her mental terror of expecting a child transports her back, through a dizzy transatlantic voyage, to her native island. Then, she dreams of calypso songs and playful games from her childhood to flee from her harsh reproductive reality in England, and to find protection in homely memories of a Caribbean womb. For Erin Kingsley, the conditions of otherness and pregnancy are synonymous with each other in Rhys’s fiction, because the female sex, the cultural position of the colonized, and the racial condition of “the other” are not only entwined, but also impact the bodily condition of childbearing to yield “changeability, dismantling of self, ostracization, fragmentation and outsiderness” (2015: 292–​3). Anna’s socially confirmed status of in-​ betweenness as a liminal woman –​a poor, non-​white immigrant and a defenseless demimondaine –​in the patriarchal motherland, prevents her from freely and gladly assuming the mentally harmful second state of liminality, implied in the organic processes of illicit pregnancy and childbirth. It is not the inarticulate heroine of Voyage in the Dark, but a letter from Ethel to Laurie that confirms Anna’s pregnancy:  “Last week she came to me and said she was going to have a baby. It appears to me […] that she must be nearly three months gone” (VD 142). It is not a coincidence that, in the past, both women had been asking Anna whether she was expecting a child, because they were trying to understand why she was so anxious and distressed, or because they simply sensed that illegitimate childbearing was Anna’s inescapable doom. After these remarks, the (anti-​)heroine herself saw her “swollen shadow on the wall” (96), not her

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own physical self, because she could not even dare to imagine that she was really pregnant. Back to present times, Anna’s mind concentrates on her inability to think outside her own body, the absence of money, the need to get rid of the fetus, and the fear of birthing a deformed child (Kingsley 2015: 299). In fact, Rhys enables her reader to enter Anna’s mental self, obsessed with her undesired pregnancy: “All the time thinking round and round in a circle that it is there inside me, and about all the things I had taken so that if I had it, it would be a monster. The Abbé Sebastian’s Pills […] No eyes, perhaps … No arms, perhaps” (VD 143). As a victim of social pressures and a captive of her own procreative anatomy, Anna feels that she is the destroyer of the alien creature within herself: She can kill her embryo during its gestational growth by ingesting pills with that purpose. She also incarnates a Victor Frankenstein, or the reluctant creator of hideous fetal progeny, which doubles her own monstrosity as a non-​ white, destitute, promiscuous, and foreign single mother, according to prevailing prejudices in England. Being socially unsuitable to procreate, Anna internalizes that her offspring is also dysgenic; thus, it must be murdered, because the fatherless child of a female immigrant cannot survive after its birth, nor herself as a penniless single mother. Meanwhile, Ethel is unwilling to help her problematic manicurist, so Anna leaves and looks to the support of her friend Laurie, who soon recommends her to an abortionist –​Mrs. Robinson –​because Anna’s intake of pills does not enable her to get rid of the embryo, nor is a miscarriage induced by her compulsive drinking of alcohol –​a perpetual cocktail of wine, whisky, and brandy. Laurie also suggests that her Creole friend ask Walter for money to liberate herself from the unborn child. The financial means are finally provided by the mediator Vincent. Anna’s linguistic ambiguity when she says that she does not want “to have it” –​the abortion or the baby –​not only reflects the inadequacy of words to express her female experience, but also proves that she does not know what she wants (Panko 2013: 93). In contrast, Jean Rhys recognizes her authorial mission: It is impossible that a liminal woman –​like Anna –​can assume the destiny of motherhood. Rhys’s frankness and courage impregnate her act of writing about a botched abortion in the 1930s, regardless of religious taboos or social censorship. Accordingly, Anna describes her anxieties and the realm of

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her senses during Mrs. Robinson’s intervention on her procreative body, which is paralyzed and threatened by death, as if she were the victim of rape: I shut my eyes. I didn’t want to see what she was doing. When I felt her standing near me again I said, “If I can’t bear it, if I ask you to stop, will you stop?” She said, as if she were talking to a child, “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes …” The earth heaving up under me. Very slowly. So slowly. “Stop,” I said. “You must stop.” She didn’t answer. I couldn’t move. Too late now to move, too late. She said “La,” blowing out her breath. I opened my eyes. I went on crying. She went away from me. (VD 150–1)

The abortion is plagued with the pleas from an infantile martyr  –​the patient –​and indifference from an unmaternal villain –​the female unlawful practitioner. After this invasive procedure, Anna leaves and must wait until the death of her fetus is consummated, while she believes she is about to perish: “I was afraid to cross the street and then I was afraid because the slanting houses might fall on me or the pavement rise up and hit me. But most of all I was afraid of the people passing because I was dying” (151). The final passages of Voyage in the Dark reveal that Anna is ill and lies hemorrhaging after the illegal botched abortion, which requires the intervention of the male hands of a physician to save her life and provoke a miscarriage.10 While he labors with her body, Anna remains silent, inert, and semi-​unconscious, after having bathed herself in the waters of alcohol to bear this second loss of her own self. Rhys delivers white ink as a writer, amalgamating her heroine’s physical pain with the liquidity of her uncontrollable torrent of blood, her state of inebriety, and her oceanic mental flight to her maternal past. Again, Anna escapes from the hostile English reality of her own anatomy to undertake an imaginary transatlantic voyage to her lost Caribbean girlhood, while her fetus is paradoxically being destroyed. Back on her island, the labyrinth of her memory reunites her with her dead first self in snapshots from a carnival masquerade with her father and stepmother. There, Anna feels dizzy because of the loud noises and concertina-​music, the crowds of white and black people 10 The original conclusion for Voyage in the Dark was to let Anna die during the botched abortion, but due to editorial pressures, Rhys was forced to change it for the survival of her heroine.

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in the streets dancing, watching, and wearing masks. Indeed, Anna’s response to her abortion takes the form of delirious dreams or visions to present her “as being isolated from the common social body, trapped in her own angst,” because the official morality forces women to make desperate, life-​threatening choices (Minogue and Palmer 2006: 105). Anna only senses her vertiginous psychosomatic downfall when she wakes up from her feverish nightmare and hears the physician talk to Laurie. He is the voice of patriarchal judgment uttering the last spoken words in the novel. Although he seems to diagnose Anna’s physical recovery from her abortion, he prognoses her potential relapse into prostitution and illicit pregnancy: “ ‘You girls are too naïve to live, aren’t you? [She’ll be] ready to start all over again in no time, I’ve no doubt’ ” (VD 159). Meanwhile, Anna contemplates the abortive blood spilled by her (un)maternal body as if were not hers, but that of her lost mother –​a vital episode in life irretrievably forgotten by any newborn: “The ray of light came in again under the door like the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out. I lay and watched it” (159). Anna mentally travels from the intrauterine cavity of darkness and perceives the extrauterine sun of her own third birth, which is an illusion of rebirth after having consumed two previous lives: first, her Caribbean girlhood, and second, her initiation to reproductive sexuality in Europe, away from home. Nevertheless, it is impossible for Anna both to double her own self during her pregnancy and to cross the final limen of the split of the materno-​fetal unit at childbirth, because to do so would intensify her own fragmentation as a liminal woman in England, and it would also break her masochistic, vicious cycle of losing herself, symbolically dying and being reborn again and again. Jean Rhys’s next episode with maternity –​now not as an immigrant, single mother but as Mme. Lenglet –​is the birth of her first-​born child William Owen in Paris in 1920. A rhapsody of death will reverberate more than once in her writings where, unlike in Voyage in the Dark, the trauma is not located in the loss of her own self and her later awakenings to newer lives, but in the timeless realm of the death of this same boy within the obsessive receptacle of her own brain. Before losing her first newborn in hospital, “Learning to be a Mother” illustrates Rhys’s own experience with her arrival at the Parisian birthing clinic ruled by a nurse, Mme. Laboriau.

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This story’s narrator seems to be husbandless and delivers her son alone while surrounded by parturient mothers in agony. Unlike them, the only comfort that this woman cherishes is to have enough money to pay for a room of her own: “to buy the right to moan in privacy” (“Learning to be a Mother”11 53), and to beg for anesthesia when labor pain becomes unbearable. Electric light and French instructions to give birth to her baby are equally discomforting for this reluctant mother, and they utterly darken the subsequent recollection of the act of parturition that Rhys transforms into a narrative hiatus in her tale: “I watch the halo as the giant pain takes me up and squeezes me tighter, tighter, tighter. ‘Regardez,’ says Mme. Laboriau, ‘comme il est beau votre fils’ [‘look how beautiful your son is!’]” (54). For Erin Kingsley, this story symbolizes a woman’s struggle with the physical and linguistic fissure that childbirth creates in her own being, resulting in her emotional disconnection from her son (2015: 296). Indeed, the desirable oblivion, involved in the biological act of birthing under the effects of anesthesia, can render the woman’s ulterior transcription of labor into words as a problematic task. The difficult puerperium of this nameless Rhys also proves that unmaternal feelings stem from the postlapsarian punishment of labor pains: “I did not like him. I had been too much hurt. I was too tired. I kept my feelings a profound secret, but with all my efforts I could bring myself to kiss him” (LM 55). Therefore, the story’s heroine questions the validity of the patriarchal myth of “Sacred Motherhood” (56), which enforces a compulsory state of postpartum happiness onto the entire female population. Yet, Laboriau’s motherly caress helps the story’s unnamed narrator to grasp that any woman must learn to be a mother. Alone with her newborn, she gradually adapts herself to her new role and eventually gestates maternal love within herself, built upon the common state of vulnerability and unlovability shared between mother and son. Years after having conceived “Learning to be a Mother,” Jean Rhys’s pen returns to the birth of this same child –​William Owen –​and is haunted by his postnatal death, which severed the transient joy that she sensed when her maternal feelings woke. In Good Morning, Midnight, the 11

“Learning to be a Mother” is hereafter referred to by LM.

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semi-​autobiographical (anti-​)heroine Sasha Jansen is a lonely, depressed, and suicidal middle-​aged victim with a traumatic past. In 1937, she comes back to Paris, not only to persist in drowning herself in alcohol to forget the wounds of her heart, but also to masochistically recall her youth of Bohemian poverty in the streets of the French capital, where she was happy and miserable alike during the 1920s. In the prime of life, Sasha was a vagabond in Europe. She disembarked in Paris with dreams of marital bliss, but she found only a sad pregnancy ruled by male negligence; gave birth to her child alone; endured the tragic death of her baby boy, the ultimate desertion of her husband Enno, and episodes of beggary or, perhaps, prostitution. Erica Johnson holds that Sasha belatedly interprets all these traumatic events as reflections of her own inadequacy as a wife and mother, whereby the past always assaults her self-​esteem (2014: 35). Jean Rhys refuses to impregnate her novel with a straightforward or chronological account to trace the harrowing chapters of Sasha’s past, plagued with a sudden pregnancy, an awaited childbirth, and her baby’s fatal death. Instead, this last traumatic loss repeats itself in the undying realm of her fragmentary, circular, and sinusoidal memories –​without coherence or logical order –​in a present or a future tense. Painful images, déjà vus, nightmarish hallucinations, and bodily sensations reverberate to torment the reluctant survivor of death –​Sasha –​and to interrupt the ordinary course of her life. She even admits being condemned to a death-​in-​life existence, where she is “a bit of an automaton” (Good Morning, Midnight12 10). She avoids confronting her physical self and remains within the uterine protection of the four walls in a cheap hotel of Paris to prioritize her mental life, because “a room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside” (GM 38). Therefore, the process of recovery expected when Sasha returns to the epicenter of her past in Paris is boycotted by her psychic confinement in her room, which replicates her physical childbearing located in the past. She does not reconstruct either her story as a woman in love with her husband or as an expectant mother in the 1920s, to benefit from the healing act of writing about her trauma. Instead, Sasha’s chosen state of self-​absorption enables her memories to burn her repeatedly, like a wrathful volcano of 12

Good Morning, Midnight is hereafter referred to by GM.

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unpredicted eruptions of mourning and grief. Her baby’s death in the clinic is the most painful lava that forever burns her: The clouds are clouds, trees are trees, people are people, and that’s that. Don’t mix them up again. No, I won’t. And there’s always the tisane of orange-​flower water. But my heart, heavy as lead, heavy as a stone. He has a ticket tied round his wrist because he died. Lying so cold and still with a ticket round his wrist because he died. Not to think. Only to watch the branches of that tree and the pattern they make standing out against a cold sky. Above all, not to think …(139)

The result of emotional anesthesia after surviving this sad maternal loss does not numb Sasha enough to obliterate previous bodily sensations of hunger, poverty, physical pain, or marital neglect, which she had suffered during her pregnancy and at childbirth. In fact, disjointed flashbacks from these past events disorderly visit the mental captivity of an older heroine returning to Paris many years after having gestated, delivered, and lost her baby. Regressing to the chaotic report of her youth, Sasha’s suspicion that she was expecting a child in the liminal space of a lavatory in a train station before arriving at the French capital, became a drama. Her husband and she were penniless, so she could not be happy. When her pregnancy was confirmed, she did not dare to tell the good tidings to Enno. Moreover, Sasha recollects constant financial struggles after landing in Paris, resulting in still vivid images of hunger, starvation, and emaciation throughout her pregnancy, that is typically a process involving fetal nutrition and the satisfaction of maternal cravings: “I look thin –​too thin –​and dirty and haggard, with that expression that you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are” (121). If Enno earned money or she managed to give English lessons in Paris, sensations of happiness and satiation provided by food –​ steaks, spaghettis, or Turkish delights  –​replenished both her maternal womb and her stomach. Sasha also enjoyed how French people respected her, and that they were generally obliging with expectant mothers: “My face is pretty, my stomach is huge. Last time we ate at the Algerian restaurant I  had to rush away and be sick … People are very kind to me. They get up and give me their seats in buses” (132). Conversely, Enno

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condemned a pregnant Sasha to the torture of his unjustified long absences from home, while she masochistically waited for his return, was afraid of being abandoned by him, and remained emotionally dependent on his moods: “He knew so exactly when to be cruel, so exactly how to be kind” (129). However, unlike Anna in Voyage in the Dark, Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight cherishes the doubling of her own self, perceived in the mirror during her advanced pregnancy: Now snow is falling. There is the reflection of snow in the room. The light makes everything seem strange. The mound of my stomach is hidden under the bedclothes. So calm I feel, watching myself in the glass opposite. My hair hangs down on my shoulders. It is curly again and the corners of my mouth turn up. I like myself today. I am never sick now. I am very well and very happy […] So I may be in Paris alone. But it’s all arranged. As soon as it starts I am to get into a taxi and go off to the sage femme [midwife]. My room is booked –​it’s all arranged. It’s nothing to make a fuss about, everybody says. (137)

Here, winter arrives and Sasha quietly prepares herself to deliver her baby. Despite being alone, neither her absent husband nor the shortage of money interfere with the ecstasy of the materno-​fetal unit. The expectant mother enjoys contemplating her healthy maternal beauty and her swollen belly, without any fear nor anticipation of the impending eternity of mourning after giving birth. Nevertheless, the final split between mother and child is lethal. Sasha loses her baby and then Enno days later; ergo in the end, she loses herself in the obscure mouth of trauma. Childbirth had announced the onset of her ordeal and reminded Sasha of her constant vulnerability during her pregnancy, because her husband was, again, not by her side when she alone took the taxi to the clinic and there, she could not afford to relieve her labor pain: “ ‘Chloroform, chloroform,’ I  say when I  speak. Of course I  would. What nonsense! There is no doctor to give chloroform here. This is a place for poor people” (58). Regardless of her command of French, the English-​speaking Sasha cannot obey the midwife’s instructions: “She speaks to me in a language that is no language. But I understand it […] What are you? I am an instrument, something to be made use of … She darts from one room to another, encouraging, soothing, reproaching. ‘Now, you’re not trying. Courage’ ” (58). The heroine’s parturient body and her extenuated mind

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are, indeed, transitorily fractured, so Sasha sees herself as an object deprived of volition, or merely as malleable female flesh in foreign hands across the dilated process of parturition. This scene reflects Sasha’s indeterminate status, because she is in the solely feminine space of birthing, which has different linguistic code rules, while she cannot have access to the patriarchal system of language (Kingsley 2015: 293–​4, 302). A male-​ dominated linguistic order –​combining sounds and graphic words –​is, thus, inadequate to articulate Sasha’s physical pain and prenatal emotions during labor. Moreover, Sasha finds no sisterly comfort or care in the nurses. In stubborn agreement with her heroine, Rhys refuses to verbalize the language of the birthing body in her novel, so she deprives the reader of the explicit act of delivery. Accordingly, the narration abruptly jumps from blankness, confusion, and paralysis at the onset of childbirth to the puerperal insomnia of Sasha, whose mind remains actively thinking about her poverty, loneliness, and maternal incompetence, finding the latter its vessel in the story “Learning to be a Mother.” After the split between mother and child in Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha’s timeless nightmares of mental pain begin: her baby’s death weeks after and Enno’s final desertion, leading to her own unwanted survival. For Judith Herman, the recognition of trauma is vital in the process of recovery (1997: 127). Conversely, Rhys’s heroine never expresses the grief from her maternal loss with words either to herself or to others, nor does she ever write the sequential account of her procreative experience until her puerperium toward healing. Instead, Sasha’s traumatized mind is (in) voluntarily visited by a ghost baby from the past. Jean Rhys’s last episode with pregnancy is reflected in “Vienne,” where she only recalls once the pregnancy of her only surviving child, Maryvonne. In this story, its semi-​autobiographical protagonist Francine lives with her husband Pierre in several countries during the 1920s. Thanks to a dubious fortune made on the currency exchange market, Pierre pampers his wife, so they lead together a glamorous married life in Vienna, but the couple must move to Budapest. Before the heroine realizes that her perpetual exile across Europe has just begun because they are dangerously on the wrong side of the law, Francine enjoys the comforts of luxurious uterine surroundings, which pleasingly confine her to the mental self-​absorption of her sweet expectancy. Indeed, she savors her idleness and passivity, because

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she believes that Pierre nurtures and provides for the doubling of her self during pregnancy: There was a hard, elegant, little sofa in our room, covered with striped yellow silk –​ sky-​blue cushions. I spent long afternoons lying on that sofa plunged in a placid dream of maternity. I felt a calm sense of power lying in that dark, cool room, as though I could inevitably and certainly draw to myself all I had ever wished for in life –​as though I were mysteriously irresistible, a magnet, a Femme Sacrée [Sacred Woman]. One can become absorbed … exalted … lost as it were, when one is going to have a baby, and one is extremely pleased about it. (VI13 107)

Nonetheless, Francine’s transient haven of prenatal peace and joy is aborted when she must escape to Prague, because her husband is followed by the police. Similarly, Jean Lenglet –​Rhys’s spouse –​took a job as a secretary-​ interpreter to the Interallied Commission in Vienna shorty after World War I, and he got into trouble over fraudulent art and currency dealings (Savory 2009: 28). Also as experienced by Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight, the healthy mother-​child coexistence during Francine’s pregnancy in “Vienne” is not broken by intrauterine troubles, but by external factors:  financial insecurity, Pierre’s fraudulent business, and his later potential arrest and suicidal thoughts. Francine’s serenity disappears and thereafter, her pregnancy is not alluded to in the story. She is no longer a maternal goddess revered by her husband, but a desperate mortal woman with child, persecuted by her fears and by the police that cannot split her union with Pierre into two separate selves. Patricia Moran states that Rhys repudiates maternity to concentrate on prostitution and degraded, commodified female sexuality as the main themes of her literary works (2007:  112–​13). However, the uncontrollable, unruly memories of her own traumatic pregnancies and childbirths during her nomadic youth betray Rhys to impregnate her life-​testimonies with intermittent drops of white ink, leaking from perpetually liminal prisons of mental pain. In contrast, Anaïs Nin eagerly nourishes the aesthetics of calling and recalling her own procreative body and (un)maternal subjectivity in her stories and life-​long diaries, written from the age of 11 until shortly before her death in 1977. This cosmopolitan American author –​from a 13

“Vienne” is referred to by VI.

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Cuban family of musicians –​reproduces the patriarchal literary tradition of gestating and delivering artworks as the desired progeny from a proud parent-​artist, whose liminal process of conception is also extenuating –​even agonizing –​as Nin records before expecting a child: “Writing now shows the pains of childbearing. No joy. Just pain, sweat, exhaustion. It saps the blood. It is a curse […] What a grip on one’s soul, one’s guts, everything. I yearn to be delivered of this book. It is devouring me” (Diary I14 315). Meanwhile, Nin’s own experience as a pregnant/​parturient woman in Paris in 1934 is often the prime matter to intentionally give birth to the literary artifice of her journals and life-​writings, where she indulges herself in the pleasure of conceiving her fictional self-​portrait as a heroine, and she expurgates the guilt from one episode of intended maternal loss. Intuitively, Nin nurtures the future potential of Cixous’s Écriture Féminine, when she confesses that her procreative uterus hosts the embryo of her artistic potency: “Waiting in the café, I write these words: ‘On being the womb.’ And it unleashes a tremendous feminine universe. I am completely divorced from man’s world of ideas. I swim in nature. On being the womb…englobing” (Nin 1967: 184). According to Sharon Spencer, Anaïs Nin wanted to “endow words with flesh and blood,” because the narrative articulation of women’s lives was murdered by the puritanical judgments and “cerebral” approach of male writers, afraid of feelings (1989: 161). Conversely, female writings rather aspire to be deep and honest, to trace expeditions into dangerous terrains, and to explore taboos in the search for such truths that cause pain (165). Although Nin’s literary manifesto and Spencer’s later interpretation glorify the conclusion that female anatomy inseminates women’s artistry against the exclusively mental act involved in men’s literature, the diarist, paradoxically, refused to become a mother throughout her life. She was married to the wealthy American banker Hugh Guiler, but she was chained to a legion of lovers among writers, psychoanalysts, and expatriates in Paris. Therefore, Nin rejected the social institution of motherhood, although she did not abort the liminal experience of being pregnant and delivering a child, nor its translatability into autobiographical art. 14

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. I: 1931–​4 is hereafter referred to by DI.

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Anaïs Nin published the short story “Birth” within the collection Under a Glass Bell in 1944 and the literary artefact of her diaries during the 1960s, which recorded her life in Paris since 1931. In both writings, she narrates the stillbirth of a premature baby girl, which occurred in September 1934. However, the unexpurgated version of her journals made public in the 1990s long after Nin’s death, revealed the truth behind this catastrophic chapter of childbirth and the fictionality behind her earlier life-​ testimonies: The induced labor during her sixth month of pregnancy was, in actual fact, an abortion dilated across time. By early 1934, Anaïs Nin had ended her consensually incestuous experiment with her father –​the Don Juan pianist Joaquín Nin. Although she was leading a quiet, dull domestic life with her husband in the rural outskirts of Paris, an ardent intimacy between her and her psychoanalyst Otto Rank was growing. Simultaneously, she was nourishing a clandestine intellectual and sexual liaison with the American writer Henry Miller, where she economically fed her moneyless lover, so that he could gestate his novel Tropic of Cancer. Anaïs Nin confides herself to the blank pages of her diary to avow that: “The artist ceased to write. I was filled with a great feminine activity. I did more and more for Henry; I wanted to serve Henry […] Love swallows in me even the artist” (Unexpurgated Diary15 300, 310). Therefore, the sexual act and its unintended offspring of procreation impregnate the woman –​Anaïs –​intoxicated by erotic passion, so she is oblivious of her other self –​the writer. Nin’s hidden but genuine diaries –​whose final disclosure shocked readers in the 1990s –​and their artificial copies officially published in the 1960s bifurcate when offering two contradictory accounts of Nin’s pregnancy in 1934. Nevertheless, both versions of her journals, as well as the story “Birth,” reveal an almost identical narrative of the act of childbirth. In May, Anaïs learns that she is expecting a baby: “I carry in my womb the seed of Henry’s child. I became pregnant five or six weeks ago […] [it is not] Hugh’s and I must destroy it” (UD 329). Meanwhile, her authoritative journal chooses the month of June to announce the impracticality of both a safe childbirth and her destiny of motherhood. She visits the studio 15

Incest, from ‘A Journal of Love’: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932–​1934 is hereafter referred to by UD.

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of the sculptress Chana Orloff who exalts maternity and creates artworks on various stages of pregnancy, which Nin finds “oppressive” (DI 332). Moreover, she does not understand why children are brought to a world that “is going to pieces under our eyes” (332). In this same diary entry, Nin accidentally declares –​without preliminaries about the discovery of her own pregnancy –​that she is anatomically unfit to become a mother: “I saw a doctor who said I was too small to have the child without a Cesarean section. For the moment everything is alive and normal” (337). Maternal ambivalence presides over later diary entries before the pre-​term delivery of her baby: I have experienced the most terrible mixture of emotions –​pride to be a mother, a woman, a complete woman, the love of a human creation, the infinite possibilities of motherhood. I have imagined this little Henry, desired it, refused it, weighed it against love (it is a choice between the child and Henry) (UD 329)

Although Nin senses the female plenitude inherent in sexual reproduction and pictures her unborn male child, she knows that becoming a mother and remaining Miller’s lover are irreconcilable options. Her confessions agglutinate a vortex of bodily sensations, high mental activity, and external circumstances. Yet, Nin’s decision not to keep the baby inside her uterus seems to be irrevocable: I have hated the idea of destroying a human life. I have watched the transformation of my body –​the swelling of my breasts, the weight of the womb, the feeling of being pulled downward, of a growth, of a transformation. I have desired the serenity in which alone a child can be born. Now, at this critical moment of my life, I cannot have it. Henry doesn’t want it. I can’t give Hugh a child of Henry’s […] Not motherhood, immolation, selflessness. Motherhood, that is solitude again, giving, protecting, serving, surrendering. No. No. No. (329–​30)

Nin’s mental and social selves reject the patriarchal institution of being a mother, because this mandatory gender role becomes a prison of self-​ renunciation and noncommunication, which sterilizes the woman and, potentially, also the artist. Though she abhors the thought of killing her fetus, Nin wants neither to interrupt the course of her life  –​inseminated by wild erotic feelings –​nor to accept that her husband gladly assumes the paternity of Henry’s baby:  “Persecution by Hugh, trying to assert his will over mine, trying to force me to keep the child, surprised by

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my determination, angered that I should not bow and obey” (331). Thus, Nin’s final decision to abort is more than the understanding that it is an unsuitable time to build a family or unfair for her husband to bear the procreative burden of her own adultery, but rather an act of self-​assertion and the vindication of her freedom to take control over her anatomy and future life, regardless of social and biological pressures. Paradoxically, Nin’s body cherishes the psychosomatic changes involved in the gestational process: “I have loved the feeling of growth in me, the physical well-​ being, the richness, the connection with the earth, the whole physical experience of pregnancy […] the stomach swelling, the feeling of expansion, of fullness” (367). Indeed, Nin does not repudiate the organically healthy and aesthetically inspiring liminal stage of pregnancy, but instead a woman’s sterility and sickness in postliminal motherhood. In the summer of 1934, Nin’s unexpurgated diary reveals that, although the decision is taken, the abortive procedure is delayed. It is hard to find proper obstetrical instruments, due to her small size, while Catholic doctors refuse to perform this illegal intervention in interwar Paris. Instead, “to rush the delivery of the Easter egg” (365), she is administered quinine, which is today viewed as an ineffective abortifacient. Nonetheless, the fetus clings to life: “Abortion should have taken two weeks. It has taken me four months” (367). Furthermore, Nin is on the verge of forgetting her husband, Miller, and her unborn child, to elope with her therapist Otto Rank, who fully occupies her soma and her psyche: “I am sex –​ clearly, to him, sex adorned with the other things. The image he wants is that of the mistress. He approves that I don’t want children –​he abhors the mother image” (355). What surely displeases Rank is Nin’s unerotic gestating body. However, she conveniently transforms the revulsion of her married lover into her own mental act of justifying her personal non-​conformity to maternity under the umbrella of psychoanalysis, fixed on ordeals of castrating mothers. In August, Anaïs Nin meets a physician. He diagnoses that the quinine prescribed by a midwife to induce the miscarriage was ineffectual, and that her pregnancy is more advanced than expected. Then, she writes: I have to be operated on, and the child is six months old, and alive and normal. It will be almost a childbirth. It will take over a week. I had begun to feel so heavy,

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Before her journals and the story “Birth” converge to narrate the stillbirth of a baby girl, Anaïs Nin offers an innovative narrative of pregnancy with white ink, when she keeps a conversation with the other half of her doubling self –​her unborn child –​in both diaries. In the official version, she mentally voyages to her uterine cavity to trigger the materno-​fetal communication: I feel your small feet kicking against my womb. It is very dark in the room we are sitting in, just as dark it must be for you inside of me, but it must be sweeter for your to be lying in the warmth that it is for me to be seeking, in this dark room, the joy of not knowing, not feeling […] of lying still and quiet in utter warmth and darkness. (DI 338)

Beyond the vitality of her fetus, Nin verbalizes the prelingual delights of prenatal life against the hostility of the symbolic law of the father, and echoes Rank’s theory of the trauma of birth, which explains the postnatal wish of any human to penetrate again the maternal womb to enjoy anew the lost intrauterine peace. Her actual words addressed to her unborn child are:  “How much better it would be if you had stayed away from earth, in obscurity and unconsciousness, in the paradise of non-​being […] All of us forever again seeking this warmth and this darkness, this being alive without pain, this being alive without anxiety or fear or aloneness” (338). Actually, for Rank, the first trauma to any individual occurs at birth, due to our primal fixation on the space of the maternal body, being psychoanalysis and the cultural or sexual adjustment of the “civilized man” to the extrauterine life, the therapeutic mechanisms to overcome it (1993: 211–​12). Beyond the narcotic outpourings of psychoanalysis in her journals, Nin unravels that paternal absence is the true reason for her (un) maternal refusal to endure the traumatic severance from her baby at birth: You are a child without a father, just as I was a child without a father. You are born of man, but you have no father […] Inside of this woman there was still a child without a father, a child who did not die when it should have died. There was still the ghost of a little girl forever wailing inside, bewailing the loss of a father. (UD 374)

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As Anna in Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, Nin is still safe while being pregnant, but she is unfit for postliminal childrearing. She does not want to condemn her unborn baby to fatherlessness, because she herself is still an adult female child crying for the love of Joaquín Nin, who deserted her and her mother in the past. For Henke, these diary entries reflect how Anaïs Nin rationalizes her choice to terminate her pregnancy, and how she pronounces an eloquent exercise of self-​exoneration, but she simultaneously torments herself by personifying the fetus and she also exhibits a powerful sense of guilt, though she was a lapsed Catholic (2000: 68). Mostly self-​centered on her liaison with Henry Miller, Nin’s official journal continues this mother-​child talk to justify that she is helpless, and that her lover would find that parental duties clash with his literary potency: He will hate your wailing and your slobbering, and your sickness, and my feeding you rather than his work, his creation. He might cast you aside for this love of his work, which brings him praise and power. He might run away, as my father ran away […] It would be better to die than to be abandoned, for you would spend your life haunting the world for this lost father. (DI 339)

As an artificial artwork of retrospection, this version of her diary not only camouflages the intended abortion turned into a dangerous pre-​ term delivery, but also impregnates her tale with the melodrama of a double paternal refusal –​Joaquin Nin’s and Henry Miller’s –​which is the vital clue to anticipate the next journalized episode of her self-​declared destiny of biological inadequacy for maternity. In this same literary creation, Anaïs Nin invents that her physician –​a Jewish-​German refugee in Paris –​cannot hear her child breathe, so she must undertake the epic journey of saving her own life thanks to expert male hands, possibly at the expense of her child’s survival: “They might save it. Anxiety. Fear of death. Fear of yielding to eternal sleep” (340). Incarnating a heroine, rituals of beautification offer her the courage of a warrior to fight against labor:  “I combed my hair, I  powdered and perfumed myself, painted my eyelashes” (341). Henke rather sees that Nin compares herself to Christ suffering on the cross, because she submits to a symbolic female martyrdom of bodily immolation and sacrificial torture at childbirth

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(2000: 68). When the diarist is at the birthing room after weeks of being administered drugs to induce labor contractions and provoke a natural birth, Nin’s unexpurgated diary, its official version, and her short story are all ultimately reunited to reveal an identical sequence of events.16 Indeed, her literary work “Birth” is embellished with neither previous autobiographical data nor fictional descriptions; instead, it defies Nin’s journals, because it is clinically begun by a doctor who pronounces that the baby is born dead, before its unnamed mother can recollect the traumatic experience of the physical and emotional separation between her and her stillborn. Both the brevity and flexibility of this story from 1944 enable Nin to capture the graphic sketch of a vaginal childbirth with intense physicality and pain, but without compromising her own identity or surrendering to patriarchal novelistic conventions, which would have forced introducing the reader to other characters or preceding circumstances. Accordingly, the parturient woman in “Birth” is on the verge of exhaustion and death, because she cannot force herself to push any longer after endless hours at labor. Although she has no physical strength, she remains passive and inert, due to her mental state of self-​division. She longs to finalize the physical agony of childbirth, but she does not wish to sever the materno-​fetal unit of life, because of the then medical certainty that no 6-​month-​old unborn baby had any chance to survive outside the maternal womb: All in me which chose to keep, to lull, to embrace, to love, all in me which carried, preserved, and protected, all in me which imprisoned the whole world in its passionate tenderness, this part of me would not thrust out the child, even though it had died in me. Even though it threatened my life, I could not break, tear out, separate, surrender, open and dilate and yield up a fragment of a life […] this part of me rebelled against pushing out the child. (“Birth”17 75)

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The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. I: 1931–​4 situates childbirth in August 1934 and its unexpurgated version on August 29, whereas Deirdre Bair states that Nin gave birth to a stillborn girl on September 22 after days laboring intermittently because the medication did not work (1995:199–​200). “Birth” is referred to by BI.

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For this woman, the liminal state of pregnancy means being the custodian of growing human life and nurturance in harmonious silence, whereas the irrevocable split between mother and child at this pre-​term delivery means the doubly dark prospects of physical death for the baby and mental death for her. Hence, her birthing body stubbornly resists the traumatic separation, so the woman disobeys the phallocentric language of the male physician with “eyes protruding with anger and fear” (BI 75), when he loudly orders her with imperative words: “ ‘Push, push with all your strength!’ ” (75). The doctor, assisted by his subservient harem of nurses, is irritated and impatient to conclude the obstetric intervention and leave behind the materno-​fetal unit broken into pieces. As cold as the operating table and the birthing room with glacial lighting, the medical personnel are unsympathetic toward the psychological crisis undergone by the parturient woman. Meanwhile, her body temperature rises until the incandescence of fire, as she declares: “The heat of my anger warms me, all the ice and pain are melted in the fury” (78). She hopelessly waits for a gesture of human warmth from unsisterly nurses to alleviate the utmost weariness caused by the unendurable weight of her limbs after eternal hours of cervical dilation:  “My legs felt enormously heavy, like marble columns, like immense marble columns crushing my body. I was pleading for someone to hold them” (76). Nin’s story “Birth,” extracted from her journals, exemplifies a genuine act of Cixous’s Écriture Féminine, where there is no split between the silent female anatomy and the writing mind, but they rather embrace each other to shout and mourn in unison. Thus, the birthing body uses a tentative language of senses and emotions to utter its physical and psychological agony: “I pushed until I heard my bones cracking, until my veins swelled” (76), or the unintelligibility of the brutal organic call of Mother Nature at birth: “The pain makes me cry out. A long animal howl” (78). The story’s unnamed woman even obliterates her wish to die in situ during the operation, because the biological immediacy of parturition defeats all mental activity: “I want to remember all the time why I should want to live. I am all pain and no memory” (78). However, the act of recalling the forward movement at labor occurs and is bathed with amniotic ink. In “Birth,” Anaïs Nin entangles the unborn child’s physical passage through the obscure birth canal to life with its

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mother’s passage through a mental cavern of gloomy shadows, in transit to the extrauterine light guiding her to maternal loss and trauma: I am pushing myself out of the tunnel, or is the child being pushed out of me? […] this pushing in darkness, with a small shaft of light in the eyes like the edge of a knife, the feeling of a knife cutting the flesh, the flesh somewhere is tearing as if it were burned through by a flame, somewhere my flesh is tearing and the blood is spilling out. I am pushing in the darkness, in utter darkness. (77)

Nin’s incisive surgical pen summons her own birthing body from the past to recall subcutaneous sensations of unutterable physical suffering for the mother within this story at the zenith of cervical opening: angry laceration, dismemberment, and hemorrhage of her red-​hot internal genitalia. Like a razor’s edge, the yet unborn child pierces and rips her inside, while travelling along her cervix down to her vagina. This gradual amputation of the materno-​fetal unit at labor also evokes hostility or hatred, from one of its two constituents –​the woman –​to the other –​the baby –​due to the bodily damage to the former provoked by the uncompromising desertion of the latter: “Inside of my body there are fires, there are bruises, the flesh is in pain. The child is not a child, it is a demon strangling me. The demon lies inert at the door of the womb, blocking life, and I cannot rid myself of it” (78). Nin’s authorial genius in translating the timeless agony at parturition into art delivers a twofold interpretation. Firstly, the unborn child is a devilish tormentor, because it does not dwell in the womb anymore but has become alien matter for the mother and has chosen to voyage inside her body. Due to its haste to be outside her intrauterine nest of love, the child is not a vital part of the materno-​fetal unit; thus, it is not hers, it does not double her self nor belong to her any more. Secondly, the story suggests that it is stillborn. The baby is already dead inside the vagina, so it is merely intrusive, inert flesh in the woman’s genitals; it cannot be expelled, so it endangers her own survival. Concurrently, the male intervention to usurp labor and to save the mother’s life is ineffectual, because the doctor is powerless to finalize his surgical operation and her ordeal on the birthing table: “No instrument can help me. His eyes are furious. He would like to take a knife. He has to watch and wait” (78). The unnamed narrator even pictures that men’s impotency at childbirth transforms this good physician into a potential murderer. For her, he could secretly desire

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to kill the castrating parturient woman  –​allied to the law of Mother Nature –​seeking to steal his power as a competent obstetrician. However, in Nin’s story, no man’s commands manage to command the female body, no torture can torture the birthing woman to the limit of complete surrender, no forceps can force the natural birth, but only a mother’s own preternatural strength can eventually trespass the limen of the vagina and deliver the stillborn trapped at the birth canal. Self-​sufficient like a female animal, the woman squeezes her belly with her hands: The womb is stirring and dilating. Drum drum drum drum drum. I am ready! […] There is blood in my eyes. A tunnel. I push into this tunnel. I bite my lips and push. There is a fire and flesh ripping and no air. Out of the tunnel! All my blood is spilling out. Push! Push! Push! It is coming! It is coming! It is coming! I feel the slipperiness, the sudden deliverance, the weight is gone. Darkness. I hear voices. I open my eyes. I hear them saying: “It was a little girl. Better not show it to her.” (78–9)

Alone, the woman ends her story; a story that reunites and intertwines two antagonistic liminal passages  –​to life and to death; passages that should have remained separate. The baby is born dead, the mother outlives its birth, and her trauma begins, surely until she is dead. At the final stage of labor, she was armored by nature to incarnate a brave warrior to gain ground and fight against an unknown enemy: God, biology, fate, or science. Transitorily, she is empowered to push hard and to expel the baby by herself, so she is eased by the final release: This beloved –​yet evil –​ part of herself is no longer inside her body. Although she is alive, she soon returns to the hostile light and coldness of the extrauterine reality for her. The nurses confirm the baby girl’s death, her barrenness as an empty mother and, inadvertently, the prognosis of eternal bereavement: death-​ in-​life. Powerless, the heroine is defeated by the premature delivery and is not rewarded after this perilous journey of mental and physical pain. She feels no bliss, joy, or self-​realization, because the postliminal experience of maternity is aborted by the stillbirth. Before coming back to the truth, the sequence of events, and the sense of female agency in Nin’s journals, the end of “Birth” describes the dead girl like a doll: “It has long eyelashes on its closed eyes, it is perfectly made, and all glistening with the waters of the womb” (79). Thus, poetry ultimately washes away the blood and defers the maternal trauma to a realm of timelessness, untold to the reader.

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This poignant and throbbing story of an unnamed loving mother contrasts with Nin’s apparent carelessness, clinical detachment, and high spirits during her postpartum recovery, despite the nuisance of maternal milk. Her unexpurgated diary is a recital of her curiosity to observe her deformed progeny shortly after its birth: “The head was bigger than the average. It was black. The child had died –​strangled, perhaps, or from the operations. One more day and the tumor in its head would have infected me. I would have died” (UD 381). Nin even shows belligerence toward the helpless dead creature: “I hated it for all the pain it had caused me, and because it was a little girl and I had fancied it to be a boy” (381). Beyond her frivolity on the baby’s sex and the unmaternal absence of the possessive “my” to allude to her child, Nin’s journalized words disclose or fictionalize how she defeated her own certain death, provoked by a presumably diseased offspring, or how she unchained herself from the bondage of motherhood after the hemorrhaging war of childbirth. Bruised yet invincible, she is a heroine who celebrates her epic victory with her husband: “When I saw Hugh again, I wept. He was terrified when he saw all the veins on my face cracked. We drank champagne. I fell asleep. Glory, glory of deliverance. The sleep of deliverance” (383). Next morning, Nin experiences an epiphany of rebirth after her metaphorical death at the birthing table. She even justifies her pre-​term delivery as an abortion thanks to the visitation of Divine Grace through the bright sun of September: “God penetrated my whole body […] I wept with joy. I knew everything then; I knew everything I had done was right” (384). When Nin abandons the clinic to resume writing and her frenetic life with her husband, Rank, Miller, and other intellectuals in Paris, she is overwhelmed by an exulting feeling of relief because she was not devoured by motherhood, so she writes: “I walked with joy at having escaped the great mouth of the monster” (385). Helen Tookey has recollected the cascade of scholars since the 1990s, who have attacked Nin for being a femme fatale, only obsessed with non-​ reproductive sexuality, the antithesis of the maternal, or the reincarnation of the myth of the “child-​murdering witch” (2001: 310). Similarly, Deirdre Bair argues that the account of childbirth in Nin’s diary is “a portrait of monstrous egotism and selfishness, horrifying in its callous indifference […] and cheerfulness at having disposed so relatively easily of the problem”

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(1995: 200). Conversely, Henke claims that “Nin’s third-​term abortion provoked psychological dysphoria and haunting flashbacks expressed in the compulsive need to narrate the birth story” many times to relive the pain of pregnancy-​loss in revised artistic frameworks until the reiterated trauma could be mitigated and made acceptable to her tormented consciousness (2000: 75). Instead of the female gorgon demonized by unsympathetic critical approaches, Nin embodies the paradigm of self-​contradiction and emotional ambivalence after the liberating –​yet piercing –​double surgical intervention of abortion and childbirth, occurring together and fusing female empowerment with harmful post-​traumatic sequelae of maternal guilt, mourning, and remorse. Entangled with her feelings of triumph and relief from the same diary entries, Nin tortures herself and blames her male inseminator for her selfish crime in both journals: “For Henry, for love of Henry, or of my life as a woman, I killed the child. To protect Henry, to be free, I killed the child. Not to be abandoned, I killed the child” (UD 382), which again echoes Nin’s primal trauma: her father’s desertion when she was a little girl. Nevertheless, not becoming a mother could be both her sacrifice for a man and her decision to create her own art freely, or to impregnate her literary production with procreativity. For Susan Friedman, this chapter in Nin’s life transforms her as an artist, because she later adopts a “womb-​based art” or “(pro)creation,” as a self-​conscious form of feminine writing from the female body (1987: 72). Intuitively, Nin experiments with the liminal continuum of childbearing to discover that she only cherishes the doubling of the self involved in pregnancy, because she fears the final split into two individual selves at childbirth and the inhibitions of motherhood. Nin’s wish to return to the materno-​fetal unit after expelling her baby: “This little girl, a prolongation of myself and of Henry, I reabsorbed into myself. It is to remain in me, a part of me. I gathered myself all together again” (UD 382), confirms the sad loss of her gestational bliss from the recent past, or Rank’s theory of the trauma of birth, in Nin’s particular case, for the mother, not for the child. Trickles of grief in her diary also suggest that the stillborn is a ruined artwork for the already unpregnant artist: “Regrets, long dreams of what this little girl might have been. A dead creation, my first dead creation. The deep pain caused by any death, and any destruction” (DI 346). Nin even explores non-​biological alternatives of

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intrauterine nurturance of life to compensate for her voluntary renunciation to maternity: “Perhaps I was designed for other forms of creation. Nature connived to keep me a man’s woman, and not a mother; not a mother to children but to men. Nature shaping my body for the love of man, not of child” (346). Therefore, she becomes the Great Mother, the helper –​not the helped –​upon whom her many “children” depended, including Miller, her therapists, and her own father (Schneider 1978: 12). Irrespective of her ersatz forms of mothering, the reproduction of the same procreative narrative in three different writings shows how Nin needed –​or forced herself –​to write about pregnancy and childbirth to purge her own feelings of cold-​bloodedness and blameworthiness. Consequently, she could have benefited from the panacea of aestheticizing her bodily experiences –​or scripto-​therapy –​to elude mental breakdown and to heal from the self-​ inflicted agony of maternal loss. Therefore, the fictional story “Birth” would confine more truth about the invigorating –​yet painful –​encounter with procreativity for the woman Anaïs, than the artifice created by the heroine-​ narrator-​writer Nin in her autobiographical diaries, where the experience of pregnancy is elevated to liminal art, not destined to be brought to term, not to be enslaved by motherhood.

Chapter 3

Toward a Contemporary Unity between Creativity and Procreativity Margaret Drabble, Elizabeth Baines, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Ilona Karmel, and Cherríe Moraga

The literature written by some women in the second half of the twentieth century challenged traditional limitations of the still patriarchal literary Establishment and newer restrictions imposed by some factions of feminist movements. The former persisted in regulating the subject matters that could be aestheticized and those to be discarded. Meanwhile, the latter discouraged the female choices of becoming a mother and writing about maternity, because this literary topic was perceived as having a misogynist connection to the monolithic ideology that sexual reproduction represents women’s only destiny. Among the anatomical experiences where femaleness and biology converge and merge, pregnancy and childbirth stand out, but yet, they were doubly a social taboo and an unartistic, repudiated narrative progeny after World War II. However, Adrienne Rich stresses that the body has remained as a fundamental problem for women, particularly “its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desires, […] its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings” (1986:  284). Furthermore, Rich believes that female physicality –​including “waves of tenderness in the uterus” stemming from biological maternity –​can be converted into power and knowledge (284). Therefore, both the presence and the absence of the liminal experiences of gestation and labor have persisted as vital concerns in the lives of many women and as frequent imperatives for creativity of female authors, despite pressures to avoid these topics from some men and some feminists.

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The postwar history of North America and Great Britain is written by arduous fights for women’s rights –​struggles which painfully labor an offspring of titanic milestones toward today’s victory of gender equality, at least nominally or inked by law. Satisfying, healthy pregnancies and childbirths, or the alternative of non-​reproduction –​based on women’s agency and freedom from religious or social impositions –​stand out among the vindications successfully reached by feminist movements and the so-​ called sexual revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, before these decades, women were kindly called to embrace the phenomenon of the “Baby Boom.” Therefore, the female population still bore the almost compulsory burden of becoming mothers in postwar times, supposedly to maximize their own wellbeing and, in that way, to ensure political objectives of growth and fecundity for conservative European nations and North America, which continued to force women to comply with the sacred patriarchal institutions of marriage and motherhood. Margarete Sandelowski argues that maternity was women’s raison d’être in that particular historical period, and that the American birth rate rose to unprecedented levels after the demographic drama of the recent armed conflict as “the result of a need to make up for the deprivations of war and the horror of the atomic bomb by extolling the richness and vitality of family life” (1984: 74). Meanwhile, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique identifies the so-​called “problem that has no name” for U.S. suburban mothers and wives during the 1950s, based upon fixed gender roles that defined their identity, leading to their dissatisfaction, alienation, and even to mental breakdowns and suicides. Promoted by the media and cultural discourses, the U.S. female population had to embrace an ideal of “unique femininity” –​innate to their sexual nature being different from men and its passive receptivity –​that was to devote themselves to their own beauty and to nurture many children, as giving birth was the only “dream” of creation or of a future for women to achieve personal self-​realization, because they had no wishes of their own, other than being good wives and mothers (Friedan 2010: 42, 45). To destroy this reductionist mystique, Friedan and other feminists demonstrated that women had ambitions: achieving professional careers and vocational ventures –​including writing –​or earning their own financial independence from male breadwinners, irrespective of other life choices, including marrying or not, and birthing and raising children or not. For Lise Vogel,

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the campaign to bring pregnancy within the scope of equality norms and to ensure job security and benefits –​in the areas of unemployment, health, and disability –​for gestating women workers, was a main attainment for feminists during the 1970s in the United States that facilitated by law that expectant mothers were not discriminated at work by employers or courts (1990: 13). Despite being legally protected, pregnant women in contemporary times are still required to follow prenatal advice from physicians, and to abide by social pressures making them liable for the duty of ensuring the proper physical development and wellbeing of their embryos/​fetuses throughout the liminal process of gestation, all the while their reproductive bodies are also publicly scrutinized in terms of their “healthy” habits, diets, or (mis)conduct. Mary Ruth Marotte concludes that even today, people read the gestating anatomy as hyper-​sexualized or de-​sexualized (2008: 3). The swollen belly is viewed both as a sacred chalice and as a disgustingly erotic artifact, although beauty standards in consumer-​oriented magazines on childbearing, paradoxically, convey that simultaneous pregnancy and thinness to erase the proof of gestation are equitable goals (5). Therefore, an expectant mother still endures the stressful social dynamic between the enclosure of her gestating/​birthing body and the disclosure of the blessing of institutional motherhood, potentially affecting her mental health, the emotional bond with her unborn child, and the response to her future maternity. A woman’s choice of induced abortion and her democratic access to contraceptive methods have been fought for and legitimized by feminist movements, in constant battle against antagonistic forces, like the traditional family institution, the Church, pro-​natal organizations, and right-​ wing political parties, in gradually more permissive and secular Western societies throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In 1967, Great Britain was the first country to decriminalize the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. By including women in the policy-​making process to legalize the termination of gestation, British feminism succeeded in turning abortion into a fundamental right of the female population, but it did not manage to reduce the intervention of the medical profession with respect to the expectant mother’s individual decisions about her reproductive body (Stetson 2011: 154). Before 1967, British physicians, the legal system, and the media –​promoting sensationalist accounts of illegal abortions –​expressed

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their horror at women who voluntarily ended their pregnancies, while demonizing physicians performing illegal abortions ( Jones 2011: 196). In 1973, as part of the national debate, the U.S. Supreme Court declared abortion lawful under specific circumstances in the United States in its opinion Roe v. Wade. Until then, it was also difficult and dangerous for many American women to terminate their pregnancies, so “tens of thousands of them annually poured into emergency rooms,” with women of color as expectant mothers being at a greater risk of death from less safe illegal abortions than their more privileged white counterparts (Greenfield 1999: 22). Another priority for feminists has been the availability of birth control, or women’s full command over their fertility, by means of prophylactic devices, the barrier method of the diaphragm inside the vagina, and oral contraceptives. Nevertheless, most Western women had to wait for more women-​friendly, liberal governments after the 1950s to have free access to contraception. In 1960, the F.D.A. approved the Pill in the United States. This revolutionary achievement not only curbed large-​sized families from the late “Baby Boom” –​citing the dangers of overpopulation in North America –​but also encouraged the freedom of premarital sexual activities among young people, and enabled women to complete their higher education and have longer professional careers before voluntarily accepting the feminine mystique of marriage, childbearing, and motherhood. Lesley Hall argues that, although available in England since 1961, society’s hostility against the Pill there, unlike its rejection of abortion, vanished by the 1970s, and that birth control services in London proved the cost-​effectiveness of contraception in reducing unwanted pregnancies (2000: 170, 178). Nevertheless, the prescription of the Pill was first available for married couples to control national natality rates during the 1960s and, afterwards, for young single people in the 1970s to enjoy non-​reproductive sexuality. Despite these advancements in women’s rights, contraception was still controversial. For conservative Western elites that still preached sexual restraint, birth control incited people to immorality and degeneracy. Particularly among teenagers, illegitimate births did increase, while the paradigm of the single mother continued to be stigmatized and linked to her “bad character” or low income (Hall 2000: 171). Unmarried mothers were even believed to be in need of clinical treatment in Britain, because

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their promiscuity meant that they suffered personality disorders, so they were often forced to marry before the baby was born, although such unions often ended in separation or divorce (Cook 2005: 288). Meanwhile, women of color migrating to Great Britain from former colonies, and those from racial minorities living in the United States, were discriminated against and suffered as a result of eugenic ideologies or practices that were intended to preserve the whiteness of Anglo-​Saxon nations. A key demand of women’s liberation movements was, indeed, to avoid forced sterilization, which was still sometimes imposed upon poor or ethnic women as a precondition to access abortion (Hall 2000: 177). The 1980s featured the return of right-​ wing governments to Great Britain and the United States, which glorified reproductive sexuality and conservative family values. Although partly unsympathetic to both contraception and abortion, Western societies were, however, reluctant to relinquish the feminist victories regarding women’s rights over their sexual freedom and procreative bodies. A transcendental preoccupation of women and most feminists is childbirth. As a rite of passage, it was not typically a life-​threatening experience anymore, because of the dramatic decrease of mortality rates for both the mother and the child after World War II in Western nations. Nevertheless, birthing a baby was not necessarily an act of female empowerment, an experience of personal self-​realization, or a beautiful episode in many women’s life narratives. Instead, it was perceived by some as a bloodstained battle against the interventionism of invasive physicians and hospitalized childbirths. Sandelowski reviews how gynecologists and obstetricians in the 1940s and 1950s advocated for a psychosomatic approach to explore and treat pregnant/​birthing women. This scientific proposal established that the soma and the psyche are closely intertwined, so they should not be separated for diagnostic and prognostic purposes. Accordingly, psychological factors and stressors may affect the etiology of bodily diseases and organic processes, like pregnancy and childbirth, whereas physiological elements and symptoms of illness may negatively influence the mental health of the individual. The psychosomatic approach reinforced the view that childbearing was not a wholly normal state, but an emotional condition that required medical treatment and surveillance (Sandelowski 1984: 60). These hypotheses contributed to perpetuate the belief that

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pregnancy was a physically/​mentally debilitating pathological condition, while expectant mothers themselves were powerless patients in the expert hands of the (male) medical profession. Physicians investigated and prevented the anxiety of pregnant women, like their fears of delivering a child or of pain during labor (85). Nevertheless, natural childbirth movements1 spread during the second half of the twentieth century in Great Britain and North America to counterattack the interventionism of gynecologists and obstetricians in women’s procreative health. These groups criticized the use of medical technology, anesthesia, and surgical operations, like Cesarean sections or episiotomy,2 to invade the natural act of childbirth. Their advocates also accused physicians of heightening the existing feelings of fear and anger in expectant mothers, or their sense of powerlessness while delivering their children in hospitals. Then, home births appeared with the desire of preventing and reducing labor pain, and they promised satisfaction, pleasure, and happiness in birth-​giving, so words like “exhilaration” or “ecstasy” replaced physical suffering or terror to describe women’s procreativity (Sandelowski 1984: xii–​xiii). Natural childbirth movements have insisted on the benefits of home deliveries as the right decision for the physical and emotional health of mothers and babies against the male business of usurping women’s powers at labor. Similarly, a main battle fought by feminists since the 1960s –​extended to women’s health movements and government policymakers –​is the de-​medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth; to define them as safe physiological processes, rather than as pathologies (Treichler 1990: 121, 131). Clare Hanson argues that the Natural Childbirth Association in Great Britain, founded by Prunella Briance in 1956, not only claimed that child mortality decreased thanks to non-​interventionist approaches at labor, 1

2

After World War II, the obstetrician Grantly Dick-​Read created the natural childbirth movement in Great Britain. Meanwhile, the anthropologist Margaret Mead inspired women to experience childbirth at home, not as mindless female animals or objects manipulated by obstetricians, but as mindful beings, capable of controlling their bodies (Friedan 2010: 116). The incision between the vagina and anus to enlarge the birth canal for the unborn child.

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but also encouraged antenatal classes to teach pregnant women skills in relaxation, breathing, or massage; to inform them about the birthing process; to allow group discussion; to share first-​hand experiences; and to build up self-​confidence before delivering their babies (2004: 142). As a valuable life-​testimony for female authors, a legitimate claim for feminists, and precious memories for most mothers, natural births are viewed as desirable to ensure women’s agency, full consciousness, and intimidate narratives with white ink during the event of labor. Yet, this alternative remains as a marginal option for childbirth, because deliveries attended by obstetricians at hospital have prevailed as women’s main choice, at least, until contemporary times. Elaine Showalter compares the intellectual vigor of postwar American women writers with the traditionalism and anti-​experimentalism of their British counterparts, less involved in feminist movements (2009: 259). Consequently, the white ink of the procreative body would not have impregnated women’s literature in Great Britain. Although there was a relaxation of taboos, including (non-​)reproductive sexuality, Showalter contends that there was “a revival of the Victorian idea that female experience” was “narrow and insignificant,” so if this is deliberately chosen by the woman writer, she “diminishes her own potential and restricts herself to a cultural ghetto,” because freedom for her actually means to be able to select masculine subject matters in literature (2009: 259). Nevertheless, there have been innovative initiatives from British women writers to denounce the stigmatization and victimization of gestating/​birthing mothers in postwar societies. This chapter explores narratives of pregnancy and childbirth by educated, upper-​middle class, and white women in England: Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone and Elizabeth Baines’s The Birth Machine. These two novels, respectively, problematize the occurrence of an unexpected pregnancy out of wedlock and the ordeal of hospital childbirth, which thwarts a woman’s intimate encounter with her own birthing body. The assumption of the universality of the experiences of gestation and parturition as an essentialist liminal continuum –​equal for all women –​is also questioned by the individuality and subjectivity of each expectant mother. The situation of every individual woman is conditioned by her own perception of the doubling and split of her self during childbearing,

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by her personal relationship with her embryo/​fetus, and by (un)avoidable interferences from external pressures or social forces. Indeed, the rite of passage to motherhood –​or ideally to mothering –​dramatically changes according to a unique configuration for each future mother within a wide spectrum of variables, like nationality, family, ancestry, age, profession, marital status, social class, cultural and educational background, sexual orientation, religion, race, ethnicity, and historical determinants. Nevertheless, bourgeois female voices of European origin have dominated the still insufficient narratives on pregnancy and childbirth in the second half of the twentieth century. Consequently, this chapter also rescues exceptional testimonies of expectant mothers from the racial/​ethnic diversity found in Western nations, though typically in conjunction with adverse factors of social exclusion, poverty, and emotional distress, or even with atrocious practices of genocidal cleansing during World War II. Accordingly, this study delves into the procreative literature of women from the rich multiculturality within the United States, impregnated with hyphenated constructions of dual female identity and, thus, with dual prenatal/​natal experiences in their writings: Asian-​American thanks to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior; African-​American thanks to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved; Jewish-​American thanks to Ilona Karmel’s An Estate of Memory; and Mexican-​American thanks to Cherríe Moraga’s Waiting in the Wings. Most women writers of color or from non-​majority ethnicities narrate unregulated pregnancies and natural childbirths, characterized by multiple forms of slavery, gender violence, dehumanization, and social stigmatization, due to sex, race, and sexual orientation, which are stressors that jeopardize their experiences of gestation and parturition, or their maternal rights. Nonetheless, the marginality and vulnerability, inherent in their racial, ethnic, or sexual otherness, invigorate them with courage and impregnate them with greater (pro)creative powers to deliver free, white-​inked liminal narratives about pregnancy and childbirth, because they would suffer less from inhibiting social, family, and editorial pressures. The following narratives on pregnancy and childbirth defy the patriarchal ideology of sexual reproduction as women’s only destiny, and the denial of motherhood/​mothering by fascism, heteronormativity, and some feminists, because these stories speak a common mother tongue against

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the inkless procreative body, and on behalf of the desirable white ink of women’s plural maternal choices.

Margaret Drabble and Elizabeth Baines: (Pro)creative Boundaries and Escape After World War II, many autobiographies and fiction by women from Western countries revolved around graduate mothers and their dissatisfaction with the patriarchal institution of marriage and their domestic burdens, including procreation. Instead, the British author Margaret Drabble (1939–​) rescues and transplants the Victorian plot of the young Fallen Woman to the historical period of the sexual revolution and second-​wave feminism in England during the 1960s, to offer an alternative viewpoint with The Millstone (1965): an unmarried girl who rises to self-​knowledge and maternal bliss, when she chooses  –​after a one-​ night stand –​to have a baby alone. Rosamund Stacey is an upper-​middle class  Cambridge graduate and a young scholar, who is writing a PhD dissertation on Elizabethan poetry. She lives in a London flat, emancipated or even estranged from her parents, who are socialist academicians gone to Africa. She is not the paradigmatic victim seduced, deserted, and ruined by a womanizer, but an economically independent woman, who is empowered to choose by herself about her professional career, her body, and her sexual life. In fact, Drabble allows herself, as a writer, to be inventive in terms of procreativity thanks to this extravagant choice of a heroine. Within the realistic context of ignorant, low-​class teenage girls driven to the still tragedy of unmarried motherhood in the 1960s, Rosamund is in her twenties, sensitive to feminist vindications, and affiliated with England’s academic and social elite by birth and education, when she decides alone not to be driven to abortion or a loveless marriage merely to avoid the stigma of illegitimate pregnancy and childbirth. Instead, she embraces her destiny and the creative potential of becoming a single mother –​to love and be loved by her baby –​during and beyond the liminal state of childbearing.

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Rosamund defines herself as an industrious doctoral researcher, a competent reader, a teacher, and a literary critic, but she is not a truly creative author, although she is surrounded by an artistically impregnating circle of bohemian writers. Paradoxically, she is accidentally doomed to procreativity, as a result of fate and free will. Rosamund is, simultaneously, dating both Roger and Joe, but she avoids having sex with either of these men. Despite the climate of tacit permissiveness toward premarital sexual affairs and the availability of birth control methods in postwar Britain, she remains a virgin, who had been reluctant to feel both erotic pleasure and emotional commitment to any man, when she has unprotected sex with a casual acquaintance: George Matthews, a B.B.C. radio announcer. Drabble’s novel begins with Rosamund’s mental introspection after discovering that she is expecting a baby: “My career has always been marked by a strange mixture of confidence and cowardice” (The Millstone3 7). Her innate dualism between self-​assertion and self-​effacement –​ reproduced throughout the novel –​also presides over a new dilemma in her life: keeping or getting rid of her unborn child. Rosamund’s “cowardice” implies victimization, when she confesses to herself that being pregnant is the chastisement for having led a sexless life until then, for not having lost her virginity in due time with her first boyfriend Hamish: My crime was my suspicion, my fear, my apprehensive terror of the very idea of sex [although] I liked men and was forever in and out of love for years […] I walked around with a scarlet letter embroidered upon my bosom, visible enough in the end, but the A stood for Abstinence, not for Adultery. In the end I even came to believe that I got it thus, my punishment, because I had dallied and hesitated and trembled for so long. Had I rushed in regardless, at eighteen, full of generous passion, as other girls do, I would have got away with it too. But being at heart a Victorian, I paid the Victorian penalty. (TM  21–​2)

As a knowledgeable scholar, Rosamund alludes to the symbolism behind the “A” letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romance The Scarlet Letter (1850), where its heroine Hester Prynne transforms the stigma of “Adultery” into “Able,” to raise her daughter Pearl alone but unmolested, to survive despite religious intolerance in seventeenth-​century Puritan 3

The Millstone is hereafter referred to by TM.

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New England, and to grow herself as a free-​thinking woman. Expecting a child after only one sexual encounter implies the oxymoronic retribution of Rosamund’s sinful Victorian maidenhood, unlike Hester’s curse after having eaten the fruit of forbidden extramarital sex. The event of her unplanned pregnancy also reminds Drabble’s introspective heroine of the long shadow of reproductive sexuality in women’s lives, and that she had hitherto neglected her physical self. Rosamund is, indeed, brought to admit that “she has lost control of her own destiny,” so she is humbled by her body, which forces “a reluctant admission of femaleness upon her” (Showalter 2009: 250). Her stubborn mental denial that she could be with child is contradicted by the early physiological signs of the first trimester of her pregnancy, which diagnose the supremacy of her own female biology over her intellectual mind that had, thus far, ruled her life: I had dismissed [expecting a child] as being too ridiculous and unlikely a symptom of my sense of doom to be worth serious attention. When I was finally obliged to acknowledge my condition, I was for the first time in my life completely at a loss […] I even wondered if all the symptoms from which I suffered might not be purely psychological. In the end it was the fear of being made a fool of by my subconscious that drove me to the doctor. (TM 38, 40)

Whereas Rosamund’s mind is hers  –​sovereign and strong despite fears and inhibitions –​she apprehends that her new bodily condition weakens her free will and, inevitably, drives her to the authoritarian domain of the (male) medical profession, where she “would be reprimanded like a school child for [her] state” (10), due to the natural alliance between patriarchy and medicine. Suddenly, Rosamund observes that there are pregnant women everywhere and receives visual stimuli, like maternity shops and boutiques for babies in her neighborhood, which reproach her brain with thoughts of guilt over her physical disgust about children. Before visiting a physician, she attempts to abort to prove to herself that “choice” –​non-​ reproductive sex –​may defeat “fate” –​conception and motherhood: I knew vaguely about gin, that it was supposed to do something or other to the womb, quinine or something, I believe, and that combined with a hot bath it sometimes works, so I decided that other girls had gone through with it, so why not me. (10)

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Nevertheless, Rosamund’s lack of communication with her acquaintances and family, together with her trust in second-​hand narratives of ineffective abortive methods, are confronted with more bad luck: the unexpected visit of her friends to drink her gin, so she cannot get rid of the embryo inside her uterus. Then, she is paradoxically forced to unbalance her dualism at war:  “Confidence” defeats “cowardice.” The social consumption of alcohol, which involuntarily aborts her killing ablution in isolation, awakens Rosamund’s dormant self-​reliance, proclaiming that the final winner is the power of her own choice to become a mother: In that state of total inebriation it seemed to me that a baby might be no such bad thing, however impractical and impossible. My sister had babies, nice babies, and seemed to like them. My friends had babies. There was no reason why I shouldn’t have one either, it would serve me right, I thought, for having been born a woman in the first place. I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t a woman, could I, however much I might try from day to day to avoid the issue? (19)

Although Margaret Drabble here recurs to the dangerously essentialist conflation between the female and the maternal, Rosamund’s mental reflections confirm that pregnancy can create an awareness of her previously alienated physical self, and help her to overcome her inhibitions about her own female identity. Els Maeckelberghe contends that until then, the heroine’s anatomy was a device for walking around or sitting at a table in the British Museum, but while it gestates a child, it is present and expanding to connect her to life and to admit the importance of the female body, as the most obvious difference from men: Women bear children, while men cannot (1998: 77–​9). For Rosamund, entering the liminal state of pregnancy means the liberating act of embracing her full womanhood, linked to procreativity. In fact, Drabble views motherhood “not as an institution under male control,” but “as the relationship of a woman to her powers of reproduction and to her children,” so that having a baby is not an end in itself, but an effective way of growing and coping with change, or of coming of age and learning to live, a transit which remains unavailable to men (Rayson 1978: 43). Despite the apparent victory of maternity, Rosamund does not converse with her gestating body throughout the novel, although her mental activity never ceases during

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her pregnancy. She often speculates about motherhood as an impediment or a spur for her promising career as a young scholar: “I saw no reason why my proposed career of thesis, assistant lectureship, lectureship and so on should be interrupted: I saw a few non-​reasons, I must admit, but in my wiser moments I knew they would not weigh heavily enough against my talents” (TM 56). Surprisingly, it is her academic confidence what reconciles her gestating body with her mental idea of maternity, when she wonders: “My Elizabethan poets did not begin to pale into insignificance in comparison with the thought of buying nappies. On the contrary, I found I was working extremely well at this time and with great concentration and clarity” (76). Sümeyra Buran Yilmaz argues that, despite being considered a “social crime,” illegitimate pregnancy helps Rosamund to focus her energy on her studies, so she completes her dissertation ahead of schedule, because she trusts that she can run both her career and motherhood (2014:  508). Therefore, the heroine’s intellectual industriousness and the prospect of expecting a child –​without either financial or sentimental dependence on her absent inseminator –​would not be irreconcilable, at least, during the liminal state of pregnancy, because Rosamund’s safe mental abstractions are not threatened yet by the advent of the difficulties of mothering, or by the concreteness of the daily routine of rearing a child. Before the materno-​fetal unit splits, she weathers a potential psychological crisis between her professional self and her physical self, which could have led her to mental breakdown or to maladjustment in her new role as a mother. Moreover, these months of prenatal speculation also prepare her to envision her future identity as a working woman, who is not a victim forced by biology or by the social stigma of unwed motherhood to relinquish her aspirations to become a scholar. Nevertheless, Rosamund eventually confesses that the customary bodily nuisances of her third term of pregnancy not only hinder the completion of her academic goals, but also affect her entire life, because they slow down her mental faculties and interfere with enjoyable or routine activities: I felt at times too tired to read. I ate more and more iron pills but they did not seem to have much effect. In the end I decided that I had merely got stale through too much concentration on too few things, and that I ought to branch out a little. It

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Domestic occupations traditionally attributed to expectant mothers, like knitting, weaving, or basketwork, do not please or entertain Rosamund, who rather follows the advice of her friend Lydia to do jigsaw puzzles instead: “I became addicted […] it was a soothing, time-​consuming process, and when I went to bed I would dream not of George, nor of babies locked away from me where I couldn’t feed them, not even childbirth, but of pieces of blue sky edged with bits of tree” (101–​2). This preference displays not only Rosamund’s contempt for prenatal accomplishments imposed upon women by patriarchal forces, but also the victory of the “A” scarlet letter of her own: She is Able to reunite the social burden of her unwed pregnancy with her proud status as an intellectual individual, who chooses activities that stimulate her brain, not others that would reconcile her with misogynist domestic conventions on motherhood in postwar Britain. Curiously, these puzzles also allow Rosamund to delight in a transitory state of oblivion. She remains sane by not thinking about the trial of parturition or other concerns regarding her current and future life as a mother, such as nursing her baby or being obsessed with its absent father. Nonetheless, intelligent games and the preservation of her bright academic career are not the only learning experiences for the heroine, because her pregnancy also triggers an enriching process of self-​education about herself, other women, and the entire human race. Rosamund’s harmonious pair of roles –​an expectant mother and a scholar –​would not contemplate other feminine functions, like being a lover, a girlfriend, or a wife, because they would be hostile to or pervert the perfection of becoming a working parent. She refuses to tell George that she is expecting his baby and avoids any contact with him after their only sexual encounter. Valerie Myer posits that Rosamund descends from her “ivory tower of scholarship” and, instinctively, loves her unborn child, but she cannot extend this new-​found capacity of loving to anybody else –​not even to her baby’s father –​because “maternal impulse” is both less complicated and stronger than sexual desire

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in Drabble’s novels (1974: 21, 84). Catching a reluctant husband for a loveless marriage to comply with the normativity of marriage is not an option for Rosamund either, because she willingly places herself in the margins of patriarchal conventions as a single mother, while she is already economically self-​sufficient thanks her high birth and academic career. Institutions other than marriage are also affected by the untold news of her pregnancy; namely, family and society. In fact, Rosamund expresses no joy or excitement but rather dismay when realizing that her words must precede her swelling, gestating body, which will soon speak by itself: Once I had thus decided to have the baby –​or rather failed to decide not to have it –​ I had to face the problem of publicity. It was not the kind of event one can conceal forever, and I was already over three months gone […] I could not bear the idea of the fuss. I hate to cause trouble. (TM 45)

To keep the cocoon of the materno-​fetal unit to herself, Rosamund prefers not to tell the good tidings of her pregnancy to anyone, because this oneness is also her intrauterine protection against external aggressions. Therefore, her pre-​existing misanthropic obsession not to disturb or talk to people, delays the disclosure of her future maternity. Unlike her mental confidence when she is alone, the final revelation of her pregnancy to others –​for instance when she tells Roger –​still shows fissures in her determination to become a single mother: “ ‘It might be quite nice to have a baby,’ I said, thinking that if I said this to everybody for the next six months I might convince both myself and them” (53). Whereas Rosamund has little difficulty informing the circle of her liberal friends, who react with a “mixture of curiosity, admiration, pity and indifference” (69), she stubbornly does not contemplate telling either her parents living in Africa or her brother nearby about her pregnancy. Conversely, the heroine contacts the only family member she relies upon to seek her support: “My sister […] would be sympathetic, as she had always sung to me the praises of motherhood and domesticity” (85). However, the balm of sorority to reassure Rosamund cannot be administered, because instead of comforting her, her sister Beatrice writes back and encourages her to carry the child to term, but only to give it up to adoption after its birth, because Beatrice believes that Rosamund had not seriously considered

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the stigma of unwed motherhood for her and her offspring. Surprisingly, this is the spur of pride that Rosamund needs to vanquish her cowardice about her new maternal self and her future life as a parent: I had not asked for advice about my own child: I had not asked for advice, I was quite capable of advising myself. Her letter did in fact serve one purpose: it revealed to me the depth of my determination to keep the baby […] based […] on an extraordinary confidence in myself, in a conviction, quite irrational, that no adoptive parents could ever be as excellent as I myself would be. (88–​9)

Rosamund understands that her self-​reliance eventually wins the war against her fears and doubts about being a woman and becoming a mother, because she realizes that she can incarnate an excellent (expectant) mother, not the careless girl whimsically wanting a baby that her sister had depicted in her admonishing letter. Thus, Rosamund defiantly discards all alternatives proposed by her unmotherly entourage to prevent the burden of maternity and to preserve her upper-​middle class respectability: abortion, adoption, or marrying her inseminator. Moreover, this letter breaks Rosamund’s emotional bonds with Beatrice and with the rest of her family, who are neither informed about her pregnancy, nor about the delivery and illness of her baby after birth. Instead of returning to England to support or scold their daughter, her liberal parents move from Africa to India, although they learn the news of Rosamund’s pregnancy through her physician, an old acquaintance of theirs. Susan Spitzer analyzes that the heroine’s wish for a baby is bound up with the notion of independence or a dream of autonomy: She wants to be emancipated from her absent parents, when she understands that she does not need them because of their partial dedication to her, so she replaces this dependence on her mother and father with the fantasy of exclusive love coming from her baby (1978: 231). The materno-​fetal unit is, thus, strengthened by Rosamund’s isolation from her family and promises maternal bliss for her and her child postnatally. Conversely, her prenatal process of self-​education excludes building other emotional bonds or objects of affection in her future life. Beyond her family, her inseminator, and her friends, the heroine further learns about herself and human nature, because her pregnancy forces her to interact with physicians, nurses, and other pregnant women within

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the social context of the National Health Service (N.H.S.) in Great Britain in the 1960s. During her first visit to Dr. Esmond, Rosamund informs him that she is not married, and she reports: “He shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger, and said did my parents know” (TM 44). Apart from confirming that he will find a hospital bed for the delivery expected in early March, the physician is allied to patriarchal society to label Rosamund with the stigma of being an unmarried mother, and to encourage her to give the baby to adoption. Whereas she is not surprised by this male reaction, she is not prepared to be inspected by five students in an uncomfortable medical session. Actually, this clinical encounter affects more her mind than her gestating body: I lay there, my eyes shut, and quietly smiling to conceal my outrage, because I knew that these things must happen, and that doctors must be trained, and that medical students must pass examinations; and he asked them questions about the height of the fundus, and could they estimate the length of pregnancy, and what about the pelvis. They all said I had a narrow pelvis, and I lay there and listened to them and felt them, with no more protest than if I had been a corpse examined by […] pathologists for the cause of death. But I was not dead, I was alive …(67)

This experience evidences the dehumanizing sensations felt by the pregnant patient as a subject during the obstetric examination. Rosamund is kindly forced to remain voiceless and paralyzed  –​almost like inert matter –​while her body is inspected by untrained (male) hands, so her physical self is merely an object without power to express discomfort or discontent. In fact, she asks herself why she –​an intellectual woman –​ and not any other expectant mother, is the one who must endure such a humiliating ordeal. The aftermath of World War II marks the birth of the N.H.S. to provide comprehensive healthcare –​including antenatal, birth and postnatal services –​to all women irrespective of their origin, social status, or ethnicity. Rosamund’s visits to the antenatal clinic have a public dimension and even the potential of creating a classless, sisterly community of expectant mothers united by common feelings: white and colored, privileged and destitute. Indeed, the heroine’s liberal education toward social equality from her socialist parents, would enable her to communicate and build bonds of mutual support with anonymous pregnant women, who could be more sympathetic than her own family or friends.

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However, the antenatal scenes in The Millstone reveal that for Rosamund, “her class identity is stronger than her gender identity, that any feeling of solidarity is undercut by a contradictory combination of guilt about her privilege and pride in her difference” (Cosslett 1991: 101). Instead of scrutinizing her own expanding belly, Rosamund observes the physiological condition of some expectant mothers in the waiting room of her clinic, whom she catalogues as a “variety of human misery” (TM 64). Though she pities them, she is not at ease in this situation and distances herself from their suffering to stress their otherness, in terms of physical and mental health, beauty and social status: I was in no mood for finding people cheering, attractive or encouraging, but the truth is that they looked to me an unbelievably depressed and miserable lot. One hears much, though mostly from the interested male, about the beauty of a woman with child, ships in full sail, and all that kind of metaphorical euphemism, and I suppose that from time to time on the faces of well-​fed, well-​bred young ladies I have seen a certain peaceful glow, but the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on the other side. Anemia and exhaustion were written on most countenances: the clothes were dreadful, the legs swollen, the bodies heavy and unbalanced. (64)

At the democratic N.H.S.  clinic, Rosamund’s first (mis)perceptions foster differences, not similarities between her self and women of other origins or lower social classes. Nevertheless, the heroine sees the reality about maternity to declare an untold truth:  Idyllic images of bliss and beauty during pregnancy are manufactured by men’s self-​serving interests to ensure sexual reproduction and higher natality rates. Meanwhile, Tess Cosslett states that Drabble constructs these other female characters in the narrow terms of Rosamund’s own perspective to convey a message of repudiation, loathing, or ridicule for these disgusting, passive victims (1991:  101–​2). Indeed, the description of a resigned and aghast black woman4 “with the peasant acceptance of physical life of which one hears, but with a look of wide-​eyed dilating terror” (TM 65), strengthens the heroine’s dehumanization of other pregnant patients, who must endure 4

For Cosslett, Rosamund is racist, because she reads the silent black woman’s feelings from her face and constructs a new stereotype of primitive motherhood, plagued with pain and horror (1994: 28).

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aloof judgments from the healthy and wealthy Rosamund, as well as from doctors. Cosslett insists on the victory of class and individualism over maternal solidarity in Drabble’s novel, because its heroine’s feminism is individualistic: She combines career and motherhood, but she separates herself from other less privileged mothers (1994:  98–​9). Nonetheless, Rosamund admits that, although she does not carry the same heavy burden and has nothing in common with them, she entered the same female community of reproductive bodies in liminal captivity: “I disliked the look of them, that I felt a stranger and a foreigner there, and yet I was one of them, I was like that too, I was trapped in a human limit for the first time in my life, and I was going to have to learn how to live inside it” (TM 65). Previously unconcerned about the reality of her own swollen belly, Rosamund also understands other expectant mothers one month before parturition, when she experiences the typical aches and discomforts of late pregnancy: “I felt thoroughly annoyed; I could understand, in this condition, why women are, as they certainly are, such perpetual complaining bores” (101). Next encounters with other pregnant women even confirm Rosamund’s likeness to them. Initially, she hates listening to their first or second-​hand stories about labor and babies. Yet later, when she engages in their conversations, she confesses that pregnancy and the idea of childbirth not only invade her physical self, but also nourish her mental self with joy and enhance curiosity, communication, and the sense of oneness among women: The degrading truth was that there was no topic more fascinating to us in that condition [..] So strong became the pull of nature that by the end of the six months’ attendance I felt more in common with the ladies at the clinic than with my own acquaintances. (68)

In short, these antenatal episodes and the constraints of the third trimester of pregnancy enable Rosamund to be aware of her maternal femaleness and to sympathize with other expectant mothers, leading, thus, to her personal growth. Nurses and midwives are also ambiguous characters with whom Rosamund must interact at the N.H.S. While having the first conversation with one of them to complete administrative procedures, the heroine corrects her –​without shame or vacillation –​that she is not a married

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but a single mother: “ ‘I’m not Mrs. Stacey, I’m Miss’ ” (66). Moreover, Rosamund observes the prejudices of the midwife –​as a patriarchal agent of strict gender normativity –​against her social status and careless maternal choice: “She saw me […] as one of these rich dissolute young girls about town, and I was rather relieved that her profession prevented her from inquiring why I had not done the sensible and expected thing and gone and had an expensive abortion” (66). This hostile situation suggests not only Rosamund’s wounded high-​class pride, but also her refusal to conform to stereotypes of deviant femininity and motherhood coined by misogynist conventions. Her final confrontation with female healthcare professionals is the delivery of her child Octavia. Paradoxically, Drabble chooses not to profusely describe this episode, as if her heroine had fallen into a sweet state of narrative oblivion after being rewarded with her daughter: “I suppose the end of anyone’s first pregnancy is frightening. I cannot quite remember how frightened I was, because it is one of the horrible tricks of nature to make one forget instantly after childbirth all that one had feared and suffered” (102). However, Rosamund is irritated by the scarlet initial “U” for Unmarried that she observes at the end of her hospital bed. As a lucid first-​person narrator, she does also remember the hostility and inefficiency of nurses and midwives. Instead of reporting pain and terror or raptures when labor contractions begin, Rosamund is only concerned not to disturb ambulance men and healthcare staff, because “It was a quarter past eleven, a time for all good citizens to be asleep” (106). Upon the arrival at the maternity ward, she is informed that she is the only birthing woman that night, so she smiles: “unsure whether [the nurse] was expressing pleasure or annoyance at having something to do” (109). To strengthen her antagonism toward the N.H.S., Rosamund is also treated like an invalid, and she is told that she is forced to use a wheelchair: “ ‘You’re our responsibility now, we can’t allow you to walk’ ” (109). She is soon surrounded by an army of healthcare staff to take control of her delivery and to mollify her, yet simultaneously to ignore her: About five nurses arrived with the pethidine, which they administered; then they all sat in a row in the corridor outside and started to talk about their boy friends. I listened to their conversations, trying to distract myself from sensations that did not

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seem quite reasonable and endurable; and after a while the drug began to work: the pain did not diminish but my resistance to it disappeared, and every two minutes regularly it flowed through me as thought I were some other person […] I just lay there. (110)

The opioid contributes to numb Rosamund’s pain and to detach her thinking mind from her birthing body. Although she surrenders to hospital protocols, she remains conscious. The effects of the analgesic substance do not last long, while the negligence of absent nurses triggers the normal course of a natural childbirth with nearly no intervention of patriarchal hands or drugs: When I heard myself start to moan rather violently, and they all came rushing back and within five minutes my child was born. Right up to the very last minute, through sensations which though unbelievably violent were now no longer painful but indeed almost a promise of pleasure. (113)

As a novelist, Margaret Drabble could be accused of British unemotional rationality or cold understatement, because she does not provide the minute account of the birthing scene or any white ink to describe physical pain or bodily struggle. Instead, she insinuates that crossing the limen of childbirth to finish a pregnancy can be a fast, uneventful, and serene passage to life for the baby and to mothering for the woman, not an ordeal for her parturient body/​mind. Drabble sees the extraordinary occurrence of giving birth through the lens of natural normality with no urgency of verbal profusion, not through the literary artificiality of melodrama, suspense, unintelligibility, or the unrealistic exaggeration of the beauty or horror found in the experience of labor. Rosamund paradoxically adopts a position of superiority and confidence vis-​à-​vis the hospital staff, when during the intrapartum period, she tries to calm the nurses on duty, who give her labor instructions, but feel guilty for having failed to administer her painkillers, been inattentive to her needs, and having misunderstood that she was about to deliver: “That’s all right,” she kept saying, “that’s fine, you’re coming along fine. Oh, do try not to push.” There was more panic in her smooth tones than in me; I felt all right now, I felt fine. The child was born in a great rush and hurry, quite uncontrolled and undelivered; they told me afterwards that they only just caught her, and I felt

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Rosamund gives birth to her baby in a trice, almost uninstructed and unmolested by the patriarchal N.H.S. Her daughter Octavia glides down from the moist maternal womb and she is slippery, as if reluctant to be caught by the ready hands of the nurses and anxious to rejoin her mother’s bosom. Rosamund’s puerperium is colored by precious sensations previously unknown to her: “I lay awake for two hours, unable to get over my happiness. I  was not much used to feeling happiness:  satisfaction, perhaps, or triumph, and at times excitement and exhilaration” (115); feelings which compensate for all her doubts during her pregnancy. Octavia’s beauty infatuates her, and her baby is also the object of her motherly pride in front of friends and strangers at the hospital. Although the materno-​ fetal unit is severed at parturition, mother and child immediately gestate a colossal bond of love and extrauterine interdependence, untrained by vicarious stories of postnatal bliss out of their interest and also undisturbed by outsiders, including the baby’s grandparents and George. Months later, the malfunction of Octavia’s heart, leading to a life-​threatening yet successful surgery, reinforces the exclusive mother-​daughter union and culminates the process of Rosamund’s self-​education: the awakening of her emotional self. She soon regains her slender body and celebrates with the reader that becoming a working mother is her victory over patriarchal and biological intromissions: I simply did not believe that the handicap of one small illegitimate baby would make a scrap of difference to my career: I was in such a strong position by nature that were a situation to arise in which there were any choice to make between me and another; I would win, through the evident superiority of mind. (125)

Pregnancy and childbirth ultimately do not interrupt Rosamund’s promising route to her profession, but instead they nourish self-​confidence and motivation to solidify her future as a scholar. The message of her story is, therefore, that she does not have to opt for either career or children. Rosamund can have both sources of self-​realization and discard any sentimental or financial dependence on men and family for social approval

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and survival. Accordingly, Nancy Hardin contends that The Millstone is a modern moral fable intended to teach contemporary young women the lesson of love and freedom as a possibility, and how pregnancy can positively change a woman’s inner self and her interaction with the outside world (1973: 25). Despite the drought of white ink to engender the liminal process of gestation and childbirth, the sociological dimension of Drabble’s novel is a milestone, not a millstone. Indeed, hers is an auspicious literary tour de force during the historical time of second-​wave feminism –​a movement that partly urged women to remain childless –​ because The Millstone weaves procreativity with creativity, the joys of maternity with professional self-​fulfillment for an intellectual woman. In essence, Rosamund eventually learns, grows, and builds her own sense of the self to reconcile the duality between emotions and rationality –​as a loving working parent –​refusing to sink into the Victorian narrative of the Fallen Woman, or into the passivity, silence, and drama associated with unwed motherhood in Britain during the 1960s. If Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone seems to understate the vital episode of childbirth, other novels in later decades choose to focus on this transcendental limen of sexual reproduction and to diagnose the ambivalently positive impact of obstetric advancements on women’s birthing experiences. In the second half of the twentieth century, obstetrics left behind the attitude of watchful expectancy and followed a trend to actively regularize the progress of labor, so that the cervix dilates at a constant rate, conformed to an ideal curve and if not, drug substances were to be administered (Alice Adams 1994: 51). Edna Quinn reviews the transformative growth of new technologies and medical procedures during this historical period to entrench childbirth in hospitals, to empower physicians, and to destroy the self-​reliance of expectant mothers in their natural gifts to deliver babies without medical intervention. Since then, standardized labor management protocols included shaving women’s pubic hair; administering enema on admission; the immobilization of patients with no right to eat or drink; intravenous infusion at parturition; the artificial rupture of membranes; the use of technological equipment; drugs for pain or to stimulate labor; episiotomy and forceps to deliver babies, possibly resulting in operative births, like Cesarean sections (Quinn 2008: 138).

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The physiological pain, helplessness, and emotional ordeal of any first-​ time expectant mother, who had to endure these same invasive procedures from the breakthrough obstetric industry and the hospital business of labor in the 1970s, impregnate Elizabeth Baines’s The Birth Machine (1983). Still under the spell of Friedan’s historical “feminine mystique,” the heroine in this novel –​Zelda –​is an Angel in the House or the domestic wife of a physician, Roland Harris, who is, paradoxically, doing research on oral contraceptives. Zelda’s third trimester of pregnancy and childbirth enjoy the unique prerogative of being under the personal care of Professor McGuirk and his qualified team of healthcare staff at the Center for Medical Research. This eminent scientist is the Platonian inseminator of knowledge to his students and his audience in international conferences on “Induction to Labor.” He is the god-​like father of this novel obstetric technology conceived by himself and his subordinates or surrogate parents. As a postindustrial Victor Frankenstein, McGuirk overreaches with his revolutionary invention to “imitate labour before the time it would have occurred spontaneously” (The Birth Machine5 12). He publicly discloses that he is using “not one machine, but two. One for controlling the drug flow, another for monitoring the progress of the patient” (BM 2). Nevertheless, his treasurable patient is not the mother, but the unborn child to be protected by his technological progeny, as he explains to his students who attentively worship their Master: “‘By continuous monitoring of the uterine contractions and of the foetal heart sounds, it may be possible to obtain advance warning of foetal distress –​which, as we have seen […] can result in permanent damage or death to the foetus’” (60). The Professor believes in the great fallibility of the gestating/​birthing body, when he diagnoses its potential condition of post-​maturity; so to say, the “Decrease in Placental Efficiency” (14) while “the foetus […] is at risk due to prolonged pregnancy” (14), requiring his expert intercession to detect and correct female errors. As already discussed, Irigaray understands that the placenta is a liminal tissue mediating in the beatific uterine coexistence between mother and child. Conversely, McGuirk 5

The Birth Machine is hereafter referred to by BM.

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proves that this temporary organ tied to the fetus through the umbilical cord, is rather a failed engine subjected to ageing and deterioration, because it can jeopardize the manufacturing process of birthing babies. The Professor cannot perfect the biological mother as his experimental subject, but his patented birth artefact can be the vital technical repair to artificially disrupt the liminal process of pregnancy, born from nature’s flaws to fabricate and reassemble women’s genital tools of procreativity. He is, indeed, a Faustian man “pregnant” with the idea of connecting the birthing woman to the machine, not to humanize his device, but to mechanize the mother’s body. Baines’s novel is in transit from the objectivity of McGuirk –​as the self-​proclaimed protagonist of the birth experience –​to the subjectivity of the expectant mother fastened to the machine and, thus, ravaged by a man’s technology. Indeed, The Birth Machine favors the third-​person account of Zelda’s childbirth and puerperium in medias res, interwoven with incontinent flashbacks of her late pregnancy, to defy the chronological reconstruction of childbearing. At week twenty-​four, she is examined not only by the Professor in person, but also by his swarm of hungry students: He takes the skin of her upper arm and rolls it between his fingers and thumb. “This is a very healthy pregnancy.” [….] This is a very special patient. The Professor gives her a special smile. Thank you Mrs Harris, for letting the students see you. The Professor can count on Mrs Harris to understand. Mrs Harris, above anyone, knows the need for students to get clinical practice. Mrs Harris has the benefit of inside knowledge. And therefore […] the power to help out. (43)

Zelda’s pliant body is objectified and trapped like in a bell jar for antenatal examination. She remains silent and is not talked to, because McGuirk speaks for her during his practical lecture delivered to his students. She is only an impersonal –​yet exceptional –​in-​vivo clinical case study. Her unproblematic pregnancy and her tacit understanding of medical practices as a doctor’s wife are what turn her into an ideal experimental subject –​ though without her knowledge and consent  –​to test the convenience of the Professor’s machine to induce labor, also to be used if there is no evidence of potential etiologies of the mother or complications affecting the unborn child at parturition. By Christmas, Zelda faces her last month of pregnancy and bears a double burden upon her body:  her husband

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and McGuirk. Roland behaves both as an authoritarian spouse and as a doctor to inhibit her seasonal food cravings: [He] can tell her that animal fats, and sugar, and purified starch are bad for her body, for anyone’s body, they can thicken the arteries and slow down the blood. And if they’re bad for the mother, they can’t be good for the foetus. And she must think of the baby. Baby first. She must eat the right things. And eat in moderation. A fat pregnant woman will have a fat baby. Fat babies aren’t healthy. Zelda’s stomach rumbled. Though after that […], she lost her appetite. (64)

Elizabeth Baines does not use Roland’s direct words, but a third-​person report, which reflects how the husband prioritizes the health of his unborn child over its mother’s bodily urges, or how he simplifies his discourse for his babyish wife to understand and obey his dietary impositions against sweet delicatessen. Another physical restraint on an expectant mother is sex –​a taboo in women’s previous procreative narratives, which is partly broken by Baines. In fact, Zelda and Roland crave each other’s bodies, but they cannot gorge on the forbidden fruit of a coitus during her late pregnancy to preserve the materno-​fetal unit intact: “He lay against her, his purple penis immediately erect. No sex. They couldn’t. It hurt her now. If only they could: She touched his arms. They were rigid, muscles clenched. He gazed at the ceiling. Already his erection was fading” (67). Edna Quinn identifies that a major problem in childbirth is “the doctor knows best” attitude, which prevents physicians from giving information to their patients for them to make decisions (2008: 146). This is illustrated by the hostile relationship between physicians and women –​ including gestating/​birthing mothers –​as a natural extension of socially constructed gender roles of male authority and female confinement to silence and obedience. In Zelda’s late pregnancy, she is given only admonishments and instructions; she remains in the dark, unable to decide on her baby’s arrival. Roland does not treat her as a reliable adult, and he is evasive when she shares her fears with him: She does not comprehend why the Professor chose her for an induced labor in January, if she is a healthy gestating woman. Roland eventually reveals McGuirk’s true reason for an early delivery: “ ‘It’s just a precaution’ […] ‘you’ve stopped gaining weight. That could be an indication that the placenta is beginning to deteriorate’ ”

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(BM 65, 69), which paradoxically contradicts Roland’s nutritional restrictions to a starving Zelda. Still, she is reluctant to surrender to an induced labor, but she is finally brainwashed by her husband to interiorize that she is an unmaternal woman, if she does comply with the labor protocols of his hierarchal superior McGuirk, whom he blindly trusts. Zelda’s non-​festive Christmas on the eve of childbirth ends with her confession of guilt to herself: “He was so right. Baby first. Oh, God, she must call on her dried-​up selfish soul” (70), while enjoying the privileges of being a doctor’s wife: insincerity and lack of information. Helpless, frightened, and unaccompanied by her husband, Zelda submits to male commands and arrives to the maternity hospital for her appointment of induced labor, which was conveniently scheduled after the weekend, on a Monday morning. As soon as she is admitted, the Professor’s strict, routinized labor management protocols are triggered to take full control over Zelda. First, she is prepared for the invasive rituals of technological childbirth: immobilization, food restrictions, removal of her public hair, and enema. She is stripped of agency over her own birthing body and shivers because she is exposed to a cold, aseptic clinical environment and to an army of aloof nurses following McGuirk’s directions and giving her orders. Then, Zelda is connected to the labor machine of metallic bestiality and male rationality to seize her womb, and to control what is naturally uncontrollable: human birth. She is also attacked by obstetric weapons in hands of an unnamed male physician, to pierce her genitals and her mind: “A plastic-​glove touch on her vulva; immediately, suddenly, cold metal inside her […] Then a pain, too buried to be sharp, but a sense of everything pinched together: her womb, her guts, her knotted spine” (22). After this medical plunder against the sovereignty of her body, Zelda is taken back to her room to test the effectiveness of her induced labor and to passively wait for her water to break, as it accidentally occurs: She […] stood. Her knees wobbled. A flood of water rushed down her legs and spread across the floor. Now she did feel it, its tickling warmth on her cold feet. The pool spread and shone across the vinyl. At once Sister came in. “Mrs Harris! What on earth are you doing out of bed?” “I want to go to the lavatory.” “Then I’ll bring you a bedpan. No getting out of bed once your waters have been broken. We can’t risk an infection. Naughty girl, now, Mrs Harris!” (23)

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Paradoxically called “Sister,” this unsympathetic nurse infantilizes Zelda as a mischievous child and chastises her for disobeying her orders of immobilization. As an absent Roland also did, this is another reminder that Zelda is forbidden to decide or actively participate in childbearing. The pre-​labor rupture of membranes and concomitant sensations in her raging abdomen are biologically female, although they are artificially provoked by a man’s engine to induce labor. Nevertheless, Zelda’s body and mind –​in unison –​ vomit anger and riot over the Professor’s machinery of soldiers –​his medical staff  –​and weapons  –​his obstetric equipment. In fact, the uterine contractions  –​promised by the water breaking  –​do not start, because her womb acts naturally: It has its own laws and stubbornly it resists the time constrictions imposed by McGuirk’s team, which shows impatience waiting for their patient:  “ ‘Damn […] she’s bloody difficult, this one’ ” (59). Meanwhile, Zelda’s mind escapes to fairy-​tales and childhood memories when she is under constant intravenous infusion of oxytocic6 to induce labor. Lucie Armitt argues that the heroine’s nightmares are set in motion by the plunging of hypodermic needles into her veins, and that the drugs send her to a fantasy world (2000: 157). Then, Zelda remembers her mother’s kitchen, playing with dolls, witchcraft games in a den with girls, like Hilary and Annie; or the horrible discovery of the remains of a boy killed by a male sexual predator, who had been confused with an old woman taken for a witch enticing children gone astray in the woods. Vividly, Zelda also recalls that she was mesmerized by the story “Briar-​Rose,”7 where a fish opens its mouth to promise a daughter to a childless Queen. These pictures within the labyrinth of her uterine memory show Zelda’s quest for sisters, or the caress and sympathy from other women –​adults or infants, whether flesh-​ and-​blood or imaginary. While the materno-​fetal unit is tortured at labor by patriarchal, non-​fictional villains, Zelda regresses not only to her mother’s love materialized in food and to her female friends’ insouciance, but also 6

7

Oxytocic stimulates uterine contractions, but it may have dangerous side effects and should be avoided unless medical complications exist or the baby is overdue, because it can overstimulate the uterus, causing it to tire and work less efficiently, with more painful uterine contractions (Quinn 2008:143). The novel’s prologue is a passage from Edgar Taylor’s “Rose-​Bud”  –​the English version of the classic fairy-​tale “Briar-​Rose.”

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to the preternatural power of witches and to the promise of “happily ever after” in fairylands in order to embrace her unborn child. Unburied from the unconscious and uncannily familiar, these significant –​yet scattered –​ snapshots of domesticity, tales of beauty, and horror stories based on actual events, are connected with Zelda’s subjectivity in motion. Inside this chaos of magic and past recollections, her brain also retrieves childhood traumas of death that intensify her current vulnerability at parturition. Nonetheless, she simultaneously attempts to find a paragon of rebellion to revolt against her oppressors at the maternity clinic, while her body lies inert and plugged into the birth machine. Then, the oxytocic dosage for induced labor is increased to defeat nature, because a spontaneous childbirth could sabotage the obstetric technology in the case of the irresponsible non-​responsiveness of a female patient like Zelda. Although she is paralyzed at the mercy of doctors, drugs, and metallic devices, she fights against external interferences, thanks to her subversive parallel mental activity. Despite the efforts of her mind, her birthing body finally surrenders to men’s engine when the first signs of real labor begin: The machine is measuring, measuring the contractions, the rate at which her womb gathers itself up, gradually retracts, the muscle thickening at one end like the crown of a turnip. And measuring the foetal heart rate, tracing the pulse that throbs along the foetal skull, recording how it changes, slows, for half a minute at a time, as the muscle contraction compresses the blood vessels that run to the placenta. And Zelda drifts, drops her fingers, lets the tension float from the ends of them, and rides with the pain. (BM 72)

Zelda convulses and writhes in pain. She does not lie in a comatose state inside the vortex of her rambling nightmares of power and powerlessness, but she has no agency to offer physical resistance. She cannot slow down the speed or turn off the motors of the electronic fetal monitoring (E.F.M.), which disrupts and dehumanizes the liminal process of childbirth. Within this war of the sexes between female biology and male technology bathed in abundant blood, the military tactics of the Professor’s battalion are to undermine Zelda’s body and mind together. Firstly, her organism is clinically categorized as a waste or unqualified to give birth by herself, due to “inadequate placenta, a sponge squeezed of goodness, pale, emptied of red blood, unable to nourish. Bad veins, bad placenta,

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inadequate mother who must be strapped to a machine” (72). Zelda’s soma endangers the baby’s safety, so the induced labor is justified and requires constant medical intervention and surveillance. Secondly, Zelda is often blamed for her unmaternal guerrilla war of passive disobedience because, despite her agonic spasms, she is uncooperative with the healthcare staff, and she does not become one with the birth machine to deliver her child faster. This is reflected by a nurse’s gentle rebuke to awaken her sense of guilt: “ ‘You look done in. I think you could do with something to buck you up, hey? […] ‘Are you thinking about your little baby? He won’t be long now’ ” (58). If the remembrance of the fairy-​tale “Briar-​Rose” suggests that the modern heroine of The Birth Machine intuitively yearns for a girl, the Professor’s team rationally imposes its wish for the male sex upon Zelda’s unborn baby by using the pronoun “He.” Meanwhile, the third-​person narrator reports that the drug pumped into the heroine’s blood could murder her, and that she is lucid enough to sense this danger: Her breath comes quickly, panic breaths, at the same time another contraction begins, and she isn’t ready, she isn’t in control. The contraction seizes her, a giant hand descending and grabbing round the middle and crushing the life out; she’s like a rubber doll, helpless. But oh, she can feel, she can hear [a voice-​over]: “Mrs Harris! What’s this? Good gracious me, you’ll scare the other patients!” (73)

Zelda’s furious insubordination against the tandem of E.F.M. and incessant intravenous infusions of oxytocic is to unleash the beast within her self, to shout like a loud woman, or howl like a she-​animal, in order to shock and paralyze the Professor’s technicians, who are manipulating and symbolically raping her birthing body. In the eyes of men-​led science and technology, Zelda is judged unfit to deliver her baby alone and in the process, she has become an evil, savage, and lunatic beast; thus, uncivilized or merely raw female, to be domesticated by patriarchal institutions. However, Baines’s novel also emanates fertile white ink. Zelda is transfigured into a fearful Medusa, whose lupine guffaw and filthy scatological wrath petrify doctors and nurses while they are birthing the expectant mother as if she were their own child: She’s their baby, their goody, their Frankenstein beauty. Oh, no, she’s not, here’s the urge: her body gels, gathers, and now she’s her very own monster, wolf-​mouth howling,

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frog-​legs flexing: they flinch back. She can make them flinch back, hold them off from her own magic circle. She laughs, wild strangled laughter, coiling helter-​skelter inside the huge knot of her, she sees them looking from one to the other. In spite of their magic, in spite of their enemas, she squirts shit in their faces. The head smashes down through the bag of her abdomen. (78–​9)

Zelda demonstrates that she is not a rubber-​doll to be played with her reproductive bodily parts, but a reanimated creature of her own mythmaking. Tess Cosslett argues that Baines’s novel offers an image of a primitive force in women’s own bodies revealed during the birth process, which resists the coercion of the medical establishment in the form of a witch (1994:  33). Similarly, Diane Purkiss contends that Zelda’s rebellious noise at labor to break her submissiveness can be viewed through the image of the witch, only possible after a vision at the maternity hospital: seeing her old school friend Hilary, with whom she used to play witchcraft games (1996: 25). Meanwhile, the Professor’s protocol states that, if fetal distress is detected by E.F.M., an emergency Cesarean section must be performed at once. Nonetheless, this diagnosis of presumable risks for the unborn baby conceals the final battle toward the expected victory of patriarchal obstetrics to burst into flames Zelda’s witch-​self: her big mouth, her irregular uterine contractions that defy the male clock-​time, and her gradual mastery of breathing techniques to reconquer the act of childbirth against the traditional instructions given by the nurses and the Professor’s technological meddling. Quinn enumerates the indications for a Cesarean section, regularly performed from the second half of the twentieth century: abnormal fetal positions; failure to progress or prolonged labor; unsuccessful induction when the membranes have been ruptured, when the placenta separates before the birth and cuts the baby’s oxygen supply, or when this same tissue is lying across the cervix with risk of severe bleeding if labor continues (2008: 145). Only soothed by Hilary’s sisterly hand next to her and by the late arrival of her husband, the frightening news of the need of surgery to deliver her baby come with more needles and anesthetics to force Zelda to immerse herself in an episode of semi-​comatose depersonalization with the split between her free psyche that rises and her soma in chains: She sits up. Unhinges her head and shoulder from the rest of her body, unclips them easily […] As she floats, swims up, she sees that the light is coming off the

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Doctors decide to perform a so-​called “bikini-​line incision” (84) below the patient’s pubic hairline, so as not to reduce her “sexual viability” (84), nor to visually stigmatize her desirable body in public nudity or in private striptease for her only male owner, Roland. Sardonically, Baines’s third-​person narrator comments on the blatant misogyny behind the convenience of this obstetric/​plastic surgery to ensure the future sexual pleasure of Zelda’s husband, or erotic fantasies from the male surgeon on duty: “[He] must consider she wears very brief bikinis. This patient is a very sexy patient. Or so he flatters Roland. He busies himself cutting” (84). The open war between the female body and male technology has a clear winner:  the Professor and his cavalry of nurses, doctors, drugs, and iron devices, because a full-​term pregnancy, nature’s free control over labor time, and a vaginal birth are ultimately denied to Zelda. Finally, the knife of a physician hurries to complete the mission of the team, and to allow them to have supper at home, while silencing the witch within their unkind patient Zelda, who not only required a Cesarean section but also kept them waiting at work for a long time: The pink-​and-​white skin, a thin skin that could be broken to let out red blood. The attendant clips the blood off, clamps the vessels […] “Nearly there,” says the surgeon. The attendant stands back. Now it’s up to the chief, to put his hand in and deliver. “Oh!” he says, conversationally, just before he pulls, “I can see it’s a boy!” A boy. Good lord, a boy. […] Who would have guessed it would be the boy, under the pink-​and white skin of roses? A sluther. Pop he pulls it out, like a rabbit from a hat. A purple corkscrew baby. (86)

Elizabeth Baines shows that Zelda does not give birth, but her child is pulled out of her uterus –​objectified as a container –​to unnaturally sever the materno-​fetal unit too early, and without the freedom and loving strength from her own body. Moreover, the baby is not the wished-​for girl promised to Zelda by the childhood fairy-​tale “Briar-​Rose,” but a boy who is not immediately nestled against his mother’s bosom. Required by labor protocol or not, the child passes from the hands of the surgeon –​who intruded into Zelda’s womb to deliver him –​into the hands of nurses –​ who will inspect him –​and then into those of Roland Harris –​who will

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raise him –​as the heir for this father and a trophy for McGuirk’s medical team. Meanwhile, the forsaken mother lies semi-​unconscious, passive, and defeated, as remains of fairy dust from her childhood remembrances enfold the miraculous mutation of her body after birth, and she waits for her abdominal wound to be sown up by a male medical wizard: “Zelda looks down. Her stomach has gone flat. Back to normal. Transformed. Abracadabra. Good as new. He sews quickly, magic stitches that disappear all by themselves in a week. Invisible mending” (87). Robbie Kahn believes that for many women, the Cesarean scar is a sign of patriarchy or an ineradicable mark upon their bodies, which represents the loss of their generative power of birth (1995: 136–​7). Accordingly, the subcutaneous tissues of Zelda’s pelvis are sealed after this cosmetic surgery, but her furious injury is not healed and still bleeds. Flashbacks of herself reading books about obstetrics during her late pregnancy, her lucid observations of the medical team at the maternity hospital, and her regression to childhood memories and fantasies with the eruption of the mythical witch, all enable Zelda to unravel the truth behind her induced labor while it occurs: “They would have done it anyway. They have specially chosen her, because she’s so healthy” (BM 76). The diseased obstetric technology determines that the gestation of a woman in good health is always a condition to be clinically treated, because “the female malady” would be the evil birthing body itself, including the sorcery behind the uncontrollable flux of its uterine contractions. To protect the existence of both the unborn baby and medical professionals, the Professor asserts in a lecture that: “ ‘It is now conceivable that we could manage seventy-​five per cent of uncomplicated pregnancies in this way, and so confine the main proportion of deliveries to the safety and convenience of the social hours’ ” (129). Zelda learns too late that she has been a test subject for a “Clinical Trial: Convenience Induction” (128), to publish the benefits of pre-​term labor beyond health in a research paper for a scientific journal. Still prostrated on the hospital bed, she refuses to remain as a Frankenstein’s doll in the Professor’s bell jar or to incarnate Princess Aurora from the fairy-​tale “Briar-​Rose,” because Zelda’s charming prince will not rescue her from her birthing ordeal and return her to life. Her worst postpartum discovery is, indeed, Roland’s complicity with McGuirk’s plans, probably an “an eye for eye” (126) for her adultery in the past, or an excuse for her husband to

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justify the medical decisions of his hierarchical superior. It is the dormant witch inside her who awakens Zelda’s beastly insubordination to escape alone with her baby from the misogynist institutions of obstetrics at hospital and marriage at home. Thus, the heroine disconnects herself from both the birth machine and her kitchen. Instead, she chooses to reconquer her body in motion and, like a wounded she-​animal, she embraces primitive maternal instincts to protect her only man –​her baby boy –​from those who committed gender violence against the materno-​fetal unit. This novel is a reaction against the dramatic increase of labor inductions –​even for non-​medical reasons –​in the 1970s and 1980s (Cosslett 1994: 50). Elizabeth Baines also states that her work is “not a plea for natural childbirth” (2010a: 141), but it shows how modern societies overlook or deny uncertainty, particularly high-​tech obstetrics, where scientific objectivity and personal subjectivity are in conflict (139). Labor management protocols, manuals, and clinical trials not only undermine the unpredictable laws of reproductive nature and the magic of childbirth, but also dehumanize the medical profession even more than its female patients. Baines’s birthing mother is robotized and victimized by an inhumane childbirth, but she eventually recovers the preternatural strength of the loud, mad witch to protest against both her husband and doctors. In short, Rosamund Stacey and Zelda Harris clamor for social and medical changes to preserve the freedom and health of their procreative bodies and minds against patriarchal forces. Meanwhile, when facing pregnancy and childbirth, literary women from different ethnic backgrounds and less privileged socio-​historical contexts endure even more physical and psychological suffering and violence than these two white, middle-​class heroines from Great Britain.

Racialized Bodies of Liminal Reproduction in Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison In the second half of the twentieth century, women writers have narrated not only their own gestating/​birthing experiences and fictionalized

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contemporary preoccupations with pregnancy and childbirth, but also paid homage to the bondage and ordeals suffered by their foremothers. Writing about other women’s past stories of procreativity means rewriting a new version of history impregnated by female creativity, correcting official chronicles from male pens, and incriminating patriarchal tormentors of the maternal body/​mind. This literary exercise of revisionism is particularly productive and therapeutic to reproduce both the silences and loud cries of forsaken minority women fallen into the liminal margins of the annals. The rich ethnic configuration of the United States with cascades of hyphenated identities –​for example African-​American or Asian-​ American  –​enables female authors to explore the diversity, hardships, and heroism found in women’s prenatal/​natal experiences, governed by dynamics of master versus slave, the individual versus the collectivity, in former and more recent times. Some revisionist literary works by Toni Morrison (1931–​ 2019) and Maxine Hong Kingston (1940–​ ) revolve around the cruel disruption of the phenomena of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding by patriarchal institutions from earlier historical periods, such as chattel slavery on plantations and traditional families in rural or urban settings. These authors’ narratives of gestation and labor, indeed, demonstrate that sexual reproduction nurtures or aborts the female sense of the self, and acts to fortify or sever mother-​daughter relationships postnatally. However, these stories also reflect that childbearing mostly intensifies the social marginality and emotional vulnerability of women of color. The advent of menarche is a liminal rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, initiating the possibility of becoming pregnant for adolescent girls and potentially delivering an offspring of dishonor to their families and rage from their communities, as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) illustrate. In the latter, Maxine8 is a second-​generation Chinese-​American living in postwar California and growing up in an ethnic ghetto. She must listen to the cautionary tale of her mother –​Brave Orchid –​about her paternal 8

‘Maxine’ will be used to refer to the autobiographical character, the story-​teller and the relative of the Chinese aunt in The Woman Warrior, whereas ‘Hong Kingston’ will be used to refer to the author of this literary work.

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aunt, who committed the triple crime of illegitimate pregnancy, infanticide, and suicide back in China in 1923: Don’t let your father know that I told you. He denies her. Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born. The villagers are watchful. (The Woman Warrior9 5)

Defying her husband’s authority, Brave Orchid is the bard of family tales, who exploits her sister-​in-​law’s drama to warn a teenage Maxine against the impending danger of having sex with boys. Erin Ninh argues that this mother does not threaten her daughter with the punishment of the community’s vengeance to destroy the whole family, because she is aware that they are not in a Chinese village any more, but immigrants living in the United States, so if Maxine misbehaves, expulsion from her own kin is the likely parental prerogative (2011: 64). In Morrison’s The Bluest Eye set in Lorain (Ohio) during the 1940s, Pecola is an African-​American girl who is temporarily taken in by the MacTeers, because her violent, alcoholic father –​Cholly Breedlove –​is in jail after having burned down his own home. Pecola’s new family includes her two foster sisters, Frieda and Claudia. The latter hates white icons of popular culture, like the golden curls of Shirley Temple from her famous children’s movies, or blue-​eyed baby dolls that everyone must adore –​even girls of color –​due to social pressures of white beauty and the desirable destiny of maternity. Coherently, Claudia stubbornly declares:  “I had no interest in babies or in the concept of motherhood. I  was interested only in humans my own age and size” (The Bluest Eye10 20). However, the sisters must soon confront the limen of menarche. When blood stains the legs of 11-​year-​ old Pecola, an older Frieda informs her:  “ ‘That’s ministratin’ […] You won’t die. It just means you can have a baby!’ ” (BE 27–​8). Whereas Brave Orchid dictates the rule of sexual abstinence to her daughter Maxine, the absence of maternal care to explain the eruption of menarche confuses Pecola during her stay at the MacTeers. She already bears the stigma of 9 10

The Woman Warrior is hereafter referred to by WA. The Bluest Eye is hereafter referred to by BE.

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being socially declared inferior on account of the marginal conjunction of her blackness, young age, ugliness, femaleness, poverty, and submissive nature, when her ignorance about sexual reproduction and second-​hand tales they have overheard, drive her foster sisters –​Frieda and Claudia –​to affirm that the chance of expecting a child requires that “ ‘somebody has to love you’ ” (32). The novelty of menstruation and Pecola’s imperious wish to have blue eyes to obey mainstream standards of beauty, nourish her daydreams of happiness, whereby the idea of becoming pregnant would not mean loving an unborn baby, but rather being loved by a man to conceive human life. Consequently, Pecola wrongly links sexual reproduction to the family affection she lacks. Meanwhile, her own mother Pauline flees from the maternal duties of her home dirtied by her husband, to clean the house and serve the daughter of a white family. According to Asian customs and the only version provided by Brave Orchid in The Woman Warrior, Maxine’s aunt married a man chosen by their respective families in rural China. Without any romanticism, she probably met him on their wedding day, so they had no time to build emotional bonds because he emigrated to America to seek a better future right after signing the nuptial contract. Under chastity codes enforced upon Chinese women, she lived with her family-​in-​law. When a swollen belly began to undulate the young aunt’s silhouette, her husband had been away for years, as Maxine’s mother narrates: I remember looking at [her] one day when she and I were dressing; I had not noticed before that she had such a protruding melon of a stomach. But I did not think, “She’s pregnant,” until she began to look like other pregnant women, her shirt pulling and the white tops of her black pants showing. (WA 3)

Paradoxically, Brave Orchid does not trust the liminal transformation in another woman’s body until the gestational state is confirmed by dress habits that she has always observed in other countrywomen with child. The social verdict against the aunt is the crime of adulterous pregnancy. In contrast with more laxity in prosperous times, Hong Kingston identifies economic reasons for the severe penalty of social exclusion suffered by her gestating relative, because of China’s historical calamities in the 1920s, like hunger, floods, plagues, droughts, and wars against

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Japan. The villagers kept their jurisdiction to decide on the fate of transgressive members: “[They] punished her for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them” (13), because the sin of one single individual –​doubly harmful if a woman’s –​jeopardized the survival of the entire rural community. Pin-​chia Feng contends that roundness was a symbol of collectivity in the daily lives of villagers to maintain harmony and hope, and to ensure the patrilineal law of male descent in Chinese families: having sons to feed the old and the dead (1998: 115). Accordingly, The Woman Warrior enumerates superstitious repetitions of this talisman meaning domestic cohesion and survival: “The round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables of graduated sizes that fit one roundness inside another, round windows and rice bowls” (WA 13). Nonetheless, the aunt’s individualistic physical roundness of gestating an illegitimate child, fractures this circle of kinship and threatens the stability of the entire Chinese village. Materialized in curses, vandalism, and lynching, the anger and hatred by the rural community against this unruly sexual woman on the verge of childbirth, runs parallel with the repudiation by her parents-​in-​law to protect the continuity of their lineage against bastardy, so she is sent back to her blood family. Maxine breaks the umbilical cord with her mother to deliver her own reinterpretation of Brave Orchid’s oral story. Her empathetic revisionism is to execute a transfusion of white ink from her creative mind toward the procreative body and social circumstances of her repudiated ancestor, to speculate about her illegitimate pregnancy, and to reconstruct the crucial episode of parturition. Love and rape are Maxine’s only two explanatory versions of her aunt’s (un)intended adultery. Firstly, she could have protected the secret identity of the lover of her life and death: “She kept the man’s name to herself throughout her labor and dying; she did not accuse him that he be punished with her. To save her inseminator’s name she gave silent birth” (11), to publicly bear alone a scarlet letter outside her womb and to defy the community’s thirst of revenge with her stubborn muteness. Moreover, Hong Kingston vindicates the right of a Chinese woman from the past to be infatuated or to have sex with a villager of her choice who is not her husband, so her sympathetic act of literary revisionism hopes that her aunt’s erotic feelings were reciprocated by someone who “wasn’t

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just a tits-​and-​ass man” (9). Secondly, several narrative clues, accredited by the ancestral subjugation of Asian women to men’s yoke, indicate that this young wife was rather the victim of sexual assaults committed by a maniac from the area, who could have actively participated later in her downfall: Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil. I wonder whether he masked himself when he joined the raid on her family […] He was not a stranger because the village housed no strangers. She had to have dealings with him other than sex […] His demand must have surprised, then terrified her. She obeyed him; she always did as she was told […] [He said] “If you tell your family, I’ll beat you. I’ll kill you.” (6–​7)

The narrator even conjectures that the male aggressor could belong to her aunt’s family: “He may have been somebody in her own household” (11), suspecting not only her father-​in-​law and brothers-​in-​law in her legal home. Incest is a taboo that universally enforces exogamy as the core social structure since archaic civilizations. Maureen Sabine surmises that the aunt could have been abused by her own father, and that his felony was kept secret by Maxine’s father to prevent its transgenerational repetition (2004:  115). Nonetheless, being the only adored girl in a clan of male adolescents –​where jealousy against their spoiled sister, new sexual impulses, and testosterone circulate –​cannot exonerate her own blood brothers of guilt either. This includes Maxine’s father who, without surprise, condemns his sister to oblivion as if she had never existed. Any of these men could have contributed to destroy the seed of interbred villainy, by instigating this birthing woman to commit infanticide and suicide. Under either supposition –​forbidden love or incestuous rape –​the crime of illicit sexual reproduction persists, while the villagers must vent their avenging wrath, so they punish the aunt’s procreative body, irrespective of her status as a villain or a victim. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola also endures two incestuous sexual abuses perpetrated by her father, leading to an unwanted pregnancy and to the premature birth of a baby who soon dies. Morrison omits these liminal processes of gestation and labor, so she only narrates their onset –​the criminal act of rape –​and their aftermath –​the girl’s postpartum psychosis. Moreover, the novelist explores the life-​stories of Pecola’s parents

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to document the physical and psychological violence they subsequently inflict upon their daughter: Cholly’s past of brutality and Pauline’s own pregnancies and childbirths. The depravity of Pecola’s father is related to his birth: “When [he] was four days old, his mother wrapped him in two blankets and one newspaper and placed him on a junk heap by the railroad” (BE 132). Cholly was rescued by his Great Aunt Jimmy, who raised him until her death. As an adolescent, two white men symbolically raped him. While he was having his first sexual encounter in a vineyard with his girlfriend Darlene, these men remained to watch, humiliatingly treated him like a stallion, and forced him to consummate the coitus. Instead of unleashing his fury against his male aggressors, Cholly blamed Darlene and later escaped when he suspected that she was expecting a child: “[He] knew it was wrong to run out on a pregnant girl, and recalled, with sympathy, that his father had done just that” (151). Rejected by his own progenitor when they finally met for the first time, Cholly’s rootlessness releases him from any commitment to love and protect his future wife and progeny. In fact, the incestuous abuse against his daughter –​later in his life –​is linked to this episode of oppression suffered within a white-​dominated society, because humiliation is transmitted through generations (Koopman 2013: 306). After few early days of marital bliss, Pauline endures her husband’s constant beatings, alcoholism, and failure as a breadwinner, even when she is expecting her first child Sammy: “He didn’t hit me too hard, ’cause I were pregnant I guess” (BE 123). Mentally she flees from poverty and her domestic ordeals to find solace, glamour, and excitement in the films she watches at the picture shows. Pauline is impregnated by deluded ideals of romantic love and happy endings from the fictional lives of cinematographic white beauties, with whom she misleadingly identifies. Nevertheless, her emotional detachment from her black children does not begin while she is expecting them. She seeks no birth control methods, tries to minimize the risks of harming her fetuses, and nurtures the materno-​fetal unit with her unborn daughter Pecola, thanks to her self-​absorption and loving intrauterine words: That second time, I actually tried to get pregnant. Maybe ’cause I’d had one already and wasn’t scairt to do it. Anyway, I felt good, and wasn’t thinking on the carrying, just the baby itself. I used to talk to it whilst it be still in the womb. Like good friends we was. You know. I be hanging wash and I knowed lifting weren’t good for it. I’d

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say to it holt on now I gone hang up these few rags, don’t get froggy; it be over soon. It wouldn’t leap or nothing […] just friendly talk. On up til the end I felted good about that baby. (124)

Therefore, the mother-​daughter relationship seems to be unmolested by external troubles, anticipating a healthy delivery and a placid experience of mothering. Paula Eckard detects the destructive impact of the mainstream film culture on Pauline as an African-​American woman and parent. While she bears Pecola, eats candy, and watches a movie featuring the white actress Jean Harlow, Pauline breaks a tooth, so this accident, together with her advanced pregnancy, destroys the effect of the motion picture and reminds her of her imperfect beauty and her violent, unhappy life with her husband (Eckard 2002:  39). Once the cinematographic glitter and creamy glamour vanish, Pauline gives birth to unmaternal blackness and ugliness, not to Pecola. She breeds no love into her child but feels only aversion. The four seasons shape the four-​part structure of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Surprisingly, the novel begins in fall, whereas spring –​in third position –​is impregnated by unrestrained male libido and perversion. Frieda is assaulted by Mr. Henry –​a boarder at the MacTeer –​but she eludes rape and her parents violently kick out the child molester, though the girl’s fear persists: “ ‘I don’t want to be ruined’ ” (BE 101), due to her lack of education about sex. Nevertheless, there is a more vulnerable victim who cannot escape unscathed in the novel, Pecola. Incest also penetrates springtime when Cholly spies his daughter standing at the sink washing dishes. Mark Ledbetter argues that the language within each chapter violates the season which names it, because spring is not here a time of rebirth and hope, but instead it echoes death from the previous winter and “breeds on the familiar,” stealing Pecola’s purity (1996: 27). In fact, the months for the reawakening of nature, pollination, flower blossoms, and soil fertility are, paradoxically, the season selected for an unnatural event to suddenly happen: A precociously menstruating girl is raped and she conceives a child in her womb impregnated by the seed of her unfatherly father, who “wanted to fuck her –​tenderly” (BE 162–​3). Morrison profusely describes the criminal act of Pecola’s deflowering to confirm the unnarratable ordeal endured by this teenager, and to suggest the ambivalent feelings of her

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tormentor toward his felony. Cholly recalls happy memories of his wife’s body while he is empowered, free, and wildly excited to break the sexual taboo of incest: The tightness of her vagina was more than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down to his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made –​a hollow suck of air in the back of her throat […] Removing himself from her was so painful to him he cut it short and snatched his genitals out of the dry harbor of her vagina. She appeared to have fainted […] Again the hatred mixed with tenderness. The hatred would not let him pick her up, the tenderness forced him to cover her. (163)

An unmaternal Pauline neither trusts her daughter’s revelation nor protects her from the sexual predator at home but instead beats her, so Pecola cannot tell her mother about the second time her father rapes her with impunity. Her unwanted pregnancy that transforms her girlish body, is soon noticed by the scrutinizing public eye, so she is expelled from school. The reader has no access to Pecola’s aftermath of trauma, but she/​he is privy to this information thanks to a dialogue between two women, overheard by Claudia in sorrow. This girl grasps that her friend Pecola was not inseminated by any boy, but by her own daddy, or “that dirty nigger” (189). However, these two ambassadresses of Lorain’s public opinion show neither compassion nor sympathy for the adolescent expectant mother, who is suspected of participating in her father’s sexual perversions without resistance: “She carry some of the blame.” “Oh, come on. She ain’t but twelve or so.” “Yeah. But you never know. How come she didn’t fight him?” “Maybe she did.” “Yeah? You never know.” “ Well, it probably won’t live. They say the way her mama beat her she lucky to be alive herself.” “She be lucky if it don’t live. Bound to be the ugliest thing walking.” (189)

These women show no pity or goodwill for the unborn baby or toward its grandmother either. As a wife and a mother, Pauline’s shame, disgust, and fury endanger the sanity and physical survival of an unnatural

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materno-​fetal unit, consisting of her own daughter and her grand-​child. If pregnancy involves Kristeva’s doubling of the self, Pecola’s journey through the liminal gestational process rather implies the utter obliteration of her own self, or her mental split into two selves: her debilitated consciousness and her imaginary friend with whom she converses. The fetus only occupies her body as an intruder to be evaded, but it does not triplicate Pecola’s identity or have any space in her mind, sieged by the trauma of incest. The denial of her sense of oneness comes with madness, because Pecola trusts that she incarnates the supremacist ideal of white beauty to be accepted and loved by her family and society: She eventually has blue eyes. Therefore, Pecola mentally escapes from the ugliness of her black identity, from the stigma of her undesirable gestating body, and from the abjection of the flesh of in-​betweenness growing within her still girlish uterus: Her unborn child is also her sibling. No longer a puerile wish but a pathological obsession, Pecola is persuaded that she was endowed with the longed-​for blue eyes thanks to the supernatural powers of a local magician, Soaphead. This pedophilic West Indian is a healer and adviser in Lorain, who failed to become a preacher. Feeling superior as a light-​skinned, middle-​aged man vis-​à-​vis a hideous black girl with a grotesque swollen belly and an impossible request, he finds a great sadistic pleasure in his experiment of torturing this powerless child and poisoning his landlady’s disgusting dog simultaneously. Soaphead asks Pecola to give fetid meat to the animal and tells her: “‘If nothing happens, you will know that God has refused you. If the animal behaves strangely, your wish will be granted on the day following this one’” (175). The girl touches her stomach and her nausea almost leads her to vomit as a clear symptom of her first trimester of pregnancy, whereas the dog convulses and dies. Happy and credulous, Pecola runs away although she soon ceases to exist as an individual and as an expectant mother. Eckard argues that, while the seasons correspond to the changing rhythms of the maternal body, the novel’s disruptions of nature’s cycle of fertility and regeneration find representation in Pecola’s failure of maternity (2002: 40–​1). In The Bluest Eye, summer is not the liminal time for sunny growth, sweet fruition, and the happy delivery of a new life, but for the storms of child loss and the (un)maternal descent into perpetual madness. Pecola’s mental split into

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two halves crystallizes in a dialogue between her own voice and another (un)friendly voice. The girl believes that her eyes “get prettier each time [she] look[s]‌at them” (BE 201), that they are the bluest in the country, and that everyone  –​particularly her imaginary friend  –​admires them and envies her. Pecola’s first self remains narcissistic in ecstatic contemplation of her new beauty, yet also inarticulate and traumatized by incest and its sequelae of pregnancy, whereas her second self is inquisitive and asks details about the sexual act perpetrated by her criminal father: “And you don’t have to be afraid of Cholly coming at you anymore.” “No.” “That was horrible, wasn’t it?” “Yes.” “The second time too?” “Yes.” “Really? The second time too?” “Leave me alone! You better leave me alone.”11 (201)

Associated with the violent inseminator she wants to forget, the fetus is, implicitly, denied by Pecola’s split mind. Nonetheless, the MacTeer sisters, who ignore both how a baby is conceived and the calvary of an incestuous rape, cannot forget their friend’s unborn child. Claudia and Frieda decide to sacrifice their savings to buy new bicycles and instead use this money to plant marigold seeds and make their wish for the birth of a healthy baby come true. If Pecola refuses to look inside her body but stares at the myopic image of her external blue eyes, Claudia performs a symbolic obstetric ultrasound of sympathy when she imagines her friend’s fetus within its intrauterine home:  “It was in a dark, wet place, its head covered with great O’s of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, kissing-​thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin” (190). She pities Pecola, but more importantly, she cannot grasp why an innocent unborn child generates so much repugnance and hatred. Claudia rejects the synthetic artificiality 11

In this dialogue, the normal speech represents Pecola’s first self  –​her own consciousness –​whereas the words in italics are pronounced by her imaginary friend –​ her second self.

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and beauty standards of white dolls, and instead, she celebrates her racial pride and self-​love with a real-​life image: the pretty blackness of the baby within her friend’s womb (Eckard 2002:  45). Nevertheless, the marigolds do not germinate in the unyielding earth because nature’s cycle of four seasons is aborted during Pecola’s summer: The gestational period cannot be completed naturally, her child is born too early and dies, as everybody had hoped, except the MacTeer sisters. Claudia suddenly grows up and understands that her mother is a more loving caretaker than she had previously thought, but she falls into an autumn of melancholy and, vicariously, receives a lesson about the dangers of sexual reproduction to prepare her for adulthood, unlike Maxine’s forced exposure to her mother’s didactic Chinese tales in The Woman Warrior. Conversely, while her father dies and her brother flees, Pecola remains rummaging for food in the garbage, trapped in circular time with no seasons and no reason following her unnatural pregnancy. After her pre-​ term labor, this girl’s maternal loss geminates: She has neither child/​sibling of her own to love, nor protection and nurturance from her mother, because Pauline lives in her own singular season of escapism from her black reality. She still works as a cleaning lady to adore the truly blue-​ eyed daughter and the porcelain of her white employers. Toni Morrison’s literary act of revisionism and sympathy not only returns to the times of her own childhood in Lorain (Ohio) during the 1940s, but also traces the liminality and the white ink spilt in the gestating/​ birthing/​breastfeeding experiences of African-​American women from the earlier historical period before and after the U.S. Civil War (1861–​5). If Cholly enforces the law of the father upon his daughter Pecola in The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s later novel Beloved (1987) goes back to the southern fatherland of slavery in Kentucky, where the (reproductive) bodies and minds of black women of all ages were systematically tortured by white male owners. Angela Davis reconstructs the African-​American chronicles after the international abolition of slave trade during the nineteenth century that compelled southern states to protect their plantation economies and rely upon natural reproduction in order to ensure domestic slave population. In those times, black women were praised for their fertility and delivering many babies was a treasure, but they were not respected, so the ideological glorification of motherhood did not extend to female slaves (Davis 1981: 7).

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Moreover, white slave owners sought to arrange conditions so that their “breeders” bore children as often as biologically possible, but never as far as to exempt pregnant women or mothers with babies from work cultivating the fields (7). Indeed, the patriarchal institution of slavery imposed a triple punishment on African-​American women for being black, for their capacity to get pregnant, and for becoming mothers. They were forced to work hard without rest, while they were whipped if they protested or failed to fulfil their agricultural tasks. They were continuously raped by their white masters or inseminated by their black partners to gestate a strong and young slave labor force. After birthing, they were separated from their babies to be sold out in the slave market, while their breast milk was usurped to nourish white children. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (un)ravels the aftermath of trauma that confines a slave mother of four children after escaping to a free state, but this novel also resurrects the daughter she killed to avoid slave catchers, who would condemn her to an adulthood of sexual violence and procreative exploitation.12 Eighteen years after this crime and ten years after the Emancipation Proclamation,13 Sethe lives alone with her only surviving daughter –​Denver –​in the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio. Sethe’s mother was murdered when Sethe was only a little girl; her caring mother-​in-​law Baby Suggs had recently died; her two older sons –​Howard and Buglar –​ had run way from her; and Halle –​the father of all her children –​never returned to her life after she fled from slavery. Furthermore, she is not a free woman in 1873. Beyond the endemic racism in the postwar white U.S. society, Sethe endures social ostracism in a city that cannot forgive that she is a criminal mother, while her home at 124 Bluestone Road is “full of a baby’s venom” (Beloved14 3), because it is haunted by the angry ghost of her daughter, whose throat she herself cut. But mainly, Sethe is a 12

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Morrison acknowledges that the inspiration for Beloved was the story of Margaret Garner. Catching the attention of abolitionists and newspapers for her sanity and lack of repentance, this mother of color escaped slavery and was arrested for killing one of her children –​and trying to kill the others –​rather than see them returned to the owner’s plantation (2007b: xi). Ratified by the thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865, it abolished the institution of slavery in southern states during the Civil War. Beloved is hereafter referred to by BD.

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slave to traumatic recollections from her past strangling her present: her last pregnancy –​Denver’s –​and the infanticide of Beloved. Cathy Caruth posits that “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature” returns to haunt the survivor belatedly (2010: 4). In Morrison’s novel, Sethe’s harrowing memories occupy a non-​liminal time in her mind and transport her back to the longed-​for maternal body of her youth, and also to the place of her bondage in a Kentucky plantation and to her illusory sense of freedom once she escaped slavery and reached the free-​ state of Ohio. Alan Gibbs argues that Beloved is the paradigm of a trauma text. Rather than adhering to a linear chronology, its fractured narrative prioritizes the psychic experience of its heroines and is structured according to their associative memories of mental pain, with a heavy formal basis in varieties of repetition and the narrative use of a plurality of disembodied voices –​Sethe, Denver and Beloved –​that “merge and overlap, sometimes so indistinctly that is it unclear who speaks” (Gibbs 2014: 72–​3). Unlike Brave Orchid’s eagerness for story-​telling to subdue her daughter Maxine in Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Sethe is reluctant to remember the tragic events of violence during her last pregnancy and of maternal destruction after Denver’s birth. Nevertheless, she is often assaulted by scattered flashbacks from the past. After eighteen years, she is also interrogated by Denver, by the adult revenant of her slain baby Beloved, and by Paul D., who is Sethe’s new lover after a long hiatus of abstinence from love and sexual reproduction. Then, she regresses to her gestating/​birthing/​ breastfeeding body to vomit angry white ink –​dirtied by slavery and her master’s violence –​in an intermittent, repetitive, and disordered painful narration of her captivity in Kentucky, her transit to freedom while crossing the Ohio river, and the eternal bondage of infanticidal guilt in her mind. As an adolescent woman, Sethe was a lucky slave. She had been estranged from her mother Ma’dam, but she was purchased by kind-​hearted slave owners –​Mr. and Mrs. Garner –​to work at the plantation of Sweet Home and to choose among six African stallions to impregnate her. Unmarried, she enjoyed tender love and sex with her partner Halle for six years. During this time, Sethe gestated and delivered three babies to replenish the fields with new slaves. In contrast, other black women, including her own mother and her mother-​in-​law Baby Suggs, were raped by their

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white masters, and they delivered mulatto children, whom they refused to nurse or from whom they were violently separated and could not rear. Eighteen years later, Paul D. cannot understand why Sethe had run away from Kentucky during the third trimester of her pregnancy, but she confesses to him: “Had to. Couldn’t be no waiting” (BD 9). In fact, she flees to freedom to give birth to her unborn baby Denver and to rejoin her children already sent in a wagon to Baby Suggs, living free in Cincinnati. Sethe is particularly worried for her baby Beloved, who still needs to be fed with breast milk. Her dangerous decision is precipitated by the new “reign of terror” of the Schoolteacher, who manages the plantation of Sweet Home after his brother-​in-​law –​Mr. Garner –​died. Ruling with an iron fist, this new white overseer instructs his nephews in a pseudo-​scientific taxonomy to study the animal and human characteristics of his black slaves, in order to demonstrate the superiority of the white race. Accordingly, African women are classified as female mammals to be humiliated, beaten, and objectified. Sethe repeatedly reunites the broken pieces of the harrowing memory from her past when she was brutally whipped, and her breast milk was sucked with violence by two voracious men: I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-​reading teacher watching and writing it up. I am still full of that, God damn it, I can’t go back and add more. Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft –​hiding close by –​the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn’t look at all. (83)

Sethe can name the traumatic felony suffered but does not want –​or is unable –​to articulate the unintelligible sensations of psychosomatic pain and to translate visual images of horror into words. Under the watchful eye of the Schoolteacher and an impotent Halle, the nephews dehumanize Sethe and rape her maternal body. Her white masters treat her like a cow for their adult sexual amusement and a preindustrial machine of producing dairy for white children. Also enfolded by silence and oblivion in literature, breastfeeding is the postnatal vestige of the former materno-​fetal unit gestated during pregnancy and naturally preserved after the split between mother and child at birth. Jean Wyatt contends that the nursing

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connection dissolves the boundary between the self and the other, because it is impossible to separate what belongs to the maternal body from what belongs to the baby, because the two are joined by the nipple and milk flows between them (1993: 481). Being still a liminal stage, lactation prolongs the physical interdependence between mother and child, while it nurtures life-​long emotional bonds between them. For Sethe, the already twofold experience involved in pregnancy –​Kristeva’s doubling of the self –​is also geminated, because she carries Denver inside her womb, while she has breast milk for Beloved, who still suckles although she is on her way to freedom. Sethe’s only power is breastfeeding, whereas maternal nourishment is the sole gift she possesses to offer to her precious treasure –​her baby –​and this is cruelly stolen from her. Therefore, she remembers feeling helpless because of the brutal drain and her anxious urgency to feed her hungry daughter: All I knew was I had to get my milk to my baby girl. Nobody was going to nurse her like me. Nobody was going to get it to her fast enough, or take it away when she had enough and didn’t know it. Nobody knew that she couldn’t pass her air if you held her up on your shoulder, only if she was lying on my knees. Nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me. (BD 19)

Sethe recalls telling the nephews’ sexual abuse to Mrs. Garner. Then, the Schoolteacher flogs her with violence to paint her body with patriarchal black ink, as she admits: “[He] made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still” (20). Equally a slave at the Sweet Home plantation in those days, Paul D. listens to her story with horror after eighteen years. He cannot believe how maternal milk is plundered while a mother is still breastfeeding a baby, or how a pregnant woman is beaten to death. Sethe is punished in such a way that her owner mortifies her whole body, although a hole dug protects the only anatomical part that is economically valuable for him: her swollen belly, or the biological container of his new slave labor. What Paul D. grasps is that Sethe managed to flee from her Sweet Home prison, because her white master and his men could not imagine that a pregnant slave, who had been raped and battered with inhumane bestiality, could escape and survive. As an heirloom, oral stories are told from mothers to daughters

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in African-​American culture. Denver does not want to know about her conception and her prenatal life of slavery in Kentucky, but only about her missing father and her own birth. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that Sethe bears traumatic secrets from her past, and that there are painful limens that she  –​as a daughter  –​cannot trespass:  “the single slow blink of her eyes; the bottom lip sliding up slowly to cover the top; and then a nostril sigh, like the snuff of a candle flame –​signs that [she] had reached the point beyond which she would not go” (45). Reaching mythic proportions, the labor of Sethe’s last child is, in contrast, a heroic tale of thrilling adventures and maternal courage to save the life of her unborn baby, and to reach her suckling daughter in Cincinnati. In the novel, this episode is told several times by two narrators  –​Denver as a surrogate story-​teller and Sethe –​and it is addressed to different listeners: Paul D., Beloved, and Denver. Sethe’s engorged breasts and dry blood from her open wounds are not the only companions of a runaway slave mother in the woods, because she is also escorted by a wild creature inside her womb: She could not, would not, stop, for when she did the little antelope rammed her with horns and pawed the ground of her womb with impatient hooves. While she was walking, it seemed to graze, quietly –​so she walked, on two feet meant, in this sixth month of pregnancy, for standing still. (36)

Kristen Lillvis posits that this fetal movement –​as a symbol of the future –​ evokes her memory of men and women –​including Ma’am –​on the plantation, where Sethe “was born dancing ‘the antelope’ ”; a memento of her past, thanks to which she unites her family and sees mothering as a way to commune with her own mother and her unborn daughter (2013: 459). Thus, Morrison’s white ink invokes African rituals to seek the lost mother that Sethe hardly remembers, and to nourish the emotional bond of the materno-​fetal unit in a crucial moment of physical exhaustion when she is on the verge of death. Near the port of liberty, Sethe’s dying body collapses in the bushes, where “nothing was alive but her nipples and the little antelope” (BD 36). Nevertheless, the imperious call of breastfeeding her daughter Beloved and the vigor of the unborn baby kicking inside her uterus are the geminated

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forces of Sethe’s maternal self that enable her to cling to life until she is discovered by another fugitive woman. Amy Denver is a white indentured servant heading to cross the river to reach the shores of self-​sufficiency and independence in a distant Boston. When she knew that Sethe was a pregnant slave mother escaping from a male owner and saw her wounded body, Amy was sympathetic to her plight. She sang to Sethe at night, massaged her swollen ankles and broken feet, healed her back crowned with a tree carving, and gave food to the starving antelope unit of mother and child that was “all jaws” (38). Amy even “made her think that maybe she wasn’t, after all, just a crawling graveyard for a six-​month baby’s last hours” (42). Although Sethe should distrust and fear this white girl, there is no difference of power between them since both are runaways, so the universality of the female experience of oppression and the urgency of childbirth help to unite them (Eckard 2002: 67). The Ohio River separated the slave-​state of Kentucky and the free-​ state of Ohio, so it was crossed by southern slaves to reach a new life in the north until the end of the U.S. Civil War.15 When the two women begin to traverse this waterway on a leaking boat to leave behind their respective captivities, Sethe’s breast milk for her already-​born baby drops while her water breaks to announce the inconvenient moment for delivery. Therefore, after prioritizing only Beloved’s needs, the maternal call again geminates itself because she now confuses fetal death with the prenatal stillness of the unborn antelope before sprinting to its postnatal life: “[She] looked down at her stomach and touched it […] She had not died in the night, but the baby had. If that was the case, then there was no stopping now. She would get that milk to her baby girl if she had to swim” (BD 97). In fact, the experience of liminality in the novel triplicates itself. Childbirth and crossing the boundary between slavery and freedom occur simultaneously, and they are also located in the same place, which allows fluidity to traverse the limen –​a river –​between the two shores of pregnancy and mothering,

15 The Underground Railroad was the secret Abolitionist organization of hiding places and safe houses, which helped slaves to escape to free states or to Canada, and it typically implied crossing the Ohio River.

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of death and life. Thus, this episode includes three overlapping levels of liminality: biological –​enduring child labor; spatial –​crossing the river; and symbolic –​reaching freedom. Fresh water, blood, and amniotic liquid are spilt and blend to bless the arrival of Sethe’s youngest child, assisted by Amy –​an improvised midwife: She waited for the sweet beat that followed the blast of pain. On her knees again, she crawled into the boat. It waddled under her and she had just enough time to brace her leaf-​bag feet on the bench when another rip took her breath away. Panting under four summer stars, she threw her legs over the sides, because here come the head, as Amy informed her […] It was stuck. Face up and drowning in its mother’s blood. Amy stopped begging Jesus and began to curse His daddy. “Push!” screamed Amy. “Pull,” whispered Sethe. (99)

Childbirth becomes an act of sisterly solidarity and female empowerment, whereby two women are transitorily free to cooperate and save the unborn baby and their own lives rowing toward freedom, away from dangerous male oppressors. Beyond Amy’s strong hands to grip the baby’s head and her tender coos, nature acts without men’s intervention: The maternal body speaks, while Toni Morrison’s white ink records its loud talk. Uterine blood invades the unborn baby’s passage through Sethe’s vagina, but this liquid crisis of death is transient and overcome. The parturient mother has a moment of repose following titanic efforts while nature eventually announces the cry of life from the strong female antelope after some suspense: “Nothing happened for so long they both believed they had lost it. Sethe arched suddenly and the afterbirth shot out. Then the baby whimpered and [she] looked. Twenty inches of cord hung from its belly and it trembled in the cooling evening air” (99). The materno-​fetal unit is severed, but it reaches the coasts of the free-​state of Ohio, where the white girl and the black former slave are separated for good. Nonetheless, their liminal friendship is sealed thanks to the act of naming without race or gender barriers: Sethe honors her savior Amy because the baby girl is called Denver. The mother reaches the safe harbor of Cincinnati and finally breastfeeds Beloved. Prior to the impending drama of bloody death, Sethe enjoys a non-​menstrual moon cycle of joy and liberty to nurse her two daughters, whereas Baby Suggs’s maternal powers and postpartum cares help her daughter-​in-​law to conclude her full passage to

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mothering: “Sethe remembered the touch of those fingers that she knew better than her own. They had bathed her in sections, wrapped her womb, combed her hair, oiled her nipples, stitched her clothes, cleaned her feet, greased her back …” (115). Therefore, two women as healers –​Amy and Baby Suggs –​welcome a new mother-​daughter unit: Sethe and Denver. Unlike this primitive delivery invigorated by the hands of nature and by sisterly sympathy in Morrison’s Beloved, white patriarchal forces and hospital childbirth in The Bluest Eye debilitate the emotional symbiosis between Pauline and Pecola gestated during pregnancy. Mrs. Breedlove narrates the experience of delivering her daughter under a standardized procedure of double dehumanization and humiliation for women of color, due to gender and racial reasons, while she is attended by male doctors and students at a maternity ward: They put me in a big room with a whole mess of women. The pains was coming, but not too bad. A little old doctor […] put some kind of jelly on it and rammed it up between my legs. When he left off, some more doctors come. One old one and some young ones. The old one was learning the young ones about babies. Showing them how to do. When he got to me he said now these here women you don’t have any trouble with. They deliver right away and with no pain. Just like horses. The young ones smiled a little. They looked at my stomach and between my legs. They never said nothing to me. Only one looked […] at my face. (BE  124–​5)

Tess Cosslett posits that the primitive woman is merely a social construct of the African mother going into the bushes on her own and giving birth without external intervention, pain, or fear, because she was taught to do so, and she is expected to immediately return to work on the fields (1994: 9–​10, 12). Yet at hospital, Pauline is treated like a primitive female or a mammal, whose body is not supposed to suffer at labor. However, she reacts against this non-​scientific evaluation and forces herself to express ear-​piercing pain to reclaim her identity as a woman and racial equality for non-​white mothers: “‘I moaned something awful. The pains wasn’t as bad as I let on, but I had to let them people know having a baby was more than a bowel movement. I hurt just like them white women’” (BE 125). Nevertheless, Pauline’s victory against the silence imposed upon African-​American women by the tandem of patriarchal racism and misogyny is short-​lived because she soon observes blackness in the newly

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born Pecola: “‘The baby come. Big old healthy thing. She looked different from what I thought. Reckon I talked to it so much before I conjured up a mind’s eye view of it […] Lord she was ugly’” (125–​6). For Andrea O’Reilly, motherhood is act of empowerment and resistance vital for black women’s fight against sexism and racism in Morrison’s novels, yet not in The Bluest Eye. Pauline is rendered vulnerable to white supremacist ideology, which results in her self-​hatred and self-​effacement –​her blackness makes her undesirable –​and this explains her unmaternal reaction at Pecola’s birth, disempowers her daughter in life, and demonstrates that parents need to love themselves if they are to love their children (O’Reilly 2005:  129, 132). Pauline’s baby is, indeed, not the mental fetus she had imagined for months and fed with cinematographic white beauty during her pregnancy, but a mirror image of her own black self, whose reflection is despised by society and degraded by black men’s inky rage. In short, the act of childbirth not only breaks the idyllic materno-​fetal unit between Pauline and her child, but also estranges mother and daughter forever, as it is somatized by Pecola –​always drinking abundant milk at the MacTeers, always thirsty for maternal nourishment. In Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Brave Orchid believes that there is no valuable maternal pedagogy in informing Maxine about the experience of childbirth for their unnamable relative from rural China. Instead, she only offers the forensic evidence of bodily destruction involved in the sequential acts of infanticide and suicide: “‘Your aunt gave birth in the pigsty that night. The next morning when I went for water, I found her and the baby plugging up the family well’” (WA 5). A born story-​teller, Maxine decides to compensate for her mother’s narrative silence. Textually, she embellishes and dilates the liminally empty space of laboring a baby thanks to her white ink of female sympathy. Childbirth is, indeed, the only episode when the reader senses the maternal body of the wretched aunt and feels her emotions. Maxine stresses the naive inexperience of her Chinese ancestor, who connects the psychologically bleeding injury of being rejected by her family, with acute physical pain when sudden labor contractions begin: “When she felt the birth coming, she thought that she had been hurt. Her body seized together. ‘They’ve hurt me too much […] This is gall, and it will kill me’ ” (14). As a primitive woman, the aunt finds that nature is her only friend to live or die, to give birth to life or kill

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her child. Without male obstetric interventionism, Maxine’s imaginary midwifery guides her novice relative to concentrate herself on her birthing body and run to the pigsty to find a spatial shelter: This pain chilled her –​a cold, steady kind of surface pain. Inside, spasmodically, the other pain, the pain of the child, heated her. For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space […] Laboring, this woman who had carried her child as a foreign growth that sickened her every day, expelled it at last. She reached down to touch the hot, wet, moving mass, surely smaller than anything human, and could feel that it was human after all –​fingers, toes, nails, nose. (14–​15)

Maxine not only captures the physicality in the act of childbirth endured by her aunt, but also she imagines the sad memories for this birthing woman, who regresses to her girlhood, remembers the lost domestic bliss, and escapes from her actual ordeal of labor, having been dirtied by the community’s intolerance, yet purified alone in the piggery: “She saw the family in the evening gambling at the dinner table, the young people massaging their elders’ backs. She saw them congratulating one another, high joy on the mornings the rice shoots came up” (14). Then, the passage of the child through the birth canal is fast and aseptic, while the mother feels transient mental release from the unbearable burden of sexual transgression. Yet, cutting the umbilical cord is traumatic for both parts of the now extinct materno-​fetal unit: “At its birth the two of them had felt the same raw pain of separation, a wound that only the family pressing tight could close” (15). Nevertheless, maternal instincts soon emerge in Maxine’s aunt. They are intuitively materialized by the loving act of breastfeeding, which reunites mother and child to obliterate their common physical and mental suffering: She pulled it up on to her belly, and it lay curled there […] She opened her loose shirt and buttoned the child inside. After resting, it squirmed and thrashed and she pushed it up to her breast. It turned its head this way and that until it found her nipple. There, it made little snuffling noises. She clenched her teeth at its preciousness, lovely as a young calf, a piglet, a little dog. (15)

Robust research confirms that infanticide has been a common practice in China, having almost exclusively female victims, but according to D.E. Mungello, the moral weight of homicide at birth was lessened by the

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Chinese view that newborn infants had not fully attained human status (2008:  127). Killing baby girls helped to avoid starvation and famine, but it was also a form of birth control to reduce the number of potential mothers and not to provide dowries at marriage (2). Consequently, pregnancy and childbirth entailed a greater maternal fear or the guilt of potentially gestating femaleness, regardless of the civil status of the expectant mother. Kay Ann Johnson identifies the common modus operandi of drowning girls right after birth in rural China (1985: 33). In Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, the unnamable aunt kills herself and her newborn baby by jumping into the village’s well during her short puerperium. Nonetheless, Maxine interprets that this double crime is the unequivocal declaration of maternal love: “Carrying the baby to the well shows loving. Otherwise abandon it. Turn its face into the mud. Mothers who love their children take them along. It was probably a girl; there is some hope of forgiveness for boys” (WA 15). Angela Petit discards any ambiguity and reads that responsibility and affection are the only motives of this Chinese woman to kill her baby, which also culminates Maxine’s identification with her aunt (2003:  489). The selfish alternative to infanticide would have been survival, implying that the newborn is left to its fate and to the wrath of the community prior to her suicide. But mainly, Maxine’s compassionate literary revisionism defends the theory of the plausible female sex of the baby: her dead cousin. Irrespective of the stigma of adultery, the narrator senses that a boy’s birth could have alleviated her aunt’s family, because of the economic value of raising a male laborer who can work to maintain his elders in the future. Maxine’s poetics of sympathy imagines that her aunt lays her child on her bosom to escape together, and that they embrace each other in liquid death to avoid yet another girl being murdered, enslaved, starved, sexually abused, or inseminated by neighbors or a man in her own family. The aunt’s surreptitious vendetta is to pollute the village’s drinking water with two corpses. By contaminating the only source of nourishment for this superstitious Asian community, she condemns her tormentors to misery. Back to California’s reality, Maxine is simultaneously learning how to become a writer and an adult woman with a dual identity, facing

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American racism and Chinese sexism. During this liminal process, she transfigures her aunt –​an angry ghost feared by her compatriots and forgotten by her own family –​into an exemplary female model of stubborn determination during her pregnancy and of maternal love at childbirth, who will haunt her or guide her life. Brave Orchid’s second tale offers to Maxine an antithetical vision of Asian femininity: the mythical warrior Fa Mu Lan. This heroine abandons her family to submit herself to the rigid discipline of martial arts in the mountains of the white tigers, and she successfully overthrows a baron who had enslaved her village and sexually exploited young girls. Married to a soldier, Fa Mu Lan could be another paragon of female strength for Maxine, because she becomes pregnant and delivers her son while she is fighting like a brave swordsman against her oppressor: During the last four months, I wore my armor altered so that I looked like a powerful, big man […] I walked with the foot soldier so as not to jounce the gestation. Now when I was naked, I was a strange human being indeed –​words carved on my back and the baby large in front. I hid from battle only once, when I gave birth to our baby. In dark and silver dreams I had seen him falling from the sky, each night closer to the earth, his soul a star. Just before labor began, the last star rays sank into my belly. (WA  39–​40)

Fa Mu Lan embellishes her liminal journey to childbirth with celestial poetry, as if it were a cosmogonic myth. She also demonstrates that childbearing does not debilitate women’s physical powers, because she continues her war against the male tyrant after labor: “We made a sling for the baby inside my big armor, and rode back into the thickest part of the fighting. The umbilical cord flew with the red flag and made us laugh” (40). Nevertheless, Fa Mu Lan surrenders to silence and to the authority of her kin after having defeated the male oppressor, because she promises to serve her husband and family-​in-​law as a good wife, daughter, and mother of numerous children. In her own battle against gender, social, and family pressures, Maxine cannot identify herself with Fa Mu Lan and her domestic doom. Instead, she remains loyal to the myth of illegitimate pregnancy and murderous childbirth incarnated by her wretched aunt, to forge her dual identity in California and to win the war against the

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patriarchal tyranny taught by her mother, who preached Chinese lessons of obedience, and that being born female is a waste. If infanticide is an act of insubordination against the autocracy and repression of families(-​in-​law) and rural communities from old China in Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Toni Morrison’s Beloved also accuses the patriarchal institution of slavery of condemning black women to the maternal sacrifice of killing their own babies. Extensive research establishes that infanticide is associated with female anger and youth –​ not with mental illness –​and that altruism is one of the main motivations for killing the child to end its real or imagined suffering (Porter and Gavin 2010: 102–​3). After having experienced all her four pregnancies in bondage, Sethe perpetrates the desperate act of murdering Beloved, when she realizes that she and her progeny cannot escape from their white male oppressors. In fact, her Kentucky owner and his men track and find her in Cincinnati, seeking to reclaim the economic value of “property that reproduced itself without cost” (BD 269). Laura Dawkins contends that the black mother kills not in rage but in the name of love, and that child-​ murder underscores the tragic boundaries of the maternal power, which is limited to her “physical authority over the helpless offspring of her own flesh” (2004: 223). For Sethe, delivering babies as slaves means giving birth to death-​in-​life. Then, if blood welcomes children at childbirth, blood must flow to rescue them thanks to a postnatal mortal slaughter. Although Sethe cuts the throat of her suckling Beloved to prevent her daughter from experiencing inevitable sexual and reproductive exploitation in the future, she also intends to destroy her other children to release them from slavery. Nonetheless, Sethe is detained, confined in jail, and separated from her family for some time, while her captors disappear without any human plunder. Before being severed from her daughters, Sethe holds both the dead baby and the living newborn. Her nipple feeds Denver with breast milk and Beloved’s spilled blood to reunite the three females in a liquid state of perpetual liminality: A mother and her two daughters become one inside the blissful maternal uterus, and they are united also in tragic postnatal life and death. The furious murdered child haunts Sethe’s home for eighteen years. However, when Sethe starts to live with her new partner Paul D., this ghost

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infant transfigures herself into a flesh-​and-​blood young woman.16 At first, she is a mysterious girl of unknown origin and kind disposition, but Sethe soon believes that her sacrificed baby has come back into her life. Yet, this revenant does not come alone. The trauma of having killed her own child, together with earlier harrowing memories from her last pregnancy in captivity, painfully reverberate in Sethe’s mind beyond involuntary flashbacks and the deliberate acts of partial story-​telling requested by Denver or Paul D. Even worse for the deterioration of Sethe’s mental health is taking the pathological journey toward an imaginary pregnancy to regain the irretrievable materno-​fetal unit. Indeed, her murdered daughter is not only to live with her in Cincinnati, but also to reside within the womb of her mind. Sethe’s vital longing is not to gestate, deliver, and breastfeed any baby, but her Beloved, so she refuses to become pregnant again at 38 years old: “ ‘You are one crazy-​headed man […] Don’t you think I’m too old to start that all over again?’ ” (BD 151), when Paul D. asks her to have a child together. Nonetheless, there is no doubling of the self in this revived pregnancy, but a triplication of the self, because Denver joins the uterine reunion between her mother and her older sister. The complete identification of Sethe and her youngest daughter with the slain girl is celebrated by their three voices singing in unison: “Beloved/​You are my sister/​You are my daughter/​You are my face; you are me” (255). Morrison also illustrates the mental recovery of the longed-​for materno-​fetal unit thanks to three monologues of white ink articulated by the mother and her two daughters. Sethe finally pronounces her double trauma using words. While pregnant, she was raped and robbed of her milk intended to breastfeed Beloved, and later, she slew her child: Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing […] Why I did it. How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her […] 16

There is a scholarly debate about Beloved’s identity: a sexual slave escaping from her captor, an evil spirit, the reincarnation of Sethe’s mother violently murdered, or the symbol of all African women kidnapped, transported, and enslaved in America for centuries.

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Sethe believes that Beloved’s return to her emotional womb means that her daughter has forgiven her crime. As a newly gestating mother of the same unborn child, she talks in a future tense to show how she will compensate Beloved with breast milk –​so to say, with love and protection –​ when she soon gives birth to her again: “I’ll tend her as no mother ever tended a child” (236). Wyatt argues that Sethe defines herself as a “maternal body,” so “her insistence on her own physical presence and connection with her children” precludes an easy acceptation of her separation from them and her use of language (1993: 474). Because breastfeeding is the last remnant of her child’s liminal dependence upon her, Sethe clings to this promise of milk to welcome Beloved to her bosom one more time, and to prove that she can be a good mother. The mental talk to her daughter does not distinguish what is her own flesh from what is her child’s: “When I tell you you mine, I also mean I’m yours” (BD 239), as Sethe intuitively embraces Kristeva’s doubling of the self during her physical and mental pregnancies. Sethe is even impassive when Paul deserts her after learning that in the past, she had killed her child, because gestating her unborn daughter in her mind fulfills her emotional cravings more than a man’s love. Indeed, Sethe only reclaims her natural right to be a mother, not a sexual woman. Denver’s monologue proudly builds bonds with her sister: “Beloved is my sister. I swallowed her blood right along with my mother’s milk” (242). Meanwhile, her tautological compulsion to recall her passage through the maternal vagina at labor thanks to Sethe’s narrative lips proves that she is not fully severed from her mother’s body. Thus, at first, Denver gladly accepts the pathological homecoming to Sethe’s mental womb. Still, Denver’s words are ambivalent. She misses her absent father –​pictured like an angel –​and the exemplary female model of her deceased grandmother. Though Denver loves her only parent, she is still afraid of Sethe’s murderous instincts, which could be replicated again with herself as the target. Her older brothers fled from home not because of the ghost baby, but on account of their

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fear of Sethe. Finally, Denver also escapes to leave behind the dangerous law of the belated materno-​fetal unit, when she observes that Beloved harms her mother and ravenously consumes all her symbolic milk, and that the symbiosis of this twin pregnancy is unhealthy because all three live: “locked in a love that wore everyone out” (286). In this novel, Morrison captures a narrative that Western cultures omit: the desires and feelings of a preverbal infant, who expresses her vital urge of maternal closeness and undoes all marks of separation, including pronoun positions, connective syntax, or punctuation that tend to stabilize language (Wyatt 1993: 474). Beloved’s monologue violates most patriarchal linguistic conventions and illustrates how, despite her extrauterine existence, she remains inside the maternal womb: I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop   her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too   a hot thing All of it is now it is always now. (BD 248)

There are no boundaries between the mother and her unborn child, so Beloved cherishes stable space-​time coordinates: a permanent present tense in the safe, warm uterus. If this state of undifferentiation is healthy during any real period of gestation by virtue of the materno-​fetal unit, it becomes pathogenic when it grows into an imaginary pregnancy between a mother and her already-​born/​dead daughter. There are many interpretations for Beloved’s unintelligible discourse. One is that the intrauterine cocoon is harshly disturbed or interrupted by both a biological call and patriarchal forces: a downward movement and a liquid passage to life –​her own birth; to death –​her murder; and finally, to resurrection –​her return to Sethe’s womb. This monologue is, indeed, circular because it ends how it begins: “Her smiling face is the place for me   it is the face I lost   she is my face smiling at me   doing it at last   a hot thing   now we can join   a hot thing” (252), so Beloved seems to be a woman born and alive, but she communes again with her mother within her uterus. Nevertheless, the offspring of this dilated mental pregnancy and prenatal life is hideous for the three parties. Denver experiences the second birth of escaping from home and building her separate identity in contact with

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other people; Sethe descends into madness and is devoured by her fetal daughter; and Beloved avenges her baby corpse by tormenting her mother and by herself expecting a child. However, a sympathetic community of black sisters from Cincinnati rescues Sethe from her revived evil daughter who eventually disappears; whereas Paul D. and Denver later return to nurse Sethe through her liberating puerperal convalescence, because she had been Beloved’s slave during her fearful mental pregnancy. Brave Orchid and Maxine –​“No Name” aunt and her “No Name” baby girl –​Mrs. MacTeer, Frieda, and Claudia –​Pauline Breedlove and Pecola –​Sethe, Beloved, and Denver –​women of all ages, all mothers and daughters. They are all menaced by male predators and reproductive sexuality; all experience blood and milk; some are empowered by their procreative bodies; some are blessed with happy conceptions, healthy pregnancies, invigorating deliveries, and breastfeeding; yet for others, life-​giving and life-​destroying are intertwined; others are cursed with rape, incest, maternal absence, child loss, descent into madness without returning to sanity, or with the lack of physic individuation from their own mothers; some women eventually grow up, survive, learn from their foremothers, and are remembered by their beloved after their deaths; whereas others are murdered, regress to intrauterine blackness, reject all female teachings, die too early, and fall into oblivion –​all are unhistorical, voiceless women from racial minorities subdued by a wide spectrum of slavery practices in the United States or elsewhere, and everywhere. The literary revisionism and poetics of sympathy by Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison break the silence and non-​existence imposed upon these ethnic women by patriarchal forces, exalt the power of the maternal body, caress its physical and emotional wounds, narrate the unnarratable, and liberate these female selves from the bondage of their racial and gender otherness. However, even the most wretched among these fictional heroines is more fortunate than those incalculable, real Chinese baby girls cruelly drowned at birth; servants exploited by their families(-​in-​law); Africans transported to their American nightmare, enslaved, raped, and separated from their progeny; or modern U.S. citizens marginalized by society for being colored or ugly –​ none was rescued by a writer’s white ink, but they were still women, all mothers and daughters.

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The Negation of Sexual Reproduction: Ilona Karmel and Cherríe Moraga At first sight, the Holocaust novel An Estate of Memory (1969) by the Polish-​born Jewish-​American writer Ilona Karmel (1925–​2000) and the autobiography Waiting in the Wings:  Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (1997) by the lesbian Chicana Cherríe Moraga (1952–​) cannot be twinned. However, built upon fallacies of racial purity and biological laws, both totalitarian and democratic patriarchies, impregnated by dogmas of ethnic cleansing and homophobia in the twentieth century, have denied the right of pregnancy, childbirth, and maternity to Jewish women and lesbians alike. Whether under the yoke of criminal anti-​Semitism or the inviolable paradigm of the compulsorily heterosexual family blessed by religion, Jewish and homosexual women have been selected for the extermination of their gestating/​birthing bodies –​vital for the survival of Judaism –​or sentenced to the death of an empty uterus, respectively. Oral tradition and rabbinic law establish that persons born of a Jewish mother are Jewish irrespective of their father’s ancestry. This matrilineal principle is also supported by sacred texts. Birthing the Israelite nation is, indeed, rooted in the preservation of its cultural identity and the continuity of a biological line, only ensured by mothers according to the Hebrew Bible, containing many accounts of infertile women yearning for children (Lehman, Kanarek, and Bronner 2017: 4). Its main procreative narrative is presided over by a weeping Rachel17 –​Jacob’s barren wife –​until mandrake roots induce her fertility. She eventually bears 17

Jacob was the grandson of Abraham, who established a covenant with God and was promised the land of Canaan. Jacob married Rachel and her fecund sister Leah. Envious, Rachel gave her servant Bilhah to Jacob to conceive children, but later she became fertile to deliver Joseph and Benjamin –​the two youngest among Jacob’s twelve sons. In the Hebrew Bible, Rachel’s tears move God, who promises that her descendants would reach Israel, so she represents the mother crying for her children, and her suffering foreshadows Mary’s anguish at the foot of the cross of her son, Jesus Christ, as mater dolorosa (Koren 2017: 228, 247).

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two sons, dies at the birth of her second baby while journeying to the Promised Land, and she becomes the matriarch of Israel. Nevertheless, the Jewish maternal bloodline collides with Nazi Germany during World War II after a dilated history of hatred and persecution. In Adolf Hitler’s ideology, all women are child bearers, so “one gestating Jewish mother posed a greater threat than any fighting man,” and “every child that a woman brings into the world is a battle, a battle waged for the existence of her people” (qtd. in Kremer 1999: 2). While glorifying and legislating childbearing and childrearing for pure female Aryans to nurture the German fatherland, Nazism declares a gender and racial war against the reproductive powers of Jewish women, who would conceive a future Israelite motherland. Fascism also ravages the customary rule of armed conflicts: Men engage in combat and may die, while gestating female civilians are protected from the bloodshed, so they can live to deliver future male soldiers and a next generation of young mothers. Whether as survivors themselves or descendants in Europe and America paying tribute to their fallen foremothers, Jewish women’s fiction and life-​writings on the Holocaust revolve around sexual humiliations, amenorrhea, eugenic experiments with fertility and forced sterilization, forbidden pregnancy and labor, and the denial of breastfeeding and mothering, as typically female experiences to neutralize the mainstream male lens to chronicle and investigate the Holocaust. Jewish women soon discovered that they were biologically “inferior,” that bearing children was a crime against the Reich, and that their babies were to be assassinated by German decree, so pregnancy and motherhood are often tropes of female vulnerability in their testimonies, but they also become reminders of the dominance of the life force (Kremer 1999: 11). Ilona Karmel was incarcerated at the Plaszow and Skarysko labor camps after the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto; she contracted typhoid, lost her mother, and her legs were crushed by a tank before her liberation. She convalesced in Sweden for two years, relearned how to walk, and emigrated to the United States, where she chose to become a writer. Therefore, she is not an intruder –​only armed with artistic imagination –​seeking to penetrate the womb-​like enclosure of concentration camps, exclusively gestating death. An Estate of Memory is not a postwar memoir, but Karmel is transfigured into the real victim who survives to articulate physical and

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mental pain; the historian who attests the objectivity of the Jewish genocide; the eyewitness who observes the stories of other female inmates; and the bard who resurrects unnamed mothers and daughters to rescue their (non-​)fictional lives from oblivion. Moreover, Karmel’s stateless act of writing is linguistically liminal. She escapes from Europe and forgets her motherland, her language of birth –​Polish –​and the unintelligible traumatic ordeal of Nazi slaughter, which concurrently starves and breastfeeds the tongue of her rebirth and literary expression in English, in the United States of the 1960s. An Estate of Memory narrates the daily routine and the terrors of four Jewish women of different ages, confined in a concentration camp, undistinguished by social class, segregated from men, and violently separated from their beloved. Although in liminal captivity, their minds are free to remember their pasts, to flee from their frightful present tense, and to hope for a future of peace and reproductive continuity. Through interior monologues, the novel prioritizes women’s mental mechanisms to endure the ordeal of the fascist carnage with dignity and courage: They recall an idyllic prewar existence and dream of a postwar recovery of liberty and happiness. For Sara Horowitz, childbearing and motherhood provide an arena for heroism and inner resistance against anti-​Semitic forces of evil, when women are determined to risk their lives to carry to term their pregnancies, and when their success requires the help of other female prisoners (1994: 269). The zenith of Karmel’s work is, indeed, the proactivity, valor, and rebellion against Nazi death from this quartet of mothers and daughters, who feel empowered and allied, when three of them embrace a common cause to protect the Jewish matrilineal bloodline: to save the life of the fourth pregnant woman and her unborn child. Tola Ohrenstein is the 19-​year-​old heiress of a distinguished family of wealthy Cracowian merchants killed by the Reich. She is clever, rational, and cold; a loner who hides under a mattress during a selection for murder and cannot commit to others in Plaszow until she finds Barbara Grünbaum. This childless matron and altruist wife of a farmer called to arms, pretended to be a Catholic Pole thanks to her Aryan looks, until she stopped denying her Jewishness and decided to join her people in captivity, as she confesses to a perplexed Tola: Here I can be myself again, I can do something, can help […] Not that I mind lying, I’m no saint. Still, this kind of lie does something to you; you start believing

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Barbara and Tola are transferred to Skarzysko, where they find Aurelia Katz and her 15-​year-​old daughter Alinka. In this labor camp, they must endure cold weather, malnutrition, and starvation; unsanitary housing in barracks; overcrowding and lack of hygiene; rags as clothes; epidemics, like typhus or dysentery; selections to mass extermination and roll calls, where women are punished for small (un)real infractions with food restrictions, verbal abuse, public humiliations, and corporal chastisement. Long hours of forced labor in a munitions factory result not only in exhaustion and physical deterioration, but also in despondency, chronic diseases, and death. Jewish inmates bury their ethnic graves by working for Nazism to win the war, and by making ammunition to murder their own people. For manufacturing purposes, some women are also selected to become living corpses who kill their lungs and breath, due to their exposure to poisonous chemicals, like picric acid. Consequently, some captives beg, bribe, barter, or “give themselves […] in payment for not going to the yellow work” (EM 120), to avoid the so-​called Picrine. Nazi officials mostly declined to sexually abuse women to prevent racial interbreeding in concentration camps, but that was not always the case of Jewish police who collaborated with the Germans: the O.D. men. Aurelia Katz is a mature singer with erratic behavior and affected manners, who irritates other inmates with her uncooperativeness, pessimism, and clumsiness. She often cries and complains, but mostly remains still and silent, self-​centered to incubate her pain, unresponsive to other women’s needs, and unsympathetic to their suffering. She scarcely uses her melodic voice to hearten others. However, the maternal Barbara intercedes with the authorities of the labor camp for Aurelia to avoid being severed from her daughter. Later, she confesses to her benefactress the truth about Alinka: “ ‘We are not related, we only pretend to be in order to stay together. Not that it helps much. […] And then the circumstances under which we met … You see, we met in the grave’ ” (130). Nonetheless, it is this adolescent orphan who explains that they both survived a mass 18

An Estate of Memory is hereafter referred to by EM.

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murder, and how she –​as a girl –​must mother Aurelia, since she began to act out her longing for death: “ ‘Each time an SS truck passed by, she tried to dash into the road. She had had enough; she wanted to give herself up. I kept pinching, kept hitting her, till she was black and blue’ ” (148). Barbara adopts this family unit without blood ties to live together in the same barracks, and to protect them despite Tola’s reluctance: “ ‘I don’t intend to compete with Mrs. Katz for the crown of martyrdom. Still, everyone here has been through something terrible [….] a bunk isn’t a manor house; you can’t invite us all’ ” (134). This quartet ultimately agrees to weave a nurturing web of female bonding and mother-​ daughter relationships, where predominantly Barbara nurses the three other women or is worshipped by Aurelia, while Tola becomes a role model for Alinka. Nevertheless, this village of solidarity and sorority is not exempt from self-​gratification and suspicion. Tola resents Aurelia for darting from a line of workers passing heavy anti-​aircraft shells to gorge on muddy bread in the road, so Tola insists to a forgiving Barbara that the self-​interest of one individual endangers the entire group: “ ‘The girl couldn’t take it any longer and dropped her shell […] This woman has let herself go, she can think of nothing but her stomach’ ” (134). Aurelia’s new friends are equally repelled by her poor hygiene, her plainness, and her disproportionate anatomy characterized by her bulging belly: “her square torso too heavy for her wobbly legs” (105). Aurelia’s grotesque body and greedy gluttony with crumbs are the first narrative clues to hint that she hides that she is expecting a child. The call of her fetus is self-​preservation when she selfishly acts to satisfy her cravings irrespective of other women. Marlene Heinemann identifies three categories of mothers with low chances of survival, who were usually gassed after arriving in concentration camps: those arrested with small children, those above 45 years old, and those who gave birth (1986: 22). In fact, Aurelia meets all the requirements to be murdered at once: Her age verges on menopause, she is secretly pregnant, and her daughter Alinka19 is not a little girl, but not yet an adult. Gestation and childbirth duplicate 19 Alinka’s official age in the camp is not 15 but 17 years old to escape from mass execution.

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the risk of death for Jewish women,20 so when it is rumored that a faceless pregnant shadow was caught in the latrine “quite advanced” (EM 144), all female prisoners feel pity for her doom, but no one suspects that Aurelia is the expectant mother, because her reproductive youth is already gone. She was criticized for not selling her golden teeth to buy food, but Alinka justified that so as “not to look like a decrepit old woman” (137). Tola disbelieves that Aurelia can be with child, because “[she] is old, fifty or more; her husband has been dead for almost a year” (150). Barbara also notices that her friend’s torso had “grown even heavier, more square” (141) over time, but she assumes that idleness is behind the rare corpulence for a famished Jewish prisoner, who “[does] nothing but eat and sleep” (141). Therefore, Barbara encourages Aurelia: “ ‘Take a walk, […] move, do something!’ ” (141). Meanwhile, Tola is particularly upset with Aurelia: “for the way she ate, voraciously yet with her finger bent daintily […]; for sleeping at work and waking them up at night” (138), and even calls her “a professional victim” (138) or a “hand-​shy dog” (139), who shrewdly abuses the generosity of Barbara, always eager to share bread with her. Despite alienating her friends, Aurelia silences her pregnancy until the urges of her gestating body and her unborn child finally denounce her. It is during one of her annoying escapades at night to eat soup in the latrine when the inquisitive Tola discovers that Aurelia is the Gothic pregnant wraith. Tola is bewildered by the intricate technique of camouflage that Aurelia uses to hide her liminal state of gestation, which is to bind her abdomen with bandages: Those frayed, artfully tied rags proved it, and Aurelia Katz herself, cringing, her torso pressed against the wall. Then she turned, she clutched at her coat, but her hands got confused, they shook, they pulled the coat open. Like a drum the protruding belly pushed against her shirt; through a tear the red porous flesh showed, and veins twined into dark knots, [she] pulled the coat tight. (150–​1) 20 Dr. Mengele explained his natal method in Auschwitz: “When a Jewish child is born […] I can’t set the child free because there are no longer any Jews who live in freedom. I can’t let the child stay in the camp because there are no facilities in the camp that would enable the child to develop normally. It would not be humanitarian to send a child to the ovens without permitting the mother to be there to witness the child’s death. That is why I send the woman and the child to the gas ovens together.” (qtd. in Kremer 1999: 14)

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Aurelia refuses to inform Tola about her due date, but she suspects that, because of “the bandages [were] pushing into the belly, so swollen it was clear that everything would happen soon” (152). Then, Karmel’s novel eventually penetrates the expectant mother’s mind impregnated by anguish and terror: While sitting on her paper-​covered seat, not just to rest from the bandages bruising her flesh but to soak in all the cold, all the stench she could bear so that the bunk by contrast would appear hospitable and warm, then on those nights she would budget the time. (152)

Days pass and delivery approaches, but the Allied troops do not advance fast enough to end the war and save her life. Aurelia cannot nurture the materno-​fetal unit, because she perceives that her fetus is a parasitic intruder inside her uterus that devours her chances of survival: “There is no way out […] what was swelling within her [was] just a disease, a boil throbbing with pus. In due time this boil would burst open –​an operation she might or might not survive” (152). Pregnancy is a nightmarish occurrence in the present tense, which Aurelia associates exclusively with the hostile labor camp and with the threat of death. Consequently, she wants to flee from her own war with gestation and from the mortal wound of childbirth, the same way she needs to escape from physical captivity. Given that she rejects her current double confinement –​being heavily pregnant and a prisoner –​Aurelia opts for a state of hibernation, which coincides with winter. She refuses to recall and narrate the early months of her pregnancy, infected with mass murder, forced labor, and suicidal thoughts. Instead, she invents or discloses to Tola how her child was conceived. Aurelia’s rare experience of sexual intercourse in a childless, loveless marriage to a music teacher was her clement gift to him on the eve of his announced execution, while for her incredulous listener, marital sex is Aurelia’s way to embellish a rape or adulterous encounters in the Cracow ghetto under siege. Alinka knows that Aurelia expects a baby since her second month of gestation, so Barbara is the only member of the quartet who ignores the truth. During Sabbath candles prior to Tola’s ghostly discovery, the farmer’s wife prayed for the unidentified expectant mother: “ ‘I’m sure

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this pregnant woman must be young […] and helpless […] this girl must be slaving at Picrine […] she must be starving’ ” (145). Barbara questions her silent friends in vain to find out who this female prisoner can be and unselfishly, she offers her sympathy and help before she learns that Aurelia is the one with child. Barbara cares for the powerless expectant mother, but mostly for both her own childlessness and the unborn baby when she mentally summons her absent husband Stephan and imagines his reaction: “ ‘We’ll do anything for that little innocent’ ” (146). This is the metaphorical male sperm for Barbara to non-​sexually conceive a baby in her rapturous uterine mind. In fact, she appropriates, first, the pregnancy of the unknown girl, and later, that of Aurelia, to compensate for her own maternal frustration: “Her longing for a child was […] intact: the envy of that other woman, the sense of loss, and at once the disbelief and at once the hope that such loss could not be suffered forever” (166). In the labor camp, Barbara often recalls her non-​procreative past of freedom when she believed that she could be pregnant: Nights when she had lain motionless so as not to disturb the child whose home she might have just become. And it seemed to her someone had been watching her on those nights, someone who looked like the professor and said “quite unnecessary” in a high squeaky voice. (284)

In fact, a doctor later issued this same sentence to diagnose Stefan’s sterility. Conversely, Barbara’s reproductive potential and maternal instincts remain robust during her forced confinement at the camp, notably when Tola informs her about Aurelia’s pregnancy. Then, Barbara infiltrates her friend’s unhomely womb to picture her fetus with white ink, and to nurture an imaginary materno-​fetal unit of her own: [She] was looking only at the square torso, the house in which the child lived. She steeped closer; the dark walls seemed to part, and there he was crouching, his blurred eyes groping around. A child –​the child whom she would save. And already she could feel him –​his soft skin, his breath. (167)

Although she reproaches Aurelia for her insincerity, Barbara prioritizes her own mental activity and seizes the maternal authority to impose her wish when she sexes the baby. But above all, she decides to mother Aurelia

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more than before, while carrying the duty to safeguard her unborn boy. Barbara idealizes and exalts the experience of pregnancy, so she cannot sympathize with unmotherly women “for whom childbearing disintegrated to varicose veins, nausea –​and endless succession of petty illness. Quite otherwise it would be with her soon. As if the curse cast upon Eve were to be revoked for her sake, so she felt –​her childbearing only exuberance, only the growth of joy” (166). If Aurelia remains as the reluctant gestating body for whom her impending maternity is a physical disease and a psychic ordeal, Barbara incarnates the pregnant soul of a loving expectant mother. Furthermore, this new mental condition impregnates her with more strength, courage, and solidarity to endure her confinement in the camp, while finding sense in her sacrifice, despite threats of punishment and death. Indeed, if the biological mother –​Aurelia –​will soon have to push to deliver the baby through her birth canal, the surrogate mother –​Barbara –​intends to deliver her boy for a second time. On that occasion, he will have to trespass through the dark passage of captivity to radiant freedom, because she plans to smuggle him out of the labor camp. She contrives to contact trustworthy O.D. men and bribable collaborators to arrange for the baby to cross the limen to life beyond the uterine prison. Meanwhile, Barbara writes a letter to her loyal housekeepers –​Antoni and Marta –​to fetch and nurse the yet unborn boy until the war ends. Overflowing enthusiasm, Barbara implicates all members of the quartet in her idea of “communal pregnancy” and the unsafe mission “to rescue the child” (165), although Tola warns her not to arouse “false hopes” (165). She and Alinka rather think that they have no money to reward men inside the camp, and that Poles outside are not altruistic enough to defy the Reich, to risk their lives for a Jewish boy, or to please an old friend –​the idealist Barbara, who is annoyed because she believes that not everyone is heartless. Sidra Ezrahi argues that heroism in the universe of concentration camps is to stay alive and to commit small acts of defiance and self-​preservation, where humanity is the key for the prisoners to fight against the temptations of surrender and death (1982: 69, 86). Despite fear and uncertainty, the sororal spirit of survival, self-​sacrifice, and disobedience to Nazi extermination among the quartet of women in Karmel’s novel is consolidated

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when Barbara, Tola, and Alinka commit to support each other to save themselves and the lives of their pregnant friend Aurelia and her unborn baby. Therefore, they become unhistorical heroines, who locally engender a female guerrilla attack to defeat Hitler in his war against Jewish sexual reproduction, and to ensure ova to fertilize an idealized Israelite motherland. Even Aurelia is partly infected with the viral optimism of Barbara, who equates the triumphant progress of the Allied soldiers on the verge of reaching Polish borders, with the advancement of their communal pregnancy toward the frontier of childbirth. Nevertheless, this parallel military and prenatal forward motion also communes with the auspicious passing of the seasons: “Aurelia came to feel she had been carrying no more a chunk of winter, which now at last was dissolving into the mild spring air. Soon the last vestige of this winter would be expelled, soon she would become like everyone else” (EM 232). Beyond the goal of safe undifferentiation from other women after labor that Aurelia longs for, the cycle of nature promises her the advent of springtime to gestate the sunny cease-​fire, to deliver the fruit of a baby, and to grow the blossom of freedom, while she still freezes in the barren, dark, and cold hell of her captivity. Nature whispers that life is an ongoing phenomenon, despite Nazi attempts to impose the winter of death and to abort the seedtime and the harvest season for all European Jewry. Barbara’s maternal song of fervent faith in birth and rebirth soothes Aurelia into signing a truce with her fetus; the battle finally lulled when he has become human to his mother: “The hope grew stronger. Within her was peace. What had stirred in her body, with kicks like cries protesting against being “just an illness, a boil,” had become still” (231). Winter, pregnancy, and war are one single liminal nightmare to possibly expire soon, thanks to the synergy of spring, childbirth, and liberty. Meanwhile, Barbara not only shares with Aurelia her postwar dreams of white linen, colors of nature, succulent banquets, and smiles of infants, but also warms her friend and her unborn baby with her own body every night. To feed them with bread, potatoes, or soup, Barbara sells her own family mementos, jewels, and clothes; and she “work[s]‌all the time, for the two of them –​more, for three, as if the quota were demanded even of him, of the child squatting within Aurelia’s womb” (169). Barbara even gestates the idea that she is the indispensable constituent of the materno-​ fetal unit, because her emotional and material nourishment for her boy is

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as vital as his uterine home and the amniotic exchanges with his biological mother, for his growth, tranquility, and safety: When Aurelia ate the food she had brought, the child too ate, smacking with relish. When Aurelia with her help took off the tight bandages, the child was stretching, was resting at last. With every day he needed her more; needed her bread, her care, her hope that was like air to him, like the very breath. How he would have fared without this hope, Barbara dreaded to think. (170)

Aurelia is relieved when other female prisoners know that she is pregnant, because she resents that she was previously misjudged about her constant need of rest, sleep, and food, as she reproaches Tola: “ ‘You looked at me as if I were an insect, a mere nothing’ ” (153). Despite Barbara’s positivity and the arrangements of the child’s deliverance, Aurelia sees that the spring of peace is delayed, while she learns stories of expectant mothers murdered in labor camps, so one monomaniacal question bombards her mind under siege: “ ‘Can it end well in such a place?’ ” (172). Before her due date, Aurelia recalls the cultural heritage of Jewish childbirths that she vicariously experienced, when the heroic birthing woman –​not the baby –​was the center of attention, pampered by physicians, nurses, relatives, and friends: Luxury –​this was birth; flowers, and the conspiracy of protectiveness toward the young mother, the silk gown open on the breast. Such license too was birth, and admiration, and praise –​the easy birth admired, for wasn’t it just like her? So energetic, so brave! The protracted labor praised no less, as no one else could have emerged from such an ordeal so radiant and oh, so lovely. “How lovely you look” was what one had to say. (173)

Aurelia contrasts her past with her present, but it is impossible to correlate the happy deliveries she remembers with the imminent biological call of childbirth for her, and the mental terror of knowing that she cannot flee from the labor camp, ruled by female vulnerability, scarcity of nutrients, and death. Her inner thoughts blend with verbal outbursts, in which she is not capable of calling herself a mother, surrenders to despair, and cares only about her own survival –​not that of her child: I just want everything to be over, in what way, I don’t care, as long as it’s over. […] Tell me, am I a monster, an unnatural moth –​person? I don’t know, I’m losing my

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Chapter 3 grip on myself […] If they believe that all will end well, why can’t I? And I try. But for you it’s easy to believe this; if everything goes wrong, you’ll wash your hands of it and leave. I cannot leave. Oh, no, I’m not a monster! Even if I don’t care; I’m not. I never wanted this to happen; it was an accident. (173–​4)

Aurelia prefers to abort the quartet’s communal pregnancy, because she asserts that only she bears the lethal bodily threat of birthing a child, so this risk is not to be shared with others. Nevertheless, she defends herself:  Her attitude is not unnatural because she never intended to be a mother. Then, she distrusts Barbara’s optimism, while a realistic Tola cannot comfort the woman she sees in her: “old, toothless […] with her mouth sucked in” (174). Ilona Karmel not only accuses the Nazi regime of breeding Aurelia’s unmaternal nature within the context of the Holocaust, but also innovates on the topic of pregnancy and childbirth in women’s literature by depicting a forsaken pre-​menopausal widow as an expectant mother in bondage, including her battle against the threat of ageing. To flee from the gas chamber, Aurelia rouges her lips with blood and stays in the cold for her skin to have fewer wrinkles. Most children born in Nazi camps did not survive: Their mothers did not have milk and the overseers did not provide them with enough nourishment, so they starved or were killed by means of injections of air and gasoline; they were drowned or beaten to death (Amesberger 2010: 144). Barbara is determined to save Aurelia’s unborn child. Yet, she struggles to decide whether she can succeed in deceiving her captors by pretending to be a Catholic Pole, hurrying to baptize her baby outside the prison after his birth; or if she will be caught and killed together with her boy. Meanwhile, Aurelia’s countdown to childbirth means immobility, silence, and isolation from the quartet. She desires to expel the danger from her uterus, although she fears the onset of labor pains announcing that the moment of life or death came: At times it happened that a quiver would disturb her peace. “It will be nothing, it must be nothing,” she repeated like a magic spell. If the spell proved potent and the quiver stopped, she calmed down. If it returned, even for an instant, terror seized her. (EM 232)

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Aurelia yearns for oblivion and drowsy sleep, but her unborn child kicks rhythmically to remind his antagonistic mother that symbolically, he is the only captor who tortures her body and mind: Clasping her belly like an overfilled basket she ran outside, then stopped, and pressed it against the damp barracks wall and pushed and squirmed. Nothing helped. Powerful, refreshed by the long rest, the kicking within her went on. Now she knew what was inside her: no disease, no boil, but a tormentor who sucked her strength, snatched every crumb away, then hid to make her believe the persecution was over, and now came back for good. (242)

The night when labor contractions begin, Aurelia is alone with Tola while Barbara is absent at work. Consequently, the body and the soul of the birthing woman are severed from each other, so childbirth is in peril. Aurelia wants to scream to exteriorize her pain at labor. She trusts it is not a crime for a mother to deliver a baby in a labor camp, regardless of its certain death after birth. In contrast, Tola is faithful to the sororal spirit within the quartet and carries out Barbara’s risky mission of the child’s deliverance: She informs a Jewish doctor and O.D. men to transport Aurelia away from the barracks under curfew, to a clothing depot in the woods. However, this parturient woman wants to give birth in the latrine and deliberately screams to be heard by a foreman to win her own war against the baby: He must inevitably die so that she can survive. Tola conceals Aurelia’s birthing body and persuades the man that the captive in pain has typhus, which paradoxically saves the unborn child, but this could be his mother’s death sentence:  The foreman sees Aurelia’s sick, old face only, so he declares that she will have to go soon to Picrine and leaves. Despite Tola’s anger against her infanticidal friend, she helps her to untie the knots and remove the bandages that harm her, so as to alleviate her tormented abdomen: “Reddish and bruised, the enormous belly pushed against like a knoll of clay earth over which wheels had rolled” (252). Then, physical suffering in rising waves and (un)maternal feelings alternate to show another battle between the soma and the psyche of the parturient woman: “The spasms grew more prolonged, the gasps harsher, and when they ceased Aurelia’s mouth went on moving without a sound. ‘I  –​it’s not the pain.’ She licked a drop of blood off. ‘Only I’m afraid

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to be left alone with it, to see it’ ” (253). To avoid growing fond of her baby postnatally, Tola promises Aurelia that she will never see him. While being transported in a cart to a safe depot, Aurelia is also described as “one of the barrels jingling with their torn hoops” (253), to suggest the impotence, inertness, and objectification of her birthing body. Upon arrival, the doctor expects to scold a “young wench” (254) for “whor[ing] around” (254) in asexual times of war, but he feels pity when “Aurelia lift[s]‌to him her withered face” (254). Tola saves the life of the unborn boy once more when she convinces the physician not to report the childbirth to the camp’s authorities, although he warns her that the mother can be pardoned, never her baby. The labor scene is often interrupted and partly omitted, because Karmel chooses not to focus on the action of delivering the child, but on Tola’s tribulations and her heroic agency. To reinforce Aurelia’s dehumanization again, she is merely a body left inside the depot “with her knees drawn up, her mouth now pushing the breath out, now snapping as if to snatch the rag that the doctor held” (255), while the narrative is located elsewhere. Karmel’s novel stays, like a traditional father, waiting outside for the physician to inform about the baby’s safe birth. The author also narrates the proximity of Nazi dangers, interspersed with Aurelia’s distant screams, confirming that not she but her friend is the true heroine at labor. Tola has been tearless since the German occupation of Cracow that killed her family and ruined her promising future. Nevertheless, when the doctor commands her to fetch water for his parturient patient, Tola begins to cry until a wail announces a new life: She walked on, the cold water dripping down her legs, the pail feeling lighter and lighter. Then a few meager tears moved down her face; because the water had run out from the leaky pail she was crying, because in the darkness she did not know her way. And when the tears stopped, she pressed her eyes tight, to bring more tears, for the child now being born […] Then a cry –​an infant’s cry. (256)

Barbara was the pregnant soul for the materno-​fetal unit in the last months of Aurelia’s gestation, but she cannot save her boy by herself and arrives too late at the nativity scene. Meanwhile, Tola involuntarily incarnates mater dolorosa:  She gets lost and suffers mental pain while carrying and spilling water, whereas her birthing face with a cascade of

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tears replaces maternal amniotic fluids and blood expelled by an absent Aurelia, in the dark. It is, therefore, Tola who symbolically delivers and helps the child to slip and split from his biological mother to penetrate his own vale of tears. If the official male victory of Allied powers against fascism was declared only one time –​May 8, 1945 –​in World War II, the female victory over the denial of Jewish sexual reproduction in concentration camps occurred every time that a woman was able to fulfil her pregnancy and gave birth to a child who would survive. In Karmel’s novel, the first movement to save the neonate is to soothe its threatening postnatal wailing, which could alert the camp authorities, by feeding her with water and sugar. It is Alinka who reveals that Barbara was wrong about her baby’s sex, because the imagined male fetus is, in reality, a flesh-​and-​ blood girl. Although the farmer’s wife pays the physician and O.D. men to accomplish the vital action of the rescue mission, it is also Alinka who convinces a gullible German soldier to smuggle out Aurelia’s daughter from their prison. Although he embraces Nazi ideology, he ignores the inhuman truth of the Holocaust and trusts that Hitler only incarcerates and murders Jewish criminals, never children. In short, Alinka is the last member of the quartet to deliver the baby to her freedom. Meanwhile, the doctor diagnoses that Aurelia is physically well after labor, but she paradoxically refuses to eat, which confirms that it was the fetus’s voracious hunger for life  –​not her own instinct of self-​preservation  –​that kept them both alive during pregnancy. Moreover, Aurelia’s puerperium is impregnated by inarticulateness and a lack of expression, particularly when she learns that no one discovered that she gave birth to a girl about to escape from the camp: “ ‘Forgive me, I … I feel. I don’t know how I feel’ ” (271); or when she “manage[s]‌a pale smile” (275) after finding out that her baby grows up safe with Antoni and Marta. Barbara justifies Aurelia’s screaming to give herself up to the Nazis at the onset of labor because of her suffering and panic, liminally leading her to insanity. As Karmel’s only narrative clues, Aurelia’s subsequent puerperal silence, passivity, and self-​ effacement also reveal her psychological injury after gestating/​birthing in captivity, her maternal guilt, and her mourning about not loving her daughter and not being authorized to live out her belated motherhood. The elision of Aurelia’s mental pain prefigures the quiet extinction of her

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body –​undesirable for the Reich and only a uterus bearing the potentiality of Jewish survival –​because she does, indeed, die of typhus. The quartet disintegrates after the successful mission to safeguard and liberate the baby girl. Tola’s intelligence and perfect German allow her to become the overseer of her fellow prisoners and benefit from extra food, a bunk of her own, and safety. She chooses selfish individuality, while Barbara persists in her maternal martyrdom of collectivity: She protects the weak and nurses Alinka, who has become dangerously ill with typhus. Thanks to her cares, the teenager recovers and, ultimately, she is the only surviving member of the group. Barbara is selected for mass execution when she refuses to abandon the sick at the camp hospital. Meanwhile, Tola falls from grace but weeps, repents, and is eventually redeemed, because she is executed as a savior while protecting a starving Alinka, who was trying to get nourishment during a forced march at the end of the war. Barbara and Tola are, indeed, the true Biblical Rachels, the symbolic matriarchs of Israel, not the biological mother Aurelia. These two women suffer and cry for (unborn) children, but they die and have no lifetime to rear their surrogate progeny. Infected with two femicides, the novel’s realistic epilogue brutally strikes the reader and decimates her/​his expectations. Nevertheless, Ilona Karmel’s enduring white ink plants the seed of hope in spring, which obliterates the sense of failure in wintry death and perpetuates the Jewish maternal bloodline with two female survivors. Barbara and Tola save not only Aurelia’s daughter, but also Alinka. Both girls represent the generational renewal of nature’s cycle of sexual reproduction; thus, they geminate the promise of future gestating/​birthing bodies, maternal power and love for the idealized Israelite motherland defeating the Nazi goal of destroying Jewish fertility. Diana Taylor argues that the question of who becomes a mother and the struggles awaiting primarily lesbian, infertile, and older women choosing non-​traditional maternal paths, reflect that motherhood is, by definition, a political decision (1997: 286). Even in democracies until recent times, the denial of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering to gay women has been an inviolable, repressive rule of barrenness grounded in the indisputable patriarchal equation between heterosexuality and motherhood, sanctioned not necessarily by biology, but rather by sexual and social customs, religion, and science. The homosexual Chicana writer Cherríe Moraga confesses

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that her long-​term choice of childlessness was inculcated by the harmful conflation of being a woman and becoming a mother: [I had] the rigid conviction that lesbians (that is, those of us on the more masculine side of the spectrum) weren’t really women. We were women-​lovers, a kind of third sex, and most definitely not men. Having babies was something “real” women did –​ not butches. (Waiting in the Wings21 20)

For decades, Moraga reproduces the gender ideology of heterosexuality that disavows her own femaleness, and she interiorizes the rule that lesbianism and motherhood are exclusive categories:  [We] don’t make babies with our lovers22 (WW 15). Based upon the “butch” and “femme” divisions among lesbians, Moraga conveys her difficulty imagining herself as a mother, because she is not only unable to create a child through sexual relations with her female lovers, but also further restrained by her identity as a non-​feminine homosexual (Garay 2009: 199). Yet, the heartbreaking separation from a child she co-​parented for years under the secondary role of being the gay lover of a mother, awakened Moraga’s dormant maternal instincts, drove her to reconsider biological maternity at forty, and yearn for a queer family of her own conception. However, this mission was complicated by her older age to become pregnant, by social prejudices against lesbian mothers, and by her own Mexican-​American ancestry enforcing the traditional paradigm of Catholic heterosexual parenthood. As journal entries impregnated with her amalgamated thoughts, emotions, dreams, bodily sensations, and social interactions, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood recollects Moraga’s odyssey toward maternity come to fruition after great pain. Enfolded by a prologue and an epilogue, its trinitarian structure consists of “City of Angels” narrating the liminal stages from conception in January through a six-​month gestation resulting in a premature delivery in July; “Waiting in the Wings” chronicling the first months of life and the struggles to survive for her sick baby Rafael Angel; and “Dream of a Desert” describing snapshots of Moraga’s mothering practices and the recovery 21 Waiting in the Wings is hereafter referred to by WW. 2 2 The use of italics to quote Waiting in the Wings is consistent with Moraga’s own choice.

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of her son’s health. The sequential entries in her diary accentuate its objectivity and linearity recounting the liminal continuum of childbearing. Meanwhile, the transitions between her matrilineal tongue –​Spanish –​ and the linguistic rules of her American fatherland –​ English –​ nourish Moraga’s journal exploring and expanding her in-​between language of procreativity with white ink. Margaret Gibson contends that conventional motherhood can be queered when its “expected” sexual, gendered, relational, political, and symbolic components are defied (2014: 6). The subtitle of Moraga’s life-​writing indicates her resolute attempt, as a third-​wave feminist, to transform her personal experience of becoming a mother into a political statement about the diversity of options for sexual reproduction and mothering in the United States, in order to defy the expectation that heteronormativity governs maternity. Sex, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, love-​life, social status, profession, and nationality –​all configure Moraga’s identity: She is a butch lesbian with a white partner Ella, while being also a middle-​class Mexican-​American writer from California. Her father is Anglo and her mother Chicana, but Moraga identifies herself as a woman of color and fully embraces being a Latina. Some of these (un) orthodox variables clash with the rules of traditional motherhood, but they will enable her to reach the desirable sense of self as a lesbian (expectant) mother. Moraga admits that time and place of residence are also vital factors to bear in mind for her socially perilous entrepreneurship to conceive her own queer family. The progressive, cosmopolitan city of San Francisco at the end of the twentieth century is the imperfectly ideal place to become a gay parent, compared to more narrow-​minded, puritanical communities in other areas of the United States. Instead of the available medical option of in-​vivo fertilization using sperm from an unidentified donor, Moraga’s meditated decision of a homemade insemination accepts –​yet concurrently queers –​the law of sexual reproduction. Becoming a homosexual mother still involves male semen and a female ovum, but the non-​copulating couple consists of two friends signing a “queer contract” (WW 39): a lesbian woman –​Cherríe –​and a gay man of her own choice, Pablo. They both share the same procreative goal and love each other without erotic attraction between them. Furthermore, this queer

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ritual of unselfish love to help Moraga is triangulated by the presence of her lover –​Ella –​as the potential co-​mother: The insemination had nothing to do with sex or orgasm or excitement, except our three-​way titillated embarrassment over the procedure. Pablo stood in the bathroom, trying to think about anything sexier than the mouth of a mason jar, while Ella and I waited nervously in the bedroom together, Ella practicing pumping water in and out of the syringe […] “Yeah,” I answer, “one way or another that sperm has just gotta get inside you.” Very simple… and unromantic. Yet I did feel made love to. And whether pregnant or not, I knew I would never forget what that softness felt like, my legs up and open to receive whatever destiny had decided for me. I close my eyes and dream Pablo as a sweet twin lover. (25)

The first attempt at conception is successful, so Moraga enters the limen of pregnancy in a queerly natural way, not in a fertility clinic. The inseminator is only the biological father, whereas the future baby’s other true parent is Moraga’s female partner, who offers her emotional support and the erogenous pleasure of her physical proximity during the queer act of sexual reproduction. As a double movement of survival and resistance, of recuperation and reinvention, Moraga maintains the blood ties of her maternal ancestors by choosing a Chicano father, but her vision of a family goes beyond biology, because it includes her social network of lovers and friends (Driver 2008: 158). Her queer mothering is inclusive –​ not exclusive  –​because her procreative choice is rooted in presumable countercurrents of conservatism and liberalism in constant negotiation and harmonization:  the genes of her Mexican origins and the pride of her lesbianism. On the one hand, Moraga’s monogamous gay relationship with a trustworthy female partner is crucial for her reproductive decision: “I would not have embarked on this journey alone: I chose motherhood because I knew Ella was that quality of woman who would never just up and leave” (WW 16). On the other hand, Moraga avoids the negative aspects of her Hispanic ancestry, such as homophobia, rigid ecclesiastical dogmas, and the patriarchal repression of Chicanas in terms of their sexuality and compulsory domestic gender roles. Instead, she integrates other positive elements of her Mexican identity into her own project of maternal queerness, like the protection of cultural heritage, the significance of family togetherness, and intergenerational matrilineal bonds.

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Moraga’s butch self also emerges to mock herself and her sexist choice of a colored, pure-​breed stallion: “Nationality. I am to be the mother of a Mexican baby. I am the worst and best of those macho Chicano nationalists. I picked a man for his brains and dark beauty. And the race continues” (39). Indeed, Moraga parodies the racial supremacism from her maternal lineage to queerly assert her own identity with cockiness: She is masculine, motherly, and Hispanic, but also traditionalist because she wants to ensure the continuity of the Mexican bloodline in her unborn baby. Moraga’s first weeks of undiagnosed gestation intertwine mental anguish: I am superstitious. I think if I want it too bad, it won’t happen (27), with unreadable body sensations that she intuitively senses or needs to decipher as pregnancy symptoms: I feel my hormones acting up, blowing me up, sitting heavy on my chest […] I experience pain often in my womb and vagina (26). Moreover, procreativity negatively affects her creativity, because her longing for a child distracts Moraga from her artistic endeavors as a playwright. Then, she is convinced by Ella and her sister to take a home pregnancy test. The paramount importance of its positive result bewilders her: “How could two tiny lines, such insignificant markings, pronounce something as irrevocable as a human life?” (27). Nonetheless, she distrusts the empirical evidence of expecting a baby until Ella takes the same test and its negative result proves the infallibility of this diagnostic test. Moraga rather confides in the physical transformations in her own pregnant anatomy, accompanied with abdominal pain, to confirm that her womb houses the longed-​for embryo: My skin has broken out in a desperate rash. This morning I awaken to a narrow band of pain just below my ribcage. I feel my uterus expanding. I know the baby is larger now. Its presence is irrevocable, and the gravity of this change hits a deeper level. (30)

Indeed, Moraga manages to translate her new body awareness into a genuine exercise of white ink throughout Waiting in the Wings. Nevertheless, the self-​absorption of her physiological self, nurturing the materno-​fetal unit with delight, is often interrupted by inevitable interpersonal exchanges and social exposure. The future mother needs to inform her physician and her blood family with skeptical members like her brother, and to share the glad tidings with the sympathetic sorority

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of her friends, students, and co-​workers from San Francisco, who offer advice and help. Cherríe Moraga cherishes a first victory against the unproductive patriarchal medicine when she confronts her incredulous doctor with her occupied uterus. She is a 40-​year-​old lesbian, but she became pregnant at home in one attempt, without medical intervention. Weeks later, when clinicians confirm that her healthy child clings to her womb, tears of joy alternate with the shocking discovery that she carries a son. Her instinctive conviction of gestating a daughter, together with fallacious assumptions about specific times in women’s ovulating cycle to conceive a girl, are soon discarded by the full acceptance of her child’s sex: “This baby was a soul wanting to get here, as a male. Punto final [full stop]” (32). Soon, Moraga endows her embryo with maleness and personhood when she chooses to call him Rafael, like the archangel of healers –​ a name to honor her Mexican Catholicism, while his festival concurs with her due date in late September. Since then, Moraga listens to Rafael and locates his presence inside her body with accuracy: [He] greets me with bolder movement each day. I feel him now just to the right of my navel (44). She even perceives him with alacrity:  The animal kicks inside me, and that’s all the sign of life I need. I am female essence relieved of all burden. There is nothing else required of me but to dwell here, pregnant (34–​5). Intoxicated by the power of Mother Nature, Moraga quietly senses and appreciates her own womanhood while she feels her not-​so-​quiet child within. She also engages in intrauterine dialogues with Rafael when she endures pregnancy discomforts to ask him about her pain: I spoke to him for understanding amid aching joints and a low-​grade fever and a steady dampness between my thighs (33). Cherríe Moraga resents that daily life distracts her from focalizing her attention on her son or on the liminal changes of her anatomy. However, the heightened awareness of her own body transcends her womb and its new inhabitant, and engulfs her entire physicality, her external appearance, and her sexuality. She laments how allergies, flu, and other ailments unrelated to gestation, indispose her and diminish her chances for delighting in the season of blossoms, because spring coincides with the second trimester of pregnancy, when her swollen belly and round silhouette already bloom and expose the unequivocal growth of life within: Rafael is no longer an

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embryo but already a fetus. Moraga even feels that her non-​reproductive anatomy is the unmaternal enemy that boycotts the enjoyment of her gestational state to its fullest –​physically and emotionally: These miserable allergies are dragging me down into a fog of anxiety, depression. The days are gorgeous, but I cannot fully appreciate them, the winds stirring up the pollen, the seeds of life. Pregnancy happening everywhere and ironically my body is reacting against it (38). Moraga is also ambivalent about the interdependence between her robust gender identity and the liminal transformations of her pregnant body, leading to a new physical femininity, which is welcomed by her child’s co-​mother: Ella tells me daily how much more feminine I look. I see it, too –​ my hair longer than it’s been in fifteen years, my hips and thighs and breasts rounding from this pregnancy, the softening taking place throughout my body, the tears. I like it and yet in bed feel a strong urge to reassert my butchness, my self as a love-​maker. (45)

It is the quality of betwixt and between of queerness that reconciles her own sexuality with the beauty preferences of her lover, so Moraga enjoys the liminally feminine attractiveness of pregnancy. Yet, this cannot menace her essence and sexual choice as both a masculine lesbian lover and an expectant mother. Yvonne Yarbro-​Bejarano detects the centrality of the erotic in Moraga’s Waiting in the Wings, and how she breaks taboos in mainstream representations of procreation that divorce sexuality from pregnancy once conception has occurred (2001: 136). Therefore, Moraga’s life-​writing not only confirms that Ella and herself make love while she is pregnant, but also expresses how sensuous desire erupts from her gestating anatomy in constant mutation. Unexpectedly, this wave of voluptuousness also delivers erogenous pleasure to her in isolation. When she stays in New York without her partner, Moraga recalls lovers from her youth and admits that she masturbates, so Waiting in the Wings pioneers in declaring that pregnancy does not inexorably entail a woman’s chastity or her lack of libido. Instead, Moraga’s mind flies to memories of lesbian sex, while her body stays with her on earth. She already knows that her physical self is an object of onanism and a subject of sexual climax, but she now senses lust and new erotic sensations through the doubling of her self, because beyond the uterus, the baby is present inside of her.

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Therefore, Moraga celebrates the queer sexualization and liminal arousal of her own anatomy thanks to pregnancy: I put my fingers to a vague and lingering nostalgia for a life ten years ago […] and remember. But it is no past woman I discover there, more the eruption of who I am today. How do I describe that at the moment of orgasm, I feel the infant inside me curl up into a hard fist, no violence, but a hard ball of intensity swelling in my womb? And I cry for this life, this miracle, this sexuality that is happening to me unlike any I have experienced. The slightest contact evokes a response. Touching myself, remembering touching Ella touching me. (WW 34)

Moraga treasures this new sensuality, although she often loses control over her gestating body. Meanwhile, her mental activity, colored by maternal love and clouded by terrors, reigns over her pregnancy. Firstly, she nourishes the antagonism between her soma and her psyche when she accuses the former of subjugating the latter: Hormones. I cry freely and without will or censor. Last night I go to bed, weepy-​e yed when Ella comes in (44). Secondly, she exalts that true life begins at forty, so she is enraptured by beautiful dreams of her son, still a fetus or already a boy at different ages. However, her conscious and unconscious selves more often become bad allies to torture her when she feels powerless under the constant fear of losing her child. Moraga experiences anxiety after the insemination, the haunting threat of bleeding every time she begins to spot thick earth-​brown color (36), and frequent nightmares –​ bathed in panic –​about the death of her unborn baby, followed by her own wake: My entire body fills with the fire of fear first, then despair […] [and] bounds with adrenaline. I feel the new life inside me stir. And I think of how this small smudge of life knows me like no other, how once I knew my mother the same way and was born with the knowledge of her torment. This is not the legacy I wish to pass onto my baby. (30)

Here, Moraga is afraid of miscarriage, but trusting the power of influence by the materno-​fetal unit on both constituents, she also returns to her girlhood and recalls her own mother to confess feelings of guilt, because she imagines that, as a pregnant woman, she can transfuse her blemishes and distress intergenerationally to her unborn son and potentially ruin his

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future life. Interbred with the Mexican myth of La Llorona,23 Moraga’s rewriting of Medea from classical Greece also disquiets her, because it amalgamates vicarious infanticidal pulses with her own desperate craving for a child, which she cannot reconcile. Indeed, her fertile productivity as a playwright becomes an oneiric obsession that detects her irrational fear of murdering her own son prenatally. Uncannily erupting before the pre-​ term delivery, nightmares with dreadful images expelling uterine death at premature birth, invade Moraga’s intermittent sleep at night: A small cup-​sized baby has erupted from my womb in my dream. It has dark hair and what seems like painted black lines for emerging features. The tiny sack of baby hangs by a cord between my legs. I keep trying to push it back inside, knowing it is not yet ready to emerge. (36)

Nonetheless, Waiting in the Wings reflects that bad omens seen by the mental self can foreshadow the dangers awaiting the physical self a week later, the time when spotting turns into a risk of miscarriage and forces Moraga to be at the mercy of biology and healthcare: This is no dream. Bleeding buckets between my legs as I drive to the hospital, my future without this child rushes before me. I try to stop my thoughts: how familiar childlessness is to me; how much simpler it would be; how every corpuscle in my body resists a return to that state. (39)

On this occasion, medicine helps Moraga, because the hemorrhage was caused by polyps in the cervix. The obstetric technology also reassures her when an ultrasound monitor listens to her baby’s heartbeat, which means more for Moraga than only fetal survival  –​this is the signal of Rafael’s full human-​beingness (40). Nevertheless, this frightening episode with a happy ending allows Moraga to grasp the fragility of prenatal life, the real threat of death beyond nightmares, her emotional dependence on Rafael, and even her own vulnerability, because during this traumatic chapter of her pregnancy, she was not a woman, but only a “girl-​child with baby” (39). 23

From the times of Mexico’s colonization, she incarnates “the bad Indian mother.” When her rich Spanish inseminator returns home to marry another woman, La Llorona drowns her own children and endlessly weeps.

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Waiting in the Wings revolves around the Mexican queer pregnancy and maternity for a lesbian artist, being aware that her older age biologically predisposes her to gestate potential prenatal/​natal/​postnatal illness and death. However, Suzanne Bost highlights that this narrative about birth is not only menaced by mortal risks for the (un)born baby, but also intertwined with communal illness and shared mortality: Moraga’s many friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and relatives are “crippling,” sick, dying, or being mourned in funerals, some of whom are male victims of A.I.D.S. in San Francisco during the 1990s –​a reality that actually occupies more textual space than pregnancy or childbirth (2009: 121–​2). Simultaneously, Moraga contextualizes and personalizes the natural processes of natality and mortality in a retrospective manner: Is there a kind of queer balance to this birthing and dying … lesbians giving life to sons, our brothers passing? He is the child of queers (WW 62). She has two clear purposes to make this statement: to elevate her messianic, queer-​born boy who can prevent the gay community from becoming extinct by the then deadly plague, and to find strength within herself to undergo the risk of Rafael’s death before/​ during/​after giving life to him. If thirty-​two weeks typically means survival in a pre-​term labor, Moraga’s water breaks during the twenty-​seventh week of gestation at the end of June. She is not with Ella at home in San Francisco, but transitorily in her birthplace: Los Angeles –​the city of the Angels –​to deliver her son Rafael Angel, who “wouldn’t wait” (48) until the due date. Only escorted by her ageing parents, Moraga does not endure physical pain, but instead the utmost powerlessness, so her only solace is to converse with her birthing son in a taxi on her way to the maternity clinic: Hang on, mijito [my son]. Stay inside me, please stay inside me (49). Moraga’s queer childbirth is also controlled by the same indomitable forces within her body and by the same external interventionism of science, once she has expelled almost all amniotic fluid and she is hospitalized to delay the premature delivery and to preserve fetal life, because “the baby’s lungs are not strong enough to breathe on their own” (50). Moraga is a patient, but she feels like a victim, who passively submits to the god-​like authority of doctors or nurses –​liminally her new family whom she must trust. If she has profusely expressed her admiration and gratitude to Ella for nursing and loving her throughout her pregnancy, as narrated in Waiting in the Wings, the presence of the co-​mother is vital for the emotional resilience

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of the biological mother during the intrapartum period lasting one week. In tears, Moraga expresses her joy when her partner finally arrives at the maternity ward: “I hadn’t realized how much I was needing her until our eyes meet. Her face is the mirror of tenderness, recognition I have been waiting for” (49). Moraga reports that Rafael Angel, or a two-p​ ound-s​ ix-o​ unce milagrito [little miracle] (51), was born on July 3, at the twenty-​eighth week of gestation, alive but struggling to survive. When labor contractions grow strong, she counts on Ella and her sister Jo Ann to hold her hand during the critical four hours of her pre-​term labor, relatively painless for the mother, but dangerous for her son. It is her little sororal family –​not negligent nurses –​who alert the doctor to take Moraga to the delivery room, at the moment when she describes with blunt scatological precision: “I feel a revolution occur in my womb, the pain taking a full somersault inside of me, dropping down into what feels like my bowels […] I fall back onto my back, feel the urge to defecate” (52). As Yarbro-​Bejarano detects, Moraga details childbirth with bodily processes of elimination and sex, establishing the experience on the level of “animal” sensation and even sexual pleasure (2001: 140). Queerly colored by eroticism and orgasmic instincts, Moraga’s maternal self-​realization felt during labor makes her transitorily forget her child’s potential death at birth, while her understanding required to reduce its risk only comes after a moment of crisis when the directions of her physician seem to be contradictory. Then, she is mentally confused, but her body cooperates with him in the heroic birthing mission: The doctor tells me to push. And I do. […] That’s it, he’s coming. Go on. I push. There he is, one more. Ella tells me she can see him. Then the doctor’s voice is urgent. Stop. Don’t push. Hold back. I don’t know why. My vagina is pure fire, a horrible burning. When everything in me wants to push him all the way out, they tell me to stop. But it is the cord, the cord is wrapped around his neck. The doctor remains very calm, cuts the baby free. Then I let go and let him spill out of me. Relief, my body is engulfed in a pleasure –​an animal pleasure, a pulsing, an aliveness like nothing I’ve known. I am a girl and a woman and an animal, and estoy temblando [I am trembling] like the best of sex, the best of being thoroughly entered and spent. They don’t bring the baby to my belly as they do in the movies. (WW 53)

More a self-​indulgent than a self-​sacrificing image, Moraga’s parturient body “not only expands and multiplies but also crosses boundaries

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between human and animal, girl and woman, pain and pleasure,” so it surpasses the limits assumed to govern maternal subjects (Bost 2009: 120). Indeed, the essentially transgressive nature of queer mothering permits Moraga to intensify the liminality inherent in the birthing process, to dedramatize child labor, and to destabilize the fantasies of extraordinariness, sacred beauty, and propriety, traditionally enfolding the poetics of childbirth. Moraga also questions the cinematographic script about the happy postnatal reunion between mother and child, because hostile reality returns. Rafael is alive and has “an indio [Indian] nose” (WW 54) that ensures his Mexicanness, but he is separated from his mother and urgently taken to Intensive Care. Consequently, Moraga resents medical interventionism and clings to the umbilical bond of the severed materno-​ fetal unit: “I want to keep the cord, bury it somewhere […] far away from this hospital” (53) –​a conduit which paradoxically almost killed her child at birth. In spite of the dangerous haste of nature’s early call and the necessary acquiescence of the parturient mother to medical authority for the sake of a safe labor, Moraga’s queer victory is to make the choice of having Ella and Jo Ann by her side as symbolic midwives to look after her emotional health, while delivering her baby: “I knew as I held my lover’s and my sister’s hands in the grip of labor that this was what I understood as hogar [home], sustenance; that this is how a woman should always give birth, surrounded by women” (54). Moraga and her child are deprived of the third trimester of pregnancy. Instead, Rafael spends these three months in a uterine incubator while his fragile, tiny body is threatened by infections, respiratory distress, a heart condition, and an intestinal disease requiring surgery. Meanwhile, the labor pains of his mother are delayed and transformed into postnatal helplessness and mental terrors under the constant threat of seeing her son die. Moraga realizes that mothering a sick baby implies more suffering than delivering him, although she also mourns because she could not conclude the nine-​month liminal time of her pregnancy: I think it is loss, then wonder if it’s really guilt I feel that my son had to go through so much suffering outside the womb because I couldn’t protect him inside (98). While her faith in both an Aztec goddess and Our Lady of Guadalupe is intermittent, Moraga incarnates a saintly mother of pain or mater dolorosa. She tortures and blames herself for being reproductively unfit to

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give life to a healthy son. Yet, she queerly communes with Rafael after birth to resist long months of uncertainty, distress, and fear, waiting for the good news of her child’s survival: My mind does not always serve as my friend. My heart, yes. In that place resides a seamless connection between my baby’s essence beating inside those incubator walls and my milk-​ hard-​breasted body (57). Rafael’s symbolic childbirth occurs when he is out of danger days after his due date. He is discharged from hospital in October and returns home with his mother, who was also liminally confined for three months in this same place. Although Moraga is grateful to the healthcare professionals for saving her baby, her anger explodes when a security guard at the medical institution blocks Ella’s entrance to see Rafael after visiting hours, because he does not recognize the category of “co-​parent.” Despite this homophobic experience, Moraga’s queer mothering is a victory over the chronic sociocultural veto against homosexual childbearing and maternity: She is a mother and rears her son while remaining as an economically independent gay woman. Her butch lesbianism contains the role of Rafael’s mother-​father, although she welcomes Pablo’s presence and the traditions of his Mexican family. Moraga’s obsessive worries about her baby’s weak health desexualizes and causes the deterioration of the relationship with her partner leading to a breakup, but the final reconciliation between them entitles Ella to be the rightful co-​mother of their son. The epilogue of Waiting in the Wings truly encloses Moraga’s key to success for queer mothering: “Love and blood and home and history and desire coalesce and collide to construct a child’s sense of self and family. […] I know blood matters. It just does not matter more than love” (125). In short, Moraga reunites her Mexican genes and lesbian pride in her choice of kinship, happiness, and a hearth for her and Rafael –​a boy who delights in having multiple parent figures and resembles his biological mother and father, yet his character is sculpted by Ella’s loving presence in his life. Fertile or barren, heterosexual or gay, young or older, biological or non-​biological mothers; custodians of an ethnic bloodline or symbolic matriarchs of a future nation, enduring or cherishing pregnancy and labor in their bodies and/​or with their minds, separated from their babies for their survival or reunited with them to fight for life –​all women, a chorale of

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parental diversity and plurality, peacemakers in wars against natality, not to be subdued by patriarchal pressures of childlessness, not to be denied their rights of traditional or queer sexual reproduction and maternity; all women demand to be admitted to (un)maternal freedom and to a literature of procreativity.

Chapter 4

Progression to (In)conclusion, Regression to Margaret Atwood

As a mental activity, literature has been historically steered by a patriarchal hand at the helm and navigated through a predictable sea of unnameability and unintelligibility in the process of translating the human body into words, particularly when the author has been a woman and, even worse, if she has ventured to narrate the biological continuum of pregnancy and childbirth, but not so if she has dutifully transcribed her socially prescribed function as a mother. Literature has thus frequently bolstered the standard that rearing children is a woman’s only destiny in life. That destiny has legitimized her virtuous purity or condemned her sexual nature; it has been exhibited with pride by her male owner or severely punished by social authorities in the case of bastardy. Indeed, a robust pillar of the misogynist architecture of the Western world has been the conflation of the female and the maternal:  Being a worthy, good woman means being sexually fertile and becoming a loving mother. This ontological equation has corseted a woman’s freedom and sense of self, obliterated her individuality, and censored her right to make a vital choice on her own: maternity or childlessness. Her two lords in heaven and on earth –​God and her husband or her legal owner –​have expected the woman to reproduce herself biologically only, and to deliver a progeny for the sake of her family and all humankind, but not to reproduce her mental powers in artistic vocations or to labor in remunerative professions –​only accessible to men –​because a woman’s non-​reproductive work has been irreconcilable with the postlapsarian curse of reproductive sexuality. Being a mother has been not only the compulsory feminine role of domestic confinement and subordination to men in life, but also a recurrent literary theme for

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moralizing male writers to sanctify or demonize any woman, grounded in non-​negotiable laws of marriage, her economic dependence upon a male breadwinner, or heteronormative social mores, among others. Conversely, expecting a baby has been viewed as an ordinary miracle not to be unraveled; a familiar secret to be concealed from the public eye, or a transient phase of tabooed invisibility and impurity in a woman’s cycle of fertility, yet childbearing has been necessary for her social mission to perpetuate the human species. Consequently, the story-​writing about becoming a mother has been traditionally marginalized, although it has been camouflaged in the margins of story-​telling thanks to embryonic cacophonies from within the works of some nineteenth-​century literary foremothers. Even in recent times, Naomi Wolf wonders with dismay:  “Are we bad women, bad mothers, for exploring such issues? Should pregnancy and birth remain such sanitized rites of passage that we can’t speak graphically or honestly about them? I believe not” (2001: 9). Nevertheless, (un)maternal instincts and feelings, pressures and decisions about sexual reproduction –​childlessness, contraception, abortion, or infanticide –​have been not only critical matters of state affecting women’s whole existence, the continuation of a bloodline, and the future of the human race, but also indicators to assess the milestones of women’s liberation movements toward goals of gender equity in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. Since the 1960s and 1970s, the procreative body has impregnated controversies led by intellectuals and activists to divide feminism into two antagonistic factions at war: anti-​motherhood feminism and maternal feminism. To pacify these stances, Adrienne Rich has distinguished between the male-​dominated institution of motherhood, which should be eradicated in favor of social justice, and the experience of mothering, which is to be understood as genuinely female and autonomous, empowering and enriching for expectant mothers, freed from male intrusion and medical interventionism. Robbie Pfeufer Kahn also contends that feminists fear the mother-​child bond because it is this knot that ties women to domesticity and to take care of children, even when they work outside the home, as patriarchy has rendered maternity problematic. However, one of the objectives of feminism should be for women to return

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to, recover, and acknowledge the maternal body, as well as to honor female generativity, from pregnancy to breastfeeding babies (Kahn 1995: 385–​6). In line with these conciliatory postulates, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva have exalted the speaking power of the female (reproductive) anatomy, and argued that the experience of gestating/​birthing a child is pleasurable and ecstatic for the woman, contributes to her self-​realization, and can even crystallize in a powerful literature of her own: Écriture Féminine. Nurtured by critical and empathic impulses to fuse creativity with procreativity in women’s literature, this study has reflected the colossal labor of selected British and North American women writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to narrate the biological processes of pregnancy and childbirth in their artistic progeny, whether intuitively or deliberately, fictionally or autobiographically, motherly or unmaternally, fully carried to term or prematurely aborted, delivering torrents or only tiny drops of white ink. These female authors have reproduced physical and mental pain or fear, the (un)maternal sensations and emotions of symbiosis with or detachment from the embryo/​fetus felt by expectant mothers during pregnancy and at childbirth, while criticizing, rebelling against, and revealing women’s vulnerability to the masculinized institution of motherhood and its protocols written in black ink. Criticism of patriarchal interventionism is shown in Ruth, where Elizabeth Gaskell deplores the uncompassionate, unchristian behavior of small Victorian communities to stigmatize illicit pregnancies, and by Zelda Harris in Elizabeth Baines’s The Birth Machine, who accuses sick hospital childbirths of disrupting the healthy call of nature to mothers at parturition. Conversely, other women writers have reflected that harsh realities and literary traditions have forced them to be true daughters of their times, which can be academically confounded with their complicity with patriarchal discourses against their real desires of female autonomy in procreative matters. The Realism behind the fiction of Mary Anne Evans/​ George Eliot and Edith Wharton demonstrates that social pressures on sexual reproduction and maternity have been stronger than women’s agency to control their destinies as expectant mothers. The heroines in their novels are eventually punished for their sexual transgressions with death, or they are condemned to conformity, infantilization, and custody under a placid

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house arrest in conventional marriages. Nonetheless, in other works, rebellion is materialized and succeeds in empowering women during pregnancy and beyond labor. The unnamed protagonist of Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl dodges governmental imposition of forced abortion, sterilization, and prenatal malnutrition to protect her fetus and to give birth to her daughter in free poverty. Meanwhile, Rosamund Stacey in Margaret Drabble’s Millstone refuses both to relinquish her professional aspirations as a scholar and to marry her inseminator, whom she does not love. She also rejects to give up her child in adoption to escape unbruised from the stigma of illicit maternity in postwar Great Britain. In earlier Gothic narratives, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the female revolt against the patriarchal impositions of procreativity and motherhood is only released through (un)realistic violence and (self-​)destruction. Vulnerability is manifest in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and in Ilona Karmel’s An Estate of Memory, where chattel slavery in the U.S. South and imprisonment in Nazi labor camps in Poland, respectively, undermine women’s control over their pregnancies, transform childbirth into a perilous journey, and abort the promise of rapturous mothering practices. One lasting literary achievement is women writers’ ability to transcend the family pressures and the sociopolitical dimensions of the patriarchal institution of motherhood to invite readers to appreciate a new palette of psychological states and nuances of organic sensations felt by the gestating/​birthing female self. Moreover, these authors reflect how women’s procreative subjectivity can be translated into words against the edicts of unnameability and unintelligibility previously enforced by men to avoid narrating the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in literature. Consequently, this study has favored the exploration of the physiological and emotional dimensions of childbearing for women, always occurring before rearing their babies and mostly before materializing their decisions –​ whether by choice or by force –​to abort or even to kill their newborn children, or before being cruelly separated from them by men or patriarchal institutions. Ultimately, this work has delved into how autobiographical compulsions and the workings of memory by female authors as expectant mothers –​together with their fertile imaginations and their poetics of sympathy narrating the process of childbearing for other gestating/​parturient

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women –​engender life-​writings and procreative fiction as an embryonic literary corpus on pregnancy and childbirth, in (dis)harmony with Cixous’s Écriture Féminine. Although nineteenth-​century women writers narratively disclose the swollen belly as the anatomical evidence of childbearing, the reproductive body dares to articulate wellbeing, discomfort, suffering, or simply pregnancy symptoms and cravings, in most of the twentieth-​century literary works under analysis. Gaskell and Le Sueur prove that gestating a baby is not a female malady that debilitates the physical vitality of young pregnant women, while an older Cherríe Moraga trusts her bodily signs revealing that she is expecting a child, irrespective of positive markers from a clinical test. Starving in freedom or confined, Sasha in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Aurelia in Karmel’s An Estate of Memory long for gorging on food. Anaïs Nin’s diaries reflect how she cherishes the sensations of her transient anatomical metamorphosis when she is with child. Meanwhile, for Drabble, pregnancy does not diminish the mental concentration and academic skills of her heroine Rosamund, at least until the last weeks of gestation. Baines and Moraga even confess that childbearing is not necessarily exempt from sexual desire, despite the long shadow of religious taboos. Nevertheless, Moraga also narrates the health complications that she endured during pregnancy, leading to emotional suffering and to the life-​threatening delivery of her premature son. Painless or painful, childbirth is, unquestionably, the most narratable episode of human reproduction, where the parturient woman incarnates an epic heroine or a martyr, where physiological sensations reach their heights, and where her birthing anatomy is called by nature to labor alone or is intruded upon by obstetricians. The passage to life and the passage to death can embrace each other at parturition, resulting in the cessation of all vital functions of the mother’s body, as in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, or those of the child’s body in Nin’s story “Birth.” Affluent expectant mothers can become slaves of overprotection and luxury by means of medical interventionism, which numbs their birthing selves, in the novels by Wharton, Rhys, and Baines. Conversely, the body of poor women is awakened or set free to deliver their babies autonomously –​yet often unsafely –​as seen in the female characters in Eliot’s Adam Bede, Le Sueur’s The Girl, Maxine Hong Kingston’s

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The Woman Warrior, or Morrison’s Beloved, despite all being still victims under a patriarchal yoke. Betwixt and between, the (non-​)fictional parturient protagonists in the works of Karmel and Moraga cling to the tenderness and solidarity of other women as sisters, although they are still at the mercy of mortal dangers, physicians, and male tormentors. Anaïs Nin reflects that the intrapartum period is extremely exhausting, dilated in time, and painful for the mother; while Drabble shows that delivering a baby is fast, painless, uneventful, and non-​miraculous for Rosamund. Nonetheless, in these two cases and in other narratives under analysis, nurses and male doctors at hospital are not sufficiently responsive to the physical and emotional suffering of parturient patients. Writers, like Nin and Moraga, recall their personal experiences as birthing mothers, so in their life-​writings, they provide minute accounts of their deliveries –​from the onset of labor until the puerperium –​even described as epic journeys, invigorating for the mother as a heroic warrior fighting against adversity, as also observed in Morrison’s fiction, Beloved. Instead, morality codes, narrative decorum, and even the lack of knowledge about procreation in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, compel nineteenth-​century novelists to omit the scene of labor in their works. As a sympathetic narrator and a symbolic midwife in The Woman Warrior, Maxine’s ignorance about childbirth is, in contrast, not a literary impediment for her to accompany her unnamed parturient aunt rejected by her blood family; or to justify the infanticide committed by this relative as, in reality, an act of maternal love. Tormented by her own illegitimate teenage pregnancies and haunted by the imagined dangers of scientific progress in the field of sexual reproduction during the early nineteenth century, Mary Shelley represents childbirth as a Gothic nightmare of maternal hatred, disgust, and horror. In Frankenstein, it is at labor when a male scientist rejects the monstrous offspring of his own ambitious experiment, because he regrets having usurped women’s biological power to gestate and give birth to human life. If the female body struggles, yet succeeds in speaking throughout pregnancy and at childbirth in most twentieth-​century works under analysis, the creative mothers of this literary progeny have generally attempted to verbalize the chromatic spectrum of (un)maternal emotions and the psychological states of expectant mothers, enjoyed or endured from conception

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until puerperium, even in some nineteenth-​century novels. This study has heavily relied upon Kristeva’s theory of the splitting and doubling of the self at pregnancy, and upon the liminal category of in-​betweenness of the materno-​fetal unit of undifferentiated life and symbiosis created between mother and child in the female womb for nine months, until their ultimate split into two separate entities at labor. The literary codification of these challenges to the expectant mother’s identity and individuality, as well as her mental activity and her emotional (dis)connection from/​to her embryo/​ fetus during the continuum of childbearing, have been explored in this study. From Ruth in Gaskell’s novel to Moraga’s life-​writing, some women feel blessed and are impregnated with maternal love and self-​sacrifice as soon as they learn that they are expecting a child; whereas others, from Catherine in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to Aurelia in Karmel’s An Estate of Memory, do not nurture the materno-​fetal unit with affectionate bonds; instead, they reject the doubling of their selves. Thus, these heroines lament the destruction of their individual selves during pregnancy, or they think only of their own survival and the elimination of their unborn children. Given that such an unmaternal nature must have remained veiled, punished, or converted into Gothic extravaganzas in nineteenth-​century fiction, it is a modern(ist) milestone that women writers from the early twentieth century have broken a social taboo and distinctly narrated the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. While the heroines of Wharton’s Summer and Le Sueur’s The Girl choose to reject abortion, Anna in Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and Anaïs Nin –​writing in her semi-​fictional diaries –​ decide not to become mothers, because assuming that role would have been incompatible with maintaining their adulterous affairs and their chronic emotional dependence upon men. It is paradoxical that sometimes in this literature, the unmaternal women are those who converse with their fetuses inside their wombs, not necessarily those who are eager expectant mothers. Nin explains to her unborn child the reasons why it should not be born, while Pauline in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye prenatally nourishes the communication with her daughter until she observes Pecola’s dark ugliness at birth. Pregnancy can trigger dangerous states of psychic regression and helplessness in gestating women, who would fixate more upon themselves, their own childhood and

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parents, and their unresolved mental conflicts, rather than upon their fetuses and future children during the months of gestation. Such states are, indeed, a common ground in some works of women writers under analysis. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Catherine descends into madness, because she yearns to return to her unpregnant body and girlish freedom. Meanwhile, Nin’s journals vomit her primeval trauma as a young daughter while she is expecting an unwanted child: She cannot become a mother because she feels that she is still a little girl deserted by her own father. Other gestating women remember their absent or dead mothers, such as Charity in Wharton’s Summer or Sethe in Morrison’s Beloved. Likewise, Mary Shelley blames herself for having murdered her own mother –​Mary Wollstonecraft –​at her birth, while she writes Frankenstein. Conversely, in Drabble’s The Millstone, Rosamund’s intellectualism and mental hyperactivity do not connect her to her family or to her inseminator, but to her self-​confidence and determination to love exclusively her unborn baby and to rule her life alone as a working single mother. The desirable haven of peace and bliss in nurturing the materno-​fetal unit is often broken by male intruders, who do not protect but instead endanger pregnant women. The heroine of Le Sueur’s The Girl is beaten, raped, and degraded by men when she is with child; while both Rhys and Baines demonstrate that wives are emotionally and financially helpless, because they must orbit around their solar husbands during their pregnancies. In fact, this hostility surrounding the reality of expectant mothers and their subordination to patriarchal institutions –​from marriage to slavery and fascism –​show how gestating women are not permitted to turn inward to their own bodies and to their unborn babies, so that, ultimately, only some of them –​like Cherríe Moraga –​can cherish episodes of untroubled prenatal self-​absorption. As the final split between mother and child to welcome motherhood or mothering, parturition is, undoubtedly, the most intense procreative episode of psychological crisis, enfeeblement, or empowerment for birthing women. However, some literary women are not granted permission to offer their own versions of the mental ordeal or the ecstasy at labor, due to patriarchal pressures. Hetty’s delivery in Eliot’s Adam Bede is objectively reconstructed by witnesses and a judge to condemn her to death without pity. Meanwhile, Lita falls into the sweet oblivion of anesthetics in Wharton’s

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Twilight Sleep not only to avoid physical pain, but also to erase the retrospective narrative of maternal feelings while giving birth to her baby, thanks to the intrusion of her mother-​in-​law and obstetricians. Conversely, other authors imagine or recall labor with accuracy, and describe this chapter profusely in their writings. Mental suffering is more piercing than physical pain in Nin’s “Birth,” because its heroine knows that her premature baby will inevitably die as soon as it parts from her uterus. Consequently, she struggles against her own body and a male physician, not to sever the materno-​fetal unit at labor. In turn, Zelda in Baines’s The Birth Machine is a victim of reproductive violence perpetrated by the demands of a clinical trial to induce her pre-​term labor and to defy nature’s caprices. Zelda’s mind equally fights against her own birthing anatomy connected to a machine of torture, and flees to memories of her childhood to find the necessary madness required to disconnect her self from this brutal technology that torments her and her child. This study has also demonstrated the modern applicability of the anthropological concept of liminality to study women’s literature on procreativity beyond patriarchal assumptions that pregnancy and childbirth are merely rites of passage from primitive communities. This work has explored the ideas that a woman with child is a liminal person, that the maternal womb is a liminal space until the unborn child crosses the ultimate limen of its mother’s birth canal at labor, and that the period of gestation is equally a liminal time, because it is clearly demarcated between conception and puerperium. Irrespective of the evident social transcendence in traversing the threshold toward motherhood or mothering for any woman, pregnancy and childbirth are transformative occurrences in her life, which temporarily alter her body and organic functions, as well as her feelings, sensations, cognition and interpersonal relationships, her identity and individuality –​all by virtue of the existence of the materno-​ fetal unit for nine months and its later division into two separate selves at parturition. Moreover, these two liminal biological phenomena imply that a woman can lose a previously stable self and social status, and that she temporarily dwells in a state of in-​betweenness, involving her potential psychological vulnerability, the spatiality of sharing her own body with an embryo/​fetus, and the marginality of being an outsider between two

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visible poles of femininity: childlessness and maternity. This study has demonstrated that the social and emotional costs of bearing liminality during pregnancy and at childbirth are greater than physical burdens and pain for gestating/​birthing women. However, it has been proved that these genuinely female experiences also deliver autobiographical or fictional narratives of self-​discovery and recovery from suffering, share subjectivity and intimacy with (female) readers, and serve as sociopolitical weapons to fight for all women’s rights, while merging procreativity and creativity with white ink. Most of the mothers in the literary works under analysis gestate and deliver their biological children. Nevertheless, this work has also explored non-​biological options for mothering and the irrelevance of bloodline to defy traditional paradigms of motherhood; for instance, the community of motherly solidarity in Le Sueur’s The Girl, the imaginary pregnancy and the second birth in Morrison’s Beloved, the symbolic matriarch in Karmel’s novel, and the co-​mother in Moraga’s life-​writing. In fact, this study has selected examples of women’s literature in which becoming a mother is not a universal or essentializing event, in order to configure a rich mosaic of prismatic female procreative subjectivities and narratives. Marginal accounts by women of color and those from ethnic minorities under the yoke of tyranny –​together with destitute, homosexual, and older mothers –​have been voiced to counterbalance more conventional views from upper-​middle class, heterosexual, white, and young women (writers) from Great Britain and North America, as well as to emphasize the political dimension of sexual reproduction subjected to patriarchal (hetero)normativity. In essence, the narratives on pregnancy and childbirth have become a growing fetal corpus within the inclusively uterine women’s literature, colored by white ink from (un)maternal pens, generally freed from male prisons. Heather Hewett argues that, at the beginning of the twenty-​first century, women have been writing about being a mother for more than hundred years, although she identifies a veritable eruption of “mommy lit” –​mostly life-​writings –​since the 1990s as a popular genre, where many types of mothers have claimed their own space and voiced public and private preoccupations with maternity, like choosing or not between paid work and staying at home (2006: 122, 135). Inevitably, the proliferation of

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“mommy lit” is not limited to the experience of rearing children but extended to the liminal process of becoming a mother. Therefore, the edicts of unnameability and unintelligibility –​previously affecting the narration of pregnancy and childbirth –​have nearly disappeared in contemporary literature, anticipating good health and continuity in women’s writings about procreativity into the future. However, Andrea O’Reilly warns that the contemporary discourses from this “mommy lit” tend to argue that no woman is truly complete or fulfilled unless she has babies, and in order to be the best mother, she must devote herself entirely to her children “24/​ 7,” so the stories from this genre repudiate feminism, but they also draw from it by insisting on women’s choice, autonomy and control over their destinies when they become parents (2009: 242–​3). Thus, this study can conclude that there is no final reconciliation yet between the experience of maternity and feminism. Some fiction by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood (1939–​) illustrates that the debates about sexual reproduction among feminists and mothers continue into the twenty-​first century, even after free access to contraception and abortion, reconciliation between maternity and a professional career, social acceptance of single mothers and lesbian mothering, and codification of women’s legal protections during childbearing, have been largely achieved in Western democracies. Atwood’s writings with sociopolitical intentions sometimes revolve around the harmful possible return to patriarchal authority over sexual reproduction, the restoration of motherhood against any female autonomy, the intransigence of feminism about maternal choices, and unresolved troubles alienating women’s gestating/​birthing bodies and minds in urban societies, including such factors as medical interventionism, obstetric technology, hospital childbirth, and surrogate pregnancy. A connoisseur of current complexities and a sybil of futuristic scenarios, Atwood invites the reader to wonder about women’s potential regression to their reproductive bodies as prisons in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). In this speculative fiction, the reversion to the patriarchal law of compulsory reproductive sexuality commodifies and debilitates women. Her dystopia is impregnated by both the radicalism of second-​wave feminism and the religious and political neoconservatism from the end of the twentieth century,

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to imagine or foreshadow a theocratic, military dictatorship that enslaves and subdues the female procreative body/​mind again in the future. In Atwood’s work, the imagined United States of the twenty-​first century has been converted into the republic of Gilead after a period of terrorist attacks, when the U.S. president was murdered and the Congress dissolved. The new totalitarian state, with no individual rights and freedom, is governed by a ruling class of Christian fundamentalists, who homogenize women and institutionalize the female experiences from conception to motherhood. Children are a vital necessity for the survival of the human species after a nuclear disaster and its consequential environmental pollution have rendered many citizens sterile, resulting in dramatically reduced birth rates and a higher number of malformed babies. In this situation, fertile women of reproductive age and healthy newborns personify the only future and hope for Gilead. The incessant echo of the desperate prayer to God by Jacob’s barren wife Rachel: “Give me children, or else I die” (Genesis 30: 3), transforms pregnancy and labor into some women’s compulsory destiny in life and their safe passage to salvation in Gilead. Indeed, the patriarchal reinterpretation of this lamentation from Israel’s Biblical matriarch and her exploitation of the surrogate uterus of her slave Bilhah to be inseminated by Rachel’s own husband Jacob, inspire the ideology of the fascist regime found in Atwood’s novel, which segregates the female population and divides them into unmovable castes, primarily between gestating/​birthing women and wed mothers. Those who are clinically diagnosed as fertile and have committed sexual crimes before Gilead –​abortion, contraception, homosexuality, adultery, or having had sex with other women’s husbands –​ must become Handmaids: men’s sexual and procreative slaves by force. Conversely, those who are declared barren by medicine but have had decent sexual conduct and are married to Gilead’s military elite –​the Wives –​are destined to serve as mothers of non-​biological children. Paradoxically, wifehood is not a prerequisite for Handmaids –​as Atwood’s futuristic Fallen Women –​to be entitled to gestate and deliver the nation’s sacred babies; while being married is necessary to rear children with full rights and social approval. Alice Adams argues that female solidarity in this dystopia is impracticable because Wives are reproductive consumers, competing with one another for access to the scarce commodity that are children; whereas

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Handmaids are reproductive laborers, who are also rivals competing among themselves to produce babies for the market (1994: 106–​7). Atwood’s visionary fiction of the 1980s nurtures the main contemporary debate about sexual reproduction and maternity: surrogacy. Indeed, the controversial nature of surrogate pregnancy and its complex legal framework worldwide divide feminists, mothers, and the entire society today, in much the same way that nineteenth-​century societies did not agree whether to forgive or to punish Fallen Women for their illicit pregnancies, or the way that second-​wave feminism included antagonistic maternal and anti-​motherhood factions. For many citizens in the twenty-​first century, homosexual, ill, ageing, and sterile women, or those with professional careers, are legitimized to become mothers without having to make the traditional choice of either adopting already-​born children or gestating babies in their own uteruses. Therefore, pregnancy and parturition would be merely liminal functions of the female anatomy, not necessarily resulting in motherhood or mothering. Yet for others, surrogacy is never an altruistic agreement, but bluntly a mercantile contract and the profitable business of selling children, whereby sterile couples and other types of potential parents in Western countries use their economic power to objectify and exploit the reproductive capacities of healthy and fertile women, often of color, from the Third World, who may be in need of money. Accordingly, Diana Taylor argues that “who gets to be a mother” and is considered as such has as much to do with economics as with biology (1997: 287). Rita Arditti equally explains that there is nothing surrogate about the woman who carries new life in her body, nourishes it with her own blood, and gives birth to the baby, because she makes a greater biological contribution to the child than the genetic donor, including the risks she takes at parturition (1997: 324, 330). The utilitarian (ab)use of the female anatomy can also be psychologically harmful for the surrogate mother prenatally and postnatally. In fact, anti-​surrogacy supporters contend that reproductive options, such as abortion, sterilization, sperm donation, or surrogacy, can be later regretted, so the woman must be protected against her own decisions (Andrews 1988: 74). Likewise, some feminists claim that the surrogate mother cannot give an informed consent to relinquish her newborn baby until after she has experienced giving birth (75).

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Atwood anticipates this thorny controversy on surrogacy in The Handmaid’s Tale, where pregnancy and childbirth are rites of passage with a liminal holy value in Gilead, a society that worships gestating/​parturient women, but paradoxically justifies the way that they are degraded to be mere bodies subordinated to the procreative imperatives of its misogynist ideology. As most second-​wave feminists resented the conclusion that being a woman only signified having a uterus in patriarchal societies, Atwood’s heroine is a Handmaid, who laments that her fixed identity and her only gender role are defined solely by her genitals, and thus reflect the reification of her own body, or the male reconquest of the superior female power in sexual reproduction: “We are for breeding purposes: we aren’t concubines, geisha girls, courtesans […] there are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-​legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices” (The Handmaid’s Tale1 146). Handmaids must wear nun-​like uniform in red, with a potent symbolism of sexuality, fertility, and hemorrhage at labor. Atwood’s novel is told by a first-​person narrator in captivity: the Handmaid Offred, whose patronymic name means “of Commander Fred” –​her owner, inseminator, and the biological father of her potential offspring. Fred is married to his barren Wife Serena Joy, the future mother of the babies that Offred is forced to incubate, not to be declared an “Unwoman,” and not to be sent to exile and die in the Colonies. During the revolution, Offred was dispossessed of her freedom, her home, her employment, her belongings, and her own anatomy. While she was attempting to flee to Canada, she was separated from her daughter and her husband Luke, who had divorced another woman in the past. Declared an offender by law, Offred is also deprived of her real name –​June –​and brainwashed to become a Handmaid at the Rachel and Leah Center ruled by the Aunts. As high-​rank gaolers of unreproductive age, the Aunts sympathize with the new theocracy and accuse pre-​Gilead societies of sexual depravity and violent crimes against women, like pornography or rape. Therefore, the Aunts persuade their pupils to accept the salvation of being Handmaids, where sex only serves reproductive purposes. Abortion and contraception are capital offenses in 1

The Handmaid’s Tale is hereafter referred to by HT.

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this fascist state, but for the army of Aunts, abortionist doctors and women who sought abortions in the past are equally to be retroactively punished. Offred’s nightmare takes place in Cambridge, Massachusetts –​the cradle of Puritan intolerance against women during the seventeenth-​ century colonization of North America, and paradoxically, also the home of U.S. academic erudition: the prestigious Harvard University, founded in 1636. In fact, The Handmaid’s Tale confirms that the future is rooted in the past, and although this novel criticizes “the profound male-​centeredness” in our cultures, it also disapproves of a feminism that stresses the differences between men and women (Cataldo 2013: 177, 182). A vital physiological dissimilarity between the two sexes is their respective biological functions during sexual reproduction. However, Atwood’s dystopia reflects that stressing such natural differences in procreation to defend women’s rights can generate the opposite effect: the unnatural re-​enslavement of women to men and to their own sexual anatomies as expectant mothers. In the novel, June confesses that the compulsory female destiny of pregnancy and childbirth threatens her sense of the self: “I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely” (HT 72–​3). This Handmaid is 35 years old, facing the mortal risk of ageing, yet she is still fertile, because a physician certifies that she can procreate thanks to her “viable ovaries” (153). To combat the obliteration of her individual identity and to rebel against being a functional fetal container, June finds strength and solace in her memories of the past and in the renewal of her plans of escape to Canada with her untraceable daughter and husband, although he has probably died. Desperately, June also waits to become pregnant and is afraid of the periodical curse of menstruation, reminding her that her empty uterus makes her vulnerable and a female waste in Gilead: “Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own” (83). Meanwhile, June remembers her free gestating body from the past, when her womb once housed a child, conceived in a pleasurable coitus with the man she loved –​ a baby who became the daughter she reared, while she herself experienced a happy mothering. Nonetheless, her missing girl –​probably adopted by a

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sterile couple of Commanders –​does not fall into oblivion, because June mentally writes with white ink to recall the lost materno-​fetal unit from her memories, in order to stay alive and keep faith in a future reunion between mother and child: Lying in bed, with Luke, his hand on my rounded belly. The three of us, in bed, she kicking, turning over within me. Thunderstorm outside the window, that’s why she’s awake, they can hear, they sleep, they can be startled, even there in the soothing of the heart, like waves on the shore around them. (113)

While June must become pregnant again in captivity, her meandering thoughts regress to recall her own mother –​a second-​wave feminist who decided to become a single parent at the age of 37. If as a girl and a young adult June was conservative and scorned her mother’s radical hatred of men and traditional motherhood, she admires her absent parent once she herself has no reproductive choice in Gilead. As a prisoner in the present tense of the female biological cycle with healthy daily habits and diets to enhance her fertility, the threshold to cross, for a Handmaid to liminally dwell in the safe realm of procreativity, is the ritual of sexual intercourse with the military male leader who owns and names her. Customarily, he initiates her potential passage to pregnancy with prayers and uses Biblical quotes to indoctrinate obedience into his slave –​as the daughter of a sinful Eve –​to redeem herself, thanks to the sacred mission of motherhood, despite the postlapsarian curse of painful sexual reproduction: “ ‘Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety’ ” (233). The Ceremony of the sexual act is a standardized procedure, in which the female body, paradoxically, rules. It occurs once a month, only when the woman is simultaneously ovulating and copulating. As a sexual object, she is inseminated by her master –​Commander Fred in Offred’s case –​who, unlike the Handmaids, is never suspected of being sterile by law and must accomplish his mission to possess only her reproductive genitals to breed a child in good health, without loving, desiring, or caring for her as his sexual partner. The Wife –​and the future mother of the Commander’s biological offspring –​is also humiliated, because she must be present and participate in this coital ritual by holding the surrogate mother with her

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hands. June’s account of this imposition of aseptic, unerotic sexual intercourse with the exclusive goal of inseminating her, reflects a traumatic episode of depersonalization, or the split between her body and her mind that she must endure every month. While her brain is free and active to think by herself and maintain her identity intact as June, Offred’s genitals liminally remain anesthetized and passive; they no longer belong to her and are emotionally severed from the rest of her anatomy: My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love, because this is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose. (104–​5)

June lies to herself to minimize the ordeal of her unequivocal reality and its mental damage: the sexual and reproductive violence inflicted upon her periodically, when she is forced to have sex with a man she does not desire or love, to conceive a child that she will not be allowed to rear or to see grow up, because both options of motherhood and mothering are forbidden to Handmaids. June’s psychological pain is, indeed, geminated. Her survival is in danger if she does not become pregnant in due time, so she longs for a fetus inside her womb, but as a potential surrogate mother, she mentally anticipates suffering because she knows that she will not be authorized to keep her biological child after birth. Meanwhile, Serena also resents the memento of her sterility during these procreative ceremonies, so she cannot sympathize with her Handmaid, but feels hatred and envy. As a Commander’s Wife, Serena tortures Offred by reminding her that her time to procreate is running out, and that her survival –​only ensured by the successful gestation and labor of a healthy baby  –​is at risk every time menstruation proves that her uterus is empty. Whereas Offred rejects the proposal of her physician himself to inseminate her during a medical visit because it is illegal, Serena deplores her Handmaid’s gradual closeness to her husband beyond the Ceremony. Consequently, this Wife arranges clandestine and consensual sexual encounters between her chauffeur –​Nick –​and Offred to separate her rival from Fred, while

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still “giving her a child,” as claimed by the barren Rachel in the Bible. Not being June’s friend, it is another sexual slave –​Janine/​Ofwarren –​who expects a baby in Atwood’s novel: One of them is vastly pregnant; her belly, under her loose garment, swells triumphantly […] she’s a magic presence to us, an object of envy and desire, we covet her. She’s a flag on a hilltop, showing us what can still be done: we too can be saved. (36)

Janine boasts about the physical evidence of gestating a child in the presence of other Handmaids. Although she nurtures no bonds of sisterly solidarity with her counterparts –​but rather competition and jealousy –​ Janine’s pregnancy symbolizes June’s hope of survival to be reproduced in her own womb. The transcendental goal in the life of all Handmaids is to deliver children without congenital malformations to be reared by Wives. However, June only experiences labor vicariously in The Handmaid’s Tale. Notwithstanding that it can be viewed as the only procreative episode of female empowerment, June describes that parturition is, again, not an intimate act, but a public ritual presided over by the Wife, who becomes the non-​biological mother of the child being born. Compulsorily, it is a natural birth relying upon Nature’s call and the mother’s physiological strength, with no induction of contractions or epidural injection to relieve labor pain. This female-​controlled delivery is neither the ideal desired by feminists nor the return to old practices of a conscious birth experience for the mother’s sake, but rather the patriarchal reproduction of the Biblical doctrine “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,” to protect the baby from a potential physical harm provoked by anesthetics (Korte 1990: 42). In Gilead, childbirth is not monitored in any hospital or attended by male obstetricians, but by a chorale of women in a communal chapter of liminal sorority to collaborate with each other at labor only, and to celebrate the blessing of a new life. These midwives –​Aunts, Wives, and other Handmaids in unison –​become one with the birthing woman, share her physical agony, and encourage her with their singing voices: “Pant! Pant! Pant!” we chant […] She’s calmer now, air sucks evenly into her lungs, we lean forward, tensed, the muscles in our backs and bellies hurt from the strain.

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It’s coming, it’s coming, like a bugle, a call to arms, like a wall falling, we can feel it like a heavy stone moving down, pulled down inside us, we think we will burst. We grip each other’s hands, we are no longer single […] “Push, push, push.” We’re with her, we’re the same as her, we’re drunk. Aunt Elizabeth kneels, with an outspread towel to catch the baby, here’s the crowning, the glory, the head, purple and smeared with yoghurt, another push and it slithers out, slick with fluid and blood, into our waiting. Oh praise. (HT 134–​5,  135–​6)

Thanks to the wave-​like rhythm between contractions and relaxation during Janine’s (un)natural delivery, June recalls the birth of her own daughter in company of Luke. Nonetheless, she also generalizes about the unintelligibility of physical suffering –​impossible to deliver with words –​ because the inadequate workings of memory prevent reawakening this bodily sensation from her past experience of labor: “Who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind” (135). If the newborns are healthy, childbirth means crossing the limen to survival for Handmaids –​yet not to motherhood –​because, as surrogate mothers in Gilead, they can breastfeed their babies for some months, but they are destined to be separated from their progeny, while avoiding being declared “Unwomen” and banished to the Colonies. The novel’s conclusion is dilated to ambiguity. June wishes or believes that she is expecting Nick’s child, before she flees from her Commander’s household to freedom in Canada or to her own death in a public execution; whether rescued or betrayed by her inseminator, who works for Gilead’s secret police or, alternatively, he may be an heroic dissenter from the underground Mayday resistance. Roberta Rubenstein explains that in The Handmaid’s Tale, women are defined by their potential fertility –​or its absence –​while procreation and maternity are simultaneously idealized and dehumanized, because Atwood demonstrates how the irreconcilable split between pro-​life and pro-​choice ideologies of reproduction in contemporary times corroborates female ambivalence about childbearing in patriarchal societies (1988: 102). Atwood’s futuristic novel perpetuates the Christian and Freudian curse on women: Anatomy is their only destiny. Those who are fertile become the saviors of the human race at risk of extinction, praised and valued for

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their natural power to gestate and deliver children, but they also become Gilead’s sexual slaves to reproduce its dogmas of Biblical fundamentalism and misogynist autocracy against (un)maternal choices. Consequently, Handmaids can only dwell in the liminal realm of pregnancy and childbirth as surrogate mothers, but they are not compensated by the pro-​natalist credo of this neofascist state with the rewards of surrogacy –​economic remuneration or the self-​realization in helping a sterile couple –​nor have they freedom in sexual reproduction to select their sexual partners or to rear their biological children. In short, Atwood’s dystopia invites readers to a nightmare of procreativity for women to detect that the threshold between progression and regression in terms of contemporary maternal rights and gender equality is vulnerable and can be breached by patriarchal trespassers, ready to re-​enslave women’s wombs. Into the twenty-​first century, sexual reproduction and (un)maternal decisions are territories of female sovereignty in Western democracies. Pregnancy and parturition can be cherished or rejected by women. The social, emotional, and physiological changes associated with the liminal period between conception and birth can be integrated into their identities and ongoing lives. Gestating and birthing children can ultimately result in mothering or, alternatively, in institutional motherhood. Women are permitted to discard the anatomical destiny of maternity with fewer social prejudices questioning their essential female nature. Women can choose contraception or to interrupt their pregnancies, but they have less agency to deliver babies free from the standards of hospital childbirths, Cesarean sections, and obstetric technology. Women can seek new alternatives to become (non-​)biological mothers, yet surrogacy remains under dispute. But more importantly, women can write about becoming mothers with white ink. Their literature, as reflected in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, can even detect the risks of a counter-​revolutionary reaction to the liberty reached by the female body/​mind and her (un)maternal choices, or warn other women against the potential return to male domination over procreativity. There is no oracle to predict women’s futures as (non-​)expectant mothers; there is no final point to the non-​liminal process of women writing about pregnancy and childbirth today. Ultimately, this study concludes that the facts of female empowerment or powerlessness in sexual reproduction and

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maternity are indicative of the progression or the regression in terms of gender equality, and that literature –​together with its retrospective critical analysis –​provides barometers not only to mark and honor women’s (pro) creative victories, but also to alert them to the reappearance of patriarchal revenants, seeking to usurp their (un)maternal freedom and their uniquely resonant voices narrating pregnancy and childbirth.

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Index

abortion  15, 35, 69, 70, 77, 89, 100, 113–​17, 122–​3, 129, 133, 140, 144, 218, 223, 227, 228, 229, 230–​1 abortionist  35, 77, 82, 94, 103–​4, 128, 231 botched abortion  103–​5 coerced abortion  88, 93, 98, 220 decriminalization of abortion  1, 127–​8 adulterous pregnancy  xi, 18, 115, 161, 162, 180 advanced pregnancy  24, 109, 143, 149–​ 50, 157, 165 Angel in the House  21–​2, 25, 67, 69, 148 antenatal examination  114, 141, 149, 207 anti-​motherhood feminism  1, 218, 229 Atwood, Margaret  xiii, 217, 227–​36 The Handmaid’s Tale  xiii, 227–​36 Baines, Elizabeth  xiii, 131, 133, 148–​58, 219, 221, 224, 225 The Birth Machine  xiii, 131, 148–​58, 219, 225 Beauvoir, Simone de  xi, 1–​3, 7 birth control  3, 21, 72, 86, 90, 128–​9, 134, 164, 180, 218, 227, 228, 230, 236 breastfeeding  14, 22, 24, 51, 159, 179, 186, 188, 219, 235 in Toni Morrison’s Beloved  169–​70, 171, 172–​3, 174–​5, 182–​4 Brontë, Emily  xii, 25–​6, 37–​48, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224 Wuthering Heights  xii, 37–​48, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224

Cesarean section  114, 130, 147, 155–​6, 157, 236 childlessness  16, 24, 37, 43, 48, 73, 79, 152, 189, 193, 194, 210, 215, 226 choice of  46, 147, 203, 217, 218 Cixous, Hélène  xii, 5–​7, 26, 112, 119, 219, 221 co-​mother  203, 205, 208, 211, 214, 226 communal childbearing  195–​7, 198, 199–​201 conception  4, 14, 18, 23, 58, 78, 98, 100, 135, 174, 186, 203, 205, 208, 222, 225, 228, 236 in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein  26–​7, 28, 29–​30, 31–​2, 35–​6 contraception see birth control corset  56–​7, 61, 64 death at childbirth  2, 15, 17, 27, 38, 44, 45–​7, 117, 198 doubling of the self  8, 19, 39, 47, 109, 111, 116, 123, 131, 167, 173, 183, 184, 208, 223 Drabble, Margaret  xiii, 131, 133–​47, 220, 221, 222, 224 The Millstone  xiii, 131, 133–​47, 220, 224 Écriture Féminine  xii, 5–​7, 26, 57, 112, 119, 219, 221 Eliot, George  xii, 25, 48–​50, 51, 52–​3, 55–​7, 61, 62–​5, 67, 75, 219, 221, 224 Adam Bede  xii, 48–​50, 51, 52–​3, 55–​7, 61–​5, 67, 221, 224 eugenics  70, 80, 82, 95, 96, 129, 188 Evans, Mary Anne see George Eliot

252 Index Fallen Woman  22, 25, 48–​67, 76, 95, 133, 147, 228, 229 feminism  5, 6, 7, 26, 69, 71–​2, 125–​31, 132, 143, 204, 218–​19, 231, 234 second-​wave  1, 3–​4, 133, 147, 227, 229, 230, 232 fertility  24, 50, 98, 187, 214, 217, 228–​9, 231, 235 fetal movement see quickening first trimester of pregnancy  40, 55, 76–​7, 94, 135, 167 Gaskell, Elizabeth  xii, 25, 48–​52, 56, 57, 58–​61, 62, 65–​7, 75, 219, 221, 223 Ruth  xii, 48–​52, 53–​5, 56, 57, 58–​61, 62, 65–​7, 219, 223 Gothicism  xii, 23, 25–​6, 28, 31, 33, 36, 37, 43, 47, 192, 220, 222, 223 Holocaust  187, 188–​202 hospital childbirth  24, 105–​6, 129–​30, 131, 144–​6, 177–​8, 211–​13, 219, 222, 227, 236 in Elizabeth Baines’s The Birth Machine  147, 151–​7, 225 illegitimate childbearing  28, 48, 102, 128–​9, 133, 137, 160, 162, 181, 222 illegitimate child  xi, 30–​1, 51, 56, 61–​ 4, 67, 146, 162, 217 imaginary pregnancy see mental pregnancy induced labor  113, 115, 117–​18, 127, 150–​8 infanticide  24, 51, 62–​5, 160, 163, 171, 178–​80, 182, 185, 192, 210, 218, 222 infertility  51, 95, 97, 121, 187, 202, 214, 228, 230, 234 insanity of pregnancy  22–​3, 40–​4, 47, 72

Karmel, Ilona  xiii, 132, 187–​202, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226 An Estate of Memory  xiii, 132, 187, 188–​202, 220, 221, 223 Kingston, Maxine Hong  xiii, 132, 158–​63, 169, 171, 178–​82, 186, 221 The Woman Warrior  xiii, 132, 159–​60, 161–​3, 169, 171, 178–​82, 222 Kristeva, Julia  7–​10, 14, 39, 167, 173, 184, 219, 223 labor contractions  97, 118, 144, 148, 152–​ 3, 155, 157, 178–​9, 199, 212, 234–​5 labor pain  x, 2, 32, 35, 63, 69, 97, 118–​22, 145, 153, 176, 177, 178–​9, 198–​9, 212–​13, 221, 222, 234–​5 pain relief during labor  23–​4, 71, 73, 83–​6, 87, 106, 109, 130, 147 late pregnancy see advanced pregnancy Le Sueur, Meridel  xiii, 72, 73, 87–​98, 99, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226 The Girl  xiii, 87–​98, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226 lesbian mother  3, 187, 202–​14, 226, 227, 229 liminality  xii, 1, 8, 11–​19, 69, 99, 102, 169, 175–​6, 182, 213, 225–​6 madness  x, xii, xiii, 22–​3, 25, 40–​4, 47, 63, 81, 95, 97, 154, 167–​8, 186, 201, 224, 225 mater dolorosa  9, 187, 200–​1, 213–​14 maternal feminism  xii, 1, 4–​5, 125, 218–​ 19, 229 maternal instinct  3, 25, 49, 50–​1, 60, 71, 72, 81, 138, 158, 179, 194–​5, 203, 218 materno-​fetal unit  xii, 8–​9, 15, 19, 109, 116, 139, 140, 150, 164–​5, 172, 174, 194, 200, 206, 209, 223

Index in danger  40, 41, 61–​2, 158, 166–​7, 193, 223–​4 return to lost materno-​fetal unit  123, 183–​6, 232 split of materno-​fetal unit  84, 105, 118, 119–​20, 137, 152, 156, 176, 178, 179, 225 matriarch  46, 87, 94, 187–​8, 202, 214, 226, 228 Medusa  5–​6, 25–​6, 27, 37, 47, 154 menstruation  13, 38, 159–​61, 165, 231, 233 mental pregnancy  183–​6, 194–​5, 196–​7, 200, 226 midwife  23, 27, 63, 70, 97, 109, 115, 143–​4, 176, 179, 213, 222, 234 miscarriage  15, 23, 35, 57, 103, 104, 115, 209–​10 Moraga, Cherríe  xiii, 132, 187, 202–​14, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226 Waiting in the Wings  xiii, 132, 187, 203–​14 Morrison, Toni  xiii, 132, 158–​9, 160–​1, 163–​78, 182–​6, 220, 222, 223, 224, 226 Beloved  xiii, 132, 169–​77, 182–​6, 220, 222, 224, 226 The Bluest Eye  xiii, 132, 159, 160–​1, 163–​9, 177–​8, 223 Mother Nature  25, 27, 35, 37, 42, 47, 57, 78, 84, 119, 121, 196, 207 mother-​daughter relationship  86, 90–​1, 146, 159–​61, 164–​5, 166, 170, 173–​4, 177–​8, 182–​6, 190–​1, 201, 223, 231–​2 dead mother and pregnant daughter  27–​8, 30, 79–​80, 89–​90, 224 motherhood  ix, 7–​8, 10, 18, 24, 25, 30, 38, 43, 46, 57–​8, 60, 65, 70, 72, 73, 77, 82, 84, 86–​7, 100, 106, 114–​15, 128, 132, 133, 135, 160, 169, 178,

253 188, 189, 201, 202–​3, 204, 205, 226, 227, 228, 232, 235 cult of domestic motherhood  xiii, 48, 62, 67 destiny/​mission of  x, 3, 37, 103, 113, 232 institution of  xii, 4–​5, 17, 20, 21–​2, 41, 45, 71, 81, 112, 126, 127, 218, 219, 220 in Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone  133, 135, 136–​40, 143, 144, 147 or mothering  14, 224, 225, 229, 233, 236 revolt against  26, 42, 47, 122, 123–​4 postliminal  49, 96, 115 mothering  xii, xiv, 4–​5, 7, 14, 21, 124, 132, 137, 145, 165, 174, 175, 177, 203–​4, 218, 220, 224, 225, 226, 229, 231, 236 denial of  132, 188, 202, 233 queer/​lesbian  205, 213–​14, 227 National Health Service (N.H.S.)  141–​6 natural childbirth  130–​1, 132, 158, 234–​5 New Woman  65, 69–​70 Nin, Anaïs  xiii, 72, 99, 111–​24, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225 “Birth”  xiii, 113, 116, 118–​21, 124, 221, 225 diaries  xiii, 99, 112–​18, 119, 121, 122–​4, 221, 223, 224 nurse  66–​7, 105–​6, 110, 119, 121, 140–​1, 143–​6, 151–​2, 154–​5, 156–​7, 197, 211–​12, 222 obstetrician  70, 114, 115–​16, 127, 135, 140–​1, 143, 147, 206–​7, 231, 233 absence of  24, 93, 97, 234 during childbirth  84–​5, 104–​5, 109, 117–​21, 129–​31, 150–​8, 177, 197, 199–​201, 211–​12, 221, 222, 225

254 Index in the nineteenth ​century  22–​4, 27, 33, 63–​4 obstetrics  18, 70, 85–​6, 115, 119, 141, 147–​ 9, 150–​8, 168, 179, 210, 227, 236 physician see obstetrician placenta  15–​16, 27, 148–​9, 150–​1, 153–​ 4, 155 postpartum period see puerperium pre-​term labor  28, 34, 40, 46, 57, 64, 157, 163, 169, 203, 210, 212–​13, 221, 225 in Anaïs Nin’s works  113, 114, 118–​22 primitive mother  11, 62, 119, 121, 142, 154–​5, 158, 172, 177, 178–​9, 212–​13 prostitution  22, 65, 70, 75, 76, 78, 81, 88, 89–​90, 97, 101–​2, 105, 107, 111 puerperium  34, 55, 61, 65, 106, 110, 122, 146, 149, 157–​8, 176–​7, 180, 186, 201, 222, 223, 225 puerperal disorders  24, 27, 32–​3, 63–​ 4, 110, 163 quickening  8, 15, 23, 70, 96, 174–​5, 177, 196, 199, 207 Rachel (Bible)  187, 202, 228, 230, 234 racism  142, 170, 177–​8, 181 rape  35, 88, 93, 96, 104, 162, 170, 171–​2, 173, 183, 186, 193, 224, 230, 233 in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye  163–​4, 165–​6, 168 Rhys, Jean  xiii, 72, 98–​111, 117, 221, 223, 224 Good Morning, Midnight  xiii, 100, 106–​110, 221 “Learning to be a Mother”  100, 105–​6 “Vienne”  100, 110–​11 Voyage in the Dark  xiii, 100–​5, 117, 223 Rich, Adrienne  4–​5, 15, 71, 125, 218

rite of passage  xiii, 10–​11, 14, 18, 26, 30, 38, 49, 51, 82, 92, 129, 132, 159 science  7, 23, 26–​7, 28–​37, 121, 148–​9, 154, 202, 211 season(s)  29, 42, 46, 56, 59, 62, 76, 78, 92, 96, 165–​7, 169, 192, 207–​8 second trimester of pregnancy  8, 41, 56, 78, 207–​8 Shelley, Mary  xii, 25–​37, 47, 220, 222, 224 Frankenstein  xiii, 26–​37, 220, 222, 224 single mother  xi, 62, 65, 78–​81, 103, 105, 128–​9, 133–​47, 224, 227, 232 slavery  100, 132, 159, 169–​75, 182, 183, 186, 220, 224, 228 sexual slavery  227–​36 sterilization  88, 94, 95–​7, 98, 129, 188, 220, 229 stigma  xiii, 13, 18–​19, 61, 132, 160–​1, 180 of illicit childbearing  24, 28, 32, 48, 75, 128, 131, 133–​5, 137, 140–​1, 167, 219, 220 of the Fallen Woman  52, 55, 57 stillbirth  15, 113, 116, 118–​21 suicide  28, 41, 44, 55, 57, 59, 62, 100, 107, 111, 126, 160, 163, 178, 180, 193 surrogacy  227, 228, 229–​30, 236 technology see obstetrics third trimester of pregnancy  44–​5, 56, 82, 95, 148, 172, 213 trauma  xiii, 16, 19, 72, 98–​9, 105, 116, 123, 153, 166–​8, 189, 224, 233 traumatic childbearing  30, 32–​3, 100, 111, 170–​4, 210 traumatic maternal loss  28, 36, 107–​ 10, 118–​21, 182–​6 twilight sleep  71, 83–​6, 87

Index Virgin Mary  9, 21, 58, 60, 67 virginity  ix, 21–​2, 49, 52, 53, 55, 57, 75–​6, 82, 88, 91–​2, 101, 134 water breaking  151–​2, 175–​6, 211 Wharton, Edith  xiii, 72, 73–​87, 99, 219, 221, 223, 224–​5 Summer  xiii, 73–​83, 87, 223, 224 Twilight Sleep  xiii, 73, 83–​7, 224–​5

255 white ink  xii, xiii, xiv, 1, 6–​7, 69, 93, 97, 111, 116, 133, 154, 162, 169, 174, 176, 183, 186, 194, 202, 204, 206, 226, 232, 236 abundant or scarce  20, 77, 131, 147, 219 angry  99, 104, 171 at childbirth  87, 131, 145, 176, 178 in nineteenth-​century literature  25, 26, 34, 36, 42, 49, 67

Cultural Identity Studies Edited by Carmen Zamorano Llena, Billy Gray and Jonas Stier

This series publishes new research into relationships and interactions between culture and identity, broadly conceived. Studies relating to intercultural or transcultural identities are particularly welcome, as the series is the publishing project of the Intercultural Studies research group at Dalarna University, Sweden. The series embraces research into the roles of linguistic, social, political, psychological, literary, audiovisual, religious and/or cultural aspects in the processes of individual and collective identity formation. Given the nature of the field, interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse approaches are encouraged. Work on the theorizing of cultural aspects of identity formation and case studies of individual writers, thinkers and/or cultural products will be included. The series welcomes intercultural, transcultural and transnational links and comparisons worldwide.

Vol. 1

Helen Chambers (ed.) Violence, Culture and Identity: Essays on German and Austrian Literature, Politics and Society. 436 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-266-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7195-X

Vol. 2

Heather Williams Postcolonial Brittany: Literature between Languages. 191 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03-910556-4 / US-ISBN 978-0-8204-7583-7

Vol. 3

Andrew Hiscock (ed.) Mighty Europe 1400–1700: Writing an Early Modern Continent. 240 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-074-2

Vol. 4

Marie-Claire Patron Culture and Identity in Study Abroad Contexts: After Australia, French without France. 332 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-082-7

Vol. 5

Henriëtte Louwerse Homeless Entertainment: On Hafid Bouazza’s Literary Writing. 252 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-333-0

Vol. 6

Robbie Aitken Exclusion and Inclusion, Gradations of Whiteness and SocioEconomic Engineering in German Southwest Africa, 1884-1914. 265 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-060-5

Vol. 7

Lorna Milne (ed.) Postcolonial Violence, Culture and Identity in Francophone Africa and the Antilles. 233 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-330-0

Vol. 8

David Gascoigne (ed.) Violent Histories: Violence, Culture and Identity in France from Surrealism to the Néo-polar. 204 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-317-1

Vol. 9 Victoria Carpenter (ed.) A World Torn Apart: Representations of Violence in Latin American Narrative. 304 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-335-4 Vol. 10

Georg Grote The South Tyrol Question, 1866–2010: From National Rage to Regional State. 194 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-03911-336-1

Vol. 11

Áine McGillicuddy René Schickele and Alsace: Cultural Identity between the Borders. 302 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-393-4

Vol. 12

Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Carmen Zamorano Llena (eds) Redefinitions of Irish Identity: A Postnationalist Approach. 310 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-558-7

Vol. 13

Elisabeth Lillie (ed.) Sense and Sensitivity: Difference and Diversity in Higher Education Classrooms. 260 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-03911-869-4

Vol. 14

Philip Dine Sport and Identity in France: Practices, Locations, Representations. 383 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-03911-898-4

Vol. 15

George McKay, Christopher Williams, Michael Goddard, Neil Foxlee and Egidija Ramanauskaite· (eds) Subcultures and New Religious Movements in Russia and East-Central Europe. 453 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-921-9

Vol. 16

Katia Pizzi and Godela Weiss-Sussex (eds) The Cultural Identities of European Cities. 249 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-930-1

Vol. 17

Kevin Searle From Farms to Foundries: An Arab Community in Industrial Britain. 255 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-934-9

Vol. 18

Paul Gifford and Tessa Hauswedell (eds) Europe and its Others: Essays on Interperception and Identity. 305 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-968-4

Vol. 19

Philip Dine and Seán Crosson (eds) Sport, Representation and Evolving Identities in Europe. 408 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-977-6

Vol. 20 Lucille Cairns and Santiago Fouz-Hernández (eds) Rethinking ‘Identities’: Cultural Articulations of Alterity and Resistance in the New Millennium. 266 pages. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-0865-6 Vol. 21

Patrick O’Donovan and Laura Rascaroli (eds) The Cause of Cosmopolitanism: Dispositions, Models, Transformations. 428 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0139-8

Vol. 22

Rob Garbutt The Locals: Identity, Place and Belonging in Australia and Beyond. 272 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0154-1

Vol. 23

Rossella M. Riccobono (ed.) The Poetics of the Margins: Mapping Europe from the Interstices. 225 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0158-9

Vol. 24

Andrew Liston The Ecological Voice in Recent German-Swiss Prose. 248 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0218-0

Vol. 25

Nóra de Buiteléir Tyrol or Not Tyrol: Theatre as History in Südtirol/Alto Adige. 233 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0731-4

Vol. 26

Kamakshi P. Murti To Veil or not to Veil: Europe’s Shape-Shifting ‘Other’. 247 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0859-5

Vol. 27

Martin Potter British and Catholic? National and Religious Identity in the Work of David Jones, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. 161 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0860-1

Vol. 28

Madeleine Brook Popular History and Fiction: The Myth of August the Strong in German Literature, Art and Media. 278 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0842-7

Vol. 29 Peter Horn At the Margin of One/Many Languages: Essays on South African Literature. 244 pages. 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1864-8 Vol. 30

Eiko Ohira Subjected Subcontinent: Sectarian and Sexual Lines in Indian Writing in English. 276 pages. 2016. ISBN 978-3-0343-2206-5

Vol. 31 Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez and José Igor Prieto Arranz (eds) The Humanities Still Matter: Identity, Gender and Space in TwentyFirst-Century Europe. 308 Pages. 2020. ISBN 978-1-78997-279-5 Vol. 32

Adelle Sefton-Rowston Polities and Poetics: Race Relations and Reconciliation in Australian Literature. Forthcoming 2021. ISBN 978-1-78874-454-6

Vol. 33

Forthcoming

Vol. 34 Francisco José Cortés Vieco Bearing Liminality, Laboring White Ink: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Women’s Literature. 280 pages. 2021. ISBN 978-1-80079-013-1