Childbirth From The Woman's Point of View

University of Tulsa
Childbirth from the Woman's Point of View in British Women's Fiction: Enid Bagnold's The Squire and A. S. Byatt's Still Life Author(s): Tess Cosslett Reviewed work(s): Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 263-286 Published by: University of Tulsa Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463738 . Accessed: 06/12/2012 20:00
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Childbirth
from in British
the
Woman's
Point Fiction:
of View
Womens Squire and
Enid
Bagnold
s The
A.
S.
Byatt
s Still Life
Tess Cosslett University of Lancaster
Enid Bagnold's newly reissued novel The Squire (1938) and A. S. Byatt's recent novel Still Life (1985)1 are both unusual in that they contain accounts of childbirth from the point of view of the woman giving birth. As Maria Curro Kreppel points out, "in novels, childbirth is almost always an observed event told through the eyes of doctor or attendant or father... we are seldom invited to share vicariously in the consciousness of a woman experiencing birth."2 Carol H. Poston has also remarked that in literature "birth from the audience rather than the participant point of view is nearly universal."3 Though the participant point of view has become more common in contem? porary literature, it is still difficultto find accounts of any length that invite us to share the birthing woman's consciousness; and Enid Bagnold, writing in the 1930s, clearly saw herself as the pioneer of a new subject-matter.
Byatt, writing in 1985, does have some predecessors?notably Margaret Drabble in The Millstone (1965) and The Waterfall(1969) and Doris Lessing in A Proper Marriage (1956).4 But the Drabble novels respectively compress the birth itselfinto a paragraph and elide it entirely between accounts of the preparation and the aftermath.5A Proper Marriage has some parallels to Still Life, which I will mention, but I have chosen to concentrate on The Squire
and Still Life because of their interesting representations of three different time periods. The fictional representation of childbirth from the woman's point of view is still quite rare, and neither Bagnold nor Byatt can be seen as writing in a recognized genre.6 In The Squire the birth is the central event and climax of the novel, the focus for a series of meditations on motherhood and middle age. Still Life is a more diffuseand complex novel, split between two sister heroines, Frederica who pursues an academic career and Stepha? nie who has given up her academic interests to get married. Stephanie's experiences of pregnancy and childbirth are, however, central to her part of the plot. The move from audience to participant point of view raises the interesting question, how is this previously undocumented experience to be described? 263
Poston sees women's attempts to describe birth as largely contaminated by the language of the "male" point of view from which the experience has mostly been described?she calls instead for the "authentic voice" of women to be heard (pp. 20-22). But any experience is necessarily mediated by the cultural frameworks within which it takes place. In literature there can never be an "authentic" voice that is not constituted by contemporary ideologies.7 Thus Poston begins her article with a (very moving) account of one of her own experiences of childbirth, but this account is clearly influ? enced by the rhetoric of the contemporary "natural childbirth" movement (she cites Sheila Kitzinger as her "Bible," pp. 20-22). Similarly, both Bagnold and Byatt at times use the language of "natural childbirth" (a concept pioneered by a man, Grantly Dick-Read, in the 1930s), and their accounts of birth are necessarily affected by the institutional practices and beliefs current in their times, as well as by contemporary assumptions about what it is to be a woman, what opportunities are offered or closed to her by motherhood. They also cannot avoid using already existing literarypatterns: Stephanie's firstexperience of giving birth is presented in explicitly Wordsworthian terms, while the birth in The Squire is presented in terms of military and religious patterns of imagery. But these novelists do not merely reproduce existing beliefs and patterns; they also resist them: their represen? tations of childbirth are remarkable achievements, not because they into?
nate "authentic voices" of female experience, but because of the creative use to which they put contemporary and inherited "voices," language, images, in order to give childbirth from the woman's point of view its own literary shape. We need not think of women writers as trapped by cultural inheri? tances or by contemporary ideologies?they can negotiate with these givens to serve a differentpurpose.8 To make this point, I will investigate in detail major points of comparison between these novels. As products of differenttimes, I want to show how, to some extent, they reproduce different ideologies about childbirth and moth? erhood and how the differentinstitutional, social, and economic circum? stances portrayed make the births into entirely differentexperiences. Sur? rounded by servants, the upper class squire has a freedom to enjoy and to control her experience, which the harassed Stephanie, married to a curate and supporting various relatives, does not.9 In particular, the squire can buy the undivided attention of a midwife in her own home for a month, while under a depersonalized hospital regime. At the same time, Stephanie suffers these writers use similar strategies to appropriate a measure of power and control for their women characters within male-defined institutions. In particular, the rhetoric of natural childbirth is wrested from men and used to invest the birthing woman with a "natural" wisdom of the body. The novels also give meaning to the births by setting them as central events within a 264
larger literary pattern, though the actual patterns differ:the birth in The Squire constitutes the climax of a pattern of triumph, while the births in Still Life mark stages in a pattern of decline and defeat. Then, too, the lives of the birthing women and other women in the novels follow differentpatterns that reflectdifferent concepts of female identity.Both novels dignifybirth as an important subjective experience, in which the protagonist passes through a special transitional state "outside" the social world and returns
transformed. The transformation raises important questions about subjec? tivity and identity,as one person becomes two. Giving birth thus competes with marriage and death?those two old fictional standbys?as a supreme
conventions are of course not neutral, but encode or challenge contempo? rarysocial and political assumptions.10 As I have said, the birth is the center and climax of The Squire; the only other events in the novel are the squire's
experience that confirms or destroys identity. To begin with, it is important to see how the births fitinto the structure of each novel, how they are shaped by literary forms and conventions. These
militarism, and religion?gives an effectof continual surprise, overturning expected connections, as when the squire calls herself a "female male" (p. 191). Bagnold assimilates her innovation to the conventional structures of the love-plot and the adventure-plot while emphasizing the unconven? tional nature of her subject matter. Thus near the end of the book we are told, "Between the midwife, the child and the squire the love-scene had passed and was over" (p. 217); later, the squire sits with "her lover [the baby] on her lap" and listens, bored, to a visitor talking about her love-life (p. 233); when the midwife first arrives, the squire meets her "in excitement and love" the who is to look after the baby when the midwife is gone, nurse, 113); (p. also has her love-plot: "Though this was her lady's fifth birth, to Nurse it was
furtherattention to the birth by using the language of romance and of heroic action. The mixing of differentmetaphors by Bagnold?romance, sport,
everyday interaction with her household and her other children. To struc? ture a novel around such an event was an innovation; to make childbirth a central subject was transgressive and shocking in itself, and Bagnold draws
yet like being in love, it was the prince arriving" (p. 7). Parallel to these images of romance are images of heroic male action: the squire will bear her baby like "a soldier," thinks the nurse approvingly; the squire describes her relationship with the midwife as "like a boxer with his trainer... we gather together as for a race" (p. 100); in the midwife's ideal clinic, the mothers would be isolated from the world "in a camp, like athletes in training"; the midwife herself in her dedication to her profession is described in military metaphors, "something rigid, fierce and bright lay ready in her crouching armed against disturbance, ready to crush whatever tampered with the harness of her routine.... When her eyes flashed it was as though she had 265
taken up a sword" (pp. 112-13); as labor begins, the squire exclaims "What an extraordinary adventure!" (p. 134). The male role taken by the squire is emphasized by the absence of her husband thoughtout the book, allowing her to take the title and function of "squire," the "master" of the house. The male language casts her as a heroic and controlling figure:it may be regrettable that Bagnold could only do this by reference to male roles; but the reversal of genders here, within her contemporary ideological context, serves to dignify the birth as an impor? tant and central human action. This masculinization of the squire and her appropriation of a new sort of love-plot are both stressed by the contrasts often drawn between her and her younger friend, Lady Caroline. Caroline, with her love-affairs, represents the squire's youth: the contrast between them causes the squire to rejoice in her own middle age, in which she has lost her purely decorative femininity and ceased her involvement in trivial
love affairs.Instead, she has become more "male" and has discovered a new and better sort of "love" with her children. She tells Caroline, "Such as you ought to be called 'women.' We ought to be called 'wumen'; some different word. Wumen are hard-working, faulty, honest, female males?trudging down life pushing the future before them in a wheelbarrow" (p. 191). Motherhood is thus, astonishingly, not a quintessential function of woman; it is instead accomplished by "female males," while womanhood is associated
only with sex-appeal. Motherhood is something that empowers a woman (Caroline is seen as a "victim") and paradoxically frees her from her gender and from the humiliations of love for a man. The continuing comparison with Caroline sets out what being a mother means in terms of female identity. Interestingly, there are no contrasts between motherhood and career or motherhood and intellectual life as there are in Still Life. The squire's task of commanding her household is equivalent to a career, and she has ample spare time for any other pursuits since afterthe midwife has gone, charge of the baby will be handed over to the nurse, who already looks after the other children. If the contrast with Caroline operates to increase the squire's selfsatisfaction, the novel is in fact structured so that all other female characters are subservient to the squire's central role as mother. Both the midwife and the nurse have given up sex and maternity in order to serve other people's children?the squire's, in this case. The arrival of the squire's new baby is the "leap and triumph of her virgin maternity" (p. 7) forthe nurse. The midwife's "profession of repressed maternity" (p. 217) is seen as necessarily involving a "farewellto sex" (p. 174). Women who are not dedicated to the squire and her baby are categorized as against them?notably Mrs. Pascoe, the cook, who says '"I can tend a death but I've no nerve for a birth'" (pp. 12-13), shocking the nurse by talking "like that about the sacred prince, the lovely baby" 266
(p. 34). Mrs. Pascoe is also asexual, with "her ginger-headed virginity,her malicious prudish anger at the birth" (p. 34), and she confirmsher villainy by giving her notice and throwing the household into confusion at the crucial moment. The only other mother in the novel is the midwife's previous patient, who shocked the midwife by her lack of maternal feeling, putting "her sex before her maternity" (p. 120), meaning that she refused to breast? feed. In comparison to her, the squires role as perfect mother can only be enhanced. The novel's glorification of the squire's motherhood is very much of its time. In the period 1900-1939, the government conducted a "campaign to 'glorify,dignify and purify' motherhood," in order to produce "a better imperial race." The spur to this campaign had been the poor physical quality of recruits for the Boer War. This physical deterioration in the population was identified as resulting not from poor living standards but from maternal ignorance, which was cheaper to remedy.While remedies such as ante-natal
clinics and health visitors were aimed at the lower classes, as Jane Lewis points out, "the accompanying ideology of the new, improved motherhood, that would raise a better race, was not."11 The upper class squire is seen in terms of this imperialistic ideology, and the midwife acts often as its spokeswoman, though, as we have seen, Bagnold does not simply reflectthis ideology but appropriates it to construct her enabling image of birthing
chill, as though she, her house, good and bad, brilliant flowers and warm baby as well as grumbling and responsibility, were what Frederica dreaded" (p. 243). At the end of the novel, Frederica thinks, "she had perhaps relied on Stephanie to do for both of them things she herself feared doing, perhaps couldn't do" (p. 355). But what Stephanie has most recently done is died, by a horrible domestic accident. We are shown her undergoing three extreme bodily experiences in the novel, two births (the second birth more painful and less triumphant than the first)and a death. Stephanie's life choice seems to lead downwards to a dead-end, as body triumphs over mind. We see her trying vainly to keep up her reading and thinking, reading Wordsworth in the ante-natal clinic or in a few brief snatched hours at the library,during which her mother-in-law and brother fail to look after the baby properly, dropping him on the floor as she comes back in. After her death her husband 267
ticity instead of an academic career, and we are clearly meant to contrast her with her equally brilliant sister, Frederica, who spends most of the novel as an undergraduate at Cambridge. When Frederica visits, Stephanie "felt a
woman as a powerful male figure. While The Squire centers on the birth as the triumphant confirmation of the squire's value and identity as a mother, in Still Life the two births that Stephanie endures form part of a gradual darkening of her life. Stephanie, who has a Double First from Cambridge, has chosen marriage and domes?
thinks "how she had been made dumb, by marrying him, about Wordsworth and Shakespeare" (p. 343). In addition to this loss of intellectual life, her marriage is presented as involving a gradual and irreversible loss of her her body, then her time, "separate self," her "privacy"; the babies invade first uncongenial relatives come to stay, and parishioners make demands. Her death, from tryingto rescue a sparrow trapped in the house, is symbolically appropriate forsomeone whose life has already been given up to others. The fact that she alone of the book's characters dies suggests some horrible connection between maternity and death?the births seem to make her more vulnerable to physical accident. It is not just that birth is inevitably associated with death, both in that a new being is delivered to mortality and,
more immediately, death in childbirth has always been a likelihood for women, but also physicality,and hence mortality,is the property only of the mother; the other main characters transcend it by virtue of being men or taking on male roles. The downward spiral of Stephanie's life has a clearly signaled parallel in Wordsworth's Immortality Ode, the poem she studies in her few hours in the and thinks instead of the University Library She cannot concentrate library. at Cambridge and "of'my life' of the desired shape of'my life' as it had seemed so clear and so bright in that earlier library" (p. 153), but then she realizes
Ode: the gradual darkening of the light she is thinking about the Immortality in that poem is happening to her.12 This is confirmed later when she is pregnant with her second child and this time "cycled more slowly to the hospital, her mind dense with times, weights, measures, precautions, vi? tamins, blood sample, Will's diet, yeast, little cakes for the mothers' Union. Custom and frost,frostand custom" (pp. 242-43). Notice that the imagery of when it is applied to a the Immortality Ode functions somewhat differently woman's life: Stephanie's moment of "light" occurred when she was a young woman at Cambridge, full of bright prospects; Wordsworth's when he was an infant or at most a young boy. It is not the coming of adulthood as such that dims Stephanie's light, but specifically marriage and motherhood. When Ode to describe Stephanie's firstexperi? Byatt comes to use the Immortality ence of giving birth, we will find that the Wordsworthian model fitsfemale experience even less well and is again implicitly revised. That the darkening of Stephanie's life is exclusively the result of her domestic role is emphasized by its contrast with the upward trajectory of Frederica's to academic and sexual success. In this contrast between Stephanie and Frederica, female life-choices are distributed entirely differentlythan in The Squire, so as to from sexuality/self-assertion/life?thisre? divide maternity/loss-of-self/death class position and the different flectsStephanie's different assumptions about women's roles current in her time. While we can see Bagnold's glorification of motherhood as reflecting contemporary ideology, Byatt's darker story 268
reflects not so much the beliefs of the 1950s when the novel is set, as the beliefs of the 1980s when the novel was written. In the '50s, motherhood and domesticity were promoted as ideals for women in reaction to the war years when women were coopted into industry; from a later perspective these ideals are seen as limiting and destructive. The book's stark contrast between the roles of mother-woman and career-woman is of the '50s;13 the implied criticism of this polarization and of its destructive effectson an intellectual woman who chooses the mother-role derives from a later point of view, influenced by the intervening rise of the women's movement. The differentsocial and institutional contexts in which the births take place also embody contemporary beliefs, while at the same time the por? traiture of institutions in each case reflectsdifferentfictional functions: the squire's home birth is seen as an experience that confirms her identity, whereas Stephanies selfhood is threatened by an impersonal hospital re? gime. In The Squire, the "institution" is the English country house, though within this institution the midwife sets up her own institution, a private, protected space that she and the squire inhabit forthe month of her sojourn. While the squire has bought the services of the midwife, their relationship is represented as one of love, equality, and understanding?they work well together and have done so before at previous births. The birth thus takes place in an atmosphere both "natural" and safe, surrounded by love and trusted expertise. The midwife represents an institution that incorporates the latest scientific knowledge with an ancient intuitional wisdom. The
squire and she archetypally enact roles that mother and midwife have carried out through the ages. Bagnold makes use of recurrent religious imagery that further sanctifies their relationship. The Squire begins with anticipation of the midwife's arrival as the squire waits to enter the last stage of her pregnancy, "the last period, a purification. Stripped of my children, accompanied by a nun, and all the cares of my household thrust from me!" (p. 98). This religious imagery continues: the doctor is a "monk," the midwife dreams of a "'nunnery-clinic'" (p. 161) where mothers would be "palisaded" from the cares of the outside world (p. 121). Her religious devotion is both to her modern scientific training and to her ancient calling. In creating this idyll, Bagnold gives her own interpretation to contempo? rary changes in the training and status of midwives and their relation to
doctors. There have been midwives since Biblical times and beyond,14 but the profession only became state registered in Britain in 1902. The amount of training required to practice as a midwife was increased three times between 1902 and 1937. This extension of midwives' training attracted a new type of woman to the profession: as Jane Lewis explains, "the midwife was ceasing to be an older local resident, and was becoming a younger, probably middle-class professional."15 Thus the squire and midwife are class 269
equals: ifnot upper-class like the squire, the midwife is clearly a lady, which allows their equal companionship. In the nineteenth century there had been attempts to register midwives on the same footing as doctors,16 but these failed, and the 1902 Act gave them a position subordinate to doctors, yet with more independence than nurses. They were permitted to supervise normal births, but required to call in a doctor if any complications ensued. The history of midwiferyis one of the gradual encroachment of men?male midwives or doctors?on an originally wholly female preserve.17 The squire and the midwife discuss this capitulation of "female" instinct to "male" scientific training: "I care so much,"said the midwife, "thatI am prepared sitting up straighter, to give up the baby?the victimofcenturiesofwomen?to the attackofman!" The squires eyesopened. "The book of instincthas long, long been closed," said the midwife. "But what do we get instead?"said the squire. "The science-guidedbaby! on a chart, itsfood Labelled, its tearsand stools in bottles,its measurements weighedlike a prescription!" "Betterthan muddle,"said the midwife, (pp. 182-83) Despite her scepticism about "male" science, the squire has taken the precaution of having the doctor present as well as the midwife. Most women would not be able to affordthis double attendance, and the doctor s fees were higher than the midwife's. The doctor is, however, a background figure, mostly sitting in the garden reading while the squire gets on with her labor.
Still, he is not an alien figureand partakes of the same religious imagery ("the monk") and the same atmosphere of love and trust as the midwife: "She looked at her doctor and was so filled with trustthat it was like love" (p. 141). The doctor thus provides additional reassurance, but Bagnold presents the special world in which the birth takes place as an all-female one, created by the relationship between the squire and the midwife. The midwife is shown using her "female" instinct powerfully:"With her mysteriouslydevel? oped instinct, so sharpened by her work, she felt that the baby was gathering itself together for its exit. 'It'll be tonight,' she felt, though no doctor could positively have said so" (pp. 123-24). She belongs to an ancient line of female wisdom: "Behind her, into the Middle Ages, and far behind that, stretched
the medieval line of priestesses, wise-women, gamps, midwives, threading their way slowly up to the fine instrument which she had become" (p. 121). The midwifes profession is dignified by its antiquity, and so is the rela? tionship between the mother and her. In an extraordinary scene, the narrator takes up an external perspective on the two in order to emphasize this: 270
There were long silences and the curious medieval pictureremained posed. The woman about to go into labour lay, clothed, but her belly exposed, and silent,holdingin hersilence the verycentreofa livelystage.The thrilled, other actor,withher centuriesof tradition,on her knees, listeningwith her slenderhands forthe creak ofthe gates thatwould open to let out her charge. If the shade of the window-cleaner had returnedto his black window in the dead of night he would have seen a group, indecent, venerable, moving, blessed by antiquity, (p. 136) Neither the squire nor the midwife is given a name: this emphasizes both from the their representative and archetypal functions and is quite different dehumanizing anonymity of the nurses in Still Life. Bagnold may seem to have forgotten here the "masculinization" of birth she created through her sporting and military metaphors, but we can also see her creating in the midwife another "female-male," combining ancient female intuition and male scientific advances. Bagnold presents the midwife as both connected to and, because of her training, an improvement on the past. The institution in which Stephanie gives birth, the 1950s' National Health Service hospital, is almost a point-for-point reversal of the ideal presented in The Squire.18 We are given an interesting, dual-time perspective on the hospital: Still Life, as I have said, is written in the 1980s about the 1950s, and the narrator occasionally intervenes to compare practices then and now. The narrator's perspective cannot but be influenced by the revolt in the 1970s and '80s against hospitalization and the mechanization of birth (Towler and Bramall, pp. 273-81), and we may wonder how much Steph? anie's consciousness, her reactions to what is done to her, are also informed by the author's perspective in the 1980s.19 The hospital that Stephanie enters is, like the special world created by the squire and the midwife, set apart from the ordinary world, but it is presented as a place of darkness and alienation. The opening of the firstchapter of the book, "Ante-Natal," is only half-humorously allegorical: as Stephanie enters the clinic, "it was written over the entrance, gold letters on purple gloss on red brick. Gynaecology and Obstetrics. Inside the archway an archetypal hand, the firstof a series, pointed on a placard. Ante-Natal Clinic, First Right. It was dark in there" (p. 11). Thus birth in both novels takes the mothers into another world, and, as we shall see, various stages must be undergone to get out again into normal life. In the world that Stephanie enters, the love,
trust, and mutuality between squire and midwife are absent. The nurses are busy and anonymous people who are not to be bothered by the patients' problems; they intervene in order to inflict indignities and to prevent "natural" movement and "natural" rhythms. While the squire and midwife share an understanding of what is going on and how to deal with it, 271
Stephanie is at odds with her nurses, her instinctive knowledge of what she should be doing countered by their rigid mechanical procedures. In some cases, the nurses' practice is the opposite of the midwife's?for instance, they will not allow Stephanie to walk about while in labor; and in others the same practices that are seen as restful and natural in The Squire are seen as unnatural and harassing in Still Life. This is particularly so with regard to breast-feeding procedures, as we shall see. Stephanie's experience of the hospital regime begins in the "dark" ante? natal clinic. Here her naked belly is not part of an ancient and blessed picture, but the consequence of a ridiculously small gown she has to put on:
"She was used, but not reconciled, to such indignities" (p. 14). She is examined not by a woman who is both friend and priestess, but by a pressured and embarrassed male doctor who "did not meet her eye: this was usual" (p. 15). Nurses speak to patients "as one speaks to distracted children
or incapable old people" (p. 14). The patients become dehumanized: Mrs. Owen, a new patient, is too intimidated to be able to tell anyone she is about to have a miscarriage. Stephanie is especially distressed because '"I didn't This place puts you listen. Nobody did. We taught her to stand in line.... in line. You stay in it'" (p. 16). In the clinic, Stephanie tries to read Wordsworth while waiting, but her privacy is invaded by Mrs. Owen's crisis. When she arrives at the hospital in labor, she suffersthe indignities of the ritual shaving and enema (pp. 88-89). In the delivery room, the nurses take away her possessions and are too busy to bring her the Wordsworth she has specially brought to read during the firststage of labor. The women are not cooperative co-workers, but representatives of a repressive institution, who work against what Stephanie's body is telling her to do. They stop her walking about the room in the firststage of labor and force her to get into bed. As she enters the final stages, the nurses again lay hands on her: "She wished the women dead for holding her so uncomfortably in an unnatural
position" (p. 92). Conversely, in The Squire the doctor encourages the squire to keep walking until the last possible minute. This sounds like advanced thinking, but was in fact standard practice up to and including the 1930s (Towler and Bramall, pp. 49-50, 91, 222). Stephanie, in the 1950s, is supposed to hit on this idea by instinct (pp. 90-91), but we must remember the book is written in the 1980s when the practice has been revived, along with letting women give birth in whatever position they choose rather than holding them in "unnatural" positions. How much of Stephanies experience of the hospital as a repressive institution is 1980s' hindsight? The narrator twice intervenes to compare practice then and now. After the baby is born, he is whisked away, and she comments, "It was not a time, or a hospital, where the child is put to the mother's breast" (p. 93); and later she comments on how "the 272
ward. . . put you to bed?and in those days confined you to bed" (p. 100). In both cases she implies that present-day practice is more enlightened and more natural. She contrasts the routines of child-care and breast-feeding in particular with modern ideas about the importance of demand-feeding and the physical bond between mother and baby: Babies mustfeedsteadilyforthe prescribed ten minutes?no more,or mothers nipples wouldbe sore,no less,or theymightnot put on.... Those who asked to feedfrequently, or enjoyedsleeping in theirmother's arms,weredesignated warningswereutteredabout not lettingthese helpless "spoiled"and frightful human scraps get the upper hand. Nurses dehumanisedbabies, (p. 100) Interestingly, in The Squire these same routines are accepted as natural and good. The midwife takes over the baby when he is born and only brings him to the mother at fixed intervals to be fed. In an idyllic firstfeeding
scene, "the squire, bending over the baby, her watch in her hand, would have given him ten minutes" (p. 151). Feeding at fixed intervals, which is now seen as rigid and unnatural, is presented as a natural rhythm:20 "Strange, concentrated life, that no man knows, shared with the cat in the stable and the bitch in the straw of the kennel.... The regularity of her milk, as
natural way to proceed. In fact, it follows the prescriptions of the influential child-care "expert" of the 1930s, Sir F. Truby King, who "emphasised the dangers of spoiling a baby with too much attention, and. . . warned against undue affection and insufficientfirmness,"and who was also responsible for the idea of the rigid four-hour feeding schedule. Truby King's ideas only began to be challenged by John Bowlby in the 1950s, who emphasized instead the psychological and emotional needs of babies (Towler and Bra? mall, p. 270). In the 1950s' hospital in Still Life, Truby King's notions still held sway. These questions of cultural context are especially important in the de? scriptions of the births as physical processes. The Squire gives us a description that would not be out of place in a modern handbook on natural childbirth. Beforehand, the squire expatiates to Caroline on her theories about pain: turnsinto pain only when it is foughtand resisted?.. . "Perhapschild-birth therecomes a time, afterthe first pains have passed, when you swimdown a silverriverrunninglike a torrent, withthe convulsive,corkscrew movements 273
always, astonished the squire. At six and ten and two and six and ten, to the tick, to the instant, her breasts swelled and reminded her" (pp. 169-70). There is no equivalent discussion of "spoiling" in The Squire, but the way to treat the baby seems to be to leave him outside lying in his cot as much as possible and to pick him up only forfeeding. This is taken for granted as the
the of a great fish,threshingfromits neck to its tail. And ifyou can marry and swimon, then the movements, go withthem,turnlike a screwin the river pain. . .becomes a flamewhich doesn't burn you." (p. 101) She puts this theory into practice during the birth: Now the first twisting spate of pain began. Swim then, swimwith it foryour Ifyouswim,not pain but sensation! life.Ifyouresist, and impediment! horror, rush and the abreast of violence which is also you!Wild it, together, you Keep Other thingsexist than pain! (p. 145) movements,hallucinated swimming! Carol Poston comments on how birth has been wrongly presented as a savage and horrible experience because it has only been seen from an audience's point of view (p. 21).21 Bagnold makes the same point by imagin? ing how the squire would have looked to an uninitiated audience: "By her
movements, by her exclamations she would have struck horror into anyone but her monk and her nun. She would have seemed tortured, tossing, crying, muttering, grunting. . . . She was not in torture, she was in labour; she had been thus before and knew her way" (p. 146). Here Bagnold accurately describes the way birth is usually presented from an external perspective, especially in her emphasis on the disturbing effectof the squire's "exclama? " tions." For instance, in Anna Karenina, Levin hears a groan which makes his heart stop beating" and later is terrifiedby "an unearthly cry." Tolstoy, like Bagnold, implies that the birthing woman, Kitty,deals more bravely and competently with the experience than Levin, the terrifiedonlooker, but this her ability "to take pride in is seen as an attribute of her superior spirituality, her pain and to rejoice in it."22 Birth pain is thus put into the Christian scheme of redemption, and women count as more spiritual beings because of
their greater suffering. In this context we can see how playful Bagnold's "monk and nun" imagery is?the squire's competence is physical, not spir? itual. It is not a mysterious attribute of womanhood, but analogous to the competence and bravery of a male soldier or athlete. This emphasis in The Squire on minimizing the pain of labor by cooperat? ing with contractions seems advanced?how did the squire come by these ideas? She presents them as a matter of learning through personal experi? time is all panic. The second half-panic, but at the third and ence: "'the first fourth times something began to dawn on me. I said, "Is this really pain?"1" (p. 100). Through her experience of several births, she has come upon "'the secret of childbearing in the past, when women had eleven and fifteen children and learnt how to have them'" (p. 102). Personal experience leads to ancient wisdom. Similarly, Byatt endows Stephanie's body with a "primi? tive," instinctive knowledge of the techniques of natural childbirth. But is 274
(Towler and Bramall, p. 222).23 This preceded publication of The Squire, though postdating Bagnold's last child born in 1930. But in 1923 Bagnold had met Harold Waller, a progressive doctor with advanced ideas about childbirth and childcare. "Harold Waller influenced Enid's ways and views of life more completely than anyone she had met since Antoine [Bibesco, her second lover]," writes her biographer, and when she gave birth to her second child, "with Dr. Waller's constant advice and the help of an excellent nurse, Ethel Raynham Smith [the original of the midwife in The Squire], Enid thoroughly enjoyed this baby." In contrast, she described her firstbirth "'as though an outside power was forcing you through a sausage machine.'"24 The change in her experience of childbirth may have been due to experience, but more likely was due to Waller. In the case of breast-feeding, as we have seen, Bagnold rewrites culture as nature.25 In StillLife Stephanie has read "a book about natural childbirth," but had to perform the relaxationexercisesprescribed made no effort bythe book. She had always been confident in her self-possessionin her own body. She imaginedwomen werenot so civilised that theyhad no naturalsense ofwhat to do with thingsthat happened to everyoneas imperatively as eating and excreting.If it was naturalto relax,she would relax,when the time came. (p. 85)26 Again, childbirth is presented as natural and primitive, and when the nurses leave her alone, we are shown Stephanie "obeying some powerful instinct,"
modern natural childbirth really natural, or is it a cultural practice that we learn from books? In 1933 the "firstpublished work on the psychological approach to pain relief," Grantly Dick-Read's Natural Childbirth,appeared
walking rhythmically up and down, working with the rhythms of the pain (pp. 90-91). The pain is imaged as "singing," not hurting, when she relaxes into it (p. 87). Could Stephanie have experienced this, or Byatt have written it, without having read the literature of natural childbirth? In both novels we see a great need to present cultural practices as natural and instinctive, to
assert that women have access to some ancient wisdom of the body during childbirth. In Doris Lessing's A Proper Marriage, this natural wisdom is displaced onto the native cleaning woman who releases Matty's tension with her touch and her incantation, "'Let the baby come, let the baby come.'"27 Even this attribution of more natural childbirth to more primitive cultures is strongly reminiscent of a key scene in Grantly Dick-Read's book where he watches a "native" woman giving birth among the bushes, seemingly without pain.28 I do not want to imply, however, that these women writers have merely been brainwashed into accepting "natural" childbirth: instead, it seems to 275
me they create empowering solutions to the paradox presented by a book on natural childbirth written by a man. (New editions of Grantly Dick-Read's book appeared in the '40s and '50s.) Natural Childbirth is male-centered in its view of women. It presents "civilised" women as fearful, helpless, and naturally dependent on men; the obstetrician must exploit this to transfer their complete dependence to him?then he can persuade them out of the fear and tension that alone create pain. An obstacle to this is women's tendency to rely on other women, especially their mothers, who feed their fears and impede the work of the charismatic male obstetrician. There is a hint of this ideology in the squire's absolute trust in her doctor, but he remains a background figure,and her main trustrests in the female midwife. More than this, as we have seen, the idea of a non-resisting, pain-free
childbirth is presented as occurring spontaneously to the mother herself,as a product of her personal experience, and as a recovery of past female wisdom: she puts the idea into practice on her own initiative and with her own encouragement. Similarly, Stephanie ignores handbooks and trustsher own body, which gives her the right messages in spite and not because of institutional intervention. Both women claim natural childbirth as a woman's unaided power and marginalize or render invisible its male cultural origins. This claim to female centrality and power is also evident in another with possible revision by Bagnold of Dick-Read. He ends Natural Childbirth water-imagery?specifically, an image of doctor and midwife standing on the shore, encouraging the frail bark of the baby through the waves of labor. Lest this image seem to put the doctor in too marginal a position, Dick-Read adds a final image implicitly likening him to Christ walking on the water,calming
the fears of the disciples.29 Bagnold too uses water imagery to describe labor?the flowing river and the swimming fish?but the mother here oc? cupies the center of the process; she is the fishwho knows how to swim with and within the currents. These novels take a similar attitude to natural childbirth and its empower? ing potentialities,30 but where the squire is allowed to put her bodily wisdom into practice, Stephanie's is blocked and thwarted by the nurses who impede her rhythmsand hold her in an "unnatural" position. The imagery of flowing
water stresses the harmonious nature of the squire's experience, her total, willing engulfment in it?she becomes one with her own bodily rhythms: "her mind went down and lived in her body, ran out of her brain and lived in her flesh" (p. 144). By contrast, Stephanie suffers from a split between mind and body:31 "The spine, Stephanie's shrinking mind stated, is a plane, flaton the bed, as though by butchery the belly is severed and the flanksfall" (p. 92); as the baby is born, "the body split in half" (p. 93). The birth is imaged several times as a contest between the baby trying to get out and the body holding it in: "something heavy and hard and huge inside her opened her out 276
struggle and splitting may be a realistic description of childbirth, they also fit the deliberately constructed pattern of Stephanie's life?the split between her academic mind and her pregnant body, the gradual invasion of her separate self by other people's demands (so, too, the squire's acceptance of her pain mirrors her acceptance of her life as a whole). Stephanie's more painful second birth is presented in more self-consciously literaryterms: she has managed to keep hold of a book this time, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, so that the slowlydevelopingnightmareof a blocked labour,a twistedcord, exhaustion and finallythe hauling forceps, suffocation, arhythmic gripings, coiled and coiled in her mind withLizzie Hexam's coal fire, withthe sluggish Thames and itscargo ofdead bodies.... and her intermittent mind'seyesaw the choppyblack water under London Bridge as the tide turned,(p. 249) Here we have a darker version of the water imagery. The institution is similarly bleak: "They wheeled her away to be stitched. She thought they could not be aware of the cruelty of hoisting her fat, forked legs into their meat hooks and canvas slings.... They wheeled her back. There was Daniel, with dark-shadowed eyes, in some ante-room between butchery and communal sleeping-place" (p. 249). The violent imagery prefigures her death. The image of the ante-room suggests once more the idea of birth as a transitional experience, a potentially empowering transformation that takes place in some special area outside normal society. Ann Oakley in Women Confined: Towards a Sociology of Childbirthmakes use of an anthropological model of childbirth as a "status passage," involving rituals of "separation" from society, "transition," and "incorporation" back into society.32 These stages are certainly present in both novels, though the writersare concerned not only with outward rituals such as entering or leaving the hospital, but with the subjective feelings that accompany transition to a new status. In each novel, there are two important transition points after the birth. First, there is the transition from fetus to newborn, inside to outside. Second, a little later comes a transition from the closed world of mother and baby to the wider world of family and/or community?what Oakley calls "incorpora? tion." At both points, cultural assumptions about what it means to be an individual are highlighted. Both women experience a sense of discontinuity between the fetus inside and the new child outside. The squire, paradox? ically, sees the transition as a passage from extreme age to extreme youth. The fetus is
like a battering ram"; "The thing launched itself again against its prison walls" (p. 92). The pain is imaged as "a suffocating net" or an animal antagonist: "the pain gripped like a claw" (p. 91). Though these images of
277
old, filledwith instinct.It acted like a god, as her master, directingher. She had no controloverit. It had nothingto do withthe bornbabythatwas to fall witha crashfromage to trembling that,once born,would throwup its youth, and lie, shocked and naked,just withinthe gatesofthe world,(p. 30) mastery She is also alive to other paradoxes of pregnancy: the strangeness of being two people at once or of being one who is to become two. In an astonishing scene, she sits at dinner and imagines the fetus hanging inside her body: "now, at the table, behind the fall of the tablecloth, behind the sheath of skin, hanging head down between cliffsof bone, was the baby,... a diver poised in albumen, ancient and epic, shot with delicate spasms, as old as a
Pharoah in its tomb" (pp. 30-31). Later, the baby "seemed to swim and strike like a dolphin" inside her, and she thinks, "'It is a mystery... I shall be two people.'. . . She was a vase, a container, a split oak for a gnome to live in"
(p. 88). When she is in labor, she catches sight of the cot and watches "the things laid out with which to wash what W\S NOT THERE, to warm the feet of what DID NOT BREATHE, the setting of the pillows and the NOT BE TOUCHED" blankets for what COULD (p. 144). The parallel paradoxes and the impersonal "what" turn this last sentence into a riddle, whose answer is the baby. The fetus,before the birth, both is and is not there, both is and is not a person.33 In the delivery room, Stephanie sees her prospective baby's cot with a similar sense of astonishment and unreality: it was only when she saw that small cot that she understoodforthe first time what was happening: thatthiswas not an ordeal which had grippedherto test her: that two people werehere. That thiswas happening to two people. That someone had to getout. That itwas inconceivable thatthe femalebody could the size ofa babyto come out. everbe open or elastic enough to allow anything theremustbe an end?it must. ... (p. 89) That nevertheless Here the ideas of two-in-one, of the mysterious absent person, are a cause of fearful not happy wonder. The squire never sees her labor as a contest between female body and fetus, while Stephanie experiences a battering by "a furious blunt block," a "bursting thing" (p. 92). Byatt uses the same metaphor as Bagnold forthe fetus'smovements, "its dolphin-like arching and wheeling," but these movements at night keep Stephanie and her husband from making love: "Even in bed there was no privacy" (p. 29). As the baby grows, "what had been swimming. . . was now tightly packed and bone She had lost her grinding. . . she was not sailing, she was weighted.... autonomy. Something was living her life; she was not living" (p. 84). The squire feels this loss of autonomy, but for her it is a "god" who controls her 278
it all the more striking when her firstsight of her new baby is ecstatic: "She had not expected ecstasy." As in The Squire, there is a disjunction between fetus and newborn: "He bore little, but not no, relation to the furious thing which had breached her" (p. 93). Stephanie and the child have a Words< worthian experience of light: "the light poured through the window, brighter and brighter,and his eyes saw it, and hers, and she was aware of bliss" (p. 94). As in the Immortality Ode, the child is born "trailing clouds of glory" (st. 5). But Wordsworth's birth myth excludes any mention of woman's physical role in giving birth; his child arrives on earth direct from heaven with no female intermediary. When a woman uses his myth to describe her own experience of giving birth, the reintroduction of the physical aspect must challenge or
benignly; characteristically, Stephanie feels the experience as a painful splitting between her real self and the fetus that has taken over her body. Stephanie's generally negative experiences of pregnancy and labor make
revise Wordsworth's account: as Anne Stevenson puts it, "The stains /of your cloud of glory /bled from my veins."34 Byatt does not challenge Wordsworth directly like this, but Wordsworth's myth is implicitly revised. While for Wordsworth the "prisonhouse" closed its shades on "the growing boy,"during Stephanie's labor, "the thing launched itself again against its prison walls" (p. 92). Here the child comes from a prison, not from heaven, and enjoys a brief moment of light before other shades of everyday life close in. The woman who has to carry the child in her womb and physically give birth cannot subscribe to Wordsworth's male myth of transcendent origins. The light that momentarily bathes Stephanie's child is left as an anomalous and sourceless phenomenon. The squire's tenderness for her new baby is as expected as Stephanie's child. Both ecstasy is unexpected. This is Stephanie's first,the squire's fifth
mothers share similar experiences of recognition of the new child, as the impersonal "thing" or "god" turns into a person. "'So it was you!'" says the squire to her new baby, "thinking of her nine months' companion, of her hardness towards him, now melted. . . and thinking with wonderment 'So it was you" (p. 182). Stephanie too "recognised" her baby: "'You,' she said to him, skin for the firsttime on skin in the outside air, which was warm and shining, 'you'" (p. 94). The mothers attribute a unique individuality to the new child. Stephanie's second child is born to a more muted welcome? Dickensian darkness, not Wordsworthian light, is the presiding influence. Mary is born with a disfiguringbirth mark, and "Stephanie felt pity?not recognition, as she had with Will, not wonder, but protective pity" (p. 250). For the squire, even pity is "almost divine," a "deep, terrible feeling" that ties her to her husband and children (pp. 130-31) and seems much more intense than the lost loves of her youth. Soon afterthe mother welcomes the newborn, the baby is introduced into 279
its wider social relations. Both mother and child must come back to the everyday from their special place of trial or triumph. Here both novels also adopt a Romantic model in which the innocent, semi-divine, and asocial child has to fitinto the ordinary social world of "common day." In The Squire, the midwife is concerned to prolong the mother and baby's isolation as long as possible, both to allow the mother's milk to establish and to keep the baby fromharmful influences. Her dream is a "palisaded" maternity clinic, "where mothers could be set apart from the world, for more than a month, for two, for three, so that lazily and fully,like cattle, they could feed their young" (p. 161). But the squire is not in a "palisaded" clinic, the concerns of the household and the demands of her other children loom large, and her lively mind welcomes them?she is poised between two worlds: "Sometimes the squire still held him [the baby] in her spirit like a daffodil bulb held in the earth; but now she was beginning to stare out over his head, to fretfor her knit family,to ask forthe bustle and contact back in her life" (p. 180). As she returns to the family, so the baby loses his special mystery:"He was unpacked now from his mystery and put into his family life" (p. 218). Though the midwife tries to retard it, this process is accomplished naturally and happily. Society exerts its pressures on Stephanie and her baby almost immedi?
ately, as she is "ground between two communities, the ward and the family, both it seemed intent on forming her and William to their own rites and classifications" (p. 99). The nurses with their routines "dehumanise" the babies: "There was no mysteryin the eyes of William in the hands of a cross nurse at two in the morning" (p. 100). We have a complete reversal of the effect of Bagnold's midwife: she has her routines, but these are seen as devices to keep the baby in its mysterious and separate world as long as possible. Although Stephanie names the baby William after Wordsworth,
the family immediately asserts its influence when she remembers this is also her father's name. Her desire to keep the baby "separate" is undermined: '"He's getting tied into the community and he's only been here a few hours'" (p. 97). As successive family visitors hold the baby, he takes on different appearances. His heredity takes possession of him. These transformations are seen as a process of contamination: "After a day's visiting William's heat was wrong?he was sweaty with other people's sweat, damp in nappies other people had touched. . . . His smell was obscured by others" (p. 106). Assim? ilation into the family is violent: he is "pounced" on by Stephanie's father; he "vanishes" into the gross body of Daniel's mother. The baby's bright new separate self and the weight of inheritance he cannot avoid are antithetical? an antithesis, of course, that fits the Wordsworthian model structuring Stephanie's thoughts about the birth. For both novelists, the "overlooking" of others conveys some fears about the newborn's contact with undesirable elements in society, which?like 280
"unnatural" birth?these authors wish to resist. In The Squire, the midwife stops the squire's young friend Caroline from seeing the baby. The squire has already humorously predicted to Caroline, '"You won't be allowed in, with your charming "evil-eye"!. . . You don't know my midwife. She's psychic. She'll know you're a love-woman. She won't let you bend over her newborn'" (p. 99). The virginal midwife is tryingto keep the baby in a different,sacred world while she is in charge: Caroline's sexuality would profane it. The dangerous influence in Still Life is Stephanie's brother Marcus, who is in a state of mental disintegration at the time of the birth. Surprisingly, when Marcus comes to visit Stephanie in the hospital, Stephanie's mother offers him the baby to hold: "They had all. . . been in some way afraid of Marcus's encounter with the child. They had a primitive sense that he might like some bad fairy'overlook' William, or by sympathetic magic infect him with fear. 'Give him back to me,' said Stephanie, almost fiercely" (pp. 103-04). These fears about the "evil eye" confirm the Romantic assumption both novelists are working with that the baby is innocent and good. Carol Poston seems to accept accounts of childbirth as "authentic" only if they somehow intertwine ideas of birth and death: death is birth's "only competitor as an essential human experience." She dignifies birth, I would argue, to give it importance as an "elemental activity," which can be "material for the highest art" (pp. 20, 30). These novels would satisfyPoston
in using their births as spurs to meditations on death, transience, and human continuity. For the squire, the birth temporarily frees her from thoughts of death. It makes time stand still: "How strangely the birth of a baby pressed away the menace of death and assuaged in the breast that savage and pitifulneed forimmortality!. . . Time stands still. Death recedes" (p. 152). But when she thinks about the birth before and after the magic
space created by the midwife around the new baby, inevitably it arouses thoughts of her own death: "'When you have given birth. . . then indeed you what it is to die!'" begin to look about you with suspicion, to smell, so faintly, This dark is made a of images of series 38-39). (pp. thought acceptable by herself as part of a process of human continuity, images that focus especially on her relationship and identification with her daughter, Lucy, rather than with the new baby, who is a boy: "She saw herself, alive and doomed, strong and helpless, passing in a line of women, her mother before her, the child Lucy, behind, women walking on a temple frieze, Greek women in fluttering robes rounding a vase's girth for ever" (p. 67). Here Bagnold boldly adapts Keats's image of the Grecian Urn, introducing the idea of reproduction into his static world and producing an image of female continuity, including but also transcending time and change. She also uses more modern imagery to the same purpose: "She took her place then in a line of women like a figure on a roll of film, her mother before her, her children behind. . . . 'Lucy' 281
whispered the squire, and had an odd sense that Lucy was herself, that she herself was her own mother, that these three women were one" (pp. 263-64). Just as Bagnold uses both the imagery of Keats's Grecian Urn and the modern image of the "roll of film,"so Byatt uses both the scientific language of modern genetics and the literary language of Wordsworth to express a
more disillusioned sense of continuity. Stephanie's family makes "her feel that William was just a link in a complex and possibly faulty genetic chain" (p. 106). As Stephanie's next baby is conceived, the narrator ponders chance and destiny: now that the sexual functionis an aberrationfrom There is a theorycurrent the product of "parasitic DNA" which parthenogenetichermaphroditism, to impart,cuckoo-like,a factorof itsown puts out a pilus, a "geneticsyringe" into the nucleic acid of anotherorganism.Whilst theyslept withtheirheads togetheron the pillow,the cells pullulated and divided,boiled and extruded, arranged genes, chromosomes,proteins, plans, patterns,another life, the same life in another form. And as the immortal life of the genotype is some say,so the phenotype,the individualbody, becomes redun? transmitted, dant, dispensable: it is economic for it to age, cease to function,die. (pp. 236-37)
Ode reinforces this somber note, as "custom The imagery of the Immortality and frost"press down on Stephanie, and the light that surrounds her first? born fades away. The woman giving birth in these novels is presented as being at the center of the human dilemma. To achieve this centrality for the birth experiences of their women characters, both novelists at every point make use of, adapt, or rewrite such varied discourses as those of Romantic poetry, natural childbirth, 1930s' militarism, 1980s' individualism, modern genetics, religious ritual. While the births in each novel are entirely differentexperiences, conditioned by their contemporary cultural contexts, both writers demonstrate a freedom to adapt and combine cultural materials and to give their birthing women a key literary role. It does not seem that any of these discourses, literary or non-literary, is easier or more difficultto adapt than another: Byatt may seem too much in thrall to Wordsworth, but Bagnold freely adapts Keats; both novelists appropriate the rhetoric of natural childbirth for their own uses, but both may seem too influenced by contemporary prejudices about breast-feeding?Bagnold in her celebration of feeding by the clock and Byatt in her condemnation of it. Where perhaps they seem least free, most unreflecting or merely reflexive, is in the underlying assumptions about women's nature that determine the construction of their characters' roles. The division in The Squire into mother-woman and love-woman and in Still 282
Life into mother-woman and career-woman reflects social and economic structuresbut does not challenge their "naturalness," even ifByatt implicitly protests against them. Here both writers reflect a deeply-held and long? standing Western assumption about the separation of the mother fromother female roles and attributes. This is where a resisting reader could question the ideological structures underpinning these novels and produce further new and different combinations. If women writers possess a degree of freedom in adapting cultural discourses to their own ends in representing the "natural" experience of childbirth, we as readers and critics can carry on this process.
NOTES Bagnold, The Squire (London: Virago, 1987); A. S. Byatt, Still Life to both novelsfollowin the text. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Page references 2 Maria Curro Kreppel, "Books I've Read: Crosscurrentsin Obstetrics and Childbirth,"Atlantis,10 (Fall 1984), 2, 4. Literary 3 Carol H. Poston, "Childbirth in Literature,"Feminist Studies,4 (June 1978), in the text. Examples of this 20-21. Subsequent references appear parenthetically Shandy, typeofaccount, cited by Kreppel and Poston,are Laurence Sterne'sTristram Emile Zola's La Terre, Ernest Hemingway'sA Lavansdattar, Sigrid Undset's Kristin Farewell toArmsand IndianCamp, and Sylvia Plath'sThe BellJar.Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina also provides a description of childbirth seen through the eyes of the husband.A remarkable the woman'spoint nineteenth-century example ofbirthfrom of view is George Moore's Esther Waters. Apart fromthe two articlesby Poston and Kreppel, there has been little feministliterarycriticismof the representationof in childbirthas metaphorforother childbirth.Feministcriticsseem more interested kindsoffemalecreativity. See forexample Susan Stanford and Friedman,"Creativity the ChildbirthMetaphor:Gender Difference in Literary Discourse,"Feminist Studies, 13 (1987), 49-82; Carole Stone, "The Female Artistin Kate Chopin's The Awakening: Birth and Creativity," WomensStudies,13 (1986), 23-32; and Susan Gubar, "The Birthofthe Artistas Heroine: (Re)production,the Kunstlerroman Tradition,and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield," in The Representation of Women in Fiction,ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet (Baltimore and London: Johns ofcontem? Press, 1983), pp. 19-59. Gubar does discussthe effect Hopkins University poraryadvances in obstetricson women's image of childbirth,but in her literary analysis she is concerned only with birth as a metaphorforartisticcreativity. My objection to this concentrationon childbirthas metaphoris similarto Nina Baym's objection to the concentratedfocuson the motheras metaphorin recentfeminist "we movebeyondthe entanglements ofour real mothers literary theory: by imprison? ing them in metaphor,"in "The Madwoman and Her Languages," Tulsa Studiesin Womens Literature, 3 (1984), 56. See also Lillian Robinson, "Working/Women/ Writing,"in Sex, Class, and Culture(New Yorkand London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 283 1 Enid
of other typesof female creativity over 227-29, foran objection to the privileging criticism. childbirthitselfin feminist literary 4 MargaretDrabble, The Millstone(Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1968), and The Waterfall(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage Toronto,New York:Granada, 1977). (London, Sydney, 5 The Millstone structures is, however, revealingabout the class and institutional the birth,as I argued in "Childbirthon the National Health: Issues of surrounding Class and Gender Identityin Two Post-WarBritish Novels," unpublished paper deliveredto the Women'sResearch Seminar,Lancaster University, April 1988. 6 The traditionalgenresforthe descriptionofchildbirthhave been the medical textbookand the femaleoral tradition?the "old wives'tale." Puttingsuch accounts a breakingof genericboundaries. I explore into novels is necessarilytransgressive, in "Fictionaland Non-FictionalAccounts ofChild? these genericboundariesfurther birth,"unpublishedpaper deliveredto the Women'sStudies Conferenceat Coventry Polytechnic,March 1989. 7 The culturalframeworks that structure the particularexperienceofchildbirth ofmedicine. See have been ablydemonstrated feminist by sociologistsand historians a Sociology forinstanceAnn Oakley,Women Towards (Oxford: ofChildbirth Confined: Martin Robertson, 1980); Alice Rossi, "Transitionto Parenthood,"Journal ofMar? to Bed: 30 (February1968), 28-39; Judith WalzerLeavitt,Brought riageand theFamily, in York: Oxford Rima 1750-1950 America, Press, (New 1986); Childbearing University D. Apple, Mothersand Medicine: A Social Historyof InfantFeeding,1850-1950 of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Nancy Schrom Dye, (Madison, Wisconsin: University "Review Essay on the Historyof Childbirth in America," Signs,6 (1980), 97-108. as Experience and Institution Adrienne Rich's Of WomanBorn:Motherhood (London: element in motherhood. Virago, 1977) also revealsthe cultural and "institutional" see Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, For the importanceof ideologyin literature, "FeministScholarship and the Social Constructionof Woman," in Makinga Differ? ed. Greene and Kahn (London and New York: ence: Feminist Criticism, Literary Methuen, 1985), pp. 2-5; JudithNewton and Deborah Rosenfelt,"Introduction: and Social Change,ed. in Feminist Criticism a Materialist-Feminist Towards Criticism," Newton and Rosenfelt(London and New York:Methuen, 1985), pp. xix-xxvi;and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing of TwentiethStrategies BeyondtheEnding:Narrative Writers Women Press,1985), pp. 2-3, all of Century (Bloomington:Indiana University of ideology. which are using an Althusseriandefinition 8 For further negotiatingwith and developmentof this idea of women writers in withindominantideologies,see TessCosslett, WomantoWoman:FemaleFriendship Fiction Nineteenth-Century (Brighton:HarvesterPress,and Atlantic Highlands,New Humanities Press, 1988), pp. 1-15. Jersey: 9 We have an interesting in A Proper ofthe twoextremes mixture Marriage. Matty is partofa privilegedwhiteelite,but she undergoesthe nursing-home birththatwas leftto care forthe fashionableat the time(1940s). When she comes out, she is at first but later acquires Africanservantsto help her. baby by herself 10 Forthisequation ofsocial and novelisticconventionsee DuPlessis, pp. 2-3. She has developed the idea fromRaymond Williams, Marxismand Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). See also Tess Cosslett, Womanto Woman,pp. 1-3. 284
11Jane Lewis, The Politics Childand MaternalWelfare in England, of Motherhood: J900-J939(London: Croom Helm, 1980), pp. 13, 38, 18, 61. 12 See William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimationsof Immortality fromRecollec? tionsofEarlyChildhood," The Poetical Works ed. Ernestde Selincourt ofWordsworth, (1950; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1964), st. 8, p. 461. 13 This polarityis, of course, presentin earlier women'sfiction,notably in The confirms her role and her Awakening by Kate Chopin, where the mother-woman oppressionin a birth-scenethat is witnessedfroman externalperspectiveby Edna, the sexuallyfreeartist-woman. The Awakening, ofcourse,showsEdna's lifechoices to be equally,ifnot more,doom-ladenthan thoseofAdele, the mother-woman. But the chiefdifference is thatofperspective: The Awakening showsEdna witnessing fromthe outside "the scene of torture," of maternity fromwhich she symbolof the tyranny mustescape. (See Stone, pp. 23,30.) In Still Life,we move inside the mother-woman's consciousnessand findshe too is a potential artistor career-woman. Doris Lessing's A ProperMarriagegoes further than this to show the mother-woman successfully leaving her child to pursueher own independentlife,but thereremainsthe under? lyingassumptionthat the two roles are incompatible. 14JeanDonnison, Midwives and MedicalMen: A History ofInter-Professional Rivalry and Womens Rights (London: Heineman, 1977), p. 1, and Jean Towler and Joan in History and Society(London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 6. Subse? Bramall,Midwives to Towlerand Bramall appear parenthetically in the text. quent references 15 Lewis, pp. 144-45. 16 Donnison, p. 116. 17 See Donnison, Towlerand Bramall, passim.For an American parallel, see also B. Women and Men Midwives: and Misogyny in Early Jane Donegan, Medicine, Morality America(Westport,Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978). 18 A Proper Marriagealso describesbirthunder a rigidand unresponsivehospital regimein the 1940s. Itsperspectiveis from1956, and the termsin which the hospital and in some regimeis presentedare not as dark as in StillLife?there is more humor, ways Matty is prepared to go along with the hospital routine in order to defyher mother's more"old-fashioned" ideas. In terms ofthe structure ofthe book as a whole, the rigidity of the hospital regimeseems to representthe failingsof white colonial society?a more "natural"approach to childbirthcomes fromthe Africancleaningwoman who helps Matty during the birth. See Rich, pp. 176-82, for another indictmentof the depersonalizedhospital regime. 19 had her first children in the 1960s. Byattherself 20 The currentbelief in the 1930s was that the breastssecreted milk at regular four-hour intervals(Lewis, p. 71). See also F. TrubyKing, The Expectant Mother and Baby'sFirstMonth(Sydney:Angus and Robertson, 1923), pp. 33-34, 37, 48. 21 See also Poston's ofchildbirthin books byUndset and Hemingway, descriptions pp. 22, 26. 22 Leo Anna Karenina(London: The Pilot Press,1947), pp. 357,362,356. Tolstoy, 23 (London: Heineman, 1933). GrantlyDick-Read, NaturalChildbirth 24 Anne Sebba, Enid and Bagnold:The Authorised (London: Weidenfeld Biography Nicholson, 1986), pp. 84, 90, 81. 25 In the late 1930s Waller conducted research that revealed the importanceof 285
and exploded the doctrineof regularsecre? the reflex mechanism in breast-feeding well afterthe birthof tion. He published his research in 1938. This was, however, Bagnold's last child and at a timewhen she had ceased to be in contact withWaller (Lewis, p. 71; Sebba, p. 118). 26 In Drabbles The Millstone,the pregnant heroine "had deliberatelyfound nothingout about the subject at all, and had steeredclear of all natural childbirth classes, filmstripsof deliveries,and helpfuldiagrams"(p. 92). These women writers apparentlywant to keep their characters'experience of birth uncontaminatedby also showsno signsofhavingacquired culture.MattyKnowell,in A Proper Marriage, about birthbeforethe experience. any information 27 Lessing,A ProperMarriage, p. 209. 28 Dick-Read, pp. 40-41. 29 Dick-Read, pp. 59, 65, 100, 102-03, 30-31, 67-68, 123. 30 Sheila Kitzinger in has continuedthisfemalereclamationofnaturalchildbirth Ann her on the The Experience Childbirth 1962). (London: Gollancz, of Oakley quotes way the idea of natural childbirth can empower a woman against the medical . . . She retainsthe instrument. "She is no longera passive suffering establishment: of choice. . ." (Kitzinger, of self-control, p. 20), but Oakley powerof self-direction, also warnsthat"in itsoriginsand typeofculturalaccommodation overthe last thirty has been colonized bymedicine itself" naturalchildbirth (Oakley,p. 36) and so years, forcedon a credulousor unwillingmother.This dual can become another tyranny aspect of the naturalchildbirthmovementis also commentedon by Nancy Schrom Dye (p. 108). 31 Poston sees thissplitting ofthe ofthe woman into two as a "femalerefinement" male "audience point of view,""whereinthe woman feels the agony of birth as an event which tears her into two selves, one watchingthe other"(p. 21). 32 Oakley,pp. 187-89. 33 This withthe baby inside is, not surprisingly, absentfrom relationship pre-birth accounts of birth. In Anna Karenina,TolstoydescribesLevin's external-perspective awarenessof his son thus: "Meanwhile . . . like the small, uncertainflameof a first had notbeen"(p. 363, my the lifeof a human being, which just before lamp, flickered italics). 34 Anne Stevenson, "The Victory," The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets,ed. JeniCouzyn (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1985), p. 191.
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Childbirth From The Woman's Point of View

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