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Table of Contents

Contents

Prologue locating the autobiographical academic

introduction biah sites: discourses of matemity and birthing

Chapter 1 one step forward, two steps backward: the radical maternal

subject and writing the gravid body

Chapter II the self who is not one: -lrs Blwd and the split maternal

subject

Chapter III the body cries: Blown Fieures and the jouniey towards a radical

materni@

Conclusion ideas, predictions, process ... and process

Works Cited

Prologue

locating the autob wgraphical academic

The bitth of my daughter Tristan occasioned th& thesis about brnh. bodies and

representation in the fiction of Audrey Thomas. The event. marked by language as I

traversed the sipnifiers stepmother to birth mother. was liliewise inscnbed corporeaiiy-

traced with b M . pemed with fluid, dashed with pain, paragraphed with joukscuu:e.

Transformarive. 1 uavelled the distance horn student and observer of discourses about binh

and maternai bodies ro subject of these same discourses. 1 changed position--bm subject of

my own e-xperience tu object of my daughter's e-xperiences. S U . b i n h is difficuit to

represent in language- We are only just learning how to talk about bodies, at lest , bodies

that are not separateci hom consciousness. 1 became the verb "birthing," became a mother

and a maternal subjecc who is substantively diffkreat from the Robin who began the

birthing journey.

I feei it is important to include here çornethrng of my journey. my narrative of a

changmg maternd subjectivity. When 1 became prepant. I was parentmg my nephew. and

was thus an "other rnother" with a history of human and ammal rnidwifery assistance. 1:

attended two of my sister Paula's homebirths (the f h t in 1983), and she picked me as a

veteran of many and various animal buths. who rliçoiayed an immunity to b l d Paula's

k t homebirth radicaiiy altered my perceptions of birth. a d 1 s h d never forget the clear

eyes of her ca lm little feliow. who. minutes aiter his arrival. was q i n g ro Gnd the source of

the voices speaking ro him. He was a f a cry h m the fussy, red. unfocused infants 1 had

seen at hospitals. That moment. then, marks an epiphany, which in retrospect I can identiti-

as the beginning of my buth story.

By Paula's thud binh, 1 was a more active participant. hding a way to encourage

her througb a veq- p d transition and holding her up during active labor and brrth. This

nephew was l i terdy caught by the rnidwife. accompanied by his older sibiing's whoops and

hoiiers. Soon after t h e-xperience 1 became an instarnom to my favorite nephew. Dorian

(then eight), my Ç s r reacher in maternal subjectivity.

I begm with tbis background because it represents what is ohen missing in oral

binh scories. and what was originally missing in the h t drat't of thrs text. matemal

e-xperiences prior ta prima gravi&. 1 have inciuded this brie£ narrative here to emphasize a

characteristic of women's fictional narratives of birth-past e-uperiences. Without my histoq-.

1 codd not have e,uperienced birthing as i di& and without this history my initiai response

to the fiterature of birthing 1 propose to examine here wodd have been entirely different-

1 was able to create a positive and joyous birthing, a powerfd performative act. My

body, my agency. my knowledge: my emotions. my creative vision--d were supported by my

b i n h attendants. I constmcted an "ideal" b m h kom the representations that I codd h d : 1

researched, found mentors to learn h m and b h h with. Then as a group. we performed

birthing. 1 suppose the reaçon I keep derring to birth as performance is that buthuig is

specular- My maternd body checked and rechecked. the actors circulating around and

through. paying attention to the cues they receive h m the &ring woman. not quite yec a

mother. The whole elcperience was reminiscent of a weli-scnpted play: the d e s d e h t e d .

centre stage being the buthing unit.

1 would like ta emphasize the importance of the gmup effort in the success of this

adventure-birthing as a cdective experience, not just the birthing woman's. We shared a

cornmitment to birth as a positive. e m p o w e ~ g and transfomative e-xperience particular to

women, but vaiuable to ail without my attendants, in parücular Dr. Elizabeth Jar&--a

general practitioner-my midwife. Luba Lyons Richardson. and her apprentice. Kim m e r -

Lewis, my story would have been very differenc. However, I do not beLieve it would have

changed what it is 1 want to investigate in this thesis.

There is a photograph of this birthing event wtuch has becorne my personal icon of

the entire e-xperience. It graphicdy captures the contradictions and problematics of

maternal subjectivity. -4s many representations do. it isolates a moment 1 coddn't sec-it

represents a particular instance noc available to mu gaze, a doubling. -1 moment of self-

othering: a miniature face protruchg h m my body, framed by my legs. -4nother head

hoiiering like mine (up at the other end, where heads should be). 1 love th& picture. but it is

nonedieless disturbing and provocative. representing sometIiing that's noc suppased to esist.

a body with two heads or. perhaps. two mincis.' The two-headed woman. For me. t h

phomgraph is the perfect symboi for s o r n e b g 1 have corne to c d a radical maternai

subject, one that has becorne the subject of my personal and intellectual quest.

I believe the experience of birth is an esperience of transformation. and thus is

never simple or easy. There are bridges and fissures. coming-togethers and falling-aparts.

continuities and discontinuities--ail marking the scene of binh. Central to this scene. and to

its transformative potential. is a birthing body, a Labomg moman. It was my relationship to

my body that most informed my experience. What is di5cult to articulate is the process of

learning to see this relationship beyond terms of ownership and in terms of being: that is. I

am my body. i do not own it. Events didn't happen in or to a body. 1 was birthing-the verb.

What became mat diff;euit M embody was surrender-surrender to the biological and

f e m m e unlniown, to fears of M y incapacity, to fears of fadure, of not being strong

enough--and, most of ail, surrendet to mwing beyond the itlusion of conscious control. of the

opposition of mind and body.

I found myseif confkonting internalized and negative images of femaie Mes--the

litany of imperfecuon, corruption. and weakness. the a priori voice in my head which tried

to undermine my confidence in my ability to binh, Not surprisingly, t h voice had a

representative at the birth scene, the hospital nurse (the ody outsider to my group). It was

her voice which came to represent the other separated by a door. the Medicai Establishment.

the "systemn I Ggured as rny insidious opponent. I knew it was hovering ominousiy. waicing

for "something to go wrong." The nurse kept suggesting interventions and esperw "just in

case." My daughter was a month early, which catapulted me inm the defined high-risk

category. But another voice, the collective voice of my attendants, supponed my refusais by

encouraging trust in my process and in the child. We gently blocked medicai interference.

and inscribed my success a m s s hospitai records and the dent . despondent machines. My

team and 1 chdenged and displaced medical authorit- even as i had to challenge and

displace its voice in my head I refused to becorne its object, the anonymous, Laboring

woman. My birth. then. was at once an elcerience of transgression and of aurhonty and

power. It was also, I have corne to understand. marginal To have an intervention-hee and

positive "narural birthe2 is unusuai for a woman in Canadian society where mosc binhing

occurs in hospitals. But my e'cperience of midnife assisted homebirths led me CO wonder

why mine was an exceptional e-uperience.

T ~ I S thesis represents rny questions about radical maternal subjects. and about

rnothers who narrate and are narrated. about storied bodies. It questions represenrations of

fernale bodies and of birthiag. suggestrng the need to subvert "standardw medical practices

and obstetrical rituais. ,Uttiough these questions have led me to many discourses. it is in

women's literary tests chat the radical maternai subject can be found Therefore. such cextç

d be the focus of my discussion. It is perhaps not surpriçing that much of the ~nGing on

bKth, both fictional and non-fictionai. has been written by men.3 However. there are now

many literary texts, autobiographical and Eictional narratives by women, w h c h esplore the

experiences of birth and matemity. There are, ha&, rnothers actively engaged in

representing the birth e-xperience.

Before 1 address my subject more directly, 1 wodd Like to ckmQ my position on a

few key issues. In the k t place. an? i n q w attempting to talk about bodies. especially

matemal bodies. ruas the risk of essent;siism. I contend that an essentialint discourse is the

normative discourse about bodies w ben body and consciousaess are separated. and then

posited as opposing and valued terms. Ths fi. of course. the traditional posiuon of

patriarchal thinl;iog and of some ieminist f h i n g . Duaiism is embedded in our ianguage.

and that makes it very rliffieult to d i about bodyminci experiences that refuse to stay in

their Linguistic temtories. The artempt. however. must be made. and is being made by many

fine writers and critics. In the second place. maternal subjectivity is radical. The process of

binh can force an understanding of the self that is radically different h m traditional male

modeis of seihood. Thus far. there is Ltde discourse about matemty that escapes dualism,

we need a new discourse to configure a radical maternal body, and it is my hope that Ihis

work will add to a growing and strident bodv of sesistant writing.

Generally, 1 am actively crincal of what is commody known in Canada. and in most

western countries. as a "typical hospiral birth? 1 a m not opposed to obstetrical technology

per se but to the ways in which it is s~sternacicdy appiied to birthing women. and the way

in which rnediico/technolo&icai obstemcai "progress" remains mystiGed and somehow beyond

the women it is supposed to senre- I contend that our culture views fernale bodies and

mothers as inferior and p o t e d y f a d e 4 machines. and the treatment of pregnant

women is founded upon this principle. However. to w a k into a hospita1 to birth is to place

oneseif withia a system with itç own intents: and Lhe mother. on whom these practices are

m a t e d e d . is often left deepiy uaumanzed 1 write as a wornan who challenged these

systems and succeeded in doing W. for when I turned to the iiterature, ta women's

narratives and ta "authorities." as many confuseci mothers do. I could not find myselL What

I ciid h d . however. was a relationship between what the authonties had to say about

biiezhrng and the e.xperiences. both neganve and positive. of women who write about birth.

1 w d e-xplore the comple-uities of this relationshp , that is. the posslbie ways an

individual maternai subject engages the various discourses circumscribing bvthing and

femaie bodies. discourses which &pre her as an object. When a mother narrates a birth

atory, it is she who becomes the authority, the subject she may not have been during the

e-xperience.

Notes ¶ 1 was pleasandy surpriseci surpnsed to encouter a s im ik photograph on the m e r of Jane Gallop's text Thinkinc Throueh The Bodv. However, there is a major ciifference between the two phougmphs: &e absence of medical personnel and paraphemalia in mine. M y entire body appears within the hame. and the baby's face is as clearly visible as mine. Where Gallop celebrates the confusion of identities. the intenwining of materna1 body and institutional others. it is the dear picture of myself as a two-headed woman and the sharp clarity of diffused boundaries that amaze me.

' 1 place this term in quotations as 1 view it with suspicion. The term " n a d birth" was coined by Dr, Grandey Di& Read in his Natural BVth (19331, a te- which describes his method of h g - h e e childbirth without pain. He can be credited with the origin of the image of a nacive woman squatting in the bush and having her baby apparentiy without the fuss and pain associated with birth in the early twentieth centuq. His mechoci involves, among other th;ngs, that the mother surrender her conscious awareness in order to kee her "primitive" physical body to do its work. Sheila Krzenger. the curent chef writer and promoter of the "naturai childbirth" movement. provides a mode1 of natural birth that stresses surrender to the "natural" physicality of birth and promotes the use of written birth plans.

3 In her s w e y of the development of the "birth scene" in the Engiish novel. Madeleine Riley liçts 105 te- including either birth scenes, mention of births or discussions of the attitudes surrounding "cofiement." Dating fkom between 1749 and 1909. only 36 of the novels are by wornen.

Introduction

birth sitesr discourses of matemity and birthing

mnstead a£ panicipating in--ie.. a d h e ~ g to one side s r the other of-a binary pair, these pairs can be more readily problematized by regarding the body as the threshold or borderline concept that hovers periiously and undecidably a t the pivocal point of binary pairs. The body is neither--wMe alço being both--the private or ttie public, self or other. n a d or cultural, py&d or d. instinctive or learned. genetically or environmentally determineci. Ln the face of socd constnictionism. the body's tangibiiity. its matter, its (quasi) nature may be mvoked: but in opposition to essentiaiisrn. bioiogism. and natudism. it is the body as cultural product that must be stressed

Eiizabeth Grosz. Bodies (234)

Let h e r e be no doubt about it. There is a battie raging for the control of women's

bodies, and the h n t line stretches a m s many iabor and delivery wards. The war is not

abstract, theoretical or ideologicai: it is a mateinal reality e-xperïenced most acuteiy by

birthing women. and in a specific h c a ~ n . the hospitaL Medicine-capitai "W--is the

ideological discourse gwerning hospimis. mhich. in tum. perpetuates, regulanzes. and

standardizes the prôctices of this ideolw. Medicine has "interests," often opposed to those

of birthmg women, interests thac are mystif5ed as a set of "standardn routines and practices.

and distanced from interrogacîon via naming, via the specialized language of Medicine and

Medical authority.

At a t h e when she is mos t vulnerable. each woman must negotiate a concrete set of

Linguistic, physical. and m e W practlces. many of which can be seen as coercive,

colonking, even viojent. cloaked in the m a d e of "standard techniques" and "routine

procedures." Such euphemisms cover procedures ranging h m enemas to cesarians

routinely offered to or forced upon the materna1 subject. Euphemisms circle around

pregnancy and buth. so common even in Medical language we f h d the strange effect of a

discourse that functions through negative meraphorization. Tbings are represented as

something other than what they appear m be. Consider these two phrases: "you wouldn't

want to hurt the baby," or "ail our mothers have enemas here." Medical discourse

suppresses, here, any reference to the mother's body. It is her unnamed body that rnight

injure the baby, and her excretory system that must be deansed: it is her body that holds dangernus potentiaL Medical discourse then subtly informs the birthing woman that her

interesta are not primary. in these examples. the woman is reduced to inhabiting a common

noun, mothers, a group that may or may not be harmfiil to their young, and that must

submit to procedures they may or may not want. or need, 1 picked these examples because

they are ordinary; ciichèd phrases like "yu wouldn't want to catch a cold." or "ail our

children take naps." To me. their very ordinariness suggests the ease with which ianguage

elides and suppresses the body. At the scene of birth a panicular cont'iguration of the body,

the maternal body, is elided through language, despite the fact that the body is the focus of

ph ysicai attention.

Women's bodies are elided when figureci as something other than seives. The fernale

body is traditiondy represented in patriarchal discourse as excessive. uncontroilable: and

thus m u t be regulated and controUed. ("Corne. dear. there's no reason for d that fuss.")

wornan's matemal body, e s p e c d y her birthing body, disrupts order and boundanes. She

grows. e.upands, erupts. aows in an unconmUable manner. Thus. t h body is the object of

intense 0bstetxka.k inquiry, inquiry with an explicit a h to b ~ g to light that which remains

hidden within during reproduction and parturition. Most imponantl>- for obstetncs. in order

to be controUed, regulated, standardized. and made safe during birth. the pregnant body

musc alço be tigured as potentially pathologmd. The maternai body must be discomected

and made into a separate object h m the consciousness it shares. There seem. then. to be

two entities under discussion: tbe maternai mind (self. consciousness). and the maternal

body (a birehing machine). Language aims for the birthing womanrs mind. medicai practice

for her silenced body.

It may seem abçurdly obvious that the conceptual framework of patnarchal

discourse is structured through binary oppositions. but. in thrç case. the obvious can be

dangerous for the birthing woman. -At the scene of birth. when duahcies become literalized

(remember the two-headed woman), she is located as a second term in language. the

dangerous ocher, a negative pole--maleifernale, childhother. subjec~object. Futhermore. she

is herself a divided mind/body--bath as subject and as medical object. Women. as a d

group, are enculturaced into accepting these divisions. Take. for example. the hdings of

Robbie Davis-Floyd (1994):

This separation of self £rom biology is dearly reflected in the body concepts held by many of these women. 1 asked each one. 'How do you think about your body? What is your body?' 1 was interesteci to notice that most, instead of giving me a definition. immediately began to talk about how they judged their bodies-as too fat, not in good enough shape. or healthy . in good shape. Such statements r d e c t their shared belief thd the body is imperfect .... The words of most of those who did pmvide definitions expresseci the additional and eqiraiiy fundamental belief that th body is separate from the sel[ (1 130)

In their words we hear again the belief these women so strongly hold, that the mùtd is more important thun the body, that as h g as their rninds are aume, Lhq, are active participants in the birth process. (1 131)'

What Davis-Floyd uncovers in her research. and which concurs with my own readings, is

that a large proportion of her respondents. "if not exactly W e d . were a t least rather

cornfortable with their &My technological obstetricai e-xperiences, and were not much

interesteci in resistance" (1 128). Note that these are "obstetrical e.xperiencesn and not

"birthings." This use oflanguage troubles me. for it speaks of birthing wornen's own

ambivalence towards their female b~ciies. 1 find it deeply disturbing that women daim a

diçembodied conscious e-uperience as "okay," especially as regards pregnancy and birth.

Resistance to the dominant mode1 of birth. the hledicoitechnolopical modei, works against

the construction of a "disembodied futuren (1 139) in which the bodies of women, ideaüy, d

become obsolete. as is the stated goal of certain reproductive technologies.' What I have

found in women's narratives. in both imaginative and autobiograp hical works. is a use of

language that daers h m the words dora i respondents. sirnilar to those interviewed by

Davis-Flo y&

First of dl, authors imaginativeiy reconsmct their e-xperiences in ways that suggest

they deeply resent being treated as a "bodyn during binh. This does not imply, however.

that they prefer being treated as a "minci" When birch has been difFirrult or completely

medicalized, as in the case of cesarian section. women may feel severed £mm the experience

physically. and &en vaiorize their conscious participation. This is understandable. but

dflerent fiom choosing consciousness over physicality. To be treated "as a body," howwer,

implies thac conscious participation has somehow been subverted What appears in

narrative is often an attempt to reconcile these two seemingly distinct e-qeriences, the

conscious and the physicai That is, wnters U e -4udrey Thomas in hlrs. Blmd (1970) and

Doris Lessing in A P r ~ e r hfarria~e (1954) tq to show how female bodies have memories.

how bodies can remember the experience in a way that is at odds with conscious

recollection, Eiizabeth Baines in The Binh Machine (1983) and Anais Nin in "Blrth" (1934)

write of biieth experiences that become traumauc precisely because their authority as

birthing women has been taken away by medical practices. The maternai subjectivity

e-xplored in writing leads to the subject of this inquiry--what 1 c d the radical materna1

I figure the radicai maternai subject as one who will not clam her conçciousness to

be separate h m her body. This hci of subject appears in women's writing, especiaily, as

we s h d see. in the works of Audrey Thomas. in my use of the term here. radicai insists

upon "corporeality," a term suggested by Elizabeth Grosz in her Volatile Bodies: Toward ri

moreal Feminism. I intend to h e my study of r a d i d maternai su bject through this

question: where is the body in the narrative? Narrative. as a particular discourse, can

represent the matelaal body and maternai consciousness in new ways, can attempt to

coiifigure an embodied maternal subject. The radical maternal subject is dangerous to the

dominant discouses because she has a voice. and a body, and the experience CO validate

alternatives to the dominant structures. -k DavisFloyd States. "the importance ... of this

tiny percemage of alternative model women is tremendous, for they are holding open a

giant conceptual space in which women and their babies can h d mythologicai m m to be

more than mechanistic antagoaistsw (1994. 1139). And 1 would ad& these same women help

to create a new model of the maternal which speaks to my concerns here.

1 would like. then. to consider the foiiowing questions. Where is the feminist

maternal subject located and why is she so rarely represented in women's literature?

Wherein lies the possibility cd a radical and embodied maternity? 1 suggest the materna1

subject could represent herself and her binhing experisnces in a way that challenges and

rewrites the dominant discourses of birth. a wrïting that speaks h m corporeality. What

forms could maternal discourse take in order to represent corporeality in laaguage? What

are the configurations of her radicai body? And how does the radical materna1 narrative

resist dualistic paradigms and challenge dominant discourses?

Materna1 bodies are found, as much by absence as by presence. in many discourses:

iiterature, orai narratives. stories. tates. tescbooks. ~ciological research. i3m. advertking,

critical works. Although my literary source here wdl be the narratives ofhdrey Thomas, 1

think it is imperative to e-xplore the contexrs within which the maternal e-xperience is

represented or elided. Mothers have stories to tell. -As W W e d Hunsburger rays,

"1 beiieve that women tell theit stories because birth iç such a pmfound. almost

indescnbable experience. Telling the story is a chance to relive the e-xperience. to feel the

excicement, the joy, the fear, one more time' (7). There is a qualitative ciifference between

osai bïrth stories and fictional narratives. however. which can be brought out by lookmg at

another of Hunsburger's statements. "Wherher a birth was a simple a&ii.r with no

interventions or a long ordeal ending in a cesarian section, the power of the e-xperience was

the same and the inner strength of the woman shone throughn (6-7). Birtbing is indeed an

experience of power, but here are great inequities in the power relauonships circuiating

around the various loci of birth. Who bas the power and who iç powerless are detennined to

a great -tent by location. culture, f d y &tory. and by the individual woman's access to

education. Aithough some of Hunsburger's respondents speak directly to the power

reiationships between themselves and their doctors and to the effect of the relationships on

their birth, 1 feel that Hunsburger's statements validate a restricted sense of power. that is.

a power that derives h m a woman's ability to negotiate a given set of obstacles, not h m

her power to determine how that set is ~0~~

For a woman to occupy the subject position and to author ber own birth narrative

means to create possibility. Lived experience can be troped. fïgwed, changeci. Material

reality can be altered- hf eaning c m be made. 1 am struck by the many critical texts on

maternity and birth in which the author marks her birthing as the ongin of her critical

work.' s u g g e s ~ g that questions and critical andyçis have întimate ties to lived expenence.

The c0nnir.t e'rperienced in a certain birthing event &en motivates women to write. They

ofien e.upose. then. the power relationships of their e-xperiences in ways which oral

respondents do net.* What characterizes many of the novels 1 have read. however. is the

pervasive concern of wornen writers with the body/mind split, and with the recurring

ambivaient attitudes towards traditional models of bot& mothe rhd and birth6 This

concern is alço prominent in non-fictional works critical of modern obstetrical practices.

Many writers (not ai i of them female) share a belief in the transformative power of birth

experiences, and celebrate the differme of the maternal body, the body that temporady

transforms into one that is and is noc the woman. even while they e-qose the problems and

contradictions of the maternai.

What. then, is the transgressive potential of matemal subjectivity?

The power-and the threat-of the mother's perspective can be perceived most b e d i a t e l y in the scene of birth. In representing this e-xperience, which is inaccessible to men. a woman may achieve an understanding of the self that is quite Merent h m a man's. (Adams 25)

What strikes me in this short passage. which is talking about the radical potential of the

maternai subject. is the two occurrences of "man," In both cases maternai subjectivity is

deiked, abstractly, in opposition to somethuig male: birth is "inaccessible m."

understanding is "quite different from." that of men- Notice also the slippage fimm "the

mother'sn to "a womann--indicative. 1 believe, of underlying dualistic paradgms in operauon.

X narrative account of the radical maternal needs to address this primary opposition of

female/male (and a l l its correlatives), and attempt to manoeuvre into a different conceptual

space. The problem remains: how does a woman develop the radical maternal in relation to

her indMduality and her e-xperiences without falling into compaxison M male discourse?

1 would like to i d e n e three problems in euisting representations of the maternai

body which infom this thesis. To begm with, all discourses which indude bd--medicai.

technological, literary, sociological, the natural birth movement. psychologuai, etc. --indude

the figure of the "natural woman." She inhabits-ephemeral. iike a ghost. but concrete. U e

the surgeon's knife--every narrative of buth. She is the goddess within. technoiogy's

idealized victim. the primitive woman (and thus &n the "Biackw woman), the "naturd

birth" ideal, the d e c t i v e memory, in need af medical assistance. mattainable. rampant ... somehow always there. And it is a particulai. form of ber body, her materna1 body, to which

d other matemal bodies are c o m p a d However. this body is constricteci and appropriateci

in dinerem ways by ditrerent discourses. and the readings directly affect iived expenence.-

Secondiy, the female body is. bp definition, opposed to the paradigm of mind/souL

Our bodies are the other-4eaking. dangernus. unpredictable. animal--the "naturai" upon

which the "cuituialw is constnicted. terme incognitue to be cdonized Much ferninjst

discourse criticizes and e-xposes the amhciality of this defhtion. yet the dehition remains

intemalized by many women (as their narratives attest). The pregnant and birthing body is

pairticulariy representative of disorder and am bivalence.

M e t in& as the? are women. they are represented and live themselves as seepage, Liquidity. The metaphorics of uncontrollabiiity, the ambivalence between desperate htal attraction and strong revulsion. the deep-seated fear of absorption, the association of fernininity with contagion and disorder, the undecidability of the limits of the fernale body @&ularly, but not oniy, with the onset of puberty and in the case of pregnancy), its powers of cynical seduction and d u r e are a l l common chemes in litefary and cuitural representations of women. (Grosz 203)

-AU the figures discussed bp Grosz are apparent in both women's narracisres and birth

discourses. Soma women voice a deep distrust of their body as integral to their experience of

birth: others report the training it took to surmount that distrust and thereby change their

experiences. ofien àismantLUlg defkitions of femaleness in the process.

These k t two problems. the metaphor of the "primitiven woman and the

representation of the female body as mese and uncontrollable. are htercomected, for these

two @es are almost interchangeable in the naturai birth mode1 and in some medicd

ideology. They slip continuaiiy, and often representation of one is dependant upon

representation of the other. In many women's narratives. the "natural" woman cornes ta

represent the body, an ideal body the character could not. or kiied to. be. Thus. she is a

contradictory ligure. For instance, some n-omen who expect a "naturai" birth and do not

acheve it c d the "primitive" woman a fake and unredistic image. But she is the image

appeaied to as the guiding ided of the " n a d n birth modei The "primiuven woman has

become a measuring stick used by women ro gauge the success or fadure of their birthing

e-uperiences.

However, in both cases the "natutai" woman is opposed to consciousness and cannot

expenence "embodied subjectMty" or "psphicai corporeaiity ." to use the temninologg

proposed by Elizabeth Gmsz She occupies the negative value of a binary pair--she is body.

Her expdence &ts opposite the sodrnind or coIlSCiOusness, or self Her experience of

birtb and the representations of ber experience are dependant on her silence. She is body,

body without voice. Because the " n a d woman" is a coianized ideai. she is dent . Tess

Cosslett points out that Dr- Read's "primitiven woman is a constniction.

While Read's description of his 'primitive woman' stresses exotic decads like the 'sub-tropical sun' and the attitudes of 'the natives' (Read 1933 a), suggesting an incident taking place in some far-distant tribe. in his official biography it transpires that the description is based on an incident in Belgium, during the Fkst World War (Thomas 1957 56)- The woman is a Belgian peasant. upon whom Read projects his stereotype of the primitive woman. (89-90)*

The "primitive/natdn woman is a t3ction that entered the lexicon of bizzh discourses

through the purposeful manipulation of tmth by an obstetrician. If the body of the "namral

woman" is the ideal by which maternai bodies are rneasued, both extemaiiy by dominant

discourse and interndy by the woman herself, then women measure themselves against a

htion. The "natural woman" is futhermore a literary fiction--Dr. Read created an Ahcan

woman and iandçcape purposefùiiy to associate "primitive" with "natural" Indeed, th

association is one of the associations made by Audrey Thomas and her character lsobel

Carpenter. Nevertheless, the image of the "natumi" woman has helped countless women

improve their births in materiai ways. and thus cannot be diçmissed or discounted with

ease.

Birth is represented as a transfomative experience in many discourses, some which

c d themselves feminif;t and some which do not. The persistence of the image of the

"primitive/natural" woman and the polarization between "naturai" birth proponents and

medical birth proponents speaks to the diEculty of locating new paradigms with which to

ta& about and represent materna1 bodies. With on& a body, the materna1 subject cannoc

help but be silent,

The third problem is this: when ?ou begin with the assumption that the seif ana the

body are not separate or opposed. we run out of words. As Grosz açks.

How, then. is a different anaiysis of the body to proceed? .. . What, idedy. would a feminist philosophy of the body avoid, and what must it take into consideration? . . .

First, it must avoid the impasse posed by riichotomous accounts of the person which divide the subject into mutuaiiy exciusive categories of mind and body. ,Uthough within our inteUectual heritage there is no ianguage in whkh to describe such concepts. no terminology that does not succumb to versions of this poianzation. some kind of understanàïng of embodied djectivi ty , ofpsychical c o r p o r d t y , aeeds to be developed. (21-22)

Although her text does not specifically encounter or d g u m the partkmhity of maternal

bodies, this passage suggests that new configurations of the maternal body are possible,

ones whirrh seek tn deconstruct binary oppositions.

Women wrïters have been developing this "Merent analysis," -As M e m e Rich

wrices. "[iln the most fundamentai and bewiidering of contradictions. [the ïnscitution of

motherhood] has alienated women h m our bodies by incarcerating us in them" (13). By

writing the ways in which women encounter the dominant modeis and the ways in which

they succeed, faiL alter, challenge. subven. or submit. nre can begin to confiPuie the radical

maternal. as Daphne Marlatt does:

This secret space between our iimbs we keep so hidden -- is yet so, what? What wordç are chere? if it couid speak! -- -As indeed it di& it spoke the babe, and then the afterbirch. a bieeding mass of meat,

(Ana Historic 126)

Like Tess Cosslett in her Women W r i t i n ~ Childbirth: Modem discourses of motherhood, "1

want to show how the woman's stmy of childbirth makes use of, is overwhelmed by, or

resistsn (4) concepts of the maternai and of bmhing bodies imaged in the dominant

discourses.

1 would iike to explore the resistance to these powerful concepts by focusing on the

work of Canariian author Audrey Thomas. Mrs. Blood (1970) and Blom FiPures (1974) will

serve as my primary texts. as the narratives whose representations of the radical maternal

subject 1 want to unrave1 These tests compose a powerful expression of the punctuated

silence between woman as consciousness and woman as womb. Whac does it mean for a

woman when the spiit between her body and her mùid becornes what she is? What tiappens

when sbe can inhabit neither one nor the other comfortably, when they both betray her?

What does it mean when dis/integration. not transformation, is the result of birth? Isobel

Carpenter. the protagonist of both texts, is chat woman. She is a white woman living in

-Afkica who, in &Lrs. Blood, e-xperiences a miscarriage. and. in BIown Fiaires, returns u,

Xfrica searching for "somelhing she has lost." her fetus.

We k t encounter Isobel through the two speakiug voices of Mrs. B l d Mrs. B l d .

the voice d the body-mernories. experiences. sexuality . of " being a body;" and Ltlrs. Thmg,

the voice of "having" a body acted upon by social forces. an awareness, a consciousness of

body as cultural product. Just as Isobel is not named in Mrs. Blood, the event of her

miseaniage is likewise not named She experiences this pmcess as a mdtipiicizy of failures.

most critically a Eailure of her woman's body u, do its job. Yet the manner in which Isobel

reads this faiiw makes these texts especially valuable. In Isobei's world as in ours.

miscarriage is sacîaliy stigmatized. "We must stick to the patterns. Big giris don't cry.

Madame must not cry in the presence of the natives. 1 put on my lipstick like an oM

hhioned district aimmissioner dressing earehilly for dinner in the jungle" (Mrs. Thing 91).'

Many women express long-term feelings of inadequacy as a result of miscarriage-- they feel

they have "Eailed" somehow. "The tendency to ignore. silence. and misunderstand women

who have miscarried is a form of psychological punishment and indicates that miscarriage

carries a stigman (Reinhartz 85). h b e l articulates man- levels of silence. man y Ievels of

g d t . "That is what 1 fear. Right now, under cover of my 'dekate condition' (which has

already branded me as not quite comme il f a t ) . 1 do not have to compete with chese capable

ladiesn (Mis. Thing 161). Thus this narrative articuiates many margins. borders. barriers.

and refiises ta be limited by them (as 1 wdi argue the eouaüy marginal wholistic narrauves

do). Mrs. Blood and Mrs, Thing have their own stories to tek and their different stories

foreground dichotomies. suggesting Isobei's subjectivity is constituted amund this spiit-

Signifiicantly, because Isobel is not named directiy she is overdetermined by her duplicate

subjectivity--Y am not who 1 am" (Mrs. B U 215). representing the overdetermination of

maternai subjectivity in patrtarchal discourse,

In Blown Fiares , Isobel returns to Akita to search for her miscarried fetus. The

grief enacted since "the deed without a namen (bh. B l d 2 15) remains unspoken, and we

see Isobel "[f]indy getting on the evening plane but m h g the mistake of ticking 'needs

assistance' and t e h g the stewardess she was about to go insane -- non (17'). Blown Fiavres

is the story of her quest to find the missing part of herseff. who is

Isobel is no ionger spoken through the two voices of MIS. B 1 d In the same way that

women talk about the births of their chddren as the binh of a new self. Isobel is reborn

here. But Like the miscarriage. she e-xperiences her new seif io terms of failme. Searching

for wholeness. she e.qeriences a successive &inregration. represented through a

cacophony of voices and texts within the noveL Isobel deeply feels her las. and when we

read that "[wlhat kightened Isobel was that her mind had followed the exmple of her body

and was going to betray hern (32). we see the temble price she has to pay in her attempt to

negotiate having a body and being one. She turns to various b d s of magic and ritual.

includiag other discourses of consciousness, other configurawns of bodies. to facilitate the

articulation of her experieaces. Her solutions, though, rem& problematic.

In this thesis, then, 1 want to explore the extent to which Mrs. Blood and Blown

F h r e s suggest that the ultimate result of experiencing female Me as a duaiity, of

occupying the negatnre side of binary constnxctions. is madness, hysteria. dis/integration.

Thomas challenges representations of madness and hysteria men as she uses them to

represent the &ect that miscarriage has had on Isabel-the way Isobel reads her loss within

ovedapping cultural conte-utç. lsobel will not becorne "whole" u n d she integrates the lost

pan--her fetus-inm her sex

These miçsing parts are, paradorrically. what speak to the importance of embodied

subjectivity. 1 will argue that. in these two novels. madness is one possible outcome when

women cannot integrate body consciousness. It &t be that madness is an extreme

reaction to the e-xperience of miscarriage. but it smkes me as a plausible reaction to what is

socially constituted as maternal subjectivity and e-xperience. It is this ç o c d y constituted

maternai subject that Isobel can not be. And. I suggest. that it is dangernus for her to be.

Thomas. however. is not soiely concerned ~1th representing the silenced and

marginalized experience of miscarriage. By p o m a e g dis!integrabon. by intemgating the

very split of mind and body through textual &sures and hgmentations. Thomas questions

the notions of how selves "shouid" be constructed Her texts offer many key insights into the

western construction of maternai subjects. Isobel c m not be the "perfect mother" desired by

the status quo and created through "the reproducuon of m o t h e ~ g , ' ' ~ then enacted by the

women inhabiting her social world She a h can not be the "natural woman* who is strong

enough to drop her baby in the woods and keep workïng, like the -*can women she

speculates about. Isobel £igues herselffrail and we& a fdu re when measured by any of

the modeis offered m her. She is in the pmeess of mtscamying, and therefore is 'unhealthy."

which furthes marginaLizes her. m a t Isobel is is "nocs." -And. I wouid suggest. what current

discourses of binh construct. and what Thomas is n-orking against. is the way in whch

women are forced to constnict themselves as mts. By exposing the terms of fadure. the

terms of the binary oppositions which conscitute Isooel (and to which madness may be the

oniy response), Thomas creates the narrative space ro explore "what might ben--a radical

and corporeal maternal subjecuvity. It may seem paracioxical that a study of birth

narratives focuses on a character who miscarries. but miscarriage is a h d of birth and part

of a woman's reproductive history normaliy silenced -4s a marginalized experience.

miscarriage foregrounds the social forces acting upon women as they struggie to read their

corporeality.

Chapter 1. one step forward, two steps backtcwd. presents a hismry of the issues

raised in this Lnrroduction, I feel it is important to trace the development of medical

representations af the female body, especially the gravid M y , in order ta show how thiç

discourse shapes the mtemporary material experience of birthing. Of central importance

my discussion in Chapter 1 are concepts of self. and the historicai separation of mind and

body. Ail representations of women have developed within this separation. and my purpose

in this chapter is to show the deieterious effects of the ohious. That is, women must

negotiate a set of ever-changing and c u l t d y determined medicai procedures as a "normalm

part of pregnancy and binh, and do so without questioning. at l e s t &en enough. the

underlying ideologies. These idedoges are badty in need of interrogation. cüid 1 discuss

current challenges to the master narratives of buth. I wiU alço argue that the medical

narrative is just that, a smry, a socially and culturally inscribeci discourse whose presumed

authorïty must be questioned. Women's narratives play a major role in deconsuvcting the

rnediçal mystique of terminotogy and practice by posing the questions. --though Thomas's

noveis predace many of the technologcal advances i discuss in Chapter 1. the underfying

ideology remains the same. Technology increases the dangers posed ta maternal subjectivity

and makes it increasingl difficult for the maternal to be corporeal,

Chapter II, the self w h is not one, offers a close reading of b h . B l d Isobei's

separation into the two voices of A h . Blood and h h - Thing is a consnuction which reacts

to my prjmary concerns in this thesis. the rnind/body dichotorny. I look, then, at Thomas's

use of the "primitive" woman and the ways in which Isobel reads black bodies. especially- her

nurses' bodies. How Thomas portra5-s hobel's body, especlally in tenns of phyçical and

semai memories. relates isubei's supression of her memories to the ways in which they

contribute to her feelings of guilt, The body, her body, is histos.. 1 consider an early lover,

Richard, who represents Isobel's tlme of semial and social fieedom--her time with Richard is

another lost part of herseiE Isobel has much to Say about the mothers who surround her,

and 1 consider how her views reiatbrce or subvert the idedogres of rnocherhd Fùidy, 1

look at the ways in which medicine is represented by looking at Isabel's doctors and at the

other bjrth smries w b c h appear in the narrative.

Chapter III, the body cries. focuses on Blown Fimrres, looking at the changes in

Isobel and her insistence on imminent madness-how these changes are m d e s t e d by

changes in narrative structure. Madness and hysteria play a large part in any discourse of

femaie reproduction, and my discussion as to whether or not Içobel fits or does not fit

traditionai medicai and pspcholanai@c paradigms wiil deai with both madness and

hysteria. 1 wiil discuss Delilah Rosenthal. a young woman seeking an abortion who becomes

Isobel's travelling cornpanion. Delilah is a doubling m e for Isabel and also a site of

contradiction. embodying the conuadictions Isobel needs to resolve. Blown Fimres abounds

with teferences .m magic. rituai and witches. and 1 look at these images with reference M

both standard and alternative interpetations. 1 discuss Isobel's fetishization of her

miscarried fetus for her reading of this 10s has many implications. In sum. 1 discuss the

implication of Isobel's quest in light of the radical materna1 subject. 1s Isobers quest

successful. or does her shattered self name an irreparable Çagmentation?

Notes

Davis-Floyd uses italics thmughout her article to highlight "correspondences with or divergences h m the technocratic model as they emerge in these women's words" (1994, 1 128).

Consider the foLiowing exmeme example. In posunortem ventdation (P\W). a pregnant woman who has been declared brain dead is kept alive artificially in order to enable the fetus to mature to an age that offers a chance of survival fn 1988 Paul Gerber. h m Queensland University, Australia. speaking about surrogacy, suggested that "[tJhe idea to use the brain dead and neomons--newly dead people--was not ghouliçh and was bettes than commercial surrogacy because 'at l e s t the dead would be doing some good-' ... 'It's a wonderful solution for the problems posed by surrogacy, and a magnificent use of a corpse'" (cited in Raymond 49).

1 have recently came to recogmse that 1 was able to configure the power relationships in my birthing because of a family history of resistance to rihe dominant Medical modeL There are Eamily stories-my sister's home births and m y mother's stones of resistance to medicai interference in the late 195û's.

For example. see .hms 3; Brandt 8: Cosslett 155. and Hunsburger 1.

There have also been obstetricians who have spoken out against standard obstetrical practices as a result of their personal e,upe.riences. See. for e-uample, Robert S. Mendelsohn's Codessions of a Medical Heretiç (Pickering, Ont: Beaverbooks, 1978). and Male Practice; How Doetors Mani~ulate Women (Pickering, Ont: Beaverbooks, 198 1).

"ee. for example. Marge Piercy's Women on the Edpe of Tima (1976). Doris Lessing's A Proner M W (1954). and Elizabeth Baines' The Birth Machine (1983).

' Take, for example. the white middle-class woman with education who, foilowing the naturd birth model, seeks the squatting ancestress within herself. -.Uthough not necessaniy black. she is often represented that way because of oui. culturai association of "primitivew with "color." How. then. do matenai experiences ciiffer for the modem black woman. who may be expected to be this ancestress in her birthing? -Uthough not weii documented. E d y Marun points out some instances of racist treatment in the repiies of her respondents. and in an uncredited video ciïp s h o w at the one &y session "Humanïzing Childbirth: Fdy-Cen t r ed Maternity Care." the treatment of white and bhck women was visibly different, and suggesced the idea chat black women were somehow easier birthers. Nurses were far less toleicant of black clients who showed great distress.

* See AN. Thomas, Dr. C o u r m u s . The Stohr of Dr Grantlv Dick Read (Zandon: Heinemann), 1957.

9 1 will use the names of the two narrators in Mn. Blood, Mrs. Thing and Mrs. Blood. to distinguish becween Isobei's two voices.

'O This concept was dweloped by Nancy Chodorow in her imponant work The Reoroduetion gf Mothering: Psychoanal~sis and the Sociolow of Gender (1978).

Chapter 1 one step forward, two steps backward:

the radical materna1 subject and writing the gravid body

New mothers were harangueci by weU-inten tioned but insistent nurses and counsellars into attending courses on everything: "bathing baby," "buckling up baby," "mother and baby fitness," "mother and baby nutrition." There were dady lessons on breast-feeding. New mothers were rounded up like convicts by boisterous and coercivenurses, who used a lot of "How L e wes?" and "We dont want to miss thats." They were pleasant, patronizing and persuasive, and did not take weli to mothers who missed their courses. "Oh, we think we know al1 that, clo we? Last year we hatl a woman like that here, and the first thing that happened when she took her baby home was a terrible accident while she was bathing him. and he was paralYzed for Lile." Joan Baxter, Gravevard For ~ r e a m e k : One Woman's 0&9se; in Afria

(193)

Isobel Carpenter is a remarkable character. I f m t encountered her years ago in an

undergraduate Canaclinn Literature course. and die Icfi an indelible impreseion. I

remember getting riled in class tryïng to explain how incredibly ditrerent this character

was. 1 had not read a novel berore where an cntue text was devoted to a woman's

perspective of her own reproductive experiences. Mrs. Blooci spoke to the unspoken, as 1

then saw it, mess and pain of being female. She articulated what many in the clam didn't

want to know about; she made them uncornfortable. Instead, I was fAed with excitement

and possibility. Isbobei's story propelied me ont0 new and surprising roads, and I want to

thank her hem. But what can a character who has a miscarriage then goes Iooking for her

fetus olTer to the female reader? She has a sbry. SMplXed to this degree, Isobel may sound

like a madwoman, and, indeed, she can be seen that way. But who is doing the looking?

hliscarriage is not a common dinner table subject, nor is the effect of such a loss. The

marining of ImbeI'u ~ R R ik~l t1wp in the diucourecs ~urrountling pregnancy and birth.

i would U e , then, to begin with the iclea of "self." Lsobel represents a conception of

seif that is radically M e r e n t from the "Liberalist individualist tradition" (Raymond 189) of

the unified, autonomous, and rational (read male) self. The novel problematizes the

rekionship of Isobel to herself by deconstructing the unified speaking subject. In Mrg,

BlocKi. we hem Isobel in two voices: Mrs. D l d , the voice of b d y , and Mrs. Thing, the voice

of social awareness. Isobel is not a unified self, and I would suggest it is this characteristic

which rnakes her p a r t i d d y suitabie for my inquiry: her mindtbody split is representative

of the material conditions of many women.

The radicai matemal subject can be glimpsed through a look at the conditions which

create such a split of self in the b t place. And it is women writing their birth narratives

w ho illuminate this splic through e-xposing the relationshps bectveen their individual story

and dominant narratives. The dominant narratives of birth have a cornplex production

history in themsdves, and. although it is beyond the scope of this thesis to present this

history, 1 will attempt to b ~ g out issues crucial to the radical matemal subject.

Birthing is a cd& production. How we birth. where we birth. how we mother--ail

these are inscrrbed w i h discourses of which the medico/technological mode1 of binh is the

primary one. This discourse has a vested interest in reproducing a dichotomous

representation of the maternal body. It inscribes a specific set of power relations on the

female subject. In this modeL the female body is a possession: it is under someone's controll

Al bïrth narratives--womenls narratives, oral interviews. the natural birth

movement, the whoiistic model. old wlves' tales--react to the medicdtechnological model,

and each one concerns itseif with the matemal body. This body (as with aU bodies) is

informed and mediated by culture; "[tjhe body is not opposed ta culture, a resistant

throwback to a natural past; it is itseif a cultural, the cultural productn (Grosz 23). In our

culture, the maternal body has become. k t and foremost, a medicai body. However, the

medical body is an abstracted body, a textual body. Medical students are taught to see the

anatomical allas not as a repreçentalion of a body, but the reverse--the teut determines the

field of view of the medicd gaze. Thus 'medime proceeds hom a textual basis as much as

b m an empirical one" (Ritchie 209). The gravid female body represents, then. a criticai

disjunction, a paradox, a literality of fkpres. "frlhe very structure of childbearing, in which

something becomes r e d that did not e.Gt before--or that e-xisted ody as a word, a theory, or

a 'conceptionr-ois a structure of literalization. by which the reiatively figurative becomes the

relatively literd" (Homans 26). The maternal body is a suong visual reminder of the

materiality of the absent sigaifier in which the symboiic order is anchored--the mother--and

therefore threatening. -As Margaret Homans so aptlg puts it: "[tlhe symblic order is

founded, not merely on the regrettable loss of the mother. but rather on her active and overt

rnurdef (1 1) .' This figure of the murdered morher is aiso üeralized throughout history by

a material reality-the records of women dying in chiidbirth,

grove, ln. Excavation KI ceceive corpse, m o u d or monument wer it (secret as the --) , OE graef, (grafan GRALT~)

gmve? v-t @.p. -n. --à, as stared). came, snrlpture. engrave; (@.) fk indelible (an, in mind etc.; --n,--dl. [corn--Teut; OE, grafan cf Du- grmen, C. gmben, deg. cogn- W. groovel grmes, a& n 1. important. weighty, neediog serious thought. (of Eaults. ~ u l t i e s , responsibilities, symptozns) formidable. threatening, serious. W e d , s o h , slow-moving, not gap; sombre. p h , not showy, hence -ly, (-4--) , adv. 3. n- - accent Ff,L gravis. heavy, seri0us.j graue4, v.t ciean (ship's bottom) by burning off accrehns and tarring while agmund or in graving-dock, perh. f OF g m e = grève. shore gravid, a (iiterary). Pregnant. f LgrauiduP (GRAw~) Thou shalt not make to thyseff any graven image ... "You are very a" he said gravely. "You are gravely iilw -4nd the g a v e will decay ?ou And turn you to dust Not one man in f%y Xpoor girl c m trust. grievel. v. t & i Give deep sormw to: feel grief (at. for. about. over). [LF greuer f L gravare (gravis, heavy)] @h. B l o d 130)

1 have cited this whole passage fkom Mm. Blood because it iüustrates the ways in which

language can slip and slide to reveal the s d a t i o n s clinging to the maternal body. It

rdects the womb/tomb association so prevalent in literature and medical discourse.

Maternal mortaliq provides medicine with a rationale to invade the maternai body.

Language is the purveyor of the cultural investment in the maternal body. Robbie

Davis-Floyd:

How to make birth, a powerfully fernale phenomenon. reinforce, instead of undermine. the partiarchal system upon which -4.merica.n society is still based? How to turn the naturai and individual binh p m e s s into a culturai rite of passage which s u c c e s ~ y inculcates the dominant core system into the initiates? (1990. 145)

Obstetrical practices are cuitual practices. motivated by the need to control reproduction.

The metaphors of the medical narrative reveal much: unveîling mgsteries, illuminacing rhe

darkness. making visible the womb. knowing the fetus. These metaphors are present in

obstemcal discourses and fîourish in such new medicd specialties as fetal ~ u r g e r y . ~ They

continue to produce the gravid body as an object to be known. and conceal the manner in

which this linowledge is produceci. Obstetrical practices and howiedge rely on a

simuitaneous suppression of maternai subjectivity and restriction of the "maternal" to the

"body." They also rely on a construction of the gravid body as a "natural" object, but one

that, like all natural systems, can be made "ideal" through rntervention and technologxcd

apparati This is the omnipresent concept behmd medicine's maternai body: it needs to be

Eixed To do that. women need to be regulated, controUed. known.

Medicine is now dependent on technology, and technalogy is. amrding to Peter C.

Reynolds:

emergent h m a mythoIogicai system that depends on the ritual transformation of nature to conform to cdturaUp constructeci images. In Reynolds' anaiysis. "technological progress" is a folk Eerm for the ritual process of repiacing "natural" bodies. conceptualized as primitive. terrestrial, "fernale," and poiluting, with man-made bodies, concephiaiized and advanced, p d e d . ceiestial and male. (cited in Davis-Floyd 1994. 1125)

Thus, maternity and birth. although figured as " n a d w processes. must be destruyed and

rebuilt "as cultural process-as an integral result of technocratic society's supervaiuation of

science and technology over nature" (Davis-Floyd 1126).

At thiç point, 1 would like to e-xpiore this word "naturai." a dangernus and s i i p p e l

te=, omnipresent in all discourses of maternity and birth- It is a tenu that changes its

meaning frequently over time and one deeply implicated in the suppression of the femaie

body. What is "nacuraIn to childbirth is continudy redefïned in obsteuics. 1 beiieve that if

there ever was a "naturai chiidbirth." it no longer exists. e-xpressed by the paradox that in

order to have a "natural" birth in our cuiture. you musc smdy and train for it.j The "nature"

appealed to by the discursive practices s m u n d i n g birth is a profoundiy constructed

cultural pduc t . It îs also a masculiae product, and as such needs ta be regarded with deep

suspicion when used to jus* medicai descriptions and practices as appiied to women.

However, no term seems ready to replace it. -As Grosz sug, ~ests:

It is not adequate to simply dismiss the category of nature outnght. to completely retranscnbe it without residue into the cultural: this in itseif is the moniçt, or logocentric, gesture par excellence. Lnstead, the interimplication of the natural and the social or cultural needs M e r investigation--the hole in nature that allows cultural seepage or production must provide something hice a n a d condition for cultural production: but in turn the cultural too must be seen in its limitarioas. as a kind of insufFiciency that requires natural supplementation. Culture itself can only have meanhg and value in terms of its own other(s): when its others are obliterated-as tends to occur within the problematic of social constnrctionism--culture in effect takes on ail the immutable. fîsed characteristics attributed to the naturai order. (2 1)

This passage suggeçts that medical maternai bodies (their "nature")have "taken on

&utable, h e d characteristics." Medical representations of the materna1 body have.

hstoricaily , h e d these characteristics by k t separating materna1 subjeccivity from che

materna1 body and then devatuing the mother's subjective experiences of her body.

Under the guise of medicai objectivity, mediclne has gained access co the matemal

body. Medical representations of women and medical practices have evolved independently

of women's experiences, under the guise and authority of objectMty. Medicine has coionized

the site of birth, but in order tn gain access to women's bodies, doctors had to seU the

"medical-pdeSSiOna1 daim to know what is going on inside the uterus better than the

mother h e r s a (Oakley 27). What is not cornmon knowledge.. howwer. is that the social

colonization of macerniry \vas a response to cultural pressure--war.5 D u ~ g the y e m before

W W it was discovered that many aduit males were rnedically unfit to kht . The living

conditio11~ of working and lower class mothers came under scrutiny as the site of production

of this raw war materiaL Likewise. women's bodies became a large pool of readily available

study objects. This social colonization did not take piace overnight. but it followed a steady

yrocess, t a h g less than Hty years to cornpleteiy alter the cultural codes of reproduction.

The ascendency of medicine as the dominant modei and practice of western

reproduction is based on the rhetoric of safety and painlessness. Women are a fh id of

childbirth. There is no doubt that women once died in large numbers as a direct resdt of

matemity. Hospitals were. within h i s t o d and literary memory, sites of the highest

matemal and infant monality.' This is no longer the case. and Madeleine Riley has noted

the drop in matemal and infant mortality is marked by diminishùig deaths in the English

novel, and a concommir;ant shift in the representation of the social status of the doctor and

midwife (56). The culturai impression is that maternal and natal molzality statistics have

been reduced to an "acceptable" range. This "acceptablen range, though. is itseif a cultural

construct. Obstetrical medicine has never fulfilled its mandate to erimlnace maternal and

fetal death. Despite technology. moirality statistics remain h@ in some developed nations.

but "common wisdomn insists hospimi birrh is safe because of sophisticated technol~gy.~

Research into birthing alternatives supports the contention midwife-assisted hospital or

home births boast lower maternal and infant mortaiity rates. The medical conml of

pregnant women continues u, be based in fear. but a fear displaced h m the institution and

inculcated in women through representations of the fernaleimatemal body as "imperfect,"

"pathological." and even "hostile" to the developing fetus.

Fear does permeate women's narratives ofbirthing to such an extent that it needs to

be addressed as a m a t e d condition. 1 beiieve the relationshp between women's

experiences of fear and the medical promise of safety is àirectioaal. Women fear monality

and pain, but &ey also fear failure and not being able ~o "measue up." -b always. the

question is measure up to what? hlany women fear their maternal bodies because they are

not "under conmLW They aiso fear control shrough the technological barrage attendant in

hospicai binhs. Many , m. fear the seduction of technolog)., the promise of perfect p d e s s

e-xperience, of failing to be "primitive" enough.

Part of this omnipresent fear. 1 beheve. is due to the la& of 'mother st~ries."~ The

maternai subject has not been the producer of knowledge about the maternai subject. "mhe

mother has been so largeiy absent in Western narrative, not becawe she is unnarratable,

but becuse her subjectivity has been violently and repeatedly suppressed" (Brandt 7). Her

knowledge about her body was deemed "non-factual." c d e d women's gossip or old-wives'

tales. And since every pregnant woman is stiU deiuged with the "horror" versions of these

taies (as we s h d discuss in more detail shortly), the legacy of fear is perpetuated

Medical authority has always "spoken for" women. rather than addressed them as

subjects Furthemore. "[wlornen and patients are not the social ,goups most iikely to leave

a record of their views and e-xpenences" (OaMey @.'O yet women as mothers do speak now.

and often they do ço by learning the medical ianguage of reproduction. Medical discourse

conditions reproductive e-xperiences by regulacing both content and description. as dues the

language of a girl's mother. Generdy speaking, girls corne e a d ~ to view their reproductive

biology with suspicion, because their menses mark and define them as other and c u l t d y

second class. The rise of anore.xia among young women, "arguably the m a t stark and

striking sexualization of biologmd instincts." is a "form of protest at the social meaning of

the female body" (Grosz 40). Consider as weil. how few women's heatth products are

marketed on TV, and the ones that are are overwheimingly sanitary products, vaginal

douches. medical aids. These advertisements reinforce a cultural message: the female body

is "dirty" and "unsanicary." Metaphors of female uncieaniiness circulate fieely through a

bewildering array of narratives.

The language encountered in medical school by both femaie and maie students,

particuiary in "ob/gynn (obstetics and gynaecology). is another e-xample. Most certainly, the

female student wili have experienced discrimination in trying to enter the field in the k t

place." embody a m e r e n t reiationship to medicd metaphors. She wiil see herselfin the

object of study, and may h d the "demeaning tone of [ob/gynJ tem ... 'offenme'" (Zambrana

1 l), as in the case of menstruation. Menstruation is represented as a "de,ai.adation of tissue."

The female student could encounter this fipure in a personal way. in terms of her

e-xperience. like pain or lack of it. Degradation. to her. may more aptly apply m her energy

levels, or emotionai capacities. not CO her tissues. -4 maie student would have no personal

frame of reference with which to see an-ytbg but diagrams and tissues. What might be a

" h b o ~ g uterusn to a male student could be. CO the female student. a potentiai state of

being. The woman who refuses interventions, cailed a "NAT (Not -4 Tmper)" by Dr. ,Y,

author of the medical Bildungsmman lntern (1968, and a term 3 s curent in ofnce slang

(Ritchie 214), might be calied strong and heroic by a woman intern. However. women

meciid students have to undergo an intense çocializatition process which may "exert a more

resulting in a f d e practitioner diçtancing herself h m identification with fernale patients.

-4ccording to the b e r i c a n Medical Association (1993), mer haif the obstetncians under the

age of thirty are women (iriimbrana L 1). Much research wiii be needed m discover whether

these women wiil actnrely engage in introducing positive representations of the female body

hm medical language, and thus into practice.

With the advent of the male-midwife in the late 18th cent-, pregnant women's

bodies came under male scrutiny for the first t h e . and to effect this change. traditionai

representations of the fernale bod~ were use& Female M t y was an argument used botii to

institutionalize pregnancy care and ro spternaticaily undermine the practice of midwifery.

Pregnancy and binh had to be t'irst conceived as a "mechcal phenornenon" before a

"systematic body of knowledge or techniques applicable to pregnancy ... could pruvide a

rationale for medical supervisionn (Oakley f. 1). This required the concept of an "ideal

pregnancy," developed by doctors and marketed to women. Women were weU conditioned to

taking advice on etiquette, education and housekeeping, and adapted to medical advice

which held the promise of safe b i d . :' Mien medicine became involved in reproduction.

"the first and most hdamenta i nonon \vas that pregnancy itseff was not a diseasen (Oakley

14). However, if pregnancy was considered "nomaLw there %vas iittie justification for

medical interference:

The authors of [early pregnancy advice manuais1 did not simply view the pregnancy as a normal physioIogïcal bct ion . To do that would have been to defeat their purpose, which was m provide information. What they did was a good deal more complex essenriay , they constmted a schema of pregnancy whch systematized w h t u:as tuken to be th? eueryday erperience of pregnant women. Thus systematized. ~hrs ek~erience came ta be represented as technical-medical know ledge. (Oakley 14: my italics)

In the passage above. Oakley e-xposes the "constructionw of obçtetrical knowledge. Medicine.

which uncil the late 19th century could only rely on the knowledge of the woman herself.

began to construct "everyday e.xpenencen t'or her. Gone are the days when a doctor could

lament "'[tlhe most certain mode of knoming whether a woman be in a state of gestation or

not' wrote professor James Blundel of Guy's Hospital in 1834. pessimistically, but with some

degree ofaccuracy, 'is by waiting cd the cerm of nine months be complete'" (0ab;ley 1';). The

next step was to represent tbis iriformation as somethrng else-medical knowiedge. This

knowledge was then systematicdy represented as defirutive. and then applied c u l t d y as

women's behavior came to be seen as a "socialn rather than a "personal" matter. Women's

control mer the Location and practices of birth. and wer their bodies. was increasingly

replaced by social systems and cultural expectations,

Ofparticular importance to the current power relationships in birthbg was the

creation of a new specialty, obstetrics. which resuited firom medicine's interest in pregnancy.

And obsteaics could not suMve as a specdty wirhout prestige.'3 especially if pregnancy

and birtb were "normal" and "naturai" First a concept of pregnancy as pathological. "a

medical concept akïn m iuness" (Oakiey LZ), had to be developed It did not reach full

articulation until the 1950s. and did not becorne institutionaiized u n d the mass transition

kom home to hospitai births in the 1960s. This mass transition was realized through

massive social camp- mplemented through heatth workers. women's health groups and

medicine. '' As the uncoverings of medical science continued. the fernale body was figued as

being progressiveiy transparent, and the means of this rendering were increasingly

technologxal Thus. the information p d u c e d was articulated in laquage inaccessible to

women. -4s the uterus and fetus became increasïngly imaged, they came ta be known

separately fiom the woman. Birzh could then be "managed" by k t reducing a woman to

her biology (read body), and then managing its components. As one early speciaiist observed

in 1901, "[a] new scienufic understanding would combine with new medical technologies CO

endow the physician with virtually complete power to extract every fetus h m the womb

dive and healthyn (cited in Oakley 48). This vision of extraction has corne to pass oust take

a iook at cesarian statistics), but noce who is active--the physician, not the rnother. The

doctor becornes the ail-powerful @ver of life who "extracts" (a metaphor of violence) the fetus

kom a "wornb." not the woman.

Thus pregnancy has been "ideologically transformed k m a social, k t into a

biological, and. aecondy, into a medicd phenornenon" (Oakley 5). Oakley documents a

variety of sources CO show the iarge-=ale seduction of women over to medicd services.

including cash incentives. Concurrentiy, the Iess e-qensive midwifery services were

systematicdy undermined What was once " d e n became "unsat'e." This was a direct

reversal of a scant hundred years earlier. However, there is Little information h m women

themselves as to why there was increasing "obedience" to a new set of medical ddh t ions

and regulations. "Docmrs might not know very much. but women must consult themn

(Oakley 259, and women obeyed to the point where "medical hegemony over the lives of

patients is substantlal" (Oakley 256)--our current condition.

This hegemony is now enf'orced through technology. The technologies of birth--

uitrasound, amniocentesis, fetal monitors, management-are technologies designed to

"impmven the fiinction of the female body, and to iimit the deleterious effects of gestation

and birth on the fetus. The fetus, as it is now represented, is a new entity. And it is

dangerou to confuse it with the unborn cbild of a h u n h d years ago. In today's society, the

fetus is an independent life with-rights and privileges over. or at ieast equal to. the

mother's. Materna1 narratives con&ure the tétus m many different \va>-S. but there is a

growing concern that this new fetal subject. a creation of t echnol~gy .~~ is a highly

pmblematic individual For example. consider the eliîion preçent in certain le& documents

where the mother carrying the child is termed a "maternal e n ~ o n m e n t . " ' ~ We must.

therefore, also consider the new representaaons of the fems in light of the aforestated

medicdtechnoiogical modeL In Blown Fisres . the fetus cornes to be the transcendental

srgnifier of the tes , replacing the phaiius. It k the ail-important s@er in Isobel's

symbolic order. -4s such. it speaks to the ways in which maternal subjecbvity may read

differentiy the symbols generated by the dommant discourse.

While T a s Cosslett suggests "we are not suddenij- going to find 'authentic' voices as

the 'false' stories of the doctors are lifted off" (3). both birthing women and wornen writers

have developed liaguistic straregies to expose and undermine medical control of knowledge

and subvert the medical metaphors that operate at the scene of birth. One current, and

effective, stracegy has b e n the development d a binh pian. Many women now nirite out a

list of what they do and do not want as far as interventions. and the list is considerable-

enemas, pitocin, morphine, demerol. epidutal anaesthetic. fetd monitoring, IV hook-up,

episiotomy, etc.--and often spec* who is don-ed in the binhing room. This action.

promoted by the natural birth model. works on the principle of consumer rights. Women, as

consumers. have more power to change obstemcal practice chan they do as binhiag women.

Unfortunately, this rhetoric contilbutes CO the commodifica~on of bodies and birthing, but it

has led to significant improvements in typical hospital birdis. I wodd note. though. that

these are "plans" only, and many women have discovered the power of their written words

evaporates on contact rvith medical authonty. -

One of Hunsburger's respondents. Diane. had a few things to Say about t h issue

that are pertinent to my arguments.

The only thing 1 had to compromise on was that they had to put an intravenous 0 in. That doctor wants di ~ I S mothers to have an IV. Tbat was the compromise I made in order to be able to use the binhing room. If I wouldn't have agreed to it. he would not have delivered. and another doctor wouid have been called. (36)

Hardly anyone here prepares a birth pian. But when the doctor went over it, he said, 'Oh. that's h e . Itrs not tao rigici' The way it was worded wasn't. This is what 1 want. period They weren't orders, they were wishes. (58)

Diane's comments demonsuate the extent to whir?h preparation for birth can be a

preparation for compromise, She is not able to birth in the m m she desires without

accepting an mtervention. and "two of [the doctors attendingj won't use the birthing m m n

(Diane 56). The language cf he~bi r th plan must be carefully constsuctd not to offend or

threaten the doctor. Hunsburger comments:

Diane also knew the importance of compromise. She was w d h g to put up with an IV in order to have a physician who was willing to attend in the birthing m m . She said. 'You can't be pushy or stubborn or obnoxious. You need to be £ieeuible.' (59)

My e-xperience. gained through assismg in a few home and hospital births and calking CO

many mothers about their birth esperiences, suggests that women who are "pushy, stubborn

and obnoxiousn in determining the material conditions of their blrths do represent a threat

to obstetticians, and are viewed bg them with distntst and fear.

What is elided under the successhl action for change on the part of educated

mothers is that relatively few mothers are able to become well versed in medical

tenninology. Many women are controlled through their inability CO understand medical

discourse. It has become a race and class matter with access CO education determinhg

wornea's access to "authoritative" intbnnation about. and relevant to, their bodies.

Furthemore, a quick glance at the intonnation oEered through public health services shows

Little that strays h m "standard procedure-" Athough a good ded of basic medical and

biological information is available. many pamphlets s d e r h m pour wricing and

organization that are pitched far tao hi& above the uneducated reader.

Thus smggles over legislanon. economic dependency, family organization and reproductive rights are clearly related to demands for sema1 autonom y and the control of sexual violence: the ciaim that women are denied knowledge of their own sexuality and that they iack the language in which to express it ... is also tied to che arguments ... ciaun[kigj that knowIedge and language are also areas of patnarchal control and domination. (Bryson 22 1)

The power struggles that rage over reproduction. the issue of who controls this information.

are heavily weighted in favor of medicine. Women. as a social group, do not control the

production of knowledge about their bodies. so bat. in practice. howing the wordç--

presentation. station. abruption. eclampsia. failure to progres. etc.--cari ofien make no

Access to the ianguage of production--"hospitalese" might be a good tenn--does not

confer control mer the cultural pracnces srgnified by that ianguage. There is a sobering

pattern emerging in modem women's birth accounts like the stories told to Davis-FIoyd and

Hunsburger- What stands out in women's aecounts is the way technologicai language

mystifies its concrete practices on femaie bodies. This figures in women's narratives and in

oral intenriews as "tbings" that happen ta their bodies during birth bat their consciousness

must Iater deai with, account for, make meaning oE This phrase "make meaning" is

common. occurring frequently in the words of women who have had diEcult births or who

feel they had no control over their birthings. -4s culture does not accept the idea of embodied

subjectivity, women's accounts seem to reinforce the very sepmation of mind and body upon

which technologicai ianguage depends. It may be their only way to rationalize events that

"happened to them." Women's narratives. however. can Ma,ginatively teconfigure the events

in ways that e-upose the cost of making meaning.

1 have spent some tirne on issues of language, power. control and practice of the

dominant discourse af birth, and the elision of the body upon which it is based, and I wdl

t um now to look at the body itselE The medicd represenmtion of the femaie body, through

medical terms and descriptions, permeates aU other modeis of bodies and birth. Ln medical

narratives, the female body k t and foremost figures as an aberrant male body. The male

body, imaged repeatedly as "machine." has parts that can be fixed, remwed. or repiaced, as

necessmy. O u female bodies. however. are inefficient machines; furthermore, they have

faulty wiring. The g h h in our systems iç our hormones. if the female body is represented

as joined to the mind at al, it is through hormonal interaction. and tb interaction is rife

with its own "pathologies." The discovery of the female hormonal system established a

tghter medical hold on the materna1 body, and on aU stages of the female reproductive

cycle. The information gleaned was then used to discredit M y e-upressions of hormones.

iike P M . by positioning them in a iuerarchical relationsiup with the brain. ("It's a i l in your

head. dearie.")' The body is again eiided or e.xpkined away even on the hormonal level.

the mind remains in controL

Emiiy Martin's groundbreakmg study, The Woman in the Bodv (198?), analyzed

medical discourses. such as textbooks and media releases, comparing their metaphors with

chose found in personai interviews with rvornen, Martin found "most [medical] descriptions

of specific processes give preeminent controi to the brain" (40). More e.xpiicitly, medical

metaphors "have an obvious relation to the dominant form of organization in our society"

(41). The M y needs a foreman to be a good worker, well-contmiled by the brain. Martin

suggests that the basic descriptions of fernale reproductive functions. e-g., menstruation. are

te1eoLogicaL That is, what is valued is the possibility of pregnancy, not the mensmial cycle

in and of itself This cyde is Ggured as a Wure of pregnancy. She cites a current medical

text: "[wlhen fertilization fMs to mur, the endometrium is shed, and a new cycle stans.

That is why it used to be taught that 'menstruation is the uteruç crying for the lack of a

baby'" (4s3.19 Many of her respondents speak in simrlar terms of "lack of pregnancu."

Martin argues that "seeing menstruation as a failed pduct ion contributes to our

negative view dit" (45). She argues b a t most modern doctors and scientists would not

regard menstruation as pathological (I would dispute this daim), but tesbooks are SM

produced which Mage the normal female biology negatively. From one of these textboolis.

Human P h v s i o l a she pulls out the t'oilowing words:

In rapid succeçsion the reader is confronted with "degenerate." decline." "withdrawn," "spasms." "lack," "degenerate." "weakenecLU "leak." "deteriorate." "discharge." and &r all that. "repair." (47)"

With such metaphors permeating medical t~~tbooks. it is not a far step to imagine the

terminology presented to women by their doctors.

hdeed, Martin found that the more women had been e-uposed to sciencïfic

metaphors, educated women for the most part. the more they £igured their own menses

negativeiy, and then aansmitted that image CO their daughters." Her hdings are

supported by eurrent critical and popular literatures." as weU as by women's narratives.

For e,xample, Daphne Marlatt's Ana Kistoric (1988), Audrey Thomas's Songs, and Doris

Lessing's X (1954) contain passages in which the daughter confronts the

negative images of female reproduction transmitted by her mother. Young lsobel Carpenter

tek us:

The sight of my mother's body fUed me with shame and deep disgust. .. . Blood spots on the back of her nightgown made me want CO vomit. and she herselfcalled menstruation by derogatoq names: "the curse." "faiIing off the roof," "getting your grandrnother." For three rnonths after 1 began to menstniate 1 slept naked on the floor of my bedroom so as not to spot the sheets and let her know and spent my d k money stockpihg Kotex from the machines a t school. taking the used ones back with me in my lunch kit to be disposed of in the @ris1 lavatory at recess. (Son- 64).

In this passage we see how deeply Esobel feels the negative aspects of her mother's sexuali-,

and see her mother's increasingly social. and negative. metonymic associations. The passage

goes on to List the "nicknames" her famiiy used to refer to "parts of the body and bodiiy

functions ... [il t was a i l very coy and somehow dirty" (Son= ô4).

An altemative representation does exist: women's menstrual cycles seen as a source

of power, a monthly emphasis on living as embodied subjectMty, an alternative wap of

knowing and of knowledge production. and put simply, a positive process. Many women's

narratives, howwer, iaclude references to their shame about menstruation and their

disgust at the biological process whch has been transmitted to daughters by mothers. and

to women by culture. In Au&ey Thomas's novels. and other novels such as Ana f i ton%

part of the fernale character's growth process. as I wïil show, depends upon rewriting these

stories. of imaginatively tecon&prmg experience.

No matter what mode1 the individual chooses--medicai. "natural," wholistic--access

to miormation determines the quality of the experience. rvhîch 1 would c d its corporeal

manifestation. In the words of one unidentified mother "Education and preparation for

birth is tremendously important. It is important not ody m know what to eirpect and how to

cope. but is essential to know what options and choices are avahblen (Hunsburger 3'7). 1

would argue that the rhetoric of "avarlablilityn and "choicen elides, again, the body. What is

constructecl as choice. how these choices are shaped and represented, and which choices are

ac tudy offered to the birthing woman--ail these are issues that maintain the dusion that

women can control such choices.

Cusslett states:

1T)he consciousness of a birthing woman. whether constituted in an autobiographiical account. or as a 'character' in a fiction, involves a process of negotiatwn with prevniiing idedogies. ... whose aim is, 1 would argue. power: in terms of writing, the power to take over the story, in terms of childbirth. the power to control the e-xperience; or. in both cases, the power to protest. or ceiebrate, lack of controL (3)

Again. the body is elided in Cosslett's description. although 1 concur with her suggestion

thac power dynamics are involved in bot. birthing and writing. However. Cosslett's

assessrnent that it is through "consciousnessn that women have access to privileged power in

their birth experience is problernatic. Power is framed, here. in relation to a kind of convoi

whose terms are not s p d e d . 1 wouid argue that the "power to protest lack of control" is

speaking to an extemai and imposed controi of the binhing woman's body or mind by drugs

or technologies. whiie "power to celebrate lack of contml" speaks to her ability to neqotiate a

different space, close to the corporeaL

Medical metaphors have a ma te rd reality for women. a corporeal manifestation. To

dustrate the complexity of this reality consider the following e-xample. "Fetal monitor"

might suggest çomething similnr ta a "hail monitor:" siightly orninous. that is. but

nonetheless incapable of doing any red h m . What this term eiides is the body to which

this device is attacheci. While hmked up to a fetal monitor, an external monitor, the

laboring woman must m a i n s a . which is often physically very uncornfortable and can

also slow down a labor by weakening her contractions. Nor does the monitor make visible its

function in replanng the laboring woman's owa Lnowledge of the state of her labor. The

monitor has the authority in the situation and it literaliy spe& for her in a series of blibs.

bleeps. and tracings on paper.' Women's narratives are fidl of metaphors of disembodllnent.

metaphors which suggest wbat the above scenario graphically represents. Spbolicdy, the

laboring woman is robbed of motion. trapped: the monitor reads only her body and its

contents. yet presumes to speak authoritativel- about these contents. so she is Likewise

robbed of subjective consciousness. She is again a two-headed woman. her own voice

silenced whiie the machine speaks for her. Using the cechnique of examining conceptual

metaphors, Emily Martin has found that the "central image women use is the foUowing:

Your self is separate from your body" (77). This irnagery is ornnipresent in ~Martin's

i n t e ~ e w s with women of diverse race and class, and speaks to "[tjhe s e p a r a ~ n of self h m

body that women descnbe when they talk about menstxuation, menopause and birthn (79).

in other words, women see themselves as kagmented selves to which bioiogicai processes

"happen."

The terms of the battie over the maternai body have now changed, due, for the most

part. to rigorous feminist scholarship and increasingiy vocal demands for change by birthing

women. Much of this change in matenal practices has been insugated through the n a t d

childbinh mode1 However. even in the natural model this dicbotomy remains--the woman's

self is separate f k m her body. in chis model the matemal body must s d be controiled in

cenain ways. and must become the "primitive maternai body." Cosslett. for example.

identifies these two discourses. the medical and the na& chiidbirth sturies. as dominant

and reiated in that both contain problematic elements "in many ways ... dependent on

ptescriptive myths of primitive. essentiai motherhood" (2). The other stories. however, she

terms "old wives' tales," that is. the "stories that women tell each other" ('7). I find t h

division reductive. for it doesn't seem to d o w for modek such as chose emerging h m

various mythologxcai and rituai knowledges of women's corporeality, or the seWbody unity

of the wholistic modeL 1 prefer to recover the old wives' tale in the sense of "wise women's

tale." and not restrict the term m "artxculat[ingf the unacceptable side of childbirth in our

culturen (7).

The above fiamework does noc account for psychcal corporeality, set 1 contend that

this kind of information can be made avadable by looking at ritual and mythical

knowledges, new models of birth. and birth narratives. There are alternate modeh which

CO-e representaciow of women's bodies. of maternai bodies in new and &en disturùing

ways. 1 turn now to a discussion of one of these alternatives, and to why wholistic birthers

are such a minority.

Robbie Davis-Floyd terms this alternative mode1 "the wholistic model of birth,"

which she locates pnniarily among homebuthers. In such a model. "like self and body,

mother œui baby are essentidy One --that is, ltrey form partt of an integruted system that

CM only &e hurmed by dissection in& its Wtdicidtcal par tsn (1994. 1 Essential to this

rnodel is the concept of mincVbody integration. which emphasizes "aciice agency and Uwtet

knowing," and whose practitioners often regard "a woman's intuition or 'inner h w i n g '

more highly than the object idy obtuirted information of tests " (1 134). The vduation of

inner knowiug is a common theme in women's narratives as weiL Ln binh stories. like h a i s

Nin's "Binh," writers often articulate that they perceiveci things. they "knewn cenain thmgs

which their doctors did not. 1 have aise encountered this knowledge speaking to women

about their births. Repeatedly, women e-xpress the wish that they had listened ta "their

inner selves" during pregnancy and birth, even when their experiences are rlifficult.

But a question remains. If hospital birth has become an aiienating e-xperience. if

women's culturally enforced disembodiment is e-xacerbated durîng their birth e-uperiences.

why do women continue u, submit to "obstetricai r i t~als?"~ Davis-Floyd contends that in a

cechnological society "the natural process of childbirth presents special conceptuai

dilemmas, as it calls into perpetuai question anp boundaries ... culture tries to dehea t e

between itself and nature" (1990, 175). She suggests, then, as do many feminist critics,

myseff included. that reproduction has been targeted as a conceptuai battleground between

nature and culture. The question is "mlow to make birth. a powerfdy femaie phenornenon.

reinforce. instead of undermine. the patriarchal system upon whch ... mie- is still basedn

( 1990, 175). This manoeuver is accomplished by valuing the "product of concep tionw over the

mother. Birth is a female "rite of passage," but a rite in which "[tJhe most desirable end

product of the birth process is the new souaL member. the baby; the new mother is a

secondary by-productn (1994. 112'7).

Davis-Floyd locates the impetus for the development of obstetrical rimais in the

transformationai power of the birthing e-xperience: transformational. that is. for the

individual woman. The birthing woman IS in a dangernus iiminai period during birth. Living

in a "transitional r e a h between socla1 categones whch is officdy not supposed to e.uistm

(1990. li9)." In the teehnological model. this individual porenoal is dangernus and

threatening, suggestiug that the naturai process upon which society depends for its new

members, "the graphic evidence that babies corne h m women and nature. not fmm

technologg and culture must be brought under control: birrh must appear to con£irm.

instead of refute. the technoiogicd model" (178). Here 1 h d an important link between

Davis-Floyd's work and that of Elizabeth Grosz In idenofvine birth as a cultural

experience, and the body as cultural product, it becornes easier to understand the difEculty

women face when they attempt to buck the svstem. and insist upon corporeaiit_v.

Modern birth, then, c a . no longer be viewed as simply a medical creation- "Fijany

obstetrical procedures whirrh pass for science are in Eact rimals designed to convey the core

values of ... çociety m bïrthing women" (DavisFloyd 1990. 176). Thus the obstetrical ritual

"telI(s] her not that she gives life. but rather that the instimtion doesn (180). Consider the

following passage:

A s the moment of birth approaches. there is a . intensification of actions performed on the woman. as she is transferred to a delivery m m . placed in the lithotomy position, covered with s t ede sheets and doused with antiseptic, and an episiotomy is cut to widen her vaginal opening. The lithotamy position. in which the woman lies with her legs elevated in s t imps and her buttocks a t the very edge of the deLivery table, completes the process of her symbolic inversion fimm aumnomp and privacy m dependence and comple te exposure. eupressing and reinforcing her powerlessness and the power of society at the supreme moment of her own individual transformation. The steriie sheets with which she is draped h m neck to foot enforce the dear deheation of categorp boundaries, graphically iiiustrating to the woman that her baby, Society's product, is pure and dean, and must be protected from the fundamental uncleanness of her body and her sexuality. ( 180)

1 would comment here that in Canada bwth is not as extremely conmolleci as it appears to be

in this passage. Prenatal classes. for example. stress the advantage of the supported squat

position for ease of delr'very, and women commody labor and deliver in the same room.

However, if there is the slightest reason for medicai concern. and this is usuaUy determined

by hospital personnel, women ven- quickly lose an? authority over theù birth. One

disturbing trend. shown dearly in Hunsburger's t e s , is that increasing numbers of women

d e technological interference for m t e d Each woman in Hunsburger's text discussed the

"choicesn which were offered her by either physicians or hospital s d . but rarely questioned

how they were determineci. There is a disturbing kick of intervention-hee birth in modem

kt-person accounts iike the stories coiiected by -4nns. Davis-Floyd and Hunsburger.

When the medicdtechnological narrative of birth c m be viewed as a master

narrative, as a purveyor of cultural and ntual demands. it has p d o u n d implications for

women's writing. For example, in Thomas's novels lsobel Carpenter beiieves that Ahcan

magic and rituals are the o d y way in whch she wiU restore her whoieness. -4nd rïtud

depends on I;minality and rnagic, intendeci to have &ects on both the body and minci

Isobel's search in Blown FieUres can be seen as a se& for ritual rneaning denied her by

her own culture. Medicine does not call its procedures rituals. it calls them science. and so

many women in O u r çociety are ieft. a€ter a hospital birth. with the same feeling as Isabel-

something is missing.

So far, 1 have tried to show the intricate relationships between the uisututionaiized

foms of biftil and the individual woman: relationships of language, power, rhetoric and

cultural imperratives that seriousiy affect women's reproduction and buthing. There is one

more crucial relationship to discuss. The mother's position is precarious in modern

obstetrics. and cuitural emphasis has shifted fkom the mocher to the fetus. -As 1 stated

earlier. thiç fetus as an independent being is a modern construction. unknowable u n d the

acivent of technology. To piace h e fetus in opposition tn the mother threatens any struggie

for the bvthing woman's agency, not ro mention the affect it has on her personal

relationship with herseif and her prepancy. Rosalind Pohck Petchesky argues that the

fetus has achieved its own " s ~ b o i i c import" due. in large part. to our modern ability to

image it separacely h m the mother. ,-\ perfect e-xample is the trend for hospitals to seU a

sonogram photo of the k t ulrrasound exam. a "stillw of the small fetus. This is now often

baby's f h t picture. "The 'fetal form' itself has, within the larger culture, acquired a

symbolic import that condenses withm a series of losses--hm se-mal innocence to cornpliant

women ta h e r i c a n imperid mght. It is not the image of a baby at ali but of a tiny man, a

homunculus" (268). 1 ibd a chiiling resonance here. Grosz assens that men. whether gay or

straight, "regar[d] their sexual organs on the mode1 of the hornunculus, a Little man within

the man, with a quasi-aumnomy of its own" (200). The baby that replaces the phaiius as the

object of desire in the resolu tion of the girl child's Oedipai confiict is the homuncuius of the

male body image literalized in die sonogram photo. a homuncuius dehered to the woman

through patriarchal technoioa-. The fetus is gloded in mages that distance and separate

it r o m the mother. whose body is of'ten not in the Mage at aiL Consider. for e-xample, the

metaphor of "ascronautW oiken rippiied CO the fetus. &ee floatiug in space. What is effaced is

the frame. the concext. the wornan's body without which the fetus can not survive--it is an

illusion of hee space perperuared by the same obstecrical rituais mentioned earlier."

However, with phompphy and orher images, pictures "become a magical source of

fecishes that can resurrect the dead or preserve a lost loven (Petchesky 269). Technology has

promoted the independent fetus by changmg the conceptuai mace of birth. and "obstetricd

technologies of visunlisrntion and elecuonic/surgicd intervention chus dismpt the very

definition, as traditjonally undersumi, of 'inside' and 'outside' a woman's body, of pregnancy

as an 'interior' e.xperiencen (Perches- 272).' The danger identified by Petchesky and others

is that this visuaiization, together with its use againçt women. is a "form of fetishization." in

which "[tlhe technology which makes the babyfetus more 'visible' renders the woman

invisiblen (Petchesky 2-71), The fetus enters the symbolic order at the same time as it

iatroduces a new sïgndbtion system.

Women's narratives continue to supply a Gront Ene of resistaace in the current b a d e

inscribed on the bodies of women, bodies actuai and linguistic, physical and ideologd

Narratives which speak to any part of women's reproductive experiences supply a misçing

story--the experiential process of being fernale with a s p h . sexed body. Women's

narratives work against the medical imperative to make visible the interior of the female

body by insisting women are far more than dark interiors: we have reproductive h~tor ies

which are not physical. Our so-called interiority may often contain a large amount of repressed and non-validated knowledge, a woman's "inner howing," When a writer engages

brrthing, whether from a personal or fictionai perspective, she engages her comples personal

&tory. However, because of the cultural valuatioa of women as mochers, much of our other

reproductive experiences (menstruation, menopause. chilciiess sexuality) are devalued or

outright ignored Often, then. the smry of a girl iïghting for self-defkition within a -wiety

eager to f i e her becomes visible in narratives by wornen-

This girl. Like Isobel. or - . n i e in Ana Historic, howç her mature body wiil become

the site of suuggle simply because she is "fernale" and can reproduce. Such howiedge can

produce great ambivalence about her identity, and seriouçiy affect her body-image. in our

cultue, there are few rituals of menarche to encourage the gici's transition to womanhood,

few outward validations of the positivity of being female. So ofien, then. the prmgonist

e-upresses the manner in which her earlier knowledge has been vigorously suppressed, or

denied, or resisted, only to resurface in her addt reproductive e.xperiences. She recalls and

interprets the ways in which her youthfui e-qeriences affect her present state. For e-xample,

she may recd the embarrassrnent of her first interna1 examination as it surfaces

une.xpected.- during a routiae pregnancy check. Or, as with Audrey Thomas's Isobei. her

sexuality in che present of the storp is related to her se-uualiq of the p s t , and the changes

traced are invested with meaning.

What is ofken apparent in narrative. especdiy in bfrs. Blood and Blawn Fiare% is

a gradua1 removal of the self from the body. Tbe mature woman ofien feels she has 'bst"

somethmg during her maturation process. It may be spontaneity. openness. physical

delighc. that goes missing when her "growing up" involves increased suppression of her body

knowledge, or shame, or guilt or invalidation of her experiences. When such experiences are

piaced in narrative, they are validated for both the writer and the reader.

If girls' knowledge ofreahy is p o l i M y dangerous. it is both psycholog3cally and plitically dangerou for girls not to know what is gohg on -- or to render t h e d v e s innocent by d i s c u ~ e c t h g themseh b m their bodies, that repositov of experience and desire, and thus. in essence, disassociating themselves h m themselves, 6mm relationships and h m what they know about ttie world. Because girls are encourageci to make this disconnection at the time of their adolescence, girk' dissent at this time becomes psycho~ca l ly essenuai. ... (GiUigan 34)

IE the @ri's embodiment, her resistance to ideologically imposeci "dissociation," is politicdy

dangerous, women's narratives spealirng what is discounteci and siienced in master

narratives pose a threat. a transgressron. Women themselves transmit a knowledge of

reproduction which challenges the Tacnialn pronouncementç of medicine and technology.

They write and taJk about bleeding, about cycliog each month for many years. gestation,

birth, nursing, rnothering-a process of reconstruction and knowledge production that offers

a powerfd rereading of the femaie (and the matemal) body..

During pregnancy and birth. however, a woman experiences the onslaught of d

pressures and proscriptions in unprecedented and invasive ways. The aascent mother

becomes the site of inquiry, e.up1oration. old wives' tales. prescriptions. and doctors' advice-

most of which is contradictary. Textual competition: all the words she has heard or read

about the "female experiencen becorne embodied in her gmwing reiationship to her M d .

and her changing d e in society. Women's writing is essential for keeping open a conceptual

space that works against technological rituals and is one effective way women's knowledge

ïs perpetuated in o u society, 1 read ficnon through the b e of non-f%tionai narratives in

order to e-xplore the ways women's burhing scories react to and transgress master

narratives, as do women's bt person accounts- Without these fictions and accounrs, it

would be diEcult to assess what women think about their own expenences. about their

pregnant and materna1 bodies. How eb-er. the "non-fictional" master narratives influence

each story and need ta be accounted for. And so 1 argue that women's narratives are an

essenual source of the howledge requred to configure &e radical materna1 subject. Now on

to Audrey Thomas and Içobel Carpemer.

Notes

1 would Ue. at this poinr, to draw attention to an important passage in Janice Raymond's Women As Womba Her critique was crucial in heiping me ta understand the important difference between "being a and "having a body."

The right to control one's body too often kames the body as a possession and as capital ta diçpose of as the individual wishes. This view of rights analogizes the body to private propeny. To say 1 own my body is substantively different h m sa-ying I am my W. In the Latter articulacion. the body becomes more than a private space that the person is free ta do with as she pieases- It becomes the grouad of the self that has integrity. nipnity, and worth-more than a use value.

Theories about owning the body heip objecnfv and commodifY women's bodies, both for others and the woman herself. creating a distance between a woman's self and a woman's body. A proprietury right to my body aüows me to submit it to the conml of others or CO do with it what 1 please, no matter how those actions undermine not o d y rny digrne*, integrity, and my ability to act but also the digmty, integrity, and abilities dothers as welL -4 substantive *ht to mg body means the body is more than a mere possession and raises the fundamentai issue of the relationship between my body and my self. and my self to the ciass of women worldwide. (lûû)

In her discussion of the ditferent relationship of the daughrer to "The Law of the Fathern Homans notes:

That Lacan's namative originates in male e-qerience shouldn't necessady invaiidate it as a description d a daughter's relation to se-uuaiiy and language. But his narrative depends upon a disingenuous confusion of trope and material condition, On the one hand. "phdus." "masculine." and "ferninine" are aU argued to be tropes or positions in language, which anyone, male or femaie. can occupy. On the other han& he himselfappiies what he has said about the trope "wornan" to actual women ... Lacan's narrative of the origin of fîguration authorizes itseif by teilhg the story in such a way as apparent& to privilege m a t i o n as a mode, and yet it depends on the literal difference of the sex organs. (9)

1 would iike to suggest a similar "confusion of trope and m a t e r d conditionn e-uists in the medicd figuration of the gravid bodv.

3 See Adams. Chapter 12. "Obstetrics and the InteUigble Fetus." especiaily notes 5 and 7.

'' Stealin~ Fire: The M y t h o l o ~ ~ of the Technocracv (Iconic -4nthropology Press: Palo Ato. CA), 1991.

Tess Cosslett has a similar opinion ( 16). and I recencly saw it in action while attending prenatal classes as a colleague's birthing buddy. Ln a room full of couples intent on natural binh, 1 was particularly struck by the amounc of advenising disperseci in free packages. The medical and instructional rnaterials, &ou& offered to the &t time parents. were iost among the advertising -1 hrge component of the instruction I saw was specficdy oriented towards what happens in the hospitd I'm not sure where the "natural" was.

See Oakley p. 35.

' The primarg cause. appmximately W ? of mattvnal death was puerperal sepsis. the "childbed fmer" which Dr J. Matthews Duncan (circa 1870) estimated at 1 in every 120 term births within a month of parturition, "'It would be di&ult to imagine any public institution more disgustinp' said physicÿui Charles Beil of the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital in 1871; The wards were filthy in 'the extreme. the beds were not fit for human beings to occupyl(cited in S t ~ ~ ~ o c k . 1958, p. 129)" (Oakley 33). (J. Stumock Eariy Maternity Hospitals in Edinburgh. British Journal of Obstetrics and G-ynaecol- pp. 122-31.) It is wonh noting that by 1980 there no deaths h m puerperal sepsis in England, However, there is a si(spSit b r y of death by childbed fever in English Literature and in Engiish authors.

X recent report by Pamela Green indicates that the "US. might have twice as many pregnancy-reiated maternal deaths as have been previousty reportedm (17). The country has been rankeà seventeenth by UNICEF at 12 per 100.000 Live births. Evea this number is highly misleadkg though. because "poor. d areas ... have rates that can be as much as 60 times higher. in effect. one national average underrepresents how abysmai maternal care is in some parts of the U.S." (17).

As Di Brandt so eloquently puts it. 'VVhere, in the rich canon of Western iiterature. were the mother stories? 1 asked mysel£ Where. indeed, were the motbers, symbolic or otherwise. whom 1 mq$t have tunied to in that moment of loneliness and desperationn (4)?

'O One of the k t attempts to find out what women themsehres thought of the new antenatal Gare policies is the unusuai document compiled by Samuel Hebert hfD cited in Oakley 42-3 and published as. hL L. Davies, Maternitv: letters from workin~ women (London: G- Beil and Sons. 1915; reprinted 1978, Virago).

" See, for example. D. Scully, Men Who Contml Women's Health: The Miseducarion of Obstetncians-Gvnecoioeis~ (Boston: Houghton MdEn. 1980); N.S. Shaw, Forced Labour; Maternitv Care in the United States (Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press, 1974); M. Harrison. A Woman in Residence (New York: Random House. 1982).

'' "By the eariy 1900s in Britain. public domestic educauon was started for girls. a kind of d e and mother prep schoool The ostensible curriculum was the correction of methods of childrearing (and childbearing), but this could be used to justif' a much more broaùiy-based curriculum, which inciuded almost eveq facet of women's behavior" (Oaldey 43).

l3 Oaldey states that the founding of a Bntish Coliege of Obstetricians and G-vnaecologists in 1938 "was an overt attempt to provide rvould-be obstetricians with that degree of professionai status and instruction which would. in the end. ensure an effective challenge to all other professionai groups involved in the c h i c d care of childbearing womenn (1 12). .As a note of interest. ia Zambrana. some fifty vears later, none of the subjects listed status as a reason for entering ob/gyn (63).

" At the session "Midwifery Past. Presenc and Future" ar the conference Women's He&: -4 Feminist Perspective (Camosun College. October 22. 1992. Victoria. B.C.), we were shown video montage which included part of a naval training nIn for navy wives h m the eariy 1960's. It was an orientation h. expected. 1 believe. to help ease woments amcien- about hospicai births. We wawhed the woman (shaved and purged oE screen, the voice-over said). helped up on a table. and given an epidural. we next saw her strapped in the Lithotomy position, given a large episiotomy and delivered by forceps. It was hghtening, especiaily the c h , unemotional voice of the narrator. who expIained how wonderful it was not to feel

- -

anythrng, and how lucky navy wives were to have the best in medical assistance during birth. We also watched a home buth from the 1990's on the same video that showed a happy

and speedy unassisted deliveqr. 1 was surphseci when the majority of questions h m women who had not yet birthed focusectless on rejectioa of the medical model. wen though it was achowledged as "horri6c," and more on the possibility of fading to "be able to deal with" the pain of childbirth,

'' -4s Cari Cohen argues. 04 fehis viable todag may well not have been viable (if in that precise bmhgmd condition) ten years aga Ifviability depends on the state of technoiogy (which it does), and mord status depends upon viability (as deged), then the moral status of the letus wouid appear to change with technological advance" (63).

l6 111 chapter 2 of her test. "Matemal Environments and Ejaculatory Fathers: New Defirutions of hlotherhood and Fatherhood," Janice Raymond documents the development of this term--it is a legal term (metaphor) for a surrogate mother. 1 believe it is a deady metaphor, and ne& to be eliminated. Its penetration into legal language. and into public discourse via uncritical media, has grave implications for the status of women.

l 7 Hunsburger d e d e s birth plans thus: "The best binh plans are written with the understanding that these are the M y ' s preferences. not instructions. Most parents acknowledge that they will understand if changes have to be made for the safety of either the rnother or the baby" (58). 1 have three questions. 1. How many parents, especially mothers, have the necessary training to properly challenge medical parameters of safety? 2. Why can't these written items be instructions? 3. Because medical personnel, especially obstetricians, tend to taik over a i a b o ~ g woman's head. how will a rvornan enforce her "preferences"?

l 8 There is an alternative body of wisdorn that suggests this &ect of the menstnial cycle is actudy a decreased tolerance to a r t i f i d y imposed rhythm of work.

'' She quotes h m William Ganong. Review of Medical Phvsiolom- (Los Angeles. C A Lange, 1985, 1 lth Edition), 63.

She quotes h m Elliot B. Mason. Human Phvsioloc (Men10 Park. C.k Benjamin Cummings Publishg Co.. 1983), 525.

" See Martin 106-1 13.

v - See. for exampie. Ceiu -Amberston's Blessin~s of the Blood: -4 Book of Menstrual Lore and Rituals for Women (lïctoria: Beach Horne Publishers Limited. 1991); and Penebpe Shuttle and Peter Redgrove.

At a birth I r e c e n - attendecl. t h example was reaiized .As the baby was quite ea*. there was legitimate cause for concern and for more or Iess continuai monitoring of the laboring mother. However. the mother was unable to move and reiieve her painful back labor. and more clinical attention was gwen to the monimr than the mother. At one point. I knew the stage of the mother's labor accurately h m watchïng her physical syrnptoms and Listening to her words. whiie the nurse. who was relyuig on the machine. gave the mother an inaccurate report of her pmgress. T b misinterpretation on the p a n of the nurse was traumatic for the mother, but it was soon recti6ed

24 See p. 15, n- 1.

" I k t heard this term used and expiainecl by Dr. Susan-McKay at a one-day seminar "Humauizing Childbirth: Family-Centred M a t e n i i ~ Care-" She used the tenu ta designate any cornmon obstetrical proceduie, such as episiotumy, for which there was not a sound medicai reason (given recent. and mostiy feminist inquiry) for the lkequency. or die standarization of its practice. In m y notes 1 wrote the fobwing quote: "-And dont forget Ladies--these ARE rituals and can be challenged!"

" Rites of passage entaii a period of liminality in which the initiate is neither what they were to begin with nor have they made the transition to the other side. in traditional cultures. this period is ciangemus as the initiate is unprorected and can corne under the sway of gnat magical forces. Not a bad metaphoric description of the dangers of hospical birth.

'7 See "Part m. Framing the Fetal Portrait." in .Adams. partkulary 117- 121.

" Petchesky goes on fo Say, quoting Donna Haraway. that "who convols the interpretation of bodiiy boundaries in medical herrneneutics [becomes] a major femini.c;t issue" (272).

Chapter II

the self who is not o m - M m Blood and the split matenal subject

But there wasnt r e d y anybody taking about the fact that, you know, blush, darling, I'm pregnant, & nine months later you have a dear little baby. But that doesnt always happen, you know, & there's a lot of nasty tbiogs that go on in between. & sometimes you dont have the baby or the baby's deformed. or whatever- -And in that 1 sense I guess 1 was rea& trying to Say, look. why dont we & about these things. It's about time we tak t about these things. (sic)

Audrey Thomas. "Songs and Wisdomn ( B o w ~ M ~ 14 15)

"Some days my name is blrs. Blood; some days it's Mrs. Thing. Today it's 1hh-s.

Thing" ah. Thrng 1 1). deciares the speaker. and so s t a m Mrs. Blood. -4 perplexing self-

introduction. Eleanor Watchei t e k us that " (tjhe three published noveh, Son?. hfrs. BIood,

and Blown Figures, together with several of Bornas's j su>ries. portray the interna&

consistent Me of a character u s u d y named Isabel. a woman who has much in common with 1 her creator" (4). hdeed. Thomas has conunented that "Isobel is an exaggeration. me to the

rrth power" (cited in Kachtel 5). --Uthough we must be carefd of reading too much biography

into Isobel, it is nonerheless there. as in many birth sturies. Içobel Carpenter. nbe C l e q .

speaking as bh. ThingMrs. B l d has corne a far way h m the girl "Iflrightened equaily by

her father's pusillnn;mil and ber mother's impotent rage psobel] escapes into a poetic.

pastel-colored, picture book world" (Gottiieb and lieitner 365).

lsobei's brealidown into the split subject of Mm. BlmdAhLrç. Thing wdi be my focus

here. 1 tvill look at the ways in w hich Thomas's formai and thematic devices point to a

radical matemd narrarive. The way Isobel is portrayed in Mm. BImd doesn't f u W the

radical maternal: she doesn't become a radical matemal subject untii the end of Blown

Fimires. In Mrs. Blood. Thomas e ~ ~ I o r e s the process and shows how n;fficult it is to

transgress the cdturaj and medical paradigms of women or birthuig. 1 want to explore the

extent to which Isobel's split voice offers an anatomy of the problems posed by the master

narratives 1 e - q h e d in the k t chapter. Isobel, as she negotiates with dominant

narratives of selfhood. reproduction and mothering during her miscarriage. e-qeriences her

maternal subjectivity as dienation. dis-ease and fear.

Thomas uses the dual narration to reconfigure the maternal subject, to speak to

questions of corporeality and writing. Her narrative is an example of the matemal writing

Cosslett discusses, the kind that works both within and agai.nst the dominant narratives of

b i d . In formally representing Isobel as two distinct speakïng voices, Thomas is able ta

illustrate what it is that Fçobel cornes to terms with or understands about her subjectivity,

her personal genealogy as a matemd subject. However, Isobel doesn't yet have a clear sense

of how her historicity has shaped her and so the narrauve is hagmented. The narrators'

self - ref ihty , through language. symbol and memory, shows that Thomas believes the

body is inscribed by hismry. She also demonstrates the need for the maternai subject to

engage as much with the historicity of &tory as Fvith b a t of the present moment. in blrs.

BImd, history emerges through Isobel's neuroses and shows how she's been conscructed.

what has shaped her. The present moment. how it is determined by the "system" and by

Isobel's corporeal consciousness, is the event of the miscarriage.

Before we proceed to my discussion of the split voice and then account for the

antiphonal relations between past and present, I would like to give a sense of what the split

narrators represent. &h. Blood is the voice of the body--mernories, e-uperiences. sexuaiity, of

being a body. She mediates the historp of Içobel's body, her corporeal history; and also

represents secretion. leekage. transgression. Mrs. Thing is the voice of "having" a body acted

upon by social forces, she has an acute consciousness of her body as cultural product. hh.

Thing stands for containment and restriction; she shows how the materna1 subject is

alienated and damaged by Western paradigms of maternity. However, Isobel'ç spiit

subjectivity, the fact that there are two voices. shows chat the issue af corporeality has not

yet been resolveci

1 would like to gwe a sense of the younger Isobel before I begui my reading of blrs.

Blood Isobel Cleary grew ui wornanhood in Sones. a 6iMungsroman tracing the

development of a writer. her geneaiogy as a female subject, £mm chiIdhooci to maturity. The

noveL en& with lsobel stretched out on her "stomach in the sitting m m . a map of Europe

spread out flat before (herl" (205). preparing to leave home for the k t Une. She won a

scholarship to coilege through her facility with language. and has corne into a sense of

herseif as a separate subject, no longer so vulnerable to her "mother's impotent rage." By

the end of a as b&ts a daughter coming of ape, Isobel ù able to see her mother with a

cianty she lacked before: "So innocent- So angq. Loveless. Growing old, 1 wanted to c o d o n

her -- realized not that I never ioved her but thac she had never let me love her and that

these were two en tir el^ Meren t thingç" (205). Csobel begins her adult He with excitement.

hope, and the resoluwon of many childhood contlirrts,

m. B l d picks up Isobei's iife many years iater, after travel, l o v e - & . ,

university, marriage and the birth of two children. A mother. with experience in the

material world, Isobel fies with her famiiy, her husband Jason (whose work as an art

teacher brought them ta Afiica), and her two children, Nichoias and Mary. in Mrs. Biaod,

Isobei's h is circumscnbed by a hospital and the teachers' h g compound Her life in

these restricted locations is marlred by fear, a fear that reinstates and ampmes the fears of

her childhood. Isobel is an aiienzrted mother in mauy ways, multïply insecure. She can't 6nd

an image of motherhood that both reassures and encompasses her. dthough she h o w s she

doesn't want to become ber own mother, She is intimidated by the competencp of the mostiy

British faculty wives with whom she must associate. and has little contact with the Local

-Akican women. Although Isobel h d s some intimacy with the black women in the hospital

ward. it is complicated by issues of race and ciass.

-As the narrative b e p s . we h d Isobel overcome by fear. a paralping fear that her

death is immanent in her miscarriage. As she waits in the hospital, trying to keep her

pregnancy viable, Isobei's world becomes determinecl by the progress and process of her

pregnant body. Her wodd has become other: her mkamiage becomes. in many ways, a

defhïtion of self Cosslett notes that rnany birth accounts contain a "lund of dual point of

view, as 'objective' i n f i a t i o n h m outsiders is incorporated with the woman's own story"

(136), while "fictionai accounts stick scrupulously to their heroine's point of viewn (137).

Thomas's birth account exhrbits both characteristicç, while the respondents in Hunsburger's

t es . for e-uample, exhibit the k t characteristic. With the dual narration. in whîch Isobel

c m be seeo to other herself. Thomas pays scrupdous attention to a kt-person point of

view that is not Iimited to one voice. -4s weU. "objectiven information appears throughout the

t e s in the form of quotes, in the voices of doctors and nurses, in newspaper accounts and

stories.

h h . B l d is unusual then. a birth smry that resists categorization. and 1 would iike

to begin with some e-xtended passages to better show the density of Thomas's narrative

style. It is difncuit to get a sense of the narrative rhythms, the whirls and eddies of memorv,

ebbs and flows of association, when only short chunks of text are considered Joan Coldweli

notes that Thomas makes use of some form of "splitting" or "doubling" (5 1) in aii three Isobel

novels, most apparent in Mrs. Blood The foilowing passages w d show how the doubiing of

narrative voices creates the space for the contradictions with;n Isobel to emerge and

dialogue with each other- indeed. as the nwel opens. we encounter a double kt-person

narrator, Isobel as iMrs, Thing~hh. Blood. two voices that describe overlapping time

sequences. A close reading of these pages reveals a Lot about the complesity of the

differences between the two.

Once she has intmduced herseif with two names, hh. Thmg proceeds to describe

the chair "Wou know the kind)" (11). in which she sits. She invites me as reader to collude

with her assessrnent of this "kitchen" chair: her parenthetical voice reminds me that 1, too,

have felt this way-Sitting around in the kitchen with sistem. ken&. mothers--discussing

our cycles, o u days of blooh This image, a woman Sitting in a kitchen chair, is instantiy

fbmdiar tu me, and signifies cordort and impending conversation- But this wiU change. Mrs.

Thing proceeds to dishate my Ealse sense of d o r t . "1 Say 'professes' or, better stili.

'purpons.' because things here aren't always what they seem to be and one must behave

accordin&. Or ton (1 1). While she is speaking these words. Mrs. Thmg is in a makeshift

ambulance en route tn the hospicai. The chair she sits in is uncornfortable. not unlike the

garish plastic chairs in old hospital emergency rooms and airports. The image of the woman

sitting now inciudes pain, entrapment. foreboding.

Take the matter of the ambulance, for instance, CVhen Jason came back and said, "They think you ought to go to town." 1 was sitting up in bed wearing one of my new striped nighties. 1 have six of them. six diEerent "flaveurs" you might say: lemon-lime. raspberry, candied violets. orange. chocolate and Fox's Glacier Mint (blue. reaiiy, but 1 was trying ta think afsornething blue and cool that you could su& iike peppermint-striped candy and the nearest is a Fox's Glacier Mint, although they're not blue of couse). We got them ail (or Jason did) at Woodward's bargain basement; only it isn't a basement but six floors up, which is very confusing to anyone brought up on bargain basements which you went down to. (I remember one where we used to go and get our pan& and socks and have our shoes repaired. It was in a large department store and you went down the steps £rom the main Door and past the ladies' washroom which was very cold and srnelied of Lysol so that somehow you knew even then that a bargain basement hwer even than that cold, foul-smeiling place was sometbing not quite nice. For Lysol was something Mr. h a s i d e used in school if somebody threw up and what Marna used when the puppy did lus business on the rug. So 1 can't get used to the idea of a bargain basement being siu floors up. But that's where Jason got the nighties. 1 wanted lots and 1 wanted Cotton so it wotdd be cool and of course they had to button down the h m . ) (1 1- 12)

We are catapulted f z away h m the kitchen chair into kaleidoscopic mernories,

metony-mies. associations. This long passage is about "the matter of the ambuiance."

curiouslp a vehide that doesn't appear again u n d many pages later.

The matter of the ambulance becomes a matter of nightgowns. a recurring symbol in 2

Thomas's work. -Qpropriately, the novel begins with this chain of associations, with the

nightgown as a subject for rumination. for nightgowns often indicate the social or sexual

stacus of a fernale character in Thomas's fktion. lkIrs- Thmg is concerned with keeping

things covered. with the disguise of seif, with readable signs--nightgowns. for example. form

part of a wornan's language in the hospitd w a d Zsobel is u reader, reading the women

around her through their bedwear.

Her nightgowns Mate's J were fantastic t h g s and must have been brought back from New York with the wig and the cologne: nylon, M y and

very hot. I should tW But h e l y bright coiors - corai and p e a d blue and cerise. My peppermint-stripped mttw seemed rembly prim and pmper and &en 1 could see her look at me in a rather patronking way -- the kind of Iook a teenage girl mght give her mIlidcln a m (41).

Mrs. Thing sees in M i s . Mate's nightgown colon the brightness of -Xkca conuasted to the

economical and proper Me she leads. her English Me. She suspects that Mm. Mate, the wrfe

of an Miican ofücial, "is recreating herseif in some image d e d h m the Xmerican ladies'

magazines and the ads in the Graphic" (41). but admires her as a "child of nature and of

love yet utterly unselfconscious about her new mgw (41). However. hh. b g doesntt seem

to see the irony, as she too ïs a reader of ladies' magazmes. and of the National G e o m a ~ h i ~

Instead. she displays here her tendency to romanucrze and valorize the bhck women

around her, Isobel's images are also "cuiied" fiam the same magazines. Isobel. though, in aii

her n a r r a ~ e manifestations. can't be unselfconscious. Her self-refiection makes visible the

gaps between someone reading and sorneone being read. and Mrs. Thing reads the bhck

women =und her as somehow more "natural" and "primitive." a point 1 wiil take up iater

on-

And so the passage about the ambulance is noc about the ambulance. It is for

personal justitkation and reveals much about Mrs. T h g s character. The cotton nightie she

is wearing when the ambulance arrives nUs her with ham me.^ hLrs. Thing feels a need to

e x p h , to just*, how the details of her Me, iike the trip in the ambuiance, have corne to be

as they are. -4s her smry unfolds. we discover thac Mrs. Thing has often been e m b m s e d - -

smetimes by her se.waiity, sometimes by her Iack of socd graces, and often by her parents'

behavior, panicularly her mother's. Isobei's embarrassrnent and her soc& isolation as a

cbild motivated her acute powew of obselvation and her abilities with laquage. Her need ta

absorb de tds derives in part from a chtldhood obsession with gecting things down. "if

wmething d y unusual happened 1 tried to impde the whoie cornplex of

sightlsoundltouchltaste/smeil on my consciousness and memory as though such an

experience was iike some rare and multicolored b~tterIly-~ (Son.- 33). Embarrassrnent

confiates her childhood emotion and situation (wearing bargain basement dothes) with her

adult situation (going to the hospital in a "second" wiEh a "rnend"). .As a child she was taught

about things "not quite nicew like puppies that do "busmess" on the mg, and thmgs that are

supposed to be nice iike a "Ladies' washroom." Mrç. Thing fears she. too. rnight be "not quite

nice."

Isobel desires a world ordered through language. She craves a world where the

meaning of a thing stays properly attacheci to its object-a "basement" should remain below

the ground Susan Rudy Dorschc suggests that "what we have traditionaily referred to as

the writing of A u h y Thomas is obsessed with the contextual. contradic~ry meanings, and

meaningie5811esses, of words. with the ways subjectivity is represented. in fact present only ,

in and as languagew (221). Thus $a thing is not quite socially proper it can be deseribed.

obscured, with the r i a t words. a rùghtgowa of text, Isobel's meanings, her obsessive

readings. are greatiy colored by fear. indeed a fear so strong it has at times paralyzed her

body. "For chat's one tbing you'ii have to accept about me. the fear. 1 can't remember a time

when 1 wasn't a h i d : and now 1 felt the hour had come round at Iast -- and time has proved

me right -- and whatever it was that 1 had felt behind me. stalkùig me. for a i i those years

was nearly on me and 1 could almost smell itn (hh- Thing 12). The smeIi of Lysol. the

tartness of fear. While language as it defmes fernale subjectivity restrains her. she relies on

language to daec t her fear. or disgurse it as other things.

When Jason arrives to tell her she will ïndeed have to travel to the hospid in an

ambulaace, she reads the vehicle as a harbinger of doom:

IH]e stood there very uncornfortable and worried and said it was rotten luck and Engiishy phrases like that which he never uses anymore except when he's embarrassed (now if herd said it was a "bad shown at least 1 might have summoned up a laugh). h d when he said "ambulancew 1 cried some more because it seemed so 0 5 4 and 1 knew nght then 1 was going to die. because why else send an ambulance? (Rb. Thing 12)

This is the first hint we recerve about &Irç. Thin@ health: she does not name it. or teil the

reader directly. This unnamed. but highly embarrassing, condition is idended by the

parenthetical voice. a more critical and sarcastic voice chat resorts to euphemism, "Show" is

the term for the lrght bleeding that may accompany the onset of labor. That thiç occassion is

a "bad shown sets the scene for a birth drama gone wrong, if the reader knows the "lulgo."

The sense of drama iç funher heightened by blrs. Thuig's leave-taking h m her house.

Coming down the starrs supporting hewelfon Jason's m. "1 felt as though I were being

given away in some bizarre marriage parodyn (13). The theatrical metaphor suggests that

hl&. Tiimg sees herself as çornehow acting out the begmning of a tragedy, performing her

fear of death. There is even an audience for her entrance into this drama. Joseph. a native

man who cares for her house and children. also "looked womed and embarrassed. for he

hows (who doesn't) what's the matter" (14)- U n i e s we have picked up the dues, or read

the "signs." as Isobel often remmds us to do. we don't know "what's the matter."

This "embarrassing" conditmn IS soon parncul;irized by Mrs. Blood This is how h h .

Blood h t introduces herself:

1 am here because I bleed. 1 came in the back of a converted diesel truck, Sitting very tall on a straight backed chair which was chained to the &r

like the ch& on a sh;o in a gale. The nurse was very square and solid and reassuring and 1 willed myself to neither f%nt nor cry but to observe what might be the strangest (if not the dtimate) journey of my life. (14)

This voice is substanbnrely diBerent h m Mis- Thing's. &S. Blood's voice is literal,

conveying the solidity of her experiences. Here, the "ambulancen becomes a "converted diesel

truck" and the "kitchen chair" is now a "straight backed chair ... chained to the floor." The

"bad shown now has a name, b l d The world Mrs. B l d describes is solid, physical.

viscerai. It, tao. is fragrant with odor. Mis. BIood's memories and wonderings cascade dong

ph ysicd associations more than soc& relations. To continue:

I did not look back at Jason or Joseph tvhen tve left. I'm like that. They had not ceased to e-uist but chey e-uisted. once 1 stepped inside the van (or "ambuhce," if we wanr to use hyperbole), on another dimension altogether. like figures in an old daguerro~ype or relatives they told me had gone to heaven. Sometimes, now, 1 wonder what they are doing at a s p e d c moment. Whiie I am waiîiug, buttocks tensed. for the iron d o t , is Joseph relaxing on the back stoop, smoking Twker for Men. not aware of his butta& at a& but only aware of the den t . ordered house behind h m , rnapbe the s m d of the bread baging, and the feel of h t drag on his cigarette or a mosquito bite on his arm? And when I am tensing and Joseph is relazang. what is Jason doing, or Nichoias or Mary or the ladies who wiU corne ta see me this afternoon? We are all in the same time zone and more or iess in the same place and yet we do nor @.et at the ~~~~~~~~~g moment for anyone other than ouselves, Pain, pleasure -- can they r s d y e - e t in group relationships? It is difficult to make love with your eyes wide open or crap together in an open field O r cry on a bus- -IUthough men c m pee together, and talk whiie they are peeing, women h d it di6cult to ask their f iend to pass them Goilet paper underneath the door. 1 have pail blue.piastic curtains around my bed to keep my pain in. I am bathed behiod these curtains and I roll on my side so they can take the bloody sheets away behind these curtains. 1 pee behind them. And when they are rernoved, L am sitting up, swabbed and scrubbed and dean toothed. m. having brushed and spat into what Alexandria ("Is that r e d y your name. -Uexandria?") insists on referring to as the Nemesis basin, Perbaps she is q h t , "Ail the perfumes of -4rabia could not sweecen ..." -And the masquerade of order has begun. (1415)

ilh. B l d s world is populated by bodies and secretions. their physicaiity. There are

"bloady sheets" that must be cleaned. spic to be removed. There are buttocks--sittïng, tense.

rela~ed. in pain, There is "crap" and "pee." Her concenis are focused on the body. more

specficaily, on the ways in whch bodies are often unrelated to each other, isoiated, even

though they ail share the common attribute of bodily secretiona This passage hghlights the

ways in which bodies intrude and mediate d relations. hlrs. Blood. whose body fluds

are escaping her involuntarily. isn't able to p d e of s o c d reticence. She has to accept a

stranger wnllong into her b a h m . toiiet paper in hand While a t the hospital. she is

isoiated behind "pale blue curtains ta keep mer] pain in." G m z suggests that the escape of

M y fluids:

afhnt[s] a subject's aspiration toward autonomy and self-identity. They attest to a certain irreducible "dirt" or disgust. a horror of the unknown or the unspecifiable that perrneates. kgers. and at times l eah out of the body. a testimony of the hudulence or impossibility of the "cleao" and "proper-" They resist the determination that marks soiids, for they are without shape or form d their own. (194)

The c u h s keep h h , BIood's leakuig fluids away h m the gaze of other women. Thus her

transgressive and "dirty" body is hidden behind the "masquerade of order" (15). This order.

Thomas suggests. is an instituuonal strategy that places boundaries around an unruly bob.

However, Isobel perceives herself to be both "uncieann and "hudulent." for she confites

the s o d and personai. In her discourse. the two become inseparable.

As the passages above demonstrate. the two narrators inhabit the same physical

space but they do not perceive it the same way. This situation mirrom other dualisticaily

embodied States, like pregnancy or the conscious and unconçcious. in which two separate

"things" share the same space--a corporeal paradox In lrght of the radical maternai subject.

then, Thomas's speakers bring this corporeal paradox m the narrative surface. pmviding a

rich space for interpretation. Attempts to d e h e and categorize hlrs. B l d and Mrs.Thkig

within a dialectic appear irresistible though. in an eariy review of the novel. Thomas U e n

States:

With the heightened introversion of the sick. the narrator sees herself in two alternating roles. as hlrs. Thing when pain or social unease or housewifery reduces her to an object. and as hfrs. B l d when she is oppressed by the tyranny of the mind The novel is sectioned inm A b . Thing thoughts and ~Mrs. Blood thoughts. the former more in evidence early in the book. the latter dominating the £inal part. (98)

Allen identifies the narrator as "sick." but lsobel is not precisely a si& subject. Isobei dwek

upon the meaning of her condition precjlsely because it is important that she not appear too

sick. Feminiçt scholarship has demonstra ted that ideas of "çicknessw are as ideologicdy

loaded as ideas of rnotherhood or feminity.' Içobel knows she d be judged by the wornen

around her for the level of her "periormance" during t h "difficdt" time. It is interesting to

note that most critics, and man'; of them female. use words iike "diEicult" or "unfortunate"

to descrxbe Isobel's miscrullage. However. Caldrveil indudes Thomas's description: the

"horror and utter futility of a six months long, drawnuuc miseamagen (46).' Miscarriage

carries certain social connotations. for "society pressures us not to adopt the sick mle so that

we w u feei compeiled to continue perfolTming our functions" (Remhan 87). Mrs. Thing

knows that she is dangerously close to being someone "the ladies wiü discuss over coffee .. . like some neurotic semi-invaiid in the best ladies magazine smry tradition" (137).

Howwer, Isobei's heightened introversion in Mrs. B I d is, in many ways, imposed

by her physical conditiont This is not to say that Isobel is not seif-absorbecL ,Anne M e r

suggests that "Thomas('sj narrators ... seem to find themselves in a vicious circle of seif-

reflectionn (220). What she reflects about, although certainly painfut. appears intimate&

rekted to her horizontalness and bleeding, to her body not to sickness. Alen argues that

"there is a distinctively feminine sensiuvity and outlook is anipiy demonstrated by women

noveiists of the nineteenth century but oniy recently has the novel began to e-xplore the

biological conditions atTecting that sensitivity" (99). Presumabiv, he refers here ro women's

reproductive Lves. but he doesnTt seem u, recognise the relationshq of miscarriage to

reproduction. hstead. he talks about oppression: hfrs. Thing's by social Me: Mrs. Blood's by

the pressures of the mind His use of s m n g and masculine language --"oppressed, tyranny,

dominating--to describe the double narrator's posiuon in her smry demonstrates that he

remains oblivious to female corporeaiity.

GottLieb and Keitner caution against an oversimplified dialectic reading of the

Merences between blrs. Thing and Mrs. B l d

For example. the Mrs. Th.mg/h(lrs. Blood split suggestç the kgmented nature of woman, divided. not only fiom other women. but ais0 from herseif. by language. tradition. religion. and Law in order to be for someone else. h h . Thing, then. might be woman as she is acted upon: passive. perfofmiag perfunctory d e s that have blurred her identiq and transformed her into object or fiuiction. Mrs. BIood. by contrast. might be woman in much with a universal source of female strengrh. yet whoUy overwheimed by her reproductive capacity . (368)

The caution is weil taken. for Mrs. Thing and h h . Blood do not make a whole subject.

"Caps and miçsing parts. loss and impending los. are recurring mot& in the Ue and mind

of the fernale character. and are a centrai clue to her dilemman (368). Indeed. even when

both narrators teli the same ston-. the &ect can be increased ambiguiw rather than cianty.

The division of be-hg thac GottLeb and Keïtner ta& about here recalls the binary

opposition of social-mindhaturai-body underfying representations of women. However. as

the body is present in &S. Thing's s t o q and consciousness is present in Mrs. Blood's story,

the distinctions between such categories become blurred Thomas's use of the two narracors

speaiïs to the various possible and contlicting staces of resistant matenal corporeality in a

society that values consciousness at the expense of experience. Mary O'Brien, in The oolitics

gf re~roduction (1981), argues persuasively the= is a gendered ciifference in reproductive 6 consciousa- that has been instrumental in -Mg the experience/coLlSCiOusness split.

Women are able to experience Me as a continuous pmess through their actual or possible

reproductive labor, s h i h tn the way in whicrh "women's rnothering reproduces itself

cyclicdy" (Chodomw 7).

O'Brien's discussion exposes the cuitural noMn of the humanislic being, the

autonomous. rationd man of Plato. as a construction based on the need to redorce the

patemai a t the expense of the maternal. to disengage "man" h m nunure. Ironicdy, the

ancient Greeks were interested in j u s m g theu new t h i n g as "naturai." for they

recognised the unity of e-xperience and consciousness, O'Brien reminds us "[tjhis unity of

e-xperience-consciousness is ignored where reproduction is concemed to be eicher whoUy

physical or wholiy metaphysical" (126). Tius has led to the persistent situation "where

materna1 labour is material but involuncary" (142). Thus wornan is seen as re~epracle.~ as

vessel or container--"He is corked up in there like a pear in brandy" (hLrs. Blood 99)--for the

developing fetus. The fetus is then able to acquire the status of an independent being, like

the male subject. "Paternity is voluntary and e s s e n M y ideal" (142), a situation that fosters 8 the notion of the fictional self-actuahmg man, the humanistic seif, the autonomous "1".

h h . Thing and h h . Blood do not together construct an autonomous "Ln despite the

ht -person narration, and so the novel resists this as a mode1 for maternai subjectivity.

Dorscht suggests that "[tjo c d the '1' an absent presence or a lack which constitutes

subjectivity is to descnbe what is v e q often the 'subject' in and of Thomas' writing'," and

that "Lacan's theory of the selfis ... implicit in Thomas's work" (221). But like the body

image constructed during the miirror stage. isobei's miscarrq-mg body is a "traitor body" (93).

not e-xactly the same as the body she desires to see. The repeated images of mirrors and 9

doors, ailusions CO -*ce Through the L o o k i n ~ Glasç, and the active mirroring of events

througb the two nanators suggest not only collusion becween the miirored worlds but a h a

distortion dect. rnuch in the way the minor image Lacan's male chiid develops is not b

body, but its representation. The subject then. in Lacaman terms, is deîïned thmugh lack,

through a loss defined as e n t q into the syrnbolic order. into language. in hlrs. Blood, the

process of this pyschologicai loss is made literal through the process of miscarriage. Içobel.

the maternal subject, rarely loses command of language and so never leaves the symbolic.

Instead. she appropriates ianguage and qmbol to literalize howledge. CO make her

e.xperience concrete and projecc it outward on the world around her. What appears in the

Lacanian system as loss or death is. in the maternai system. multiplicity and beginning.

Many critics pass by Isobei's identity as a maternai subject in a few sentences. if we

reduce Isobel's voices to binary representatives-to Mrs. Tbing speaking as female

consciousness and Mrs. Blmd s p e h g as female body--bath voices are matemal voices.

When the miscarriage occurs. Isobel already has two chiidren. Her family may be alluded to

@ essays and reviews. but when Thomas wrote these novels. she was a mother, and. except

for S o n 5 Isobel is as weU. If "discourse itself is gendered" (Keliough 299) and determines

the tenns we can use to speak about reproductive consciousness. the maternd subject

engendered by this discourse is herseif limited The split narration shows how materna1

consciousness inhabi~ a cultural b h d spot in reproducuve consciousness. a place where

desires collide. where repression îs generated through the application of prohibition on boch

maternal thought and action. The radical maternal subject. then. wodd seek strategies to

describe herself in ways that challenge the dominant discoui~ses of reproduction and so

suggest new ways to look at maternai corporeality. Thomas's hLrs. Thing and hLrs. Biood

show the gaps and losses in what s often taken to be a whole--a maternal subject--through

their intertextuai narration.

Homans suggests that the 'structure of childbeanng, in which somethmg becornes

real that did not euist before--or that existed ody as a word. a theory, or a 'conceptiont--is a

structure of literalizamn. by which the relatively figurai becomes the relatively literal" (26).

In Thomas's novels. structures of literalization appear on many leveis. The most apparent is

the dual narration through which the abstract idea of the divided self becomes two voices.

Homans aàds that in a "Literaq text. the literaiization of a m e occurs when some piece af

overtly figurative laquage. a simrie or an extended or conspicuous metaphor. is translated

into an actuai event or circumstancen (30). For e-uample. the ifigure of the "bad showw

becomes l i t e d through h h . Thing's performance in the hospital "1-g here and bleeding

the afternoon away" (29). Organic mage- becomes &rai through the event of the

rniscarriage. h h . Thmg sees herseif as "soinethg wilting on a too thin and b h d y stallr"

(29), a s tak that does eventudy collapse. There are also the ways in which the landçcape of

.&ca üeralizes Isobei's bleeding. and her fears. "The landçcape drips with poison" (Mn.

Thing" (149). -And the hibiscus flowers in the sitting m m . like Isobel. "have opened too

early and tao wide ... blood red the? float limply in the tepid water" (Mm. Thing 154).

nilacernai subjectwity. then. is idce the structure of childbearing in that mottiers are

capable of mediating more than one consciousness during pregnancy, birth and infancy. in

Lacanian terms. where subjectiviw is conceived as an absent "1." dual subjectivity, like

Isabel's, has transgressive possibilities. Adams suggests that maternal subjectivity is "one of

negotiating a shared subjectivity" (10). Mis. Blood makes literal this abstract idea in the two

narrators. In the Lacaman minor stage. the male in£ant "identifies with an abject h m

which he is p e r p e t u d ~ alienated" (Adams LOI, the image of his body in the mirror, a

representacion chat is aonetheless recognized as self When this recognition is fkmiy in

place, the male child can distinguish that he is ciXesent h m the mother. who becornes a

separate entity. As Chodorow, Homans and Adams point outVLo the case is different for

women and girl children in ways that are signihnt for bguage, eçpeciaily women's use of

language. A wornan may reexperïence and pdoundly rwise the mirror stage in giving birth

(Adams Il). There ean be a fear of beeoming one's mother (Cosslett 38). ' ' yet there is also a

co~ec t ion to the materna1 lineage (Adams W. Mrs. BIood. then. can be seen as the voice of

the body, or the mirror image. and h h . Thing as the voice of consciousness Loobg at the

mirror.

Isobel tries to "sustain an dlusion" ofunity, but that there is such a thing, the unity

of e~xperience/consciousness. was recognized b y the ancient Greek philosop hers. However.

when subjectivity is dehed through a mode1 of male consciousness. the female e'cperience

of shared subjecnvity must be converted into a maie expenence of unity and continuity. In

hIrs. Blood, the narrators dramatize the mother's position in the mirror stage.

The mother's position in the chma is a paradox She is at once a subject whose access u, language depends on the death of the mother crnd the mother whose death permits that access. If the essential foundation of language (read humanity) is the death of the mother. how does a mother herself sustain an iilusion of bodily and psychic uni- while negotiating a deeply am bigtous identity? (Adams 14)

Thomas's fiequent inclusion of -Uiee in her texts12 suggests that the maternid subject may

actuaiiy be the mirror through which aiternate realities are realized -As the conduits

through which our species e-xperiences time as continuity, mothers are in a unique position

to construct new paradigms for reiationships and language. Xker âU. they m i m r the

universe to heipless infants. Thus whatever the female experiences vis-à-vis pregnancy,

birth and nurturing are devalued and replaced with a masculist13 abstraction. a

construction of ideal e-xperience against the physicality of lived e-xperience.

Corporeality, as Grosz suggests. is a usehl term for e.qerience/consciousness. and

works well as a template for the shared subjectivity of mateniity because it does not exclude

conflict and ambiguity. "Rather than a universal process, in which each woman in labor

simply relearns the lesscns of the muTor stage, narratives of birth suggest diverse

elaborations on basic themes of dienation, identifkation. and the construction of

subjectivity througb contradiction" (Adams I l ) . In Mrs. BIood, the differences between the

two narrative voices make visible the contradictions in the way Isobel has h e d her iived

experience, e s p d y her experiences with se-niality and mothers, Corporeality embraces

the contradiction of mindlbody and aii its correlates. and the ways in which Isabel reads her

failing body during the process of her miscarriage show the process of revision at work.

However, it is nifficult to represent in words, as reflected by one of Thomas's femaie

characters, a wrïter who desires "a pallette, not a penn (Latakh 6 1) in order to represent

bodies in ali eheir dimensional fuhess. Yet, in Mrç. Blood, Thomas succeeds in writing

corporeality through the interpolation of the two narrators.

Narrative, then, produces bodies as it is p d u c e d by them. re&g the intene,nual

bomowings h m literature to mediane discussed in Chapter 1. In Mrs. Blood, the socml

order that is the "productive nucleus'' of the bod~ is represented through the posruve and

negative effects of Isobel's e-xperiences. both in the present and the pas. Cosslett suggests

that the "disapearance of the s e p during the pain of birth has "to do with the

e-xperiences into language. Representation of these e-xperiences. inciuding miscarriage.

posits that subjectivity is corporeal and can be embodied both by the person and in the text.

1 will deny that there is the 'reai' material body on one hand and its various culturai and historicd representations on the other. ... mhese representations and cultural inçcrip tions quite literally constitu te bodies and help ta produce them as such. The bodies in whicrh 1 am interested are c u l t d y , se.wally, raciaiiy specific bodies. the mobile and changeable terms of cultural production. -& an essential in ternal condition of human bodies. a consequence d perhaps their organic openness to culturai completion, bodies must take the social order as their productive nucleus. (Grosz x-xi)

Thomas. speriking about bh. Blood, says:

Before that I was writhg but not in any dedicated way. 1 wasn't ready to. 1 wasn't ready to reveal myseif at all. They were reaily terrible stories, Then 1 reached a point of despair: it didn't matter any more. It was something 1 had to work out. and the oniy way 1 could do it was to organize the pain and turn it into art. 1 realized that it wasn't going to kiiI me. So 1 r e d y be, =an to write, to go down deeper. ,And then you can get a h d of distance. Start selecting words and phrases and decide how you're going to convey the intensity because you can step back (Wachtei 5)

By writing Mm. Blood as alternamg voice sections. Thomas represents the two aspects of

corporeality forrndy. However. she manipulates the language. figures and representations

of this double narrative and establtches associations among sections CO create a namauve

ebb and flow that works against dialectic thinking. Isobei's resistance to binary conceptions

of reproduction is shown through consecutive sections which often describe the same

incident. like the passages about her trip CO the hospital. but reproduce these scenes with

variation. often through the use of meemomy. Variation, metonymy, repetition and word

play become linguiçtic strategies through which the radical matemal subject transgresses

reproductive dialectics and constructs her corporeah-.

With the two narrators both representing a single body, Thomas can be seen ta

represent the body as a "pureiy sudkce phenornenon. a cornplex, rnultifaceted surface foided

back on itself. e-xhibiting a certain torsion but nevertheles a £iat plane whose inscription

produces the (illusion or &ects of) depth and interiority'' (Grosz 1 16). In Mrs. Blood, Isabel's

body becomes a "bt plane" as she Lies horizontal and stiu while her dreams and mernories

swirl and eddy on the narrative~surface. -And the "metaphor of the body as a page or strip on

which a social text (or several texts) is written will be useful in reconfigurations of body"

(Grosz 1 1'7). Writing as a maternal subject. Thomas @es an example of "body writing" in

which te- "construct bodies as networks of meaning and social sigmfkance, producing

them as meaningful and functional 'subjects' widiin socml ensemblesn (Grosz 1 if). -4s Içobel

struggles to recognise the ways in which she has been wntten by "social texts." çhe attempts

CO read her body, her race and gender. through the saclal textç of -&ca. through black

bodies.

Thomas has said "'one way of bleeding without bleeding is to be a poet or a writer'"

(Bowering 22). The wisping silver strands interlacing the beily and breasts of maternal

bodies become the spidery black tert of the mother Miting. The seeping blood of miscarriage

becomes the fluid narration of the noveL "How long does it take for the b l d in a dead

man's veins to dry? ... Does it ail dry up iike unused ink in mkwells or does it Lie in the labres

and mibutaries of the body like stagnant water" @h. Blood 142)? Thomas writes the body

in a way that "conceives of subjectivity on the mode1 not of latency or depth. but of surfacen

(Grosz viiiï. "1 am covered with mernories like barnacles. Weighed down, encmsted with

them so chat only a vague outline of my onginal shape remainsn @h. Blood 148).

To say that the body is "purely surfacen visibiy contradicts the interiority of fetal Me.

and yet writing binh is a way of recovemg to a flat plane the incerior surfaces of

pregnancy. ,ildams States that *[l]ib;e the infant's symbiotic unicy with the mother, another

state that cannot conceive of itç own end. labor is finice. And its end signals a (re)emergence

into the symbolic. where representawon wiU only serve to accentuate its loss" (23). The b h .

BimùhIrs. Thmg relationship is much like a symbiotic unity chat can't conceive of its own

end. as is writing. In aucobiographical ficwon. libre . . . a i s Nin's "Birth" or Buch Emecheta's

The Jovs of Motherhood (t979), however, the mother writing does know how events have

ended, doeç h o w how the iabor proceeded, does know if there is a healthy cMd or not, and

thus can shape. rewrite. and textuahe her e'rperience accordingly.

In the same way that Thomas articulaces Isobel's corporeality through the forma1

and thematic elements of the novel. she exposes the fiction of self-actualization and shows

how Isobel is dependent on others. that her subjectivicy has been achieved through

relationshps: "It is impossible for me to see other people as separate h m myseif' (birs.

Thing 191). Içobel recognises that her hagrle sense of self is a relational and e-xperiend

constnict. "1 have memories preserved intact, iike men in peat, to be found by a later me"

(Mrs. Blood 33). O'Brien argues that "the rnediation of cyclical and historical time [occurs

throughj human reproductive Labof (168). Maternai consciousness. then. has the p o t e n d

to mediate tirne. In Mrs. Blood, even though the narrative appears to foilow linear t h e , the

interweaving of memory and eqerience with the historical present of the narrative disrupts

the linear surface. suggestmg a ma ternd consciousness aware of cyclical relationships and a

different notion of tirne. Indeed. Thoffias manipulates notions of past and present by

collapsing distinctions benveen [hem during the process of Isobel's pregnancy. The present

moment of the narrative Leads to memorîes of her past aud articulates her genedogy as a

maternai subject.

The way the three secuons of the novel are formeci subtly manipulates and

condenses time, rdecting Esobei's perception of the progress of her fkagde pregnancy. "The

narrative is divided into three parts: each part reduces itself in length by approxhately

haK... Pt] compresses and squeezes the 'time' of the c e n d character in such a way as to

emulate the course of her pregnancv and her attempt to control the feaf (Gottlieb and

Keitner 3k3. By drawing attencion to the malleability of time perception Thomas sug, -estsi

bodies are integral to history, to memories "found intact like men in peat." The present of

Isobei's gravid body includes the p a x of her se-nial and non-matemal body; her body

extends beyond linear the. However. because maternd subjects are culturally thwarted in

e-xpressing many of these mgress ive time elements. corporeality in pregnancy, b m h and

mothering is seen as a linear process of development. Athough many mothers will attest to

the change in time perception during these eventç. how a mother perceives the t h e flow of

her pregnancy and birth often goes unspoken.

1 would like ta offer a close reading of four consecutive sections of the novel 15 in

order to demonstrate the ways in winch Isobei's genedogy as a materna1 subject emerges

through the past of the novel. dirough memory. 1 ~ v d l then move to a discussion of the

present of the novel and the ways m which fsobel reads her relationships with the nurses.

doctors. and other women on the ward. how she reacts as a maternai subject. These

memories occur after Isobel has been sent home h m the hospid. and "out of the sickroom

atmosphere" (Mrs, Thing 152). However. "~lreakfast in bai, and then the cheerfid soundç of

someone eise putting my house in order" (152) make her feel Mie a useless appendage. It

takes her a few days to adjust to bemg home and doing nothmg. "So last night 1 felt for the

fkst tirne as though I belonged in Jason's house and hadn't stumbled into a stsanger's place

by mistake" ( A h . Thmg 174)- Wer feelings of aiienation in her own home are associated

with sim;iar feelings in the homes dochers.

Mrs. Thing is remembering her 6rst winter as Jason's new d e , living at hu

parents' home in London. This pmod of her life is marked by the conmadiction between the

love she feels for Jason and the antagonism she feek for Jason's unnamed mother. e e d y

similar in tempement tn her own.16 She describes Jason's mother with reveaiing

understatement: "Usudy she only lit the fue in the breakfkt m m and 1 would huddle

there, waiting u n d 1 could deceatly go upstairs and take a nap. (She had ail the housework

done by 'elevenses')" (146). She feelç "as though. n-hen [Jasonj left the house. he took the

real me with him and 1 was pst a stand-in. waitmg in another peson's part" (146). Her

statement that th;c is "the t%st winter of my discontent" (146) is an apt ailusion to her

status as dispiaced wife with no house of her own- Here we see h h . Thing's dependence on

her relationship with her lover. h t e d a t in many sections: she feeis "incornpiete" when

separated, isoiated "1 feel as though 1 were simpty bobbing m the wacer. keeping rny head

up, waiting to be rescued" (146)-

hh. BIood, in connast. remembers the ame when she was "young and f d i of

ragery" (146); she recalls instances of desire and sensuaiity in both her S a i r with Richard

and her early marriage. In a memory she says "1 borrowed a shilling fimm my love just so 1

could wonder at the beauty of his skin while he was sleeping" (146). This rnemory slides into

another when she remembers Jason as they "la,- together on the weil-kept Lam oblivious to

the badc bedroom windows of the other houses dong the rown (14'7). it is one of the rare

moments when Isobel is oblivious of others in her cime with Jason. These mernories. though.

are infiltrated by Jason's mother and her domineerïng attitude.

Evh. Blood's merno- suggests the transgressive potential of materna1 sexuality , a

semiality that is forbidden in the mother-in-law's domain. as it is forbidden in the present of

the noveL "Last night I woke up and wanted him and was asharned ... 1 lay in the dark and

Listened to the drums and waated him so badly rny legs ached with the effort to stay stiU

Why couldn't 1 wake hun up and teU him that" ( b h - Thuig lm)? The power of Jason's

mother to affect the newiyved relamnshp is conveyed thmugh her use of language as a

weapon of grult. in an episode narrated twice.I7 the newlyweds and Jason's parents have

been out at a party, posslbiy Isobel's babp shower. During the d m e home. Jason's father

talks about the trifie they had eaten. one he had publicly calied delicious. "'Btoody a m

d e . ' he said" (147), and Jason's mother chastises him severely for his hypocrisy . suggesting the way in which mothers are e-xpected to maintain and transmit moral

imperatives.

in this section. however, Mm. Blood W h t s a single phrase--"May you be

forgiven" (147), shifting attention KI notions of sin and giuit that give meaning to ideas iike

hypocrisy. Signrficantly, hh. Blood's sensuaiity is also punctuated by &t. The question

resonates: who needs to be forgiven and for what? Memory then jumps to Richard, co a time

of constant inhibition. H e disdains social conventions: a Iover who tells her "Ite never made

love between 0xf;Drd and Wadord Junction" (147), then proceeds to lock the door and do so

with her. Maternai se.nia1.i~. then. revisits scenes of past passion and reveals the hidden

content of the memory, in this case g d t and hypocrisy. One of the thiags isobel struggles

with is the piit she feels about-uninhibiteci sexuality. Like her mother in Son= part of

Isobel is a h i d of passion and responds with g d t when she transgresses prohibitions on

female sexuality. lblemorïes of passion seem out of place in a woma. restricted to a hospital

bed. but Isabel, in many w a p . is passionate in her fear. She fears deeply. "'.-1~ez-uous du

p&" (143, the phrase that ends the section. remin& the reader that mernories. m.

e s p e d y the good ones, conmin traces of pain.

In the fohwing secuon. Mrs. Thing speaks again. This passage, which i quote in

fuU speaks to the ways in w&ich society normdy de& with the "subconscious" aspects of

Two days after 1 got home with Mary 1 dreamed that 1 knocked over the pram or let it go, whde 1 was out waiking and the baby's head came off and r d e d out into the road. where it was crushed by an oncoming car. I was very hghtened abour that dream and woke Jason up and told him.

"It was just a dream." he said: "go back to sleep." In a minute or two he was breathing heaviiy agam.

But 1 sat awake. hugging my knees and willing myseif not to get up and check the baby, who was sleeping in the next room.

It was no m. and GnaUy I tiptoed out inta to cold hail and down to Mary's m m . where of course she was sound asleep in her carry cot on Jason's ald beci

But sbe heard me and poked her head in. "Is anything the matter, dear?" And then. he m. rawning and crumpled in his striped pajamas. "What's

the matter. love?" And 1 said "Nothtng, 1 just felt m e checking on the baby." And he said. "1s somethmg the matter with her. then? What's the matter

with her?" And 1 said "Nothinq, i'm going back to bed now." And she gave me a suange look and lacer 1 heard her say, "Weli. I'm wide

awake now. Make us a cup of tea. Father, there's a darhg." And Jason slept on- Innocent. U n m u b l e d And after a wMe I stopped

telling him about rnr dreams. (146-'7)

Isobel "stopped" sharing her mxiety ntith Jason in part because of the omnipresence of

Jason' s mother, the "&en of rhe passage. Like d anxiety, this one also remained

unarticulated uni5.i her current moment of crisis. Western society attempts to impose strict

iimitations on the intensity of the mother/child dyad by discounting materna1 fears and

imposing notions of e d y ind~iduality through the ph+ separation of mother and child.

The decapitation represented in this dream suggests Isobel's deep fear that

consciousness wiU aot help her mothering--heads easily corne off bodies. Isobel feeis, as do

many new mothers. that she is iaept. a feeling reinforced by the presence of her werly-

efficient mother-in-law. Isobel tries to do the rïght thing "wilhg bersew not to get up and

check the baby ," but fin& ic irn~mssihle iiot to look, to fincl out if her fears are realized.

ironically; Isobel recognises that the hundary between dreams and reality is not as

concrete as it may seem. an insight not supported by the adults around her. That the clream

surfaces now, when she is "safe" and home from the hospital, could aiso indicate her fear

that she rnight aomehow be implicated in her current pregnancy'e inetability. The end

result, though, is Isobel's silence, precisely the silence that covers anxiety and poses as

maternai cornpetence.

L'receediiig t h i~üéimgos 1 Iiuvo just Cliwuslied is orle Mm. Ulwd nürrii tcs sctting uo

the material reality informing Isobel's dream imagery. Jason's father is happily discussing

the new yram he is guing to buy for the coming baliy. Isubel c h m e s a c l i f i r en~ one, but

"Vath" is conlcnl; lic'tl "gel thc i~ i Co cldiver it ncnl wcckn ( I 4 4 ) .

"Oh Fath!" she said, putting down her neede "No. dear. You can't do that!' "Why not? We coulcl keey it in the passage." "Oh it's not tlrat, dear. It's,..well..nobdy has expensive things like prarns

clcliverad until tlie Lüby's barn. NoMy. Suu rnusln'c do it k'rirlicr deür. SIie pickeci up her work.

"Whad? Why? Oh. I see." l i e s twd therc awkwurd, the catalogue iri his hand.

"Well, 1'11 order it, shall I? It's al1 right to do that, isn't it?* ... Jason, back late, eating his warmed up supper in the Sitting room.

Listening a t the beclroom door. "1 don't know, dear- She said she was tired. I expect she's fast asleep by

now." (144)

This passage is significant because it casually intertwines a number of motifs. and because

it is narrated by Mrs. B l d . W ith Mrs. B l d as speaker. this exchange between parents-in-

law suggests the ways in which social conventions, t a h s and suptxstitions operate on

many Ievels, including the M y . We can see that the earlier dream imagery, the lnby falling

dreamtime imaging. In her dream the pram Liecornes for Isobel a s y m h l of loss, a symbol of

death-it draws attention to what isn't yet, the emergent baby. In the passage above there

threütening and sinister stepmother like the one in Cinderella, to which Thomas alludes in

t3lown Fimireg and other works.18 The passage also suggests the matriarch's role as keeper

of conventions and taboos. The image of the crone is brought to mind, resisting the naïve

young queen,'' not yet d e r in the kingdom.

The knitting needles and the handwork on the lap aice a h symbols of the efficient

mother, busily making garments in her "spare time." It is this kind of officious, industrious

mother that Isobel resists and defînes herseif against, yet longs to be. "But 1 would not dash

into town, even if welI, to buy up flour. 1 would no6 voiunteer a t the iibrary or take a carload

of children to the pool. 1 cannot 'run up' dresses unless I have a pattern or cook without a

recipe. 1 am not, reaUy , very self-reliant or very sociab ten ( M m Blood 16 1). The kind of

mothers living in the compound remind Isabel of Jtimn's mother, who "would love it uut

herew (161). In the present-tense narrative of the novel, Isobel fears the women will find her

out, discover that she is posing as a competent mother. She hides under her "deiicate

conditionn (161). and uses the words of the women she fears to stay immobile and languid,

even when she is ailowed home €rom the hospital. "And if [Mary MI, rugged, capable, cope-

able, who could drive to the doctor's with her chiid's bitten-off tongue on the seat beside her,

feeis that way then somehow it must be the right way to feer (Mrs. Thing 139).

But that competent, fearless rnother would never have a dream of decapitation, or sc,

lsobel imagines. In the final Line of the passage about the pram that can not be bought until

the baby is bom, we can see a suggestion of the power wielded by old women'a speech. Isobel

is hiding away, her desire thwarted and replaced by forehding, her delight in a new pram

transformed into thoughts of maNormecl and murdered babies. Indeed, the narrative moves

to a newspaper account oEa bahy girl with multiple body parts, who is "operated on " and "is

now quite a normal girl with only a scar left to mark her former defonnityn (145)-Ounlike

Mrs Blood whose sciirs can not be seen, but, who sees herself as somehow "deformed."

Macabre and grotesque hclies inforrn the narrative: decapitated babies in dreams,

newspaper accoun ts of deformed children, a mongoloid girl from Isobel's c h i l d h d . These

images are reminiscent of the grolesques and chirneras that populate fairy-tales and

niytl~ulugy. Hlowevcr, 'Ilioiiiua rcproaeiits Ille grutcaque an alipect OC ma~eriiil iiï" and

materna1 consciousness. Such images speak to real matemal fears of producing a deformed,

and thus substandard child, and also ta the persistence of the idea that deformed children

are the visible producis of maternai sin!' Ilowever, the white women amund her--those

otlior rriottioru, rricdclli ~( 'ciiri ipc~cii~ riiotlidicnd, vcry Llritidi, vcry "riiuiic-don--1licy tlo rio^

give in to fear, a r e never decapitated, incapacitated.

Decapitation is a motif that appears often in buth this text and Blown Firures. .As

such it is a representation bursting with associations for IsobeL She describes a childhood

scene travelling with her family on their annuai road trip, climbing a narrow and twisting

road:

Anyway, there was the milk truck on i t s side and another car smashed underneath i t and bload and milk together running al1 across the road. The

min wasn't heavy enough to wash i t aU away and there must have been hundreds of gaiions of miik in the truck. The driver of the mi& truck had been decapitated as the truck went over and a i i this blood had run out of him and onto the road before the ambulance men had got there. My mother shouted a t us not to look -- "Don't look!" -- but of course we did, and the head was just there in the road a s we went by. My father didn't see it -- he was staring straight ahead and cursing -- but 1 saw it, and so did my sister and of course my mother. The ambulance men, who'd been putting the body in the ambulance, 1 guess, were coming back, presumably to get the head, for they had a blanket or a bag with them and looked startled and furtive as my father drove by, like someixxiy caught doing something he shouldn't. Poaching or something iike that. (Mrs. Thing 20)

We see here that Isobel's memories are purposehl and relational. They resonate and bounce

from one another, told and retuld, the way mernories build up in the conscious and

subconscious as a subject goes over an experience. tier witnessing of a decapitation in real

t h e erupts a s a symbol of worry and loss, both in terms of the baby she is growing and in

terms of herself. Lying prone, she is like a decapitated head, thinking away while her body

does something she doesn't Mie. Thus we can say that Thomas, far from placïng random

thoughts and associations in a n alternating order, carefully constructs each narrating voice

to explore the dialectic of mothering. Isobel's mernories are neither isoiated nor derived

solely &om actual accidents, but incorporate the feelings, smeiis, textures and clreams that

construct Isobel's subjectivity. In many ways, she constructs her matenal subjectivity

against the representütions of mothcring availü1)lc to hcr in her own history, r1ecl)ly rifraid

she will end up like the other mothers.

Isobel's memories articulate the source of many of her feelings of isolation and

alienation within her own culture. Ln the present time of the novel, her identiîy as a white

woman in an African hospitiil isolates her visibly. Her white skin becomes the mark of her

difference, a difference that has always been there, but which Isobel has disguised.

surrounded by people who share her whiteness. While lying in the hospital bed, she

aearches for connections, for inclusion in the community of nurses, doctorç, hospital

workers, and the other women patients. Early in the novel, Mrs. Blood speculates about the

young black janitor who cleans the only hallway she can see from her hospital bed. She

attempts to dissolve the boundaries separating them hy remembering that she, too, once

swabbed floors and ernptied bedpans. It is a memory that first presents itself as a point of

cornmonality between Isobel and this "other" person, the janitor, but it only offers the

cornfort t.f false similarity.

Soon the two men who clean the floors will wander in with their tins of turpentine and Mansion Polish and we will inhale the perfume of their labours. It is dificuit to tell how old they are (these people age in a M e r e n t way from us), but one is certainly a lot older than the other. They Wear cut-

off, ragged. thaki trousers. LiLe grotesque parodies of US. college boys on holiday. and the inevitable ragged undershirts. The nurses treat theni very bady ("StaEf" in particuiar, but i hate her on other grounds than these). 1 snde ot them in my egalitarian way and once in a while the younger one acknowledges my greeting with a solemn n d . Woulcl he believe it if 1 told him I had a job like that once in orcier to get sumrner money? "Yes. Madame!" he would say, but he wouid not understand, (15)

In the black janitor's worlci, white wornen do not swab floors. However, Thomas does not

articulate the story behind the "understanding" a t this point in the narrative. The story of

this sumnier job. first retated in Sonrrs, is one of the stories embedded in hlrs. 13loot1, one of

the barnacles. What is at fmt concealed is that lsobel worked on a women's ward in a

lunatic hospital with dementeci and seniie women where she regularly came in contact with

trangressive Mies . There were old women who regularly used fecal matter as silly-putty,

women who were incontinent or insane. While on this job, Isobel has two horrifie 2 1 enperiences, one in which she cut her hand on a contarninated scalpel blade, and one in

which she was left with strips of flesh in her nails while helping attend a corpse.u In both

these incidents, she sees and feols on her Lwdy the homfk aspects of transgressive bodily

lluidtj. AL t lie ~)rc?sciit t111ie of 111~' tmrra~ke, stic lin& tierself a protluccr of thcse fluicis, and

thus, possibly, a prculucer of horror. The "job like that" turns out to be very dilrerent

ir1deed.2~ but that is a story hlrs. U l d can not tell here because she fears that neither the

Mricuri licopie rior the white pqi lc , for diiTercn1 reasons, would bclievc hcr.

Thomas brings hlrs. 13lood's sense of ciifference and isolation to the surface of the

tert thwugh Iaobel's readings of her M y and the black bodies arourid her. lier thoughts

about the black janitor discussecl ahve slide unlmoken ta considerations of what her

They also bring the h d on trays from somewhere rather far away because it's coIJ by the lime i l cornes aarund. M y food is terrible and tasteiess. "European-blanti" it says on a piece of paper which is planteci. like a h g , on top of rny cold porridge. 1 cannot sit up to see what the others get but it smells deliciuus -- spicy anci full of sunlight and colour. And througti the morning, although visiting hours aren't till three, friends of the womcn here will corne with pans ut'stew and papaws and sliced oranges, and they wiU talk together in their tiigh, nasal, rather bee-like voices, and eüt; and the nurses will cal1 greetings and stop to chat and pay no attention to the mariy rules which are Leing broken. (15)

hlrs. Blood cornes from another warld, a bland, white world. cold and tasteless compared to

the vibrant Life around her, alien to her western conception of hospitals. Colors and srnells

becorne each other; the women are not isolated but "bee-liken suggesting busy. communal

activity and a nurturing thmugh food that heightens Mrs. Blood's sense of isolation. She

exists in a diEferent space from the others; patients, nurses or janitors, in relation to them

she is in "anotlier dimension altagether" (14). Furthemore, Isobel is prone, restricted to bed

and lying clown, her field orview limited. tunnel-like; she is not making love and her eyes

are open. "The phenornenon of being 'horizontal man' for such a long time is -- I am

convinccd of it -- beginning to affect me. 1 gaze up a t the ladies like sorne enormou8 baby in

a cot and I'm sure their faces look quite other than if 1 were comrnunicating with them face

to face" (blra. 'i'hing 28). In Iriobel's new world, then, nothing is quite what it appears to be.

She is isolated, prone and "other" to those around her.

Thomas has çommented that since Isobel "has such a very tenuous sense of herseif

as a yhysical entity, she pmhably feels, as most of us do, that what you do is what you are"

(E3owering 24). Contemplating loss, she lies prone in the hospital "where she's really

Frightcnetl, not only ufraiii rihe'r going to dio. but rrhc looklr around her EL rbirib.~ arenl being

conducted in a way chat she understands a t all (sic)" (Thomas, cited in Bowering 16). in the

hospital locale then, Isobel searches around her and within her for images of women and

mothers h t she cün untlercjiantl und feel comhrtable with. "Conhsion. criiburrassment,

and mixetl feelings are the emotions of real motherç" (Butling 198).

In Mrs. Hltuitl, a s in many birth stories, the mother's relationship to lier nurses and

doctors is very important. Such relationships are often textualized, and in morlern birth

narratives, wumen writers tlisplay a strong ambivalence tuwards these figures. Doctors and

nurses speak for authority, for the institutionalized knowtedge of birthing. They are

responsible for sys temic routine, for technological rituals, for things the mother did not

want to happen. Ductors, in psrticular, are represented in ways that Loth ciisplay and

challenge the hierarchical control of information. They are the ones "presurned to ~ n o w , " ~ '

and the ones w ho censor women's perceptions of their birthing bodies by withholding a t will

the terms of medical description. When kt rs. Blmtl was written, women were expected to

"give themselves overn into their obstetrician's care and Isobel's relationship with Dr.

Biswas certainly sliows thia tranotérence. Niirses, though, are in a more cornplex

relationship with the mother for they are bath authority figures and (possibly) materna1

ligures, wlio ruplacc the trütli~ioriül gütliaritig oC woriitln a t the scerie of Liriti. Numes are

buund ta apply the rules of the institution and to remain ancillary to doctors, and are often

seen by birthing wornen a s unsympathetic.

hl rs. LiIt~)cl tlrarnatixcs tlic coinplexity of the molher's relationsh il) i.o iristil.iitional

i~irtli ü~tetitlari~s. L3ucüuse of tlic Aïricati location, however, tliese relütiotisliips are

particularized in ways that show how race is mocMed by gender and gender is m d e d by

race. I d e l is completely dependent on the nurses-Alexandria, Esther, and Elimbeth-and

rascinated by them. 'I'hey, in turn. are fascinated by her, her white skin and red hair, her

frailty. The nurses are women of color, as are most of the other women on the ward, and

lsobel is keenly aware of the ways in which this isolates her.

I would like to ask to ask them what they call their periods. I would Iike very much to be objective and anthropological toward them. a s Jason apparently can be when he visits the stool village or the village where the women make the smooth-bellied waterpots. He asks them questions about their crafi and a h u t themselves as craftsmen. Why can 1 not ask these nurses similar questions about themselves a s women? What do you call your periudu, among yourselves? What do you feel a h u t virginity, ses, contraception? 'i'tiese art. the children of the new order -- not Eliualietli maybe, but the oiher two. Sixteen and seventeen, wearing short sliirts and worliing independently of family o r of trile. The piIl is available here, L know chat. AISO. Delfen. although, lilie everything else. no& always availüble. Do they have intercourse a t a11 and with whom and in what position? Yet they are not really yuite free from the cocoon. They went to mission schouls, and Alexandria has a tribal mark across one eheek. And on their days off they do not Wear wigs and European skirts, but the traditional long dresses made of riiümniy clotli. ... 'i'hcy are still ruoreci, 1 gueirii, in the colonial and l r i h l past, however free they may seem ta an avid reader of the Natiortal Gecgruphie.

1 would like to really knaw them, but I sense that they are only as verbse as they are because I am a stranger. and they are young and rornantic. So I niust arrange the snippets of information 1 gather on a threacl of the purest conjecture. (hlrs. Blwd 83-4)

lsobei's whiteness isolates her frorn the kind of knowledge she thinks the Lilack nurses

represent. She wants to understand difference within gender, and craves to know about the

ways zürican wornen construct their black bodies, how they read their race as well as their

sexuality and desire. lsobel wants to lie "objective and anthropohgicaln in the way she

leams about her nurses, but cannot, suggesting that the objective, distanced stance cannot

yroduce answers ahout how women feel about theu reprductive lives, especially when

those lives are marked by rracial difference. Isobel, though, has constructed her image of

African women froni a rornantic perspective. .& an "avid reader of the Nationel Ceo~arihiç"

lsobel reütls ntirrüiive~ tliüc fced lier romiriitic vision of the "freen bluck woiiiüii. She knowe,

too, that stie is "making it up." that she can only speculate about the nurses' lives as black

women. I lor desire io Lic objjcctivc. collitles wit h lier ability to speculate. mil so she mis-

rcads, oc rathci, iloesn't recrtl l~eyond her original romanticized reading. "Woiiicn here wear

wigs of straight lacqrterctl jet-1)lück hair, particullirly, t he younger, moclcrri' ories. 1 didn't

recognise our chariiiing Stall'Niirse when she lirst appxared without her unili~rrn and in her

shining wign (Mrs. iilocwl 35).

become the object of her inquiry, she becomes the object of theirs. What emerges through

Isobei's siory iti how her whiteness is iilm a color, and equally constructeti by the blacb;

nurses. lsobel is to them a romantic figure, an exotic stranger. The nurses rcad her fair skin

a s a marker of othcr physical differences, especially a s a sign of fragility.

Elizabeth and Alexandna were washing me today and exclaiming over the whiteness of my skin. "Please, you have very f i e skin."

" I t has it's disadvantages." "What kind of disaclvankiges?" (And as they talk they soap my legs and

rinse them with a cool d o t h and soap my back -- very carefully and tetiderly as though 1 were a precious relic or an exotic bit of Qotsam washed up on an alien beach.) (ME. Thing 46).

lsobel reaùs their perception of her "fine skinn as a sign of her uniqueness. her

"preciousness," as though her skin marks her a s more white than white, a rare

represen ta tive of her race.

Her M y becornes a site of speculation for h e r nurses and the ûther women of coior

on the ward. The black women use her Lwnly and her fragility to construet ihcir view of

w hiteness.

The two girls a r e very proud of my delicate skin, and my bath has becorne a great ritual to them. much as one might look forward, 1 guess. to dusting a rare figure of ivory or alabaster. My left sida Lelongs to Esther. my riglit to Alexandria, and they move slowly down me, running their fingers over my pale shouiders, my arms. my legs and exclaiming to Elizabeth. who is busy writing up the order book or making swabs. The other wornen in the würd juin in and there is rnuch g d - n a t u r e d bunter at rny expense. hly skin gives me a kind of Gulliver-quality, for them, d o n g with my virtually horizontal state.

"What did she say'?" "She said you are unbaked bread.' Laughter. "What a re they saying?" "'Mi. 1'Iiey are saying .. . welt ... Thcy are asktng what color is yntir pirbic

hJ1r.'' Uut 1 do not rnind, riotu; it is a break in the loneliness, and their Iüughter is

riot unkinci. 1 tell them the story of the Princess and the Pea, which ihey rujmit, with great glee. in the vernacular. I also tell them il is not a ~ C M M ~

~ h i n g to have such skin, and 1 secretly believe they agree with me. although they always argue very politely on the other side. @h. Thing 104- 10; my en~phasis)

The "now" in the passage is suggestive. Although Isobel wants to be a part of the community

of women in the hosptial ward, she keei~s objcctifying herself, a "rare figure of ivory or

alribaster." lt is when she can accept herself as "othern to them, when she can tell a story

that tloes not belong to their traclition but nonetheless speaks to thcm as women, that she

can participate in their fernale community. Isobel does not feel such acceptance within her

own white community, where laughter might disguise scorn. She daesn't aclinowledge, in

this passage, thcir "not unkindn laughter might be unkind if she was black. By sharing

stories, in this case a fairy-tale, she attempts to comect their reading of whiteness as

privilege. Isobel, who has always k e n anxious about the way other women yerceive her,

wants to perceive their laughter as an indication of her belonging.

lsobel desires to know about these women in rnuch the same way they desire to

know about her. Isotiel, though, perhaps purposefully, glosses over her ignorance a h u t how

white women feel about the same questions of corporeality--pubic hair, bleeding, chiidren.

These are the kinds of questions that Isobel coulh't ask her mother in S O W ~ , and certainly

dcwsn't ask Jason's mother in hl rs. I3im~I. Isobel Iücks a close female friend in either text.

During her extendecl stay in the hospital, isobel develops an unusually intirnate relationship

with her nurses that helps to fil1 a gap in her life. Isabel feels separated from the possibifites

of sistert~ood and the wornen of the hospital signify such a possibility. hl m. Ulwd tells us;

-And now five nighties a re not enough, and Esther and Aiexandria, sornetimes Elizabeth, take them home to the nurses' quarters and wash and iron some every night. They corne back smelling faintly of scorch and charcoal. Do they talk about me with the other girls and say here, look, this is the white woman's b i d , so that a crowd gathers around while the charcoal is heating and they pass my bloatly garments from hanil tii brown liaiirl und coinment sur~ly becuuoe they are women and maybe because they arc nurses on the universal calarnity of pain and birth and blood? (83)

'L'tie imagery here, the three black women passing the blootlied garrnent from hand to hand,

is fraiight with ambivalence. Although the rcader is invitecl to reacl this passage as a

"un iv~lrml'' nioirwnl.. Isolictl ifi wcirdcririg, q r c m r lai ing, t.t;ii t tirrr lilcx~cl IH ho ol)jc!c:t. of ISul.Iicr

a ~ i d .-\lc*~aritlriü's scrutiny, or h e i r discourse. lscibct wonders if they speak rimoiig cach other

aliuut lier iti ~ l i c way die woutil like thcm to spcak with tier. 110 thcse women rejnsent the

three stages of woman--maiden, mother, crone? For Isobel, ironically, the blood that is a sign

d h t h l ik and death is hcr only material link to Esther, Alexanclria and Elizabeth.

Isabel's tlesire lo appropriate w h a ~ she reücls into these "other" women is

problematic. African women do view themselves and each other differently, but as Isobel

speaks for them we clo not hear their points ofview. lsobel's discourse is a forni of

coionization, unfortunately similür to that which appropriates the black wornan's body as a

natural birth metaphor. lsobel knows it is her clifference that ironically allows her entrance

into these womon's livcs. lives stie tloesn't touçh when isalatetl in the teacher's compound.

llowever, her romantic, exotic reading of her nurses is interrupted by witnessing how they

ill-treat women of their own race.

Tlieir hantls are gcntle as they wash me and therefcire i concluilc tllcir reaction to suiTering must be the same as mine. Yet they treat the other girl lehind the screen with a mordistic contempt that would do credil tu my

Aunt Hettie and her rigid views on sin and the devil's business. (hlrs. Thing 84)

The girl behind the screen is unmamed and pregnant, suggesting both black and white

women are restricted by prohibitions on female sexual freedom. Aunt Hettie is a character

from Songs. the only religious character. She tries to intimidate the young Isobel into

chaetity and ie relontless in her religioue harranguing. And eo we can eee hem that the

black wonien in the novel are oEered as countcr images to ~ h e white women--the teacher's

wives, her mothers, the wives of imported government staff--in Isobel's life. present and

past.

However egali tarian Isobel desires to be, she reads black woman as somehow c h e r

to nature, to the rhythms of parturition and lactation, sexuaiity and the "naturalness" of

niotherhood, "The primitive woman squats down in the fieid in the same position she uses to

evacuate her bowels. Probably she is mounted from behind or standing up a t least. She Lies

down just to die" (Mrs. Thing 118). Isobel is speaking for the "primitiven woman here,

assuming that daerences in birthing also lead to différences in sexuality. What is unique,

and problematiç, to Thomas's writing is that the black nurses embdy the contradiction

between nature and institution Liy uccupying the position in her birth story usually occupied

by a white woman. The black woman as representative of the "primitiven is literalized in the

bodies of Isobel's nurses. Yet it is their same badies that expose Isobel's misreacling.

Wtiat Isobel sees are the crowded, noisy conditions in the hospital's courtyard and

open areas.

The courtyard of the hospital was filled with people then, as it must im now aiid every day. People on benches, people on the concrete pavement, people talking, eating, sleeping. People with dirty bandages or clean, people with cüsts and crutches, weeping chilclren, sleeping chiltlren, someotic vomiting irlto our path and the snwll of oranges and sicknesti. i t was net. quiet, fike the doctor's waiting room or a hospital corridor back home ... and II) was ashanietl aiid frigl~tcnect (one anlong sa mtiny) t.o think auch a critel rioriliberal tliough. (Mrs. 'l'iiing 38)

Isobel, tlien, tlespite lier longirig to belong and to learn from African womeii, is fearful of the

crowds, the noise, the blatant disease of the hospital. The chaos and mess are kept away

[rom her, niuch as lhe blue curtains keep her bleecling isolatctl from the oilier women on her

ward. She is "ashamcd and frightened" to acknowledge the aspects of African lire that

cannot be roman ticized.

What does Isobel actually want from the black women around her? 1 suggest that

Isobel is searching for a way, during the isolation of her rniscarriage, to become self-reliant.

Isobel has constructecl her materna1 subjectïvity through relationships: the wüy she felt an

irnpostor when Jason was not a t home, "not the real me," is similar to t h e way she feels at

the hospital, disconnected from her family. Even though she resents the efficiency of the

compound mothers, she wishes to be as self-reliant as they are. In her blacli nurses, she sees

another representation of self-reliance. The "modernn ones have broken away from their

tribe in order tu work ai the hospital in a way that Isobel cannot yet imagine breaking away

from her feelings of dependency. 25

Thomas portrays the biack nurses, Alexandria, Esther and Elizabeth, in a much

niore sympathetic light t11ati iti usutll in birtli stories. Often, nurses a r c rcpresented as cold,

interfering, dismissive of the laboring wornan's s ~ r u & e . ~ ~ Mthough Isobel receives special

case from them because she is white, the compassion they show isobel is a n emotion many

mothers feel is lacking in their birth nurses. Also unusual in Mrs. Rlrw)cl is the intimate

relationship, almost a friendship, she develops with her physician, Dr. Biswas. 27

ImmobiliLeJ and surrounded by the "paraphernalia" of the hospital, Isobel has time to

contemplatc and enjtiy 1111s relülionship in a wuy thül mrsi pregnaiit wiimcn ilo not. Dr.

Biswas is portrüyetl much more sympathetically than most of the physiciüris in birth stories.

"At first I think he talked CO put me at ease and now it has become a habit -- a kind of

midmorning pi&-me-up. After d l , he and 1 are 'white,' relatively opealring, and thrown

together in a strange countryn (Mrs. Thing 24).

Dr. Uiswas is East Iiitlian and shüres lsobcl's feelings of alienation, wliich helps to

promote their friendship. They play word games while he examines her, but "[tlhere are

barriers we must not cross and we toss the old safe worùs back and forth like w o n tennis

balis" (26). h o t h e r hospital doctor. Ur. Shankar, provides a representation of the more

cornmon type oEndashed linc 'gynie' " (23) firmly in grasp of his authority over the women he

treats.

Dr. Shankar came pounding in wearing his white rubber boots. T h e first tirne -- years ago -- that 1 saw a doctar in white rubber boots 1 coultln't believe iiiy eyes. 1 still think i t lwks vagucly gay and at the saine tinic sinister, as thaugh they work in a slaughterhouse. Dr. Biswas, even when he hüs jus1 conw frorii ttic opcrating rcw~rn, ülwuys fin& the tirnc LU change becli iiito sliucs. I h t riot our l)r. Shankilr. ï 1 hink lie likes the sourit1 t1:cy iiiake as lie cornes alorig the hall. (hlrs. Tliing 22)

The image of the white ruhber boots and the explicit association with a slaughterhouse

brings us to a primary feature of the obstetrical relationship to birthing mothers, that of

rational man helping irrational, animalistic mother:

Slip. Slap. Slip. Slap. Exit Dr. Shankar into the maternity ward. Does he have contenipt for al1 women o r oniy for Mrican women because h e considers h e m inferior and European women because he thinks them weak? C h e

eould speculate that a man h m India, a gynaecologist particularly, might eventually become su saddened by the suffering and stupidity of his own women and so indflerent to the s d e r i n g ofothers more fortunate by reason of birth or economics that he could no longer understand or even tulerate the psychology of pain or menta1 anguish. And does he limit his contempt to the -Mrican wornen on this ward, Senior Officiais-3? How does he act toward the women on the general warcis, for instance? But no, it's too cornplicatecl. Look at this attitude (an attitude that Dr. Biswas shares) towards Elizabeth and .Alexandria iind Crace Abounding. Africans are inferiors, poor or rich. Which uf us, bluck or white, does lie dislikc tlic leasr, I wunder? (hlrs. 'I'liiiig 26)

This passage recalls the way that prepnant and birthing women are represented as animal-

like in medical discourse, "stupid" in their pain and anguuish. Note, though. that thk is the

first instance where Lsobel names the ward she is on, "Senior Oficials-3," a privileged ward.

.As weU, we see hem that Lsobel's speculationa on racial relations are "too complicatedw to b0

pursued in full, suggesting that I d e l is aware of the limits of her colonizing discourse.

In Pufiliail, a novet by Pay Wekion, the nûrtator makes explicit t ha t ctcxtors can see

pregnant women as animalistic, an association that Isobel only speculates about. Liffey, the

pregnant protagonist, is visiting her doctor, Dr. Southey, to ask about some pain she has

been errperiencing.

"Yes, but why?" [l,iffeyl made a special journey to ask hirn. "I rlon'l know," he said irnpatiently. "These things just happen 10 pregnant

latlics." Lle was busy: lie had two patients with terminal cancer. He wished he

could keey his respect for pregnant women. They seemed to him to belong t w conrjdetely to the animal kingdom that it was alrnoat sttunge tu hcür them talk. (155)

l'regnant women are tritüied with "contemjit" and offtciousness that apj~ly across race

lioundüric?~. In the pussage uiioiit Dr. Stianliür, 'l'liomas exposes the rüçist and ~irejudicial

altitutics of birth tlwtors, atli~rides slie believes Dr. Uiswas may share. Ins~catl . even the

nice Ur. Uiswtis is r a c k Içobel's word games with Dr. Biswas involve a complicity with the

privileges of her color and status on the one hand while, on the other, they signal a

concealment, the ciisguise of her bleeding under words. isobers particular &are of

physicality iind cinimality, her bleeding, signals her commonality with other women in the

eyes of her doctor. She deflects her pain and fear, and to some extent his authority, by

juusting with wortls. She constructs a friendly relationship where, in fact, there may be

Iritlecd, as IsoLcl rccognises, ~ h e r e is sumcthing mügicd in wotiien's t~iowlcdge, liut,

from her perspective, it is the science offered by the medical institution that can Save her

pregnancy. I d e l longs for the seeurity of a h l u t e knowledge promised by medicine, but

instead must lay prone, a most untechnological solution to the impending miscamage. She

is offered the comfort of fate: "'You are risking nothing." says Dr. Biswas when he lets

Isobel go home for a while,"'what will happen will happen'" (Mrs. Thing 122), but Dr.

Shankar tells her "'1 wouldn't let you go if you were my patient'" (hlrs. Thing 13 1). Dr.

Biswas's comments, here, set uy an interesting inversion, for authoritative metiical

discourse can't assert its authority over fate, and ul timateiy eit8 in defeat at the site of

know in medical discourse.

tfowever, when it is time for Isubel to go home from the hospital, when her bleeding

has stopyed. her relationship with Dr.Biswas changes. Isabel is sitting up in bed and and

has just taken a little walk with her nurses. She is weak and shaky:

"But of course! You cannot tuse a loi, of b l d and not use your muscles for many weeks and feel ottiarwise. That is to be expected. But is thecc any iheding?"

"Not yet," "Not yet! You are becoming very negative. What is the matter?" "Nothing. I just don't believe it." "You Iiave hccorne KI introspective." "Perhaps, Perliaps I Iiave simply accepted the wlwle thing." "What? That there will be more bleetling? Certainly that is possible. 1 told

yoii the d d s when you came Iiere. You knew that long ago." And the hateful tears began. Esther and Alexandria are worried. Why am 1

crying? Dr. Biswas is obviously exasperated. "But what is the matter?" "Nothing. i don't know." "i thinli," he gives me a traitor's smile, "it is time for you to go home." " 1 lome?" "Yes. 'lbmorrow afternoon." ... Ife shrugs. Ile has Leen operating and is not so attractive with the little

green cap hitling his hair. (klrs. Thing 12 1-22)

Isobel is torn. .As much as she doesn't want tu stay in the hoçpital, i t offers her the only

concrete comfort against the fear of losing her yregnancy. When Dr. Biswas refuses to play

someone "no1 so atlractive," not a friend. "Ile looks at me intently from behind his heavy

glasses. I see on ly an alien face -- the face of the professional" (hlrs. Thing 122).

Isabel, then, is sent home: "And if 1 stay'? The contempt of Dr. Iliswüs (who is not

stupid); the increasing disinclinations to look out of the window a t all; the hurt on Jason's

face; the ladies' am usement a t my 'peculiar' attitude (for everything is Iinown, eventually)"

(Illrs. Thing 122-23). She must leave the now "familiar," the "prectictable waves of Senior

Officals Y-3" (Mrs. Thing 122), and return ta what she knows but is strange to her. home.

This is what is "expectedn of her by everyone: doctor, nurses, husband, the ladies. Again,

Isabel is subjected to the demands of m i e t y not to be sick. not to be an invalid, in-valid as a

maternal subject. Isobel is expected to becorne the self-reliant mother, to "deal withn her

gravict l ~ n l y in an indeoandent way that the navel shows is a mythical çonstrirction.

X mother having a rniscarriage is an unusual maternal figure in literature. She

embodies the contradiction between materna1 selfkacrifice and maternal self-interest. Gad

Kellough shows, in her discussion of the legal discoutse governing reproduction in Canada,

that "human life [isl cibstracted from its dependence on materna1 nurturance" (53) even

wtiile mot.hc?rs are acicially coitipalleci tu riise chiltiren. In füct, "sincc worncn provide the

conditions that enable the interests of others, fernale self-interest ercists only in relation to

those served" ( 148). Mrs. Tliing rcprcsenis one aspect of the mother's position in this

dialectic. She is at unce acutely aware of her baby's survival depending on her nunurance

and of the cliscomfort of being hori~ontal. She expresses the paradox of "female seif interest"

in that she is willing to do anything to Save this child, but she believes she is being punished

fi)r her prcvious seIr-interest, Iiar love of Rictiurd--thcrcCort! she secs hcr lxnly as a "traitor

b d y n (93). Heinliar~ notes that miscarriages are cunsidered "g& in rnany but

they are considered "Liari" "when ... believed to Lie caused by other people's actions ... rather

than by 'nature' or 'Gd1 ' (136). Isabel has internalized this belief as she considers her own

self-interest to have caused the miscarriage, and thus plays out the "expiation" dernanded by

society for her "sin."

Thomas drarnatizes the contradiction of maternal self-in terest th rough her

ap~~ropririLion uC l:liristiun nrytliology, particulüry the virgin birth and ~carisiil~s~antiation.

Lsobel iriiügines ticrself üs a crucifieci, materna1 Christ, as both Mary and Jesus. Thomas

deconstructs Christian mylholoby tu give voice ta the silent woman in the Christian myth,

Mary. I t is through women. through our bleeding without dying, that true

trünsubst~intitition twcur5. Woriicii18 I~ku~cl, tlicn, irlcntifiotr iinivcrsül kinsiiip ttiut.

transgresses race and t h e and so is sacred- Thomas textualiles Isobel's miscarriage

experierictt in a wüy thal "conlftrrils dircctly trüclitionüt imugatj of wotncn" (llutling LW),

suggesting dutions, but not solving the thorny pcoblern of how Isobel can cecuncile her

serise of guilt and lailure a t mothering witli the loss she is undergoing. Uowering suggests

that the "birth occasion gets you out of life into legenri" (21)' and rnythical aspects of the text

invite a subversive reading of Christian mythology. Thomas comments that "giving birth is

an archetypai experience that you can know and remember, whereas these others (being

Lwrn and dyingJ you cannot. Archetypa1 experiences are sort of circular experiences"

(Llowering 2 1). Circularity is an aspect of the femah experience of lime, and so i l makes

sense that Isobel, ptiysically restricted as she is, develops a mythical rela~ionship withui her

consciousness/unconsciousness. Her experiences, when represenied as text. stand outside of

time, free to move forward and backward fsobel is tiee to see herself as a hero in myth. "1

stink therefore I am. This is the bloody and bawd of Christ which was riven for me. Take

this in remernbrance of men Blrs. BIood 21). Thomas has said that Isobei is a "Christ figure.

She sees twrself -- tliis is my M y , which was given for you -- this is what she says in one of

her little hlrs Blood fasrtasies. Drink this, which is her blood, her real b lod , you know, in

remernbrance of men (Bowering 20).

Thomas's revisionist reatiing of Christian mythology places women, soecifically

bleeding women, as the centre of myth. She explicitly relates the eiiperience of h r t h to the

siifferirig of Christ. "And the bluoriy thing in 1 1 1 ~ Lied or on the table grniles and liirgets the

horror and the oulrage and Iiolds out her arms to receivc her viulaior, her hem, her fiuh,

saying, "This is my M y which was given for thee, Feed on me in thy heart by faith and by

thanksgivingn (Mm. B l d 183). Birth is the site of Loth suffering and ascension, replacing

the crucirixion drama. Thomas's Mary is not a quiet conduit for divine birth, but a woman

who yellt;. "'l'o<lüy,' he saitl, 'we wil l discuer, the symbolic significance of the Lllxdy and bawd

of Christ, that is to say, bloody Mary, who propelled tlim, shrieking, into the musty straw

and thoicght al1 over thal wliit*h Iintl jiiul bcgiin'" (Mm. IHINMI 193). : \ l t l~~ i lg l~ llle syntax of

this sentence suggests it is Christ shrieking, the way in which Iwliel daims both roles,

Mary and Jesus, nia kcs the reibrcircc ürnbiguciu~i. Mary, too, in Iwl~el'ri rcvisioning, shrieks.

Lsobel, as blrç. Bloocl, takes over the roles of LMth Mary and Jesus. She becomes not only the

mother o f G d , but ttie etcrnül gwl as well. The suffering of women during Liirth is what

connects them lo the universül, but not as the Christian myth would have i l , ü curse of a

jeaious ancl vengehl god. It is the blessing of woman: "You cursed my pyjamasn (blrs. Blood

73).

Liowever, lsobel is no1 cotnplctely hunes1 wi th either herself or the reader. We can

see that she feeIs guilty , inadequate a s wire and mother, but klrs. Thing tells us that this is

not the only Iwits of guilt.

I pick a fight with Jason because want to hate him, fighting pain with greater pain. 1 wnnt io tell him that I have been unfaithful to hini, wliere aiid when and niaylie even why. Yet 1 cannot. I am a victim of my own sense of sin. It is riot consicleration for Jason that stops me but fear of the gods. I cried out to him that night 'l'm being punished because I didn't Love my father.' h t l he said 'Nansense,' but 1 could tell that he was frightenecl. What if 1 am being punished because 1 was unfaithfui? What would he say to that?

I keep niy secrets hidden, like grenades, beneath the pillow. (102-3)

Mrs. Thing, then, Iieeps secrets Erom her husband. But Mrs. Blood explodes the grenade,

giving voice io the repressed and hidden elements in Isobel's We. It is in Mrs. B l d s

narrative sections that we encounter the enigmatic Richard. Richard is the repressed locus

of Isobel's guilt. He is the reason, as it were. she believes she h being punished with this

miscarriage. It is not that she didn't love her father, but that she loved Richard too much.

Richard was her lover in England, before she met her husband and if he is the one with

whorn she was "~nfi i i thful ,~ then Mrs. Thing is codating relationships and sexual

experiençes. There is no textual evidence, except in the above passage, that Isobel's affair

with Richard occurred at the same time as her relationship with Jason.

There is, on the other hand, much evidence that Isobel's relationship with Richard

was an intense, sexual obsession. ".And 1 still carry the feel of him around witli me like a

birthmarb: or a scar. And that was a long time agon (Mm BIod 66). Ile was a black man, a

free spirit, who treated lsobel with a mixture of love and idifference. It is the intensity of

her feelings for Kichard, and the intense memories of these feelings, that create Isobel's

feelings of unfaithfulness. "Or was it sunply the burtlen of my lust for Hichnrd which I

carried with me for a long, long time and finaily set down with relief on Jason as a hobo

might set down a bundle which has suddenly become too burdensorne to bear" (Mrs. Thing

170)? For despite her love for Richard, he rejects her.

'i'lien he began to sing one of his rutle wngs end we al1 went of to the (kws- IIeys to gel drun k.

And that was nut the reai Richard, because the real one said, "1 don% want anything sordid."

And 1 said, "Neither do 1." aIthough I would have slept with him on a bcrich in the wtliting nmm o r in ~ h e bück scat of a car ....

And it was the real Richard who said, "There is no nice way of saying this," and the unreal Richard who said in the pub, "Fuck off." (hlrs. Blootl 86)

['art of Isol~ei's iiasire t o know t h e African pcoplo can be seen as a Iimging io rcsoive the

bitter contradictions in her memories of Richard--the real Richard versus the rornanticized

liichard.

t3ut in the presen t of the narrative, there is no Richard; there is Jason. lsobel feels a

great ambiguity towards her marriage, towards her love for Jason.

Jason and I lusted after one another, briet'iy and beautifiilly, because we met in a winter when we were both lonely. Why couldn't we Ieave it at that? Wliy dici 1 irisist that it was lave? Why tlid 1 want a (lefinitive scalp for niy LeIl? Why is h e not jus1 a memory, like al1 the rest? Now we are linkecl together like some grotesque infant with two of everything except some vital piece -- backbone perhaps. Our history prevents us €rom ever drawing apart: Mary, Nicholas, the past as "we," not he and 1. (Mrs. Thing 119)

Jason is (lependable. can cope, knows how to face fear. During a violent rainstorm, a few

nights befiire Isole1 miscarrics, she watches clason teach her Jaughter to face fear. "Dut the

house stood against it as Jason had SM against the fear and had made Mary stand against

the fear as well. And 1 know he t m could feel Mary's t e m r but ignored it" (Mrs. Thhg 178).

Jason, then, stands against the fear that consumes Isobel. He can fight, can cuntinue his

daily routine, but is embarrassed by her Fears. Isobei's conflicted feelings towards him

result. in part. from her anger against his self-sulficiency.

In the fmal section of the novel, Isobel experiences her miscarriage. hlrs. B l d

speaks thiv section exclusivoly, suggesting thah only the M y ' s voice iu tip~~rooriate to

Jescribe the miscarriage. She returns to the hospital.

't'hree days and twu nights and on the third night L know it will be over. 1 shake al1 the tinre w w , and cannot eat. l'hey Say perhaps I have a touch

of malaria. but i knaw that it is fiom the effort needed to hold the baby in and keep the pain away.

thon comes and Iiolds my hand and leüves. ( hlrs. D l m I 2 13)

The form of the text is radically altered as the narrative breaks down into sentences and

phrases representing the incoherence of Isobel's suffering. The text ends. however, with

lsobel reliving what has been rigorously repressed. what drives her to feel "1 am no& what I

am" (218). The aftermath of the birth is separated from the rest of the text, two pages in

which the narrator is not identified. Without the narrator's name, we espect that blrs.

Thing/hIrs. Ulooü hüve resolvetl into Isobel. This last section is spokeo througli a phonecall,

a memory from the past. lsobel phones Richard to tell him that she is pregnant and he

dismisses her pregnancy, along with his responsibiiity for it. What has been hiclden until the

final h e of the novel is that Isobel was pregnant with his child, chat her time of "youth and

ragery" came at ü terrible price.

"Iiichard, I've go1 to talk to you." "I'ress Bu tton A." "Oh, Cod. Yes. Richard, I've got to talk ta you. I'm pregnant." ... Only silence. "Richard!"

Oh, Juson, 1'111 so sorry. "Cet rid of it,"

he saitl. (220)

We learn, 1 hen, of lier al)ortiorl. and thüt thcre arc two dead fetuses. Furthermore, the

arrangenicn t of this passage, the interruption of her appeal to Jason, shows that Jason and

Richard hüve merged a t the end, the way kirs. Thing/Mrs. Blood have merged. However,

the resolution of the two voices into Isobel does not resuIt in a healing. or transformation.

Isobel doas riot re-criter the syrnhdic order; die remüins a liminal awbjec~.

GB: Mrs B l d & Mrs Thing are melded at the end of Book Two. They becorne the same person. AT; 1 think chat's absolutely so....

CD: There's a point a t which Mrs B 1 d & the presumed child a r e supposed to Le separated in their flesh. kIrs. D l d & Mm Thing becorne joined in their ... AT: Yes. . h d then the thing, which she says is the thuig, is the child who is deüd. You know, she cülis it a thing. BG: Yes, so out comes thing & blood. Sr: Thing & b l d come out. & she's left, but with nothing. Or you dont know wtiat she's left with (sic). (Bowering 25)

The result of this literalioation is neither the child, a new subjectivity, nor a n integrated

mother, but "nothing." This "nothing," this chilci as corpse, "literaliz[esl Lacan's conception

of the s y m h l as the death of the object" (Adams 16). Thomas's nothings, however, hold

meaning: "Love, L 'ueirf. Nothing. Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again" (2 17).

Cosslet t suggests that in miscarriage, a new icientity is not achieved. "The old self is

lost, and no new self has been LMrn to cake its place: childbirth is more a death than a birth

il died" (219). LIowcver l~riefly, there was a "little baby," and this rnornenl of existence cornes

to have grcüt mcariing fur Iso1)el in JHown Fir*urtr,ï. 'l'lic irnugcs in this final scc:tion invite u s

to read lëobel'a exl)crionce symbolically. The child is variouuly "the fhirig, 'hiy child, " "=I

Notlrirtg, " and "like u fislr" (219). Dut it is also "A Somethirig in a silver bowln (Y 19) removed

with weeping and d e m n i t y . She is attended by Elizabeth and Ester; "a black soft hand

wipes (herf thighs" ( U O ) . tilizübeth weeps and holds her; Auntie Mary sings a "high thin

web of song to lift hcr up to heüven* ( Z O ) . We know that in L3lown bli~ure$, something has

gone niissing from lsobel Cuq)entcr, and can see here, in the language and the msny images

for the deüd fetus, that l s b e l is not sure what it is.

Notes

I See a l w Archer, Llowering; Cultlwell; llorjcht; Gottlieb & Keitner; and Irvinc.

Thomas often uses nightgowns as s y m b l s or intlicators of women's sexual or social status in lier riovcb utid dior& rituriou. I i i the stury "*Létlla Wife" (Heul Motliersr 47-W), the cenlsd character. Phyllis, ie helping a close frienci,fict, whose wife has dicd. When E'liylliti fmds a cache of sexy nightgowns belonging to the wife, a woman in her 70's. s h e is stunned and reads them as g i h from a roniantic younger hueband. Phyliis decides tu burn them because they are too intimate and symliolic to be sold or given to iinother woman. Later in the story, after Tell has gone on a trip aiid I'hylIis has investeci much fantasy in his romantic return to her, he seeiida her a oostcürd suying he's briiiging sumcunc h ç k with him. "Ihllentally (i'hyllisl raarranged the evidence of the nigli tgowns" (58).

Ariotlior ijtory in tlic m ~ i i c collcctioii, "ln tlic l h k Mid-Wiiiter" (76-WI), fulluwéi the central chüracter, Johanna, musing on her ménage à trois relationship, and shares with the reader many of her imaginings, her readings, alwut the other wornan, Maggie. One stormy night she "irnagined hlaggie in her nightgownn (79). going to get help from their man, which is an invasion of privacy and "rules" of the menage that Patrick would never allow Johanna. In the context of the story, the nightgown represents a ferninine ftagility in Müggie Iacking in Johanna, a fragility that has specific eff'ts on men.

3 Nigh tgowns are rnentionecl frequentiy. See, for example, pp. 1 1, 30, 4 1, 46, 48, 69 and 83.

4 See, for example, Karen M. Iiicks, Ed. Mistliamosis: Women as a Disease (Allentown, PA: People'e hledical Society, 1994); I d i e Doyle What hlakes Women Sick: Gcnrler and the Political Econarnv a€ f lealth (1 ioundmiils, Basingstoke: Machlillian, 1995).

5 Coldwell cites My Craft and Sullen Art...," .;lllarrtis 4. 1 (Fall 1978), 153.

6 See chapter 1, "The dialectics of reproduction," 19-64

' .Archer also comments on this: "A mother to her husband as well as to her children, Isobel tends to view her Iwdy as receptacle, the host" (2 17). Thomas's appropriation of Christian mythology will be discussecl later in tbis chapter.

u Iiellougti argues that the " theoretical problem for legal reasoning is t hat gentler equality cannot coesist with the basic preccpt of the tegal d e - - t h a ~ iife itself exists a priori, independent of human agency" (88). This has led to the situation where the fetus i6 granted the rights of a human subject "capable of making rational decisiona and entitled to the right to do so; foetuses (sicl as polenlial human subjecls who witl autonomously self-actualize" (153). The riction of self-actualization has been created through h t h the alieiiiition of women froni their reprocluctive labor, and creation of the figure of "rational man," going büçk to L'lato (O'llricii I I(L39). Wonian us prisfiivc veticrcl retains mcrcly a L>iological funclion wiiile the "second naturc" of man, his rational rebirth, frees him h m his liological origins- O'Brien also points oii t that this fiction is literalized under capitalism a s the "self-made men" who have become the "new heroes" (182).

3 Bossanne suggests that "if Thomas refecs to the Aiice books in the M y of her fiction iintler tlic Lbrrii of 1 ticmcs and iilliisiotis, or if she expiotts the structiirc of (hrroll'e t i d ~ s , it is iiol so iiiiicli willi 11ic purpose tu iiiiitate as Co c(i~erentiat.en ('23 1).

10 See Adams, 10, 25-27; Cho<lorow, Chapter 10, 159-170; and Homans, Chapter 1, 1-39.

" In her discussion of Martha Quest, Cosslett suggests that this fear results, in part, Etom Mrs. Quest's role as a representative of the "institution" of mothering. We will see how Isobel also views her mother and mother-in-taw in this way.

'' Thomas's allusions to the Alice h k s begin with the epigram of hirs. f k ~ 1 and continue most of the way Lhrough J h v n Fivura. The direct quotes and allusions are tao numerous to detail here. See alw Uossanne.

l 3 "blasculistn is a term used by Julia Penelope in "Language and the Transformation of Conaciousnei3s," Law and Inaciualitv 4. Penelope "argues that masculist is the appropriate a n tonym to ferninist in that it refers to cultural ciifferences rather than biological ones" (Kellough 101, n. 1). I appropriate the term here to emphasize the abstract and cultural c&g of ideal eliperience against the physicality of lived experience.

14 Cossletl is diwiusing Illurgarct Atw(xxl'e story "Ciiving Ijirth," m - g sjfhanrl 0 t h ~

Si.ories ('hroiito: hlcClelIand and Stewart, 1'388, originally pubiished, 1977) 228-45.

'" Clam Cieary is tfcscribed as ü "domineering and embittered housewifcn (Gottlieb & Keitner 364) who barrages the young Isobel with constant criticism in Sonrpe. She institls fear in her daughters and, as i cfiscussed in Chapter 1, elements of sexual repression. Mm. Carpenter, although never named, instills the same feelings of repression in the newly- marrieci tsobel, as 1 discuss in Chapter III. She. tw, is a domineering niother, but her form of control cliffers fruni Clara's a s we see here.

l 7 See pp. 135, 146.

" References to Cinderello are sprinkled throughout S o n ~ e , Mrs. B l d and Blown Fimtreg. One of my favorites is from Latakia, a passage set off by border iines: "Who was it that said Prince (Ihiirni irig 1)roI)al~ly chosa Cintlerellu bccüiisc stia wu6 the on ly onc w ho t:oulri clo the liouticwork" (87)':'

l9 Warner groups the "Cinderella" story with those characterized by absent mothers. I t "has been told for over a thousand years, passeci on from voice to text and back again, over and over againn (202-3). The fairy-goclmother of the mdern version has been a g d witch, bad witcfi, crone, and nursemaicl, changing places with the modern reprcsentation of the sicp-mother. In soiiie versions, the ghost of Cinclerella's detid mother retiirris iri animal form to guide her through the obstacIes presenteci in the narrative.

Sin as a cause of fetal deformity is part of the theory of "materna1 impressions," which stated ttiat "the condition and viability of the fetus was profoundly influenced by the mother's niental mi l emotional stuten (Oakley 23), and was generally acceptetl until "well into the nirieteenth century" (24). "Babies without limbs, with heads of cats, with two heads, with al1 kinds of tun~ors -- al1 these owed their origin to something the mother had seen, or experienceci, during pregnancy" (25)-

" Isobel's job at the hospital is deseribed in the €mai quarter of p h 143-2û4. 'And thus did f lose rny minch virginity" (148).

24 The "subject presumed to know" is a "figure of infallible human authority implicitly

likened to a G d , bath rnoùeled on and guaranteed by divine consciausness." This subject- teacher, ysychoanaIyst, doctor, iawyer, yerhaps even mother-4s based on the illusion "of a consciousness transparent to itself," but it is alw "most crucial to the emotional dynamic of al1 riiscursive human interactions, of a11 human relationships founded on sustained interlocution" (85). Shoshana Felman, "Psychoanalysis and Educrition: Teaching Teminable and Interminable," Jacciues Lacan and the .Atlventure of I n a h t : Psvchoanalvsis in Contemimrary Culture (Cambridge, MA; London. England: IIarvard UP, 1987).

25 Efowever, Içobel does question her notions of "modern." "-Are they modern or are they not? Does this brave new world of dams and electricity and independence trouble or thrill them at ali?" (hl m. Thing 84).

26 Take, for example. the delivery nurse in Doris Lessing's hlartha Quest hlsnha is a white woman having her f i t child in a maternity hospital in South Africa. It 1s a cold. antiseptic and iidustrial facility, and the "pink nurse," her birth attendant, olTers no compassion or useful instruction.

"Weil, dear," saitf the girl tiisapprovingly, "it's no goal carrying on like that yet." IIer plunip little tiünds, tightly sealeci in pink rubber, went plunging into hlartha's body. "Not nearly yet, you know," she remarked, regartling hIartha while she grunted and roIled in another pain. "And anywap," heard hlürtlia, the young briglit voice coming distorted through hot agoriy. "we've gut ta get tliis other baby LMrn Lefore we c m attend to you. Do you thirik you could hold i t a bit?" (190- 1)

" .As an aaide in the coincidence department. the f i t novel by a writer of color 1 read was .A f lotise liir hlr. 13iswaa, by V. S. Naipaul.

3 "hlcrrally, h y arc 'gcn~cl' wlicii co~iccpiion lias laken pluce outsidu or iiiüi-riüge or in Borne way violatecl the normative arrangemenu for the birth of a childn (Reinharz 86). This moral conception of the "gtmi" miscarriage speaks to Isobel's supressed guilt over her abrt ion that is transfcrrad to hcr iriiscarriagu.

Chapter III

the body cries: Blown Fkures and the journey towards the radical maternul

Which is what happens in Blow~h Figures. flsobell dies. She's beyonci help. And if thare a re vietimti, if everykwly'a a victim, if' yuu're prcdutorinincd to be a vietini (& in one sense maybe that is w). your athitudes tuwarda being a victim, cari Vary between the healthy attitude: 'Okay, I'm a victim, t he hell with it, let's get on with living" --

Xudrey Thomas, "Songs and Wisdomn (Bowering 15)

Rlovvn F i e r e s begins before the story proper, a t the second Jedica tion. perhaps the

unspoken and missing clause from the epigraph above:

to Isobel because you are fond of fairy-tales, and have been dl,

I have made you a story al1 for yourseif -- a new one that nobdy has read before (7)

This unusual dedication to her eharacter suggests immediately the intimate relationship

between Audrey Thomas and her creation, Isobel Carpenter. This book is going to be

something "nobody has read before; a "storyn not only about Isabel but for her. A "fairy-talen

that "nobody' has read. That "nobody" is arresting. and resonant, given Isobel's relation to

the dead fetus. Isobel is presented as a reader, but the reader, too, is placed in Isobel's

position, in the position of notwdy--an unstable place to be. We know a Tcw ttiiiigs to help

make sense of the coming narrative. Thüt it is a nuvel. a fairy-tale, a story, and a Limt. 1

'I'hat 'fhotnas "made two trips to Africa, one in the mid- 1900's and another five years later in

1970" (Grady 99). We have esplored the text gonerated by Thomas's first visit, the

pcegnüncy inscribed in Mrs, Illrnwl, and now will explore the narrative generated by her

scconcl trio. Thomas rcturncil alonc to Africü üntl trüvelled through tlie Ivory (:oas~

güthering material for this book and exploring, Lioth personally and textually, the

ramifications of her previous experience.

Rlown F i ~ i i r c t ~ tells the story of Isobel Carpenter's return to the site of her

niiscarriage. She begins her journey on a boat, as she had in Mrs. C 3 l ~ d , and travels in a

variety of vehicles to her final destination, a grove in a n unnameci sacred village- Once

there, Isabel goes through what is usually called the "egg ceremonyn that culminates the

narrative. She is looking For her dead fetus, for "something that has gone iuissing." Isabel

believes she is going mad. The book's form, with its fragmentations and muitiple narrations, 2 implies a hysteric text. Thomas has said "(tlhere may not be any trip going on at ail. The

narrator rnay be absolutely insane, who's making up a trip that somehly takes to Ahica"

(Bowering 9). It is tempting to read Thomas as writer travelling and writing as the narrator

in disguise, and there is soma textual evîdence for this reading, as I will cliscuss shortly.

Nevertheless, the overriding mode of the h k is that of a travelogue. a journey narrative.

'The ship sails on towards hIAFROI(A, the broken, the ùivided landn (68). IL is a fairy-tale

written for Isobel, to bring her safeiy through her unfinished birth story and protect her

while she remains liminal. .As with d l quests it has a destination and a reward--rebirth,

although lsobel only cornes to know the forms of these items during the development of the

s tory.

In this chapter, 1 will explore how and why Thomas appropriates traditional fairy-

tale, quest motif6 and novelislic elernents radically transforming them intu a narrative of

materna1 rebirth. Through circulating tropes of mahess and hysteria, Thomas creates a

narrative space in which the unspoken speaks. Isobel, as "the hysteric ... is one whose body

rnanifests physical syrnptoms of repressed psychic trauma. These symptonis ... are

manife6ted through the body, 'speaking' what the conscious mind fails to articulate"

(Cryderman 2). Indeed, 'l'homüs's new narrative patterns, fragmentation aiid polyphony.

suggest that the story emerges from the fernale M y , the womb. 1 iidden parts of the M y ,

exposeci again and again, represent repressed stories that refuse to stay concealed. In Blaivn

I+'inire~, the boundaries between clream and reality, M y and minci, are con tinually

challenger!, transgressed, dissipüied--suggesting the artificial construction of such

hundarics can be subvertecl, appropriatecl, reinvented. Thomas uses magic extensively in

this test in order to explore the lirnits irnposed by Western culture on concepts such as sin,

guilt and healing. lsobel turns to an/other conception of magic and ritual. traditional Alrican

stories and practices, to enéc~ hcr healing and eventual transformation. Ln ...\frican folklore

and praccices, lhere are rituals to prevent gtiost babies frorn returning to their mother's

womb.

Blown Ficures is a radical maternai narrative that describes the process of Isobel

Carpenter's transformation into a radical materna1 subject. To begin my discussion, I will

talk about the ways thal Isobel, in Dlown Pi~urca, is dlaérent froni the Isobel who s(ieaks as

Mrs. Iliing and Mrs, Blooù. Through an exploration of the radical elements of the text, its

structure and form and also its polyphonie narration, I will show how Isobel becornes a

rcacler and u stcirytcllcr wilhin her own narrative. Isoliei's rc-reucliiiys of l j l t w i t l and tlrcarn

ciiiagery suggesl her growing acceptiince of her corporeality, and the wey she resds Delilah

Rosenthal. a traveiing cornpanion who is also Isobel's textual double, is particularly

important. In order to accomplish these aims, 1 will have to follow a non-linear account of

the events in the narrative, for what happens in the last parts of the story informs my

reading as a whole. As a reacler, Isobel both reads and misreads herself and her history, and

1 will d i ~ u s s the corporeal meanings of her dreams, realities and her travel experiences as

she confronts herser and her history as a mother. and as a sexuai being. The recovery of the

dead fetus is both the goal and the motivation for the story, and I will account for the wsys

it inhabits Plown Fimreg, and, in fact, provides a reason for Isobel's appropriation of

Xfrican magic and tradition. Through a discussion of Thomas's appropriation of fairy-tales

and their radical possibilities, i will explore the role of witches in the narrative and the

implications of Isobel herself becoming a witch. A close reading of the egg ritual that closes

the novel and my narrative here, will, 1 hope, answer the question of how a s t o q in which

the rnother dies, yet doesn't die, she "remainlsl elsewheren (525), can be a radical maternal

riurrrilivc.

Isabel can be either dead or transformed, lhwgh. According to the epigraph, she is

clcad. LIowever, there is a difference between "she dies" in the story and being deart. And in

the context of this autobiogtaphical and intimate fiction, we know that Thomas continues to

write. 1 suggest that Isobel does not die but is reborn. Furthemore, her story of

transformation becomes the author's oïvn transformation. Blown b 3 *- imrs can be read as a

maternal journey towards inhabiting the subject position with authority, reclaiming

corporeality as the emobdiment of that authority. Isobel is transformeci to "ODI AKESE or

SHE EATS GRAND PEOPLEn (543), reborn with the strength to consume authorities, to eat

"grand peoplen and survive. This auggests that the reward for maternal questing is

tiubjcctivity--the authority of the materna1 subject to speak for herself.

hluch has happeneci in the five-year cesura Lietween klrs. Blmd and Blocvn Fimres.

"Controlled madness was what she had Lieen living with for tao long -- if t here were to be

rituüls and exorcisms she would have iu find ttiem out herself -- they could not be thnist

i111oi1 ber" (2 17-8). laolwl h a I~!t:oiiic i~ifccttid hy kiir und giiill, i i i i t h l ( ~ io titiiiid in lino8 or

w a k home by a diEerent route. "She felt she should spend less and Less time with them [her

children], should somehow isolate herself from them, like someone who hus an insidious but

highly cummunical>le diseasen (4 10). Isobel is dis-eased, not simply looking for dead babies,

but uncom fortable in her own skin. Hel- dis-ease expresses itselî in madness, in hysteria; her 4

somatic symptoms present through the fragmentation of the body a t al1 narrative levels of

the text. Bits of bodies clutter Lroth the narrative passages (the chapters), and the

polyphonie inter~extual inserts. These body parts exist so that they are consumed, used in

ritualirecl rebirth and magic suggesting it is through this route thet Iwbel rccleems herself

from wha t haunts her. Her redemption is an instance of maternal transubstantia tion. Isobel

must consume, acknowledge the rnissing parts of her self. Only through a public

performance and the announcement of her guilt, her silences, will she reclairn subjectivity.

What is unknown to her self must be othered so that it is visible to b t h Isobel and the

reader, and this is what the narrative proceeds to do.

Western culture offers I d e l no closure to her experience of miscarriage. Heinhan

notes there are few rituals to acknowledge the effect miscarriage has on a muther, that

"[w]omen who 'lose their babies' are supposed to 'get over it' and 'try to get pregnant again'

"(87). In Hlown Fiyres , an often repeated phrase--"'I think Içobel should have another

child.' Not 'we'. Just 'isobet'" (37 1)--shows that the social prohibitions on a mot her's grief

affkct hcr negativuly. This is ~)rccisely whüt Iliol)cl tloee not want i ~ ) do. In tlic tirne lapee

between Mrs. Blocd and Blown Figures her grief has not been acknowledged, and she has

no1 e h t c d the trünsforniüt.ive potentiül of liirthing. 'i'tierchre shc remains liminal,

emolionally raw. I ~ c k of closirrc c m clümape thc mülernal psychc., L t i ~ the ~~otcntiül for

damage is effaced in the idea that "(tlo experience long-term grief ... is though t of as a sign

of psychopathology" (Reinhar~ 83.' And so w hen Blown Fi~urea begins, we find that Isobel

has remained silen t about her grief and about what she thinks may alleviate it. "The search

for her child was julit. more thun l~usy-work; ilshe hüd totd clason t l i a ~ -- aln)ul the child,

that she literally had to find it -- would he have had her locked up? (Or put to sleep.)" (217).

isobel continues to reel her Ioss so intently preciscly becausc her culture will iiot vulidüte

miscarriage as lus.

Isobel hau closed up within herself: "she had to curl up very tightly in her safety belt

in order to have any room a t ailn (17). She is a woman whu can not buck up and cope in the

ways her society exyects from hcr. Isobel's womb has remained o~ened--metaphorically,

tiynçtironicülly, tcntually--rcprc)senting, as h i n c suggeslti, the spüce tliroicgli which the

tilory iti cr~atcd. "'lll~o~ti~s'li [iovt'l ... cctit rcs the l h ~ l c hnly, the wonil). I h i t i this tipace Ille

narrative emerges and elucidates fernale creativity" (59). i t is important. that the author and

lier characher truvcl alone, li)r the journey physicülly separütetr tticni rroni the typical

demands ytaced on mothers. Coing away €rom the family creates a separate physical space

wiiere a niother cün confront her own subjectivity, where a mother can write.

Blown Fiyures is arranged in narrative sections that more or less follow the

c.hn)r~ological nürriitive of' Isolicl's journcy. 'I'hcrc a r e twenty-four cliüptcrs. like Ttic

Odvssev (lrvine 63), with each chapter tracing Içobei's journey as she nears her goal, a goal

that develops over the course of the narrative. The overall form of the book demands great

attention on the part of the reader, for the narrative sections are intersperse ci with sections

of bits, bits that break up the story and offer sites of speculation, loci for lin kage and

meaning. Thus the form of the book makes Literal the process of Isobel's journey, her

accumulation of disparate things, of mernories and new experiences, narrative bits that, iike

drcarriti, cal1 fi)r iiitcrprctzilioii.

I r i j3lown f'iprt!% dreamtime is reali~y and vice-versa- As with the tex~uality that

characterkes sittobiographical birth narratives, Isd>el's experiences arc articulateci through

combinations of textuality and experience. Boundaries are transgresse&-dead and living

exist together, words even faIl off the page (451). What appears in dreams appears in the

landscape and in the other characters as well. In the novel there is no single authoritarian

"1." Indeed, there is a narnitor, tt~ere is fw~bel, and there is Miss h.lillcr. ari uriseen

corn panion. There are many *we'sn and "1's" speaking. continuaiiy destabilizing the

narrative. The narrator is a continual presence throughout the narrative, and is

accompanied by Mise Miller. There is little ta suggest who Miss Miller might be, but her role

is that of audience. listener. lite that of the reader. Isobel rarely speaks fur herself during

the early part of her journey; the narrator is not only omniscient but vocal. telling her how

she feels, what is "really happening." But as 1 shall cliscuss, the narrator's relationship with

Lsobel is lluid, changing. On occasion, the ntirrator switches from third- to second-person,

taking intimately io Isobel; sornetimes the narrator lies, and sornetimes moves back Erom

the stocy.

This suggests that the traditional male quest motif, with its central hero, is being

replaced with a particularly Cemale hem, the radical materna1 subjject. The test articulates

111 i~ riuli(:aI ttiiaI.t!rt~ 1i.y 1.11 rotlg11 1.1112 ~ ~ i d ) i g i ~ ~ t y or i n i ~ i ~ y voiix~ t1110uli i t ~g i II(! I ~ I I I ~ 11o1~1idiwiu~

of lsobel's body, a body continually twisting through other M e s and M y parts. The 6

hliibius strip suggestcd by (ircis~ would be a gwi mode1 through which to coiisider Isabel's

radical maternity. The "inter-connections" (Irvine 70) among the speaking voices, other

characters and Isobel's corporeality suggest the twisting and turning of inner to outer, and

outer to inner, and back again. ,As we saw in klrs, Ulood, Isobel could not fmd a fernale

friend, another woman with wham to share maternal/"internalH feelings and thoughts. In

IJlown k'irwre~, although Iscibel intends tu trdvel alone, slie is always ticcornpiinied by the

narrator. Isobel also ends up travelling with a young woman, Delilah Rosenthal. Delilah is

an important character and I will return to her, but. in forging a relationship with Delilah,

Isobel works through the traumas of her miscarriage-she gains the self-knowledge and

ability to act alone, on her own behaif.

Isobel shifts position in this text. Constructed previously by the over-cletermined

narrative voiccs of hlrs. I5lcnd. shc naw aypears as a more traditional ciiarzictcr. lier

journey is namated by an unnamed voice that continuaiiy reminds u s that Içobel IS a

character. Lorna Irvine suggests that the "narrator is not just constructor of the story, she is

critic of it as well" (7 1). A voice inviting the reader to resist Isobel's story, even as it unfolds.

1 can do anything 1 want with Isobel. I can rnake her fat or thin. like a funhouse mirror. Give her an elegant back -- she always wanted an elegant back -- a Lisp, a Iimp, a missing fmger, a wsrt on the end of her nose, a lover, a husband, a dead child. Imagine her now ..,. (1 40)

The n a m t o r insists on her control over the narrative. "Isobel, a t any second I can pluck you

iike a paw-paw from a tree. However, I will let you dance a Little longer" (477). In order to

maintain a sense of cohesion, Isobel needs to resist the machinations of the narrator to

undermine her joumey, a narrator who insists lsobel is precariously held together by her

narration. Slie is alwnys in danger of htling apart, and indeed the narrator figures her as

disin tegrating along the route.

(Oh Isobel, you fml! 1 who fit you together Iike the mayofs waist coat -- in spite of the co1d here, in spite of the bad light and the Late hours and the strange weakness like a hot Stone, in my chest, 1 marvel a t this idea of yours that you have really undertaken this journey to exorcise your demons. Don't you linow that the journey, as well as the exorcism, is of no use whatsoever; ütid if you i hink you art. going to prove to cluson how brave aiid wcil and strong you are, then ÿou are very rnuch mistaken ....) (2 13)

This is a passage where the intimacy of the narrator and the author is made apparent. The

intrusion of the narrator's physical conditions, the "bad lightn and "late hours," creates the

scene of writing, draws attention to the fact that the author of this book is writing the story,

maliing up the taie as she goes along. "Oh god, how clficult it is becoming to concentrate on

Isobel and Delilah -- they have to complicate things son (459) suggests that part of the

narraior's intent is to disguise herself as the witches and demons tormenting tsobel.

Converscly, the tonnent, the narrator's "witchiness," produces not dis-integration but re-

integration. The narrator's taunts p rduce a set of references that allow Isobel ta navigate

her way through the omissions of her past. The passage a b v e continues: "(You put his hand

on your belly -- there -- so t h he coulcl feel the baby kick. Frightened, he drew his hand

away. And you, you fml, you never thought to kiss it and put it back again)" (219). The

narrûtor, tlien, teaches Isobel her radical maternity; she displays the moments in which this

knowledge has escapeci her in the p s t . lsobel is being instructed on how to reclaim her

action, her subjectivity, how ta vision herself with increasing clarity.

1 I~elieve that Isobel is listening. As the journey progresses, more and more elements

of Isobel's geneatoby are articulüted through the narrator's intrusions. 'The reader learns

together with lsobel as, bit by bit, the episocles that inform her hysteria are exposeci. We

read the ways in which Isobel's liminality is embodied as her past experiences enipt into the

narrative present, mixing with and informing the experiences of her journey. -4s Isobel gets

closer and closer to the sacretl village, the narrator speaks to her less and less, and this

creates the effect that Isobel is s p e a k g . By ehapter XX. the narrator refrains from

contïnually exercising he r control over the narrative and Isobel through her intrusions and

commentary. isobel increasingly syeaks for herself whiie the narrator describes, watches,

becornes an obcjerver. In this section Isobel arrives at the hospital with Delilah, ostensibly

the same haspital where she miscarriecl. "Somewhere in this building her dead child might

lie sleeping in a h t t l e on a shell" (484). When Isabel actualkes her destinution, when dream

and reality occupy the same timekpoce, the narrator relinquishes control of the narrative to

Isobel, who is soon to determine her own fate.

Uut Cruin the Lieginniny uf chapter I, "[clonsider laobel, lcaning over the railing of

the promenade deck of the 1I.M.S. Pylwles" (1 l), the narrating voice invites u s to see Isobel

as mad. "'i'hornas makes use of the liberating effects of maclness on the structures of

traditional narrativen (Iwine 57). lwliel exemplifies Sandra Gilbert's statement: "the roles of

the sorccress and hysteric would indeed become exemplary tropes for the female conditionn

(Cixouu aiid CIBnient, viii). Msdiiess etin creüte the upace in which the rifflicted can speak the

tnie nature of their affliction. Isobel's madness, by revealing the material manifestations of

Isobebel's fears, frees h t h reader and character from the constraints of composing reality in a

certain way. I~iold's trope i)r nliidness iti ~)osscssion hy wikIic8:

She would, on the days when her desperation was stronger than her dernons (die stiw thein ihen as always female, OBXYiFO, DAYI, the hateful witches), push hard against the f o n t door, open it, take Nicholas to the kindsrgartcn, wcilking always along the same side of h e Street (and always the same ritreeîs) even counting the steps she took to make sure tliey came out even (44 - 45 - 46), avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk so neither bears came out nor her mother's back was broken. (Yet the witches, the demons urging "go uheacl, IsoLieI. step on it, see what happens.") (25)

-4s the pussage alwive sliggesfs, wit.h ils evwation ofchilclhcxd gamcs, l s o l d s matlness

manifests itself in little domestic things, in what the rest of people, so lsobel believes, are

not afraid of. While Isobel develops an inability to perform the most rnundane tasks, there

are moments on her journey, like the passage below, when she can still show initiative and

courage. At one stage of the journey, Isobel and Delilah stay a t a monastery tor a few days

where t his incident occucs.

They decide to return a t once with John and Heather, to their quarters. On the way Ileather gets a large moth in her hair and squeals girlishly f iut obviously frightened) until they pull it out. lsobel pulls it out, actually, as the others hn't seem tao willing. flet you were afraid of elevators Isobel. of six-lane highways and the Line-ups at the Super-Value and they m a t probably are not.) (184)

Isobel's frights a r e specific. She reads her madness through her enviwnment,

through envisioning the normally unnoticed, and iike an X-ray effect she sees the

contiguousness of M i e s and their boundaries. "What Enghtened Isobel was the people with

outlines around them or the people with no backs. What fnghtened Isabel was seeing ail the

joins. Innocent worrls detached themselves Erom sentences. grew big as signs" (32). Reading

becomes metonymically linked with reading the M y , bodies as text. But we know that in

Thomas's writing tliere are no innocent wordu and signs are meant to L>e read. T h e r e are no

victims" we read repeatedly in Loth texts, t;o these revelations invite a syrnbolic reading.

This body reatling is sirnilar to the l+'rcudiün construction or hystcria, whcre somatic

syrnptoms speak psychic elements that have been repressed. What emerges through the

narrative are the heavily repressed elements of lsobet's psyche that informeri Mrs, B l 4 ,

now brought tu the forefront as dreams, hallucinations, imaginings of a particular kind. The

narrative can be read as therapy for a madwoman as, step by step, Isobel's unconscious

reveals to Isobel and the reader the traces of her neuroses, situating the reader as analyst,

as voyeur, as interpreter. ln listening to Isobel's story, in the process of rending, we help in

this deciphering process. As tsobel reconstructs her subjectivity, we become part of the

ùialogic structure in which she begins to function as subject.

Isobel reads obsessively throughout the narrative--newspapers, magazines. road

signs, the names and slogans painted on the side of delivery trucks, religious messages on 7

the sides of the mammy lorries --many of which appear in the sections between each

chapter. The reader, then, also sees many of these bits and so interprets the intertextuality

and meaning they have for Isoliel. In one passage thtit highlights the idea of misreading,

lsobel is waiting at the taxi station with Delilah, playing aruund with "L)elilahls pocket

mirrorn (163). She sees a "man with one eye biind and and whitely translucentn (163),

recalling the "one-eyed people" of the opening line of the text. Isobel, after the man bas left,

reads a male body, although the passage is ambiguous as to which male h d y , for Isobel does

not go near the one-eyed man. She reads the discontinuities dispiayed by bodies, the

ciisjuncture between form and language that only she c m see. Isobel reads around the h e s .

(It was as though the messages had been written all over him in lemon juice or vinegar. Only in the heat of ,Mrica clid the letters show. Ail avec his body. i t woultl have been bad enough if they had been consistent, if on liis arrns was written 'arm' in beautiful copperplate script. 'Breast' on his breast and so on. But his ieft leg deciared itself to be his right eye and something in a foreign alphabet, Cyrillic perhaps, was written across his penis. No one could see tlicsc ttiiripi. No une could eee lhese things exceot hersell ...) ( I l i ; ) )

The body, here, reruses to stick to its proper names, refuses ta be categorized within its

lioundaries, niiicli like the transgressive gravid kwiy. Thut only Iwhel cün sec the

inscription is not simply an hallucination, but points to the ways in which Isobel has

misread her own body, a M y whose script she fails to understand.

One of the ways lsobel l e m s to correct her readings is through her relationship

with Delilah Rûsenthal. Thomas uses Isobel's readings of D e W to b ~ g her to a point of

crisis and recognition, which motives her action to seek the sacred village and to change her

destiny. Deiilah embodies the contradictions that lsobel needs to resolve. This relationship

is one of 'l'bornas's characteristic "doublings," Like that of the Mrs. Bl&lrs. Thing

narration. "When women confront their mimr-selves, when they create characters who

have the 'power to reach hwurcl the womari triplml on the other side of the niirrdtext and 8 help her to climb out,' they move towards literary autonomyu (Irvine 58). Doubhgs and

hauntings are a h strategieci of the materna1 narrative as we have seen. 1 would suggest,

though, that DeliIah is more than a mirror or double, for she is pregnant and does not want

her t~a l~y . I d ) e l is forcecl tci continiiiilly confront the meaning f)elilühis prcgiiiincy has for

her. tiow Delilah's desire for an abr t ion affwts her journey. "How many milligrammes has

the child grown in the night, in the red-hung cradle of Delilah's indifferent room" (160)?

Anci, strangely, we are told about Delilah's abrt ions, not IsobePs.

One of the abortions took place in New York City; they hurried her -- she wtis crawling along the corridor and leant over the railing, outside, vomiting, untii the nurse came down and tolcl her we'cl have to move along. -4 friend met her on the corner with a taxi. What would she do with this one -- would she expect Isobel to -- ? (1W)

in contrast to Mrs. Rlmcl, details are explicit here. -4s we know that Isobel has had an

ahr t ion , given the slightly arnbiguous pronoun in this scene, we can read it a s filling in a

gap of Isobel's narration. She replaces her own trauma with the seeming "inclifference" that

Delilah displays towards her "four abrtions" (47 1). However, Isobel wishes to remain aloof

and separatecl €rom Delilah's dilemma: "It seemerl to Isobel that she is not so much passing

through al1 these places as that they are passing through her, a s when one puts one's arm

and hand, for fun. between the projector and the screen" (164). Isobel. then, sees her body as

a screen upon which the narrative of her journey is projected, She embdics the places

through which she travels, and perhaps the people she travels with. The narrator, though,

has other ideas, and tells her so: "In the taxi-gare a t Ouagadougou, gas blue sky overhead,

this is the iltusion. Delilah Rosenberg does not exist. Or pethaps it is you? Perhaps this is

only Delilah's dream? liave you thought about that a t ail" (164)? Isobel cannot keep herself

detachecl from Delilah, and in that sense the narrator is correct-she is part of Delilah's

story now.

Isobel may be a charicter in Delilah's dream or Delilah a character of lsobeh

imaginings, but Delilah carries inside her the literalization of Isobel's lost babies. This fetus

becomes, lilie hlisç Miller to the narrratar, an unseen cornpanion of lsobel's storytelling.

"The child in Delilah's reluctant womb knew nothhg of borders or taxi rides. Knew not that

its mother was bored and hot and anxious. b e w only motion and sleep and these only in a

visceral sense" (169). Isobel can visualize this fetus in t h e same way she could see her "child

ridfingj quiet" (Mrs. Blmd 94) before the miscarriage. The use of "visceral" imagery a h 9 suggests a longing to return LU the place of otigùi, the womb. It is. then, the fetus that is

the figure, the entity the subject is longing to return to, for it is the fetus that occupies the

womb. But here, as we have seen, the womb is also the origin of the materna1 narrative.

And in Delilah's womb rides a ktus chat represents not only the ahrtetf fetus of Isobel's

pre-marital life, but, when ilclilah begins lo miscarry , represents, LW, the miscarried fetus.

The t'etirs itsclf is cloubled in 'l'liomas's narrü~ivc.

.AS they wüit for the ferry, Delilah begins vomitting, becoming increasingly ill. Isobel

helys her, but resents helping her. She must overcome her prejudice, her judgement of the

young woman.

She stood helplessly, trying to feel sympathetic. (But you don't, now do you? Admit it, Imbel. Juclging people is one of the things you do best. She got what she deserved. You'd really like CO walk away and leave her tl~ere. Pcomiscuous! fiarlot! Four abrtions! Let he who is without sin Isobel. Oh don't you read your bible anymare? ... Surely you can't abandon her, although there must, musn't there, have been Bad Samaritans as well? Or does Delilah, here, on this ferrylioat, amidst aiien corn -- or millet if you orefer -- qualify as ONE OF YOUH OWN KIND? 'rhink about it Isobel. What if Jason tiütl übündoncd you'?) (47 1)

The narrator brings Isohel to a place where she can question her own siibjcctivity, the ways

in which she has isolatecl herself from other women. Isobel must be able to see herself in

I)elilüh, accept herself, and other women, before she can come into her own. She must

rccognize the interconnections lietwcan womim, "sec tllelilah) as het own kintl," as a

positive force, before she can re-clah her authonty as a materna! speaker. Delilah recovers

a little on the ferry k a t , but soun Isobel sees that "she was blee&ngn (472).

Isobel knows that they will have to travel to a hospital, and wants to run away, the

way she had run, many years ago, when her daughter Mary had "cut the back of her head

an a stone." At the hospital, lsobel "lay on a bench, literally writhing in terror. W i l e the

chilcl's screams pierced her -- 'Murnmy! Mummy! Murnmy!' Then she fled. She wondered

now if either Jason o r Mary had ever forgiven her" (478). This tirne it will be different.

If she ran now from Delilah? Hadn't she come back in order to stop running away. Wasn't that why, in the end, this girl was sent ta her, Delilah's predicament, in a sense, being a parody or looking-glass reversal of her own distress five years before. The blood which iinks ali women was linking thern now; it was not a question of a cut head now (although the cut head was

important tw). Why was she so afraid; this tirne, a t least, it wasn't happening to her. (478-9)

Isobel, then, not only gets a chance to confront her relationship to the "other" woman, but

also confronts a representation of her own miscarriage experience materially. Delilah's

miscarriage is real, the blood ie real; iaobel is at the hoepital again. She is forced to confiont

her fear, to h d her dead fetus, and this time Isobel does not run.

While waiting for Deliiah, Isabel asks a young African nurse: "Whüt do you do with

the dead babies?" This nurse is "carrying a small tray covered with a cloth," suggesting she

might be carrying Delilah's fetus. The nurse tells her it depends on "what the mother

wanted us to do." lsobel discovers that the fetuses are thrown out, burned or buriecl as

garbage (483). Isobel, then, receives the answer she does not want. She clid not speak up and

determine the fate of her fetus, she did not speak of the dead child. "Here on this scarred

wooûen bench ... the awfulness of her crime against her dead child and against herself and

possibly Jason too -- for what had gone on in his heart? She never asked; he never offered -- overwhelmed her" (484-5). Isobel reaikes that her crime is silence, a silence that exists on

many levels. When Isolicl can recognize hercrolf in Delilah, ciin recopnize thal she hersclf is

rcs11ontsii)Io hr h r own r(!i~r n r d grid, hfto is d h to 1)rcak lifo-101tg I t t h i ~ t d 1)11wiivity. ancl

decicle to take action. Lsoliel must mourn--shuuld have mourned. She must break the silence

and speak her guilt, fear, and loneliness.

Isobel stays with Delilah until she is set up in a hotel and recovering. In an unusual

narrative passage, the dialogue between 1sol)el and Delilah is given like a theatre script.

The abrupt ehift in form is startling, even in a narrative with so many surprising textures,

dramatizing Isobel's pivotal moment of self-recognition. They discuss Delilah's condition,

and al1 Delilah can talk about is how to get more birth con trol, She wants to go dancing,

What Isoliel reads here is that Delilah's indiEference to her recent miscarriage is similar to

Isobel's silence. Delilah seems not ta care and so goes outward while Lsobel cares tao much

and has retreated inwards. Kecognising these reactions as parallel, similar, helps isobel to

make up her minci once and for all. She lies, und then "runs quickly down the steps and out

through the courtyard of the small hotel" (494). She exits. Out on the street, she sees the red

armbands and bits of red cloth that signal the death ofsomeone important. IC is fitting.

"(lsobcl nods. It dwsn't mütter who he is. Death is a11 arouncl her as shc rides. The street is

f i h g up with mourning people. She nods again- It's t h e ) " (494). And Isobel travelç to the

forest, to the sacred village and the grove, ta place her need Liefore the deity there. She

journeys towards a new reading.

Another misreading that lsobel overcornes in BIown Fiaireg is her perception of her

"traitor body." A s 1 suggcsted in the previous chapter, Mm. R l d can bo read as an instance

of the repressed body coming to the surface as unknown knowledge, knowledge that teaches

consciousness about itself. I shel may no longer be bleeding, but Blown Fipureg is. BI& is

Isobel's primary fear, and so the book is permeated by red, by b l d Blooû marks the site of

insanity, it suggests that Isobel s t U bleeds, but her bleeding is simply invisible to others. As

with the heroes of the stories that Thomas b t h appropriates and transforms, sheddùig

blmd is a necessary rite of passage. lIere it is b l d of women splashing ttia pages. h i n e

suggests that "one of the narrative aims seems, then, the redemption of that b l d so often

castigatecl as unclean" (70). 'l'lie cen~ra l image oE the bleerling womb, the "recl-hung rwm"

(7 l), can mean rnany things, displaying both Isobel's and her culture's ambivalence towards

blood signs. Again and again. the text reminds us that the sacreùness of b l d is predicated

upon the concept of women's bleeding as unclean. "Somewhere in this land there is a sacred

village in which no one is alIowed to die. Nor is any woman there ailowed to bleed" (337)-

the same village, i assume, that is Isobei's destination. Death and life are determined in the

presence of womL Iilcmti, ünti so the womt) for Isold is nnt just u ntirturing spm but also

"her sharp-toothed wombn (1 12).

-4s with the isobel in hl rs. Blood, Isobel in Plown F i ~ u r a has deeply ambiguous

feelings about her Lwdy and her womb. "What frightened [sobel was that her mind had

followed the example of her body and was going to betray her" (32). She feels restrained.

imprisaned. "Smetimes she felt very small inside her M y , a prisonet. Han up ancl down

the red-hung corridors, beat üt the ivory gates, peerecl helplessly through the round

windows" (32). But Lsobel can't avoid dealing with her M y that bleeds. She can't evade her

corporcality, or the multiple meanings of blood, whiIe travelling through a landscape that

assirnilates and metaphorizes b l d . There is retl dust, red earth, red butternies, red snakes,

bleeciing wounds, bld-stained pants. "A little clot of tomato lay tieside the fried egg that

first morning" (14).

'l'lie narrator tells us that "filefore, when [Isobell had been convinceci that she was

dying ... she awoke from her dream of swimming in a river to find herself, in fact, lying in a

pool of her own life's blwl," the drearn a hallucination induced t>y painkillers after her

miscarriage. To me, the often repeated phrase "(%are feet are bleeding Like sunsets on the

püin~ed Mue f lwr of my bedrot)m")" ( 1 la), rcads like a line of poetry, a metonymic evocation

of the miscarriage-the blue curtains in the hospital roorn, bleeding soles (souls?) for

Lleeding womb. 1 would like tu cletour for a moment to associate ~ h i s quote with a passage

from Mrs. Hlrwici. Is<ibel, a university student in the time of the memory. lias just made love

with some young man in the university gardens, and they are standing together afterwards,

watching a pool of carp. The egisde appears twice.

We stood on a Little bridge and Iooked at the huge goldfish -- more du11 and white than gold. "Ugh," he said. T h e y look like b ld - soaked bandages." I though he was pretentious.

"Whtit d'you know of b ld - soaked bandages?" 1 asked and spoiled his ooetry. (MM. Bimd 23-11}

And in the Japanese garden, the dirty white bellies of the oriental fish. "They louk like b l d y bandages." "What do you know a h u t b l d y bandages?" nut tiien. he wuntatl to lie ii jioet. (Mm. I3locwl I(i3)

In these passages, notable for their similarity. Imbel shatters the young man's "poetry" by

asserted the connection between his metaphor and her experience, her h l y . 'Che bleeding

female body disrupts male poetics, hollows male metaphorics, by grounding abstraction in

experience. Given her history as one who produces b l d and one who has cleaned up lots of

it, Isobel changes the poetics of blood in her narrative, asserts a female metaphorics. 1 read

the iine of poetry where bare feet bleed a s composed by Isobel after she cut her bo t d u ~ g a

walk by the ocean (1 13). It would account for its many repetitions in Rlawn Figureg. Thomas

suggests, then, a positive, fernale poetics of blood through hobel's inscription of her blood in

poetry. as well as in clrcam and memory. Women's bleeding partakes of a different time

frume, a viseral poctry--thcir b l d prwedcs the "blood of bat th and dcstructionw (Irvine

71)) vülorixecl in male eliics.

'Ille narrator asks Ishel:

Itcmcml~ec the night Mary was h r n -- remamber changing l)ück iiito yorir würm llariiicl iiiglitgowri the color oC turquoiijcs u~ id luugliter ... 'l'lic riex& düy the turquoise gown was çoaked in b l d You always bled a lot, even then. EIis rnother came to see you and, embarrassed, you asked ifshe would mind washing it out for you. Why embarrassecl. Isobel, why EhlRARHASSED. Such rich red blwd, so irrioortünt to the 1)eüutiful ctiild. ... 'l'tie 1)Loocl was a eign, an emblem -- WlIY EMBXWASSED? ... You should have kept it to show Jason. The two of you should have rubbed your faces in it, a new birth, a communion. But when Jason came you were spotless and sitting uy. (394)

In this passage we can see the narrator as both critic and teacher shocving Isobel where her

cliscontuities are. That she "shoultLn not have been embarrassed points to the larger issue of

the cultural tabou on wonien's bleeding. We see again a nightgown that speaks to the status

of its wearer--1sobel is the "color of turquoises and laughter," med with her joy a t birth and

motherhoal, mon replaced by embamassrnent a t her bleeding. There is, however, an

important inversion here in the nature of blood a s "sign." Isobel telh us repeatedly that she

faiis to r a d the signs. "Look what had happened the last time when she had ignored the

signs. Wasn't that precisely what she was here. why, in the end she had let herself be

destroyed? (For there a re no victims, Isobel, there are no v i chs ) " (15). In Mrs. B l d she

b t h punishment and remedy, she must now learn to read dinerently. The narrator teüs

Isobel there are other signs she has failed to recognise, signs that point the way to a remedy.

One remedy is to accept the ambiguity of blood, the sign of bth Me and death, and to

reclaim blood as a sign of the radical maternai, of e m w i e d consciousness.

Thomas's imagery describes, then, a radical universe in which tropes are blown

from their moorings in patrisrchal narrative and figured through a fernale, and distinctly

maternal, iineage of stories--a new kind of storytelling. In her dreams, lsobel is able to begin

this revis~oning, to recorist ruct herself as readcr:

That nigh t she dreamed she had sex with the Devil. He was completely hiiman in sbape excepl ttiot his face was perfectIy smaoth and fea~urcless, Like an egg. At the touch of his icy cold ejaculate she whimpered. He said to her, "1 am the younger brother of the Wor cl... "If it had grown up," whispered the Devil, his tongue in Isobel's ear, "it would have made a dreadfully ugly child." "Get away from me," he said. holding her tightiy. "You're unclean. The King could have you U e d for that." His coid breath frwe against her face. Isobei rose uy, a robe of £lame-red silk about her and around her neck a torque of red gold, precious pearls and rubies. She laughed a t the Devi1 and he cowered on the bed before her. From between Iier tliiglis she tmk wmt! Liloocl and marked his forehead. "See how it fëeels," she saicl, "see how it feels." (He vanished.) (68)

This dream is laden with rich inversions and ritual symbls. First of all, the devil is coldness

not heat, smooth and featureless "We an egg" with "icy cold ejaculate," not at aU the fiery

demon of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Here, Isobel usurps the "flamen and the heat. The

devil declares himseif'as "younger brother to the Word" but in this mother's text the word is

vanquished through Isobei's M y and through her Ilood. Marking the devil with womb

blood, Lianishing him with the words "see how it feels," suggests the coqioreal locus of

women's power: the M y , the words, the feelings together are necessary ta vanquish the

"Ifing."

Here, Isobel's possession Legins with Iier having sex with the devil, with the brother

of the word. In [sobel's dream the King also represents the word, the logos in its social form

that names Isobel unclean. But the devil's words do not speak what his body cloes, and thus

the word is contradiction. Thomas is suggesting the contradiction of binary constructions, of

systerns of authority that promote the disjuncture between speech and act. In an e m M e d

subject, talking and moving woulcl express the same thing. In the heam above Isobet is

represented as a powerful sorceress in "flaming red silk," performing a ritual act, capable of

banishing the devil, o r perhaps God. Zsobel envisions herself as the "bride" of the devil,

rather than as Mary or Jesus as she had in hlrs. B l d . She rejects their mythic possibilities

in Blown Fieures--"Christ, the idiot son of God, have mercy upon us. Christ, the trouble-

making son of Gd, have pity on us and Save us. Mary, hfother of idiots, send us your tearsn

(1 16). and turns towards something else, a corporeai knowing. The sorceress represents a

corporeal female knowledge and power--sensuaII transgressive, magical, and thus

tranformational, not transcendent.

The egg-shaped face of the devil retionutcti with the eggs fuund throughout the

narrative, replacing the characteristic features of the devil with a female symbl, a symhl

of fertiiity. Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove (1986) have found signincant changes in

women's dream imagery during different phases of the menstmal cycle:

We have found that dreams of jewels, round, fragde or precious things, occur at ovulation-the. It is interesting to note chat [there is] an African t a h in which women who wish to be fertile are forbidden to eat eggs. Witches are said to sail on broken egg-shells; a menstrual image. (95)

Dreams with egg imagery are prevalent among women who are ovulating, and h i n e has

noticed that in Slawn Fipures "the egg (exemplifieci even in the shape of the fernale body)

cornes to symbolize the erotic survival of the universen (66). Eggs, Like blood. are everywhere

in Blown Fimires. "Love is both everything and nothing. the egg, the little 'oh.' the circle.

the Sun, the mwn, L'oeufi all" (40 l), n phrase we have also encountered in Mrs. Rlnod. Eggs

also play an important role in the final scene of the book, the egg ceremony. Lsobei is robed

in a white penitential garment and carries an egg in each hand. h i n e suggests the "egg

ceremonies that conclude Isobei's journey divert attention kom the injured penis and the

victoriaus phallus; we focus on an earlier time of female dominance" (63).

Thomas's writing speaks to the cultural repression of and fascination with women's

M i e s and bleeding. The centrality of blmd in Isobel's dreams and the text repeatedly points

ta the importance of blood to the maternai. IsobePs body language, her hysteria. center

around her "defective" wornb. Shuttle and Redgrove argue persuasively that there is a

tradition of menstrual lore that has been systernatically suppressed during the

medicaüzation of women's reproductive lives. When the menstrual cycle is figured

negatively, as 1 discussed in the Introduction, it becomes a source of physiological and

psychological disorder. Shuttle and Hecigrove ask: "Suppose t h t society is a lie, and the

period is a momenl of lrcrtlr whictr will not sustain lies" (56), which the dream of the devil

suggests. They go on to show that in cultures that devalue menstruation. dunng the

"'moment of truth' of the paramenstrurn, greater repressions may emerge. or rnay be

expressed in My-ltinguagc as iltnes~es, or accident-proneness. This is becciuse they are

given no other language in a society run by men, they cannot be expressed outwardly, so

they screw women up inwartllyn (57).

Shuttle and Redgrove also suggest that "what we cal1 'hysteria' is the repression of a

state in which body-consciousness is naturaily extended. It is possible that what we call

'date8 oE poysesoiori' or 'Shamünism' cire such states of 'hysteria* but controlled and extended

in such a rnanner that the information fkorn the extended senses can be usefiilly employed"

(186). Thomas is actively figuring the My-consciousness of the menstrual cycle through

Isobel's experiences, her hysteria and "witchiness." Not surprisingly, one of the pejorative

terms for wornen's symptoms of menstrual tension is "witchiness," a term that Shuttle and

Redgrove reclairn as a positive term to connote emMied consciousness. "Womb-

consciousness" may be seen as a particularly female embodied subjectivity, one that is

highly vulnerable to trauma by social forces and meclical discourses that figure these

extended states of consciousness as pathological. lsobel articulates a heightened awareness

of the kind described by Shuttle and Redgrove in her dreams and her hallucinations.

However, it is dficult for Isobel to embdy herself outside of drearns at this stage in

her journey, and Thomas cloes not downplay the level of ambiguity and distress that Isobel

feels. We can not be sure where the dream ends and the narrative begins. Neverthelese,

lsobel continues to travel, despite the fact she sees herseif disappearing, becoming

ephemeral. "Isobel's fingers clisappeared down to the first joint, then the second. Soon her

han& would be gone entirely. By the time they reached the border she would be al1 gone.

There would be nobody. No body. Personnen (168). Isobel fears she is dis-integrating, being

"pulled backward into deathn (32).

Ilespite her fears, despite her sense of dis-integration, Isobel forces herseif to search

fur lier deacl fetus. The tétus informs her journey, haunting the story and ceminding us that

no revision is possible without addressing this ghost. This is a ghwt lsobel feels she has

created; sornetimes concrete, sornetirnes epherneral, it floats through the narrative.

The carnival was over, the child had been taken away in a silver basin, the great Iivery placenta thrust aside into a bucket. The woman who had liilled tlie child lay (pied in a ptn~l of ticr own lire's b l d . Two enormoue o y w in ii grey face the color of a wasp's nest. Jason had never corne, nor Dr. Biswas. Behind the Mue plastic curtains she had gone through (For whose benefit, Miss hliller, TEIL ME TIIXT) an elaborate p u r d y of birth. She reactied between her thighs and made a cross with blooci, upon her forehead.

"Sah," said Elizabeth, her brown hand over the white one, "You must not weep now, it is finished." (177)

This passage describes the scene of birth, although it is not the first such scene in BIown

Fieureç. 1 t is a part of the missing episode of Mrs. Rlwd and one through which Thomas

invites the reader tu read Isobel intertextually. Whereas earlier we were encouraged to read

the nurses attending Isobel and the reverence towards the dead baby ritualistically (hlrs.

J3lmci 2 19-20), here we see the b l d , the details of pain and loneliness and thus we are

invited to read materïally. Birth is an "elabrate parody" resulting in a death and a kiUer,

not a maternal dyarf. The "Mue plastic curtains" recall the hosytial scene in klrs. Bloc4

where they served to keep Isobel's pain Erom view, but now they hide the scene of death and

resonate with the blue floor of the poetry h e . Notice that Isobel marks her forehead with

b1ocx.l here, a s she dreamed she had done to the devil, suggesting that she has some

awareness of the ritual triais to follow. She blesses and marks herself, a maternal baptism of

b lood.

But Isobel also brands herseifa murderer, and the ghost-baby still grows within her

because there are no rituals to appease either the mother or the child. In hlrs. B l d nothing

had been offered tu heal Isobel's wounds. In Rlown Fiares the ghost baby may not be a

ghost after ail, but a reality of ambivalent curporeality.

She knew what was wrong and why, and what to do about it. She uiiduréi~ood utid ucco~totl tlio torribtc! pull or t h tlcad, kriew ulre wue a haunted as any old derelict house of her c h i l d h d , that there was within her a mal1 ghost which had to be propitiated and set free. She hati killed the child and then ignoreci its çorpse -- blasphernecl the ghost-mother by her aclions, lier sacrilcge, and thought she could gel tiway witli il. (184)

In the Africti of J3lown F&m, Is<)&)el rittempts to Itxate herself w ilhin a trütlition, fincl

stories and rituals to assist her on the journey towards expiation. One passage, placed alone

on a page and set in quotation marks to suggest an unnamed authority, tells us:

"The parents dress in holiday attire, partake of ground-nut soup (tu show it was a jayful feast) and retire to their chamber and make a pretense of lying hgether. Al1 this is tu shame the little stranger ghost that had dared to wander down into this world and to discourage it returning in that form to endanger the life of a human mother." (323)

Isobel wants to lay claim to the African traditions and rituals. in much the same way as

Isobel's speculations colonized the bodies of her black nurses in Mrs. Dltwti, slre wishes to

appropriate Mrican traditions that recognize that the death of a great many babies is a fact

of Me, and so provide a means to describe the fears and sadness of the parents through an

acknowledgement of haunting. llowever, there is a Merence here, because the fetus "born"

in Africa &es in Mrica. ,Afiica is its indigenous territory, hence the fetus appearing in many

guises throughout the narrative. In Africa, Isobei's baby can say "('Oh, where have you been

al1 this while? 1 have been looking for you for so long and I have been so lonely1)"(196). 10

The ritual a b u t the "stranger ghost" described above reassures the parents that

ltiey will recover [rom the tlcü~h, while provilling a reprelientatiori of the tlcüit l h a ~

acknowledges their influence on the living, a markedly marginal idea in Western culture.

Ghost babies can return and "endanger the iife of a human mother."

"The infant, for the f m t eight days &er birth, is scarcely considered as a human being, being looked upon as merely a "ghost child" chat has come from the tipirit world, intending irnmediately to return. If it dies behro the eighth day it certainly was such. The little body is thea sometimes whipped; i t is put in a pot with sharp-cutting elephant grass, and buried near the women's latrine." (324)

In Africa, the distinctions between real and dream, dead and alive are noc fixed and

immutable. Babies a re not considered as "real" until they have survived eight days, a

liminal period in which they huver ambiguously. Thomas suggests that in order to

understand her miscarriage experience in ilhica. Isobel needs to turn to Africa-to merge

her genealogy as a subject with that of her fetus's.

Isobel, however, until the end of the book. can only dream of appeasing the Iost

baby.

The tears ran down ittside Isobel's cheeks. She dreamed a dream that when they carriecl her clown to the river and threw in the sacrifice, the crocodile appeared immecliately, which was a g d sign. And when it saw Isobel it walked on the water and did a little dance. The breath of the people watching on the bank came out in a collective "aahn of wonder. 'The water was coverecl with spots of b l d as an ebony sky is with stars. She ate the seven yaw-paw seeds which the priest handed her and then plunged without hesitation into the sacred lake. On the other bank her child held out his arms to her. (169; my emphasis)

'iïio fiml lirie of tliiu pumuge tilcrtti iitj 10 tIie invcrsioti titrutcgicli t l iu~ ï'tioirlu~ aiiil)loy~ Iierc.

Tears do not run irrside the body, a s ghost children do not wait with their arms open across

the lake. But in Blown Fipures such things happen a s the bundary between dream and

reality is collapsed. . h d so things normally unseen Liecorne seen.

Through images such as these, Isobel's ghost baby returns corporeally. In this

Thomas's text has akhit ies with Toni Morison's Deloved (1988)," where the ghost of a baby

returns embodied, a s it turns out, in a young woman who returns "fiom the other side to

make contact with the muther she has been longing to see" (Hirsch 98)). The "other aide,"

hem. resonates with Is<iliel's vision of her lmby waving, discussed early, and offers a point of

entry into Marianne Hirsch's insightful reading of Beloved. She notes that a maternal

narrative "haunted by the ghost of a child" (93) is unusual among maternal narratives and

creates new spaces for theorizing maternal subjectivity.

Thomas explores Isobel's haunting by her dead fetuses, the aborteci one and the

miscarried one, through their embodirnent in Isobel's dreams. They are elemcnts of h b e l ' s

corporeal consciousness, elements of her history. Thomas's narrative a h explores " m a t e n a l

fantasies of reparation and recovery. I t is about the embodiment of maternal memory and

about the material and erotic confrontation with a past that, paradoxically, is represented

and ernbodied by the child" (Hirsch 97).

Indeed, Iiiobei's dead fetuses are represented as integral elements of I d e l ' s erotic

and sexual past, a past sexual self that she has not inhabited for many years. As in ML% Blood, Richard, in Blown Fipures represents "a tirne of passion, unbridled sexuality and

also sexual subservience" (Cryderman 8). "Couid she have let hirn look at her now, a t her

belly like a leftover part balloon -- Richard, lover of the beautifid? -- She used to sleep

sideways on the bed and he slept with his head on her belly. She would wake up to him

licking her" (19). But this is the same Richard who rejects her and demands she get an

abortion: "Get rid of it. he said" (Mrs. B l d 220).

Isobel names herself as murderer because of this ahrtion. However, I am not

My lying here thtic Thomas ie acivucating a stereatypically p m M e position, but. that the

haunting is a result of Isobel's inability to cope with the decisions, and with the processes,

that led ta the end of two pregnancies. Without cultural support for the processes of grieving

and validation for her feelings of guilt, Isobel can only blame herself--she has "rnurdered"

because something she was responsible for has died. And this is why, in the gap between the

two novels, because of her perceived connection between eroticism and death she has

becorne desexualiïed.

In exploring the genesis of Isobel's trauma, Thomas explores, as many

autobiographical birth narratives do, the ambiguity of the writer's relations to her mother,

relations often intensifieci cluring birth and motherhod. Isobel's identity as a maternal

subject has destalilk~ecl since her miscarriage. "She was Isobel, wife of Jason, and mother of

Mary and Nicholas (MA MA, h,lA Ki\, the breast), and yet çometimes from behind the

invisible glass wall of her disguised madness she stared at the three of them as though they

too were illusions, like herself, mannequins in a department store window" (22-3). She is

"illusion," "mannequin"; her dis-ease has produced an empty disguise, an irnpc)stor. We saw

earlier that Isobel dwells on her feelings of incornpetence and inferiority prduced in part by

a system that dictates the forms "mother" is perrnitted ta take. "Materna1 memory -- never

g d enough to remember the gwd ... and never bad enough to forget the painn (Hirsch 108).

Zsobel needs to find another kind of memory, a maternal memory "'wide enough' b contain

al1 the mernories of the past--ail the pain, the guilt, the love, the knowledge, the power of

tlic exlwricrict. of iiiuleniity, yot clour uriougii o f i r lier 'hla? blu'!'" ( 108). Iso~~el's tleliire ta

escape the system hl ~~roclucttd lier t~ ti desire to reclaim thlit "me," lier iiiuccrnal

subjectivity. Isobel's maternal subjectivity has reduced its boundaries to the negative

aspects of her history and, in many ways, the narramr's taunts and lectures force tsobel to

remember the positive aspects. However, haunted by her ghosts and possessed by demons,

Isobel's stary displays what t l irsch ca 1 ls the "violent and clisturbing reversal of generational

continuity" that lets us %ok a t wornen's writing h m the different perspective of m a t e t d

subjectivityn (93).

In many waya. BIown Fipure is a rememory.l2 The way rnemory is re-presented

suggests a s h u f i g , a re-organization, as it were. Joan Coldwell compares Thomas's

technique to that of a painter. "When one looks closely at ail of Thomas' novels, it becomes

apparent thal the e p i d e s a re not in fact repea~ed; each telling is in a difléren t form and for

a different artistic purpose, as a painter might give the same mode1 in ciifferent posesn (47).

lnvoking the painting analogy is ultimately misleading, unless we place the painter and the

painted together, a seif-portrait in the mirror. Thomas certainly invokes the mirror and the

looking-glass world in her narratives, but a closer analogy exists in the phrase "each t e h g

is in a different form." Thomas is telling a story, and her narrative shares many of the

characteristics of oral storytelling traditions where stories change, adapt, merge, with the

teller. The personaiity of the teller guides the universal of the story while deconstnicting

the telling by repetitions that suggeat the particular circurnstance of the narration. In

Thomas's storytelling technique, mernories a b u t seemingly disparate things unravel in

ways that tell a story, a stary of the journey towarcis a radical maternal subjectivity. This,

too, is rememory.

'I'licrc arc iriciilcnk rrictn tioncd in JIlowri I*'igurc~ cricluclcil from bJ rs. I l l t x d , inviting

lhe reader once again ta read intertextually. h t h lsobel and the narrator in 13lown F i ~ u r e s

are engaged in reconstructing the past, not just recounting. Aa 1 discussed in Chapter 1,

pregnancy and birth contain possibilities for the transformation of the maternal subject.

Retelling a story textuatizes transformation, clironicles experience in fluid and shifting ways

that speak to the growth of the rnother speaking. Storytelling is therefore a suitable strategy

for the radical maternal subject, a subject in process not stasis. It is in this context that

enunciating embodied subjectivity can be a process of remernory.

By far one of the most important rememories that links both novels concerns the

representütion of Isobel's miscarriage. Esrly in Blown Figures we have the first occurrence

of this rememory. Isobel's miscarriage in Mrs. Blood was not the end of a process, which is

the way we crimmonly perceive birthing; rüther, it furms part of Iscibel's traumatic delivery

as a sulijcct, as a mother, into a realm that remains open.

When Isobel returned to the hospital, to have her M y scrapetl clean of the las1 clingitig wrüp6 of child (ller child was dead und die wüs iiiortifietl, l i e r little goat escaped. Al1 that was left was a few shreds, an ernbryonic finger perhaps, ti little lost eye. "Dead Dead Dead and never called me hrlother!") , she feu apart iike daybreak, her cries stained the white sheets of the rnorning. (34)

This passage contradicts the ending of Mm. Rlcxwi where Isobel miscarries in the hospital

and the child is ceremoniously taken away. Isobel's remernory here suggests her isolation,

that she was alone when the miscarriage occurred It also suggests that the bits of bodies in

Plown Figiirm finit their urigin in this wene, in the perceived remnants of thc felus. The

fetus that "gave a little mew and then (lied" has becurne "a few shreds." some "last clinging

scraps," uiiggesting isoliol'e frugrnontution in tha timo bctwccn tlio two l,<wko.

lsobel wants to tell this story and show how it might be that a rniscarriage can

generate fragmentation of the mother. "She had no real idea of what they were going to do.

Stick something up her, something electric. Ur. Uiswas was wearing rubber LK>ots. There

was a rumour on the compounci that the hospital was out of oxygen, she knew she was going

to die" (34). We see here that the "white rubber k t s " we first encounter in hlts. B l d have

fulFilled their orninous promise, that Isobel feek like a beast a t the slaughterhouse.

"Murderers." Dr. Biswas plunged the needle in. "There is nothing to be afraid of." "That's it," said Isobel. "Count backwards please from ten." "A," said Isobel. "B." "C." "Oh Doctor, I'm afraid," (35)

"That's it." For Isobel, fear is contained where there is supposed to be none. Yet even in

crisis we see that Isobel doesn't Iose her faciiity with language. She refuses to count, but

spells, makes jokes. "'Rime cycle, Dr. Biswas, that's what it is. I'il come out as good as new.

Egg is the most ciifficuit. Ask your wife'" (34). The "little oh," the wholeness of the egg, is

broken here, the stains are not removed, and Isobel does not come out "good as new." By

rewriting her miscarriage to show and retextualize the site of her trauma, Isobel can make

sense of ber own story.

Another reinemory concerna the pram dream in hilrs. BImd (discussed in Chapter

II), whose retelling here points to the differences Isobel has undergone.

Ilowntitairs, in the evoninp. hi8 niother rlid lier crewel work by thc Tire. Isobel tossed and turned and couldn't sleep. "It's like the princess and the pea," she said, "only the pea is inside me, not under the twenty-two mattresses, and it isn't a pea, it's a pumpbn."

She clrearnt the child haci been born and she was wheeling it up the IIigh Street in a pram. Suddenly the pram tipped over and the chiid fell out. Iis head came off and rolled into the gutter. h b e l woke up, shaking violently. She stuffed her hair in her mouth to keep from screaming for Jason who was down in the hall in his old room sleeping. (437)

The pram dream is noticeably shorter here, but the image of decapitation W repeated

Significan tly, this version highlights Isobel's isolation, for she is sleeping alone, stiU

pregnant, but sick with the flu. In Mis. Bltxxi, her daughter Mary was born when the

dream occurred and Isobel needed to venfy she was al1 right, but had awûkened the whole

household who then had dismissed her fear. Her resulting silence about ber fear implicated

others in its creation. Here, the focus pulls back to the self. She creates her own silence with

the physicd gesture oCstufing lier hair in her mouth. She refuses to articulate her fear to

others, and so this remernory indicates that Isobel is looking a t the ways in which she has

created her own fear and isolation.

Thomas's manipulation of the fairy-tale in this passage is provocative. 1sobel

identSes with the fairy-tale heroine but transforrns the story for her own purpose. Her

mother-in-law is not an ominous or interfering presence, and does crewel work, instead of

knitting, but the allusion to the mother-in-law of fairy-tale is explicit. I t is the prince's

mother who tests princesses with a pea, Beyond this, there are other inversions that operate

in this rememory in subtle ways. The pea is not under the mattress, but in Isabel, and

pregnant princesses are never seen in traditional fairy-tales. And the pea in question is a

pumpkin, recalling the pumpkin into which the wife of Peter was put. Again, we are invited

to read intertextually, for it is this same fairy-tale that Isobel tells to the nurses and women

on the ward in Mrs. Rlooti, as L discussed in Chapter 11. Reading intertextually, it now

becomes obvious that what is in in h.1 rs. Blood is now out in Blown Finires.

Hemernory, as dispiayed in Blawn Fieures, is intimately related to the fairy-tale

form. Thomas, by appropriating fairy-tale motifs and forms for materna1 story-telling,

radicalixes both the substance and sign systems of fairy-tale. Her use, however, suggests a

re-articulation, a recognition of the older forms, and a return of the repressed sexuality of

the older tales. 'I'lioinas se-turns ~caditional fiiiry tales, or at leaet ttieir palriarcha1 and

popular adaptations, to forms that have more in common with "old wives' talcsn in the

üricient sentie OC tlic phrüsc. hlüny fcminisl writcrs have reclaimetl irütiilioriül stories and

ce-plaeed theni in a fernale ~ o n t e x t , , ' ~ revealing the maces of older stories. Old women's

stories originally functioned as comïng of age and instructive stories-a passing on of a

certain Surni or kriowletlge ttirough the qmlren wurd, not necessarily delivcred by a n old

woman or crone, but by a mature mother. The cultural image of the wrinkled witch as the

speaker of fairy-story is a relatively modern invention, developed tu invoke the authority of

the old wuman while sirniiltaneously devaluing the stories as "chiltlren's stories. n13

Cosslett has noted the similarity between birth accountç and the oral tradition of

"the old wives' tate." Currently, to name a story an old wives' tale is to evoke the image of

"'other women who describe with apparent relish each ache and pain and who flaunt

obstetric rlifFiculties aa if they were rosettes, prizes for having suffered in labour, ta be

exhibited proudly in fkont of those who have not yet been put on trial'" (Sheila Eutzinger in

Cosslett 121-2).~~ Such Stones are something to keep rnothers away h m , to protect them

fiom. At first glance. Thomas's re-counting of her miscarriage and its dtermath could f d

into this category. However, there is an older tradition of storytelling that I would iike to

briefly discuss here, w hich fits Thomas's work. Marina Wsrner rerninds us t ha t the old

wives' tale was once a literal translation of ilpuleius's term anilis fobulo, l6 a term that

originally describeci what we now caU fairy-tales. She telis us the "connection of old women's

speech and the consolatory, erotic, and often fanciful fable appears deeply intertwined in

liinguage itseif and with women's speaking roles, as the etymology of 'fairy' illuminates . .. . [fairy] traces its origins to futa, a rare variant of fatum (fate) which refers to a goddess of

destiny" (14- 15). There is an ancient connection between old wives' tales, women's speech

and the itlea of fate. Isobel, the reader is repeatedly reminded, is on a journey to discover

what her destiny might be.

In a w n Fi-, full of hatlucinations, witches, dead babies and dreams, in a world

populated by "[cjripples, one-eyed people, pregnant women ... the chiltiren of eggs" (1 1).

Thomas has ctafted a text which, in many ways, reads like a fairy-tale. There is a heroine

and a quest, magic and obstacles, bld-letting and rewariis. There are transformations.

Part of Isobel's journey involves taking up her position as a materna1 speaking voice, the

speaker of tales. In order to do w she rnust confront her mothers first. ln t h w n E'ipres,

ltjubel is able to acknowledge the etrécts her mothers have had. It is not a daughter's book,

but a mokher's l m k wherc Iwhel cornes to recognise the force of her heritage, her place in

wonien's tiistory, in the lineiige of mothers to whom she, personally, belongs--lier female

genealogy. "From twelve years and thousands of miles Isobel looked hack on the figure of

her motlier-in-law and saw only the Snow Queen in the Fairy Tale. Jason had been Kay and

she was Cerda. ... The power of Jason's mother had been awesome and enormous" (393).

Isobel recognizes, however, that t'airy-tale provides her with a way of understanding her

past, the tnisreaciings and miscommunications between herseif and Jason. Isobel is given a

way to re-read the wall between them. The "invisible glass walls were really sheets of purest

ice. Why had she not seen it. iiindled a fwe, perhaps, or sirnyly walked right through?"

(393).

In the next paragraph. we get the curious shift from third yerson to second that

occurs when the na rra tor answers the questions lsobel asks herself, suggesting once more

that the narrator may very well speak through one of Isoliel's voices. We know that Isobel

feeis she has lost her sexiiality and bccoma inhibitecl. "Afterwartis, sf~.er Mary had came out

and M t the ekin on Iier belly like a wrinlrlecl, rumpled bed; &ter Nicliolas; a f ~ e r the dead

child who had no name, she was too appalled and ashamed of her body to ask -- or ta want to

ask" (34 1). The answer posed by the narrator, which 1 will discuss in a moment, brings us to

the crossroads of fairy-tale, mothers, and sexuality. The narrator tells Isobel: "Because you

were afraid, Isobel. Because you thought he didn't reaiiy U e it -- passion, abandonment, the

great conflagration of a man and a woman utterly uncaring about whoever is in the next

room or downstairs or next door even .... Because you were afraid of her -- because you

accepteci, poor fool, her order as more valuable than your chaos" (393-4).

Part of Isobel's task, then, is to examine the relationships she has acceptecl with her

mothers, to question their "order" and reclaim her own "chaos." The mother-in-law's order

implies a restriction on the daughter's sexuality. "Sex -- or anything to do with it -- had

always seemed so out-of-place, so excessive, in that well-kep t house, as though a large

animal with (possibly) fleas and (certainly) dirty paws had been let loose to snuffie and mess

about" (215). Sexuality is excessive, like Isobel's pregnant body, Iike the capers of a "Large

animal." Jason's "obvious fear of her swelling M y " (215) recalls Isobel's own fear of her new

role as mother and wife, and points to the way distance is generated by fear and the

inability to speak desire. "Curled up against Jason ... [shel pushed down her terrible desire

for Iiirn" (215) Lecause, in his nio~her's house, the prohibitionir are maintüiried and sexuality

is repressed. Confrontation with the yowerful mother was out of Isobel's reach in the past,

as it was for Jason.

In order to confront hor corpoteal past and rocover her erotic potential. Isobel must

also confront the way in which she has corne to embdy , for herself, and for Jason, the

maternal imago. It is one psychic element that Isobel confronts through fairy-tale, ciream

and rememorpthe all-powerfiil rnother of the pre-Oedipal stage of development described

by Freud. The radical maternal subject needs to recognise and incorporate the maternal

imago as an aspect of her subjectivity and, through recognition not refusal, diffuse the

imago's hamfu l potential. Isobel's relationship to her rnother-in-law, who is never named,

suggests she is generaliied in Isobel's perceptions; she is the all-powerful mother.

Furthermore, we do not encounter Isobel's mother often in Blown Fimires, " indicating that

"rriotlicra" Iicre are being consitlcrd 1css ÜS "rcal rnommietin and niore al; niaterna1 figures.

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. in an article discussing the ambiguities of being both mother

and psyclioantilyat, uuggesisls lhere is uften "a most un fortunate confusion . .. I~ehween the

mother as an interna1 object (imago) and the mother as a rea1 external object. between the

conscious and the unconscious, primary processes and secondary processes, the child inside

the üdult and the üdult" ( 1 14). This innedouter b u n d a r y between ~ l i c irnconscious mothar

and ~ h e external mother is one maternai relationship that Thomas explorcs in this

narrative. As Isobel struggles to enunciate her maternal subjectivity, she must confront the

functioning of the maternal imago in her relationship with Jason. Furthemore, she must

recognise the ways in which she, in pregnancy and maternity, bas become the maternal

imago for others. "Because, too, she had become for him once and for al1 MOTHER? Because

her desires for the pleasures of the body should have been tempered or superceded by her

cancern with and absorption ùy the great mystery inside her" (216)? Isobel is re-

determinhg throuyh her journey what ~ ~ h e "should" be. As with the way in which lsobel

cornes to view female b i d a s redemptive, the drearn of the devil and the rememory of her

rniscarriage discussed earlier, she must find a way to change her reading of her sexuality.

The radical maternal, speaking as it cioes to embodied subjectivity, can't deny the sexuality

of mothers. However, Isobel is not alone in feeling uncomfortable with sexual desire during

pregnancy and lactation. Western culture promotes a non-sexual maternity, indeed ciisplays

a great fear of the sexual mother which can also be attributed in part to the "confusion" of'

imago and material person. Isobel's rememories show the ways in which she is beginning to

resolve her contîicted maternal images. On the boat to hlafroka, soon after it saiis, lsobel

begins an affair with a "Dutch Boy." "She had opened her thighs to the Dutch boy with the

Erasmus profile. ... She lay on her back beneath him in her cabin as ou tsitle the moon lay

curved against the warm black body of the night" (64). The metaphor indicates the enormity

of Isobel's action. In freeing her body, in luxuriating in sexual pleasure, Isobel expands her

boundaries, releases the long-helcl knot in which she has imprisoned her desire. She

becomes the moon, lie valit wtinlan opening her legs ia the 8ky.

Isobel's sexual encounter with the Dutch Boy is marked by blootl, recalling Isobel's

earlier affair with Richard--"you cursed my pyjamast' (Mrs. Dlml 73)--and so relates the

Dutch Boy to Itichard, marking her entry into Africa with the same blood thut marked her

earlier, uninhibited sexuality. "('Oh damn' saicl Jsobel. 'Oh hell.' 'l'here was b l d on the

~hectti und oii Iiiéi lielly. 'l'hc stcwurrl'ér numa wu8 l u . Sho lof1 hiili u ricitc l ~ c b r c Iiroukfuért)"

(64). The ease with which fsobel accepts inscribing her environment with rnenstrual b l d

con trasts with het feelings ci l Jason's parental house, where "because of the sheets on

Monday mornings," (2 15) which his mother washed, she could not make love. Athough

Isohel does not have another atFiir on her trip, she does dream of this Dutch boy many

times, and near the end of her journey "[slhe conjure[sj him up for a minute to sit beside

her" (463).

Isobel's new-found sexuality is represented through water imagery in some

passages, recalling the association of the womb and the ocean. In one passage, soon after the

boat has landed in Mafrolia, lsobel has gone w a h g alone and, exhausted and suffering

from the heat, begins to speculate about her near-death in miscarriage, fantasizing a death

in the nearby ocean:

Perhaps if she went further down and ran into the sea- To die an ocgasmic death -- buming burning burning and then her Eire put out, her cries silenced by the hard wet tongue of the sea. To be held and liclieci and caressed. To spread her thighs apart and let the warm sea enter and explore her with his rnilky Engers while tiny silver fishes swarm between her legs. (1 14)

Note that here the sea is male. While invoking the image of the materna1 sea, Thomas

creates an inversion of the image to sexuaibe it appropriately. But the sea's "milky Eingers"

recall the milky fingers of mothers and children, the Linkage between oceans and amniotic

fluids. a return to the wemb. The double-gender enc&g of the sea is reminiscent of

Isobel's double voice in Mrs. Blond, but also speaks of the fluidity that marks corporeality.

Waiting for the unnarned ferry with Delilah, a ferry that will take Isobel across the

river to her final destination, she imagines herself and the Dutch Boy as the occupants of a

"big black Mercedes" (463). The narrator tells us "Isobel and the Dutch Boy had fucked aiI

the way down from the border. Naked and cool ... they sped unknowingly past conical raofed

huts" (463-4). Until this point in the narrative, most of Isobel's sexuat irnaginings and

mernories have been related to the past. Uut here, slie rreely syeculates in the present.

Ironically, though, her earlier fears of being unfaithfui have come to pass with her affair

with the butch boy. But she can imagine cool and succulent sexuality in contrüst to the hot

and dusty place in which she waits for the krry. llowever, as we have come to expect from

Thomas's narrative, even positive imaginings contain disturbances. ln lsobel's fantasy they

speed "unknowinglyn through the country, suggesting their freedom cornes a t the price of a

ccrtairi igiicirüncc. Isol~t.l'ti own Itcwiom, tlioiigli. is iiiorc slicwificully niürC;c!cl liy Iicr

witchiness.

The Dutch Boy was drawing big blue eyes, with extravagant lashes, on lsobel's ankles. ... Isobel pulled up the skirt of her long striped dress to look a t the eyes on her ankles. She Iaughed.

"1 will have to bathe or keep my skirts down." "S0?" "In this country witches sometimes have eyes in their ankles." (45.1)

Isobel, the sexually futfillecl and active woman here, is marked by her lover as witch. We

have seen how women's witchiness can be positively interpreted. But the witch is also a

figure inhabiting a space of ambivalence-past and present, dis-ease and esorcism,

transgressive sexuality and metamorphoses. At this point in the novel, while lsobel waits for

the ferry, inner and outer time, fantasy and reality overlap. She is markect by the

representative of her sexuaiity, the Dutch Boy, with a visible sign of what she most fears,

and what she wil1 become.

During this scene at the ferry dock, the narrator explicitly relates Isobel's position to

that of the dead:

the dead should have waited for Charon and his fenryboat. The sound of the hluslim's prayer, the grey water, the cirowned trees, the sun which seemed to be 8tuck Like a terrible burning lens a b e the huge silent crowd: the whole atmasphere was one of dream or myth. They were al1 shades -- perhaps her dead child, arms outstretched in greeting, would run towards her on the other eide. But she had no coin, nor honeycake; perhaps the ferryman would not take her. (462)

This scene, resplendent with death and Me, is a turning point in the narrative. As Isobel

imagines herself crossing the river Styx. sho has likewise moved into the final stage of her

narrative. However. the only ones who can cross the river Styx without paying the

ferryman's price are eupernatural beings. 1 suggest that with hcr firntasy, when the 0utc.b

Boy unknowingly marks Isobel a s a witch, she cornes into her transformation, begins to

claim her subjectivity in a way she has not yet been able to.

The Dutch Boy's script, marking her as a witch, also reflects how Isobel's

corporeality is a matter of muttiple, often contrüdictary, inscriptions on her person. She is

inscribed a s a sexual being in10 hor own stury, while the "Lilack Ludy of the nightw initiales

her journey into the body of Africa, the M y embodying her deaci fetus. The ferry echoes not

ooly Charon's b a t , but the ferry that brings her to Mafroka, her noating and Iiquid affair

with the Dutch Boy. This ferry is the last vehicle that transfers Isobel to the "other side" as

a metamorphosing su bject, becoming witch.

Chasseguet-Smirgel suggests that the materna1 imago speaks of maternity through

"tedying images of the witch, apparitions of Death. and so on."18 She argues that. in

analysis, there are great di£fïculties in "attempting to differentiate the ... mother's respective

functions Erom the actual reality of parents in a subject's inûividual history" (120). This is

precisely the work, I would suggest, upon which Thomas has embarked. ln Dlown k'@res

Isobel is atternpting to differentiate herself from the rnothers in her past. The figure of the

witch, as in Thomas's appropriation of fairy-tale stories and in Isobel's possession by

witches, rernains a powerful and ambiguous figure. Isobel wants to redefine "witch" to

utrcoiin t fiw tho 0ur1ir:ii luri of tiur tiiut.ariiul t i ivtory. (:tirr~~cgiioi.-Sm irgul proposc!s I l i r i ~

mothers a r e in a precarious position: the mother faces the same difficulties a s the analyst

when "at times of danger and critical moments in a lifetime, the archaic maternal imago is

reactivated. The best of mothers may be (re)transformed into a witch, a Fury, a Gorgon"

(120). Chasseguet-Smirgel can only image this transformation in the negative sense, that is,

the maternal imago a s witch is the sign of undifferentiation from the mother. She concludes

her article by suggesting the condition of women is intimately related ta the spread of

culture, a culture in whiich witches are relegated to storybookç. "mhe spread of culture

cornes h m a general well-being, meaning therefore that witches can stay shut away in the

pages ofchildren's bry-tale books" (126).

in Blown Finmes, this "spread of culture" is itself a suspect idea. Witches populace

the narrative in part because they are LMng members of A f h a n tradition, not relegated to

stmy-books. In the Freudian tradition, there is no place for a witch but as a representative

confiateci with negative maternal images. with mothers who leave. with bossy narrators.

"Isobel's mother always put her hat on when she went out. calling over her shoulder that

she was never coming back. Isobel wouid lie on her bed and listen KI her mother's

determined fwtsteps fade and sink inm the cold grey pavement of the street" (450). They are

the mothers who abandon. or the mothers who are too powefi , or the voices that tempt

fate and create fear. the witch that whispers in Isobel's ear. Isobei's mother in Son=

maintained a p o w d hold over her daughters through complete unpredictabiiity and

irrational behavior, She is thus like the witchy mothers in fais.-de. or the powerfirl

maternal imago, capable of destroying children. as weii as grown women, with threats of

abandonment.

However, ,Afkïcan witches do not behave like Western witches; they are not

relegated to representations and stories, but are rntegral to village Me. The witch is the

keeper of magic. of a "naturai" embodied knowledge articulated through the language of

spelLs and the use of herbs and potions. Athough feared for their great powers. witches are

respected, and like dibias. sought out for positive and negative reasons. Their power is

embraced. In many ways. then. the -Mkican witch ligure is also a consumer of sturies. She.

or he, as males can alço be witches. must consume the narrative of their supplicaats before

effecting magic. Western experts tell us: "'Witchcraft rneets. abwe a i l else, the depressed's

need to steep herself in irrational-seGreproach and ta denounce herself as unspehbly

wicked'" (231). The following passage, in which lsobel names herseif as a witch. might be

read as an exampIe that illuminates the words of those e.upens. for cannibaiism is one of

Western society's oldest taboos.

Isobel placeci herseif in the sinner's dock and confessed she was a witch. "1 ate the chiid in my womb." she said. "Since then 1 have never b e n

happy." (51s)

It appears Isobel sees herself as "unspeakably wicked," but traditions of African witchcraft.

whicb Thomas relies on in the last parts of the narrative, challenge this view. Isobei has

consumeci her dead fetus by denying its voice, its story. Ln becoming witch. which is one way

to represent becoming a radical maternai subject, Isobel is able to give voice to her repressed

stories, perfonaing and announcing her consumptions, ber misreadings in the egg rihial

that marks the close of the n&tive. Isobei wil l be able to reintegrate the disparate

elemen ts of her geneaiogy.

Mothers who go mad h m grief and loss are not wicked--the narrative suggests they

are lost. Fairy-tales tell us that what has been lost can be restored. but that this process

usually requires courage, perseverance. magic and a helper. in many hry-tales, the wirch

is not evil but in command of supernaturd forces and there to help and guide the heroine.

In the £inal chapter. Isobel. "[iln the depEhs of the great forest to which she had been talien

in her sleep" (0 13). reaches her Einal des~at ion-a special village and s a d grove. She

spends the night before "on a sleeping mat in a but full ofold womenw (521). She bathes and

eats purifying herbs that purge her system. "No one had spoken to her since she appeared

on the edge of the village" (521) but the oid women help her alI night. In the morning "a

piece af white c d i m was wound around her as a penetential (sic) garmentn (522). For a

change "she was no longer a&ud -- her han& were warm, her breathing was slow and even"

(521). Her la& of fear, the emotion that marks the miscarrying Isobel a f 1 M r s . and

that has travelied with her in Blown Firmres, is now translated into a c a h acceptarice, a

comfon with her body. This lack of fear functions. on the one hand. as a sign of Isobel's

regained sense of corporeality and. on the other. as an indication of the final s w e of her

hysteria, reçolution.

The c e r e m o d area bursts with primary. symbolic colors. resonatiog and repeating

aii the eariier images in the narrative.

The borders of the avenue ta the grove were pianted with red Ues. The sky was blue. The priests' wives. the supplicants, the .-lpo women were picturesquely dressed in white calico. The earth was msty red. the color of dned blood The sky was blue. The eggs in her hand were white and perfect. The red lilies giistened iike woundç. The power of the god crackied around the feet of the trembling priest. The god shook him as a great wind shakes a tree. Even the live fowls. brought as unwilling penance. ceased the2 h t i c flapping and were sti iL (524)

Isobel is able to meet the g d with a stxength and c h t y she has lacked up und this point.

RittraUy p d e d and surrounded by the old women and other suppiicants. she h d s the

ability to confkont her demons and witches by renaming herself: &e is no longer a

murderer, but a witch,

Isobel knew that sbe was about to confess to the crime of witchcraft and yet she aiso knew that there were no such things as witches. "If this is the

case," whispered one of her demons who perched for a moment, in the guise of a red bunerûy, on her shodder, "then by eonfessing to being that which is not you are confkssing to being nothing." She ignored him and stood d e n t , an egg in each hand. and concentrated on the white &ths of the suppkants, the blue &y, the red lilies. (524)

Is lsobel tnrty confessing to beiag nothmg, as the demon says? Isobel. here, in bemg what

cannot be, becomes the radical maternal subject capable of withstanding the ambiguities of

mrporealiq, the ambiguity of the subject position. for a subject both knows and does not

know itself The demon, signrficantly changed to male ("him"), whkpers logic. tempts her

with an interpretation that mbs her coming utterance of paradox and meaning--chat whch

is imaginazy is not, is nothing. But we have seen in Thomas's narrative that gaps. n o b g s

and nots have substance and dect- We can read the confession as a recognition that the

radicai maternal subject embodies what cannot be known within mascuList binary discourse.

Isobei may not be "real," but she is most certainly not a nothing.

The ceremony continues as isobei. head shaved, approaches the priest who breaks

an egg on her head literalizing her earlier cornmat to Dr. Biswas (34) that her womb after

miçcarriage was like a broken egg. -At this point. h b e l h e s her identity as a separate

entity, she becomes "the woman," a suggestion. perhaps, that as she goes to the priest she is

no longer a spiit, hysterical subject.

The woman then placed herself in the sinnefs dock and confessed she was a witch. She danced ta the god's drums with the smashed egg still plastered on her head

"1 have corne." she said. "to Iay m y need before the deity." "1 have journeyed here," she said. "to get rny destiny changed" The priest stroked her gently with a nkotoba club as she knelt before him. "Obre twa owou," he said "Che end of being tired is death. It is too late,

IsobeL The witches have eaten up Four Kra." (524)

This is the most difficult p a n of the narrative to deal with. The priest teils Isobel there is no

hope. it is "tao late." The priest's diagnosis: "the end of being tired is death" struck a deep

response as 1 thought about this passage for it i n d u c e s the possibility of exhaustion as an

origin of madness. For mothers. exhaustion is a real and material condition known to have

physical and hallucinatory symptorns. Can the bone-jarring feeling of sleep deprivation

shake loose the soul? This question. iike many others raised in the narrative, are left

unanswered by my personal. and ail too facile. desire to place myseif in fsobel's position. to

read e-xhaustion literally. The priest's words suggest that Isobei's sou1 has been consumed,

that t h e may be no one answer ta Isobel's ~ U ~ S M ~ S , no salvahon.

As reader, then, how am 1 to read Isobei's seeming death? --Uthough she is called

"the woman." 1 suggest that Isobel retains the characteristiics of her metamorphosis into a

witch, and GO one way of reading this ending is that the priest, possessed as he is by the

power of the god, is telling Isobel her journey is mmplete. IçobeL as witch, has mnsumed

her own sot& consumed stories and signs and through the journey narrative. has voiced

that which needed to be mld- It might be "tao iatew then. for the god to change her "destiny."

for she has already changed it herseif . . . weii. thrs passage c m be interpreted to mean chat

Thomas has fioi.shed with her character, her rreation Isobel Thomas has articulaced her

autobiographical gen- through the fktion of Isobel. and has achieved a resolution of

the traumas in her personal narrative that Içobel represents-

.And yet. Isabel does not simpiy die. but seems vibranciy alive after her textual

death has been amounceci The ambigous enduig of Blom Figures points not to death but

to rebirth. the rebirth of the maternal subject as a radical maternai subject. Isobel. then.

becomes a subject, both "woman" and witcb, who integrates the corporeal; mythic. psychic,

semial and transfoormative elements--*legends grow up around her red hair and white &inn

(525). Ln the h d narrative moments Isobel walks into the forest. "her white cloth

disappearfedj amidst the @ n t fenisw (525). The forest grows up around her, swaiiows her

body and her story into its own: Isobei's body now becomes the body of -Afkica. She occupies

the site her fems once occupied

Isobel returns in the dreams of chddren and in omens and signs: "The wilch stole

the wombs of women and the penises of men. Crops faileck women aborteci A M d was boni

with two heads .-. Isobel remained elsewhere" (525). She continues to appear in the pages

that fobw, a witch. a ciinnihal. a penitent, damned and çoulless according to our myths

perhaps. but p o w e f i And renamed: "when 1 go m the witch-tree the name I go by is ODI

- - S E or SHE EATS GRAND PEOPLE" (543). Isobel has been reborn into radical

maternisr, a subject position which may be hghtening to others. She becomes a woman who

can consume gmnd people. She is a witch. a storytelier. an authoriw, a radical maternai

subject authorized by her own expenence to consume grand things and surnive.

Notes

i When Bowering camments that "Blown Fimares is not a conventional novel at d," Thomas

replies "No, it's not a nweL It's a book" (8). E t is impossible to this novel as beionging exclusively to one genre.

' 1 have previously argued thac Isobel spealrs *what Jacques Lacan dehnes as the 'Discourse of the Hysteric.'"

This concept is u s f i in the attempt to understand hobel's hysteria and how it relates m discourse. namely to the textuality which both produces and contains her voice. The split subject (Isobel and her madness) is organized by her fantasy (the recovery of the dead fetus). This produces the symptom of her condition (her hysteriiuher questlthe form of the narrative) whch is in turn supported by. but separated h m the patnarchd s5rnbois of womanhood (Cryderman 10)

See also 35, n, 1.

.' See also Archer; Inrine.

' In psychoanalytic terminology, somatic symptoms "presentw to the analyst.

Reinhan is here referring to the exactly equal çoetal expectations placed on both widows and women who miscarry. The passage 1 have quoted refers to them both and Reinhan cites the work of L. Caine, Widow (1974) as a source for this congruitp. In light of the associations between fairy-tale as a fonn and the prohibition of womenrs speech 1 discuss Iater in this chapter, the d correlations provide evidence for the material correlations of many of Thomas's tropes and associations.

The M6bius strïp is an inverted three-dimensional m e eight. "a model that 1 came across in reading the work of Lacan, where he likens the subject to a Mobius stzip" (Grosz ?ai). Grosz, howeuer, suggests a different reading than Lacan and one that speaks to Thomas's narrative strategies in Blown Fimires.

Bodies and min& are not two distinct substances or two kinds of attributes of a single substance but somewhere in between these two alternatives. The M6bius strip has the advantage ofshowing the inElmion of mind into body and body into mind. the ways in which. through a h d of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another. This model also provides a way of problernatizing and rethinking the relations between the inside and the outside of the subject. its physical interior and its corporeai exterior, by showing not the2 fundamental identity or reducability but the torsion of the one into the other, the passage, the vector, or uncontrollable drift of the inside to the outside and the outside ta the inside, (fi>.

' "blammy lorriesn are an indiqenous form of clfrican transportation. They can be buses. trucks. or any kind of vebcle chat traveis a well-used route h m villages to central markets. People pay far less than for officd transportation and crowd on in great numbers.

8 h i n e quotes Gilbert and Gubar, Nineteenth-Centurv Literarv Imaeination (New Haven: Yale W. 1979), 16.

ChasseguetSm@& discussing representations of the materna1 imago, explores "the relation that exists between Freud's notion cf fernale sexuaiitp and his fear of a retum to ongins--the wombm (120).

'O This is an dusion to ~haries'~ungsley's The Warer Babies (1863). a story in which lasr children are transformed inca babies that Live in the water u n d they Leam their lessons and are found again by human parents. The book appears a few cimes and one quote in particular has strong images that resonate in Thomas quotes the following passage.

"But surely. if there were water-babies, somebody wodd have caught one at least?" "Weil. how do you h o w somebody has not?" "But they would have put it inm spirits. or into the lUtrstra&d ; . e u s or

perhaps cuc ic into two halves, poor dear little thing, and sent one to Professor Owen and one to Professor Huxley, to see what they would say about i ~ " (171) - -

This is a gniesome image of fragmentation to be plucked h m a chiidren's story, but i c suggests w a p in which science disregards that which it can not kiü and smdy. The water baby, like Isabel's fetuses, are not red d e s s b e y are captured and preserved by science.

l 1 I do not want to suggest. here. that Isobets smry is quivalent to the story of Seche in Belwed The conditions of slavery that Sethe operates within and against can't be compareci to one woman's -ge. However, Hirsch offers many interesMg insights into matenial subjectivity and ghost babies that 1 would like to consider in my discussion.

l2 Pm appmpriating, here. Morrison's term "rememory." When Sethe talks about her past, she calls the telling of her experiences rernemories. "Rememory is "repetition + memory, not simpIy a recoUection of the past but its retun, its re-presentation, its re-incarnation, and thereby the revision of memol itself* (Hirsch 107).

l 3 See, for example, Susan Tower Hollis. Linda Pershing and M. Jane Young, Eds. Ferninisr Theory and the Study of Foikiore (Urbana: University of Ulinois Press, 1993); Warner.

" See Warner. especially Chapter 10. "Sweet Talk. Pleasant Laughter: Seduction 1. 148-60.

" Sheila Kitzinger is the "charismauc" (Cosslett 15) female figue of the natural chrldbinh movement in England Her pioneering book, The E-merience of Childbirth (London: G o h a , 1962; 5th ed, Harmondsworth: Pen-. 1984), did much to brîng about a shift to a female point of view in natural chddbirth. -As Cosslett suggests. there are problems with Etzingeis unacknowleged ideology. See her discussion pp. 15-23.

" Isabel's mother is described. for the most part. in Sons, and the novel shows the ways in whi& Isobel tries to work against the n e m e s of her mother. Isobei's mother is unstable and unhappy, leaving her daughters a "legacy of fear. -4Rer her first day workmg at the hospital, Isobel th;nks:

And yet. In many ways it was eaçier for me to cope with the avowed madness of Ward 88 that the glossed-over violence of my home. If 1 had said to my mother, "You're crazy," she wodd have been shocked, h o d e d , cut ta the qui& and then firious. (149)

" ChasseguetSmirgel wggests that the maternal imago presents itseif in ways that can be categorized into thtse h d s of representatinnfi: the a p d y p t i c , where the mother is dnrested ofher ability to bear children; "Marian." where the mother's d e in childbearing is ideaiized and the f'ather's denied; and the "fatal attraction." where there is a fear, conçcious or unmnscious. of the mother. She argues this k t category is by far the most prwalent. but that ail categories idorm and appear in each other. (1 16)

Condusion

ideas, predictiong pmcess ... and pmcess

The maternai subject materialized on these pages in many guises--woman, writer.

character, critic-ail inhabiting Merent bodies--gravi& nursing, birthing, sexual, f e d .

texnial. She is nanrral. technological. primitive, transcendent, imago. radical- She rants and

cries. speaks softly and screamç out. she writes. Exploring maternitp has proven to be a

complicated and h u a t i n g project. for as Virginia Wolfe so aptly pointed out. there is more

written on the "subject" of Woman than c m possibly be read by one person. In my one smaii

corner ofpossibilit~ 1 have looked at what happens when women become the subjects of

their own discourse. when the "subjectn Woman breaks Fee of the diçcourse of men and

inscribes herself as mother.

In her novels ICIlrs. Blood and Blown Fimres, Audrey Thomas succeeds in

articulating the radical poçsibilities of maternity. Her character. Isobel Carpenter. shows

how di&uit it is to be a mother in Western society, to embody the site of an ideological war.

Aithough my thesis seemed at k t a contradiction. exploring birth and birth narratives

through a character whoçe stories are accounts of miçcarriage and madness, it now seems

that, indeed, these subject positions of "£'duren and " hysteria" are exemplary locations h m

which m explore the radical rnaternd Thomas's e.uperimental style, her radical te-xtuai

forrns and blown l5gures. her bleeding narratives, present a world in which Isobel. alienated

not only h m her cult'ie but aiso from herself. can struggle mwards an embodied

consciousness. Isobei's joumeys dirough herselfand through Afkica present the reader with

singular ~>ntradcaons. speculations. and ambiguities t h a ~ mothers negotiate on a d d y

basis.

However. the radical maternal subject remains elusive. It e?ùsts. 1 believe. as a

theoreticai construct snggling m emerge into the materiai world. The master narraüves

governing women's reproductive lives continue to control institu tional practices and

maintain hegemony over the production of knowledge about women's bodies and their ways

of mothering. The body of experts is proliferating and e-upanding, gmwing grotesque with its

many wigglng appendages. Binhing remains. for the most part. an experience fraught wirh

invasiveness. -4 pregnant wornan must s t d l negotiate her way through a series of

reiationships, a series of influences that seem, for the most part. concerned with informing

her how inadequatz she is for the task. Somehow, a mother must negotiate a barrage of

contradictorg "advice." or feel she has "failed" in her mateniity. Through Isobel Carpenter.

Thomas preçents the &ects of these continual negotiations on a maternal subject-

disintegration, kgmentation, fear, guilt, dienation--these are the conditions of reeiing

mammies*

h b e l Carpenter. 1 have argue4 does sucxeed in becoming a radical maternal

subject by the end of BIown Fimres, but. as we have seen. her çuccess is problematic. \Ve

can not know, absolutely, that she survives her process of becoming embodied. for she

doesn't appear again. There are no more Isobel sturies. However. women writers continue to

produce narratives--autubiographical. Gctional, narrathres that are neither or hoth--to d k

about their reproductive experiences. More and more women as researchers. doctorç.

lawyers. etc., are asking questions h m e d h m their points of view and wicovering "factsn

about the female body and its many C O ~ M ~ S to contradict and resist hegemonic

discourses, More and more women FKtite h m the maternai subject position; indeed. it would

take more time than 1 have to read ail the writings about rnatemity produced by rnothers.

But it will be a fascmating challenge, a process of conMual discovery. And that is my

conclusion, the radical maternal subject is a subject in process. ,As character, as mother, as

writer, she iç still in a process of becoming- She embodies ambiguity, contradiction, and

resistance, speaking in a voice that refuses to mtnlize e-xperience. She incorporates the

distance between inner and outer. subject and object, dream and reality, body and mind,

within her corporeaiity. She becomes.

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