Picturing the Maternal Body
Judy Batalion - Oxford Art Journal
October 2, 2016
Caroline Rupprecht, Womb Fantasies: Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Literature, Cinema, and Art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 148 pp, ISBN: 978-0-8101-2913-9, £40 Paperback.
Rosemary Betterton, Maternal Bodies in the Visual Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), ISBN: 978-0-7190-8348-8, £70 Hardcover.
A few years back I took a hiatus from academic work in the area of feminist collaborative art and domestic representations to write a memoir. I’d recently become a mother, and the book traced the generational experience – how my emotional heritage, derived from my mother and her mother in turn, played out in my own practice of raising a daughter. My Jewish grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, having escaped to Siberian work camps, giving birth to my mother en route back to ravaged Poland. My mother was a refugee before knowing what home was. In later years, in Canada, both my grandmother and mother became compulsive hoarders, stuffing their homes with Kleenex boxes, used skirts, purses, newspapers, hanging on to all things in the fear they may be taken. They built protective nests around them, but ones that blocked me from them, emotionally and physically. The book traces how I birthed myself out of these cluttered wombs, these concentrated domesticities, in order to find a degree of subjectivity and be able to give birth myself. Entitled ‘White Walls’, the project dwells on the spaces in which motherhood transpires, sites that create personal subjectivity and hold generational inter-subjectivity, sites of fantasy and fear, that hurt and heal.
So it was with great intrigue that I approached Caroline Rupprecht’s highly creative offering Womb Fantasies: Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Literature, Cinema, and Art, a book about the complications of space and birth in the post-war psyche, and which set my own story into a historicised framework. An assistant professor of comparative literature, Rupprecht braids together psychoanalytic writings, social criticism, postcolonial and feminist film theory with cinematic texts and literature, as well as design and art, in order to explore the meanings of wombic imagery in the 1940s through the 1980s. Inspired by prehistoric caves – sites of mystery and inaccessibility which allowed them to be endowed with spiritual significance – Rupprecht reads wombic space as hidden and secret, inhabiting a darkness only open to imagination, and as such, invested with cultural and political meaning. The womb, she shows, became the site of projection of post-war sentiment.
Europeans felt the deep urge to be reborn post-tragedy; artists yearned to create anew. But they were also exhausted, sterile in the aftermath of destruction and violence. How might they integrate the past with their presents and futures? Would artists (and culture) withdraw into their genocidal history or be reborn out of it? The womb is a stand in here, a spatial metaphor that helped work out these complications and dreaded unknowns. Malleable and metaphoric, the womb represents death and rebirth, trauma and possibility, ‘interiors and exteriors, beginnings and endings, confinement or expansion … a range of spatial and temporal coordinates whose precise nature depends on the viewer’s gaze…’ (p xi). Rupprecht opens her book by analysing Womb Chair, a curvaceous, sinking office chair designed by Eero Saarinen, to show how its uterine shape references the origin of civilisation, while serving as a seat of comfort and anxiety, protection and vulnerability, privacy and exposure.
In the first part of the book, ‘Geographies,’ Rupprecht considers stories about maternal females searching for external space in which to settle, seeking space within their own engorged bodies and experiencing conflicted maternal roles. She analyses the writings of Marguerite Duras to show how the womb represents colonialism and the aftermath of war; the bloated belly is a site onto which France projects and works through its past of Nazi collaboration (relayed as agoraphobia) and territorial expansion in Indochina (claustrophobia), negotiating its dual role as victim and perpetrator. Rupprecht examines Alexander Kluge’s stories about orphans and Jewish-German babies to argue that the womb is a utopian and ‘heterotopian’ space of nostalgia and imprisonment, a way for Germany to confront the passing of time, the difficulty leaving its past for an uncertain future.
Part 2, ‘Boundaries’, reflects on male impotence in post-Nazi Germany, cultural anxiety about the loss of creativity, and intergenerational transmission of memory and guilt in post-Holocaust writing. She reads the fiction of Uwe Johnson – about a mother who immerses herself in womb-like waters to recall the memory of her own suicided mother – to show that the womb is a limitless, oceanic site related to death and genocide, and a mythical space that one might dwell in to extricate oneself from history. Finally in the 1960s and 1980s films of Jean-Luc Goddard, pregnant bellies feature as mysterious protrusions – they are synonymous with the curved camera lens. The gravid body is linked directly to the male creator and his means of creation. Creativity is catalysed by appropriating female otherness.
Rupprecht concludes her book with an inconclusive yet most interesting ‘end piece’, centred on the sole visual artwork in this study, Damien Hirst’s Virgin Mother (2005). In this extremely large-scale bronze sculptural parody of a Degas dancer and anatomical drawing of a pregnant woman’s body, half the figure is dissected to reveal her undersides, including the layers of her uterus and her foetus curled up inside, as well as her own flayed, mortal head. Displayed in outdoor courtyards in New York City and London, this flaunting work functions as the opposite of the shrouded womb that appears in the rest of the text, and like the sensational piece, suddenly jerks the earlier argument into perspective, the stakes crystallising. The womb is now, in the post-war period, an exposed public emblem, prodded and dissected, clinical and cold. The piece showcases brute truth: we are all simply part of a birth–death lifecycle. Rupprecht notes that though science suggests the pretense of uterine control, anyone who has ever tried to get pregnant knows that the womb does what it likes. She, however, asks: if culturally, the womb has lost its mystery, what are its new narratives?
Reifying these novel maternal tales is one role taken up in another recent and imaginative book that offers wombic exploration. Rosemary Betterton’s Maternal Bodies in the Visual Arts is an art historical study that examines representations of the maternal body and a litany of questions about contemporary motherhood. Neatly, while Rupprecht’s text ends with the outdoor presentation of Damien Hirst, Betterton begins her first chapter with Hirst’s YBA contemporary Marc Quinn and his large-scale public sculpture Allison Lapper Pregnant, mounted on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2005 – the same year as Hirst’s piece. This latter (but simultaneous) public presentation of pregnancy was a representation of a living, woman artist who was born without arms. In Betterton’s reading, this controversial work exposed the heteronormative expectations of public, national space.
Indeed, though both scholars framed their books in part with YBA works, their projects differ. While Rupprecht analyses mainly male artists to show how the womb is aligned with a historically and geographically specific cultural condition, Betterton looks at art largely made by women in order to dissect and help resolve the dilemmas and problems that surround the contemporary maternal body, from the cultural taboos over stillbirths, maternal aggression and aging, to the struggles of the working artist who is also a mother.
Betterton begins her book with the personal: pregnant at age 40, she became interested in maternal bodies, noting the many hypocrisies and confused expectations that are culturally imposed on this site. The maternal body, she claims, signifies deep and often conflicting cultural ideals (natural and exceptional, hidden and on exhibit, intimate and public property) but its visual history is ‘curiously unacknowledged’ (p 1). Focusing on affect and haptic understanding, on the material embodiment of the condition, Betterton articulates important and nuanced distinctions that are often glossed over. For one, the maternal body and pregnant body are not discontinuous nor are they always the same (not all pregnancies result in motherhood, nor were all mothers once pregnant). She highlights that the subjectivity of the pregnant woman is unique – she is one person, yet two, representing the state of always co-existing with(in) another, always emerging in relation to a changing child. This understanding, she suggests, can be used as a model for a different ethics of self and responsibility to the other. Maternity is in many ways unstable – a state of being decentred, split, doubled, experienced as I and not I; the mother (or mother to be) feels pride and discomfort, excitement and loss of bodily and psychic autonomy.
The book is divided into themed chapters, each of which integrates art criticism, psychoanalytic theory, poetry and literature with the analysis of artworks, the history of birthing and layers of feminist response; the text reads like a firing of ideas coming from all directions, a full scan and amniocentesis of the mother’s layered flesh. The aforementioned chapter on Quinn questions how intimacy is presented in public space. In a chapter that examines Mary Kelly, the Hackney Flashers, Alice Neel and others, Betterton poses questions about the practical and subjective difficulties in being an artist and a mother, looking historically at how the notion of genius precludes the maternal, and how hard it still is in the contemporary art world to present maternal issues outright – a theme she comes back to several times. Betterton considers class difference in childcare, but most interesting is her argument that many women artists present childbirth – not as the most natural thing to happen to them – but as something deeply unfamiliar, a rupturing discontinuity to their femininities.
A chapter based around the work of Helen Chadwick and historical Virgin paintings examines maternal bodies as sites that are sacred and/or profane, explores the shift from religion to science as governing pregnancy, and suggests a cultural focus on natality rather than mortality. Like Rupprecht, Betterton also includes a chapter on the ‘transparent womb’ and the development of gynaecology as spectacle. Through the work of Anna Furse to Gunter von Hagen, she questions how new visualisations affect the experience of being pregnant, female agency, and the feminist take on abortion. (Neither author, however, dwells on the question that most haunts me: how does pre-natal imaging, including rigorous analysis of DNA, of our deepest cores, shift the maternal-foetal bond and does it have implications for both mother and child?) An analysis of works by Paula Rego and Tracy Emin delves into the ‘monstrous’, abnormal taboos on miscarriage, stillbirth, and maternal aggression and ambivalence. She sets these works in historical context: foetal deformity is now considered to be down to genetics and behaviour (like smoking), but it used to be thought to be brought about by the gravid woman’s imagination; women, who were the ones to announce their own pregnancies before HCG blood tests, used to be endowed with more agency over their reproduction.
Particularly intriguing to this reviewer are the last two chapters which look at elements of motherhood that are not generally discussed. In one, Betterton considers works by Susan Hiller and Bobby Baker to probe the nature of maternal ‘waiting’ and time, which she presents as a multiple and disruptive embodied temporality, a complex layering of linear, cyclical and irregular episodes. In another, she proffers an analysis of the aging maternal body, decades after the birth experience. Hinging on an examination of Louise Bourgeois’ subversive and sexualised late age self-portraiture, often inclusive of a foetus and/or phallus, she considers an aging maternal corpus that is not calm and resolved, but continually probing, playing, and ‘re-membering’ (p. 172).
In doing all this, Betterton reveals our cultural anxieties around the maternal body (like Rupprecht, in a sense, but she does not explicitly characterise the contemporary mind-frame). Indeed, these anxieties are of critical importance for her. Throughout, she reiterates the stakes of this project – she aims to provide not just an analysis, but an intrusion, an attempt to show how art not just reflects cultural ideologies but can help create new cultural norms, catalysing discussion and offering new ways of looking. These visual representations of maternal and birthing bodies are sites of reconfiguration. Quinn’s public sculpture of Lapper jolted viewers into a new understanding of their public sphere as heteronormative, and offered one in which non-hetero-healthy-young maternal physique can be, not deviant, but a new somatic norm. She hopes for the ‘productivity of monsters’, demonstrating how Emin’s work presents a female body that is maternally impossible. Similarly, the Bourgeois portraits explore why culture is hostile to older women giving birth and offer a new concept of the ageing female body as generative and unkeeled. (In the US right now, there is heated debate among feminists about the medicalisation of post-partum emotion, one side claiming that patriarchal science is taking over women’s bodies yet again, the other side arguing that post-natal depression is dangerous and should be treated as a serious condition. It strikes me that Betterton’s distinctions about the maternal body through time, its shifting subjectivities and agencies, can help think through this issue.)
Like Rupprecht, Betterton refers to instances where the woman’s body serves as an emblem for male creativity, but her main concern is how it is often not a realm for female creativity, how difficult it still is to curate exhibitions about maternity. ‘For many women who practice art, become pregnant and give birth’, she writes, ‘often the most powerful and transforming experience of their lives is still routinely dismissed by critics, curators and tutors as sentimental or irrelevant to contemporary art practice’ (p. 6) Betterton addresses artists who used distancing techniques in order to expose their reproductive concerns in traditional gallery space and is even critical of them for it. As she says of Mary Kelley’s Post-Partum Document, ‘… if women’s experiences of being maternal bodies were already culturally repressed and unspoken, then a feminist strategy of nonrepresentation risked reinforcing an existing absence’ (p. 55). Notably, however, Betterton herself does something similar. She begins her book with the personal, compelling and relatable statement about her shame at studying pregnancy and her own later-in-life gestation (‘which surprised, enchanted and terrified me in equal parts and led to a radical transformation in my own identity and embodiment.… I was drawn to maternal bodies that seemed to be out of place, perhaps in response to my own anxieties about the maternal…’ pp. 1 and 12). But she never returns to that first person voice, one I (admittedly, an art historian turned memoirist) waited for through the entire book. This omission seemed conspicuous, as if she too had (advertently?) stuffed the personal under the seams of the critical text; yet it remained glaringly present, perhaps recalling the bifurcated subjectivity of the mother.
Taken together, these two books – one about how the fantasy of the gravid body has helped transform national sentiment, the other about how representations of the gravid body help shift gendered expectations – form a complementary Russian-doll-like examination of the maternal in twentieth and twenty-first century art and culture, and might be thought of to be part of a broader cult of self-conscious motherhood. The pregnant and post-partum body is under literal and metaphorical scrutiny; shifts in neo-natal technology, and consumer baby products are rapid; parenting columns and blogs proliferate in the popular press. To come back to Betterton, perhaps we are in this motherhood-obsessed moment because, like her, many women are having children later in life. These are women (myself included) who have been trained to be careerists and critics, to do ‘good jobs’. Babies can be created from frozen eggs with no fathers, staying childless is increasingly acceptable: motherhood is – to some degree – a lifestyle choice. As women make a decision to procreate, we approach parenting with self-awareness. Though the pressure to perfection that this places on mothers is usually seen as a negative, I choose to envision us dwelling in a positive feminist moment of somatic agency, of accepting new lives and forms. We are the ones creating the maternal-critical culture, for worse, and, as these books show, for better.