‘What’s a D and C between friends?’ Space, intimacy and the medicalisation of unmotherhood in modernist literature

Abstract

This essay theorises what ‘unmotherhood’—or, living outside of motherhood—means within the specific context of ‘the modern’. Unmotherhood is an actively constructed state; it is explored through the parameters of agentive choice, social pressure and state control; and at the turn-of-the-20th-century novels articulate this state through specific vocabularies of contemporaneous phenomena of modernity. I look to four novels representative of four forms of unmotherhood: Tess Slesinger’sThe Unpossesseddepicts a somewhat voluntary abortion; H.D.’sAsphodel(and its sister novelBid Me to Live) are fictional representations of the author’s own stillbirth; Jean Rhys’sGood Morning, Midnightdepicts a woman’s life in the wake of her newborn son’s death and Nella Larsen’sQuicksandis a narrative dependent on the protagonist’s refusal to marry because of her equation of marriage with conception. Reading these narratives together affords us the opportunity to consider what ‘unmotherhood’ means as a constructed state in and of itself, beyond the presumed negative, passive state of the ‘not’ or the ‘not yet’. Through this analysis, I define ‘unmotherhood’ as: (1) a state mediated through medical knowledge, objects, spaces and authority figures; (2) an experience narrated through vocabularies pulled from phenomena closely associated with 20th-century modernity and (3) a role dynamically shaped through compulsory heterosexuality embedded in familial relationships. In these three ways, my analysis of the selected novels defines unmotherhood as a permanent, transient, chosen, enforced and—contradictory as it all may be—a legible and definable experience.