The “Lessons” of the Moths in Gene Stratton-Porter’s The Girl of the Limberlost

My husband was in charge of planning family time a few Saturday afternoons ago, and he decided to take our ten-year-old son and me to the Limberlost State Historic Site in Geneva, Indiana, about an hour from where we live. This was a carefully considered choice: he thought that I would like touring the home of Gene Stratton-Porter, an early 20^th-century author most famous for her best-selling fiction set in the nearby Limberlost Swamp and that he would enjoy observing and photographing the wildlife in the recently revitalized wetlands area. In all, the site was a hit. Even Wes liked it—since he was the only kid on the Stratton-Porter home tour and, therefore, got a lot of special attention from our guide. We started in the visitor’s center, where we were quickly drawn to a butterfly habitat cage, in which we observed several huge moths. One of the staff told us that these were Polyphemus moths, a species that Stratton-Porter particularly enjoyed collecting and studying. They had hatched in the last couple of days and would only live for about 7-10 days more, with the sole purpose of mating and laying eggs in that time. (They don’t even have mouths; they can’t eat!) Next, during the home tour, the guide led us through period rooms, as well as many engaging anecdotes, to paint a compelling picture of Stratton-Porter as a talented naturalist, writer, photographer, artist, musician, and film producer who often refused to fulfill conventional gender roles and focused her critically and commercially successful career on educating the public about the flora and fauna of the swamp as well as sharing the culture of the people residing in and near the Midwestern wetlands. The most well-known of her books, we were told, is The Girl of the Limberlost, the story of Elnora Comstock, a girl who sells moths and other specimens and artifacts from the swamp to pay for her high school education, earning intense admiration from everyone in the community, including her initially neglectful mother and a wealthy man visiting from Chicago, whom she eventually agrees to marry.

When I took up the novel in the following week, I was pleasantly surprised by its complexity. Despite Stratton-Porter’s personal history of bucking gender norms and the clear focus on nature in her writing, The Girl of the Limberlost is not straightforwardly feminist or environmentalist. Contemporary scholarship on Stratton-Porter’s body of work reflects her conflicted representation of women and nature. In keeping with the popular conception of Stratton-Porter’s oeuvre, Cheryl Birkelo calls her an “early ecofeminist” (8). Robert Mellin notes, however, that her writing engages with the difficulties of maintaining environmental ideals in a cultural landscape of technological “progress”: her characters often unquestioningly accept the “easy money” that they find is “available by compromising the ecological integrity of the Limberlost region” (31). And Lawrence Jay Dessner says that Stratton-Porter’s writing “dramatizes assumptions about class, gender, and sexual identity that are at best ambiguous, at worst retrograde” (140).

In a more thorough discussion of Stratton-Porter’s depiction of women in The Girl of the Limberlost in particular, Elizabeth Ford details the disappointing trajectory of both Elnora and her mother toward “convention.” Ford notes that Katherine Comstock, Elnora’s mother, gives up her self-reliance—as well as her dedication to protecting her land from loggers and oil rigs, incidentally—in order to become the ideal mother to Elnora. And, although Elnora is originally intent on pursuing college and is consistently depicted as intelligent, strong, and resourceful at the beginning of the novel, she ultimately retreats, like the caterpillar that spins itself into a cocoon, to conventional wife and motherhood: “Before Elnora has had a chance to spread her wings, she prepares to enter the cocoon of convention, an enclosure not known for nurturing the individual pursuits of its inmates, no matter how feisty the heroine” (152). I would like to extend this discussion of women as like the moths that Elnora collects by countering aspects of Ford’s assertion. Elnora does spread her wings; it’s just that—on the surface at least—the book suggests that the way that women become beautiful moths is by taking on the responsibilities of the ideal wife and mother. Like the Polyphemus moth, and others with similar life cycles, women in this novel live for the purpose of reproduction. However, I would also suggest that the framework of “the female swerve”—Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s notion that female authors have sometimes written female characters who adhere to conventional gender norms to conceal feminist agendas—might be helpful in understanding Elnora’s significantly narrowed life path at the end of the novel.

I’d like to start with a supporting character in The Girl of the Limberlost—Edith Carr. Edith is Phillip Ammon’s betrothed. Phillip is the man who visits the Limberlost area from Chicago and, while there, develops an intense appreciation for moths—and for Elnora, the girl who collects them. Edith is frivolous, petty, and self-interested while Elnora is industrious, honest, and nurturing. (There is certainly something here about rural, Midwestern identity vs. “big city” identity, but that is beyond the scope of this post.) Despite Edith’s obvious shortcomings, Phillip tries to honor his engagement after he returns to Chicago. When he throws a ball in Edith’s honor—and clearly still thinking back to what he left in the Limberlost—he has a dressmaker create a gown for Edith in imitation of the Imperial moth, complete with wings. Emphasizing Edith’s unwillingness to subordinate herself to Phillip, the narrative conveys her understanding of the gown: “She was the Empress—yes, Phillip was but a mere man, to devise entertainments, to provide luxuries, to humour whims, to kiss hands!” (310). It is later in the novel when Edith comes to understand what readers can infer is the true significance of Imperial moth costume—that she, like Katherine and Elnora, is most beautiful and in greatest alignment with the designs of nature when she accepts her subservience to men and her intended role of wife and mother. In a conversation with Hart Henderson, her new love interest after Phillip has broken their engagement and returned to Elnora, Edith promises to become more like Elnora: “You find out what you want to do, and be, that is a man's work in the world, and I will plan our home, with no thought save your comfort. I'll be the other kind of a girl, as fast as I can learn. I can't correct all my faults in one day, but I'll change as rapidly as I can” (409). Edith’s acceptance of her new role (and “nature” in general) is solidified when she captures an Imperial moth—despite her past feelings of repulsion for all insects—and presents it to Elnora as a peace offering. Symbolically, here Edith offers herself, in the figure of the moth that she previously outfitted herself as, to the ideal of womanhood. She has finally taken on the natural responsibilities of women represented in the moth.

Just as Edith turns her attention to the Imperial moth in the moment of her acceptance of convention, soon after Katherine’s transformation to loving mother, she becomes fascinated with a just-hatched Royal moth. Katherine exults the moth’s life cycle as “a miracle” : “. . . it takes the wisdom of the Almighty God to devise the wing of a moth. . . . this creature is going to keep on spreading those wings, until they grow to size and harden to strength sufficient to bear its body. Then it flies away, mates with its kind, lays its eggs . . . . [The moths] don't eat, they don't see distinctly, they live but a few days . . . ; then they drop off easy, but the process goes on” (259-60). (Eating here could certainly represent bodily appetites in general, which would suggest that the moth is, symbolically, as asexual as the ideal mother that Katherine becomes. Eating is represented in complex ways in the novel and could certainly bear more discussion in another context.) Inspired by the moth’s purposeful design for the work of reproduction, Katherine goes on to beseech God, “Help me to learn, even this late, the lessons of Your wonderful creations. Help me to unshackle and expand my soul to the fullest realization of Your wonders” (260). Of course, Katherine is in need of the “lessons” of nature at this point because she was not always “the other kind of girl” that Elnora is and that Edith later aspires to be. Until after Elnora’s graduation from high school, Katherine treats Elnora with neglect bordering on cruelty and blames her daughter for the death of Elnora’s father, Katherine’s husband, Robert Comstock. Katherine returns again and again to the site of Robert’s death, “the oozy green hole” (207) in the swamp, where she was unable to save her husband years ago because of being in childbirth labor with Elnora. Ford calls Stratton-Porter’s representation of the sinkhole Freudian, rightly indicating its likeness to the conception of a vagina as a man trap (152). I would add that Katherine’s early attachment to this site and to the fateful moment of giving birth suggest her association with the wrong kind of womanhood—the sexually desirous and the corporeal. But, in the chapters following her study of the Royal moth, Katherine takes on a new identity as a self-sacrificing and spiritual woman by showering attention and adoration on Elnora. (Katherine’s transformation also necessitates the purchase of all sort of beauty products and stylish clothing at the shops in nearby Onabasha and the rental of a beautifully furnished home in town. Consumerism is at the heart of The Girl of the Limberlost, but this is also outside the scope of this blog post.)

While both Edith and Katherine transform into conventional women based on the instruction of moths, Elnora is associated with moths throughout the narrative, as she collects them to pay for schooling, and seems to have already learned the “lessons” of ideal womanhood even at the beginning of the book. But it is only at the end of the novel when Elnora fully accepts the conventional role of wife to Phillip and mother to his children. Perhaps the moment that seems to change Elnora’s life trajectory most significantly is when Phillip convinces her to give up her dream of attending college, a goal that she has consciously worked toward from the first day of high school, according to the narrative. The moment is precipitated by Elnora’s admission that the trees in the swamp talk to her: they tell her "[t]o be patient, to be unselfish, to do unto others as I would have them do to me" and “to be true, live a clean life, send your soul up here and the winds of the world will teach it what honour achieves” (274). Of course, the values that Elnora articulates here are many of those associated with the domesticity, chastity, and self-sacrifice of the ideal woman. And, apparently convinced that Elnora’s possession of these values makes her education complete, Phillip tells Elnora, “What you have to give is taught in no college, and I am not sure but you would spoil yourself if you tried to run your mind through a set groove with hundreds of others. I never thought I should say such a thing to any one, but . . . I honestly believe it; give up the college idea. . . . Stick close to your work in the woods. You are becoming so infinitely greater on it, than the best college girl I ever knew, that there is no comparison” (276). In keeping with the novel’s suggestion that ideal women nurture men and children, it is clear that Phillip is most interested here in what Elnora “[has] to give.” Possibly even more gratingly to the contemporary reader aware of the history of women’s financial reliance on men in patriarchal cultures, Phillip goes on to wield his own financial security against Elnora, who he positions as financially dependent, at least in the hypothetical: “If I now held the money in my hands to send you, and could give it to you in some way you would accept I would not” (277). Even when Katherine later discovers that she has enough money in the bank to send to Elnora to college, Elnora refuses, choosing instead to share the “lessons” of the Limberlost with the younger generation through the traditionally women’s role of teacher in Onabasha.

Later, when Elnora is trying to make a final decision about whether or not to marry Phillip despite what she perceives as Edith’s still justified claim to him, Elnora visits Freckles, the titular character of a previously published Stratton-Porter novel, and his wife, only identified as “the Angel,” at their lake house in Michigan. It is hard to believe that Stratton-Porter would not have been aware of the literary allusion in the name “the Angel” to Virginia Woolf’s wholly self-sacrificing mother, wife, and household manager, “the Angel in the House,” who Woolf proposes that all women need to kill in order to pursue fulfilling lives. (As I was reviewing Woolf’s discussion of “the Angel in the House,” I realized that she also wrote an essay entitled “The Death of the Moth.” There is definitely more to say about this; I hope I can get back to it soon!) It is certainly possible, given the allusion to “the Angel in the House,” that readers are to take the Angel’s ideal womanhood ironically—representative of exactly that which Elnora should kill in order to pursue college and a career but that ends up ensnaring her instead. On the surface, however, the Angel is sincere in her unwavering adoration of her four children, only a “start” to the large family she and Freckles want (372), and her desire to provide Freckles with a home that serves as a cozy retreat from his work in the city of Grand Rapids. This portion of the novel also clarifies Elnora’s ambitions to follow in the Angel’s footsteps. Upon arrival at the lake house late at night, Elnora is so excited to see the sleeping children that she asks the Angel for “a peep at the babies” before going to bed, a move that earns her the exclamation “Now you are perfect!” from the Angel (372). From there, Elnora becomes heavily involved in the care of the children and household. When she finally realizes that Edith has fully surrendered her hold on Phillip, Elnora “see[s] angels” (395) in a moment that perhaps signifies her full incorporation into the ranks of women like Freckle’s wife. Also significantly, it is in the next few paragraphs that Elnora accepts Edith’s offering of the Imperial moth, still the central symbol of ideal womanhood in the novel.

On the surface, the trajectories of the women in The Girl of the Limberlost suggest that conventional womanhood is the ideal that is taught in the “lessons” of the moths. Just as the moths are most beautiful in the phase of their lives dedicated to reproduction, these female characters are at their best as self-sacrificial wives, dedicated mothers, and efficient housekeepers. But readers cannot ignore that the ultimate fate of the moths in the Limberlost is death after only a few short days dedicated to mating and laying eggs. If women are like moths, then they are almost certainly headed toward demise—symbolic death, and, given the maternal mortality rate of this era, perhaps literal death. It is also significant that almost all the moths that appear in this narrative suffer insult beyond that of having short lives. Through descriptions of the spreading of moths’ wings as they die and the pinning of dead moths to boards, both of which contain phallic symbolism, Stratton-Porter might be leading us to consider the humiliation and violence represented in the permanent affixing of intelligent and spirited women, like Edith, Katherine, and Elnora, into roles of self-sacrifice and domesticity. The pin used to hold a specimen to a board for observation may also be interpreted in an ecofeminist view as similar to the oil rig—another phallic symbol—that penetrates the land for extraction of natural resources for human use. It is perhaps not coincidental that, as Katherine accepts her role as ideal mother, she also entertains the idea of allowing oil mining on her land, something that she had previously resisted. The placement of the oil rig is like the pin in that both represent the violence of men against nature—and women, who are here closely associated with both the wetlands itself and the moths that live there. Indeed, then, while Stratton-Porter seems to use moth symbolism to indicate the natural path for women as leading toward wife and motherhood, another possibility exists—that the moth symbolism in this novel works as a “female swerve,” through which Stratton-Porter points to the death that awaits women in domesticity. That this duality in the moth imagery in The Girl of the Limberlost exists—in conjunction with Stratton-Porter’s unconventional personal history and the ethos of conservatism in her nature writing—earns this author her contemporary reputation as an ecofeminist and deserves further study among literary scholars.

Works Cited

Birkelo, Cheryl. “Gene Stratton-Porter: Scholar of the Natural World in A Girl of the Limberlost.” Midwestern Miscellany, vol. 40, 2012, pp. 7–29. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2015384103&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Dessner, Lawrence Jay. “Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature, vol. 36, no. 2, 2000, pp. 139–57. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2000058323&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Ford, Elizabeth. “How to Cocoon a Butterfly: Mother and Daughter in A Girl of the Limberlost.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 4, 1993, pp. 148–53. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=1994060348&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2^nd ed. Yale UP, 2000. Print.

Mellin, Robert. “The ‘Talking Trees’ of the Limberlost: Negotiating a Class-Informed Ecofeminism.” Midwestern Miscellany, vol. 40, 2012, pp. 30–36. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2015384104&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Stratton-Porter, Gene. A Girl of the Limberlost. Dell Publishing Company, 1986. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1942. 235-43. Print.

The Power of Fertility in Inanna Literature and Today

Fertility has been on my mind lately. Not because I want another kid (ever!), but instead because of some lucky confluence of issues in my professional and personal lives. At the same time that I am preparing to teach a collection of myths surrounding Inanna, a Mesopotamian goddess of fertility, in my Honors humanities course in the fall, my daughter (now eight) has decided to educate herself on what will happen to her as she goes through puberty (a process that, experts say, begins for girls in the contemporary US between the ages of eight and 12). In a move surely representative of some sort of developmental milestone, Taegan apparently plucked American Girls’ The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls off her shelf one day last week (it’s been there for at least a year) and started flipping through the pages. Minding my own business in another room, I was only alerted to the situation when she then bombarded me with a barrage of questions borne, I am certain, out of a mixture of fascination and horror at the diagrams and frank information presented in the book. Once I figured out what was happening, I made a point of stopping what I was doing and, as all of the childrearing advice books suggest that parents do, answered Taegan’s questions to the best of my knowledge. This was hard for many reasons, not least of all because I could really use a refresher course on female anatomy terms and functions myself (honestly, could you explain the female reproductive cycle off of the top of your head?). But the real stumper was a question fairly unrelated to anatomy: “So, if girls have to go through all of this so that we can have the babies, why don’t we get more respect? Why has there never been a girl president?”

Well, first of all, this is a super question, and I’m proud my little girl for thinking this way (one point for feminism!). Secondly, the answer is kind of counterintuitive. In fact, in a lot of ways, it is precisely because we have the babies that we are still not considered ideal for high-level political leadership. There is still a wide-spread assumption that our capability for nurturing life prevents us from making tough political decisions. And, perhaps more significantly, great measures have been taken over the course of history to contain female fertility, as it has been constructed (by a white, male patriarchal power structure) over time as posing some sort of threat to humanity, civilization, order, etc.

But I am learning that it has not always been this way! As my recent reading has shown, Inanna was revered for her duality of “feminine” and “masculine” traits. Inanna was the most prominent and lasting Mesopotamian goddess, not only of fertility, but also of sexual love and combat; she was worshiped for her ability to make babies and to make war. In a Sumerian hymn to Inanna entitled “Loud Thundering Storm” (ca. 2,000 BCE) for instance, the goddess is portrayed as simultaneously a sustaining life-force (“. . . you pour your rain over the lands and all the people”) and a destroyer of life (“You trample the disobedient like a wild bull . . .”) (Wolkstein 95). Inanna’s power is in her ability to nurture and to kill. And, in our contemporary world, wouldn’t this make her a great president? ;)

Within the context of a fertility cult like that of Inanna, it makes perfect sense that a god or goddess would be both loving and terrible. This is because the god or goddess represents the earth (or “Nature”) itself, the source of all food and shelter and human life, but also the cause of destruction on mass scale, due to flooding, drought, tornadoes, hurricanes, cold, heat, etc. If the earth is the model for god, then of course god is terrifying and unpredictable. This basic ideology, that the divine is both nurturing and destructive, carries over into most major world religions exactly because, at their core, all religions are fertility cults in that they function to explain the dual nature of the earth that both sustains and kills us.

Now, because we are all of the earth (and/or of god, if you prefer), I believe that we are all of dual natures, just like the earth, Inanna, Yahweh, God, etc. We are all capable of nurturing life; we are all capable of battle. The early Mesopotamians seemed to understand this, that fertility was not the purview of only women and that fighting was not the purview of only men. Gods were worshiped for their powers of fertility just as goddesses were; goddesses were worshiped for their powers of destruction just as gods were.

Over time, though, it seems that the Mesopotamians abandoned many of their fertility goddesses and placed more and more faith in their phallic gods. Indeed, Inanna is exceptional in that she lived on as a prominent fertility goddess—as Ishtar in the Semitic languages—until the end of the Ancient Mesopotamian era. Interestingly, though, along the way, Inanna/Ishtar develops in the literature into a castrating matriarch, a man-eater, not unlike the vagina flower in Pink Floyd’s The Wall (see my discussion of this little gem here). In the Babylonian The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 600 BCE), Gilgamesh declines Ishtar’s advances because of her long history of wounding and maiming her lovers. By way of refusal, he lists and explains Ishtar’s male conquests:

There was Tammuz, the lover of your youth, for him you decreed wailing, year after year. You loved the many-coloured roller, but still you struck and broke his wing . . . . You have loved the lion tremendous in strength: seven pits you dug for him, and seven. . . . You have loved the shepherd of the flock; he made meal-cake for you day after day, he killed kids for your sake. You struck and turned him into a wolf; now his own herd-boys chase him away, how own hounds worry his flanks. (Matthews 6)

Somewhere along the line, it seems, Innana/Ishtar’s sexuality, once celebrated as a representation of fertile lands and people, became threatening, perhaps especially to male kings like Gilgamesh. From a symbol of the life-giving and destructive powers of the earth, Inanna was therefore turned into an emasculating bitch.

These later Mesopotamian religions are not alone. Many religious traditions depict female sexuality as threatening instead of—as with the early fertility cults—as life-sustaining. Paula Kirby makes this point explicit in her recent post at The Washington Post:

The truth is that the Abrahamic religions fear women and therefore go to extraordinary and sometimes brutal lengths to control them, constrain them, and repress them in every way. Show me a non-religious society that feels so threatened by the thought of female sexuality that it will slice off the clitoris of a young girl to ensure she can never experience sexual pleasure. Show me a non-religious society that feels the need to cloak women from head to toe and force them to experience the outside world through a slit of a few square inches. All three Abrahamic religions share the myth of Adam and Eve, the myth that it was through woman that evil was let loose in the world. They share the heritage of Leviticus, which declared a menstruating woman unclean, to be set aside, untouched, a revulsion that remains even today among some orthodox Jews, who will refuse to shake a woman’s hand for fear she may be menstruating. What kind of lunacy is this? It is the lunacy of a Bronze Age mindset fossilized by the reactionary forces of religion.

Hmmm. So, now we don’t have “girl presidents.” It seems to me that it is perhaps time to reclaim our female right to leadership on the basis of our immense powers of fertility, sexuality, and, yes, even battle. We do have the babies, as Taegan says, which makes us literal embodiments of bounty, regeneration, and violence (see my description of the childbirth process here). Just like men, we are strong and powerful in our life-giving abilities and also weak in the face of an earth that is still so often unpredictable and terrifying. What we may even have over men is that we have not been socialized to deny our weaknesses and to engage in physical combat to protect our interests, but instead to acknowledge our very human shortcomings and work through battles with communication, empathy, and—and here’s that “feminine” word again—nurturance.

Note: I’m also working on putting together a presentation for my Humanities class on the development and meaning of fertility cults. I’d be happy to share my speech notes that will go along with the presentation.

Works Cited

Matthews, Roy T. and F. Dewitt Platt. Readings in the Western Humanities. Vol. 1. 3rd ed. London: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1998.

Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer. Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.

Inevitability and Powerlessness in Margaret Atwood's "Giving Birth"

Margaret Atwood’s 1982 “Giving Birth” includes a short sketch of a set of prospective parents in a childbirth class. The group consists of several first-time mothers and fathers and only one woman who has given birth before: “She’s there, she says, to make sure they give her a shot this time. They delayed it last time and she went through hell” (261). In response to this proclamation, the other participants in the class “look at her with mild disapproval. They are not clamouring for shots, they do not intend to go through hell. Hell comes from the wrong attitude, they feel. The books talk about discomfort” (261). This scene resonates with my own experience. When I was pregnant with my now one-year-old, my husband and I enrolled in a childbirth class, mostly because this was to be his first child and I wanted him to feel included in this process with which I was already at least somewhat familiar, but also because, like Atwood’s experienced mother, my first delivery had been terrible and I was in search of some way to ensure that this one would be different. Since I had previously given birth, I was much like the woman whom Atwood describes in this scene, the only one in the group of hopeful soon-to-be mothers and their partners who had experienced the terror of labor. During the first scheduled childbirth class, the instructor encouraged us, during childbirth, to envision each contraction as a “squeeze” and assured us that these “squeezes” would not cause pain but only—and here’s that word again—discomfort. It was at that moment that I recognized this woman—who claimed to have given birth to one child herself—as simply a liar or, perhaps, as one of the lucky ones who had gotten the drugs during childbirth for which I had hysterically screamed during my first delivery. I yearned to warn the other women in the room, as the experienced mother in Atwood’s story does: “’It’s not discomfort, it’s pain, baby’” (261). I kept my mouth shut, though, and decided that instead of attempting to sway the minds of the women in that room who seemed to need to believe in the wonder of childbirth to the exclusion of its often very real agony and gore, that I would just skip the remaining classes in the childbirth course. This course could do nothing to help me through the battle that would inevitably ensue—between my insides intent on expelling my baby and my outsides trying desperately to hold me intact—and that would just as inevitably leave as its primary casualty my split and bloody body, not to mention my psychologically battered consciousness.

This sense of dreadful inevitability that I felt throughout my second pregnancy is powerfully depicted in “Giving Birth.” Indeed, although some critics read the story’s portrayal of giving birth as a metaphor for a woman’s creative process, I claim that this short piece takes as its most literal theme a mother’s complete powerlessness to escape the terrible and bodily violence that occurs in childbirth. In this way, Atwood intervenes in the romantic discourses that still pervade the dominant ideologies surrounding maternity and this process named—curiously, as Atwood points out—“giving birth.”

The narrator of the piece—a writer and a mother of a young toddler herself—recounts her plan to create a story in which a woman named Jeanie goes through the process of childbirth. Throughout her pregnancy, the character of Jeannie is shadowed by another pregnant woman, one “who did not wish to become pregnant, who did not choose to divide herself like this, who did not choose any of these ordeals, these initiations” (260-61). On the way to the hospital to give birth, Jeanie contemplates the position of this woman who is inevitably headed toward the same birthing process that Jeanie will undergo: “It would be no use telling her that everything is going to be fine. The word in English for unwanted intercourse is rape. But there is no word in the language for what is about to happen to this woman” (260). Of course, this woman seems to represent a part of Jeanie’s own consciousness, the part of her—and the part of each soon-to-be mother—that fears the process in which her body is caught and from which she is powerless to escape.

Indeed, it is this powerlessness that makes the birthing process so terrible for Jeanie in the hours to come. As she slips in and out of the painful “dark place” of each contraction, she continually struggles for control (267). At first, she tries to count through the contractions, but at some point this becomes futile: “She no longer has control of the numbers either, she can no longer see them, . . . . She realizes that she has practised for the wrong thing, . . . she should have practised for this, whatever it is” (266). Like many laboring mothers, including myself during my first delivery, Jeanie experiences a moment when she refuses to accept that she must go on, stating forcefully, “’I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t do this’” (267). Of course, she has to do it; she has to continue laboring and delivering her child. What “it is,” then, that Jeanie should have practiced for, is the realization that she cannot stop this terrible process, that she must see it out to its end.

After her baby is born, Jeanie regards the infant carefully and decides that “giving birth” is a misnomer for the experience that both she and her little girl have just undergone: “Birth isn’t something that has been given to her, nor has she taken it. It was just something that has happened so they could greet each other like this” (269). Here Jeannie rejects the romantic notion of delivery that positions the mother as the active giver of life and instead realizes that a mother who “gives birth” is simply stuck in a necessary cycle of life and death that she cannot fully control. As both baby and mother drift off to sleep, Jeanie’s partner, states definitively, “’You see, there was nothing to be afraid of’” (270). Even in her state of exhaustion, Jeanie recognizes that “he was wrong” (270).

As “Giving Birth” demonstrates, what is terrifying about the birthing process is not only the pain but the realization that one’s body will carry out the deed regardless of whether or not one’s mind wishes for it to stop or carry on and, therefore, that we have only limited control over our own bodies. Also, during a delivery, a part of the mother’s body becomes its own person. This means that childbirth truly is an “initiation,” as Jeanie calls it, into a state in which the mother inevitably loses more and more control over what was once her own body. Even though my delivery of Wes was less difficult than my delivery of Taegan six years before, I still recall a moment during his birth when I thought to myself, "I can't do this. I can't go on." Despite the fact that his actual arrival into this world was a bit easier than I expected given my previous experiences, I still maintain that "giving birth," is both an intense realization of and gateway into the sheer terror of the often powerlessness of parenthood.

Bibliographic Note: For a reading of Atwood’s short story as a depiction of a woman’s creative process, see Pascale Sardin’s “Creation and Procreation in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Giving Birth’: A Narrative of Doubles.”

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. “Giving Birth.” Mothers and Daughters in the Twentieth Century: A Literary Anthology. Ed. Heather Ingman. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. 255-71.

Sardin, Pascale. “Creation and Procreation in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Giving Birth’: A Narrative of Doubles.” Women’s Literary Creativity and The Female Body. Ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Donna Decker Schuster. New York: Macmillan, 2007. 163-174.