Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel

by Livia Arndal Woods

Overview

In Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel—the first book-length study of the topic—Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the long nineteenth century. Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for “somatic reading,” a practice attuned to impressions of the body on the page and in our own messy lived experiences. Examining works by Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and others, Woods considers instances of pregnancy that are tied to representations of immodesty, poverty, and medical diagnosis. These representations, Woods argues, should be understood in the arc of Anglo-American modernity and its aftershocks, connecting backward to early modern witch trials and forward to the criminalization of women for pregnancy outcomes in twenty-first-century America. Ultimately, she makes the case that by clearing space for the personal and anecdotal in scholarship, somatic reading helps us analyze with uncertainty rather than against it and allows for richer and more relevant textual interpretation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814283134
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	10/06/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	194
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Livia Arndal Woods is Assistant Professor of English at University of Illinois at Springfield.

Read an Excerpt

Pregnancy, like the body in general, often demands ways of not quite knowing. If, as Pardis Dabashi recently posited, “the status of critical claims about literature occupies an undefined territory between knowledge and belief, something on the order of a hunch,” so—until very recently in human history—did pregnancy. Until well into the twentieth century, the pregnant body was a suggestive cipher. Applying what I know about pregnancy from my own experience and from observing the experiences of others, I assume that most pregnant people have at some point known themselves to be so in somatic ways: sudden nausea, a growing belly, fetal movements. But, until the middle of the twentieth century, such knowledge was difficult or impossible to verify. Though we now measure hormone levels in urine to confirm pregnancy, use ultrasounds to estimate a “due date,” and track maternal and fetal heart rates to monitor risk, something like certainty about reproductive bodies (or about the body in general, though this is a much more complicated topic across histories and cultures) is radically new. Even the enlarged midsection so suggestive of pregnancy is easily misinterpreted, as, for example, was Lady Flora Hastings’s abdominal tumor by a young Queen Victoria in 1839. As aggressive paparazzi-style “bump watching” of the twenty-first century demonstrates, such uncertainty still clings insistently to our desire to know and control women’s bodies. Though reading literary representations of those bodies prompts this twenty-first-century reader to quantify and diagnose, we should not read those bodies without also building in room for that uncertainty; we can’t read the description of reproductive bodies in the nineteenth century without heightened attention to the challenge pregnancy posed not only to novelistic conventions that eschewed the frank depiction of embodied sexuality but also to emerging scientific and moral epistemologies. By joining calls for more space for the personal and anecdotal in scholarship, somatic reading helps us analyze with uncertainty rather than against it. In so doing, somatic reading builds on the critical practice debates of the last twenty years and joins what Dabashi calls an “emerging generation of scholars[hip] . . . more interested in seeing the moment of argumentative utterance as one of trial and experiment . . . a moment of speculation.”

We need speculation when we read pregnancy in the Victorian novel. This project focuses on representations of pregnancy in the novel rather than in Victorian literature writ large because of the particular texture of readerly and narrative conversation and collaboration that marks this form in this period. Victorian novels elide pregnancy as an embodied condition—somatically, tactilely, and haptically specific—in narrating the plots of women who more or less conform to feminine ideals. Reading these pregnancies as representations of embodied experience requires “reading rigorously in the absence of explicit evidence” in order to tell “an impossible story . . . and amplify the impossibility of its telling.” In reading the pregnancies of women who don’t conform to Victorian feminine ideals—women who are poor, who are pregnant and unmarried, who are unfaithful or disobedient to their husbands—it is sometimes possible to catch glimpses of pregnant embodiment: in Cathy Linton’s hectic cheeks, in Hetty Sorrel’s difficult walk away from her home, or in Sue Bridehead’s being turned away from rooms to let, for example. Focusing on these pregnancies—as this book does—involves readerly participation in implicit and explicit narrative judgments that seem to offer the possibility of moral certainty. But bodies often work outside of moral certainty, and so does somatic reading.
 

Table of Contents

An Introduction     Somatic Reading One     Judgment Two     Sympathy An Interlude    Sensation Three   Diagnosis Four    Impression A Very Short Conclusion       The Very Long Nineteenth Century

Editorial Reviews

In centering bodily experience both as a topic of interest to Victorians and as an underemphasized aspect of reading, Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel contributes to the turn toward a more personal voice in literary scholarship. Insightful and persuasive.” —Pamela K. Gilbert, author of Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History


“Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel is an innovative literary study that not only offers the first full-length monograph on the subject but also poses an intervention in the field of Victorian studies by proposing a methodology based on ‘somatic reading.’ … An excellent addition to the libraries of literary scholars specializing in the Victorian novel, the book also will appeal to interdisciplinary scholars with interests in fields beyond nineteenth-century studies, including medical humanities and the history of medicine, critical race theory, and feminist and women’s and gender studies.” —Emily Cline, H-Net


"Woods’s book shines a light on a subject that has either been ignored or taken for granted in previous studies of the novel. … She engages with an impressive range of novels both major and less well known and combines close reading with contemporary theo


“Not simply a thematic analysis of pregnancy, Pregnancy in the Victorian Novelis both meticulously researched and inspiring in its integration of literary representation and lived experience. Woods shows us how much is at stake in represent


“In excavating not only Victorian novelistic depictions of pregnancy, but also the influence of embodied experiences on the researcher, Woods’s work makes a convincing case for a radical revisioning of traditional critical approaches to the past and its l

“Wood’s willingness to take some speculative risks is compelling and offers a helpful model for other scholars.” —Nora Doyle, Victorians Institute Journal

From the Publisher