Nothing Stranger

University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2016 Nothing Stranger Helen Mary Stead University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Stead, Helen Mary, "Nothing Stranger. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2016. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3877 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Helen Mary Stead entitled "Nothing Stranger." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Michael Knight, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Margaret Lazarus Dean, Amy Billone, Joshua Bienko Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Nothing Stranger A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Helen Mary Stead August 2016 For my Dad, whose love of reading helped craft my love of writing For my Mum, whose tenacity showed me how to believe in a God who performs miracles, even when He didn’t ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express deep thanks to my advisor and dissertation director Michael Knight for supporting my work and helping guide me through the process of acquiring my PhD. I would also like to show my gratitude to Margaret Lazarus Dean, Dr. Amy Billone and Dr. Joshua Bienko for serving on my committee and giving me critical feedback to improve my work. A special thanks to Dr. Thomas Haddox for making sure all of the necessities were completed for the degree, and for listening. Thank you to those who have read and supported this work: Katherine Ann Davis, Stephanie Dugger, Genna Gazelka and Damon Murrah. Most of all, I would like to thank my most steadfast reader, Curtis Bentz, who put up with all my creative angst and has sacrificed his time and energy into helping me finish this degree—I could not have done this without him. iii ABSTRACT “Nothing Stranger” is a collection of dystopian short stories concerned with themes of motherhood and violence submitted for consideration as a creative dissertation at the University of Tennessee. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Nothing Stranger and the Role of Motherhood in Dystopian Fiction………………………...….. 1 Baby Gets UTD………………………………………………………………………………….. 21 It’s Time to Fix the Porch……………………………………………………………………….. 47 Jim and the Egg Donation……………………………………………………………………….. 57 Recall………………………………………………………………………………………….....76 Notes to Self About Writing…………………………………………………………………….. 90 A Bloody Tutu…………………………………………………………………………................99 Robby Is Dead………………………………………………………………………………….. 130 Filebox 1 from Case 139-KX-7642……………………………………………………………. 146 Heavies…………………………………………………………………………………………. 163 Leoni Remembers Her Mother…………………………………………………...……………. 185 The Art of Flamenco………………………………………………………………………........197 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………. 211 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………... 214 v Nothing Stranger and the Role of Motherhood in Dystopian Fiction 1. Introduction The purpose of this critical introduction is to situate my short story collection, Nothing Stranger, within a larger context of dystopian works that examine thematic roles of motherhood, reproduction and the control of reproduction in response to contemporary societal shifts in the definition of a traditional family unit, increased technology in reproduction, ectogenesis, cloning and eugenics, but also in an attempt to answer what it means to be a daughter without a mother, and a mother without a mother. Nothing Stranger takes its title from a repeated phrase in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Waiting Room,” as the speaker in the poem first identifies herself as not only an entity that will have breasts, which horrifies and transfixes her all at once, but also that she is part of something larger, of womanhood, and of potential motherhood—this self- realization is “nothing stranger.” It is this poem that I come back to again and again after I have 1 written a story, in an attempt to make sense of it, and many times realize, in a way, I have been writing about my own mother again. In the collection, stories like “Jim and the Egg Donation,” “It’s Time to Fix the Porch” and “Notes to Self About Writing,” directly explore who controls reproduction—a question that would have been relatively straightforward 30 years ago, now becomes more complex as reproductive practices as In Vitro Fertilization, surrogacy and terminations are normalized, scientists have the ability to manipulate genes and clone human embryos, and the not-to-far-off technology of ectogenesis, or the use of an artificial womb, is tangible. In “Jim and the Egg Donation,” Jim and Marcy are waiting to be financially stable to start their family, and in the meantime, Marcy is disappointed with Jim quitting his apprenticeship as a high-end furniture carpenter and working in construction, so she sells some of her eggs in an attempt to get back at him, and make some money in the meantime. While “Jim and the Egg Donation” has an intentional use of control over reproduction, in the story “It’s Time to Fix the Porch,” Peter accidently gets pregnant, after his wife Nancy had been wanting to get pregnant—the story observes how the couple reacts to Peter taking Nancy’s role of motherhood. In a completely different scenario, where no characters want to reproduce in “Notes to Self About Writing,” Sally tries to write past the abstraction of having an abortion and is terrified how her own Southern Baptist mother will respond to Sally explaining that she had the procedure. In “Baby Gets UTD” and “Robby Is Dead,” the stories negotiate the connection between mother and child in a broken world—how does motherhood work when sterile, “safe” practices and/or technologies are routinely used that separate mother from baby, or how can a mother disconnect enough from her son to realize he is a “bad egg”? “Leoni Remembers Her Mother” examines the transition between self and mother and the emotional repercussions of that, while “Bloody Tutu” 2 explores pregnancy as a way to save a marriage. Most of the stories in Nothing Stranger, like the narratives I will use to anchor this discussion, respond to the evolution of the role of motherhood and the encroachment of technology and societal ideologies that threaten and distort that role. What sets dystopian and apocalyptic fiction apart is that there is some inherent social critique at play, and the role of the social critique is to attempt to understand a disordered world. Elizabeth K. Rosen in Apocalyptic Transformation, discusses that “the apocalyptic impulse is, in effect, a sense-making one,” as not only does it push further than conspiracy or chaos theories, but it also “is an organizing structure that can create a moral and physical order while also holding out the possibility of social criticism that might lead to a reorientation in the midst of a bewildering historical moment” (xiii). The same is true for dystopian novels, as they are especially inclined to “world building,” and allow the writer to construct a social commentary, in order to make sense of the world in which we live: for the purposes of this discussion, it is important to evaluate the role of motherhood in contemporary novels and short stories to see how they reflect the change in laws and technology available that alter the definition of what it is to be a family, a mother, a father, a child, and how do we negotiate these loose terms on the page and in real life? And what does it mean to shift responsibility of human reproduction? 2. Reproductive Agency & Control Adrienne Rich opens Of Woman Born, her 1976 Feminist evaluation of motherhood, by the universal truth that “all human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body” (Foreword, para. 1). This book has been essential to contemporary feminist theory, especially regarding how motherhood and feminism can co- 3 exist—this notion that motherhood, including pregnancy, birth and beyond, should not be put into a heteronormative box, should not be controlled by a patriarchal society (Rich), and even though feminism has made progress, when it comes to reproduction, government, medicine and society still dictate what birth, recuperation and motherhood should look like. Even the semantics surrounding the beginning of motherhood are reflective of the continued controlled patriarchal system: while the word birth would highlight the woman as the subject of the sentence, doing the work of the verb to birth, the woman births the baby, this is not the language commonly used in America, birth is replaced with the medical word delivery, causing the woman to be relegated to an indirect object in the sentence (if in the sentence at all), the doctor delivers the baby to/for the mother, which strips women of the agency of birth. A commentary on reproductive rights under patriarchal rule is most pungent in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, after a post-nuclear incident, the ability to conceive is diminished in the Republic of Gilead, and women, like Offred, are forced to serve as handmaids to produce offspring for the elite.

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