Making Babies: Representations Ofthe Infant Century Canadian Fiction By
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Making Babies: Representations ofthe Infant in 20~Century Canadian Fiction by Sandra Lym Sabatini A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fùlfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 200 1 (8 Sandra Lynn Sabatirt 200 1 National Library Bibliothéque nationale 1+1 of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. rue Wellington OttawaON K1AON4 Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Lïbrary of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distriiute or seli reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thése sous paper or electronic formats. Ia fome de microfiche/nùn, de reproduction sur papier ou sur fonnat électronique . The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels May be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. The University of Waterloo requires the signatures of al1 persons using or photocopying this thesis. Please sign below, and give address and date. This thesis traces infant representation in Canadian fiction throughout the 20~ century and focuses on the tension between wrïting that depicts the infant as a site of desire and as a site of constraint. The tension is particularly and persistently evident in writing by women. The shidy is contextualized in tems of social and historical developments concerning the infant and explores the impact of feminism and shifting social mores in the expression of the figure ofthe infant. This impact is evident in the difference in kind of infant representation produced by men and women. Writing by men about babies moves in a linear direction, manifesthg a change in male protagonists who view the infant idealistically, if at dl, to a more distant view in mid-century. Finally male writers retum at the end of the century to a consideration of the infant as a source of meaning and value. Women's writing, on the other hand, reveals an intensifjing complexity as women corne to terms with increasing candour about the contradictory nature of theû engagement with the baby, that other subjectivity that they grow inside them. The thesis inquires into the nature of the other subjectivity whom Hannah Arendt has called "the hope of the world." Acknowledgements One day Rico Sabatini asked me what 1 would do XI could do anything- I said I wanted to get my fh.D. and he said, though we had four children and were about to have the fifth, 'Zet's do it." He has, like Orpheus, drawn me fiom what has sometimes seemed to be a certain kind of underworld, not by keeping his face tumed away, but by facing me, by tuming and always turning toward me at the best moments. For his certainty when 1was uncertain, for steadfastly and persistently helping me to achieve this goal, 1 am gratefùl to him, 1 am indebted to my advisors, Dr. Ted McGee and Dr. Charlene Diehl-Jones, for their critical readings of my work throughout its evolution, for their patience and support. Their guidance has been invaluable. Dr. Linda Warley and Dr. Kathleen Acheson provided insight into the foundation and structure of this thesis and 1 am thankfil for their presence on my cornmittee. Di Brandt was a source of encouragement and critical cunosity and her suggestions helped so much in refining the thesis in its final form. 1 have also to acknowledge the help and encouragement of Jacqueline McPherson, Norma Snyder, and Margaret Towell of the Department of English. Thanks to Heather van Eck and Pat Huston who cared for my younger children and thanks for their coffee and kleenex to my fiends Valene Ashford, Sharon Barker, Catherine Fairchild, Kim Jemigan, and Dr. Karen Hand. I'm grateful also to Catherine Irvine, great wisdom in a small package. This project about babies was inspired and sustained by the five best babies and is dedicated to them with love: Carla, Paul, Bianca, Claire, and James. Table of Contents Introduction Chapter One ~arl~20~century Infants ............................................... -41 Chapter Two Two Men and a Lady: (Qlegitimacy in Infant Representation, 1940-1960 ......... 67 Chapter Three Speaking of Reproduction, 1960s and 1970s ................................ 101 Chapter Four Wider Truth: Infants in the 1980s and 1990s ................................ 18 1 Chapter Five TheHopeoftheWorld .................................................217 Chapter Six The Subject of the Dream is the Dreamer ................................... 265 Notes .................,............................................-277 Works Cited and Consulted ............................................. -297 Introduction The miracle that saves the world. is . .the birth of nav men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by being born. Only thcjidl experience of this capacity cmbestow upon human affairsfaith and hope. those fwo essential characteristics of human experience ... thatfoundperhaps their most glorious and most succinct expression in the new words with which the Guspels accounted their "gZad fiding ":"A Child has been born unto us. " Hannah Arendt1 Beside my desk there is a painting of a dark-haired woman in blue and a fair baby clothed in white and lying against a white pillow. She leans toward the baby who raises plump arms toward her. Neither is smiling but the shared gaze is intent and direct. Instead of a wall behind the woman, there is the suggestion of wings and behind those, stars. The woman's blue dress disappears against the bedclothes, which in tum disappear against what might be the sky, so that the wornan appears to be floating with the baby. The image fkrnishes an effective analogy for a study of representations of the infant in Canadian fiction over the century. The painting demonstrates the intercomectedness felt by women and their babies who are clothed in white, pure and gazing intently upward. Et also implies a sense of divine or angelic influence in the presence of the wings. The painting indicates a strong mother-infant bond that is accompanied by a sense of supernaturd or extraordinary power. The edges are sornewhat blurred, the lines are softened and invite possibility. In focusing on the infant as the source of faith and hope for the world, Hannah Arendt points out the extraordinary effects of ordinary babies, a sense that werges fiom this painting. Experience with babies, interest in them, curiosity about what makes their eyebrows contract or their mouths srnile when they are only hours old dl combine to propel writers' engagement with these small beings. Writing about them seems driven by curiosity and by a profound concem to explore, as Arendt writes, the faith and hope, not to mention the love that babies bestow in the course of human experience. But it is also sometimes driven by repugnance. The representation of infants occurs most often as a duality, a tension between desire and rejection. Infants are ohappalling because of their baldness, toothlessness, incontinence, crying, because of the constraints they impose on women's freedom. At the same the, these are some of the same attributes that invite breathless admiration, if not worship, and that motivate people to respond energetically to the demands of the baby, as they understand those demands. Infants provoke intimate involvement because of their innocence, because of their helpless need for care, but also because of their provocation of a sense of wonder. Although the infant is a consistent and often powerfil image in literature, and although people often engage on some level in everyday life with babies, as a subject of literary study, the infant is largely absent. Several studies have focused on materna1 or childhood representation in Canadian literature. Di Brandt's Wild Mother Dancing provides a contemporary reading of the mother in Canadian literature. Theresa Quigley's book, The Child Hero in the Canadian Novel, focuses on children, but not babies. Laurence Ricou's Everyda~ Manc: Child Lanmiages in Canadian Literature explores children in literature, in particular the distinctive features of child language. Elizabeth Goodenough's Infant Tonmes: The Voice of the Child in Literature explores the nature of child-like expression fiom a stage of development as early as a child's capacity for baby talk, but both Ricou's and Goodenough's studies occur outside a dennition of infancy that focuses on the pre-linguistic infant since by definition an ùifant is, fkom the Greek, in fans. "without speech.'" Elaine Tuttle Hansen's Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood, focuses on situations of child loss, dealing with mothers who have given up children, murdered them, aborted them, women who are prisoners, lesbian mothers, slave mothers, among others. But where there are mothers and chikiren, there have to be babies. Daphne Marlatt's essay "Musing with Mothertongue" is an evocative engagement with one's birth into language. She writes that language is "a living body we enter at birth, sustauis and contains us.. .it is both place.. .and body" (223). The iofant's comection to language as sound is "a body of sound," writes Marlatt, and that "leaving the water of the mother's womb with its one dominant sound, we are bom into this other body whose multiple sounds bathe our ears from the moment of our arrival" (223). But Marlatt's musing is with the emergent nature of language in children and the manner in which it shapes adults and not with the baby itself It seems that the infant's story is not one that critics notice.