<i>Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel</i>, by Livia Arndal Woods

British literature from the eighteenth century is peopled with pregnant bodies, but one of the literary innovations of the Victorian period is the tendency to obscure the physicality of sexuality and childbearing. Despite the scarcity of explicit depictions of pregnant embodiment, Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel explores a range of canonical texts from authors such as Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy to show that pregnancy and its physical sensations play a significant role in these novels. Livia Arndal Woods teases out the subtle chronology of pregnancy in these texts and the ways in which pregnant bodies are leveraged to clarify moral authority and define the identities of both female and male characters.Woods grounds her interpretations of these texts in somatic reading, “an analytical attitude attuned to impressions of the body on the page and in our own messy lived experience” (1). Indeed, one of the most innovative aspects of this book is Woods’s willingness to bring her experiences with pregnancy to bear on her literary interpretations. Her analysis underscores the fact that readers do not leave their bodies behind when they engage with literature. As she writes, “Whether the language of pregnancy is clinical (‘pregnant’), gently knowing (‘interesting condition’), or highly euphemized (‘ship,’ ‘ocean’), it carries meaning because we flesh out what we read with what we know about the flesh” (6). In this respect, Woods follows in the footsteps of scholars such as historian Sarah Knott, whose recent work weaves together personal memoir with historical narratives of childbearing and childrearing.1 Woods’s somatic reading of Victorian novels becomes particularly interesting when she reads backward from the explicit announcement of a pregnancy or birth to trace a longer chronology of physical symptoms and sensations. In Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (1847), for instance, Cathy’s pregnancy is not revealed until roughly a month before she gives birth and dies, but Woods traces the timing of events in the novel to show that the period of Cathy’s isolation, illness, and madness coincides with the period of “quickening,” a time when Cathy would have been able to feel movements of the fetus and discover the certainty of her pregnancy. Woods reveals that the scenes of Cathy’s mental and physical disorder are ultimately connected to her embodied experiences of early pregnancy, and her madness serves to reinforce nineteenth-century perceptions of the female reproductive body as a disruptive force.Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel is organized thematically around the intertwined themes of judgment, sympathy, sensation, diagnosis, and impression. One of Woods’s central arguments is that Victorian novelists used pregnant embodiment to signal morality or transgression. The novels she examines make legible the pregnant bodies of characters who transgress the norms of femininity in some way—through premarital pregnancy or unrestrained desires, for instance—while the pregnant bodies of those characters who represent feminine virtue are modestly veiled. In this way, the physicality of pregnancy serves to elicit judgment—from narrators, characters, and the reader. Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Ruth (1853), for instance, “transforms openly embodied descriptions of pregnancy into sympathetically veiled and idealized womanhood” (23), thus soliciting from readers a willingness to regard Ruth with sympathy and generosity, despite her moral transgressions. Woods also highlights the ways that embodiment is used in these novels to signal class status; the bodies of working-class characters are made visible to the reader, while the bodies of more socioeconomically privileged women are discreetly obscured. Although Woods makes clear the ways in which women’s reproductive bodies are deployed to highlight factors such as socioeconomic status and moral rectitude or failure, she emphasizes that a focus on somatic reading can help readers move beyond the judgments demanded by the novels and instead imagine the intimate sensations of pregnancy and the central role these feelings might play in the lives of individual characters.Woods also charts change over time in the articulation and meaning of pregnant embodiment in the novels she studies. She argues that gradually “the moral authority of the nineteenth-century novel aligns itself . . . with the emerging medical authority of the doctor” (96). As the authority of the male physician becomes more visible in novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), so, too, does the pregnant body, for pregnancy is diagnosed and articulated in professional terms that nevertheless continue to shape moral judgment. Then, by the end of the Victorian period, Woods identifies a final shift in which “pregnancy is represented with increasing candor and the anxieties evoked by textual representations of pregnancy shift in emphasis from the expression of fear about women’s unruly bodies and behaviors to broader fears about unruly minds” (124). In the two chapters that articulate these key chronological shifts (“Diagnosis” and “Impression”), Woods does her best work placing Victorian literature in its broader historical context. She outlines important changes in the fields of obstetrics and psychology to show that literary interest in medical authority and the unruliness of the mind was closely connected to evolving medical cultures.Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel joins a growing and vibrant body of scholarship on representations of pregnancy in nineteenth-century British and American culture, including works by Clare Hanson and, more recently, Sasha Turner.2 Because pregnancy was so often veiled in nineteenth-century culture (in literature, visual culture, personal records and correspondence, fashion, and more), Woods’s willingness to take some speculative risks is compelling and offers a helpful model for other scholars. There is much we would like to know about the experiences of childbearing and the cultures surrounding pregnancy and childbirth that is left unsaid in the wide range of sources that have been passed down to us from the nineteenth century. Woods’s analysis suggests that our twenty-first-century experiences can offer new ways of looking for and looking at the pregnant body and the cultural meanings that coalesced around reproduction in earlier periods.