In the Club: Writing Pregnancy and Motherhood

Session Coordinator: Kristine Swenson
University of Missouri-Rolla
236 HSS, Rolla, MO 65401
kswenson@umr.edu

Motherhood in the Lives and Works of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Gloria Gilbert confesses her dread of motherhood: “What a fate—to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. . . . Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings—.” Indeed, the realities of motherhood decisively and absolutely ended the jubilant sprees of the quintessential 1920s flappers, immortalized in the works of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as young, attractive, flamboyant women with short hair, short skirts, and a keen sense of humor, daring, and their own sexuality. Their endearing, if exasperating, recklessness enlivens the fiction of both Fitzgeralds, and yet it's clear that the flapper can thrive only as long as she can afford to indulge in her own self-involvement. Motherhood inevitably compromises this essential egotism, and both Scott and Zelda, parents of a daughter born in 1921, struggle in their fiction and their lives to express the psychological consequences of motherhood. This paper explores the attitudes toward motherhood exhibited in Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's novels, taking into consideration these writers' own real-life ambivalence toward parenting.

Kathleen Drowne
University of Missouri-Rolla
kdrowne@umr.edu

Feminism and Technologies of Pregnancy

At the turn of the twentieth century, as women worked to make themselves more educated, independent, and physically fit than ever before, anti-feminists were aided by medical science in their campaign to return women to the nursery for the good of the race. Speaking of a female patient who has given birth to a ‘degenerate,' Dr. Arabella Kenealy suggests that the woman—beautiful, healthy, college-educated—is responsible: were her “rare physical and mental capability was drawn from the reserve force of her offspring? . . . Is the extreme reading of woman's rights a record of her children's wrongs?”

It is rather too easy to feel superior to Kenealy and her patient. Though we no longer speak eugenically, women remain subject to medical technologies about which we lack expertise and to a media that exploits the frightening possibilities of medical statistics. When I became pregnant last year at the age of 36, I found myself an “A.M.A.” (advanced maternal age) and, thus, a high-risk pregnancy patient. This paper explores the connections between current technologies of pregnancy and those of the fin-de-siecle; it juxtaposes what I knew from research and my feminist politics with my embodied experience as a pregnant woman.

Kristine Swenson
University of Missouri-Rolla
kswenson@umr.edu

Labor and Delivery, a reading

“Metaphors”

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

— Sylvia Plath

The problem, of course, is to solve the riddle. But the nature of metaphors, and of all language, disallows this. Because they are only representations, we find we can only approximate an answer. Unfortunately, this understanding does nothing to stem the creational impulse, and the desires of the human condition. And so, the poetry in my book, written during the two years of my first (and only) Labor & Delivery (Hope & Allen, 2003), attempts to re-create the spaces of the experiences for all women, and especially, for my daughter, Alexandra Grace.

Michelle Paulsen
The Victoria College
Michelle.Paulsen@victoriacollege.edu

Response:
Elizabeth Cummins
University of Missouri-Rolla
Cummins@umr.edu