Fertility as Literary Theme

Nature

Throughout the literatures of numerous countries fertility is tied to identity, defining women and men by their reproductive capabilities. Some works celebrate fertility without question, as Willa Cather does in My Ántonia (1918). The narrator, Jim Burden, describes Ántonia as an Earth Mother, with a flock of children about her, tending her apple orchard and the animals of the farm, all life and goodness flowing from her. Eudora Welty too in her fiction creates images of Earth Mother characters, like the pregnant woman in “The Death of a Travelling Salesman,” who is only called “the woman.” Welty’s allusions to the Dionysian fertility cult of ancient Greece unequivocally imply that a cyclical, natural view of the world is superior. Implicit as well is the theme that those who claim their place in nature will be self-fulfilled and those who deny it will always be alienated from themselves and the earth. Male writers do not always frame the topic in quite the same way. Eugene O’Neill, for example, depicts male characters who long for evidence of their virility, indeed pin all their hopes for the future on it, as in Desire Under the Elms (1924). As conversations about infertility became more open in the twenty-first century, authors began to explore the potential psychological effects of infertility, including in novels such as Monica Starkman's The End of Miracles (2016) and T. Greenwood's Where I Lost Her (2016).

Culture

Several modernist writers of the early twentieth century concentrated on the metaphor of a lack of virility and fertility in the modern world. This lack of fertility was symbolic of the decline of culture and the decline of the quality of life in the urban, industrial world. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) epitomizes this vision of a sterile desert in which nothing new can be produced to revitalize the world. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) features as its two main characters a man who can father no son and a son who lacks a father. Without children, there is no hope for the future; without a father there is no history. D. H. Lawrence, in his novels, consistently dichotomizes life between nature and sexuality (good) and urban and industrial blight (bad). The degree to which individuals’ identities suffer from this sense of sterility is apparent in the contrast between the legendary hero Ulysses and his symbolic counterpart Leopold Bloom, a henpecked, browbeaten man with little hope and no prospects.

Criticisms

In contrast to these male authors’ visions of infertility, many women authors have criticized traditional metaphors of fertility. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) questions the expectation that women are entirely fulfilled by a life of domesticity. While she bears her husband’s sons, Edna Pontellier cannot embrace motherhood with the equanimity of the Creole women around her. She feels as though her identity is erased by motherhood. In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), readers are presented with a female protagonist who takes two husbands and one lover but bears no children. These women writers assert a reality that differs from the standard literary archetype.

Three African American women writers also criticize notions of women’s fertility. Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs, in Beloved (1987), bears six children in slavery, each by a different father, and loses all but one to the slave system. Baby asserts her right to choose the fathers of her children, but clearly her fertility is used against her. Her offspring are sold away, one after another. Morrison makes it clear that what should be a source of joy and strength is subverted and degraded. In Morrison’s Sula (1973), the title character says that she is too busy making herself to make any children, suggesting that women have a difficult time discovering their own identities in the enveloping one of motherhood. Likewise, in Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976), the title character bears one child but gives it up for others to rear in order to work for the civil rights movement. For her, fertility is an inconvenience. Gloria Naylor’s novel Mama Day (1988) depicts a character who is so desperate to have a child that she goes to Mama Day for what she believes to be a magical fertility ritual. When the character has a baby, her entire life revolves around it. She lives to be the child’s mother and when the child dies, she nearly dies.

Probably one of the most stunning contemporary criticisms of cultural ideology about women’s fertility is Nigerian Buchi Emecheta’s novel The Joys of Motherhood (1979). In it, the main character, Nnu Ego, is bound by the thinking of her tribe, the Ibo, who believe that a woman’s worth lies solely in her ability to reproduce. When she fails to conceive a child by her first husband within their first year of marriage, she is cast aside and later divorced. In disgrace, Nnu Ego’s father marries her to a man in a city, far from her village, so that if she never does conceive she will not have to bear the shame in front of her kinspeople. Ironically, once the children start coming they do not stop. Nnu Ego learns that there are worse problems than infertility, namely desperate poverty and starving children. Seduced by American culture, her children one by one abandon her rather than care for her in the tradition of their native culture. Similarly, in the 2017 novel Stay with Me, by Ayobami Adebayo, Nigerian woman Yejide struggles through meeting with doctors and traditional healers in an attempt to have a child and salvage her marriage as her husband's disapproving family forces him to take a second wife.

Finally, Canadian Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), about a future in which evangelical Christians have overtaken the United States, also depicts a world in which women are defined by their fertility or lack thereof. In the book’s post-nuclear-disaster society, most people are sterile. Therefore, the women who can conceive and bear children are rounded up and given out to powerful men as broodmares. Women who are infertile are sent to work either in government-operated bordellos or in a radioactive waste site; in either case they survive about three years. Atwood deliberately subverts the image of the Earth Mother by showing women held captive and defined by their fertility rather than honored for it. Whether envisioned as a source of all life and love or as a tool of patriarchy, fertility exercises immense power over identity in this novel, as it does throughout the world.

Bibliography

Adams, Alice. “Out of the Womb: The Future of the Uterine Metaphor.” Feminist Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 1993, pp. 269–90.

Chester, Laura, editor. Cradle and All: Women Writers on Pregnancy and Birth. Faber & Faber, 1989.

Daly, Brenda O., and Maureen T. Reddy, editors. Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities. U of Tennessee P, 1991.

Kakutani, Michiko. "Portrait of a Nigerian Marriage in a Heartbreaking Debut Novel." Review of Stay with Me, by Ayobami Adebayo. The New York Times, 24 July 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/books/review-ayobami-adebayo-stay-with-me.html. Accessed 27 Aug. 2019.

Lowe-Evans, Mary. Crimes Against Fecundity: Joyce and Population Control. Syracuse UP, 1989.

Scarry, Elaine, editor. Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons. The Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.