Review: Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel, by Livia Arndal Woods

Very few Victorian novels depict pregnant bodies. We know these bodies exist (as much as a body can exist in fiction) because of the many children who populate these worlds, but as Livia Arndal Woods’s Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel explains, the embodied experience of pregnancy is typically invisible or implied—it’s a “delicate” or “interesting condition” (p. 6). And when pregnancy does appear in the pages of Victorian novels, it is often a symptom of bad behavior. Woods brings these bodies and all their swollen, leaky messiness out into the open, not simply by contextualizing or historicizing pregnancy, but by imagining how these bodies would have felt or looked to those around them.

In “An Introduction: Somatic Reading,” Woods outlines a method for reading and writing that involves our own bodies. Drawing on modesty criticism (Pardis Dabashi), “weak theory” (Paul Saint-Amour), and critical fabulation (Saidiya Hartman), among other approaches, Woods calls on us to “be modest critics by employing more of our immodest bodies in criticism” (p. 2). Pregnancy, Woods argues, is an ideal topic for cultivating this capacity to make “more space for the personal and anecdotal in scholarship [that] helps us analyze with uncertainty rather than against it” (p. 3; emphasis added). Woods’s critical stance provides a framework for talking about the unseen, unspoken, and unrepresented, and for critiquing the fictional and real worlds that make assumptions about (and laws that control) the bodies and minds of pregnant women/people.

The first two chapters demonstrate how this type of somatic reading challenges typical responses to pregnant women in fiction. Chapter 1, “Judgement,” examines the “moralizing gaze” that typically collects around pregnancy, infertility, miscarriage, and stillbirth (p. 25). Woods’s analytical approach involves “reading as much in our own critical bodies as we read about bodies critically” (p. 26). She accomplishes this, at least in part, by excavating the gestational timeline in novels such as Wuthering Heights so that we might “read [Cathy’s] pregnancy backward into scenes of her madness,” and thus reconsider assumptions about what her body represents (p. 34). This approach “opens space for more of the uncertainty that troubles judgement,” which Woods extends into a reading of Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (p. 34). Lady Glencora, aware of her “duty” to become pregnant, “is also aware of what it means when she starts bleeding each month” and the “fears of ‘unfitness’ that attach with more particular blame to women’s bodies” for failing to reproduce (p. 38). Woods concludes this chapter with the one of the harshest judgments a Victorian novel can enact on a pregnant body—premature labor and death by croquet hoop. In Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family, Bessie Keith, trying to avoid being caught flirting, trips over a croquet hoop, gives birth to a baby we didn’t know she was carrying, and then dies. This narrative punishment reaffirms the masculine authority of Bessie’s brother, but it also demonstrates what is at stake in Woods desire “to push toward different readings of reproductive bodies” that free us from the “moral judgments Yonge’s novels encourage” (p. 48).

Chapter 2, “Sympathy,” exemplifies this “push” by challenging sympathy’s role as “the model for ethical engagement with…pregnancies that occur outside of normative social expectations” (p. 49). The titular character of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth is an unmarried, poor, pregnant woman who eventually earns our sympathy through illness and death, while George Eliot’s Hetty Sorrel, a fallen woman who kills her baby, never gains access to “the novel’s sympathetic networks” (p. 49). Woods reads Hetty’s failure or refusal to understand her own condition and the subsequent infanticide she commits in Adam Bede in terms of the failure of sympathy to “offer generous access to [pregnancy] as a deeply uncertain and unwanted experience of the body” (p. 74).

In “An Interlude: Sensation,” Woods’s “loose meditations” link pregnancy loss and guilt in East Lynne to her own experiences, which she connects and contrasts with larger issues of health justice, particularly the “damning statistics regarding Black infant and maternal mortality” (pp. 23, 77). Woods uses Victorian sensation fiction as a framework for reading highly visible narratives in our own time that feature tabloid talk and social media stories about celebrity pregnancy loss, particularly by and about women of color (Chrissy Teigen and Meghan Markle, for example). While the placement of this non-chapter disrupts the steady march through phases of Victorian attitudes about and depictions of pregnancy, it does offer an intriguing deviation from traditional literary criticism that invites us to consider the “disproportionate blame,” guilt, shame, and racism that some people endure more than others (p. 23).

Chapter 3, “Diagnosis,” and chapter 4, “Impression,” take on medicalized aspects of pregnancy during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Unlike the first two chapters, which examine multiple novels, chapter 3 focuses entirely on a single plot, Rosamond Lydgate’s miscarriage (abortion) in Middlemarch. In perhaps the most compelling chapter in a book filled with engaging readings, Woods uses Rosamond’s storyline to propose a new concept: “free indirect diagnosis” (pp. 23, 96). She defines this concept as an element of the novel that “fosters in the reader an alignment with a diagnosis perspective, most often that of the doctor or narrator,” thus making the “judgements…about bodies…feel like our own” (p. 96). We judge Rosamond’s refusal to listen to her doctor-husband’s warning about the dangers of horseback riding while pregnant, but Woods’s reading, which includes figuring out that Rosamond would have been in her second or third trimester when she loses the baby, reminds us to consider the pain involved in this type of loss. Woods offers a close reading of a moment that might be easy enough to overlook if we are not primed by somatic reading: the narrator refers to “a memorable day of grief” that Rosamond may have felt in the past, presumably the riding accident, imbuing the pregnancy loss with an emotional response that she must have felt but has been denied by the narrative (Eliot qtd. p. 118). We have never witnessed Rosamond expressing grief, so this curious reference stands out as a moment where somatic reading requires us to use our own bodies, whether we have been pregnant or not, to fill the gap.

By the fin de siècle, pregnancy’s pain becomes more explicit as novelistic depictions “shift from the expression of fear about women’s unruly bodies and behaviors to broader fears about unruly minds” (p. 124). Woods’s sustained reading of a minor part of Middlemarch contrasts with the concise readings of four novels in chapter 4. In The Heavenly Twins, Jude the Obscure, The History of Sir Richard Calmady, and Anna Lombard, pregnant bodies are narrated in relation to “impression theory,” which is typically associated with maternal acts and thoughts that get impressed on the fetus (p. 129). Woods examines paternal impression, as the children born and killed in these novels are formed constitutionally and physically by their fathers. Old Father Time is “the form and ‘expression’ of Jude’s troubles” (p. 144); Anna’s mixed-race child with Gaida Khan must be murdered by her to preserve and serve “a bright, white [British] future” (p. 152).

The “Very Short” look at the “The Very Long Nineteenth Century” is a fitting conclusion to this readable study. Woods takes a moment to reflect on contemporary technologies that allow us to know a lot more than the Victorians did about pregnancy. Over-the-counter ovulation and pregnancy tests, genetic testing, and ultrasounds tell us about our bodies and about the fetus(es) we are carrying. And yet, there is still so much that remains unknown, particularly around loss—miscarriage, stillbirth, infertility. Woods’s thoughtful close readings of these topics not only offer us ways to discuss uncertainty in Victorian novels, but also function as examples we might share with students for how to craft close readings that attend to the language of the text, the historical context, and to our own embodied experiences.

The acknowledgement of uncertainty in the lived experiences of others that threads through Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel echoes what pediatrician and scholar Sayantani DasGupta calls “narrative humility” (The Lancet, 2008), an approach one takes to the story of another that recognizes ambiguity and contradiction, engages in self-reflection, and seeks to be transformed by this process. Given Woods’s reference to narrative medicine and her interrogation of the medicalization of pregnancy more generally, it seems fitting to consider narrative humility as a partner to the critical modesty we are encouraged to adopt. By offering fresh ways to read familiar novels and critique the Victorian mores they resist and reinforce, Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel adds to the growing list of scholarship that strives to provide us with a model for reading and teaching literature that honors our shared and diverse embodied experiences.