The Webster’s College Dictionary gives me the definition of home as ‘a valued place, regarded as a refuge or place of origin’. The place of origin and the refuge are here conflated to form the valued place. It is a real place, yet it is also imagined and imaginary.
The imaginary counterpart of the imaginary home is identified in an old Norse fairy tale that I have loved since I was a child. It is called ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ which in the story turns out to be ‘everywhere and nowhere’. It is the place where the girl in the story lives with her bridegroom-to-be, a large white bear. She becomes, as it happens, homesick for her mother and father and brothers and sisters, longing to go home to them, sad because she can not. Home to her is the place where the beloved people are living. It turns out that she and the bear (prince) are the captives of trolls, there in the place that is east of the sun and west of the moon and, when the trolls are magically defeated through the girl’s agency, she and the prince fly far from the place. (Although the story never says whether the girl gets back to her family.) The concept of home is embedded deeply in the story, apparently unresolved, yet the fact that she has found her happiness, her home, in the prince, is really the point. As with Thumbelina, the new home has been her true objective. The old home is the breeding ground for the future home.
In the garden at Bellevue Avenue, close by the nectarine tree, the tulip bed, the apricot tree, the white froth of the pear tree, stands the playhouse, the cottage with a red door, a red roof, and one window. When I returned to my old home in order to arrange for the sale of the house in the late 1990s, I stood inside the playhouse and took a photograph through the open door into the unkempt garden. A curious thing happened. I am not able to explain it, but I will simply describe it. When the photograph was printed I was astonished to see that it resembled very closely the dear cover image on one of my early collections of short stories, The Woodpecker Toy Fact. Through the open doorway on the cover there is an impression, like a painting, of a vegetable garden above which flit white butterflies. When I took the photograph in the doorway there were, as far as I knew, no butterflies. However, in the print, there they are, white butterflies apparently arrested in flight. The luminous untidy garden has taken on the character of the vegetable garden pictured on the cover of the book years before. I can if I wish put together the book with the photograph, and there I have, in so many delicate and mysterious layers, the place of origin, the refuge, the sanctuary, the valued place, the place where the snow meets the sun.
This Plush Embrace Ian Britain
We all first leave home the moment we are born. There’s an infinitude of people’s subsequent experiences and ideas of home, but everyone’s original dwelling place is a womb. What happens to us in our mothers’ wombs will, one presumes, be as variable as in any other type of home, though it’s harder to be sure of our experiences or sensations in there than of anything else in our pasts. None of our conscious memories stretches back that far.
My identification of womb with home is itself a large presumption, based entirely on post hoc personal experiences and intuition. I’ve sometimes worried that it’s no more than a quirky fancy. The obvious place to check, as I initially thought, would be Gaston Bachelard’s classic study in philosophical psychology, The Poetics of Space (1958). I came away from this book deeply impressed with its learning and its daring—but feeling for the moment even quirkier. It teems with suggestive references to the space of ‘the house’: ‘our corner of the world’; ‘our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word’; the stuff of dreams and memories by which we can travel back to ‘the land of Motionless Childhood’ or recapture the ‘original warmth’ of a ‘material paradise’. It purports to talk of ‘the maternal features of the house’ and the ways in which ‘the mother image and the house image are united’. There are brilliant cadenzas on the chrysalis, the nest and the shell. The human womb must surely be next up, I kept thinking. No: in the end, I couldn’t find a single mention. It’s as if the author wouldn’t, couldn’t, go there—as if the womb, a zone beyond recall or consciousness, was off limits for rational discourse, or even the more adventurous limits of phenomenological observation, which celebrates the role of intuition.
I still worry I must have missed something yet, as I’ve widened my investigations, I’ve been reassured by how many people appear to have shared my fancy, so that Bachelard starts to look curiously evasive by comparison, quirkier than myself. It’s perhaps worth recording some of these other instances, if only to prompt readers to marshal their own intuitions. Where can we start looking?
The physical appearance of the human womb—more technically, the uterus—is readily discernible in anatomical drawings or diagrams in medical textbooks from at least the time of the great Renaissance masters—Leonardo, most famously. Such representations have often included illustrations of a foetus. To them we may add, from the last and the present century, images of the ‘real thing’ in X-ray photography, ultrasound and film, now more widely accessible than ever through the internet. As figured in these various images, the shape of the womb (a skewed ellipse) does not immediately suggest a home in the looser colloquial sense of a house—certainly not the standard kinds of house we have grown up with in the West. But there are other distinctive features of the womb that lend themselves more readily to domestic analogies and that also accord with more nuanced connotations of ‘home’.
In view of the womb’s discrete, closed-off position within a woman’s body one can talk plausibly of its outer rim as a ‘wall’. From the one narrow opening in this wall there’s also a discernible ‘path’, which leads down to the vagina, via the cervix. Call that path a passage, and you have the image not of a whole house so much as of a room, tucked away but still connected by this opening and this passage to the larger structure of the body. (The phrase ‘womb with a view’ has been irresistible to punsters.) Rooms, too, have their own walls that define, divide off and protect.
The domestic terminology seems particularly apposite, given the role of the womb in the reproduction of families. The womb is not just the physical site for the reproductive process and the primary shelter for what is produced. Through its intricate network of blood vessels within, it also offers the kind of support for its inhabitants that we’re accustomed to associating with the ideal home: dedicated nurture, for as long as it’s needed. Home in this sense transcends the purely structural and spatial dimensions of a house and its rooms—but it has its own limits of time. As the Canadian writer and politician Michael Ignatieff has put it, home is ‘the place we have to leave in order to grow up’. There could be no more literal example of this than the womb and its provisions for the foetus over its term.
That’s the ideal of the womb. Yet how each of us responds in practice to the individual circumstances of our gestation in the womb, and our eventual departure from it, is not so easily deducible. Those anatomical images in various media can document general trends or particular aberrations in the growth of the embryo and the foetus. They can’t, however, offer any guide to our specific experiences, let alone to any ‘feelings’ we might have as individuals during those pre-natal stages. Are we developed enough then even to have individual feelings—something approaching emotions—as distinct from instinctual sensory responses to external stimuli? (Neurological research has pretty clearly established now that a foetus can hear the sounds of conversation, music, television and suchlike.)
A mother, during pregnancy, may have some intuitions about the unborn child’s levels of contentment—or discontent—at particular moments. In the end, however, these could only speak with the authority of her own feelings (or memories of those feelings), not the child’s. Even if she were able to keep an instant record of such moments, they would hardly satisfy scientific criteria for direct and testable evidence. ‘The babe leapt in my womb for joy,’ says Elizabeth to Mary on the Virgin’s visitation to her pregnant kinswoman; though all that the recorder of these words was
prepared to say when reporting this episode in his own words is: ‘the babe leapt in her womb’. This is Luke speaking—Luke the physician, as well as saint and gospeller.
Beyond anecdotal evidence, and partly behind it, too, are the workings of our imagination. If you need fuel for your own, an obvious place to look for it is in the works of artists: those distilled and refined products of the most creative imaginations among us. Artists in several media have indeed engaged with, or touched on, the theme of the foetus in the womb, though not always in obvious ways. (There’d be little point in consulting artists if we expected straightforward ‘mimetic’ representations.) But for such an elemental subject—or object—the yield of images, though not thin, is uneven.
You’ll find a plethora of womb similes in various genres of literature, and womb metaphors for all kinds of formative forces in nature and human history—though foetuses don’t always explicitly figure in these tropes. There’s also an abundance of womb images and less overt symbols of the womb in painting and sculpture, from Botticelli to Louise Bourgeois. Critic Robert Hughes in his television series The Shock of the New interpreted Matisse’s interiors as a succession of ‘wombs with a view’—the contemplation of ‘a benevolent world from a position of utter security’. The subject of Hughes’s first book, painter and fellow-Australian Donald Friend, noted ‘the enclosing womb shapes of ikons’ in some of the specimens of Byzantine and Byzantine-influenced art that he saw on his European trips. Friend’s own work included a number of interiors (hotel rooms and the like) in the Matisse style.
The family home of emigré Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius in Lincoln, Massachusetts, sports a ‘womb chair’ in the living room; so named, presumably, because of the wraparound contours of its seat and lower back. A recent installation piece from the Rotterdam-based Atelier van Lieshout is entitled Womb House, and consists of a large, uterus-shaped model of a domestic dwelling, duly divided up into separate living spaces, including a lavatory and mini-bar which occupy the area of the re-created ovaries. Just a witty spin, perhaps, on the grand, traditional dolls’ houses you can see in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; but can it be long before some architect is inspired to adapt this prototype to a design for a real building?
It may be that the ascetic aesthetic of much Modernist architecture represented a subconscious flight from the enwombing comforts of its predecessors. That would still be a testimony to the power of the womb to engender strong feelings; and feelings, in league with artistic fashions, are notoriously fickle things. Some signs of a renewed yearning for comfort and cosseting might be detectable in the ornamentation, softer edges, and colour variegation of later-twentieth- and twenty-first-century buildings, and in recent modifications along these lines to some of the more severe facades and interiors of high-Modernist ones.
Up to now, fewer artists have consciously attempted to explore the question of the unborn’s feelings or impulses in its mother’s womb as it edges toward full life. Those who have broached this subject explicitly have tended to be more recent (post-Victorian, largely post-1960s) artists. Maybe this is because of earlier taboos surrounding such ‘intimate’ territory, but one can’t readily generalise, as the extant record varies from medium to medium, genre to genre, and probably from culture to culture (though this question would require deeper comparative investigation than I can hope to attempt in this brisk tour d’horizon).
There are internet sites that identify a new genre called ‘womb music’, some of whose composers incorporate into their scores ‘natural womb sounds’, such as a foetus’s heartbeat. The main target audience for this genre would appear to be other foetuses—exploiting their now proven aural receptivity in the womb. (A perfect ‘niche’ market, one might say.) The assumption is that the foetus has instincts if not feelings, and the intended effect, presumably, is to provide both calm and stimulation. There’s no prior history of such a genre, partly because the required recording technology would not have been available earlier. That still wouldn’t explain a dearth of womb and foetus fantasies in earlier genres of music. (Even the edgiest of Expressionist composers, keen to outdo the Romantics in articulating inner depths of human feeling, don’t appear to have explored possibilities in this area or to have sought inspiration there.)
In the more graphic medium of cinema, we only find such fantasies, on the conscious level at least, as late as 1968, when Stanley Kubrick concluded his portentous epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey with the image of the embryonic ‘Star Child’ peering out at us from a translucent bubble. In the succeeding forty years this image has spawned many other such fantasies in sci-fi movies, if none as direct or eerie. Comedy filmmakers have also found rich pickings in this territory.
The best-remembered segment of Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, which came out four years after Space Odyssey, is bluntly titled ‘What Happens During Ejaculation?’ It depicts an army of recruits from ‘sperm training school’—with Allen as the characteristically neurotic one—being put through their paces in a womb. ‘See you guys in the ovary,’ says a more gung-ho spermatozoa. Their mission, ‘to make babies’, is pronounced a ‘fine’ success by their commander, though we never get to see the product of their manoeuvres, even in embryo form.
The Meaning of Life, which the Monty Python team brought out in 1983, is famous for its wryly subversive hymn-tune, ‘Every Sperm is Sacred’, and also for ‘The Universe Song’, partly illustrated with an animated diagram of a naked woman, mother of the universe as we take her to represent, being impregnated, then swelling, then giving birth in a blaze of light—giving birth, we must assume, to everything in the phenomenal world, though nothing of the process or the product is discernible in the dazzle. It’s a brilliant cartoon of the ‘Big Bang’.
We do get brief glimpses of a growing foetus in an actual human womb, and an all-too-vivid delivery scene, in Judd Apatow’s rite-of-passage comedy, Knocked Up (2007). Yet more outrageously, both womb and foetus crop up on an ultrasound image in Sacha Baron Cohen’s coruscating satire on postmodern manners, Brüno (2009), as part of the paraphernalia of a try-out session for a new television chat show. (There’s also a skit along similar lines in a recent episode of Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union.) On being shown the image, the studio audience or ‘focus group’ involved is invited to pronounce on the foetus’s fate: ‘Keep it’ or ‘Abort it’. The mother is not, in this instance, given any say. Can the vulnerable bubble be so arbitrarily pricked? If the womb’s a home, this is home invasion on a hitherto unimagined scale—though not entirely unbelievable, given the brute insouciance of the whole ‘reality TV’ genre. Come to think of it, the house in Big Brother, with its ever-looming expulsions, is itself a kind of nightmare (or, as others might think of it, paradisial) version of a womb; and it’s always struck me how the lucky contestant who gets to first base on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is like the spermatozoon that beats its fellows to the ovum.
There are various representations of foetuses inside (sometimes even outside) the womb by twentieth-century women artists: suggestively and hauntingly in some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work (Blue II of 1916 is a notable example); more prolifically, more confrontingly, more self-referentially in the works of Frida Kahlo. In Kahlo’s 1936 work, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I, the ‘I’ of the title is doubly figured: as a foetus in the mother’s womb, mercilessly unveiled by any clothes or skin, and as a young girl to the side, pointing at this pre-natal ‘incarnation’ of herself. Four years earlier, in her Henry Ford Hospital, Kahlo herself is the mother-figure, and has just miscarried, as she actually did in that year; the image shows the dead foetus lying on the floor near the hospital bed, one among several objects casually strewn about.
In the same year (1932), Salvador Dali whipped up his Oeufs sur le plat sans le plat. One of the eponymous eggs in this painting is a single yolk suspended on a string, and, by the artist’s account, is the direct rendition of a daydream he’d had about his time in his mo
ther’s womb. But, Dali being Dali, shouldn’t we take all of these eggs with a large pinch of salt?
Trying to come to terms with the work of abstract painters, where you have even less certainty than in Dali’s case of their intentions or subject-matter, you might be persuaded more easily by anatomical readings. Some works by Mark Rothko (who positively resisted any talk of his intentions) have lent themselves to ‘uterine’ interpretations, with their palette of maroons and umbers, and their darkly floating shapes, slightly fuzzy or bleeding at the edges. His favoured colours could as easily be described as visceral, of course. And his shapes are not obviously womb- or foetus-like—often nearer to rectangular, though they’ve sometimes been described as ‘ovoid’. Perhaps it’s as much to do with the filmy surrounds of the shapes and their floaty effects: mightn’t these be an unconscious recollection, at least, of the amniotic fluid that provides the foetus with much of its sustenance and protection during gestation?
Of all artistic forms, literature provides us with the greatest number and the longest tradition of womb-and-foetus vignettes (I’m excluding from consideration here the more technical medium of anatomical drawing, which in the hands of a Leonardo could easily shade into art). Even English literature, reputedly the most prone to taboos or inhibitions in such matters, offers us some eloquent specimens, and from much further back than the soi-disant ‘liberated’ 1960s.
Tantalisingly, there’s a current online poetry journal from America that calls itself Womb, but when you check it out it seems that the ‘Womb’ is just an emblem for a literary hold-all. Anything goes as far as subject matter is concerned. To complain about this would be too literal-minded, save that the policy on contributors is not so all-embracing or laissez-faire. Male readers are not discouraged (‘Womb is for everybody’) but male writers, even if they might happen to venture on the nominal subject of the magazine, are clearly deterred from submitting: this is ‘a space specifically for poems made by women’, the prospectus announces at the outset.
Home Truth Page 19