That the space of the womb itself, and what is made in there, are of more inclusive literary (and general) concern was generously and potently acknowledged in the work of Australia’s Judith Wright. In two key poems from the 1940s, ‘Woman to Man’ and ‘Woman to Child’, the words ‘womb’ and ‘foetus’ don’t actually appear; yet, taken together, there’s perhaps no starker perspective in the language on the interdependence—physical, physiological, psychological—of an expectant mother, her unborn child and the child’s father. The ties that bind these figures are dramatically graphed in an unrelenting succession of images derived from various worlds and milieux, which stretch beyond but also include those of the domestic garden (‘seed’, ‘the blood’s wild tree’, ‘folded rose’, ‘well’, ‘earth’ ‘root’, ‘stem’, ‘fruit’). Not everything in this garden is unambiguously lovely. There’s a prevailing sense of fecundity, ripeness, plenitude, nurturance, somnolent serenity, but with an admixture of darkness and violence, and a suggestion at once of transience and eternal entrapment: ‘you shall escape and not escape’.
Male writers of the twentieth century were not completely shy of investigating this territory, despite occasional scepticism about what such investigations might involve or reveal. And their envisioning of the womb and its occupants can be at least as ambiguous in its suggestions and associations.
In Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ (1959), his teeming, tumultuous elegy for his mother, Naomi, the poet momentarily contemplates the prospect of bodily reunion with her that she dangles before him during one of her countless crazy episodes:
I was cold—later—revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way would she care? She needs a lover…
It’s left unclear whether the ‘Monster’ here is Naomi, or more particularly her womb itself, or a general allusion to everyone’s origins in this organ and our apprehensive fascination with it. A couple of pages later, there’s a hint of the constrictions of the womb for the unborn child and a more rhapsodic sense of gratitude to the mother for her liberating role in the post-natal nurturing of her child (‘O glorious muse that bore me from the / womb, gave suck first mystic life & taught / me talk and music’), yet all of this is tinged with apprehension and ambiguity as well. The poet first derives his ‘vision’, as he recalls, from his mother’s head (certainly not from her womb), but this part of her body turns out to be at least as monstrous. It’s a ‘pained’ head, a deeply afflicted ‘skull’, which he is at risk of inheriting before he seeks a kind of redemption in poetry itself, or a more restful space to accommodate and nurture his own creative enterprise: ‘Peace for thee, O Poetry’. The quest, it appears, is to find a more idyllic home than his maternal one could ever provide—and to get to ‘know’, thereby, a less forbidding kind of womb or source of creation (‘for all humankind call on the Origin’).
In one of WH Auden’s sequence of poems, Shorts—penned a couple of decades before Ginsberg’s elegy—the poet-persona asks readers if they’d wish to go back to the womb, and on their behalf instantly replies in the negative: how could anyone truly want what’s not possible? (Lines 38–39.) Yet is this Auden himself—a confessed ‘claustrophiliac’—speaking? The rationalist in him may eschew the impossible but the romantic in him will out, as suggested by a subsequent exchange in Shorts (lines 94–95), which allows for the prospect of a future when unborn children may have some freedom in deciding whether they come out of the womb in the first place. And an earlier poem of his, ‘1929’, hints at a deep nostalgia for pre-natal days as it ruminates on the figure of a baby insulated in the womb vis-à-vis that of an adult deprived of such close protective bonds. We are still left with a slight uncertainty about the actual degree of comfort or support offered by our mothers’ wombs as distinct from that provided by our retrospective imaginings or thoughts on the subject. The inverted syntax of the persona’s own thoughts on the subject (Section II, lines 29–30) might appear to question the idyllic, generalised picture of our accommodation in the womb; but, if it does, this is without any Ginsbergian suggestion of the monstrous: any such terrors that may beset us, Auden makes clear, come when we have long left the womb. Auden also uses no question marks here (such as we find in the Shorts), which may encourage us, in the last analysis, to take the lines as direct statements.
The persona in ‘The Dry Salvages’, the third of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, cautions us that any ruminating on wombs—particularly wombs in relation to tombs—is the stuff of pretty conventional human thinking or expression. Yet it is possible to read much of Eliot’s poetry, and its recurrent concerns with beginnings in endings and endings in beginnings, as a highly sophisticated version of just those kinds of rumination. The opening to the Quartets is a case in point. It associates our beginnings with a gated garden that may appear to be all dried up, dead, if we pursue a path back there, yet which harbours within its withered foliage a population of children whose barely restrainable mirth is the sign of life continuously and joyously renewed.
There are much earlier traces in literature of this sort of imagery; their roots extend as far back as the first book of the Old Testament, with its depiction of the Garden of Eden and the expulsion from there of its human inhabitants when they surrender their childlike innocence by yielding to the blandishments of knowledge. Eden, the place of our beginnings by this account, but also ‘the place we had to leave in order to grow up’, is the archetypal figure of the human womb. There could be no more fitting title for this seminal biblical story: Genesis.
In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, numerous poets and dramatists touched on the subject of the womb and the foetus. And associations were commonly made in this context with various features of gardens, along with less cultivated spots in nature, or with architectural settings and appurtenances, if not always specifically domestic ones. This was an era rather more biblically attuned than our own and also one when the science of the body—including embryology—was beginning to make unprecedented strides.
After Shakespeare’s Macduff (who ‘was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped’) the most famous—or infamous—of foetuses recounted in English literature is the eponymous protagonist of another of Shakespeare’s plays, Richard III: ‘Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,’ as he bitterly recalls of himself. (The description of Macduff is also presented as self-recollection, though a much more triumphant one in the circumstances.) Strictly speaking, the description in both cases is of a prematurely born rather than of an unborn child; but in Richard’s case Shakespeare affords us a ‘preview’ of his character’s existence in the womb through another self-recollection in an earlier-published play, Henry VI, Part III. If they weren’t so self-serving, Richard’s images here of nature and nurture locked in some grotesque conspiracy against his unborn self would be highly poignant:
Why love foreswore me in my mother’s womb;
And for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,
To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub,
To make an envious mountain of my back,
Where sits deformity to mock my body.
John Donne evoked some powerful images of the moments just before or at the nativity of Christ (‘Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb, / Now leaves his well-belov’d imprisonment’, began a poem of 1610) and of the same and subsequent moments as experienced by common humankind. ‘We are all conceiv’d in close Prison,’ he announced nine years later in an Easter Sunday sermon, which then went on to explain: ‘when we are borne, we are borne but to the liberty of the house; Prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of Execution, to death.’ (In the images here of ineluctable entrapment and restricted liberties, there’s a foreshadowing of Judith Wright.)
Ben Jonson reached back not to the Bible but to a figure from classical R
oman mythology when he addressed the ‘Brave Infant of Saguntum’ in a poem of 1629. The infant’s moment of birth, by Jonson’s account, precisely coincided with the sack of his native city by the Carthaginian army under Hannibal: ‘Wise child’—as the poet calls him—‘Thou…did’st hastily return’ when only ‘halfe got out’, and ‘madst thy mother’s wombe thine urne’. As ‘urne’ (a funerary as well as a garden ornament) suggests, the infant’s regression is a form of burial, perhaps—but more serene, more sequestered, than the one the foetus might have faced if it had fully emerged from the womb into the clamour and carnage of battle. To quit or to linger in its secluded little garden, to be or not to be: it’s at least accorded some degree of agency in the matter. Three centuries on, Auden could only dream of such a prospect, and our present age, if summed up by Brüno, wouldn’t seem capable of entertaining it even as a dream.
It’s as a worm in his mother’s womb (another garden motif) that William Blake figured the pre-natal incarnation of his mythological character, Orc, in The Book of Urizen, one of the sequence of mystical books he produced toward the end of the eighteenth century. The womb itself is variously imaged here in association with other such motifs of home or garden: roots and branches, pillars, curtains and a roof. There’s little if any feeling of serenity, however, about the accommodation this womb affords, and its occupant is a duly turbulent and rebellious force both before and after his emergence from it. Orc may be a figure not just of restless humanity pre and post its expulsion from its first home in Eden but, more specifically, of the creative or poetic imagination questing for a more perfect home (anticipations of Ginsberg) or, rather, endlessly resisting any such stabilities.
A poet’s freedom to imagine whatever he will is less constrained than that of a novelist working in realist modes, which might help explain why so little fiction, compared with poetry, has ventured back to the womb. Comic fiction has had more leeway, though I can recall only the odd example. ‘Back to the womb’ is a game played at a progressive Manhattan school in Patrick Dennis’s camp romp of the 1950s, Auntie Mame. ‘Spread the sperm, spread the sperm’ goes its mantra. As in Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex…however, no one plays the foetus.
Before fictional genres became so discrete, one English novelist, Laurence Sterne, famously explored the territory of the foetus in his eccentric masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67). He, or his eponymous narrator, uses the term ‘homunculus’ (little man) for this pre-natal incarnation. At the start of the novel we find Tristram expressly reflecting on the conditions of the homunculus, and comparing its ideal or usual trajectory (‘as plain and smooth as a garden walk’) with his own, rather rougher and more irregular path, the result of his father’s being distracted at a crucial moment in Tristram’s conception. The imagery here is that of the journey of human life, and the routes we take on it, but it’s significant that the outset of the journey, in ideal terms at least, should be pictured in the domestic setting of a garden. As in Tristram’s case, not every such journey matches the ideal. Yet even so, it’s suggested, the womb is ineluctably our home base; its conditions provide the ‘foundation’ (Tristram’s word) of all of his—and all of our—post-natal incarnations. What happens in there at the time of conception, he avers, determines ‘nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world’. By this logic, while home may be a place we have to leave, it’s beyond our capacity to escape it entirely or to have much control over the process and its aftermath. (There are echoes here of Donne and foreshadowings of Judith Wright.)
Tristram further purports to recall the ‘series of melancholy dreams and fancies’ to which he was subjected throughout his mother’s pregnancy as a result of the mishap at conception—but it’s difficult as in the case of Dali’s retrospective dreaming to know how seriously we should take this. By his own acknowledgement, Tristram only knows the peculiar circumstances of his conception through layers of family legend: an ‘anecdote’ related to him by his uncle as related to his uncle by his father. And isn’t the whole narrative anyway, as its concluding sentence invites us to reflect, just ‘a cock and a bull’ story?
A fancy, in other words, as I called my own thoughts in this vein at the start. I’m not aware of any scientific consensus, either in Sterne’s time or since, about the ‘foundational’ influence of the womb on our dispositions, pre-natal or post-natal; the most reliable source of evidence for any such research, the foetus, remains the most unfathomable. It’s impressive, however—if more so to literary historians than scientific researchers—that Sterne finds various echoes in Freudian theory almost two centuries later, down to the use of domestic imagery. At one point in the 1920 edition of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud quotes directly from Tristram Shandy, bearing out his acknowledgement in the original edition (1901) of ‘how hard it is for a psychoanalyst to discover anything new that has not been discovered before by some creative writer’. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Freud floats the hypothesis that ‘the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease’. Through that circumspect (some may argue, weaselly) phrase, ‘in all likelihood’, Freud is careful to allow for Shandy-style deviations from what he senses is the norm. More assertively, in a 1909 addition to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud explains that rooms as they appear in our dreams ‘are usually women; if the various ways in and out of them are represented, this interpretation is scarcely open to doubt.’ Beyond the more obvious allusion to the acts of penetration and withdrawal during sexual intercourse, there are suggestions here of the processes of conception, gestation and childbirth. In the preceding sentence, Freud has allowed that a number of household items as they figure in our dreams—boxes, cases, chests, cupboard, ovens—‘represent the uterus’.
Freud also tells us, in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), of our general ‘compulsion’ as human beings ‘to repeat the events of infancy’, and of the different kinds of pleasure or resistance to pleasure this compulsion involves. I’m not sure how far back Freud means to take ‘infancy’ in this instance, but in looking at the patterns of repetition in my own life, particularly at the succession of ‘dwelling-places’ and rooms to which I’ve become attached, I wonder if these don’t somehow reflect the ‘pre-infancy’ period in my mother’s womb. And reflect not just the physical conditions of that space but also my ambivalent responses to it at the time. I can’t speak any more authoritatively for my own foetal self than for any other foetus, but I do have a strong instinct, perhaps worth sharing with and testing out on others, that our ideas of the womb and our ideas of home are intricately interdependent, on ideal and practical levels.
‘Dwelling places’ include countries, particular geographical locations within those countries, and particular houses (‘usual place of residence’, to use bureaucratic terminology). In my line of business, as I’ll explain, dwelling places can also include workplaces: distinctions between these categories are fuzzy.
My country of origin was India, an India that, almost exactly a year before my birth, had succeeded in gaining its political independence from the imperial ‘motherland’ of Great Britain, though at the cost of great internal turbulence that resulted in its partition and the formation of a whole new separate country: Pakistan. I was conceived three months after the formal partition in a small hotel situated right on the newly created border. This was where my mother was staying at the time on a visit to my father, who was then an officer in the Indian Army, posted to the Northwest Frontier to assist in the peacekeeping operations at this tumultuous time of transition. Hotels, as we know, for example from the 2008 bombings at the famous Taj in Mumbai, are not invulnerable to civil strife, but they were regarded as safer than a military barracks for the wives of army staff.
By the time it came for my push for independence, the due mo
ment of ‘partition’ between my mother’s body and my own, I appear to have equivocated. Versions of the family legend vary as to how overdue I was, but signs of resistance on my part and various associated difficulties (my mother’s age at the time, near to forty, and her diminutive stature) prompted my father to secure her admission to a plush Roman Catholic hospital in the most stylish area of Bombay—as Mumbai was then called—rather than risk the primitive conditions of the military hospital. My parents were not Catholics and they could not have afforded such a place in ordinary circumstances, but my father’s instinct was right. Mirroring the process of political partition up north, my parturition was long-drawn-out, painful and bloody. By whatever techniques and solicitations, I seem to have been finally persuaded to emerge from my mother’s womb, but she suffered severe haemorrhaging in the event and very nearly died. Photographs of us were later taken and displayed on the hospital’s walls as records of its candidates for ‘miracle’ recoveries.
If indeed I had any control or ‘command’ in the matter, what was I doing equivocating in the first place and putting my mother in such danger? I can only imagine I was at once too comfortable and too nervous to be easily extricated. Both of these dispositions may have been implanted in me in my first dwelling place—that precarious oasis, a hotel in a war zone, where I occupied a womb without a view but within too close hearing perhaps of the perilous disruption around and about. Or (if that’s not plausible) my mother may have inadvertently ‘signalled’ to me her own apprehensions. Given the options afforded the legendary infant of Saguntum in comparable circumstances, I wonder whether I wouldn’t finally have taken his regressive path—but he could not have expected, and I was not prepared for, the determined ministrations of the good sisters of St Elizabeth’s hospital and their superlative medical team. (The hospital is named for the same Elizabeth who felt her foetus leaping in her womb, according to Luke’s gospel.)
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