Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
These cares and kind attentions increased the discomfort, nausea, nervousness, and thousands of sufferings that almost always accompany first pregnancies. I found it so … It was my mother who started it one day when I was having dinner at her house …“Good heavens,” she cried suddenly, putting down her fork and looking at me with dismay. “Good heavens! I forgot to ask what you especially
craved
.”
“But there is nothing in particular,” I replied.
“You have no special craving,” exclaimed my mother, “nothing!
But that is unheard of. You must be wrong. You haven’t noticed. I’ll speak to your mother-in-law about it.”
And so there were my two mothers in consultation. And there was Junot, afraid I would bear him a child with a wild boar’s head … asking me every morning: “Laura, what do you crave?” My sister-in-law came back from Versailles and added her voice to the choir of questions, saying that she had seen innumerable people disfigured because of unsatisfied longings … I finally got frightened myself … I tried to think of what would please me most and couldn’t think of a thing. Then, one day, it occurred to me when I was eating pineapple lozenges that a pineapple had to be a very excellent thing … Once I persuaded myself that I had a
longing
for a pineapple, I felt at first a very lively desire, increased when Corcelet declared that … they were not in season. Ah, then I felt that mad desire which makes you feel that you will die if it is not satisfied.
(Junot, after many attempts, finally received a pineapple from Mme Bonaparte. The duchess of Abrantès welcomed it joyously and spent the night feeling and touching it as the doctor had ordered her not to eat it until morning, when Junot finally served it to her.)
I pushed the plate away. “But—I don’t know what is the matter with me. I can’t eat pineapple.” He put my nose into the cursed plate, which made it clear that I could not eat pineapple. They not only had to take it away but also had to open the windows and perfume my room in order to remove the least traces of an odor that had become hateful to me in an instant. The strangest part of it is that since then I have never been able to eat pineapple without practically forcing myself.
Women who are too coddled or who coddle themselves too much are the ones who present the most morbid phenomena. Those that go through the ordeal of pregnancy the most easily are, on one hand, matrons totally devoted to their function as breeders and, on the other hand, mannish women who are not fascinated by the adventures of their bodies and who do everything they can to triumph over them with ease: Mme de Staël went through pregnancy as easily as a conversation.
As the pregnancy proceeds, the relation between mother and fetus changes. It is solidly settled in the maternal womb, the two organisms adapt to each other, and there are biological exchanges between them allowing the woman to regain her balance. She no longer feels possessed by the species: she herself possesses the fruit of her womb. The first months she
was an ordinary woman, and diminished by the secret labor taking place in her; later she is obviously a mother, and her malfunctions are the reverse of her glory. The increasing weakness she suffers from becomes an excuse. Many women then find a marvelous peace in their pregnancy: they feel justified; they always liked to observe themselves, to spy on their bodies; because of their sense of social duty, they did not dare to focus on their body with too much self-indulgence: now they have the right to; everything they do for their own well-being they also do for the child. They are not required to work or make an effort; they no longer have to pay attention to the rest of the world; the dreams of the future they cherish have meaning for the present moment; they only have to enjoy the moment: they are on vacation. The reason for their existence is there, in their womb, and gives them a perfect impression of plenitude. “It is like a stove in winter that is always lit, that is there for you alone, entirely subject to your will. It is also like a constantly gushing cold shower in the summer, refreshing you. It is there,” says a woman quoted by Helene Deutsch. Fulfilled, woman also experiences the satisfaction of feeling “interesting,” which has been, since her adolescence, her deepest desire; as a wife, she suffered from her dependence on man; at present she is no longer sex object or servant, but she embodies the species, she is the promise of life, of eternity; her friends and family respect her; even her caprices become sacred: this is what encourages her, as we have seen, to invent “cravings.” “Pregnancy permits woman to rationalize performances which otherwise would appear absurd,” says Helene Deutsch. Justified by the presence within her of another, she finally fully enjoys being herself.
Colette wrote about this phase of her pregnancy in
L’étoile vesper (The Evening Star):
Insidiously, unhurriedly, I was invaded by the beatitude of the woman great with child. I was no longer the prey of any malaise, any unhappiness. Euphoria, purring—what scientific or familiar name can one give to this saving grace? It must certainly have filled me to overflowing, for I haven’t forgotten it … One grows weary of suppressing what one has never said—such as the state of pride, of banal magnificence which I savoured in ripening my fruit … Every evening I said a small farewell to one of the good periods of my life. I was well aware that I should regret it. But the cheerfulness, the purring, the euphoria submerged everything, and I was governed by the calm animality, the unconcern, with which I was charged by my increasing weight and the muffled call of the being I was forming.
Sixth, seventh month … the first strawberries, the first roses … Can I call pregnancy anything but a long holiday? One forgets the anguish of the term, one doesn’t forget a unique long holiday; I’ve forgotten none of it. I particularly recall that sleep used to overwhelm me at capricious hours, and that I would be seized, as in my childhood, by the desire to sleep on the ground, on the grass, on warm straw. Unique “craving,” healthy craving …
Towards the end I had the air of a rat that drags a stolen egg. Uncomfortable in myself, I would be too tired to go to bed … Even then, the weight and the tiredness did not interrupt my long holiday. I was borne on a shield of privilege and solicitude.
This happy pregnancy was called by one of Colette’s friends “a man’s pregnancy.” And she seemed to be the epitome of these women who valiantly support their state because they are not absorbed in it. She continued her work as a writer at the same time. “The child showed signs of coming first and I screwed on the top of my pen.”
Other women are more weighed down; they mull indefinitely over their new importance. With just a little encouragement they adopt masculine myths: they juxtapose the lucidity of the mind to the fertile night of Life, clear consciousness to the mysteries of interiority, sterile freedom to the weight of this womb there in its enormous facticity; the future mother smells of humus and earth, spring and root; when she dozes, her sleep is that of chaos where worlds ferment. There are those more forgetful of self who are especially enchanted with the treasure of life growing in them. This is the joy Cécile Sauvage expresses in her poems in
L’âme en bourgeon
(The Soul in Bud):
You belong to me as dawn to the plain
Around you my life is a warm fleece
Where your chilly limbs grow in secret
.
And further on:
Oh you whom I fearfully cuddle in fleecy cotton
Little soul in bud attached to my flower
With a piece of my heart I fashion your heart
Oh my cottony fruit, little moist mouth
.
*
And in a letter to her husband:
It’s funny, it seems to me I am watching the formation of a tiny planet and that I am kneading its frail globe. I have never been so close to life. I have never so felt I am sister of the earth with all vegetation and sap. My feet walk on the earth as on a living beast. I dream of the day full of flutes, of awakened bees, of dew because here he is bucking and stirring in me. If you knew what springtime freshness and what youth this soul in bud puts in my heart. And to think this is Pierrot’s infant soul and that in the night of my being it is elaborating two big eyes of infinity like his.
In contrast are women who are very flirtatious, who grasp themselves essentially as erotic objects, who love themselves in the beauty of their bodies, and who suffer from seeing themselves deformed, ungainly, incapable of arousing desire. Pregnancy does not at all appear to them as a celebration or an enrichment, but as a diminishing of their self.
In
My Life
by Isadora Duncan one can read, among other observations:
The child asserted itself now, more and more. It was strange to see my beautiful marble body softened and broken and stretched and deformed … As I walked beside the sea, I sometimes felt an excess of strength and prowess, and I thought this creature would be mine, mine alone, but on other days … I felt myself some poor animal in a mighty trap … With alternate hope and despair, I often thought of the pilgrimage of my childhood, my youth, my wanderings … my discoveries in Art, and they were as a misty, far-away prologue, leading up to this—the before-birth of a child. What any peasant woman could have!… I began to be assailed with all sorts of fears. In vain I told myself that every woman had children … It was all in the course of life, etc. I was, nevertheless, conscious of fear. Of what? Certainly not of death, nor even of pain—some unknown fear, of what I did not know … More and more my lovely body bulged under my astonished gaze … Where was my lovely, youthful naiad form? Where my ambition? My fame? Often, in spite of myself, I felt very miserable and defeated. This game with the giant Life was too much. But then I thought of the child to come, and all such painful thoughts ceased … Helpless, cruel hours of waiting in the night … With what a price we pay for the glory of motherhood.
In the last stage of pregnancy begins the separation between mother and child. Women experience his first movement differently, his kick knocking at the doors of the world, knocking against the wall of the womb that encloses him away from the world. Some women welcome and marvel at this signal announcing the presence of an autonomous life; others think of themselves with repugnance as the receptacle of a foreign individual. Once again, the union of fetus and maternal body is disturbed: the uterus descends, the woman has a feeling of pressure, tension, respiratory trouble. She is possessed this time not by the indistinct species but by this child who is going to be born; until then, he was just an image, a hope; he becomes heavily present. His reality creates new problems. Every passage is anguishing: the birth appears particularly frightening. When the woman comes close to term, all the infantile terrors come back to life; if, from a feeling of guilt, she thinks she is cursed by her mother, she persuades herself she is going to die or that the child will die. In
War and Peace
, Tolstoy painted in the character of Lise one of these infantile women who see a death sentence in birth: and she does die.
Depending on the case, the birth takes many different forms: the mother wants both to keep in her womb the treasure of her flesh that is a precious piece of her self and to get rid of an intruder; she wants finally to hold her dream in her hands, but she is afraid of new responsibilities this materialization will create: either desire can win, but she is often divided. Often, also, she does not come to the anguishing ordeal with a determined heart: she intends to prove to herself and to her family—her mother, her husband—that she is capable of surmounting it without help; but at the same time she resents the world, life, and her family for the suffering inflicted on her, and in protest she adopts a passive attitude. Independent women—matrons or masculine women—attach great importance to playing an active role in the period preceding and even during the birth; very infantile women let themselves passively go to the midwife, to their mother; some take pride in not crying out; others refuse to follow any recommendations. On the whole, it can be said that in this crisis they express their deepest attitude to the world in general, and to their motherhood in particular: they are stoic, resigned, demanding, imperious, revolted, inert, tense … These psychological dispositions have an enormous influence on the length and difficulty of the birth (which also, of course, depends on purely organic factors). What is significant is that normally woman—like some domesticated female animals—needs help to accomplish the function to which nature destines her; there are peasants in rough conditions and shamed young unmarried mothers who give birth alone: but their solitude
often brings about the death of the child or for the mother incurable illnesses. At the very moment woman completes the realization of her feminine destiny, she is still dependent: which also proves that in the human species nature can never be separated from artifice. With respect to nature, the conflict between the interest of the feminine person and that of the species is so acute it often brings about the death of either the mother or the child: human interventions by doctors and surgeons have considerably reduced—and even almost eliminated—the accidents that were previously so frequent. Anesthetic methods are in the process of giving the lie to the biblical affirmation “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children”; they are commonly used in America and are beginning to spread to France; in March 1949, a decree has just made them compulsory in England.
13
It is difficult to know exactly what suffering these methods save women from. The fact that delivery sometimes lasts more than twenty-four hours and sometimes is completed in two or three hours prevents any generalization. For some women, childbirth is martyrdom. Such is the case of Isadora Duncan: she lived through her pregnancy in anxiety, and psychic resistance undoubtedly aggravated the pains of childbirth even more. She writes:
Talk about the Spanish Inquisition! No woman who has borne a child would have to fear it. It must have been a mild sport in comparison. Relentless, cruel, knowing no release, no pity, this terrible, unseen genie had me in his grip, and was, in continued spasms, tearing my bones and my sinews apart. They say such suffering is soon forgotten. All I have to reply is that I have only to shut my eyes and I hear again my shrieks and groans as they were then.