Abstract
This collection of Australian papers covering aspects of motherhood or the wish for motherhood from autobiographical and literary perspectives contains several papers potentially of interest to psychiatrists and other health professionals. The authors explore complex and painful feelings around difficult deliveries, and around difficulties in conceiving when women are HIV-positive or are in lesbian relationships, or are infertile from unexplained causes or after treatment for cancer. It is welcome that these private feelings which are often not given a voice find one here, sometimes very much an ‘in your face’ one. This wide-ranging book includes an essay imaging maternity in Australian cinema, and a vivid contribution by Fallon that is ‘part television script, part single-voice account, part dream, part disjointed images’ (p.16) written as the foster mother of a disabled indigenous boy who herself suffered violence from her own mother. The collection concludes with an informative paper from a general practitioner, McNair, describing the restrictive legal and medical frameworks affecting the lives of lesbians who wish to become mothers.
This publication is a special book edition of the half-yearly journal, Meridian, from the English Program of the School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry at La Trobe University. The editors note the book's white middle-class bias, representing the work of academic women. This is particularly evident in the chapters written by the three editors, Kirkman, Maher and Torney Souter, as well as by McDonald, whose PhD Kirkman supervised. Kirkman, writing from the standpoint that our lives are constituted through narrative, describes women facing infertility as living in the subjunctive mode with multiple possible plots open to them and therefore needing to develop new narratives so that they can move on. What would have been described in psychodynamic terms as coming to terms with and working through a life event has been reclothed in new language. Maher argues, using the metaphor of the stirrups that partially immobilize the woman's body in birth, that ‘the distance between the physiological act of giving birth and the cultural narrations of this act is maintained through structures that privilege certain epistemological models’ (pp.207–8). At times the language of analysis that is used partially immobilizes, having the effect of a filter that distances, in contrast with other writing in this book.
The use of metaphor, often helpful, is sometimes abrasive as when Ryan introduces the cyborg metaphor for new families at the interface with humanity and technology, having argued that with the increasing number of children born through assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), ‘it is plain that the biogenetic model of family is outmoded’ (p.237). Yet the metaphor is an uncomfortable one as the children who are beneficiaries of ARTs are not cyborgs and to use a metaphor like this perhaps points to an unconscious anxiety about how far technology can go in disturbing the normative family structure. While this book provides a space for an exploration of some of the feelings around reproduction that are not usually voiced, some of the deepest terrors and horrors, paradoxically there does not seem to be much exploration of unconscious factors.
It gradually becomes somewhat unreal to read only about mothers, with what makes someone a mother – her infant – being so absent from the pages. Sometimes the infant seems to be only desired to complete the mother's sense of identity, in the goal of ‘mutual ownership of children’ (p.113), rather than as a person in her or his own right. On the cover image, reproduced from Cossington Smith's Interior with wardrobe mirror, the artist is absent from her expected reflection in the mirror, and I think this parallels an absence of narratives of mothering children. The focus on narratives of reproduction perhaps acts like stirrups, keeping the overall picture frozen at the point of the desire to produce a child. In itself this is a useful reminder of the psychic emptiness and pain for women facing the longed-for and lost, fantasied ideal conception and birth; in extending an awareness of this, the editors' contribution has been a successful one.