Making Babies: Infants in Canadian Fiction (review)

This critical inquiry into writings about infants in twentieth-century Canadian fiction posits two main arguments. The first considers the important shift that occurs in literary representations of babies over the decades. The second involves the tensions that reside at the centre of women's writings about infants throughout the century, although Sandra Sabatini's book considers writings by both men and women, as well as the impact of gender on the texts' approach to the figure of the infant. The genres under study are novels and short stories, all by white, English-speaking authors, with the exception of Native writer Thomas King and Québécois novelist Gabrielle Roy. Sabatini informs her readings with the theoretical perspectives of Julia Kristeva, Adrienne Rich, and Mary O'Brien, whose feminist views on the infant and the maternal are presented in the book's introduction, along with an overview of advice literature on baby care (from Dr Spock to Pregnancy for Dummies), which, as the author rightly points out, has pervaded the twentieth century and demonstrates its concern with the infant. Sabatini sets out to fill what she considers is a serious lacuna created by feminist criticism's failure to examine, despite its interest in maternalism over the decades, the textual constitution of the baby, which, the author convincingly argues, is always ideological.

Making Babies illustrates how the significance of the baby grows in the fiction, moving from the periphery to the centre of Canadian literature as the social and cultural contexts pertaining to pregnancy, birth, and child rearing change over time. The book's structure follows this textual evolution, as the tangential and objectified figure of the baby in the early part of the century (in works by L.M. Montgomery and F.P. Grove) is shown to give way to fictional grappling with the stigmatization of illegitimacy borne especially but not exclusively by female characters in novels by Sinclair Ross, Charles Tory Bruce, and Roy during the middle decades. Sabatini also offers a compelling comparison of men's and women's writings about babies in the 1960s and 1970s. Here, she argues, infants take up more space but remain on the periphery of the action and characterization in fiction by men (such as Matt Cohen and Robert Kroetsch), while they bring the issue of reproduction to the fore of women's writings (those of Audrey Thomas, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Marian Engel). A closer look at the impact of the feminist movement on male writing after 1980 reveals an interesting shift in representations of paternity, as related by such authors as Leon Rooke, King, and especially David Arnason. Finally, although recent novels by Barbara Gowdy, Nancy Huston, and Elyse Gasco reveal a painful ambivalence about pregnancy, birth, and maternal roles, short stories by Terry Griggs are shown to forge an exceptional and innovative entry into the baby's consciousness - accordingly 'a last frontier of voice appropriation.'

As these close textual readings insist on a duality inherent in literary representations of babies, they reveal how the destructiveness that infants are sometimes made to embody can undercut their idealized and sentimentalized status in the early fiction. Feminist writing of the 1960s and 1970s in turn reflects a tension between longing and rejection. During the decades that follow, although involved fatherhood is shown to mark fiction by men, their texts are also shown to lack the profound contradictions and complexities that define women's writings about maternity. However, considerations of men's recent writing about babies lead to provocative questions - particularly for feminist debates - about appropriation and ownership in relation to the traditionally female role of infant care, issues that the author underlines in her study of Arnason's short stories. Finally, Sabatini's textual readings are detailed and engaging, and this is where the author is at her best, unlike her curious venture in an overlong sociological exploration into issues of reproduction that prefaces her third chapter. Such musings (on the medicalization of childbirth or the biological relationship between foetus...