Maternal Impressions: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Literature and Theory (review)

The early signs of pregnancy are often illegible and unpromising at once. A vague sense of fatigue can mean an overly taxed schedule as easily as it means a newly implanted zygote. A rise in basal body temperature may signal either a passing virus or a viable fetus. Nausea in the morning may arise from indulgences of the night before or indiscretions some weeks before. Unclear and inauspicious, the early signs of pregnancy gain meaning and change valence only as knowledge of pregnancy is pursued. Cristina Mazzoni's Maternal Impressions bears a resemblance.

The readerly expectations the book evokes in its early pages are later upset. She begins with a title that invites expectations of an interpretative text that brings theory to bear on literary works to illuminate them, but what Mazzoni delivers is a theoretical text that draws on the literary texts of a number of Italian women writers from the turn of the last century, medical advice manuals from that period and the present, and personal experience to elaborate a theory of maternity. The set of questions she raises in her introduction seems unsophisticated and a bit contrived, promising little intellectual merit. Finally, the primary texts she brings together seem, at first blush, awkwardly joined. But this unclear and inauspicious beginning soon gives way to a rich study of how the maternal body signifies, produces both material and knowledge, and circulates in the cultural imaginary.

Mazzoni pursues knowledge of pregnancy and the knowledge pregnancy produces through four questions that serve as the center of gravity for the four chapters that follow her dense introduction. Asking "what role does the pregnant woman have in the physical and psychological development of the child in her womb, and how is female desire constructed in this process?" (6), Mazzoni develops in her first chapter an artful reading of the relays between the desiring pregnant woman, given to insatiable cravings, and the impressionable fetus she carries, drawing on the shifting lore of birthmarks to bring into relief historical contentions over the nature and extent of maternal power. An early folklore proposes that if a pregnant woman's desires go unsatisfied, her child will bear the mark. The woman who yearns for strawberries in December may bear a child who wears a red patch on her forehead in June. Contending with this interpretation of the birthmark, and sometimes accompanying it, is the notion that what the pregnant woman sees while conceiving the child will be born in the child's features. This early folklore endows pregnant women with, in Mazzoni's terms, impressive power, but this power is called into question after the Renaissance. The generative power of a woman's ability to mark her fetus is dismissed as mere superstition while the cravings and markings that theories of maternal impressiveness had first sought to explain are instead read as signs that a woman's body is both categorically different from a man's and in much greater need of discipline. Mazzoni then pursues the experiences of pregnancy as an epistemology of relatedness, where the continuities of bodies, not reducible to two separate subjects or to a unified subjectivity, undoes privileged dichotomies in Western science and philosophy, and proposes an ethics of relatedness. She begins here, too, a discussion of a female genealogy, a project undertaken by other feminist theorists, and pursues it, if unevenly, throughout the book, but this is not one of her more productive pursuits. The ongoing conversation as she recounts and contributes to it so privileges the bearing of a daughter, and usually considered singularly, that it leaves too ambiguous the relationships of women who bear multiple children of both sexes.

Pregnancy as a way of knowing or a distinctive form of epistemology is more thoroughly pursued in the second chapter, where Mazzoni uses the experiential knowledge of the fetus that the pregnant woman gains through...