A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories by Rachel Bowlby (review)

Rachel Bowlby’s new book aims to show that stories told from a parental point of view are everywhere around us—in contemporary tabloid journalism as well as embedded in the classics of Western literature—and that they deserve far greater critical attention as such than they have hitherto received. Generally drowned out by the more numerous and more insistent voices of adult sons and daughters (the default narrative persona being that of the grown-up child), “parental stories” tend to be at most peripherally noted, then quickly forgotten.

Take, for example, Euripides’s Medea. Oft-cited as literary evidence for the destructive force of eros, the Medea, as Bowlby reminds us, is furtively plot-driven by King Aegeus’s desire of a different kind. On his way from Delphi to Troezen to seek King Pittheus’s help in deciphering the oracle he has received, Aegeus drops in on his friend Medea in Corinth, whom he finds distraught over Jason’s marital betrayal. But Aegeus, too, has his woes. Being “entirely at [his] wits’ end” about “how children might be born to” him, he leaps at Medea’s offer of medical help—“The drugs [pharmaka] I know can do this”—thus obviating the need for Pittheus’s stab at interpretation (The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volume III Euripides, edited by David Grene and Richard Lattimore; translated by Rex Warner [University of Chicago Press, 1992], 88, 84, 87). In gratitude and by way of exchange, Aegeus guarantees Medea a permanent home in Athens under any circumstances—circumstances that turn out, by the end of the play, to include three acts of premeditated murder, including, infamously, those of her own children. Medea’s right of asylum, her freedom from criminal prosecution, is, in sum, the direct result of her granting Aegeus’s wish to be a parent: a wish fulfilled (in the birth of Theseus) by means of assisted reproductive techne.

Bowlby’s readings—which rapidly traverse genres, disciplines, centuries, and nations—disclose the historical constant of child-longing and its effects on sociopolitical narrative. Divine intervention produces Isaac from the elderly womb of Abraham’s wife, but only after Sarah’s desire for a child has resulted in her maidservant Hagar’s surrogate birthing of Ishmael—which leads, of course, to the birth of Islam as well. Pointing to such eye-opening precedents for fertility treatments and donor wombs is one of the most important contributions of this unusual book. And it is unusual in a number of ways. Although barely 200 pages (stripped of index, notes, and bibliography), it references a kaleidoscope of philosophical, historical, psychoanalytic, literary, and popular cultural texts in fifteen sections that rarely amount to more than fifteen pages each. The table of contents suggests that most of what follows will discuss a handful of celebrated nineteenth-century novels (plus Medea, Tom Jones [1749], and Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” [1934]), but more than a third of the book (and most of its heart) is devoted to comments on present-day forms and meanings of parenthood: on changing ideas of what constitutes a “scandalous” pregnancy (39); on in vitro fertilization (IVF) as a form of virgin birth (26); on the class politics of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART); on “reproductive tourism” (28); on the sudden emergence of “gay parenthood” (31); and on previous generational anxieties about the degeneracy of wet-nurses being passed on to their charges as prefiguring current fears of genetic defects in egg and sperm donations. Indeed, the most haunting aspect of A Child of One’s Own is its discussion of the growing commerce in baby-making, whereby children are high-priced, technologically-produced, outsourced, designer commodities for purchase by the so-called one percent. Bowlby quotes Sigmund Freud (and later cites Jacques Derrida) on Elternliebe, or parental love, as “nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again”—a narcissism growing monstrous in our plutocratic era...