AESTHETICISM, THE MATERNAL AND “THAT EXTREMITY OF LOVE”: WOMEN'S POETIC REPRESENTATIONS OF PREGNANCY, CHILDBIRTH AND MOTHERING IN A SOCIETY IN TRANSITION

Abstract

Late nineteenth-century women poets retrace established patterns of representation of the pregnant woman, no longer emphasizing the fragility of the child and the dangers associated with childbirth. Rather, they present an empowering vindication of womanhood in the act of expelling new life from the depths of woman's body—precisely where post-coital conception and development take place. The “maternal”, then, as an aestheticist term, includes not only gestation, delivery of the child and mothering, but also the sexual act and physiological process of conception. This expansive and connotative sense of the maternal is increasingly evident in nineteenth-century poetry that redefines aesthetic “beauty” and resituates the parameters of the ideal during the course of the century, thereby contributing to the discourse of aestheticism concerned with the socio-political and cultural implications of the pregnant woman as a symbol of human continuity. Therefore, it is not surprising that in depicting the maternal as a series of aestheticist moments of specifically female human experience, women poets depict women weaving themselves into the fabric of an altered society.