Babies and Books: Birth as Metaphor in Nietzsche and Pirandello

Abstract

The goal of life, according to the band of women in VirginiaWoolf’s short story ‘A Society’, is to produce good people and good books. Yet for all of human history, they observe, these products and their producers have been rigidly separated according to gender. As Clorinda puts it: ‘While we have borne the children, they, we supposed, have borne the books and the pictures. We have populated the world. They have civilized it’.1 She also reasons that since men seem not to have done a particularly good job of civilizing the world, it is perhaps time for women to assume that function. How is this to be accomplished? Perhaps the only solution is to devise a way for men to bear children! Virginia Woolf herself produced several good books but, to her chagrin, no people. If women since her time have, in increasing numbers, been producing both babies and books, the metaphorical division, deeply embedded in Western cultural discourse, between female physical birthgiving and male spiritual birth-giving at some level remains unresolved, as does the problem posed in ‘A Society’. The gender division is what has allowed male writers and artists to appropriate childbirth as metaphor, ‘carrying over’ the female function to their own creative process. As Susan Stanford Friedman has noted in her study of childbirthmetaphors, James Joyce, in reference to Ulysses, wrote to his wife Nora that he had been ‘thinking of the book I have written, the child which I have carried for years and years in the womb of the imagination as you carried in your womb the children you love’.2 A half-century later, in the heyday of feminism, Gunter Grass divided his novel The Flounder (1977) not into chapters but into nine months, corresponding to the time of both