Registering Trauma: the Body in Childbirth in Contemporary French Women's Writing

Abstract

Childbirth is a uniquely female experience, even if not all women experience it, and even if, for those that do, there are many different experiences to be had. Indeed, as contemporary theorists of the body argue, such experiences bodily experiences are, at the very least, inflected or, more fundamentally, constructed by the ideological discourses that traverse them. 1 Throughout history, the female reproductive body, in particular, has been the object of a range of competing discourses, which in tum have shaped to a greater or lesser degree individual women's experiences of both their bodies and their sense of self. This article considers three very different literary narratives of childbirth, all coincidentally first appearing in 1995: Christine Angot's auto fictional Interview; Virginie Despentes's short story, 'A terme'; and Camille Laurens's autobiographical recit, Philippe. Between them, they illustrate some of the challenging, unsettling harrowing ways in which the body is being figured in contemporary women's writing in France, notably by inscribing the birthing body into problematical social contexts respectively, incest, infanticide and infant mortality. My analysis explores what is at stake in these remarkable narratives, both on an individual level and in relation to the cultural moment of which they are a part. First, I situate the texts in a theoretical and literary context, and then examine them individually, before going on to draw the analyses together in a consideration of how these disturbing representations of the body in childbirth in contemporary literature operate on a number of different levels.