“Suspended between the Two Worlds”: Gestation Metaphors and Representations of Childbirth in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry

Abstract

Based on an analysis of gestation metaphors and representations of childbirth in contemporary Irish women’s poetry, this article examines the connections and tensions between the realms of creative expression and maternity. While the longstanding literary convention of analogizing the creative process to female gestation has fostered and perpetuated simplified notions of gender, often implicitly assuming that writing is a male privilege and irreconcilable with motherhood, the literary representation of the actual event of parturition poses challenges for the writer regardless of such stereotypes. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s concept of “abjection” and Elisabeth Bronfen’s “knotted subject”, symbolized by the mark at the centre of the human body that records the incision at birth, this essay analyzes the ways in which poems by contemporary Irish women writers record the primal trauma of human existence: the injury or scar inevitably produced by the separation of mother and child in parturition, which acts as a permanent reminder of our incompleteness and vulnerability as human beings.