‘Those who can’t, teach’: Pregnancy, Professors, and the Anxiety of Transmission in Waterland and Common Ground

Abstract

Pregnancy remains a rare diegetic occurrence in literature. When it appears, it has been remarked, most recently by writer Jessie Greengrass, that pregnancy struggles to ‘stand both for itself and for something other’ (Greengrass 2018). Pregnancy and maternity are at best metaphors or allegories for something else, a tendency that is not exclusively found but most often observed and most problematic in male-authored texts (Friedman 1987; Hanson 2015). While this is true of texts in which pregnancy and maternity are ‘despatched elsewhere while in the centre of things a man paces a carpet’ (Greengrass), it hardly applies to two contemporary male-authored texts in which pregnancy and maternity are central to the diegesis: Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Andrew Cowan’s Common Ground (1996). This article shows that these texts’ anxious male perspectives offer ‘a new figure of the father’, one whose language makes manifest that which ‘does not signify’ and restores balance between tenor and vehicles in metaphors of pregnancy and maternity (Miller 2005).