Pregnant bodies rarely appear in Victorian novels. When they are revealed, they are metonymy, metaphor, or symbol that represent ideology around womanhood, instructing morality or medical judgment, according to Livia Arndal Woods. Indeed, Woods observes that visible pregnant bodies often signal transgression of boundaries for a “modest” woman, while the “ideal” woman’s body is veiled. How can the canonical texts, such as George Eliot’s Adam Bede, then, be read differently, so as not to render the characters’ bodies subject to such judgment? Woods attempts to answer this question by arguing for a “somatic reading” of pregnant bodies, which she defines as “an analytical attitude attuned to impressions of the body on page and in our own messy lived experience” (1). By compiling representations of pregnancy in Victorian novels (a novel attempt), Woods makes her intervention here by thinking of pregnancy not figuratively but as an embodied experience through somatic reading.
In somatic reading, the analytic, the body, and the personal all relate to each other. The analytic stands for a classical approach of a close reading, in relation to historical and cultural context to analyze the representations of pregnancy. However, besides such an approach, what makes her book stand out is beyond the analytic – its major strength lies in its focus on the relationship between the body and the personal. Her corporeal approach is influenced by, and influences, methodologies from several fields including Victorian studies, medical humanities, and phenomenology of reading practices. In Victorian Studies, somatic reading engages with presentism, thus emphasizing continuing relevance in our current moment by linking the readerly experience. Reading Victorian novels through “I” not only reveals the historical moment but also “the patterns of our own minds and cultures” (19). In medical humanities, it provides a potential framework for reading representations of illness in addition to pregnancy, by instilling the embodied experience within the medical structure or judgment, rather than rendering the human as entities of illnesses or sets of diagnoses. Her methodology, with its emphasis on embodiment, continues in her inquiry into reading practices. She questions the relationship between them, asking, “In what ways do we read ‘real’ somatic experience into fictional representations?” (and vice versa, and why does it matter?) (19) Even if hypervisible or veiled descriptions of pregnant bodies instruct the reader what they should think, readers can engage in somatic reading that does not focus on “facts but impressions” (15) through their lived experience. In other words, even if literary descriptions of pregnant bodies can be didactic, it should not deter the literary analysis that can go beyond such didacticism but should call for a better methodology to engage with literary representations effectively. Somatic reading can acknowledge uncertainty of interpretations for representing pregnancy, as “all pregnancies …follow their own rules and take on their own lives [and]…fictional pregnancy offers an effective canvas for exploring the scope and affordances of uncertainty” (Bowell qtd. in Woods 15), while not delimiting possible analyses on fictional pregnancies. Emphasizing that “the analytical is personal” (14), somatic reading can open up possibilities of interpretation while leaving a room for “radical uncertainty that allows for the suspension of diagnostic judgment without affinity” (23).
Canonical Victorian novels such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) are reexamined in a chronological order with the focus of how pregnancy is depicted, mainly divided into three parts: mid-Victorian, high-Victorian, and fin-de-siècle novels that each exhibit particular ways of narrating pregnancy. Woods discovers narrative shifts throughout the Victorian period: the moralizing gaze of pregnancy in mid-Victorian, self-consciousness of narration in high-Victorian, and a move from “pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symbol of instability” during the fin-de-siècle period (22). While chronological, the chapters are organized thematically (such as judgment, poverty, diagnosis, and impression), moving from the conventional narration of pregnancy, doctor’s authority and control over pregnant bodies, to the anxiety over unstable minds of men leaving a “paternal impression” to posterity through pregnancy.
Chapters 2 and 3 stand out the most. They complement one another, as Chapter 3 gives specific ways in which somatic reading can fulfill its potential, answering to the problem framed earlier in Chapter 2. If Chapter 2 brings out the demand for somatic reading that does not hinge on narrator’s intention of sympathy, Chapter 3 demonstrates how somatic reading allows the reader not to give way to narrator’s or doctor’s judgmental impulse such as medical diagnosis while reading.
In Chapter 2 (“Sympathy”) Woods examines key Victorian novels that deal with pregnancy. Looking at Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), Woods reveals that hypervisibility and objectification of pregnant body exclude the characters such as Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede from networks of sympathy. What is the appropriate readerly response to such exclusion and objectification of the body? Is the answer simply ‘more sympathy’ expected from the reader? Readers do not have to be bound up in suggested “generous affective response” (23) through affinity such as class and illness per se. Somatic reading treats bodies as bodies rather than symptoms of moral or medical judgment, which opens up possibilities to read beyond the limits of sympathy determined by the narrator. Her somatic reading of Hetty in Adam Bede exemplifies this:
‘Sympathy that relies on a positive affective relationship with Hetty fails to reach her in this novel. While diagnostic access makes it possible to read her pregnancy […], it fails to offer generous access to that condition as a deeply uncertain and unwanted experience of the body during which Hetty has no support and few options.’ (Woods 74)
Somatic reading allows the reader to not be bound by sympathy circumscribed by the novel, but to reach beyond it in parallel to their own lived experience. Chapter 2 is where the significance of somatic reading shines through, offering an original methodology to read beyond the kind of guidelines provided by the text while suspending judgment due to the rendered uncertainty. Chapter 3 (“Diagnosis”) most explicitly contemplates the run-in between somatic reading of pregnancy—as illustrated in Rosamond’s experience of miscarriage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2)—and pregnancy rendered as a symbol and diagnosis, treating pregnant bodies as symptoms of the historical context of Victorian morality and the increasing medicalization of female reproductive bodies.
Woods also demonstrates very well how pregnancy becomes a metaphor: visibility and invisibility of the pregnant body rest on the immodesty and modesty of the character, incorporated into the realm of the figurative. I couldn’t help but think of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (2001) that similarly unpacks how representations of illness such as tuberculosis and AIDS are used as a metaphor to form judgment and prejudices of the person suffering. Sontag ultimately argues that illness is not a metaphor, and Woods likewise points out how depiction of pregnancy is used figuratively to reveal Victorian ideals of womanhood. In an attempt to liberate pregnancy from its metaphor, Woods deconstructs this figurative representation of pregnancy by performing somatic reading, enabling us to imagine “bodies as bodies, rather than metaphors” (24). Woods’s somatic reading also speaks to Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), in attempting to imagine the invisible, in being aware of the “line” that is already drawn as a normative path. If literary representations of pregnancy trod the ready-made line, echoing the norm of womanhood, repetition through representation is performing and reinforcing its norm (Ahmed 16). Against this repetition, Woods’ somatic reading may be close to going outside the line, or what Ahmed calls “looking at the writer’s back”: imagining beyond what we are more inclined to face towards, and seeing what is being relegated to the back. In this case, Woods questions the orientation of how pregnancy is represented in literary text—sometimes veiled, other times unveiled—and asks us to imagine the embodied, lived experience of pregnancy that may have been relegated to the back.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006.
Sontag, Suan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Picador, 2001.
Woods, Livia A. Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel. The Ohio State University Press, 2023.
Cover image: A woman in bed after giving birth. Engraving by J. Wood, 1830. Wellcome Collection.
Livia Arndal Woods is a longtime contributor to Synapsis. You can browse her articles here.
