The New Myth of Pregnancy and Motherhood
Immediately after the out-pouring of exclamations about bliss, we are shown how this paradise could be as easily lost as gained. This new period is initiated by a new myth of pregnancy and motherhood. It is extremely vital for Erica Jong’s woman artist to communicate and rationalize how her motherhood affects her works.
This begins with ‘the challenge of raising twins, managing twin careers, and battling the New York art world’ (p.62) but what is preceding is the hyper-period of pregnancy. Once pregnant, Leila becomes ‘hyperJewish, hyperartistic, hypersensitive’. (p.60/III) The hyper-ness of Leila is thus juxtapositioned against her ‘true nature’. As a mother-to-be this could be related both to her self-sustained identity of a powerful woman and a capable artist that is made explicit in this clear-cut statement of hers:
I could no more have brought WASP babies [Thom’s] into the world than I could have stopped drawing and painting p.59; I might live and paint in Italy but I would, like Sophia Loren, have my babies born in Switzerland p.61/III
The tinge of social irony here brims with another artistic life turned into a mythological role model for Leila. What is more, pregnancy is considered by Jong as the ‘most glorious time’ in Leila’s life. She ‘lay in bed like a queen’, waiting to bear her ‘princesses’. What is quite sparkling is that both Elmore and Leila kept pregnancy notebooks with sketches of each other. Both queen and sketches will further be ‘embraced’ as key words for Leila’s professional and social identity. What is worth noting here is that those sketchbooks are immediately viewed, although in brackets, in the manner of Dart period anticipated. Both of the notebooks are kept ‘back to back - or belly to belly’ on a shelf in Leila’s studio in Connecticut and even through her commitment to Dart at this point in the novel, Leila is still infatuated with their precious symbolism. Hence she still cannot look at them ‘without a twinge’.
How could such bliss have ended? How, indeed? In Leila’s mind as an artist it happens gradually. The hyperglorious time comes abruptly to a close firstly when she goes into the Operating Room as an artist and a lover and goes out an artist and a mother and secondly when Elmore’s age, cock and career begin to fail him, while Leila’s twin career of a mother of twins and a painter seems ever more rising and ascending. Then ‘the universe of love began to shift - irrevocably’ and the loving and caring husband turns into a ‘wimp and dominator.’ Leila is also struggling with her new identity of a mother: Motherhood seems to have ‘radicalized’ Leila in a strange way. All her life she had despised women who whined, ‘women who cursed woman’s lot, women who claimed to be through with love’ but once a mother she is ready to convert to Feminism. Jong is eager to convince the reader that Leila’s motherhood brings her a brand-new frame of mind for women artists. We face a woman, a mother that had ‘never’ called herself a feminist before, who had ‘abhorred’ that label, who had to cope with her life without a man. (p.64/III)
However Leila keeps her hyperartisticity even through her life of a single mother. It even calls forth the Greek triple goddess of the lower world Demeter/Persephone/Hecate as the embodiment of her fate to have her daughter split between her and Elmore, between her and the black, unknown, infernal lower world of Elmore.
I seem always to have been obsessed with the myth of Persephone, as if somehow I knew that I would live a life in which I needed her wisdom to cope with the chthonic departures of my daughters. They come and go - to Hades and back again - and when they return, it is always spring.
But the subconscious identification of Leila with the three deities, who were invoked to maintain life and assure fertility is not incidental. Their function is quintessentially creative. These were gods of prosperity and plenty. Creation could not be possible if fertility was not ensured. In the human world it is the fertility of women that is the basis of reproduction; in the realm of the vegetable life it is the fertility of the soil that ensures growth. Woman was likened to the earth and the birth of man was thus assimilated to the birth of the plant life.
Thus motherhood could be also be interpreted as ‘the most acceptable form of female creativity; as women have done throughout the ages and filled her daughters with feminist rage'[Jong 1994/a, p.50]. Our search for the myth of women artists and mothers have drawn us aside from the story of Leila and made us confront with the myths of the previous generation. This is how we meet Erica Jong’s mother, an artist herself, caught in a range of lifelong rage, frustration and self-resentment while facing the unfairness of the world and having being forced by it to stop painting. Erica Jong argues in depth about the social/political issues that make this world so difficult for women, and conspire against having both motherhood and the life of the mind. The daughter, Leila Sand, makes a clear statement that hers is the first generation in which being a writer and a mother is not utterly impossible though it is still hard. Jong further underlines this by a survey of the brief biographies of famous women in which she discovers that they had no children or only one. Thus Jong concentrates on this recent transitional time when the status-quo is beginning to change slowly and thus sets the historical time limits of the women artists myth.
Whether it is a writer or an artist who seeks the luxurious life of the mind, it is now that the blend of art and motherhood needs to be embodied in the new extraordinary character of women artists who could be called Ms Have-it-all:
We wanted to have it all - work and love, paintings and babies - and we have had it, but we have paid a price: the price of loneliness and isolation. Nobody prepared us for all this, because nobody knew how to prepare us. We were caught in a strange historical moment.
However, with Thom and Elmore gone we can now approach Leila’s relationship with her greatest love, Dart.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998