This Body which Is not M(in)e. Figuring the Pregnant Body

Abstract

This study takes its cue from Christine Battersby’s inquiry into the «phenomenality» of the self-and/but other-than-self body during gestation. Its contention is that a proprietorial, controversial attitude has often been taken in Anglophone literary texts as varied as early modern mothers’ legacies and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pregnancy poems written by women, and that even a recent novel by Ian McEwan, Nutshell (2016) portrays coming-to-life as an occasion for appropriating and disappropriating the bodies of women. The work on pregnancy and birth by the Australian poet Judith Wright, by contrast, provides a different and more nuanced version of pregnancy as double phenomenality, most especially where she seems to enact the intense chiasmatic hospitality that phenomenological thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Rosalyn Diprose associate to the embodied experience of giving and coming to life.