Читать книгу The Seed - Alexandra Kimball - Страница 5

The summer after our third miscarriage, Jeremy convinced me to go to a fancy party for his work. He thought that dressing up and eating a nice meal in a ballroom with other dressed-up people might distract me. I sat in my cocktail dress – too tight on my post-IVF bloat – and held my husband’s hand under the table. Occasionally a waiter would pass by with canapés and I’d grab one with my free hand. The table was buzzing with wine-leavened conversation, with introductions and interruptions and compliments, especially for the women, who wore a lot of black and navy, modest necklines, the assured unchic of women who do not need to impress. They generated an air of capability and confidence, success.

I desperately, desperately did not want to talk to any of them. Over the past four years, socializing had become my biggest problem, second only to infertility. If you had asked me about my social life, I would have said, ‘It does not exist,’ though, in fact, all I did was talk to other people, in online support groups on Facebook and the forum sections of infertility websites. I’d wake up in the morning and log on and read and write all day with hundreds of infertile women, sharing details of our miscarriages, our IVF results, our search for a surrogate, and reply to their queries and stories in turn. But as soon as I logged off, I’d forget all about them. Not to say I found these groups useless – if I wasn’t happy about my condition, I was certainly grateful to have a place I could discuss it. But the occasion of these conversations left them feeling ghostly and unreal, in a way that talking with other women, even about other shitty and gendered topics, never had. The discussions in these forums seemed less like genuine attempts at conversation than they did like monologues, or the petitions ancient women used to inscribe on tablets, one by one, in front of oracles for Artemis and Zeus: Will there be children for me?

Part of this was inevitable, I thought: it’s difficult for someone so deep into her own suffering to connect with anyone else, let alone someone who is suffering just as much. But I also wondered about what I felt was a deeply unfeminist, even antifeminist, vibe at work in these spaces. Not because we were all struggling to have children, which, duh, is the number one edict of patriarchy, and not even because the majority of posters were not interested in feminism or politics (in fact, a significant number appeared to be right-wing Christian women). Rather, it’s that these groups are set up to benefit the individual infertile woman, as opposed to infertile women as a group. Regardless of the banner art on every page that urged members to support infertility research, or the white ribbons to which we dutifully changed our avatars every October to coincide with Infertility Awareness Month, posters rarely discussed ‘ending infertility.’ The purpose of these groups was not communal, it was individual – each member was there to figure out how she, personally, could have a baby. And once she did, it was rare to hear from her again. (Some groups have a separate section for infertile women who have successfully conceived – in one forum, this section was literally titled ‘The Other Side.’)

Still, the outside world – I thought of anything noninfertility-related as ‘outside’ and still do – was way worse. Somewhere along the four-year way, my outside friends – all feminists, all solidarity- and collective-minded – had retreated. I’d see them every once in a while, but they felt remote, far-off in their own galaxies of pregnancy, baby-raising, or simply just not being infertile. I backed off, too. Not infrequently, I’d think of one of these women and feel a sudden hurt, but I preferred this pain to the sharp vertigo I experienced whenever they said something to remind me of my new difference, my distance. Social life presented an agonizing conundrum: my infertility was the only thing in my life, and no one apart from other infertile women ever wanted to talk about it.

At Jeremy’s work party, I was trying to silently project a sense of my private agony, but eventually, the woman seated beside me tapped me on the hand and asked me my name. She was older than me, maybe fiftyish, with a coiffed bob and a pale pink satin pantsuit that was frivolous enough to suggest that maybe she wasn’t one of the many lawyers, but a lawyer’s wife. I hoped not, because the wives always asked me about kids. Which she did.

‘Do you have any kids?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Do you plan on having them?’ she asked. Her expression was quizzical, slightly amused.

‘We can’t,’ I said. ‘We’ve had three miscarriages.’

Despite being clinical, correct, the word miscarriage, like the word infertility, always suggests the particular unruliness of the female body – a mess of genitals and organs. And even given the culture’s nominal feminism (I would be shocked if any woman at that party would have rejected being labelled a feminist), there is a perpetual undercurrent of disgust about female genitals and organs. They are, in the words of French surrealist Michel Leiris, ‘unclean or as a wound … but dangerous in itself, like everything bloody, mucous, infected.’

Saying ‘miscarriage’ out loud was like putting my uterus on the table, bleeding and scarred and radiating misuse. Tears and death and not a small amount of sex. I felt vulgar, dropping this bit of feminine gore into the lighthearted civility of the room. I understood the irony: I had no more exposed my uterus by talking about my lack of children than any other woman who mentions ‘having kids.’ All children, living or dead, come from bloody uteruses and vaginas – things polite people don’t discuss – but the logic of misogyny, which carves out a space of relative respect for some mothers (especially the wealthy, white, and married), means we usually agree to forget this. The beauty of the child erases its origins in the female body and sexuality. But when these parts go wrong and there is no child, nothing is redeemed. It’s just the spectre of the female body and sexuality: blood, mucous, infection. Death.

A few moments passed. The woman’s mouth opened and closed over the empty air. The waiter came by again, and I plucked a canapé from a round tray. Open, closed, open, closed, like she was gulping air.

‘Oh,’ she finally said, before rushing off, to the washroom or something – I didn’t see her again. I still don’t know who she was. Her chair remained empty all night, and whenever I looked at it, I wanted to laugh. It was funny, really: a literal instantiation of my isolation. Like my infertility was creating a force field around me. Suddenly the distance I felt from my outside friends snapped into sense: infertility has a lot of power.

When TV and movies want to underscore an infertile female character’s isolation, they send her to an oblivious friend’s baby shower. But in my digital support groups, a more common scenario is that we do not get invited to baby showers; in fact, our friends who are pregnant or parenting small children begin avoiding us altogether. Infertile women will often find out about our friends’ and even relatives’ pregnancies, baby showers, and births on Facebook, after the fact. Writing on pregnancy loss, American sociologists Wendy Simonds and Barbara Katz Rothman identify this isolation as the primary theme in all literature on miscarriage: ‘Bereaved mothers say, again and again, no one wanted to hear, no one let me talk, no one listened, no one said “I’m sorry.” It happened in silence.’

Discussing the topic in her excellent Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America, anthropologist Linda L. Layne quotes a woman whose experiences are typical:

[P]eople shied away either because they didn’t know what to say or because it could be a reality for them that they couldn’t deal with … [F]eelings of loneliness … began to sink in. People who knew what had happened either ignored me or said something inappropriate.

Feeling rejected by outside friends was one of the only non-medical topics that got much play in my online support groups (more so even than marital problems, which, surprisingly, I didn’t see discussed much). Posters spent a lot of time trying to decipher their friends’ motives.

‘I know she didn’t want to hurt my feelings,’ one woman wrote, after discovering that her sister-in-law had not issued her a baby-shower invitation. Or maybe, she wrote, she simply didn’t know how to respond to her relative’s pain and loss, and was trying to avoid the awkwardness and discomfort an infertile woman at a baby shower would present. She wanted justification, and the other women in the group all gave it; we wrote that the sister-in-law was not being malicious, that she was just ignorant, that she was trying to spare the woman’s feelings. But we all felt the slap, having weathered these slights ourselves. However benign the reason for excluding us, the effect was always that we felt immediately othered, so identified with the tragedy of infertility that we had become impossible to relate to, let alone socialize with. We knew that our suffering was unimaginable to most women, and that the very fact of us was frightening and depressing and better when just ignored. We had become monsters, like the one Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein creates – ‘solitary and abhorred.’

I felt my difference, my solitariness and despicability, most keenly at that dinner, but it took several more encounters (more ‘I don’t know what to say,’ more ignored requests, more absent party invitations) for me to start thinking that the horror of my infertility – my monstrousness – was not just about how different I was from regular, fertile women, but also how similar, how close. I imagined that the women who avoided me were very invested in having children (or more children) themselves. They retreated from me because they saw me as a worst-case scenario, a personal nightmare – even an omen. Monsters blur categories: human and beast; living and dead; man and woman. With fecundity so tied to femininity, I often sensed how my infertility desexed me, how it rendered me both female and not-quite female in a way that was not just sad but unsettling. The best monsters – vampires, zombies, aliens – are uncanny perversions of the human, recognizable in some form as us. (‘[M]y form is a filthy type of yours,’ says Frankenstein’s monster, ‘more horrid even from the very resemblance.’) The threat of the monster isn’t death, it’s contamination – that they might infect us with their abomination and turn us into monsters as well. When other women avoided me, I wondered if they believed, on some level, that my infertility was contagious, and that by dealing with me, they might have to contend with their fear that they might be infertile, too.

From her first recorded mentions the infertile female was a monster, distinct from woman-proper. The Babylonian Atrahasis epic, from the eighteenth-century BCE, describes a conflict between the gods and the overpopulated, lazy world of men, during which the gods flooded the earth. Eventually repenting for this destruction, the deities restored humankind to the earth, with a built-in safeguard against overpopulation: ‘Let there be a third group of people. [Let there be] fertile women and barren women. Let there be the “Eradicator” among the people and let her snatch the child from the lap of the mother.’ The Eradicator was the lion-headed demoness Lamashtu, barren and envious, who caused infertility, miscarriage, and infant death among the populace. She could only be warded off by reciting all of her seven names. Yet her existence is essential to the flourishing fertility of the population at large – the infertility of some women is the price Babylonians paid for the fertility of most. Lamashtu is an explicit early example of how the fear and Othering of female infertility is foundational to society’s functioning.

The Hebrew Testament of Solomon describes the demon Abyzou – her name derived from the word for abyss – as a fusion of woman and beast: ‘her glance was altogether bright and greeny, and her hair was tossed wildly like a dragon’s; and the whole of her limbs were invisible.’ Abyzou was barren, and she confessed that her envy of women who could bear children motivated her murderous hauntings:

[B]y night I sleep not, but go my rounds over all the world, and visit women in childbirth … [I]f I am lucky, I strangle the child. But if not, I retire to another place. For I cannot for a single night retire unsuccessful. For I am a fierce spirit, of myriad names and many shapes. And now hither, now thither I roam … I have no work other than the destruction of children, and the making their ears to be deaf, and the working of evil to their eyes, and the binding their mouths with a bond, and the ruin of their minds, and paining of their bodies.

Considered the cause of stillbirths and miscarriage, Abyzou was likely the source of child-killing monsters in other antiquity cultures: the Jewish Lilith, the Egyptian Alabasandria, and the Byzantine Gylou. The art of the period depicts these demons as serpentine, the unruly, unnatural appearance of such female forms evoking their barrenness and symbolizing their rebuke to traditional femininity. Accordingly, they were often painted being trampled under male riders on horses, a triumph of the masculine state order over the vengeful, inchoate feminine. Amulets depicting such figures were used by pregnant women to ward off vengeful spirits.

In Indonesia, a tree-dwelling spirit named Wewe Gombel was similarly motivated to evil deeds by her infertility. In life, Wewe Gombel’s husband committed infidelity when he learned she was barren, and, upon discovering this, she murdered him. The villagers drove her from the village, and she killed herself. In her spirit form, she devoted herself to making up the family she could not have, kidnapping unsupervised children and confining them in her palm tree, where she enchanted them into staying. Engravings depict her as naked and dishevelled, with matted hair and outsized, pendulous breasts (some stories have her using her breasts to hide the stolen children as she spirits them away). In folk tales, parents use her vengeful presence to warn their children against straying too far or misbehaving, a cautionary tale that figures the barren female as the ultimate threat to orderly family life, spreading her childlessness to others. She is symbolically linked to the early Hindu goddess Nirrti, who was responsible for miscarriages, infertility, and child abductions, as well as general death and decay; in a culture where infertility was presumed to always be the result of female disorder, and punishable by not only divorce but exile and death, women prayed frequently to ward off Nirrti’s influence.

In the Middle Ages, the Abyzou archetype informed the European idea of the witch, frequently accused of kidnapping children and causing miscarriages and stillbirths. The witch burnings in Europe and North America were a touchstone for late-twentieth-century feminist historians, who rightfully noted how the accused (of which around 80 per cent were female) often defied the conventional female gender roles of the era: many were unmarried, for example, or exhibited the unwomanly characteristics of anger or promiscuity. But fewer have emphasized how prominently female barrenness figured in the witch trials, how infertile and childless women were considered both particularly vulnerable to infestation by Satanic spirits and prone to acts of witchcraft themselves. More broadly, witchcraft itself manifested in the form of barrenness of all living things: miscarriages (both human and animal), famines, droughts, and crop wastages. The horror of infertility permeates the first Papal Bull on witchcraft in 1484:

Many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation, and straying from the Catholic faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi, and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine … they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands … they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls.

Many of the highest-profile witchcraft trials centred on infertile women. Even as childlessness was presumed to be the result of female infertility alone, a common assumption during this period was that male impotence was caused by female sorcery (itself an effect of a woman having sex with the Devil). In 1754 in São Paulo, Brazil, Ursulina de Jesus was accused of using sorcery to render the couple infertile, and her resulting trial and execution by burning was one of Brazil’s most sensational witchcraft cases. Her husband later failed to conceive children with his second wife, indicating that he had been responsible for the couple’s barrenness – a potent example of how medieval theology constructed female infertility as a scapegoat for larger concerns about masculine virility. In Puritan North America, a childless woman, Eunice ‘Goody’ Cole, was accused in 1656 of witchcraft by neighbours, who blamed her for the death of local livestock. Described by historian Joseph Dow as ‘ill-natured and ugly, artful and aggravating, malicious and revengeful,’ Cole was imprisoned and tortured several times over a period of ten years, earning the title of ‘the Witch of Hampton’ (she still figures prominently in local legends; Hampton, Massachusetts, has a diner named after her). The spectre of infertility even condemned women who were in fact fertile, as happened in the seventeenth-century trial of German wife Merga Bien. An argumentative woman who had been in a childless marriage for fourteen years, Bien was first arrested on suspicion of attending Satanic rites, but convicted when it was discovered that she was pregnant. Inquisitors believed such fertility after prolonged barrenness could only be the result of demonic intervention, and Bien was executed in 1603.

The Old and New Testaments had, on their surface, a good deal of sympathy for infertile women (the invocation ‘Sing, O barren woman!’ compares the plight of the chosen people of Israel to the sorrow of an infertile wife). But her potential for danger is always present, troubling that male sympathy. The barren monsters of pagan myth and folklore were threatening not only because they defied the edict for women to procreate, but because each of these feminine demons demonstrated her anger and bitterness over her situation, which fuelled her acts of supernatural revenge. As in these tales, the Bible defined women as passive instruments of their reproductive fate; the standard woman was ‘self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands’ (Titus 2:4-5). Thus emerged the only acceptable image of the infertile woman: the pining religious supplicant, symbolized most strikingly in the Biblical story of Hannah. Infertile but virtuous, she is first encountered in a moment of submission, having skipped food and drink at a family gathering to pray to God for a (specifically, male) child:

‘O Lord of Hosts, if You will look upon the suffering of Your maidservant and will remember me and not forget Your maidservant, and if You will grant Your maidservant a male child, I will dedicate him to the Lord for all the days of his life, and there shall no razor come upon his head.’ (1 Samuel 1:11)

Hannah is praying silently, unwilling to disturb others with her distress, which causes the priest Eli to interrupt and accuse her of drunkenness. Hannah rehearses her predicament in terms that also underscore her feminine piety:

‘Oh no, my lord! I am a very unhappy woman. I have drunk no wine or other strong drink, but I have been pouring out my heart to the Lord. Do not take your maidservant for a worthless woman; I have only been speaking all this time out of my great anguish and distress.’ (1 Samuel 1:14–15)

Hannah’s story circumscribes acceptable attitude for the infertile woman – prayer, silence, submission, and acceptance of God’s will. Rabbis of the period believed that barrenness existed ‘because the Holy One, blessed be He, longs to hear the prayer of the righteous’; at the same time, barren women had little to no social status and female infertility was grounds for divorce. Unsurprisingly, Hannah’s is the only prayer by a woman recorded in the Bible, illustrating the proper response to female infertility as it underscores the importance of prayer and the centrality of God to the mysteries of reproduction. (In Psalm 13: ‘He makes the barren woman abide in the house As a joyful mother of children. Praise the Lord!’) And it also invokes her propriety: after Eli tells her to ‘go in peace’ and resume eating and drinking, ‘she is happy.’ Spoiler alert: God eventually gives Hannah a (male) baby. She is one of the earliest examples of the enduring cliché that if a woman has enough faith (or, in our secular cult of ‘wellness,’ is ‘positive’ enough), a miracle pregnancy is all but inevitable. In my digital infertility groups, a meme is often posted beneath stories of the poorest prognoses: an image of a dandelion or a rainbow, below which is written, in cursive font: ‘Always Hope.’ (‘I fucking hate hope,’ my friend, who struggled with infertility before having her daughter, told me recently. ‘Hope is how you tell women to shut up. Hope is weaponized.’)

In these spaces where politics are absent, the imperative to be positive and maintain hope is particularly telling of how infertility itself is understood as ultimately mysterious and ephemeral, uprooted from even the medical science on which our outcomes depend. It is standard in many groups, for example, to refer to IVF babies as ‘miracles,’ or to symbolize babies conceived after miscarriages with rainbows, which invoke the intangible power of hope. Feeling that this imagery erases the difficult, expensive, and very concrete work of infertility, some infertile women on the Infertility subreddit have banned the terms and refer to their children not as ‘miracles,’ but ‘money and science babies.’ The shift pokes at the misogyny that shapes women’s experiences of infertility from Hannah to the present – how, unlike issues of abortion, consent, employment equality, and so forth, resolving infertility is seen as an issue not of policy or material action, but of passive faith. And it doubles the infertile woman’s isolation: in the language of hope, infertility is not a matter between women and the world, but one woman and fate.

Hannah’s prayer is recited frequently at Christian infertility groups, where her submission to God’s will is held up as a model of faith. ‘Some couples see infertility as a malady and become consumed with it,’ advises one Christian infertility site:

They may have uncomfortable feelings toward those who are blessed with children. They may find fault with each other or become angry with themselves. They may doubt God’s wisdom as it applies to their lives … So what do infertile couples do in the meantime – be happy while everyone else takes their children for picnics in the park? Absolutely! Yes! And may God grant such couples the patience to make their smiles genuine and sincere … And they can be happy, knowing that God also has a plan for their lives as well. Satisfaction and contentment with one’s station in life is always God-pleasing.

If the barren she-monsters of pagan mythology and world folklore are actors, avenging their infertility through acts of evil and destruction, Hannah is redeemed by her passivity and acceptance of a divine plan. In her, we see the origin of the contemporary myth identified by feminist historian Naomi Pfeffer: prior to the development of high-tech reproductive medicine, ‘involuntary childless women either suffered their fate in stoic silence, or resolved their childlessness by adoption.’ Hannah’s response is almost a parody of appropriate feminine submission: she prays silently, denies herself food and drink, and submits immediately to the orders of the male priest who is her only human counsel. It’s as she is trying to redeem her deviance, her failure as a woman, by doubling down on femininity, emphasizing her submissiveness and obedience to male authority. When God eventually ‘opens her womb,’ it’s partly in response to her prayer, but also to reward her for her feminine virtue. Because she is pitied, not feared, we know Hannah is not a monster.

Many anthropologists have explained the common fear of infertile women, and history’s tendency to demonize, pathologize, and criminalize barren women as more or less evolutionary: barrenness threatens the continuation of the species. But human extinction is a universal dilemma, and the fact is, the monstrosity of barrenness is still depicted as female. Our ideas about infertility germinated in patriarchy, which is organized around the gender-essentialist idea that women can be reduced to our wombs, and our virtue measured by their function. In cultures that define women as primarily child-bearers and mothers, barren women are scary because we undermine the basis of gendered life.

Woman-as-womb: it sounds comically reductive, a conceptual synecdoche too narrow for anyone living in 2019 to possibly buy into, but I’ve never met an infertile woman who hasn’t expressed some anxiety around feeling less than female because of her condition. Feeling like ‘less than a woman’ is also a common theme in online support groups; after IVF and isolation, it’s one of the most popular topics. (‘I feel like a freak and a waste of womanhood,’ one writes. Another: ‘I am a baby-less monster.’) Many women, raised to reject the essentialist idea of women-as-wombs, are as distressed by the antifeminism these feelings imply as they are by the feelings themselves. ‘Let me just say that I’m not implying anyone who is child free by choice or cannot get pregnant for one reason or another is any less than a woman,’ writes one poster on Reddit:

I guess what I’m feeling is the counterpart to a man feeling emasculated? And I know that sounds so ridiculous, so please don’t judge me. I’m here because I’m ashamed of these feelings. I just … don’t feel like a proper woman. I don’t feel like a good wife. I don’t feel like a good partner … I’m just feeling a huge blow to my ego and identity that I can’t really justify, but there you have it.

But the frequency of these feelings of defeminization among infertile women suggests that, in fact, the old idea of woman-as-womb still has some hold on us. Our culture is one where essentialist ideas about women are nominally rejected but still infest daily life, from Facebook memes asserting ‘childbirth is women’s power’ (slash, breastfeeding is; slash, baby-wearing; slash, staying at home; ad nauseam) to Hillary Clinton’s insistence that the most important job she has is that of mother and grandmother. If ‘woman’ is defined by her capacity to bear and mother children, what does it mean that some women can’t do this? Are they less female? If not, then maybe we’ve gotten the definition wrong. Maybe women aren’t defined by a working womb. But if wombs don’t make a woman, what does? Does any single thing define a woman? And if not, does ‘woman,’ as a class, make any sense at all? And crucially, if it doesn’t, what is a man?

In this way, female infertility asks the key feminist question: what is a woman?

Simone de Beauvoir famously addressed the question in The Second Sex, where she theorized woman as ‘Other’: the constructed object against which man measures and defines himself, and through which he justifies his social and political power. The Other occasions the feminine ideal of the ‘eternal feminine’ – the enduring cultural myth that the woman is essentially passive, an ‘erotic, birthing or nurturing body.’ In practice, this confines women to the ‘immanent’ – the inner, limited worlds of domesticity, bodily concerns, and (of course) reproduction: ‘her grasp upon the world is less extended than man’s, and she is more closely enslaved to the species.’ Men, on the other hand, are ‘transcendent’: oriented away from themselves, toward the spheres of politics, religion, art, and production.

Yet, as this is an ‘artificial product’ – not woman’s ‘true nature in itself, but as man defines her’ – the construct of the eternal feminine is forever haunted – taunted, in fact – by its shadow figure, which takes the form of the defiant, aberrant, and devouring female: ‘If … woman evades the rules of society, she returns to Nature and to the demon, she looses uncontrollable and evil forces in the collective midst.’ The edict of patriarchy is thus to enforce women’s adherence to the feminine ideal of immanence, through proscribing ‘legitimate marriage and the wish to have children…to strengthen the idea figure of the Mother who will be concerned with the welfare of the next generation.’

De Beauvoir had little to say about infertility, but it’s easy to see how barrenness fits into her schema. Infertility is a direct defilement of the patriarchal proposition that women are to ‘bear fruit’; all childless women, in some sense, join the other archetypal ‘bad women’ of history: the lesbian, the prostitute, and the criminal (all of which she describes). More strikingly, we can see in the twin premodern figures of the barren woman, Abyzou and Hannah, interesting examples of the threat the destructive, defiant female poses to the eternal feminine. An infertile woman is not much of a woman, not only because she’s barren, but because she’s potentially angry, and anger in a woman is irrational, dangerous, and destructive. Chaotic, destructive, and, above all, active, Abyzou represents the danger of infertility to patriarchal order, rendering the woman less-than-female, and thus – because woman is the Other against which man defines himself – rendering masculinity suspect in the process. Calling into question the basis of patriarchy. A feminist sex worker once told me that society fears the prostitute because she makes visible the lie that is capitalism; in a similar way, I think, the infertile woman makes visible the lie of gender essentialism. That is quite a feat. Infertility has a lot of power.

I’ve wondered about why I never felt compelled to embrace the idea of myself as a monster – in feminist language, reclaim it. I could do this, I could wear my barrenness proudly; I could delight in the fact that my existence is the ultimate rebuke to patriarchal order.

From Lilith Fair to Tumblr posts about witchcraft as a form of self-care, Gen X and millennial women have aligned themselves with the demonic, devouring female archetypes of deep patriarchy. I could do something like this: align myself with Abyzou; write a play about Ursulina de Jesus. But I don’t; none of us do. It would require getting angry, for one, and the fact is, however difficult it is to accept anger and defiance in a regular woman, it’s impossible to accept it in an infertile one. The bad women of history, the prostitutes and lesbians and childless warriors that feminists like to reclaim, were destructive, but they were destructive toward men. But in the demonology of barrenness, infertile women are angry and destructive toward other women and, not infrequently, children. Monsters like Abyzou, who torture and kill other women at their most vulnerable, are just difficult to square with the third-wave project of reappropriation.

This idea, that anger and bitterness is particularly unacceptable in infertile women, runs through all conversation on infertility, from the Christian prayer groups to my online support groups, where all expressions of ‘negativity’ are discouraged. When I searched the boards for posts about anger, there were more than a few – ‘Warning: Angry Rant!’; ‘Angry at My Pregnant Friend’; and so forth – but the stories that followed were riddled with disclaimers and apologies (‘I know this sounds bitchy, but’; ‘I don’t normally act this way and I do love my friend, but’). And on closer inspection, these women didn’t seem angry so much as envious or lonely or hurt. Most of the anecdotes were about someone slighting or insulting the infertile woman, after which she felt appalled but refrained from doing anything rash like talk back, or yell, or publicly break down. If she did feel rage, it was expressed later, in the private, anonymous space of the support group. Invariably, the other posters met this with empathy (‘I feel this! Let it out, girl!’), but also with encouragements to stay positive and hopeful (‘Never give up on your dream. One day you’ll say, it was all worth it!’). Faced with the temptation to be vengeful and destructive, infertile women instead become Hannahs: silent, trying to stay positive and faithful, whether in God or fate or the power of our surgeons and doctors.