Conceived in Modernism

The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control

Aimee Armande Wilson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501307140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Current debates about birth control can be surprisingly volatile, especially given the near-universal use of contraception among American and British women. Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control offers a new perspective on these debates by demonstrating that the political positions surrounding birth control have roots in literary concerns, specifically those of modernist writers. Whereas most scholarship treats modernism and birth control activism as parallel, but ultimately separate, movements, Conceived in Modernism shows that they were deeply intertwined. This book argues not only that literary concerns exerted a lasting influence on the way activists framed the emerging politics of contraception, but that birth control activism helped shape some of modernism's most innovative concepts. By revealing the presence of literary aesthetics in the discourse surrounding birth control, Conceived in Modernism helps us see this discourse as a variable facet rather than a permanent bulwark of reproductive rights debates.

1

Modernism, Monsters, and Margaret Sanger

Tony Telura, the young protagonist of Mary Heaton Vorse’s “The Magnet” (1921), wakes up in a “spectral and dark” tenement hall to the piercing sound of a woman’s screams that “slithered through him” like “a slashing knife” (8). These screams do not arise because of a ghost, vampire, or any other supernatural demon despite the gothic overtones of the story. Rather, Tony’s nightmarish experience is occasioned by his mother in childbirth. A similarly disturbing picture of maternity develops in Rita Wellman’s “On the Dump,” a story published three years earlier in the same periodical, Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review. In Wellman’s story, a poor, pregnant woman allows herself to become human trash, slipping to her death on a pile of “tobacco cans, old pans, dirty ripped mattresses,” and one “obscene” corset (7). Mrs. Robinson’s desperation at her perpetual pregnancies—she has “faced death” ten times—leaves her thinking that death on a dump heap is a welcome release and fitting end for someone society has disregarded like so much trash (7). In these stories of madness and violence, indeed throughout the Birth Control Review (BCR), gothic aesthetics and contraception (or the lack thereof) combine to create a singularly modernist narrative of involuntary maternity, which I call the modernist conception narrative.

This chapter explores the intersection of modernist aesthetics and the politicized narratives of the birth control movement in the United States. The processes by which the texts of Sanger, Vorse, and Wellman depict the maternal body—doubling, fragmentation, and linguistic iteration—illuminate a particular method by which modernist writers came to construct the pregnant female body as an aesthetic object. Through this construction, we see a side of aesthetic autonomy that is anything but autonomous: although artists may attempt to create a work of art that is complete onto itself, disengaged from politics and ethics, the narratives in the BCR show that the impulse toward autonomy obscures a critique, an underside to autonomy that engages the material world. Simultaneously, the doubled aspect of these narratives, the way they show the other as the same, suggests a way of understanding how the dominant rhetoric of the birth control movement could shift, within only a decade, from one of personal freedom and feminist revolution to the patriarchal version of eugenics it later promoted. Thus, this chapter also helps illuminate one of the shadowiest corners of the birth control movement, Sanger’s embrace of eugenics.

The importance of storytelling and narratives to the birth control movement should not be underestimated. Both advocates and critics used literary techniques and referred to literary traditions in framing their positions because fiction offered a way of moving between private sentiment and politics. Storytelling and personal experiences, argues communications scholar Jennifer Emerling Bone, “became the primary rhetorical tactics used to transform a private discussion of birth control into dominant public forums” (17–8). She goes on to say, “the use of storytelling as a rhetorical strategy (by women) helped bridge the tension between norms of femininity and the expectations that existed for public discourse” (30). In the early twentieth century, birth control raised concerns on a number of levels for many Americans struggling with the advent of a post-Victorian society since birth control gave women the potential for greater control over reproduction, made people acknowledge that couples sometimes had sex for reasons other than procreation, and meant talking about sex in general.

Discussion of contraception in the early twentieth century was severely restricted due to the Comstock Act, which, as you will recall from the introduction, prohibited shipping “obscene” materials. These prohibited materials explicitly included birth control devices and instructions on how to practice birth control. Despite the Comstock Act, knowledge of effective contraceptive practices was relatively common among the upper classes by virtue of their access to private clinics with physicians who were sometimes willing to bend the rules, and the lower classes were aware that such methods existed even if they were not privy to the necessary practical knowledge. Thus, part of Sanger’s advocacy campaign required transforming birth control from a private practice into a public conversation, a shift in which storytelling takes a central role. This point has been made by scholars such as Emerling Bone, and yet, inexplicably, the role of short stories in Sanger’s various publications is largely left unexamined, although these and other literary works appear throughout Sanger’s longest running publication, the BCR. So, this chapter makes the logical next step in the conversation: examining the role of fictional storytelling in developing rhetoric of the birth control movement.¹

Eugenics and the birth control movement

The scholarly conversation surrounding the birth control movement in the United States is transparently uneasy with the movement’s eugenic turn. In the earliest days of the movement, the 1910s, Margaret Sanger pitched birth control as the key to women’s liberation. Even more radically, she argued that birth control would allow women to enjoy sex for pleasure without fear of becoming pregnant. Consistent throughout her early arguments was the sense that women deserved individual choice in their reproductive decisions, whether or not they were currently able to exercise it. Manifesting an implicit awareness of the socially determined subject, in 1920 she declared, “no woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body” (Woman and the New Race 94). As the 1920s progressed, however, Sanger’s rhetoric in speeches and in the pages of the BCR increasingly promoted birth control as a way to achieve eugenic, rather than individual, goals. And, unlike other birth control activists such as Mary Ware Dennett, Sanger argued that birth control should be dispensed by physicians, a position that placed an additional barrier between a woman’s knowledge of birth control and her ability to practice it (Baker 212–2).

Undoubtedly, scholarly anxiety over the movement’s adoption of eugenics is due in part to the unsavoriness of eugenics to our post-Holocaust sensibilities. In addition, I argue, this discomfort is due to an inability to square the paternalism of most eugenic discourse with Sanger’s insistence (sometimes concurrent) on birth control as a tool to liberate women. As a result, the critical conversation tends to reduce the complexity of the situation to willful ignorance, contradiction, or hypocrisy on the part of Sanger. In other words, analyses typically begin with the assumption that yoking together these discourses does not make logical sense. Claire M. Roche, for instance, calls eugenics and birth control “strange bedfellows” and concludes that Sanger “was either unable or unwilling to recognize the complicated nature of the association. Sanger marketed herself and her movement as, at times, liberal, leftist, Socialist, and progressive, while she supported and made use of the increasingly elitist views of the eugenicists working in the United States and England” (262). Leaning toward hypocrisy as an explanation, Dorothy Roberts argues that what was formerly a discourse of freedom became one of control: the “language of eugenics . . . defined the purpose of birth control, shaping the meaning of reproductive freedom. Birth control became a means of controlling a population rather than a means of increasing women’s reproductive autonomy” (80). Rather than hypocrisy, pragmatism seems to explain the movement’s shift from feminist rebellion to deference for tradition for Beth Widmaier Capo. Capo argues that eugenics offered the birth control movement “another way to downplay the potential threat to patriarchy that contraception offered: reproductive control belonged not directly to women but to a wise and fatherly society who would oversee its implementation” (123). These statements by Roche, Roberts, and Capo rest on the assumption that freedom and control, feminist and patriarchal, and elitist and pluralistic are mutually exclusive positions whose junction must be explained by some underlying and unstated rationale.

Yet the eugenic turn does not have to be contradictory. Besides the fact that eugenics was thought at the turn of the century to be a progressive idea, the eugenic turn is also a manifestation of the impossibility of fixing a single, stable meaning to any aesthetic concept. The tendency of the critical conversation to cast the eugenic turn as either pragmatic or hypocritical narrows the interpretive possibilities of the birth control movement. If we reject such dichotomous arguments, we will start to see the ways in which aestheticization (by which I mean turning political rhetoric into an art object) produces a narrative of birth control that can signify freedom, on the one hand, and restriction on the other. The particular narrative of poverty constructed in the pages of the BCR reduces the political autonomy of poor women while it simultaneously argues for their increased independence. The symbolic possibilities of birth control literalize this ideological doubling by locating it in a maternal body that is split between an impotent mind and an independently reproducing body.

Looking at the birth control movement through a modernist lens provides a new way of interpreting the movement’s eugenic turn because it offers a more nuanced explanation than pragmatism, willful ignorance, or hypocrisy. I do not want to be read as excusing the most egregious practices of eugenics or thinking that there was nothing more than strategy behind Sanger’s use of its rhetoric. Rather, I want to show how Sanger’s deployment of eugenic rhetoric calls into play certain types of modernist techniques that deviate from dangerous racial essentialism even while working within a eugenic paradigm. As aesthetic creations, neither the narrative I describe here, the modernist conception narrative, nor its central trope, the vitalist maternal body, can be reduced to a single, stable meaning. Movement between “adopting” and “shying away,” to use Roche’s terminology, is not so much contradictory as it is embodied in the very same idea. And its mutability is its efficacy: the aestheticized narrative can appeal to various factions, conservative and revolutionary, at the same time. Thus the modernist conception narrative is best understood as a product of the tensions extant in the passage between Victorian norms and modern ideals.

The modernist conception narrative

To further explain Sanger’s aestheticized rhetoric, I need to first elucidate the modernist-gothic narrative of maternity as it is constructed in the BCR. If, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis has argued, the task of women writers in the twentieth century is to imagine new narratives for the lives of women (Writing 4), the stories in the BCR demonstrate that this task was undertaken in earnest in the intersection of modernist literature and the birth control movement. Challenging the traditional child-wife-mother narrative, the modernist conception narrative reappropriates gothic tropes to show the maternal body as an organism with an autonomous will to reproduce. This form of vitalism, although evolved from gothic traditions, is no longer linked to the return of the dead directly or literally. Instead, the modernist conception narrative invokes a type of aestheticism that gives corporal bodies an autonomous, at times mechanistic, existence. Zombies are a close but inexact analogy. Similar to the zombie, the maternal body here has a single purpose which it pursues unthinkingly and in a way that confuses the border between life and death. Yet these women have not returned from the dead. They are brought to the brink of death by a body that has too much life: the vitalist body’s fertility, coupled with the incessant drive to reproduce, wears the body out and frustrates the mind with efforts to control it. The body’s autonomy is shown through various linguistic techniques, revealing gradually over the course of each narrative the independent workings of a body that is no longer under the mind’s control. Thereby, this vitalist body participates in aesthetic as well as political realms because the autonomy that typifies this body develops through language. To put it another way, the writer’s words and aesthetic choices are the means by which the maternal body manifests its vitalism, while the critique of outmoded, Victorian ideals of motherhood implicit in the depiction of the maternal body as vitalist makes the modernist conception narrative participate in the political realm.

Because aesthetic autonomy in the modernist conception narrative draws an explicit connection between the art object and politics, it is a far cry from depictions of autonomy usually associated with modernism. The traditional, and at one time monolithic, interpretations held that modernists were obsessed with the art object’s removal from the daily, modernized world. In William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks’s archetypal, New Critical, understanding of aesthetic autonomy, art establishes “its own kind of intrinsic worth . . . apart from, and perhaps even in defiance of, the rival norms of ethics and politics” (476). In a different vein, Georg Lukacs famously criticized high modernism’s experimentation for failing to “pierce the surface to discover the underlying essence, i.e. the real factors that relate their experiences to the hidden social forces that produce them” (36–7). Just as famously, Theodor Adorno countered that experimental literature is not removed from the material world, but rather that experimental, fractured forms are representative of the fractured reality of modern life (“Reconciliation”).

Adorno’s argument notwithstanding, the dichotomous model of art and politics persisted until recently in discussions of literary modernism, particularly Anglo-American modernism, probably because the most commonly studied modernists—Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and so forth—were themselves keenly interested in maintaining and fortifying the division. In reaction against the persistence of the art–politics split, much of the new modernist studies attempts to show just the opposite, that modernism was a movement deeply engaged in mass culture, politics, and material reality. This chapter suggests an alternative to this either/or rhetoric by reading the narratives of Sanger, Vorse, and Wellman as modernist texts that foreground the Adornian doubling of autonomy—that what was thought to be disengagement is actually critique—and by changing the critical focus from the intention behind autonomy to the impact of such a desire.

Thus far, I have discussed autonomy as if it referred to the same concept at all times and for all people. In truth, the way scholars use this term is anything but stable. Wimsatt and Brooks, for instance, are concerned primarily with the autonomy of the art object from political utility. Yet this denotation eschews the sense in which autonomy might refer to the art object’s independence from meanings ascribed to it by the viewer/reader, as Lisa Siraganian argues in Modernism’s Other Work, or in which autonomy might refer to the individual artist, as Peter Nicholls contends in Modernisms. My main concern will be the art object’s dissociation from the politics and ethics of the daily, material world. As such, my argument wrestles with ideas of autonomy in the vein of Wimsatt and Brooks.

Nevertheless, Nicholls’s argument is worth further comment because it contains a concept that is useful for understanding the modernist conception narrative. Nicholls identifies a disruption within modernism that rejects the autonomy of the artist. H.D. and Gertrude Stein developed what Nicholls describes as a poetics “founded not on autonomy but on the continuities between self and world” and “preoccupied with what seems other but turns out to be the same” (Modernisms 200–2). In other words, the works of H.D. and Stein interrogate the autonomous individual, the self-contained “I,” to explore the possibilities of the self (respectively, to open the self to new explorations of desire, and to use emotion to forge a poetics based on the materiality of language). Nicholls identifies this “doubleness” as a critique of the impersonal, object-based poetics hailed by the “Men of 1914” (Pound, Eliot, and Lewis). The sense of doubleness as an aesthetic position from which to critique autonomy is a useful concept for understanding the modernist conception narrative. In sum, this narrative implicitly critiques autonomy by depicting it as physically and symbolically doubled as a result of the fact that the work of art is necessarily created by a historically situated artist.

As an example of autonomy’s doubleness, we might consider how one of Nicholls’s selected texts, Tender Buttons, undermines the separation of the art object from politics (my concern) instead of the autonomy of the artist (Nicholls’s concern). At first blush, Tender Buttons appears far less engaged in politics and ethics than, say, Three Lives, which presents an overt critique of power, friendship, and sexuality. Yet, I argue, any move toward autonomy results also in critique, which means that even Tender Buttons’s “autonomy” is actually engagement. The rejection of stable meaning in Tender Buttons condemns the very human desire to stabilize meaning. Stein’s prose portraits frustrate our desire to link a signified to its signifier, thereby highlighting the arbitrariness of the English language system and encouraging more playful, malleable, and unrestricted uses of language.

This argument—that autonomy is revealed as engagement through doubling and language play—has distinct affinities with Adorno’s 1957 essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” In this essay, Adorno argues that the lyric poem’s gesture toward autonomy “implies a protest against a social situation, that every individual experiences as hostile, alien, cold, oppressive” (39) and that “the work’s distance from mere existence becomes the measure of what is false and bad in the latter” (40). In the gesture toward autonomy, Adorno sees an opening for critique, which is where the parallels between my argument and Adorno’s end. The modernist conception narrative depicts autonomy as a problematic move rather than a productive potentiality. Within the narratives of Sanger, Vorse, and Wellman, aesthetic autonomy is a goal whose attempt leaves only a distorted, grotesque solipsism. Further, whereas Adorno’s lyric poem must “eschew . . . the relation of self to society as an explicit theme” (28–9), the narratives within the BCR emphatically make the opposite gesture: these narratives depict the lives of individuals in order to connect their tragic realities to the injustices of society. These differences arise because the modernist conception narrative is not an example in fiction of the lyric poetry Adorno discusses. Rather this narrative exemplifies Adorno’s point that autonomy is also involvement, which allows us to see the political effects of aesthetic autonomy. In other words, the narrative is a translation of this aspect of Adorno’s theory into art. My argument thus traces a new version of autonomy at the intersection of modernist aesthetics and political discourse. Autonomy in the BCR signifies a practice rooted in rather than dissociated from political, cultural, and historical critique.

Because the modernist conception narrative rejects boundaries between politics and art, this chapter works in part to show that the modernist embrace of autonomy has been overstated. On its own, this point is hardly new; as Lisa Siraganian has argued, the idea that autonomy has been misunderstood is “as old as modernism itself” (15). Yet this chapter goes further; it makes a new contribution to an old debate because it shows a modernist narrative that foregrounds the uneasy relationship between autonomy and engagement, directing our attention to the political ramifications of autonomy as an aesthetic goal.

These ramifications are exemplified in the maternal body vis-a-vis a trope that invokes aesthetic and political autonomy. Historically, the maternal body is often aestheticized out of histor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Modernism, Monsters, and Margaret Sanger
• 2. “God spoke with me to-day”: Prophecy, The Waste Land, and Marie Stopes
• 3. “Sentences Swelled, Adjectives Multiplied”: Orlando, Contraception, and the Life of the Mind
• 4. Southern Mother, Lethal Fetus; Or How Birth Control Makes a Modernist Out of Flannery O’Connor
• 5. Where Alien Abduction Meets Family Planning: Personhood, Race, and Reproduction in Octavia Butler’s Dawn
• Coda
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint