the ecstasy and the agony

pregnancy, childbirth and what historical romance can't quite look at

content warning: discussions of pregnancy, miscarriage, post-partum depression, suicide, and rape in fiction

to be looked at lovingly by Billie Piper, may we all be so lucky. Andrew Scott and Billie Piper in Catherine Called Birdy (2022)

Pregnancy in historical romance novels is generally a positive development that represents the end of the plot. Childbirth and carrying a pregnancy to term feels like a future promised in historical romance. In a genre that focuses on the “getting together” of couples, childbirth is often a consequence, not something that takes up space in the book. The structural demand of happily ever after means characters who die in childbirth are first wives and mothers of main characters, usually off page, giving ducal heirs chips on their shoulders or wallflowers a lack of maternal guidance. Accidental pregnancy may happen, but it will more often than not spur a dutiful proposal. A pregnancy as an epilogue device might make the reader trust that this really is happily ever after.¹ Even with some exceptions, this attitude toward pregnancy-as-plot is the vast majority of historical romance that I have read.²

My two favorite movies that I saw last year, Catherine Called Birdy (2022, dir. Lena Dunham) and Sunset Song (2015, dir. Terence Davies), both feature mothers who become pregnant after it has become no longer really safe for them to carry pregnancies to term. Both period films, though wildly different in tone, confront the hollow absence in these historical stories of what happens when something goes wrong. 

In Catherine Called Birdy, the titular character’s mother, Aislinn, has suffered many miscarriages and we see her pregnant twice in the film. Billie Piper as Aislinn is radiant the entire film, the effervescent matriarch that her family adores. Birdy’s father Rollo, played by Andrew Scott, is thornier. He uses corporal punishment on his daughter, treats her with suspicion and disdain, and spends the family’s money recklessly. Dunham does not try to tidy up these bad acts to make Rollo more palatable, but she does complicate him. There are references to Rollo’s teen years marked by an outsized level of responsibility that removed much of his choice about how his life played out, explaining the joy he finds in useless, decorative schemes. He also is an alcoholic, though through the medieval and teenaged eyes of Birdy, his addiction is treated like a backdrop to, rather than a cause of his impulsive behavior.

But the most complicating factor for Rollo is his real and demonstrative love for his wife. Unlike most of the couples in this film, so concerned with marriages for money or convenience, Aislinn and Rollo seem utterly devoted to each other. Every look between Billie Piper and Andrew Scott is full of affection and shared emotional language. So Aislinn’s continued pregnancies seem to be the result of both Rollo’s worst impulse, his lack of concern with consequence, and his best, the fact he just adores loving his wife.

As Dunham keeps Rollo’s motivations and decisions inscrutable in the eyes of his 14 year old daughter, she imbibes him with all these attempts at grace and affection. The two moments that make me cry the most during the movie are when Birdy, about to be sent to her future husband’s house, throws a temper tantrum, demanding “I want to meet the baby!” She has said this before in the movie, during a scene when her mother has miscarried, not realizing that the baby won’t live to meet her. During this outburst, where viewer, and perhaps also Birdy’s father, is reminded that Birdy is still a young girl, it becomes so clear that “I want to meet the baby!” is almost Birdy reciting a prayer to God and her father. Birdy’s “I want to meet the baby” means “May my mother and sibling live, and may I be here to see it?” 

Rollo, who has been pushing Birdy to mature the whole movie in spite of herself, who we might expect to put his foot down one more time, is frustrated with Birdy’s demands. But he crouches down to meet his disconsolate daughter and responds with ineffable weight in his voice: Birdy can stay through the birth. 

The other scene that makes me cry the most is the actual birth. Aislinn is struggling through contractions, and her birthing team is preparing for her evitable death and the death of her child by calling a priest. Rollo, whose bully mindset we have mostly seen used as a way to control Birdy, suddenly starts barking orders to everyone in the room, not even just on what to do, but what they will not allow to happen on his watch: the loss of his wife or child. 

Rollo climbs into the birthing bed with Aislinn and grabs her face and tells her “You’re so close to God without even having to utter his name. I want to make you laugh and make you safe. And I’m not going to live in a world where our children’s children don’t get to make you laugh.” Birdy bears witness to this and her mother and her twin sisters’ survival mark a change in Birdy’s understanding of what her place in the world might be, and how she might make herself useful through selflessness. Birdy, so taken with the book of saints her monk brother gives her, had earlier played at penances and tribulations, walking barefoot on stones. Birdy thinks of how she might put others first and takes steps to protect her family with the resources that she has. And unlike in the source novel, Rollo is given a clear redemption to repair his relationship with Birdy by helping her escape her distasteful arranged marriage. 

For part of the film, Sunset Song from Terence Davies deals with a similar subject matter. Davies is my favorite director who was completely new-to-me this last year and I only watched Sunset Song in December. But it immediately reminded me of Catherine Called Birdy’s relationship to the threat/joy of childbirth, when birth control methods were either nonexistent, rare, or illegal. Sunset Song follows Chris Guthrie, a Scottish woman at the beginning of the 20th century from teenhood to her early marriage. The movie is quiet and contemplative, while being incredibly violent, which largely characterizes Davies’ work.

Chris’s father is violently abusive, particularly to her mother and brother. Chris and he can hear their parents’ marital bed in their small home and it is clear one night that Chris’s father rapes her mother. This rape results in the birth of twins, after a bloody and difficult childbirth. Later, her mother cryptically warns Chris about the dangers and violence of men, suggesting that she might not be able to bear her life much longer, but that Chris should be stronger in the face of this anticipated violence. The next scene is Chris learning that her mother has died by suicide, along with killing her two youngest children, the products of her rape. The doctor announces that she was pregnant again and this had “unbalanced her.”

This movie is pretty far afield from the topic of “romance novel.” Chris’s mother’s death is not the end of the tragedy that marks her life—the film is quite oppressive. Even after the death of Chris’ father and her total inheritance of his estate, the violence of World War I comes to wreak havoc on her community and family, like her father did, all over again. But more than anything, the film is incredibly persistent. Like all of Davies’ movies I have seen, they leave me feeling optimistic in that soul-crushing, humanist sort of way that I am weak for.

There are cycles of violence in both movies and mothers attempting to narrow the scale as best they can. Rollo uses a switch on Birdy’s hand for punishment when he is inebriated and Aislinn rushes in to stop the punishment. Later Aislinn relates to Birdy how her father burned her neck with an iron as a child. Eventually, Rollo redeems himself for Birdy by putting his own body on the line in a duel for her right to not marry.

Chris’s father rapes her mother repeatedly before she dies by suicide, but when Chris’s up-until-the-traumas-of-WWI-sweet husband violently assaults her, Chris threatens him with a knife the next morning—something her mother prepared her for, but never did herself. 

Both movies deal with a mother pregnant, if not against her will, at least against her better judgment for the sake of her health, leading to the birth of twins, witnessed through the eyes of an oldest daughter preparing to enter into marriage. The mothers’ pregnancies shape the daughters’ view of marriage and what is available to them, one in terms of grace and compassion and one in terms of cruelty. 

In a way maybe on Davies heads will understand, the teapot in this shot made me cry and then I kept crying for the rest of the movie. Agyness Deyn and Kevin Guthrie in Sunset Song (2015)

One romance novel that I started, but was unable to finish, deals directly with postpartum trauma in character, but in an incredibly unsympathetic way. In the fifth Bridgerton book, To Sir Phillip, With Love, Sir Phillip Crane is married to Marina Crane, a Bridgerton cousin, and has two children with her. She was his brother’s fiancée and when his brother unexpectedly died, Phillip inherited his title and married Marina. Marina is described as melancholy and every time Phillip thinks of her, he seems to be lamenting her state of sadness. This internal complaint does not encourage him to be a more attentive husband or father. 

Marina attempts to drown herself in the first chapter of the book and Phillip is able to rescue her, but she succumbs to illness that she contracts after this attempt. For the rest of the book, Phillip thinks of her with resentment and confusion and there’s neither a reckoning with his role in her mental health crisis, nor an understanding of her illness. Instead, Phillip is able to move past his resulting secondary trauma through his relationship with Eloise Bridgerton, a wife who will be “happy” to be with him and raise their children, a contrast to the “burden” of his first wife.

One of my frustrations with this book is that there is no available restoration for Marina--she’s dead. And Quinn can’t even manage to have her husband consider her very real pain, which seems to have come in part from postpartum symptoms, in part from a melancholy nature, in part from a marriage to a man she does not love, and in part from his lack of interest in her emotional needs. Phillip knows that Marina recedes into herself even more post-childbirth, but he remembers this thought in connection with her lack of interest in having sex with him.

A more successful novel dealing with the trauma of childbirth, if adjacently is The Rakess by Scarlett Peckham. The heroine more directly has a distaste marriage than childbearing, but Sera, for all her perceived recklessness, is the only character I have ever read who tracks her cycle and directly references time-appropriate abortive teas, like pennyroyal. She began this habit after suffering the loss of an illegitimate child, produced by an union that led to her fall from society. The hero Adam is the character most anxious about the medical traumas of childbearing, since he has become a widower after losing his wife from childbirth complications, after the couple was warned to avoid procreative sex. 

Sera and Adam, even when they are in the stage of romance novel romance where a reader is just begging them to have a direct, emotional conversation, have conversations about preventing pregnancy and explore intimacy through other acts and with rudimentary birth control. The book has many allusions to the life of proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, with Sera writing proto-feminist treatises dealing with the subjugation of women. And Adam’s first wife dies in the same manner as Mary Wollstonecraft. After her marriage to William Godwin, entered into so that their child would be legitimate, Wollstonecraft gave birth to a daughter Mary. But she developed an infection postpartum and would die 11 days after the birth. 

In The Rakess, Peckham gives Sera the ending that Mary Wollstonecraft was robbed of and the one that is suitable for a genre that demands a happily ever after: a pregnancy that does not take her life or demand a marriage. As much as I loved this book, this thematic solution is representative of a fantasy of guaranteed maternal health when the happy ending demands it. And there’s no available solution for Wollstonecraft, like there is no restoration given to Marina Crane. Wollstonecraft’s daughter would grow up to be Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, and her life was also marked by trauma related to childbirth and motherhood. 

When Shelley wrote Frankenstein, she had just lost her first child and was likely nursing her second.  A monstrous inversion, a dark parody of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Frankenstein is hyper concerned with births that destroy us. Victor Frankenstein is motivated by grief of his mother to conduct his experiments in life-giving and then must reckon with his role as creator and the damage he does, to himself, his monster and his family.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. (Victor Frankenstein, after he beholds the creature he created.)

It’s not that I want romance to be dealing with the necessary horrors of creation head-on. One of my favorite authors, Sherry Thomas, has written about how reading historical romance helped her with her postpartum depression. She cites many of the same things I love about this genre--the sexiness and the escapism (less from the optimism and more from high-emotion drama that demands your attention). And in a genre that is so often concerned with heterosexual relationship and sex and requires a happily ever after, historical romance has a limitation on how it can depict childbirth. But both films I have talked about in this newsletter go beyond depicting reproductive anguish; there’s a threat of total destruction from which the mothers cannot return if they are felled by it. 

I’ve written extensively and won’t shut up about how defining genre create edge cases. Within the definition of romance, I can’t think of a plot that could deal directly with this haunting danger of childbirth, backed by actual narrative weight of death being present for the on page characters. Even that is too far afield of guaranteed HEAs for me. But as a predominantly historical romance novel reader, these movies and reading about Wollstonecraft and Shelley’s lives have meant a lot to me, filling in emotional gaps that fall outside of what romance can provide, on a subject that romance deals with so directly on almost every other vector.

1. My friend Bayley (@bayleyreadsbooks on Tiktok) calls these “babylogues.”

2. Just to cover my qualifying bases: here’s some historical romance novels I could think of that do anything, even slightly, different with reproductive health. Forever Amber, an early genre romance, by Kathleen Winsor features a heroine who has an abortion within the plot of the book. Destiny’s Surrender by Beverly Jenkins, the heroine has previously had an abortion and weighs her choice staying pregnant in the book. 

Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas and The Day of the Duchess by Sarah MacLean are second-chance, dual timeline romances where the heroine has had a miscarriage, to devastating emotional results. I can think of two books where a heroine miscarries and it affects her health and fertility acutely to the point where she can no longer have children. In A Gentleman Undone by Cecilia Grant, Lydia is infertile after a miscarriage and in The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan, Violet has had so many miscarriages in her first marriage that her doctor recommends she not try again, which sets the terms of how she and her partner have sex. 

The heroine in Suddenly You by Lisa Kleypas has a miscarriage of the baby that spurred a proposal from the hero. This is functionally the third act kidnapping of this book, so if you’ve read Kleypas, you can imagine the length of time spent dealing with the emotional weight of this event. By the epilogue (10 pages later), the couple has a son. 

In Bombshell by Sarah MacLean, the heroine makes it clear that she does not want children and will take measures to prevent pregnancy.