The Empty Cradle
In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb
There is a well-known essay by Karen Sánchez-Eppler (now part of her book Dependent States) that analyzes nineteenth-century photographs of stillborn infants and dead children. When I first read the essay, it immediately reminded me of a photograph my grandmother orchestrated in 1996 of her two youngest grandchildren, one of whom is profoundly retarded. The photographer framed them standing and facing each other, holding hands as if playing “Ring Around the Rosy.” Even though my other cousin’s eyes betrays discomfort (he would later become an actor with dreams of Juilliard), it’s a fair photograph, some of the photographer’s better work I’d say. But pairing the cousins wasn’t enough for my grandmother. She asked the photographer to Photoshop into the photograph my sister, who died in 1977 of cancer. Hanging over my grandmother’s sofa the print now hangs, with my sister’s disembodied, head gracing in the upper left corner of the frame. It is as if she were peering down from the fake blue sky of a photography studio’s backdrop into an enchanted land of soft focus. My grandmother calls the photograph Di/llon and the Angels. In spite—no, because it represents to her the completion of a photographic record of her grandchildren, the fact that the photograph is impossible, morbid even, is to my grandmother the picture’s strength. Like the families who suffered the deaths of their children in the nineteenth century, my grandmother has created in photograph a vow to remember.
The first half of Margaret Marsh’s and Wanda Ronner’s The Empty Cradle (Johns Hopkins, 1996) is a good parallel to Sánchez-Eppler’s essay, but also of all my studies of Sentiment in the nineteenth century. The antebellum United States witnessed the conjunction of many metaphors for unity, such as westward expansion and the domestic sphere. The latter put the burden of national identity upon women, in particular. (Moreso than the metaphor of it, the reality of westward expansion put a significant burden on women, too.) Bearing children was not only good for the family, it was good for the nation. According to Marsh and Ronner,
(Johns Hopkins, 1996) is a good parallel to Sánchez-Eppler’s essay, but also of all my studies of Sentiment in the nineteenth century. The antebellum United States witnessed the conjunction of many metaphors for unity, such as westward expansion and the domestic sphere. The latter put the burden of national identity upon women, in particular. (Moreso than the metaphor of it, the reality of westward expansion put a significant burden on women, too.) Bearing children was not only good for the family, it was good for the nation. According to Marsh and Ronner,by the middle of the century, it had become a middle-class article of faith that healthy family life required a woman to direct her emotional and physical energies into creating the proper home life. Domestic reformers such as Catharine Beecher made it clear that this was not a concession to male notions of women’s inferiority. Rather, the reformers asserted, in order for the nation to prosper, women everywhere were choosing to forgo the pleasures of worldly success in favor of their higher calling: They were answerable for the nation’s moral vision, and the only place to instill that vision was in the home. As domestic writer Mrs. L. H. G. Abell reminded her readers, the influence of mothers was indeed “far reaching.” As a mother, she insisted, a woman had a task much more important than whatever accomplishments men may enjoy in the larger world …. In addition to what we might call this public function of motherhood, however, there was also a woman’s responsibility to make her husband happy; and marital happiness was, according to the advice givers, “a condition made possible only by the presence of a child, whose birth was guaranteed to enhance the affection that husband and wife felt for each other.” (32–33)
It was typical in my graduate program to turn this nationalization of the domestic sphere into a general assertion of women’s efforts to develop a political space in the national conversation, and, because it was a literature program, to trace it as both a literary trope and an argument. Not every middle-class woman bought into it, Margaret Fuller being a significant example, but enough writers saw it as a compelling narrative to develop it through numerous iterations.
Recognizing the fact of the trope makes it easy, however, to forget the real consequence of such expectations upon women and families, a fact that becomes obvious in looking at cases in which infertility prevented women from creating that domestic sphere. Marsh and Ronner develop the contrast well. Theirs is a nice complement to Sánchez-Eppler’s.
