Pregnancy and the Novel: Representation and Concealment from Richardson to Hardy

作为一名小说家，我对18、19世纪的文学作品进行改编，部分原因是为了探索在小说中表现怀孕的挑战，我的见解将推动这个项目。作为一名文学评论家，我一直对前人对怀孕的反应很感兴趣，尤其是在暴力和其他形式的外部控制的背景下。该项目的主要成果将是学术专著《怀孕与小说：从理查森到哈代的表现与隐藏》。这将利用医学文献来阐明十八和十九世纪小说家同时隐藏和揭示有问题的怀孕和分娩的方式。它将揭示文学与科学之间的相互影响。我对理查森、勃朗特姐妹、艾略特、狄更斯和哈代的技巧的研究为我自己的小说提供了素材，尤其是他们嵌入生殖事件、利用第一人称和第二人称视角以及描绘敏感或禁忌主题的方式。这项研究还将考虑继理查森之后、先于勃朗特夫妇的小说家描述怀孕的策略。斯莫列特、斯特恩、伯尼、刘易斯、英奇博尔德、戴克、奥斯汀和斯科特经常使用直白或委婉的语言来反映人物的不谦逊或道德。他们发展了理查森将怀孕时间与故事时间联系起来的策略，并利用他的误导技巧，使怀孕伪装成其他疾病；有鉴于此，我在自己的小说中也做了类似的实验。通过重建生殖医学的历史知识，并利用我作为小说家的习惯，对作者的线索进行逆向工程，这个项目将揭示二十一世纪的读者很容易错过的东西。这个项目将改变并加深我们对所有这些小说中多个场景的理解。有几个例子可以说明这一点。许多评论家不认为《克拉丽莎》（1747-48）中有怀孕的可能性，或者最多将女主角的症状归因于神经障碍（如威尔特、米克和洛维特）。然而，她的昏厥、哭泣和精神错乱却直接出现在当代助产学教科书中。在《怀尔德费尔庄园的房客》（1848）中，安妮·勃朗特用日记的形式和季节的参考来记录女主人公的怀孕过程。在一个巧妙的佯装中，她描述了怀孕的症状（血液激增，感觉“不舒服”和“不舒服”，“脸色发白”），读者很容易将其解读为对痛苦和挑衅的反应（第二十七章）。在《远离疯狂的人群》（1874）中，范妮的“分娩和死亡”被一位评论家（Bronfen, 1993,70）视为“重要的叙事省略”，他忽略了范妮在挣扎着到达济贫院时的“间隔”（第XL章）所依赖的里程碑和posts，这无疑是哈代将女主角的劳动写进文本的方式。这个项目是原创的，因为它将根据对理查森植入怀孕策略的新理解，重新校准理查森的遗产。它将通过揭示在理查森之后，18世纪和19世纪的小说家是如何描绘怀孕和分娩的，这些似乎在他们的文本中不存在，但实际上是存在的。该项目将采用创造性的方法，让非学术界人士参与研究，并产生影响，特别是在怀孕和控制自己身体的想法方面，以及围绕这些想法的语言可能会如何改变。公众参与材料将帮助孕妇和产妇讲述故事和反思经验，并对倡导组织和文学协会有用。我将与医生合作，为那些有兴趣撰写自己的医疗回忆录的人举办创意写作讲习班，以提高他们的福祉；还有一个关于隐性怀孕的专业阅读小组。

This project will be driven by my insights as a novelist who writes literary adaptations of eighteenth- and nineteenth century texts partly to explore the challenges of representing pregnancy in fiction. It will also be informed by my expertise as a literary critic who has long been fascinated by how those before me have responded to pregnancy, especially in the context of violence and other forms of external control. The project's major output will be an academic monograph, Pregnancy and the Novel: Representation and Concealment from Richardson to Hardy. This will draw on medical texts to illuminate the ways that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists simultaneously hide and reveal problematic pregnancies and births. It will reveal a reciprocal influence between literature and science.My study of the techniques of Richardson, the Brontes, Eliot, Dickens and Hardy informs my own fiction, especially the ways they embed reproductive events, utilise first- and second-person point of view, and depict sensitive or taboo subject matter. The research will also consider the strategies by which the novelists who follow Richardson and precede the Brontes depict pregnancy. Smollett, Sterne, Burney, Lewis, Inchbald, Dacre, Austen and Scott frequently utilise an explicitness or euphemism in order to reflect a character's immodesty or morality. They develop Richardson's strategies for linking pregnancy time to story time, and utilise his techniques of misdirection so that pregnancy masquerades as other illnesses; in light of this, I have made similar experiments in my own novels.By reconstructing historical knowledge of reproductive medicine and utilising my novelist's habit of reverse engineering the writer's planting of clues, this project will uncover what can easily be missed by twenty-first century readers. The project will change and deepen our understanding of multiple scenes in all of these novels. A few examples will illustrate this. Numerous critics dismiss the possibility of pregnancy in Clarissa (1747-48) or at best attribute the heroine's symptoms to a nervous disorder (e.g. Wilt, Meek, and Lovett). Yet her fainting, weeping and delirium are straight out of contemporary midwifery textbooks. Anne Bronte uses the diary form and references to the seasons to track her heroine's pregnancy in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). In a clever feint, she describes pregnancy symptoms (a rush of blood, feeling 'ill' and 'unwell', being 'white in the face') that readers are primed to interpret as responses to distress and provocation (Ch. XXVII). Fanny's 'birth giving and death' in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) have been seen as 'significant narrative ellipses' by a critic (Bronfen, 1993, 70) who overlooked the milestones and posts that Fanny counts and leans against at 'intervals' (Ch. XL) as she struggles to reach the poorhouse, which are surely Hardy's way of writing his heroine's labour into the text.This project is original because it will recalibrate Richardson's legacy in light of a new understanding of his strategies for embedding pregnancy. It will break new ground by revealing how, after Richardson, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists depict pregnancies and labours that are seemingly absent from their texts but are in fact present. The project will utilise creative methods to involve non-academics in the research and create impact, especially when it comes to ideas of pregnancy and control of our own bodies, and how the language around this might change. Public engagement materials will help pregnant women and birthing people to tell stories and reflect upon experiences, and be of use to advocacy organisations as well as literary societies. I will collaborate with medical practitioners, enhancing their well-being by leading a creative writing workshop for those who are interested in developing their own medical memoirs; and a specialist reading group on concealed pregnancy.