We all first leave home the moment we are born. There’s an infinitude of people’s subsequent experiences and ideas of home, but everyone’s original dwelling place is a womb. What happens to us in our mothers’ wombs will, one presumes, be as variable as in any other type of home, though it’s harder to be sure of our experiences or sensations in there than of anything else in our pasts. None of our conscious memories stretches back that far.
My identification of womb with home is itself a large presumption, based entirely on post hoc personal experiences and intuition. I’ve sometimes worried that it’s no more than a quirky fancy. The obvious place to check, as I initially thought, would be Gaston Bachelard’s classic study in philosophical psychology, The Poetics of Space (1958). I came away from this book deeply impressed with its learning and its daring—but feeling for the moment even quirkier. It teems with suggestive references to the space of ‘the house’: ‘our corner of the world’; ‘our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word’; the stuff of dreams and memories by which we can travel back to ‘the land of Motionless Childhood’ or recapture the ‘original warmth’ of a ‘material paradise’. It purports to talk of ‘the maternal features of the house’ and the ways in which ‘the mother image and the house image are united’. There are brilliant cadenzas on the chrysalis, the nest and the shell. The human womb must surely be next up, I kept thinking. No: in the end, I couldn’t find a single mention. It’s as if the author wouldn’t, couldn’t, go there—as if the womb, a zone beyond recall or consciousness, was off limits for rational discourse, or even the more adventurous limits of phenomenological observation, which celebrates the role of intuition.
I still worry I must have missed something yet, as I’ve widened my investigations, I’ve been reassured by how many people appear to have shared my fancy, so that Bachelard starts to look curiously evasive by comparison, quirkier than myself. It’s perhaps worth recording some of these other instances, if only to prompt readers to marshal their own intuitions. Where can we start looking?
The physical appearance of the human womb—more technically, the uterus—is readily discernible in anatomical drawings or diagrams in medical textbooks from at least the time of the great Renaissance masters—Leonardo, most famously. Such representations have often included illustrations of a foetus. To them we may add, from the last and the present century, images of the ‘real thing’ in X-ray photography, ultrasound and film, now more widely accessible than ever through the internet. As figured in these various images, the shape of the womb (a skewed ellipse) does not immediately suggest a home in the looser colloquial sense of a house—certainly not the standard kinds of house we have grown up with in the West. But there are other distinctive features of the womb that lend themselves more readily to domestic analogies and that also accord with more nuanced connotations of ‘home’.
In view of the womb’s discrete, closed-off position within a woman’s body one can talk plausibly of its outer rim as a ‘wall’. From the one narrow opening in this wall there’s also a discernible ‘path’, which leads down to the vagina, via the cervix. Call that path a passage, and you have the image not of a whole house so much as of a room, tucked away but still connected by this opening and this passage to the larger structure of the body. (The phrase ‘womb with a view’ has been irresistible to punsters.) Rooms, too, have their own walls that define, divide off and protect.
The domestic terminology seems particularly apposite, given the role of the womb in the reproduction of families. The womb is not just the physical site for the reproductive process and the primary shelter for what is produced. Through its intricate network of blood vessels within, it also offers the kind of support for its inhabitants that we’re accustomed to associating with the ideal home: dedicated nurture, for as long as it’s needed. Home in this sense transcends the purely structural and spatial dimensions of a house and its rooms—but it has its own limits of time. As the Canadian writer and politician Michael Ignatieff has put it, home is ‘the place we have to leave in order to grow up’. There could be no more literal example of this than the womb and its provisions for the foetus over its term.
That’s the ideal of the womb. Yet how each of us responds in practice to the individual circumstances of our gestation in the womb, and our eventual departure from it, is not so easily deducible. Those anatomical images in various media can document general trends or particular aberrations in the growth of the embryo and the foetus. They can’t, however, offer any guide to our specific experiences, let alone to any ‘feelings’ we might have as individuals during those pre-natal stages. Are we developed enough then even to have individual feelings—something approaching emotions—as distinct from instinctual sensory responses to external stimuli? (Neurological research has pretty clearly established now that a foetus can hear the sounds of conversation, music, television and suchlike.)
A mother, during pregnancy, may have some intuitions about the unborn child’s levels of contentment—or discontent—at particular moments. In the end, however, these could only speak with the authority of her own feelings (or memories of those feelings), not the child’s. Even if she were able to keep an instant record of such moments, they would hardly satisfy scientific criteria for direct and testable evidence. ‘The babe leapt in my womb for joy,’ says Elizabeth to Mary on the Virgin’s visitation to her pregnant kinswoman; though all that the recorder of these words was prepared to say when reporting this episode in his own words is: ‘the babe leapt in her womb’. This is Luke speaking—Luke the physician, as well as saint and gospeller.
Beyond anecdotal evidence, and partly behind it, too, are the workings of our imagination. If you need fuel for your own, an obvious place to look for it is in the works of artists: those distilled and refined products of the most creative imaginations among us. Artists in several media have indeed engaged with, or touched on, the theme of the foetus in the womb, though not always in obvious ways. (There’d be little point in consulting artists if we expected straightforward ‘mimetic’ representations.) But for such an elemental subject—or object—the yield of images, though not thin, is uneven.
You’ll find a plethora of womb similes in various genres of literature, and womb metaphors for all kinds of formative forces in nature and human history—though foetuses don’t always explicitly figure in these tropes. There’s also an abundance of womb images and less overt symbols of the womb in painting and sculpture, from Botticelli to Louise Bourgeois. Critic Robert Hughes in his television series The Shock of the New interpreted Matisse’s interiors as a succession of ‘wombs with a view’—the contemplation of ‘a benevolent world from a position of utter security’. The subject of Hughes’s first book, painter and fellow-Australian Donald Friend, noted ‘the enclosing womb shapes of ikons’ in some of the specimens of Byzantine and Byzantine-influenced art that he saw on his European trips. Friend’s own work included a number of interiors (hotel rooms and the like) in the Matisse style.
The family home of emigré Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius in Lincoln, Massachusetts, sports a ‘womb chair’ in the living room; so named, presumably, because of the wraparound contours of its seat and lower back. A recent installation piece from the Rotterdam-based Atelier van Lieshout is entitled Womb House, and consists of a large, uterus-shaped model of a domestic dwelling, duly divided up into separate living spaces, including a lavatory and mini-bar which occupy the area of the re-created ovaries. Just a witty spin, perhaps, on the grand, traditional dolls’ houses you can see in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; but can it be long before some architect is inspired to adapt this prototype to a design for a real building?
It may be that the ascetic aesthetic of much Modernist architecture represented a subconscious flight from the enwombing comforts of its predecessors. That would still be a testimony to the power of the womb to engender strong feelings; and feelings, in league with artistic fashions, are notoriously fickle things. Some signs of a renewed yearning for comfort and cosseting might be detectable in the ornamentation, softer edges, and colour variegation of later-twentieth- and twenty-first-century buildings, and in recent modifications along these lines to some of the more severe facades and interiors of high-Modernist ones.
Up to now, fewer artists have consciously attempted to explore the question of the unborn’s feelings or impulses in its mother’s womb as it edges toward full life. Those who have broached this subject explicitly have tended to be more recent (post-Victorian, largely post-1960s) artists. Maybe this is because of earlier taboos surrounding such ‘intimate’ territory, but one can’t readily generalise, as the extant record varies from medium to medium, genre to genre, and probably from culture to culture (though this question would require deeper comparative investigation than I can hope to attempt in this brisk tour d’horizon).
There are internet sites that identify a new genre called ‘womb music’, some of whose composers incorporate into their scores ‘natural womb sounds’, such as a foetus’s heartbeat. The main target audience for this genre would appear to be other foetuses—exploiting their now proven aural receptivity in the womb. (A perfect ‘niche’ market, one might say.) The assumption is that the foetus has instincts if not feelings, and the intended effect, presumably, is to provide both calm and stimulation. There’s no prior history of such a genre, partly because the required recording technology would not have been available earlier. That still wouldn’t explain a dearth of womb and foetus fantasies in earlier genres of music. (Even the edgiest of Expressionist composers, keen to outdo the Romantics in articulating inner depths of human feeling, don’t appear to have explored possibilities in this area or to have sought inspiration there.)
In the more graphic medium of cinema, we only find such fantasies, on the conscious level at least, as late as 1968, when Stanley Kubrick concluded his portentous epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey with the image of the embryonic ‘Star Child’ peering out at us from a translucent bubble. In the succeeding forty years this image has spawned many other such fantasies in sci-fi movies, if none as direct or eerie. Comedy filmmakers have also found rich pickings in this territory.
The best-remembered segment of Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, which came out four years after Space Odyssey, is bluntly titled ‘What Happens During Ejaculation?’ It depicts an army of recruits from ‘sperm training school’—with Allen as the characteristically neurotic one—being put through their paces in a womb. ‘See you guys in the ovary,’ says a more gung-ho spermatozoa. Their mission, ‘to make babies’, is pronounced a ‘fine’ success by their commander, though we never get to see the product of their manoeuvres, even in embryo form.
The Meaning of Life, which the Monty Python team brought out in 1983, is famous for its wryly subversive hymn-tune, ‘Every Sperm is Sacred’, and also for ‘The Universe Song’, partly illustrated with an animated diagram of a naked woman, mother of the universe as we take her to represent, being impregnated, then swelling, then giving birth in a blaze of light—giving birth, we must assume, to everything in the phenomenal world, though nothing of the process or the product is discernible in the dazzle. It’s a brilliant cartoon of the ‘Big Bang’.
We do get brief glimpses of a growing foetus in an actual human womb, and an all-too-vivid delivery scene, in Judd Apatow’s rite-of-passage comedy, Knocked Up (2007). Yet more outrageously, both womb and foetus crop up on an ultrasound image in Sacha Baron Cohen’s coruscating satire on postmodern manners, Brüno (2009), as part of the paraphernalia of a try-out session for a new television chat show. (There’s also a skit along similar lines in a recent episode of Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union.) On being shown the image, the studio audience or ‘focus group’ involved is invited to pronounce on the foetus’s fate: ‘Keep it’ or ‘Abort it’. The mother is not, in this instance, given any say. Can the vulnerable bubble be so arbitrarily pricked? If the womb’s a home, this is home invasion on a hitherto unimagined scale—though not entirely unbelievable, given the brute insouciance of the whole ‘reality TV’ genre. Come to think of it, the house in Big Brother, with its ever-looming expulsions, is itself a kind of nightmare (or, as others might think of it, paradisial) version of a womb; and it’s always struck me how the lucky contestant who gets to first base on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is like the spermatozoon that beats its fellows to the ovum.
There are various representations of foetuses inside (sometimes even outside) the womb by twentieth-century women artists: suggestively and hauntingly in some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work (Blue II of 1916 is a notable example); more prolifically, more confrontingly, more self-referentially in the works of Frida Kahlo. In Kahlo’s 1936 work, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I, the ‘I’ of the title is doubly figured: as a foetus in the mother’s womb, mercilessly unveiled by any clothes or skin, and as a young girl to the side, pointing at this pre-natal ‘incarnation’ of herself. Four years earlier, in her Henry Ford Hospital, Kahlo herself is the mother-figure, and has just miscarried, as she actually did in that year; the image shows the dead foetus lying on the floor near the hospital bed, one among several objects casually strewn about.
In the same year (1932), Salvador Dali whipped up his Oeufs sur le plat sans le plat. One of the eponymous eggs in this painting is a single yolk suspended on a string, and, by the artist’s account, is the direct rendition of a daydream he’d had about his time in his mother’s womb. But, Dali being Dali, shouldn’t we take all of these eggs with a large pinch of salt?
Trying to come to terms with the work of abstract painters, where you have even less certainty than in Dali’s case of their intentions or subject-matter, you might be persuaded more easily by anatomical readings. Some works by Mark Rothko (who positively resisted any talk of his intentions) have lent themselves to ‘uterine’ interpretations, with their palette of maroons and umbers, and their darkly floating shapes, slightly fuzzy or bleeding at the edges. His favoured colours could as easily be described as visceral, of course. And his shapes are not obviously womb- or foetus-like—often nearer to rectangular, though they’ve sometimes been described as ‘ovoid’. Perhaps it’s as much to do with the filmy surrounds of the shapes and their floaty effects: mightn’t these be an unconscious recollection, at least, of the amniotic fluid that provides the foetus with much of its sustenance and protection during gestation?
Of all artistic forms, literature provides us with the greatest number and the longest tradition of womb-and-foetus vignettes (I’m excluding from consideration here the more technical medium of anatomical drawing, which in the hands of a Leonardo could easily shade into art). Even English literature, reputedly the most prone to taboos or inhibitions in such matters, offers us some eloquent specimens, and from much further back than the soi-disant ‘liberated’ 1960s.
Tantalisingly, there’s a current online poetry journal from America that calls itself Womb, but when you check it out it seems that the ‘Womb’ is just an emblem for a literary hold-all. Anything goes as far as subject matter is concerned. To complain about this would be too literal-minded, save that the policy on contributors is not so all-embracing or laissez-faire. Male readers are not discouraged (‘Womb is for everybody’) but male writers, even if they might happen to venture on the nominal subject of the magazine, are clearly deterred from submitting: this is ‘a space specifically for poems made by women’, the prospectus announces at the outset.
That the space of the womb itself, and what is made in there, are of more inclusive literary (and general) concern was generously and potently acknowledged in the work of Australia’s Judith Wright. In two key poems from the 1940s, ‘Woman to Man’ and ‘Woman to Child’, the words ‘womb’ and ‘foetus’ don’t actually appear; yet, taken together, there’s perhaps no starker perspective in the language on the interdependence—physical, physiological, psychological—of an expectant mother, her unborn child and the child’s father. The ties that bind these figures are dramatically graphed in an unrelenting succession of images derived from various worlds and milieux, which stretch beyond but also include those of the domestic garden (‘seed’, ‘the blood’s wild tree’, ‘folded rose’, ‘well’, ‘earth’ ‘root’, ‘stem’, ‘fruit’). Not everything in this garden is unambiguously lovely. There’s a prevailing sense of fecundity, ripeness, plenitude, nurturance, somnolent serenity, but with an admixture of darkness and violence, and a suggestion at once of transience and eternal entrapment: ‘you shall escape and not escape’.
Male writers of the twentieth century were not completely shy of investigating this territory, despite occasional scepticism about what such investigations might involve or reveal. And their envisioning of the womb and its occupants can be at least as ambiguous in its suggestions and associations.
In Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ (1959), his teeming, tumultuous elegy for his mother, Naomi, the poet momentarily contemplates the prospect of bodily reunion with her that she dangles before him during one of her countless crazy episodes:
I was cold—later—revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way would she care? She needs a lover…
It’s left unclear whether the ‘Monster’ here is Naomi, or more particularly her womb itself, or a general allusion to everyone’s origins in this organ and our apprehensive fascination with it. A couple of pages later, there’s a hint of the constrictions of the womb for the unborn child and a more rhapsodic sense of gratitude to the mother for her liberating role in the post-natal nurturing of her child (‘O glorious muse that bore me from the / womb, gave suck first mystic life & taught / me talk and music’), yet all of this is tinged with apprehension and ambiguity as well. The poet first derives his ‘vision’, as he recalls, from his mother’s head (certainly not from her womb), but this part of her body turns out to be at least as monstrous. It’s a ‘pained’ head, a deeply afflicted ‘skull’, which he is at risk of inheriting before he seeks a kind of redemption in poetry itself, or a more restful space to accommodate and nurture his own creative enterprise: ‘Peace for thee, O Poetry’. The quest, it appears, is to find a more idyllic home than his maternal one could ever provide—and to get to ‘know’, thereby, a less forbidding kind of womb or source of creation (‘for all humankind call on the Origin’).
In one of WH Auden’s sequence of poems, Shorts—penned a couple of decades before Ginsberg’s elegy—the poet-persona asks readers if they’d wish to go back to the womb, and on their behalf instantly replies in the negative: how could anyone truly want what’s not possible? (Lines 38–39.) Yet is this Auden himself—a confessed ‘claustrophiliac’—speaking? The rationalist in him may eschew the impossible but the romantic in him will out, as suggested by a subsequent exchange in Shorts (lines 94–95), which allows for the prospect of a future when unborn children may have some freedom in deciding whether they come out of the womb in the first place. And an earlier poem of his, ‘1929’, hints at a deep nostalgia for pre-natal days as it ruminates on the figure of a baby insulated in the womb vis-à-vis that of an adult deprived of such close protective bonds. We are still left with a slight uncertainty about the actual degree of comfort or support offered by our mothers’ wombs as distinct from that provided by our retrospective imaginings or thoughts on the subject. The inverted syntax of the persona’s own thoughts on the subject (Section II, lines 29–30) might appear to question the idyllic, generalised picture of our accommodation in the womb; but, if it does, this is without any Ginsbergian suggestion of the monstrous: any such terrors that may beset us, Auden makes clear, come when we have long left the womb. Auden also uses no question marks here (such as we find in the Shorts), which may encourage us, in the last analysis, to take the lines as direct statements.
The persona in ‘The Dry Salvages’, the third of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, cautions us that any ruminating on wombs—particularly wombs in relation to tombs—is the stuff of pretty conventional human thinking or expression. Yet it is possible to read much of Eliot’s poetry, and its recurrent concerns with beginnings in endings and endings in beginnings, as a highly sophisticated version of just those kinds of rumination. The opening to the Quartets is a case in point. It associates our beginnings with a gated garden that may appear to be all dried up, dead, if we pursue a path back there, yet which harbours within its withered foliage a population of children whose barely restrainable mirth is the sign of life continuously and joyously renewed.
There are much earlier traces in literature of this sort of imagery; their roots extend as far back as the first book of the Old Testament, with its depiction of the Garden of Eden and the expulsion from there of its human inhabitants when they surrender their childlike innocence by yielding to the blandishments of knowledge. Eden, the place of our beginnings by this account, but also ‘the place we had to leave in order to grow up’, is the archetypal figure of the human womb. There could be no more fitting title for this seminal biblical story: Genesis.
In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, numerous poets and dramatists touched on the subject of the womb and the foetus. And associations were commonly made in this context with various features of gardens, along with less cultivated spots in nature, or with architectural settings and appurtenances, if not always specifically domestic ones. This was an era rather more biblically attuned than our own and also one when the science of the body—including embryology—was beginning to make unprecedented strides.
After Shakespeare’s Macduff (who ‘was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped’) the most famous—or infamous—of foetuses recounted in English literature is the eponymous protagonist of another of Shakespeare’s plays, Richard III: ‘Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,’ as he bitterly recalls of himself. (The description of Macduff is also presented as self-recollection, though a much more triumphant one in the circumstances.) Strictly speaking, the description in both cases is of a prematurely born rather than of an unborn child; but in Richard’s case Shakespeare affords us a ‘preview’ of his character’s existence in the womb through another self-recollection in an earlier-published play, Henry VI, Part III. If they weren’t so self-serving, Richard’s images here of nature and nurture locked in some grotesque conspiracy against his unborn self would be highly poignant:
Why love foreswore me in my mother’s womb;
And for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,
To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub,
To make an envious mountain of my back,
Where sits deformity to mock my body.
John Donne evoked some powerful images of the moments just before or at the nativity of Christ (‘Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb, / Now leaves his well-belov’d imprisonment’, began a poem of 1610) and of the same and subsequent moments as experienced by common humankind. ‘We are all conceiv’d in close Prison,’ he announced nine years later in an Easter Sunday sermon, which then went on to explain: ‘when we are borne, we are borne but to the liberty of the house; Prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of Execution, to death.’ (In the images here of ineluctable entrapment and restricted liberties, there’s a foreshadowing of Judith Wright.)
Ben Jonson reached back not to the Bible but to a figure from classical Roman mythology when he addressed the ‘Brave Infant of Saguntum’ in a poem of 1629. The infant’s moment of birth, by Jonson’s account, precisely coincided with the sack of his native city by the Carthaginian army under Hannibal: ‘Wise child’—as the poet calls him—‘Thou…did’st hastily return’ when only ‘halfe got out’, and ‘madst thy mother’s wombe thine urne’. As ‘urne’ (a funerary as well as a garden ornament) suggests, the infant’s regression is a form of burial, perhaps—but more serene, more sequestered, than the one the foetus might have faced if it had fully emerged from the womb into the clamour and carnage of battle. To quit or to linger in its secluded little garden, to be or not to be: it’s at least accorded some degree of agency in the matter. Three centuries on, Auden could only dream of such a prospect, and our present age, if summed up by Brüno, wouldn’t seem capable of entertaining it even as a dream.
It’s as a worm in his mother’s womb (another garden motif) that William Blake figured the pre-natal incarnation of his mythological character, Orc, in The Book of Urizen, one of the sequence of mystical books he produced toward the end of the eighteenth century. The womb itself is variously imaged here in association with other such motifs of home or garden: roots and branches, pillars, curtains and a roof. There’s little if any feeling of serenity, however, about the accommodation this womb affords, and its occupant is a duly turbulent and rebellious force both before and after his emergence from it. Orc may be a figure not just of restless humanity pre and post its expulsion from its first home in Eden but, more specifically, of the creative or poetic imagination questing for a more perfect home (anticipations of Ginsberg) or, rather, endlessly resisting any such stabilities.
A poet’s freedom to imagine whatever he will is less constrained than that of a novelist working in realist modes, which might help explain why so little fiction, compared with poetry, has ventured back to the womb. Comic fiction has had more leeway, though I can recall only the odd example. ‘Back to the womb’ is a game played at a progressive Manhattan school in Patrick Dennis’s camp romp of the 1950s, Auntie Mame. ‘Spread the sperm, spread the sperm’ goes its mantra. As in Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex…however, no one plays the foetus.
Before fictional genres became so discrete, one English novelist, Laurence Sterne, famously explored the territory of the foetus in his eccentric masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67). He, or his eponymous narrator, uses the term ‘homunculus’ (little man) for this pre-natal incarnation. At the start of the novel we find Tristram expressly reflecting on the conditions of the homunculus, and comparing its ideal or usual trajectory (‘as plain and smooth as a garden walk’) with his own, rather rougher and more irregular path, the result of his father’s being distracted at a crucial moment in Tristram’s conception. The imagery here is that of the journey of human life, and the routes we take on it, but it’s significant that the outset of the journey, in ideal terms at least, should be pictured in the domestic setting of a garden. As in Tristram’s case, not every such journey matches the ideal. Yet even so, it’s suggested, the womb is ineluctably our home base; its conditions provide the ‘foundation’ (Tristram’s word) of all of his—and all of our—post-natal incarnations. What happens in there at the time of conception, he avers, determines ‘nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world’. By this logic, while home may be a place we have to leave, it’s beyond our capacity to escape it entirely or to have much control over the process and its aftermath. (There are echoes here of Donne and foreshadowings of Judith Wright.)
Tristram further purports to recall the ‘series of melancholy dreams and fancies’ to which he was subjected throughout his mother’s pregnancy as a result of the mishap at conception—but it’s difficult as in the case of Dali’s retrospective dreaming to know how seriously we should take this. By his own acknowledgement, Tristram only knows the peculiar circumstances of his conception through layers of family legend: an ‘anecdote’ related to him by his uncle as related to his uncle by his father. And isn’t the whole narrative anyway, as its concluding sentence invites us to reflect, just ‘a cock and a bull’ story?
A fancy, in other words, as I called my own thoughts in this vein at the start. I’m not aware of any scientific consensus, either in Sterne’s time or since, about the ‘foundational’ influence of the womb on our dispositions, pre-natal or post-natal; the most reliable source of evidence for any such research, the foetus, remains the most unfathomable. It’s impressive, however—if more so to literary historians than scientific researchers—that Sterne finds various echoes in Freudian theory almost two centuries later, down to the use of domestic imagery. At one point in the 1920 edition of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud quotes directly from Tristram Shandy, bearing out his acknowledgement in the original edition (1901) of ‘how hard it is for a psychoanalyst to discover anything new that has not been discovered before by some creative writer’. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Freud floats the hypothesis that ‘the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease’. Through that circumspect (some may argue, weaselly) phrase, ‘in all likelihood’, Freud is careful to allow for Shandy-style deviations from what he senses is the norm. More assertively, in a 1909 addition to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud explains that rooms as they appear in our dreams ‘are usually women; if the various ways in and out of them are represented, this interpretation is scarcely open to doubt.’ Beyond the more obvious allusion to the acts of penetration and withdrawal during sexual intercourse, there are suggestions here of the processes of conception, gestation and childbirth. In the preceding sentence, Freud has allowed that a number of household items as they figure in our dreams—boxes, cases, chests, cupboard, ovens—‘represent the uterus’.
Freud also tells us, in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), of our general ‘compulsion’ as human beings ‘to repeat the events of infancy’, and of the different kinds of pleasure or resistance to pleasure this compulsion involves. I’m not sure how far back Freud means to take ‘infancy’ in this instance, but in looking at the patterns of repetition in my own life, particularly at the succession of ‘dwelling-places’ and rooms to which I’ve become attached, I wonder if these don’t somehow reflect the ‘pre-infancy’ period in my mother’s womb. And reflect not just the physical conditions of that space but also my ambivalent responses to it at the time. I can’t speak any more authoritatively for my own foetal self than for any other foetus, but I do have a strong instinct, perhaps worth sharing with and testing out on others, that our ideas of the womb and our ideas of home are intricately interdependent, on ideal and practical levels.
‘Dwelling places’ include countries, particular geographical locations within those countries, and particular houses (‘usual place of residence’, to use bureaucratic terminology). In my line of business, as I’ll explain, dwelling places can also include workplaces: distinctions between these categories are fuzzy.
My country of origin was India, an India that, almost exactly a year before my birth, had succeeded in gaining its political independence from the imperial ‘motherland’ of Great Britain, though at the cost of great internal turbulence that resulted in its partition and the formation of a whole new separate country: Pakistan. I was conceived three months after the formal partition in a small hotel situated right on the newly created border. This was where my mother was staying at the time on a visit to my father, who was then an officer in the Indian Army, posted to the Northwest Frontier to assist in the peacekeeping operations at this tumultuous time of transition. Hotels, as we know, for example from the 2008 bombings at the famous Taj in Mumbai, are not invulnerable to civil strife, but they were regarded as safer than a military barracks for the wives of army staff.
By the time it came for my push for independence, the due moment of ‘partition’ between my mother’s body and my own, I appear to have equivocated. Versions of the family legend vary as to how overdue I was, but signs of resistance on my part and various associated difficulties (my mother’s age at the time, near to forty, and her diminutive stature) prompted my father to secure her admission to a plush Roman Catholic hospital in the most stylish area of Bombay—as Mumbai was then called—rather than risk the primitive conditions of the military hospital. My parents were not Catholics and they could not have afforded such a place in ordinary circumstances, but my father’s instinct was right. Mirroring the process of political partition up north, my parturition was long-drawn-out, painful and bloody. By whatever techniques and solicitations, I seem to have been finally persuaded to emerge from my mother’s womb, but she suffered severe haemorrhaging in the event and very nearly died. Photographs of us were later taken and displayed on the hospital’s walls as records of its candidates for ‘miracle’ recoveries.
If indeed I had any control or ‘command’ in the matter, what was I doing equivocating in the first place and putting my mother in such danger? I can only imagine I was at once too comfortable and too nervous to be easily extricated. Both of these dispositions may have been implanted in me in my first dwelling place—that precarious oasis, a hotel in a war zone, where I occupied a womb without a view but within too close hearing perhaps of the perilous disruption around and about. Or (if that’s not plausible) my mother may have inadvertently ‘signalled’ to me her own apprehensions. Given the options afforded the legendary infant of Saguntum in comparable circumstances, I wonder whether I wouldn’t finally have taken his regressive path—but he could not have expected, and I was not prepared for, the determined ministrations of the good sisters of St Elizabeth’s hospital and their superlative medical team. (The hospital is named for the same Elizabeth who felt her foetus leaping in her womb, according to Luke’s gospel.)
Even today—it’s still there on the same spot—St Elizabeth’s is something more akin to a grand hotel than many other institutions of its kind in India. Having resisted (if only thereby compounding) the pains of my entry to the world, I think I quickly came to relish the fuss and luxury this Taj among hospitals was able to provide. I throve there following the initial trauma, and I always feel drawn to return to the spot whenever I’m revisiting India. Planted on Malabar Hill, it has a natural, commanding, elevated position, something that I could never take in when still stuck in the womb. This gives it an edge over grander architectural specimens, such as the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau in Barcelona, which affords views of the city from its raised pavilions but is grounded on the flat plane of a diagonal avenue. (You can see I have a habit of ‘collecting’ and classifying such specimens—hotels, too.)
The view from St Elizabeth’s would have been my first, awestruck glimpse of the world of possibilities outside the foetal cocoon to which I’d been so stubbornly attached; and I can’t but reflect that for me it helped to form a more general habit or pattern I’ve come to notice in my life. After long resistance to having them forced upon me, I learn very quickly to adapt to new circumstances once there’s no question of resisting any further, and I’m always pleasantly surprised, thrilled even, by the vista of opportunities opened up before me. But daunted as well as delighted, apprehensive as well as exhilarated, so that from the wide array of fresh directions before me I’ll invariably opt for one that’s not unchallenging but still somehow familiar-looking. One that offers a path forward to something as yet unknown but also the semblance of a path back to the once known securities, insulations and comforts of my original dwelling place: my mother’s womb.
Even in my mother’s womb I got used to travelling, as she periodically ‘commuted’ between the Punjab, where my father remained posted, and the school in Bombay where she continued to teach during most of her pregnancy. It’s significant perhaps that in all my subsequent and much wider sojourning through several continents I’ve always been attracted to schools and other such dedicated ‘retreats’ for learning and intellectual work. In my capacity as a historian, schools—and particularly those sequestered nooks called ‘English public schools’—have provided a lifetime’s subject of research for me.
With hospitals and hotels, my visits or stays for whatever purpose have been pretty fleeting up to now; but, judging by the extraordinary amount of time I’ve spent in educational institutions, and the solace as well as stimulus they have consistently offered me, I would have to say these effectively qualify as a kind of ‘second home’ for me, or a readily recognisable home-from-home. They are where I can feel most settled even on the move. This is partly because of what my domestic habitats have always had in common with any of my workplaces outside. In its most palpable form this comes down to the presence of books. There could be no more frequently encountered object in whichever of those spaces I happen to be inhabiting.
After we came to Australia from India in my early childhood, my mother continued teaching, and my father became an academic in the field of librarianship. From as far back as I remember, bookshelves lined the walls of several of the rooms in our family home, and I always had a dedicated corner for my own personal collection. This has now grown, in step with my own academic pursuits, into a substantial library, where the boundaries between ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ are porous, and where the shelves don’t simply line but in some places form the structure of the walls. The wraparound effect might be compared to a cave’s, but it’s less austere, far more cosseting, than that suggests. Analogies with the womb are not so easy to resist.
At all of the schools I attended, libraries provided much of my intellectual nourishment while also serving as a protective retreat, whether from sport, at which I was hopeless, or bullying, for which as a bespectacled nerd I was a prime candidate. At university, fortunately, I didn’t need to escape either sport or bullying, and felt free to spend an even longer time in libraries. This was all very well for my intellectual growth but books could also provide an all-too-easy retreat from the complications and challenges of any emotional relationships. (Clive James has remarked somewhere how they were his ‘favourite place to hide’.) Conversely, some of them—particularly novels, in my case—were as effective as movies in providing an emotional, even a sexual, education that occasionally pushed or emboldened me to explore those paths for myself.
When I was employed as a university teacher, then a magazine editor, I occupied a series of offices outside home, but I always imported books from my home library to these spaces. In selecting these, I made sure there were a few old favourites that might cosset me, provide a retreat in times of stress, as well as books that would nourish and stimulate me in my appointed tasks. There was no greater threat to my sense of wellbeing than when, in my last job, I was confronted with the prospect of having to move into an ‘open-plan’ office. This was not the only reason I chose to quit, but it was certainly a factor in my decision. One might contemplate giving up a womb with a view (and my office had a very sweet view of a public garden) but not a womb of one’s own.
Expelling myself from that womb was hard but it enabled me (as first I thought, at least) to return to another: the old domed reading room of the State Library of Victoria, to which I’d often retreated in my undergraduate years. Recent ‘restorations’ have admitted a blaze of natural light through the dome that enhances its glories for some; but even those like myself who miss the circumambient gloom of old can still find a cosy, insulating intimacy there amidst all the grandeur and sublimity. It’s classically ‘open-plan’ in a sense, but if one works there early enough, or stays late enough, it’s almost as good as a womb of one’s own, and one could go on entertaining this pleasant illusion if only everyone who fills it up during the day would observe the ‘quiet area’ notices discreetly dotted about. But they don’t, or they won’t, or they can’t: many of the younger users, it’s clear, have not so much lost as never been trained in the arts of silence and, if they are seeking any kind of refuge here from the pressures of family or school, it’s for anything but the self-sufficient studious activity traditionally associated with libraries.
As with Eliot’s garden at the beginning of Four Quartets, this womb becomes peopled with excited children, but ones even less able to contain themselves as they brazenly giggle and gossip with their neighbours or on their mobiles. No authority figure seems inclined to deter them from their artless fun; and one’s own irritation, expressed or otherwise, just exhausts itself. In the end, their chattering and their flirting and their snacking take on an all-too-beguiling charm. Knowing that I’ll get no work done if I sit enviously gazing and eavesdropping on their nonchalant sport, I’m forced to repair to the more stable, dependably solitary, womb of my home study. It’s here I’m giving birth to this piece.
Just down the passage from the study is my bedroom. There are no bookcases here, only a few precariously perched tomes on my bedside table. But once you start taking in the way I’ve gone about decorating and furnishing it down the years—and it’s been by slow accretion, not by any plan—you couldn’t imagine a room more womb-like. Shades of Rothko everywhere, barely relieved. Walls, ceiling, cornices, architraves and door, all in the same raspberry-parfait sort of colour: the murkiest of pinks. Trailing curtains in a faded cherry silk, rarely pulled back to admit any view because the window they cover is too near to the street outside for any privacy. Dark, heavy wardrobes and chests—womb-like receptacles in themselves, by Freud’s account—encase the bed on three sides. On one of these sits a tall oxblood vase, very like an urn. There are rugs in Chinese red, some of which have become so tatty I’ve had them cut up and converted into an oversized, overstuffed cushion that pads the walls atop another of the wardrobes. A bedhead padded in a Liberty fabric sports a design of tendrils and vines—though their colouring (blue and red) is suggestive more of veins. There’s a quilt cover in a muted magenta, and a Bakelite bed-lamp in bleeding-beetroot. Presiding on the wall over the bedhead is a vast old poster from the Villa Medici gallery in Rome featuring a portrait of a primly elegant young woman by Horace Vernet, a kind of secular Madonna.
What a mad room! I’ve often woken up thinking. It’s occasioned as much insomnia as repose, and despite—or because of—its plush embrace it’s somewhere I’m as keen to escape as to linger in. Yet I’m gratefully drawn back to it night after night, and take to imagining that Auden, if not Rothko, would have felt curiously at home in this space. That it can even spawn such fancies on my part shows that it’s not unfruitful, either. It was here that I first conceived this piece.
NOTE: This essay has benefited greatly from the advice and suggestions of WH Chong, William Cobbett, Lisa Gorton, Christina Hill, Nicholas Jose, Brian McFarlane, Rosanna Morris-Jones, Philip Olander, John Rickard and Cynthia Troup. Though the womb is all but absent from it (as in Bachelard’s book), I also found some rewarding leads in Philippa Tristram’s study, Living Space in Fact and Fiction (1989).
Those literary estates that have cooperated with my requests for permission to quote directly from the authors they represent are noted in the general sources pages of this book. In cases where I received no response from literary estates to repeated copyright permission requests, I’ve had to paraphrase material from the authors concerned.