This is a fascinating book.

          Rachel Bowlby’s background is in comparative literature, and she has written a very ambitious book in which she attempts to illustrate current practices and dilemmas related to the state of being a parent with great literature.  Her book begins with a brief account of a baby abandoned in a telephone booth and a sixty-two-year-old woman impregnated by in-vitro fertilization technics.  There are, today, so many permutations of parenting and becoming a parent:  gay parents, parents who are single by choice, step-parents, divorced parents, parents through various forms of surrogacy, egg or sperm donation, or other biological measures.

          The book is really in two parts.  In the first, Bowlby discusses changes in parenting and the process of becoming a parent, and in the second she illustrates some of these phenomena with an examination of some great and relevant novels. 

          The first four chapters provide a rather thorough overview of the huge changes in becoming and being a parent over a short time span:  who are parents, and how do they get to be parents?  After millennia in which the process of having children was unchanged, there are an enormous number of new approaches which have occurred in the past forty years.  Accordingly, Bowlby writes, “One aim of this book is to bring out the sheer peculiarity of parenthood…”

          One of the first recent changes to the process of having children was the inclusion of ultrasound evaluations, with parents having at least one more decision to make in terms of knowing results and, often, gender.  A myriad of genetic tests which can tell gender definitively, as well as possible genetic diseases, has also become available and is in very wide use.  And there is so much more.

          There are harbingers of some of these new phenomena in ancient and more recent sources, and Bowlby calls on the.  Genesis has two stories of surrogacy, for example — Sarah and Hagard, and Rachel and Leah.  Rousseau, of course, is a well-known contributor to our thinking about childhood, and in terms of infancy he was concerned about surrogacy:  either a child would prefer the woman who was his wet nurse to his mother, or he would have contempt for her because of the dismal way his parents treated her; neither alternative was good, and Rousseau advocated for mothers feeding their own children.  John Stuart Mill’s ideas continue to haunt us in the present.  He wrote of the importance of “experiments of living”, especially in relation to the care and upbringing of children.  “He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.”  And, “the fact itself, of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life.  To undertake this responsibility — to bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing — unless the being on whom it is bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being.”  While Mill is cited by the right-to-life movement, he is in fact advocating for a right not to have life.  Moving forward historically, Bowlby emphasizes Freud’s role in disconnecting sexuality from parenting, which may have been epiphenomenal.

          Bowlby devotes a great deal of attention to foundlings — infants who have been abandoned to the streets or the care of an institution.  They are certainly an important part of the history of infancy.  She recalls the stories of Oedipus and Moses, with Moses’ mother becoming a surrogate.  She then reviews the tradition of foundling hospitals with special attention to the London Foundling Hospital, which opened in 1741 and eventually hung Hogarth’s painting, “Moses Brought Before Pharaoh’s Daughter”, in its lobby.

          For the rest of the book, Bowlby selects novels which illustrate various components of becoming or being parents.  The first of these essays is about Medea and focuses on the loss of children and childlessness, with much relevant material not found in the play.

          The second essay is about Dickens’ Great Expectations, and the unfortunate efforts of Miss Haversham to become a nurturing mother to Estella, and the somewhat more successful efforts of Magwich with Pip.  Entitled, “A Tale of Two Parents”, this chapter offers an original interpretation of a great novel as well as a detailed explanation of some psychological factors in parenting. This wonderful chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

          Other chapters include the issues of custody in George Eliot’s Silas Marner, and the confusing parentage of Fielding’s Tom Jones.  Placing a child outside the home is a theme in the context of Jane Austen’s  Mansfield Park.  Parental secrets are examined in an essay about Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and parental secrets and women’s ties in a consideration of Edith Wharton’s  Roman Fever.  The sadness of parental divorce and multiple parent figures comes alive with the chapter on Henry James’ What Maisie Knew.  And, in an excellent and complex chapter, Bowlby explores intense loyalty to a child and then divided loyalties between child and spouse in a discussion of George Moore’s Esther Waters.  Each of these chapters is a very well-crafted essay which could stand on its own.

          Although Bowlby discusses so many of the new technologies and patterns related to having “a child of one’s own”, much of the book, especially in the consideration of novels, is devoted to different types of surrogacy.  Her concluding remarks are haunting:  “There always is, or was, or will be, another person or institution or social world in the life of the child, with whom or with which it has been or will be divided.  With relief, with grief, or with pleasure; sometimes with all of these.  There is never, once and for all, a child of one’s own.  Amongst the many meanings it suggests, ‘Moses Brought Before Pharaoh’s Daughter’ is a picture of letting go.”

          In my opinion, the first part of the book, which explores almost every possible novelty in human procreation, does not entirely align with the wonderful essays on great novels in the second part of the book, which primarily feature different forms of surrogacy and reproductive secrets.  There are no great, classical novels from the fairly distant past which can include all that is going on in this realm today.  One could accordingly argue that the book falls short of its promise, but I do not, for this is a wonderful book, and I recommend it very strongly.

© 2016 © 2016 Lloyd A. Wells

Lloyd A. Wells, M.D., Ph.D., Emeritus Consultant, Mayo Clinic