Maiesiophilia

A pregnant Demi Moore photographed by 

Annie Liebovitz for Vanity Fair (1991) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

One of the most famous - and, at the time, most scandalous - scenes in D. H. Lawrence's 1915 novel The Rainbow, features newly wed Anna Brangwen dancing naked before the Unknown, whilst heavily pregnant:

 

"Big with child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting her hands and her body to the Unseen Creator [...] to whom she belonged.

      She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss. She danced in secret before the Creator, she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness." [2]      

 

One Saturday afternoon, alone in her bedroom before the fire, she again "took off her things and danced, lifting her knees and her hands in a slow, rhythmic exulting" [3]. When her husband Will enters and finds her naked in the shadows, he is somewhat startled, and advises that, if she's not careful, she'll catch a cold. 

 

Irritated by this stupid, sexless remark, Anna lifted her hands and began to dance once more, the firelight illuminating her body:

 

"He stood away near the door in blackness of shadow, watching transfixed. And with slow, heavy movements, she swayed backwards and forwards [...] pale in the dusky afternoon [...]

      He watched, and his soul burned in him. He turned aside, he could not look [...] Her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying [...] Her face was rapt and beautiful [...] [4]    

 

Will is unable to ever forget this vision of his pregnant young wife; if it aroused him at all, so too did it terrify him; for at that moment she was, in all her femaleness, beyond him. 

 

This is certainly an interesting scene to do with womanhood, sex and pregnancy - albeit one that Lawrence cannot help dressing up in religious language (just as, on the other hand, this self-professed priest of love cannot help eroticising his own metaphysics). 

 

One assumes that Lawrence's publishers (Methuen & Co.) must have known that this scene - along with several others - would cause them problems with the censors ...? 

 

And, sure enough, The Rainbow was prosecuted for obscenity, as a result of which around a thousand copies of the novel were seized and burnt and the book remained unavailable in Britain for the next eleven years (although editions were published in the United States). 

 

As one critic wrote in high moral outrage, when art refuses to 'conform to the ordered laws that govern human society [...] it must pay the penalty' [5].

 

 

II.   

 

In a letter written to Martin Secker in 1920, Lawrence reflects on the fate of The Rainbow, suggesting that the magistrates had acted in response to the hostile reviews the book received. He also informs Secker: "The scene to which exception was particularly taken was the one where Anna dances naked, when she is with child." [6] 

 

Thus, Lawrence was certainly aware that this scene was probematic - and I'm sure he knew why. For whilst Christianity has never taught that coition during pregnancy is a sin, many Church Fathers - including St. Augustine and Clement of Alexandria - seem, like Anna's husband Will, to be freaked out by the erotic aspects of pregnancy and the idea of fucking an expectant mother. 

 

The former, for example, spoke harshly about those husbands who approach their wives for sexual intercourse whilst they are with child, seeing this as a shameful lack of self-control [7]. As for the latter, he was more concerned about potential harms that might result, believing that it was necessary to protect the uterus once it had received the semen it desires and began the process of child formation. 

 

According to Clement, the womb closes itself up during pregnancy and no longer craves semen. Thus, any further act of coition at the man's insistence - and any new delivery of semen - is an excessive act of violence [8]. 

 

Beliefs such as these have continued to shape the thinking of many people, even whilst modern medical professionals insist that sex during pregnancy is normal, healthy, and perfectly safe for all parties concerned; including the unborn child, which is protected by the amniotic fluid in the womb and by the cervical mucus plug that forms shortly after conception.         

 

 

III. 

 

In conclusion ...

 

Whilst some women may experience a decrease in their sex drive whilst pregnant, others - like Anna Brangwen - never feel more sexually attractive and empowered than when big with child. 

 

Similary, whilst some men - like Will Brangwen - have a tokophobic aversion to seeing their pregnant wives dance round naked and ecstatically delighting in their womanhood and fertility, others veer towards maiesiophilia and are turned on by lactating breasts and an enlarged abdomen [9].      

 

Personally, I'm with Will on this one. It's not that I feel humiliated or nullified in my maleness by the site of a pregnant nude woman. Rather, I just find it slightly irritating when women like Anna (or Demi) get too full of themseves and believe that pregnancy - a biological function shared with all other mammals - is a miraculous state that gives them meaning or brings them closer to God. 

I would remind such women of this crucial couple of lines from Lawrence:

 

"That she bear children is not a woman's significance. But that she bear herself, that is her supreme and risky fate: that she drive on to the edge of the unknown, and beyond." [10]

 

      

Notes

 

[1] This nude photograph by Annie Liebovitz of 28-year old actress Demi Moore, who was seven months pregnant at the time, certainly got people talking when it appeared on the cover of the August 1991 issue of Vanity Fair. 

      Many critics deemed it inappropriate; some even described it as indecent (despite the fact that Moore discreetly covers her breasts with her hand). Some retail outlets would only sell the issue once it was wrapped in plain paper, as if a pornographic magazine, much to Moore's bemusement. It has since been named as one of the most influential images of the 20th-century, although, interestingly, Liebovitz herself doesn't think it a particularly good picture.    

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 169-170. 

 

[3] Ibid., p. 170.    

[4] Ibid., pp. 170-171.

[5] James Douglas, writing in the Star (22 October, 1915), quoted by Mark Kinkead-Weekes in his Introduction to The Rainbow, p. xlvi.

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Martin Secker (16 January 1920), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 458-460. The line quoted is on p. 459.

 

[7] See Augustine, On the Good of Marriage, V.   

 

[8] See Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, II. X.

 

[9] Pregnancy porn may still be a rather niche interest, but internet searches for such have steadily increased during the last few years according to stats released by Pornhub, in 2017. Not all of this traffic comes from out-and-out pregnancy fetishisists, however; it also includes, for example, those men who simply like to fantasise about their own virility and gain arousal or gratification from the possibility (or risk) of impregnating a woman. 

      Somewhat surprisingly, Pornhub's data also reveals that women are significantly more interested in pregnancy-related porn than men; indeed, women in the 25-34 year old age group are the most likely to search online for such. See Lenyon Whitaker, 'Pornhub data reveals "pregnancy porn" searches are on the rise', Metro (15 May, 2017): click here.   

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 52. 

      In this same passage, Lawrence explicity denies that the purpose of sex is for the depositing of seed. Procreation, he says, is "merely a preservative measure" and the continuance of life in the flesh "only a minor function". 

 

 

Little Hell Flames: On D. H. Lawrence's Poppy Philosophy

Bright Red Poppy (SA/2021)

 

 

This morning, a large bright red poppy has burst into flame at the top of my garden and it naturally triggers thoughts of Sylvia Plath's famous short verse* and, of course, D. H. Lawrence's philosophical remarks on the flower in his Study of Thomas Hardy** ...

 

Whilst for Plath the red poppy is a symbol both of pain and the release from pain (of sleep, of death), for Lawrence, the poppy reminds us that there is more to life than the will to self-preservation; that man - like flower - achieves his consummation or fourth-dimensional splendour by wasting himself, with no thought of the morrow.   

Even an old man, afraid of the coming winter, who warns the young against behaving like a "reckless, shameless scarlet flower" [8], can't resist watching as the poppy unfolds into being. For he knows in his innermost heart, where there is no fear, that the poppy's blaze of colour is what matters most; that even "the latent seeds were secondary" [8] and that without its outrageous redness, it is just another herbaceous plant growing wild by the roadside.  

 

And it is better that we too blossom like the poppy, rather than "linger into inactivity at the vegetable, self-preserving stage [...] like the regulation cabbage, hide-bound, a bunch of leaves that may not go any farther for fear of losing market value" [12]. For if we cannot flower into being, then we will thrash destruction about ourselves until we are rotten at heart. 

Lawrence concludes:

"The final aim of every living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself. This accomplished, it will produce what it will produce, it will bear the fruit of its nature. Not the fruit, however, but the flower is the culmination and climax [...] 

      And I know that the common wild poppy has achieved so far its complete poppy-self, unquestionable. It has uncovered its red. Its light, its self, has risen and shone out, has run on the winds for a moment. It is splendid. The world is a world because of the poppy's red. Otherwise it would be a lump of clay. [...] I tremble at the inchoate infinity of life when I think of that which the poppy has to reveal, and has not as yet had time to bring forth." [12-13]  

 

 

Notes

 

* I'm referring here to 'Poppies in July', rather than 'Poppies in October'. But both poems can be found in Ariel (Faber and Faber, 1965), Plath's second book of verse, published two years after her death and edited (somewhat controversially) by Ted Hughes. (In 2004, a new edition of Ariel was published which for the first time restored Plath's own selection and arrangement of the poems.)  

 

** D. H. Lawrence, 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press,1985), pp. 1-128. Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. Note that although I only quote from chapter I, Lawrence it still singing the praises of the red poppy coming into bloom in chapter II: 

 

"His fire breaks out of him, and he lifts his head, slowly, subtly, tense in an ecstasy of fear overwhelmed by joy, submits to the issuing of his flame and his fire, and there it hangs at the brink of the void, scarlet and radiant for a little while, imminent on the unknown, a signal, an out-post, an advance-guard, a forlorn, splendid flag, quivering from the brink of the unfathomed void, into which it flutters silently [...]" [18]    

Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair

 Floral headpieces designed by Joshua Werber

Leis designed by Lauren Liana Shearer

(For more details see Note [1] below)

It's highly likely that even before people thought to paint their faces and adorn themselves with handcrafted jewellery, they wore flowers, leaves, and twigs in their hair.

In other words, mankind's fetishistic obsession with stylising the body was born of his floraphilia and that which D. H. Lawrence contrasts with the rage of self-preservation; namely, a will to excess via which we spaff our resources, with no thought for the morrow, and seek our own blossoming into splendour: "If this excess were missing, darkness would cover the face of the earth." [2] 

It's heartening, therefore, to discover that the tribal peoples of the Omo Valley in Ethiopia still love to wear floral garlands, make shaggy wigs from dried grasses and headcoverings from giant leaves. If there's a practical reason for this - protection from the sun, for example - or perhaps a sacred-symbolic motivation, it's undoubtedly done primarily for the sheer pleasure of looking good and becoming-poppy. 

And it's this same pleasure in transforming ourselves with elements of the natural world that we find in the sophisticated world of fashion. As the journalist Ligaya Mishan notes:

"Decorating ourselves with flowers may be one of the few things that still unites us as humans, as one tribe across the world - our capacity to transform ourselves with nothing more than a handful of fallen petals; to find, in a bloom slipped behind an ear, glory." [3]

Notes

[1] The model on the left in the above picture wears a headpiece of aspidistra leaves and lily of the valley, paired with leis made of white crown flowers and scarlet Ixora blossoms. The model on the right, meanwhile, is wearing a crown of dracaena leaves and purple clematis, with leis strung with octopus tree berries, Sodom’s apple and ice plant. Photo: Gosha Rubchinskiy. Styled by Mel Ottenberg. 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 11.

[3] Ligaya Mishan, 'The Power of Wearing Flowers', New York Times (Feb 16, 2018): click here.