Pregnancy as protest in interwar British women's writing
An antecedent alternative to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12691820 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fran Bigman (0000-0003-2160-0737, Keio University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 265-270 |
| Publication date | 2016-08-24 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Medical Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1468-215X • E-ISSN: 1473-4265 |
| Publisher | BMJ (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1136/medhum-2016-010935 |
| PMID | 27559054 |
| OpenAlex | W2512125954 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
Accounts that take Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) as representative of interwar reproductive dystopia fail to recognise that the novel expresses both an interest and an anxiety about the possibility of new reproductive technologies to transform sex, gender, and the family that were widely shared by writers in different genres and perhaps expressed best by those likely to be most affected: women. This article explores three earlier works-Charlotte Haldane's Man's World (1926), Vera Brittain's Halcyon, or the Future of Monogamy (1929), and Naomi Mitchison's Comments on Birth Control (1930)-in which pregnancy, instead of figuring as illness or debility, becomes a form of resistance to the status quo. These works engage with biomedicine, however, rather than abjuring it. Through a reading of these works, this article argues that the intersection of medical humanities and science fiction (SF) can enrich both: medical humanities can push SF to go beyond the canon, and SF can challenge any characterisation of literature in the medical humanities as purely fantastical by demonstrating how it responds to the hopes and anxieties of a particular time
Antecedent (behavioral psychology · Pregnancy · Sociology · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Irish and British Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |