A Child of One's Own: Parental Stories-1st ed.

Abstract

Among the elementary human stories, parenthood has tended to go untold. Compared to the spectacular attachments of romantic love, it is only the predictable sequel. Compared to the passions of childhood, it is just a background. In reality, parenthood has quite distinctive stories of desire and grief, anxiety and hatred embodied in the foundlings of abandonment and the ‘seeklings’ of parental longing. In recent decades, too, far-reaching changes in typical family forms and in procreative possibilities (through reproductive technologies) have engendered new stories and questions. Why do people want (or not want, or want not) to be parents? How has the ‘choice’ first enabled by contraception changed the meaning of parenthood? The first half of the book looks at the implications of changing modes of biological parenthood and pre-parenthood (through reproductive technologies); at the multiplication of new parental parts and some older divisions; and at various historical antecedents to contemporary ways of thinking about parenthood, from choice to surrogacy. The second half then discovers a more complex history to the literary representation of parents and parenthood than may at first appear. It looks at how parental stories in literature may be present but obscured by the louder forms of love that claim the reader's first attention, and traces stories of parenthood back through well-known works (by Euripides, Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Moore, and Edith Wharton). These stories have taken many forms, through diverse and paradigmatic orientations to parenthood: rejection, acceptance, or (sometimes all-encompassing) desire; with their corresponding responses in abandonment, recognition, adoption, or just plain ‘having’ children.