Making babies, representations of the infant in 20th century Canadian fiction

Abstract

This thesis traces infant representation in Canadian fiction throughout the 20th century and focuses on the tension between writing that depicts the infant as a site of desire and as a site of constraint. The tension is particularly and persistently evident in writing by women. The study is contextualized in terms of social and historical developments concerning the infant and explores the impact of feminism and shifting social mores in the expression of the figure of the infant. This impact is evident in the different in kind of infant representation produced by men and women. Writing by men about babies moves in a linear direction, manifesting a change in male protagonists who view the infant idealistically, if at all, to a more distant view in mid-century. Finally male writers return at the end of the century to a consideration of the infant as a source of meaning and value. Women's writing, on the other hand, reveals an intensifying complexity as women come to terms with increasing candour about the contradictory nature of their engagement with the baby, that other subjectivity that they grow inside them. The thesis inquires into the nature of the other subjectivity whom Hannah Arendt has called "the hope of the world."