by Sady Doyle
“[I] stay at home; net, and think of my little dead baby,” Shelley wrote, just after the baby’s death. “This is foolish, I suppose; yet whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts, and do not read to divert them, they always come back to the same point—that I was a mother, and am so no longer.”2 On the one-year anniversary of her daughter’s death, Shelley wrote that she’d dreamed again of “the dead being alive.”3 She did not go into detail.
She did next time. “I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” Shelley wrote in 1831, explaining the genesis of Frankenstein. “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out; and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”4
For the rest of her life, Shelley would insist that Frankenstein—the first book of science fiction, the preeminent female Gothic, the cradle that nurtured so many of the monster stories that came after—was the result of that third vision, a “waking dream.” She never mentioned the early nightmare, about waking her dead daughter. But she was always in the picture. Look at the monster, wandering nameless through the text, a baby that was never supposed to live. Look at the subtitle: Frankenstein, or: The Modern Prometheus. Years after her daughter’s death, Shelley dreamt of stealing God’s fire.
In the Beginning
But this story is older than Shelley. It’s older than anything you can recognize, or remember; it’s a story about the beginning, from the beginning, one which predates time and the written word. We have come to the heart of it now: the unspeakable, otherworldly thing lurking inside of womanhood, the power that all these tales of female demons and deviants foreshadow. Birth is not just monstrous; it doesn’t belong in our hall of fame alongside the snake-wife and the possessed teenager. It is the reason for those other myths, the source of monstrosity itself.
Defining women around pregnancy, or pregnancy around women, is a slippery proposition. Some men have uteruses; plenty of women can’t get pregnant, or don’t want to; all would be deeply offended if you doubted their gender identity, and they would have every right to be. Yet this is not so much about how things are as about how we have been taught to imagine them.* Deep in our culture’s imagination, in the sunless waters where our myths swim, the shape that moves through the darkness is female. The idea of a woman standing at the liminal point between life and death, ferrying us across the unknowable space between, has a primal power.
And that power is monstrous. We may sentimentalize motherhood, or tell ourselves childbirth is “beautiful,” but our fears tell another story. The body of a pregnant woman—slimy, swollen, bleeding, leaking, teeming with other life—is the core repulsive image in patriarchal mythology. You can catch its warped, partial reflections in countless inhuman monstrosities, from the Alien franchise to Sumerian creation myths. That may not make actual pregnant women feel great; swollen joints and hormonal breakouts and distended abdominal muscles are hard enough without knowing that all of Western culture has deemed you inhumanly disgusting. But it may be some consolation to know that pregnant women’s bodies are horrific precisely because they confront men with the brute fact of female reproductive agency. To witness pregnancy and birth is to catch an unfiltered glimpse of a woman with power over life and death—power that men cannot take away.
Men have striven mightily to claim that power for themselves, with witch trials and medical schools and anti-abortion laws all intended to put reproduction back in male hands. Yet what goes on in that pregnant body can never be entirely governed by laws or mastered by technology. It can’t even be controlled by the pregnant person; throughout history, millions have died in childbirth. In Renaissance Italy, the first thing a woman did after discovering she was pregnant was to write her own will.5 Even now, the World Health Organization tells us, the death toll stands at around 830 pregnant people per day.6 In the United States, the toll is highest among black women, who die of post-partum complications three times as often as white women; surviving childbirth, like every other kind of survival, is a privilege.7
So, no: giving birth is not “empowering,” in any facile girl-power, rah-rah way. But it is power—something only certain people can do, which is necessary to our collective survival. If women don’t give birth, the world ends—or humans do, anyway, which to us may as well be the same thing. It is not “empowering” for the Middle East to contain 82 percent of the world’s oil reserves—quite the opposite—but nations nevertheless rise and fall on the question of who controls that fuel. Every uterus is an oil well, a valuable and disputed resource, the object of a millennia-long turf war; if you happen to be sitting on one at the moment, don’t be surprised when invading forces show up to claim it out from under you.
Cisgender men fear that the territory they try to claim will rise up and resist them; that their strength will fail at the crucial moment, and power over reproduction—which is to say, power over humanity itself—will be wrested out of their hands. A pregnant woman is a woman who is finally, fully out of control. She is the face of horror.
The Face of the Waters
So, back we go, to the beginning; to our earliest attempts to understand that primordial power. In the beginning, there was the Mother, swimming in the dark uterine waters of creation: the first God, and the first monster, that we have.
In Babylon—one of the first great cities of ancient Mesopotamia, the civilization that invented written language; this is a story from the beginning of stories themselves—the Mother was Tiamat. Like Melusine, Tiamat is a sea serpent; one of her titles, “the glistening one,” hints that she may even be the sea. All life began in Tiamat; she existed before heaven, before earth, before anything and anyone other than the Abyss.
Soon, however, Tiamat realizes that the gods—her most ambitious children—aim to replace her. She turns on them with all the horrific power of her fertility:
Ummu-Hubur [Tiamat] who formed all things,
Made in addition weapons invincible; she spawned monster-serpents,
Sharp of tooth, and merciless of fang;
With poison, instead of blood, she filled their bodies….
She set up vipers and dragons, and the monster Lahamu,
And hurricanes, and raging hounds, and scorpion-men,
And mighty tempests, and fish-men, and rams;
They bore cruel weapons, without fear of the fight.
Her commands were mighty, none could resist them;
After this fashion, huge of stature, she made eleven [kinds of] monsters.8
The world is only saved from Tiamat’s relentless birthing when Marduk, the hero and “avenger” of the gods, takes action. He breaks open Tiamat’s belly, giving the world a sort of emergency C-section:
Her courage was taken from her, and her mouth she opened wide.
He seized the spear and burst her belly,
He severed her inward parts, he pierced her heart.
He overcame her and cut off her life;
He cast down her body and stood upon it.9
Marduk splits the corpse in half; the upper half of Tiamat becomes the heavens, and the lower half is the earth. Thus, with the awful, pregnant, female body of Nature put in order through purifying male violence, Civilization can begin.
These are the terms we’ve been working with, pretty much, to this day. In much contemporary monotheism, and particularly in Christianity, the world is controlled from the top down and the outside in, by violently paternal male gods who give commandments in good times and declare holy wars in bad ones. Nature may be generically female in this cosmology (we still talk about “Mother Nature”), but it is also depersonalized, soulless; it’s just dead matter (just dead mater, as in mater-ial and mater-nity; they come from the same root) that men are intended to control: “And God said, Let us make man in our image,
after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”10
Modern translations of the Bible have corrected “man” to “humankind.” But it’s too late; the image of Man, specifically, controlling the earth and every creeping or female thing on it, has been built into the foundations of the culture. We have no space in our imagination for a power greater than Man, no animate Nature or Mother to fight back. The Enuma Elish, the epic of Tiamat and Marduk, is thought to be a direct inspiration for the biblical book of Genesis. Note where God hovers before creation begins: “Darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”11 The abyss, the waters: this is Tiamat’s territory. But in this story, no one’s home.
This is the end point of the transformation Marduk sought to effect; instead of telling stories about the necessity to master or subjugate that older, female power, men tell stories in which it never existed. But the myth of Marduk and Tiamat contains its own warning against this sort of hubris: Marduk may have killed her and scattered her body parts, but we never actually got out of Tiamat. Her body is everything around us; to this day, we’re still inside Mother.
The Garden and the Snake
Tiamat continues to ripple and echo through our myths; disguised, diminished, but always there. You can find echoes of her in the slimy, carnivorous mermaids and snake-women of our third chapter, or in later Greek myths like Echidna, the “Mother of All Monsters,” who lived beneath the oceans in a lightless cave, relentlessly giving birth to monsters. “Fierce Echidna,” Hesiod calls her, “who is half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin, eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth.”12
You can also find echoes of her in Judeo-Christian myth. In the Bible, flipping ahead from Genesis to Revelations brings us to the fateful conjunction of a woman, a dragon, and a great beast rising from the sea. Aleister Crowley made her his goddess, calling her the “one Earth, the Mother of us all, and [the] one Womb wherein all men are begotten.”13 To the rest of us, she is simply the Whore of Tiamat’s Babylon, the blood-drunk Queen of the Apocalypse, the all-consuming, all-caps MOTHER OF ABOMINATIONS, whose terrible children still wage war on the gods.
In fact, Her Satanic Majesty is likely an echo of an earlier monster: Adam’s apocryphal first wife, Lilith, who would not lie beneath him during sex, and whose punishment is to wander forever through the desert wastes, perpetually birthing and nursing a horde of demons. Medieval Christians believed that Lilith was the snake that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden; one carving in the Notre Dame cathedral portrays her with a woman’s face and breasts and a long, scaly tail, looking like a kind of evil land-mermaid.14
Lilith, like Tiamat, embodied the powers and dangers of birth—but a smaller, meaner version, pure nightmare with none of the cosmic grandeur attached. If a woman died in childbirth, which many did, or if a baby did not survive its first weeks, which many did not, Lilith was said to be responsible. Her name and description are similar to several other ancient demons of childbirth. In Mesopotamian myth, the pregnancy-blighting entity is Lamashtu. In Greek, Lamia.
Unconstrained desire and uncontrollable birth, mermaids and sea monsters, mistresses and mothers: from the beginning, these have been the same story. Melusine was always a dragon; if you see her as a mermaid, all it means is that she’s only half-exposed. Mother is the monster women threaten to be, waiting, vast and awful, just around the bend of each transformation.
Queen of the Monsters
As time moves forward, culture becomes pop culture, and myth becomes fiction. Goddesses become demons become monsters, getting smaller with each iteration, until we encounter Edmund Spenser’s Errour, “a monster vile, whom God and man does hate”:
Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide,
But th’other halfe did womans shape retaine,
Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.
And as she lay vpon the durtie ground,
Her huge long taile her den all overspred,
Yet was in knots and many boughtes vpwound,
Pointed with mortall sting. Of her there bred A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed,
Sucking upon her poisonous dugs, each one Of sundry shapes, yet all ill favored:
Soone as that uncouth light upon them shone,
Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone.15
This is, I’m confident, meant to illustrate some larger theological point—most of The Faerie Queene is, much to the disappointment of my teenage Tori Amos–loving self—but the most notable thing about it, for our purposes, is that it’s gross. Errour is not only constantly pregnant, constantly giving birth, and constantly nursing, she’s also constantly re-impregnating herself by swallowing her children back into her belly. The image of the maternal body as a boundaryless, animalistic mess of orifices and leaking fluids could not be more clear.
The gross-outs here are so reliable, in fact, that you can scarcely blame other writers for going back to the well—whether that be the fleshy, fishy, soft-lipped vagina gods of H. P. Lovecraft (including Shub-Niggurath, mother of a Spenserian “Thousand Young”) or the slimy, cave-dwelling, perpetually broody Alien Queen of James Cameron’s Aliens. Like Tiamat, the queen is a monster who is more terrifying for being the mother of monsters; her children are sharp of tooth, merciless of fang, and perpetually, relentlessly hatching.
Or, you know, there’s him. The Big Guy. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, our most well-known sea serpent—the monstrous thing, enormous, older than time, arising from the slime and wet and darkness—is Godzilla, a story where uncontrolled life force is embodied by radioactive mutation.
Most of us know Godzilla as a “he,” who bears the very masculine-sounding title “King of the Monsters.” But Godzilla’s gender is far from settled. According to Aisha Harris of Slate, the Japanese use gender-neutral pronouns; American translators defaulted to male ones, in part because “he” was the accepted generic at the time.16 This “he” was confounded in 1967, when Son of Godzilla introduced Minilla, Godzilla’s baby, implying that (a) Godzilla is an involved, postfeminist father who must make some never-seen lady Godzilla very happy; (b) Godzilla laid and hatched an egg herself, through the offices of an off-screen Manzilla; or (c) Godzilla’s genital situation, including the potential ability to self-impregnate, is beyond our power to know or classify. This ambiguity ultimately led to the 1998 American adaptation, directed by Roland Emmerich, in which Godzilla is, in fact, pregnant.
Try all you like to escape the vast water lizard, with her teeming womb and vaginal abominations. But the image will hunt you down regardless. I leave you with the haunting fact that Patrick Tatopoulos, special effects supervisor of the Emmerich Godzilla, “says that he and his crew ‘sculpted female genitalia’ onto the CG model,” meaning that, if the fictional people of New York happened to look up while they were being stomped, they received a highly intimate surprise on the way to annihilation.17
The Dragon and the Sword
These visions of powerful, archaic motherhood are so far removed from our experience that they don’t even look human; the Mother is the most purely monstrous monster in this book. Which makes sense, given that our entire social structure is built around suppressing her.
There has been plentiful feminist speculation about how patriarchy came to be, and all of it tends to be flaky and easily disproven. I won’t speculate. Patriarchal rule is at least as ancient as Marduk bursting Tiamat’s belly—so old that, if anything came before it, we’ll probably never know. But patriarchal myths always portray our current arrangement as a late development in human history. And they have a very specific, very frightening idea of how we lived before
men were in charge.
In its own stories, patriarchy replaces the chaotic, biological, female-dominated world of voluntary reproduction—reproduction governed by desire, done at any time and with anyone the soon-to-be-pregnant person likes—with a world where the sperm donor, like God, rules childbirth from the outside in and the top down. Women (and any trans men or nonbinary people forced to live as women) retain the power of pregnancy in this new order, but any other power they have is stripped away. Their sexuality is placed under intense control, their voices are silenced, and their attempts to engage in the public world—the world outside of family, outside of childbirth—are punished, driving them back into their only acceptable place. Nor can women use birth control, or decide whether or when to have children, or even play too active a role in childbirth itself. Women are not people, but the unfortunately flawed bearers of pregnancy, the vessels men employ to incubate the children they call “theirs.” Pregnancy’s primal matriarchal power is suppressed and demonized, and childbirth becomes merely the process men use to create more men.
Suppressing the power of motherhood takes work. Greek husbands and fathers, for example, took special care to pacify a trio of goddesses, the Kindly Ones, because they were once the Furies—the ferocious and hideous enforcers of blood debt, with red eyes and bloody talons, who drove men mad for harming their mothers. This came to a head in the complicated case of Orestes, who killed his mother for killing his father for killing his sister; since his mother Clytemnestra had been avenging her daughter, the Furies were on her side, whereas Orestes, a man, viewed husband-murder as something to be frowned upon. For the rule (and basic safety) of fathers to be secured, the Furies had to be talked down by Zeus’s loyal daughter Athena.
