Authors

Discussion

Pregnancy abounds in Daniela Hodrová’s trilogy Trýznivé mesto (1999), which Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol translated as City of Torment. Despite the prevalence of pregnancy in the Czech novelist’s oeuvre, scholars seldom comment on it, perhaps because Hodrová’s portrayal of pregnancy differs so much from that of her contemporaries. In the post-socialist era, many women writers tackled the taboo subject and delighted in shocking conservative audiences with meticulous details about pregnant and parturient bodies.

In juxtaposition with the “leaky bodies” that populate the poetry, short stories, and novels of the 1990s, Hodrová’s treatment of pregnancy recalls Hélène Cixous’s 1976 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” and Julia Kristeva’s 1980 essay “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini.” I argue that for Hodrová, as with Cixous and Kristeva, pregnancy constitutes the fundamental metaphor for creativity and culture. The epistemological, ethical, and phenomenological threats posed by the maternal body to phallogocentric order align with Hodrová’s literary mission. For Hodrová, literature emerges “on the edge of chaos” (“na okraji chaosu”), the title of her 2001 tome of literary criticism, where the dichotomies of living and dead, past and present, male and female, animate and inanimate collapse. Hodrová characterizes the labyrinthine Prague as pregnant, teeming with doubles, metamorphoses, and transgressions. The numerous pregnancies depicted in Trýznivé mesto similarly teeter on the threshold of the real and the fantastical, further symbolizing the link between artistic creativity and corporeal procreativity.

Some feminist scholars and writers, such as Elaine Showalter, Nina Auerbach, and Erica Jong,  oppose maternal metaphors for artistic creativity as biologically deterministic. Others, like Susan Stanford Friedman, condemn the male cooption of maternal metaphors, particularly metaphors that devalue corporeal pregnancy and parturition at the expense of elevating creative endeavors. This presentation will examine the stakes of maternal metaphors and articulate an alternative approach to these metaphors through the case study of Hodrová’s trilogy Trýznivé mesto.