The other day on Substack, a comment about no works of literature about motherhood.
Can anyone think of any novels/films/stories about motherhood? - like about pregnancy, childbirth, early childhood development? (I mean work that really goes in depth.) It’s obviously the most important thing in human life and it’s like nobody ever tries to write about it or otherwise ‘cover’ it. Is it just that it’s such an intimate, physical thing that art can’t really touch it except symbolically?1
I had just been walking outside in the cold looking at the Charles River, covered with ice but with nobody walking upon it, and wondered about crossing it, and my mind went, of course to the famous scene of Eliza Harris, the young mother from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) desperately fleeing to save her son Harry from being sold away from her, who then crosses the semi-frozen Ohio River, leaping from ice floe to ice floe with littler Harry in her arms.
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