Willa Muir thematizes the complex concept of motherhood in tliree ways. First, at a political-discourse level, she defines the maternal as an essential human principle, concerned with human welfare and the alleviation of suffering. According to Muir, because of their natuial capacity for empathy, women are able to discern that all human life is significant and meaningful and so, they do not feel tempted to question its value. Thus, motherhood is embedded in female respect for life and tends towards the fostering and protection of life. For Muir that women keep on living after their physical capacity to bear children has ceased is a kind of proof that ‘maternity is not merely a physical function: women go on living as long as their children need them.’ Moreover, motherhood not only implies the imperative to promote and sustain the physical development of others, but also to cultivate and nurture others’ psychological, spiritual, and intellectual development: it is ‘women’s business’ - and all women are potential mothers - ‘to understand the processes at work in the human soul and to help each individual to the fullest and most harmonious expression of his powers’.*"*^
Secondly, when exploring the physical experience and the social repercussions of motherhood in a male-dominated society, Muir points to the problems she has to contend with. Metaphorically and literally, pregnancy brings about significant restraints to Muir’s freedom and independence. In her autobiography, Muir recalls her experience and thoughts while she was pregnant with her son Gavin: ‘I was learning what it meant to be a heavily pregnant woman. I could not run or even walk fast, but had to progress across fields with a slow, majestic gait’ {Belonging 143). More frighteningly, she perceives her own
Willa Muir, Women: An Enquiry, p.22. Muir, Women: An Enquity, p. 15
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts o f Psycho-Analysis (Hardmondworth; Penguin, 1979)
lack of control over the ‘encroaching mystery of the process going on in my body’, which is changing even her body image (Belonging 143):
I looked like a bulging fruit and my head, when I caught sight o f m yself in a long glass, seemed small and unimportant on top. No wonder, I thought, that women are often supposed to be mindless. ‘But I am still m e,’ I said aloud, more than once, as I stared at the figure in the (Belonging 143).
Muir’s surprise when she happens to have a glimpse of her body in the glass, could be interpreted as a kind of regression to that primar y shock of awareness of differentiation and wholeness the child has when she first recognizes her image in a mirror and becomes aware of her separateness.*"*^ This time, the shock comes from Muir’s effort to create a sense of a cohesive self over time in spite of the lack of coincidence between her past and present self-image. She struggles to reconstitute her self-image in spite of all the surprising changes motherhood has brought about. Hence, her vehement and audible cry of self-affirmation: ‘But I am still me’ (Belonging 143). She has to state this aloud, so that she can hear the assertion coming from outside of herself, as it were; she has to externalise the assertion to reassure herself ‘she’ is not an illusion and that she still exists inside this radically changed body she hardly recognizes as her own. Also relevant is Muir’s remark that physical changes during pregnancy may explain the common belief that women are supposed to be mindless. Here she is expressing the popular opinion that although motherhood is clearly a creative function, it is one of a purely physical nature.*^** She is also articulating the old notion that women’s mental capacities are impaired or at least destabilised by pregnancy. For example, in her early essay. Women: an Enquiry, Muir states: ‘Men restrict the function of women to physical motherhood [...] Women are treated exactly as an inferior
class with a definite function, that of child-bearing’.*^* Yet, at the same time, Muir is convinced that a ‘woman’s energy is diverted more into unconscious life’ which gives her a particular power and wisdom - different from mere rational thinking. *^^ On the few occasions when Willa Muir attempts to make purely rational decisions, disregarding her partly unconscious feelings and emotions, the outcome is bound to be a failure, or so she reports it. For example, when the doctors - further embodiments of the rational patriarchal order - plan to induce the hirth of her son before the full term of the pregnancy, she agrees because she considers herself ignorant, and the result is a long, exhausting, and dangerous labour. She had decided ‘to use my mind like a civilized woman’, but she acknowledges: ‘I should be less reasonable and to go on trusting in the unconscious’ (Belonging 143).
Thirdly, Willa Muir links the maternal principle to human creativity at a more metaphorical or immaterial level: ‘If the full content of motherhood is thus recognized, it must inevitably be recognized as a special application of the creative power of women’. According to Muir, because of the fundamental relationship between mother and child, the physical phases of conception, gestation and birth are just the beginning of motherhood as a function.*^"* The importance of being a mother for Muir can be estimated from the fact that although she thinks of herself as an artist, she values her literary work less than her maternal role in the upbringing of her son Gavin; ‘I am finishing Mrs Ritchie of which I have some hopes. It is - or it will be - much better than my first novel. However, I think my best piece of work is Gavin - a large, well-made, healthy
Muir, Women: An Enquiry, p. 10. Muir, Women: An Enquity, p.7. Muir, Women: An Enquiry, p.9. Muir, Women: An Enquiry, p.9.
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National Library o f Scotland, Willa Muir, Letter to Marion Lochhead, 3 March 1933. M S26190/95-7
Muir, Women: An Enquity, p.9. Muir, Women: An Enquity, p.9. Muir, Women: An Enquity, p.27. Muir, Women: An Enquity, p. 15.
I clever boy!’*^^ Thus, according to Muir, the duty of the mother is to foster her
child’s intellect and spirit, as well as to nurture her/his body; a mother not only
produces a human body: she creates a human being. Because of her/his
defencelessness and immaturity, Muir insists, the child is at the mercy of her/his mother, who can ruin or strengthen the harmony between the conscious and the unconscious which is necessary for the fulfilment of human potential. Female creative power has its counterpart in an equal power for destruction. It is in the context of these creative/destructive female forces evidenced in motherhood that Muir affirms that the artist must possess both feminine and masculine qualities: immediate access to the intuitions of unconscious life and the ability to create conscious form.*^^
There are, however, two traditional notions associated with motherhood to which Willa Muir seems not to object. The author does not seem to challenge the concept of maternal instinct, which would presumably be linked to the forces of the unconscious. For example, Muir affirms that women exercise their creative power on human beings ‘with the sureness of intuitive k n o w l e d g e T h e other notion that Muir appeal’s not to question is women’s socialization into motherhood. Even though, while speaking about the narrow traditional morality imposed upon women, the author complains about ‘the pressure of conventional values [...] applied to girls almost from childhood’, at the same time, she affirms, apparently as an incontrovertible truth, that ‘it is a woman’s destiny to create
human beings’.*^** Although if human beings are to be created at all, this statement about women’s destiny is true, Muir, however, does not mean that women who do not have children are fleeing from their destiny. In the same essay, the author rejects the term ‘superfluous women’, a term used to qualify childless and/or unmarried women, who - in societies where women’s existence is justified only by producing children - are considered ‘failures in life’ and ridiculous nuisances.*^*