The Seed. Alexandra Kimball
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much play in my online support groups (more so even than marital problems, which, surprisingly, I didn’t see discussed much). Posters spent a lot of time trying to decipher their friends’ motives.
‘I know she didn’t want to hurt my feelings,’ one woman wrote, after discovering that her sister-in-law had not issued her a baby-shower invitation. Or maybe, she wrote, she simply didn’t know how to respond to her relative’s pain and loss, and was trying to avoid the awkwardness and discomfort an infertile woman at a baby shower would present. She wanted justification, and the other women in the group all gave it; we wrote that the sister-in-law was not being malicious, that she was just ignorant, that she was trying to spare the woman’s feelings. But we all felt the slap, having weathered these slights ourselves. However benign the reason for excluding us, the effect was always that we felt immediately othered, so identified with the tragedy of infertility that we had become impossible to relate to, let alone socialize with. We knew that our suffering was unimaginable to most women, and that the very fact of us was frightening and depressing and better when just ignored. We had become monsters, like the one Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein creates – ‘solitary and abhorred.’
I felt my difference, my solitariness and despicability, most keenly at that dinner, but it took several more encounters (more ‘I don’t know what to say,’ more ignored requests, more absent party invitations) for me to start thinking that the horror of my infertility – my monstrousness – was not just about how different I was from regular, fertile women, but also how similar, how close. I imagined that the women who avoided me were very invested in having children (or more children) themselves. They retreated from me because they saw me as a worst-case scenario, a personal nightmare – even an omen. Monsters blur categories: human and beast; living and dead; man and woman. With fecundity so tied to femininity, I often sensed how my infertility desexed me, how it rendered me both female and not-quite female in a way that was not just sad but unsettling. The best monsters – vampires, zombies, aliens – are uncanny perversions of the human, recognizable in some form as us. (‘[M]y form is a filthy type of yours,’ says Frankenstein’s monster, ‘more horrid even from the very resemblance.’) The threat of the monster isn’t death, it’s contamination – that they might infect us with their abomination and turn us into monsters as well. When other women avoided me, I wondered if they believed, on some level, that my infertility was contagious, and that by dealing with me, they might have to contend with their fear that they might be infertile, too.
From her first recorded mentions the infertile female was a monster, distinct from woman-proper. The Babylonian Atrahasis epic, from the eighteenth-century BCE, describes a conflict between the gods and the overpopulated, lazy world of men, during which the gods flooded the earth. Eventually repenting for this destruction, the deities restored humankind to the earth, with a built-in safeguard against overpopulation: ‘Let there be a third group of people. [Let there be] fertile women and barren women. Let there be the “Eradicator” among the people and let her snatch the child from the lap of the mother.’ The Eradicator was the lion-headed demoness Lamashtu, barren and envious, who caused infertility, miscarriage, and infant death among the populace. She could only be warded off by reciting all of her seven names. Yet her existence is essential to the flourishing fertility of the population at large – the infertility of some women is the price Babylonians paid for the fertility of most. Lamashtu is an explicit early example of how the fear and Othering of female infertility is foundational to society’s functioning.
The Hebrew Testament of Solomon describes the demon Abyzou – her name derived from the word for abyss – as a fusion of woman and beast: ‘her glance was altogether bright and greeny, and her hair was tossed wildly like a dragon’s; and the whole of her limbs were invisible.’ Abyzou was barren, and she confessed that her envy of women who could bear children motivated her murderous hauntings:
[B]y night I sleep not, but go my rounds over all the world, and visit women in childbirth … [I]f I am lucky, I strangle the child. But if not, I retire to another place. For I cannot for a single night retire unsuccessful. For I am a fierce spirit, of myriad names and many shapes. And now hither, now thither I roam … I have no work other than the destruction of children, and the making their ears to be deaf, and the working of evil to their eyes, and the binding their mouths with a bond, and the ruin of their minds, and paining of their bodies.
Considered the cause of stillbirths and miscarriage, Abyzou was likely the source of child-killing monsters in other antiquity cultures: the Jewish Lilith, the Egyptian Alabasandria, and the Byzantine Gylou. The art of the period depicts these demons as serpentine, the unruly, unnatural appearance of such female forms evoking their barrenness and symbolizing their rebuke to traditional femininity. Accordingly, they were often painted being trampled under male riders on horses, a triumph of the masculine state order over the vengeful, inchoate feminine. Amulets depicting such figures were used by pregnant women to ward off vengeful spirits.
In Indonesia, a tree-dwelling spirit named Wewe Gombel was similarly motivated to evil deeds by her infertility. In life, Wewe Gombel’s husband committed infidelity when he learned she was barren, and, upon discovering this, she murdered him. The villagers drove her from the village, and she killed herself. In her spirit form, she devoted herself to making up the family she could not have, kidnapping unsupervised children and confining them in her palm tree, where she enchanted them into staying. Engravings depict her as naked and dishevelled, with matted hair and outsized, pendulous breasts (some stories have her using her breasts to hide the stolen children as she spirits them away). In folk tales, parents use her vengeful presence to warn their children against straying too far or misbehaving, a cautionary tale that figures the barren female as the ultimate threat to orderly family life, spreading her childlessness to others. She is symbolically linked to the early Hindu goddess Nirrti, who was responsible for miscarriages, infertility, and child abductions, as well as general death and decay; in a culture where infertility was presumed to always be the result of female disorder, and punishable by not only divorce but exile and death, women prayed frequently to ward off Nirrti’s influence.
In the Middle Ages, the Abyzou archetype informed the European idea of the witch, frequently accused of kidnapping children and causing miscarriages and stillbirths. The witch burnings in Europe and North America were a touchstone for late-twentieth-century feminist historians, who rightfully noted how the accused (of which around 80 per cent were female) often defied the conventional female gender roles of the era: many were unmarried, for example, or exhibited the unwomanly characteristics of anger or promiscuity. But fewer have emphasized how prominently female barrenness figured in the witch trials, how infertile and childless women were considered both particularly vulnerable to infestation by Satanic spirits and prone to acts of witchcraft themselves. More broadly, witchcraft itself manifested in the form of barrenness of all living things: miscarriages (both human and animal), famines, droughts, and crop wastages. The horror of infertility permeates the first Papal Bull on witchcraft in 1484:
Many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation, and straying from the Catholic faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi, and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine … they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands … they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls.
Many of the highest-profile witchcraft trials centred on infertile women. Even as childlessness was presumed to be the result of female infertility alone, a common assumption during this period was that male impotence was caused by female sorcery (itself an effect of a woman having sex with the Devil). In 1754 in São Paulo, Brazil, Ursulina de Jesus was accused of using sorcery to render the couple infertile, and her resulting trial and execution by burning was one of Brazil’s most sensational witchcraft cases. Her husband later failed to conceive children with his second wife, indicating that he had been responsible for the couple’s barrenness – a potent example of how medieval theology constructed female infertility as a scapegoat for larger concerns about masculine virility. In Puritan North America, a childless