Motherhood and Media

In celebration of Valentine's Day this year, my husband and I decided to watch a movie that had nothing at all to do with pregnancy: the 1984 romantic comedy Splash . Well, I should say that I decided. He merely told me that he'd never seen the movie, and I delightedly declared that we therefore needed to watch it immediately. But it really does have nothing to do with pregnancy... at least I thought it didn't when I suggested it.  As I watched this retelling of The Little Mermaid , however, I couldn't help but think that the story and all of its similar iterations actually could be viewed rather easily through the lens of a pregnancy metaphor.    Art credit : Karamfila,  @karamfila.s on Instagram

 As many of you may know, I really love to analyze both printed texts and films for what they have to say about changing societal contexts. (Heck, I love it so much that it's essentially what I got my first post-undergrad degree in!)  Well, as I've officially hit third trimester, I've decided it's a good time to do a dive into some movies, both older and newer, that feature pregnancy.  I was inspired to choose  People Will Talk , a film from 1951 starring Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain, as my first movie because I also managed to find a vintage pregnancy book from the era a few months ago at a local used bookstore. The book, The Story of Human Birth by Dr. Alan Frank Guttmacher, was first published under its title in 1947, and I think together these texts say a lot about pregnancy and norms from the late 1940s and early 1950s.

I have a thesis: retail therapy can be a real and effective anxiety aid, especially during pregnancy. No, I'm not saying that because I want to justify being a shop-o-holic! Here's what I mean... What comes up when you search for a "pregnant shop-o-holic" stockphoto

Okay, this is only tangentially related to the intersection of motherhood and media, but some days you just have to stop everything and do a historical analysis of the social politics in a beloved children's public television show...

 "I wonder if, when a person is pregnant in Star Trek , they use a transporter to beam the baby out of the mother," my husband mused. We'd been watching our way through the 1993 delight that is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine .  I laughed, we continued the episode, and then I kept wondering: how does something as futuristic and supposedly utopian as the Star Trek Federation handle birth?

 So... I've always had a bit of a dark sense of humor. When I was in middle school, the day after we learned about what gelatin was made out of, I brought Jello to school and dramatically ate it saying, "Mmmm, cow hooves" while the girl next to me shrieked in horror. In high school, I hummed "Chin Up" from Charlotte's Web while I completed my mandatory fetal pig dissection lab. Perhaps that's why, just weeks after finding out that I was pregnant, I decided to order a copy of Ira Levin's iconic 1967 horror novel Rosemary's Baby .

Welcome to my new blog! My name is Lauren, and I am about to become a first-time mom. I also have a Masters degree in Literature & Cultural Analysis, and I've been noticing a lot that I want to talk about in the world around me as I go on this journey into motherhood. This is a space where I'll be musing about and over-analyzing things I've observed in various forms of media that relate to pregnancy and motherhood! Thanks for coming along on this journey. ~ LS