Placement

Rites of marriage and debut/first meeting shared another characteristic beyond broad ritual patterning: culmination through the same act. Each value model, however, interpreted the sex act with a different understanding of its ideal purpose and the quality of relationship it signified. Along with the personal satisfaction that a wife and her husband may have gained from it, which strengthened their bonds, household sexual activity was also valued for its productive potential, and it signified through the use of her body a woman’s obedience to the need of generational continuity. The quarters valued sex for the profits it secured from clients seeking sensual pleasures that courtesans stimulated skillfully as part of their professional labor. Nevertheless, in households and bordellos sexual activity could lead to—regardless of valuations applied to it and attempts to interrupt and control it—conception and pregnancy. Despite their differences in values, the two models’ common need for female sexuality could lead to the same female condition: a belly swollen with child.

In the face of this common biology and in spite of disparate values, it is impossible to place pregnancy in the home and in the quarter in tidy opposition within the context of the antithetical practices of birth and abortion/infanticide. Fertility and pleasure models diverged on the ideal of sexual purpose—to have a baby or to have an enjoyable time—but acts of birth and child rearing, of abortion and infanticide cannot be placed neatly on opposite sides of the divide. Fertility values promoted sexuality as serving procreative needs, but households practiced infanticide; pleasure values cheered on sexuality as nonreproductive play, but courtesans sometimes gave birth despite the preference to avoid pregnancies completely. Occurring from the needs of fertility and the consequences of pleasure, pregnancy was a phenomenon of significant ambivalence in terms of such idealized values. As a uniquely female experience, pregnancy transcended both models and their values. Symbols and practices linked it to broad cultural notions of both gender and religion that escaped each model’s narrow, idealized definitions of women. Although a woman’s pregnancy took place within a specific institution, pregnancy also placed her within an experience free of strictly bound, highly disparate institutional values and roles. In other words, the symbols and rituals that constructed pregnancy as a meaning-filled phenomenon placed a woman within wider cultural conceptions and practices of being female, constituting a category of experience that in practice lay beyond the idealized rhetorical grasp of fertility and pleasure.

To enlarge upon this view, I first argue that pregnancy was a socially ambivalent phenomenon that evaded institutional containment and singular assumptions of purpose and outcome. Pregnancy took place in a home in need of an heir or in a bordello with rarely any need for a child; it could be terminated in either home or bordello through birth or abortion, through rearing, adoption, or infanticide. Second, I examine a particular and popular form of symbolization that mediated pregnancy’s meaning through several fields of ambivalence, such as birth and death, divine and human, and the mother’s body and the fetal body. Third, following upon the symbolic link between the bodies of mother and fetus, I turn to a variety of prenatal and birth practices that pregnant women and their caretakers employed as the bodies of mother and fetus together faced the dangers inherent in the pregnancy experience.