Fertile Victorianists
A couple months ago some of the Victorianist PhD students were joking around about the high fertility rate of Victorian profs in our department (two profs going on mat leave around the same time = limited committee members). I was not pregnant at the time, but as luck would have it, I am now adding to the knocked-up nineteenth century scholars group.
Apparently we Victorianists are a fertile lot. I ran into a former prof in the library on Wednesday and he said that when he was in grad school, it was always the Victorianists who were pregnant or had kids before they finished the PhD. An inexplicable statistic, surely, but an interesting one nonetheless. There is nothing particularly maternity inducing about Victorian literature; in fact, the idea of compulsory motherhood was interrogated during the Victorian era, and the individual rights of wives and single women were finally legislated into place. Pregnancy was still referred to using a kind of fictional shorthand, but pregnant women were slowly becoming more visible in novels and short stories. Of course, not much was said about the technicalities of pregnancy or childbirth, beyond the intimation that birthing often involved blood loss, forceps, and a fairly high maternal mortality rate.
We talk about pregnancy more freely now, but there are certainly things no one tells you before you get pregnant. With that in mind, here is my list of Things I Had No Idea the First Trimester of Pregnancy Would Bring:
*Overwhelming fatigue
*Boobs so sore, heavy and hot they feel like burning bags of sand attached to my chest
*Strong aversions to foods that seem innocuous -- like soup. I miss soup.
*The ability to sleep through the night -- this is actually wonderful, and I'm sure I will
miss it as it will never happen once the kid arrives
*Afternoon, evening and middle-of-the-night nausea. Mornings are all clear, though.
*Intense cravings for raw vegetables -- another good thing.
*The ability to yak in one's mouth but suffer through and feed the cats anyway
I'm sure I'll have more to add later. Feel free to add your own.