Unnatural Birth

In keeping with my peculiar fascination with all things disturbing, I’ve found myself particularly interested in the past weeks in the birth scene in The Handmaid’s Tale. I found it very distressing to read, and it reminded of another birth: that which takes place in the classic 1979 horror film Alien. The way each narrative sets out displaying this most natural act in its own perverse way speaks to me of a link worth analyzing.

In Alien, the “birth” is preceded by an unknown organism attacking Kane, a crew member on the spaceship Nostromo, and attaching itself to his face. Later, after apparently recovering, Kane is killed when the alien’s offspring violently bursts forth from his chest. In The Handmaid’s Tale, a woman, Janine, gives birth as a surrogate mother to the child of another woman’s husband. The birth involves a ceremony wherein all the other handmaids (would-be surrogates) surround Janine, chanting birthing instructions, and revel vicariously in Janine’s success. These scenes are meant to be unsettling, and it is this paper’s purpose to compare them and discern how each attempts to disturb its audience.

In both narratives, the action of giving birth is removed from the concept of parenthood – that is, although a child is produced in each scenario, that child is not “for” the biological parent. In Alien, the “birth” is certainly against the host’s will, and any kinship that Kane has with his murderous, monstrous offspring is strictly biological. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Janine is giving birth, a role assigned to her involuntarily, on behalf of her Wife and Commander, also assigned. In both births, the child is alien to its parent, and the emotional bond that is traditionally expected between the two is not merely lacking, but cruelly twisted to the point of being frightening. The sense is that each has undergone the very personal and painful experience of birth (or its approximation) and been denied the resulting child.

Each scene also undoes gender. One crucial aspect of the Alien birth is the attack on maleness. The alien “facehugger” bursting onto Kane’s face is an act of rape – unconventional and alien, but rape. The worse attack, though, comes with the actual birth, where the notion of maleness itself is in question. The male body does not naturally give birth, and forcing it to do so is an attack on Kane’s identity, both as a male and as an individual. The appropriation of Janine’s gender for the sake of producing a child is similar. As the book’s protagonist, Offred, says: “we are two-legged wombs, that’s all” (136). The women’s identity as gendered beings is lost, and only their sex remains. Both Kane and Janine are instruments of reproduction, and nothing more.

Another similarity between the two stories is the idea of birth as self-obliteration for the parent. While the graphic destruction of Kane’s body by his alien spawn demonstrates this overtly, Janine’s experience is more subtle. By producing a baby for the Commander and Wife, and under the coercive circumstances that Gilead imposes on Handmaids, she too is subjected to self-obliteration, acknowledging that she only exists to produce a child. Janine’s society demands that she be a “worthy vessel” (65) and is otherwise uninterested in her. When the body is thought of as simply an empty shell sacrificed for the sake of the child it produces, the births are quite similar experiences. A mother dying in childbirth appears frequently in literature, but in these stories, the very nature of the child ensures the destruction, figurative or literal, of the parent, and thus makes the experience all the more horrifying.

It is important to mention that the self-sacrifice for the sake of the child is only voluntary for Janine. Kane has no choice whatsoever as regards his spawn – he doesn’t even get any warning – and experiences death as a result of the birth. Janine’s experience is different because although she is sacrificing her identity, she is doing so for the sake of saving her own life. Both scenarios are unsettling: Kane is helplessly bound to his horrific and lethal birthing, while Janine must either participate in a perverse system or undergo untold tortures and eventual death.

One last distinction between the two scenes is the notion of how society perceives the births in question. For Alien, the birth is wholly outside of what its witnesses expect; it is brutal and surprising, and the crew reacts with the same fear that is expected of the audience. In contrast, the society of Gilead is constructed around giving birth. The handmaids witnessing the birth are exhilarated because the event represents their shared success; Offred says “it’s a victory, for all of us” (127). The event at once celebrates their collective hope and validates the society they are afraid of. In Alien, all the natural aspects of birth are questioned; in Handmaid, all its social and emotional aspects are warped.

In sum, each story presents a birth scene that is violent and unnatural. Alien offers a complete breakdown of biological conceptions of birth, and places the birthing individual in a very physically vulnerable position. Meanwhile, The Handmaid’s Tale shows a society where the birth mother is not only deprived of all agency and individuality but is implicated in and feels responsible for that deprivation. The births are new life at the expense of old life, and it is left to the audience to discern whether the individual’s helplessness or complicity is more horrifying.

Works Referenced

Alien. Ridley Scott, director. Gordon Carrol, David Giler, Walter Hill, producers. Dan      O’Bannon, Ronald Shusset, writers. DVD. 20^th Century Fox, 2004.

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Random House, Inc., 1986.

And, because I can’t resist, a comic.