Heh, I remember last year complaining to my directing prof that Western art doesn't treat the experience of birth (not just motherhood, but birth, which after all everybody has to go through) and then the next day I saw a play called Debris, which included a long sequence of a woman miming how she came through the birth canal as a baby (actually, it was a good play and an excellent production). And then I heard a ghastly song on the radio with a man celebrating the fact that "She's having my baaaaby", so I thought maybe things were changing. And then I forgot all about it till I read your post, but it made me laugh because it reminded me of how indignant I was when I first noticed it.
Still and all, I think the absence of mothers and babies in SF is a genre thing, because the adventure aspect demands a that (a) you don't have your parents tagging along being sensible and making sure you wear wollen undies and have a clean pocket handkerchief and (b) babies are frightfully inconvenient if you're being chased or menaced (I've never forgotten that episode of MASH where a busful of passengers is hiding from the North Koreans and a baby starts to cry and the mother has to hold her hand so long over its mouth that it suffocates).
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branchandroot
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Date: 2007-05-10 05:18 am (UTC)Still and all, I think the absence of mothers and babies in SF is a genre thing, because the adventure aspect demands a that (a) you don't have your parents tagging along being sensible and making sure you wear wollen undies and have a clean pocket handkerchief and (b) babies are frightfully inconvenient if you're being chased or menaced (I've never forgotten that episode of MASH where a busful of passengers is hiding from the North Koreans and a baby starts to cry and the mother has to hold her hand so long over its mouth that it suffocates).