Writing in line with Cixous’s demands, Magalleque also uses these revelations to help understand her life, deftly moving the reader between her distant past and her present, personal encounters with desire, miscarriage, birth, ambition. She describes her grandmother’s cooking and self-deception, reconstructing the violence of her own labor and delivery. Much of the world his female sources describe is recognizable to him today: caring for and feeding children, sleeplessness, work, hunger, death.
But there are also witchcraft trials, bad science, and bloodshed. It was widely thought that a pregnant woman’s lust, even her emotions, could destroy her fetus for life. Expectant mothers were instructed to place their hands on their buttocks when craving a specific fruit or meat “so that the birthmark would move to an unknown location on the baby’s body.” And German city councils forced beggars to hide their disease-stricken limbs so they wouldn’t startle pregnant women passing by. The “insensitive” desire felt by teenage girls was called “greensickness,” she writes. “The disease of ripening without going anywhere.”
Of course, in attempting to reconstruct and honor the women’s lives and bodies, from their bones and stomachs to their breasts and blood, Magleck must confront the limitations of this “fragmented archive.” She cannot quote women who lacked the tools to write about their experiences, nor quote women whose accounts were thrown out or lost. She cannot bring forth the confessions of persons who consider their feelings and desires so taboo that even their names are forbidden.
“Presence” does not suffer from that deficiency. Magaleck makes the most of her material, and the glaring absence of some voices only underlines her larger argument about how much history remains unknown to us. But reading about aspects of her own autobiography, I felt the same pull she must have felt in her research: I wanted more. She details the end of relationships. The nature of her postpartum haze. Description of their understanding of motherhood and work.
Maybe I don’t deserve to know. Like those pre-modern women who wrote in riddles and allegories of their thrilling dreams and illicit fantasies, Magleck also keeps her reader at a distance. But who can blame those of us who, faced with scraps, keep turning the pages in search of revelations?
appearance: : A hidden history of the female body | By Erin Magalek | Astra House | 310 pp. | $30
