Semiotics of Pregnancy and Childbirth

I'm going to take a break from economy to talk about semiotics.

Imagine the following:  You are watching your favorite TV show.  One of the young female characters, one who the audience knows has been having (usually risky) sex, is seen alone with her head in a toilet.  And, immediately, the voice in your head says "Uh-oh, she's pregnant."

The first time I noticed this was while watching Grey's Anatomy,  but since then I've noticed this semiosis in many other films and shows.  It was even used in a History Channel show I was watching about primitive humans.  The female early human was shown vomiting into a stream as the narrator told us she was pregnant.

When I started thinking about the semiotic connection between vomiting and pregnancy, at first I got a little angry.  While many women I know have suffered from morning sickness while pregnant, I know just as many who never had any problems with it.  So it seems inaccurate to equate the two.  And when I thought further, I realized there was a bigger problem than that.

Nausea and vomiting are obviously an associative sign of pregnancy, or an index by Charles Peirce's terms.  However, if you asked women who have been pregnant the one thing that they associate most with their pregnancies few would bring up morning sickness. This association between pregnancy and vomiting seems to something from a male mind.

The representation of pregnancy and childbirth on the screen extends beyond this strange associative sign.  Other stereotypical representations include strange food cravings and the aforementioned mood swings, clearly more negative aspects while also being the issues most likely to affect nearby males.   And of course childbirth always happens too fast, while focusing mostly on the transition phase (i.e. the phase where the woman's emotions are the highest and she is most likely to yell at any men present).

A completely different aspect of the representation of pregnancy on the screen is the "actress is pregnant while the character isn't" issue.  In the later episodes of The Nanny actress Lauren Lane is expecting while her character C.C. is not.  At one point, C.C. talks about how silly it was on Seinfeld when Julia Louis-Dreyfus is pregnant, while her character is not, so they have her standing behind furniture or holding a bag.  C.C. ends the scene by commenting that "this fern needs water" picking up a plant, holding it over her own belly, and exiting.  This meta-televisual moment makes fun of this stupid practice.  The audience knows the actress is pregnant and knows they aren't supposed to know.  But we all also know that it's slightly ridiculous, since no one is fooled by delicately placed set pieces.

[The writers of The Nanny excuse Lane's extended absence from the show for the actual birth of her child and postpartum period by having her character literally go insane and be shipped off to a mental hospital.  While this makes some sense in the plot arc of the show, it does, whether intentional or not, relate childbirth to insanity.]

Lucille Ball might very well have set unrealistic standards for every pregnant actress that followed, organizing things so that the episode where her character gave birth was shown the night she actually gave birth by c-section.  Writers and producers have had a much harder time reconciling real life and the screen in almost every following incident.  [Further recent incidents can be seen on Desperate Housewives and How I Met Your Mother among many others]

The pregnant actress is partly a problem of embodiment.  How can a pregnant body embody a non-pregnant one?  But it's also a question of empowerment.  If you consider that most TV shows are created, written and directed by men, they don't quite know what to do with pregnancy.  So, they portray it from their limited knowledge, the things they remember about "nearby" pregnancies.  And their understanding of what childbirth was like for those around them.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons Little Ricky's birth was framed a bit differently, because Ball had some producing power for the show. I was so glad to finally see a somewhat realistic depiction of childbirth in recent remake of The Women.  Again, maybe this is because the film was both written and directed by a woman (Diane English) and the actress playing the woman in labor had recently given birth herself (Debra Messing).

Another possible influence might be remnants of the Hays Production Code which literally forbade depictions of childbirth.  As a result, childbirth is still considered somehow taboo; it takes awhile to bounce back from being included in a category with STDs, though I suppose childbirth and syphilis are both possible undesired consequences from sex. 

The next time you are watching a movie or a TV show that depicts a pregnant woman think about how you "know" or are "shown" that she is pregnant.  Are the associations positive or negative?  And, if you really want to challenge yourself, think about how all of these images and associations have colored your ideas of childbirth and pregnancy throughout your life.

November 7, 2010