Here’s an old story, often told. In Book 6 of the Iliad, Hector – dressed splendidly in bronze armour and a helmet with a horsehair crest – bids farewell to his wife Andromache. She begs him not to return to battle and hands him their newborn son. Hector raises the boy into the air, says a short prayer, and hands him back. ‘Go home, attend to your own handiwork / at loom and spindle,’ he commands, in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: ‘As for the war, / that is for men.’
Hector is a father in the heroic mode, and his parenting style has long been irresistible to artists and writers. Few were shocked when the painter Paul Gauguin left his wife and five children in Denmark to pursue fame and art in Paris, then Tahiti. Such distance, they say, is good for a child. ‘The father, from his distance, supports, protects, nourishes his child,’ wrote D H Lawrence in 1922: ‘and it is ultimately on the remote but powerful father-love that the infant rests.’ Distance is equally necessary for the father who seeks to make art. ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,’ wrote Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise (1938).
This is a deeply self-serving story, of course. It’s nice for the male poet not to have to change diapers. But the argument that unsullied privacy is essential to creativity is tenacious. It surfaces when Virginia Woolf writes that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ Contemporary feminists have continued to respond to this archetype of generativity. In Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation (2014), for example, the narrator vows never to marry but to become ‘an art monster instead’.
But what if domesticity – and specifically parenthood – is in fact generative for artists? What if the cliché of solitary male creativity got it wrong? We may begin with one nursing poet. In his poem ‘Frost at Midnight’, written in the winter of 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge pictures himself at home in his cottage on a frosty night. The owls cry outside and the frost rings the trees and he is alone, ‘save that at my side / My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.’ He addresses his infant son:
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
He is transported to memories of his own childhood, and then his hopes for his son’s future.
‘Frost at Midnight’ is a poem about caring, in both senses of the word: caring for and caring about. As such, it is a surprising poem about domestic labour, which has invited comment from scholars. ‘What is truly radical about “Frost at Midnight” is Coleridge’s self-representation as a father in the traditional maternal posture of watching over a sleeping baby,’ notes Jonathan Bate.
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