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Business News/ Opinion / Blogs/  BETWEEN THE LINES: How many children?
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BETWEEN THE LINES: How many children?

Can a survey of creativity and its effect on parenting be complete without taking male writers into account?

Alice Walker. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/AFP Premium
Alice Walker. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/AFP

In 1932, renowned Shakespeare scholar L.C. Knights, managed to raise a storm in the proverbial teacup by asking a somewhat facetious question: “How many children had Lady Macbeth?" Since then, scores of pages have been spent on debating not just the answer to this query but also how the fact of being, or not being, a mother throws light on Lady Macbeth’s character and, by extension, on the horrors that befall her and her husband. That a fictional character could inspire so much speculation, and arouse such curiosity among readers, is proof enough of the play’s greatness. But bringing a similar inquisitiveness to bear upon the lives of real people may not always be a useful exercise—unless the pitch of the enquiry is complicated.

Recently, Lauren Sandler wrote an essay in The Atlantic wondering whether having more than one child is inimical to creativity in women writers. Taking off from a remark by Alice Walker—that it is best for women artists to stick to having one child, since that’s a condition far more amenable to creativity than having to mother multiple offspring—Sandler goes on to survey how women writers with one son or daughter (Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick, to name some) have fared as parents. As it happens, in spite of being mother to only one daughter, Walker did not have an enviable track record as a parent, though she did come off better as a writer.

As expected, writers who are mothers to two or more children have hit back, among them Zadie Smith and Jane Smiley, the former pointedly mentioning that Dickens had nearly half a dozen children, though that did not seem to interfere with his output and recognition as a genius. “Did anyone for one moment worry that those men were becoming too fatherish to be writeresque?" Smith asks trenchantly in response to Sandler’s article.

The decision to be a parent is an intensely personal one. Further, there is no logical correlation among the number of children one chooses to have, one’s success as a parent, and as a professional. As Smith points out, writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Nicole Krauss, Nikita Lalwani and Toni Morrison are mother to multiple children—but their motherhood has not affected the quality of their writing. Although the creative life does require evolved skills of self-preservation, especially since it involves ensuring clear windows of writing time, it does not necessarily preclude the possibility of having a full and rich personal life along the way. Smith’s annoyance is triggered, partly, by the fact that Sandler’s article does not engage with this larger truth.

But her rebuttal, using Dickens as an example, gets to the heart of what is fundamentally problematic about Sandler’s line of inquiry. It is more than likely that worries about Dickens becoming too “fatherish" and less “writeresque" did not arise because, as a 19th patriarch, he could relegate the entire responsibility of raising his children to his poor wife, who he did not treat very kindly anyway, as he got on with his career. More than two hundred years later when the ambit of parenting has widened not only to include both genders but also same-sex couples, Sandler’s exclusive focus on women writers seems gratuitously provocative, if not warped. It would be infinitely more interesting, if not refreshing, to explore how writers fared as fathers instead of taking their shortcomings as a given and excusing those as being part of their privilege of being male. That such gendered assumptions continue to be perpetuated, even in the supposedly enlightened West, is more worrisome than the future of the creative life.

This fortnightly column, which appears on Fridays, talks about readers, writers and publishers of the past, present and future.

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Published: 14 Jun 2013, 07:28 PM IST
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