Why do we read anything? I can’t really answer that question. I don’t know why you are reading this and not something else, or why the other day I finally read Montaigne’s essay on thumbs, which had been recommended to me months ago. But I do know that we tell teen-agers to read “Romeo and Juliet” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” direct new medical students to “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” send someone who has lost a spouse a copy of C. S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed,” and give newlyweds Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift from the Sea.” Certain books are associated with certain ages, others with certain life events. I suppose what we read is shaped by geography, too—so much so that we pick up Joan Didion or Wallace Stegner if we are headed West, and copies of Jesmyn Ward or William Faulkner if we are headed South.
I’ve been thinking about why we read what we do because I am pregnant, and women who are expecting a child are told to read a great many things. The recommended reading ranges from books by the pediatrician Dr. Karp and the economist Emily Oster to the advice columns of Miss Manners and the birth stories of the midwife Ina May Gaskin. All that is to say nothing of the wilderness of Web sites that will track your baby’s size relative to various foods, from grape to mango to cauliflower; help you pick a first name or middle name or a pediatrician; tell you how to sleep and how not to be so sleepy.
I am sure there is wisdom to be found in all of these, but mostly I have been reading the Old Testament. I started reading it because I was auditing a course in which, every week, we made our way through a few chapters or a whole book, and, although I have read it before, I have been struck this time around by how certain stories seem more precious to me now than in the past. It’s not that the Old Testament hasn’t been meaningful and challenging to me every time I have encountered it. When I was a child, barely aware that time and history were older than my parents, I was drawn to the stories of David slaying Goliath and Ezekiel’s vision of the fiery chariot and Jacob wrestling the angel. Then came death, and the promises of Isaiah were suddenly very important to me; when I started to think more about language and poetry, the Psalms became dear companions. But it is the mothers—Eve, Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Hannah, Rachel, Tamar, Bathsheba, Ruth—whose stories are so moving to me now.
Of course they are. These stories are not obscure, and yet predictably, perhaps even pathetically, they have become more interesting to me all of a sudden, and I have found myself taking note of all the different experiences of pregnancy and parenting in the Old Testament: women punished with pain; others rewarded with children after decades of being unable to conceive; a few grieved by the loss of their children, or whole generations of women brought together by the murder of their firstborns or by the salvation of their families; daughters and strangers who become pregnant through incest or rape; mothers who favor one child over another, or adopt the children of other women.
I don’t know why in the past these stories read to me like metaphors, but they did. The matriarchs were just that: mothers of nations and peoples, not mothers who had lived through months of actual, embodied pregnancy—the same as my mother had experienced in order to give birth to me. Ishmael and Isaac were the means to the generations, the first acts of multiplication on the way to the multitudes, not living, breathing boys whom Hagar and Sarah carried to term; Jacob and Esau were real brothers, but their warring in the womb had always seemed figurative, not the literal hustle and bustle of two babies inside of Rebekah. Now, though, I cannot help but imagine these Biblical women with their growing bellies, achy backs, and swollen ankles, feeling the stirring of tiny limbs as they gain strength, delighting in the awareness that every day dependence becomes something closer to independence. And I can’t help but experience a kind of awed sympathy for the likes of Sarah, who had her baby in her nineties; so much for our own modest notions of advanced maternal age.
I have read over and over again Hannah’s song, which, like the Magnificat, celebrates the birth of a son—a prayer of personal thanksgiving that is also a statement of collective wisdom. “My heart exults in the Lord,” Hannah says, after the birth of her son Samuel, “my strength is exalted in my God.” I don’t even care that the notes in my study Bible indicate that this poem in the First Book of Samuel likely did not originate with the story of this particular mother and this particular son, because what moves me is the shared hope that God pays attention to our lives—not just their endings but also their beginnings. “The Lord killeth, and maketh alive,” Hannah says, after leaving her baby boy to be raised by the priest Eli. “He bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up.”
Reading these verses, I think of something that the teacher of this course, the novelist Marilynne Robinson, said to us: Biblical history so often depends on the birth of a baby. She pointed this out while discussing Exodus, a story that, like so many others in the Old Testament, I had previously read in a narrow way, as the narrative of a single hero who saves his people. I had barely noticed the series of mothers and motherly figures who must first act heroically in order for Moses to accomplish all that he does: the Egyptian midwives Shiphrah and Puah, who protect all of the Hebrew boys from Pharaoh’s genocide; Jochebed, who carries her son in the ark of her body and then makes him another so that he can float away on the Nile River and survive; Miriam, who watches over her brother and arranges for their mother to become his wet nurse; and Pharaoh’s daughter, who raises him.
Robinson observed that all these women make individual, often dangerous decisions to protect and nurture a baby, seemingly without the appearance of divine will shaping their actions. Theirs can seem like almost secular stories of childbirth and parenting, strikingly different from most others in the text, where characters have visions or hear voices that reveal God’s will to them. But these women know God’s plan for Moses without ever being told of it directly, a beautiful kind of knowledge connecting God with the care of children. Even Jochebed’s theophoric name conveys this intimate connection—יוֹכֶבֶד, meaning “God is glory.” I love these early chapters of Exodus because, through details large and small, they emphasize how every patriarch was once just a tiny, fragile baby in his mother’s womb.
Irealize that this is not the only, or even the most desirable, way of reading Scripture—or anything else, for that matter. Solipsism is not a literary theory, but reader response is: the idea that a text’s meaning comes from our personal interactions with it. This notion is hardly new. Postwar critics such as Roland Barthes, Louise Rosenblatt, Stanley Fish, and Wayne Booth all advocated for various versions of reader response, arguing that individuals and communities make meaning through their subjective interpretations of literature, rather than literary works having intrinsic meaning of their own. More recently, though, this theory has fallen out of favor, for understandable reasons. In its most naïve incarnations, readers assess characters based on likability, as if they were real people; in its most insidious, they judge books based on the extent to which their own personal morals or politics are depicted in the plot, as if it consisted of real events. The potential tediousness of reader response is why so many other schools of criticism reject it, arguing instead that works of art are creations of artists, not audiences, and products of their own eras, not ours, or that objective, formal aspects of artistic achievement, not subjective feelings, should be the tools of criticism.
This is the sort of formal criticism that I was taught: an appreciation of art not for how closely it resembled my life or reflected my politics but for its beauty and complexity. Rather than reduce literature to ideology or punish ethical ambiguity, most of my teachers elevated aesthetic achievement, or situated art according to its author’s intentions or its historical context. But one sometimes unlearns as much as one learns, and I was humbled to settle so easily into reader response after I got pregnant. Although it may be instrumental, this way of reading is undeniably intuitive. Even in the supposedly patriarchal texts of the law, the prophets, and the wisdom literature, I found myself noticing the stories of pregnancy and the language of figurative and literal parenthood, drawn to the lives of the mothers I had previously overlooked.
I suspect that, whatever schools of literary criticism might recommend, most of us notice ourselves in the pages of whatever we read, identifying with characters because of how their personalities or circumstances resemble our own, whether starkly or obliquely. The newly divorced are drawn to narratives of divorce, the newly relocated to tales of fresh starts and reinvention, the newly diagnosed to stories of survival or palliative care. This explains not only the whole genre of self-help but also the concept of bibliotherapy, wherein librarians or health practitioners help match readers with relevant texts or readers themselves self-select texts of interest, seeking literary remedies for whatever ails them, using books as a kind of treatment or supplemental cure for everything from depression to menopause.
But strong reflections can come from shallow waters, and characters with no deep resemblance to us can still be meaningful to our lives. The distinction between “me” and “not me” is often facile: ancient stories can continue to grip contemporary readers; a young man can find his fears of mortality articulated most convincingly by an elderly woman; narratives from one culture can become quite central to another; a middle-aged woman can be inspired by the adventures of a teen-age wizard. And, although I have lately become interested in the pregnant women of the Old Testament, I know enough to know how little I have in common with any of these Biblical women; I am grateful every day for how much modern medicine has changed the experience of conceiving and carrying a child.
Moreover, I also know how much the text already meant to me, even as a child. Great works of art can change their meaning for us across time. Books may remain static, but we do not, and plenty of memoirs take pleasure in documenting how a single book can be a companion through many different phases of adolescence and adulthood. That’s not to say that there’s a right time to read something, rather that books can mean different things to the same reader at different ages, or be more meaningful at certain moments in life than others. That is why reading “Revolutionary Road” in your twenties before you’re married is so different from reading it in your forties after you are, and why last year saw such a huge surge in the popularity of plague books by Boccaccio, Defoe, and Camus. It is also why I was so heartened this spring to notice that the first annunciation in the Old Testament is addressed to a frightened mother: “Behold, thou art with child,” an angel tells Hagar, delivering a prophecy almost identical to the one given to Abraham by God, blessing her pregnancy and promising future generations.
If we are lucky, we live long enough to value stories unlike ours, and also to see our own lives change in ways that make them more like the lives of others. We become for others what others once were for us, as children become parents, strangers become neighbors, the young become old, this generation becomes the next. This is perhaps even more humbling than realizing that, like so many others, we see ourselves in literature; even in our wild and wonderful specificity, we are not so unlike most of humanity. Our first love may seem more tender and true than any before, our pain more searing, our wedding more moving, our grief deeper and more disorienting, our children more precious, but that is how everyone else feels, too, and has felt since feeling began. What is most miraculous and meaningful in our lives is often most universal, powerful because it has happened to so many others, precious because it is happening to us.
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