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Caroline Rupprecht’s Womb Fantasies has the virtue of looking at major avant-garde writers, film-makers, artists, and designers from a feminist psychoanalytic point of view at a time when not only psychoanalysis but avant-garde literature and art have undergone a sort of purge in higher education. Rupprecht is concerned with the decades following 1945 in France and Germany and examines the consequences of historical trauma. Under consideration are literary works by Marguerite Duras, Alexander Kluge, Uwe Johnson, and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as a sculpture by Damien Hirst, Virgin Mother, that “shows that, in the new millennium, the womb has ceased to be an imaginary space” (p. xiv). The discussion of Hirst is contrasted with Rupprecht’s opening section on Eero Saarinen’s famous Womb Chair of 1951, whose popular adoption suggests that, by the mid-twentieth century, the womb was quite active as positive imaginary space. Anchoring the self in space, seeking shelter and containment in confronting the passage of time, dwelling in imaginary and mythical places, and “engendering creativity by appropriating the female body’s otherness” are of central concern to Rupprecht.
To get a sense of Rupprecht’s conceptual approach, it is useful to outline what one could take to be normative womb fantasies. For example, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is a classic in British children’s literature that depicts a closed-off regenerative space presided over by the spirits of twin sisters whose children (cousins) – one mentally abused, the other physically ill – find their way back to this forbidden, beautiful space where in time they are restored to health. Burnett’s garden is clearly a psycho-sexual figure that has to be penetrated (a key has to be found to open it), fertilized botanically, and cared for. It is pregnant with the children who, in their clandestine visits, live in a state of blissful suspension close to nature until they are “reborn.” The womb as retreat is norm