Anaïs Nin’s short story “Birth” is a part of a larger work titled Under a Glass Bell, and Other Stories, which, ultimately, relates back to The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin. In this version of Nin’s Diary, in the volume labeled Incest, Nin goes into detail about the horrors of delivering a stillborn child, the father of whom is never clearly stated. In the introduction to Nin in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, it states that Nin intended to “capture the living moments of her emotional reactions to experience” (588), and she is more than successful in doing so within this short piece through language and imagery. More specifically, by utilizing the contrasting images of both fire and ice throughout the story, Nin has successfully captured the contradictory emotions of a woman who both loves and hates the thing she has created.
Upon first reading of this story, I could not help but be reminded of Robert Frost’s short poem, “Fire and Ice”:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
On the literal level, Frost speaks of the destruction of the world but he also uses the symbols of fire and ice as symbols for the human emotions of passion and hate, respectively. Though Nin is not speaking about the end of the entire world, she does speak about the potential ending of one life and does so through a similar motif as Frost. The “ice” of the story is presented through the doctor and the two nurses; The speaker states that “A few hours before he adored me, served me. Now he was angry” (588). The doctor progressively gets more and more angry at both the situation and the speaker because of how long the whole process is taking and the nurses are shown to have a sort of cold indifference to the speaker’s pain, speaking about their own personal experiences with birth as the speaker appears to lay dying on the table in pain. The “fire” in the story comes from within the speaker and is emphasized through both her passionate feelings for the fetus and her intense physical pain.
In the beginning of the story, the speaker is conflicted: she says she is afraid of the “child”, the “dead fragment” of herself, being “out in the cold” (588), as if it were a stray dog caught in the rain, despite the fact that it is killing her. However, this sympathy for the fetus is later transformed as the “child” itself transforms into a “demon strangling me” (590). The speaker herself also goes through a transformation as her hopelessness turns into primal determination. After four hours into labor, the nurses inject the speaker with a shot in order to induce labor, and the speaker says “the ice and the blue that was all around came into my veins” (589). She becomes overwhelmed with hopelessness, being unable to remember why she is fighting so hard for something that has already ended. It isn’t until the doctor physically harms her that “the heat of my anger warms me, all the ice and pain are melted in the fury” (590) and she is reminded that she is the reason to fight against the child and the death it brings with it. The speaker says that “inside of my body there are fires” (590) which is the only time she refers to there being multiple fires. The things burning are most likely all of the speaker’s struggles “with my child and with the meaning I put into it, with my desire to give and to hold, to keep and to lose, to live and to die” (590). As these things burn as if they were a sacrifice for the speaker’s “savage” ritual of the drumming against her stomach, which ultimately leads to the expulsion of the fetus. By “burning” or letting go of all connection to the fetus, and turning it into the inhuman creature of the demon, the speaker is finally able to physically let go. However, the story ends with the speaker seeing the dead fetus and she calls it “a little girl” (591), returning to it it’s human qualities. The story then ends with the description of the fetus “glistening with the waters of the womb” (591). It is interesting that Nin chose to use “waters” here as water is the melted form of ice and also the element most commonly used to put out fires. This is playing with the idea that the womb is the only place in which one is safe from the fire and ice of the world, yet this fetus was unable to be protected even there, either through abortion or natural causes.
The fire and ice imagery throughout this story not only helps to emphasize the contradictory emotions that the speaker is feeling towards the entire situation, but also it emphasizes the morbid contradiction of giving “birth” to a dead child. Throughout this entire essay, I was tempted to call the speaker “the mother” at multiple instances. This brings forth the huge question: what is motherhood? Can it be defined so easily as having a child? Even though the speaker’s fetus never fully developed into a living, breathing child, she was pregnant with it for six entire months and it appears as though she developed an unspoken maternal bond. Nin is not so much questioning the validity of the speaker’s emotions through the fire and ice motif, but more that she is questioning the ability to continue with life after the ice has melted and the fires have been put out, when an act of life brings forth nothing but death.
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