Betsy Sullivan

Dr. Emily Hodgson Anderson

ENG 660

26 March 2015


Surrogation

The increase in fertility clinics and new ethical and technological approaches to family planning charges the word “surrogation” with images of expectant parents, test tube embryos, and wombs for rent.  Although this association between an “unnatural” or “technologically aided” birth with “surrogation” has only been linked since the late 1970s when embryo implantation was finally realized, I think this fluid notion of a familial structure serves us well when considering the occurrence of surrogates and surrogations on stage.   One of OED’s contextual examples listed for “the practice of surrogate motherhood” borrows a quote from a 1990 edition of the New Scientist: “the meaning of ‘mother,’ ‘father,’ and ‘family’ are ambiguous in the context of surrogacy” (OED).  While this sentence is laden with scare quotes and logical knots, this notion of ambiguity and fluidity within the structure of familial surrogacy echoes Joseph Roach’s definition of surrogation in Cities of the Dead.  Specifically, Roach notes that “in the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric” (Cities of the Dead 2).    When considering the etymology of surrogation alongside Roach’s definition, surrogacy is laced with the idea that bodies are interchangeable and are merely deployed to complete these binding contracts.  Once used, or written upon, the bodies that have served as proxy to reach a means to an end are rendered inconsequential. In the words of Roach, “surrogation rarely if ever succeeds” (2).

However, fraught with the notion of bodies as stepping in for one another, the trajectory of the words surrogation and surrogate have grown increasingly tied to human emotions.   The etymology of “surrogation” is fairly straight forward, defined as either an official proxy, as in the “appointment of a person to some office in place of another,” or a substitution or “subrogation” (OED). However, by turning our attention to the root word  “surrogate,” we gain more traction to pull apart the word’s evolution from a legally binding contract to an emotionally binding one.  The meanings of “surrogate” soar over time from “a person appointed by authority to act in place of another deputy,” to “one who grants licenses to marry without banns”; from “a judge having jurisdiction over the probate of wills and settlement of estates of deceased persons” to a “surrogate partner in sex therapy” (which is a concept, I’d like to note, that seems to have both emerged and fizzled out in the 1970s); from “a woman whose pregnancy arises from the implantation in her womb of a fertilized egg or embryo from another woman” to a “substitute intended to fulfill the emotional needs of a person” (OED). Marriage, inheritance, sexual intercourse, pregnancy… all of these are relational agreements that depend on at least two bodies being present, oftentimes (and hopefully) brought together both consensually and under the auspice of love.  Yet even without love or consent (and using the definitions as a guide, these terms do not include violent or forcible acts, such as rape), I would argue that each of these examples implies a contractual obligation that is written on the body performing the act.   Additionally, barring the last entry describing an emotional proxy (which I’ll return to later), each of these entries for “surrogate” imply an objective distance from the relational interactions inherent in each of these acts, much like Leontes’ inspection of the “statue” of Hermoine at the close of A Winter’s Tale.  Or perhaps, as Kenneth Gross asserts in “Resisting Pygmalion,” what is emphasized is  “how much is weirdly reduced or strangely literalized in Shakespeare’s initial emphasis on the mimetic magic of the statue” (101).  Likewise, a “mimetic magic” seems to be entangled in the varied meanings of surrogate and surrogation, as the overall concept of the term connotes a fleeting proxy to bind others.

But what of the mimetic magic that incites our emotional centers?  The final entry listed for “surrogate” defines the term as one who “fulfill[s] the emotional needs of a person” (OED).   Is that, too, in the realm of objective distance when we speak of surrogations?  Or, in the example given by Herbert Blau in his Proustian essay of memory, is emotional surrogation like his mother’s affinity for garish makeup, the effect of which points to the substitutive nature of the makeup itself?  In other words, is it even possible to provide emotional proxy for another human?   Returning again to Roach’s definition of surrogation in Cities of the Dead, the inclusion of emotional proxies in the definition of surrogate resonates with Roach’s nod to the uncanny nature of surrogation, which, I quote, “tends to disturb the complacency of all thoughtful incumbents, [and] may provoke many unbidden emotions, ranging from mildly incontinent sentimentalism to raging paranoia ” (2).   Like the evolution of the word “surrogate,” Roach’s definition of surrogation considers the emotional reverberations that might arise when one attempts to serve as proxy, to fill the vacancies, to step into a place of mimetic magic.  As Roach asserts in his article, ‘“Unpath’d waters, undream’d shores,’” it is precisely this threat of mimetic magic that inspires such rage and jealousy in Leontes at the onset of A Winter’s Tale:  “what is enacted here, in the astonishing compression of Shakespearean stagecraft, is a fundamental tension present in any explicit or implicit surrogation: not the fear of difference, per se, but the fear that difference will stop being itself and become sameness — identity” (123).  Roach here points to the anxiety that worries the edges of surrogation: what happens when proxy and original collapse into one?  What should be the resolution in the case of surrogate parenthoods that go awry?  Who is the rightful mother?  Is it the woman who carries the child?  Who provides the egg?  Or is it the woman who promises to give the most love to the child?  While it’s perhaps a pessimistic viewpoint, Roach’s notion that “surrogation rarely if ever succeeds” seems a realistic one, not only for matters taking place on-stage, but also in the legal contracts that bind surrogate families.  Surrogation, while at most basic is a term for the fluid nature of proxies, is ultimately fraught with the threat of what happens when separate entities become one, and when what has been written on the body in a legal contract cannot be erased. 

Works Cited

Blau, Herbert.  “The Makeup of Memory in the Winter of Our Discontent.” The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern.  Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press, 1987. 135-159. Press.
 

Gross, Kenneth.  “Resisting Pygmalion.”  The Dream of the Moving Statue.  University Park,    

            PA:  The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. 99-109. Print.

Roach, Joseph.  Cities of the Dead.  New York:  Columbia University Press, 1996. 2-3. Print. 

Roach, Joseph.  “’Unpath’d waters, undream’d shores’: Herbert Blau, Performing Doubles,

and the Makeup of Memory in The Winter’s Tale.”  Modern Language Quarterly (70:1) 2009, 117-31. Print.

“surrogate, n and adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, 2015.  Web. 18 March 2015.

“surrogation, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, 2015.  Web. 18 March 2015.

     

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