Epilogue: Milk Fever

MILK FEVER

Metallic threads the colour of the moon stretch across her soft stomach and thighs. Her breasts full with milk hang from her chest like two teardrops. A gentle itching spreads across her surface, a fire in her chest like molten rock beneath earth’s crust. No matrilineal knowledge of rosemary tea, dandelion poultice, or cold cabbage leaves to press to skin. Without balm of honey and beeswax to salve, nipples crack and break. Milk and blood. With a body ripe to nourish and a swollen belly now filled again, her reflection evokes a stranger. Sugary smell on neck and mouth, her odour belongs to someone else. She grows beyond her flesh, her body spilling from her skin. Veins bulge thick as earthworms from her calves and feet. A stifling heat wraps itself around her body. ‘A feminine inferno.’90 Her eyes are shards of glass slicing blue iris. White foam rushes to lick her ankles, disintegrating the ground beneath her. She swallows her tongue and peels off her skin. Layer by layer, cell by cell, she melts into oceanic white noise.

When my great grandmother was in her late twenties she was admitted to an asylum after the birth of her third child. Her postnatal depression mutated into psychosis and there she remained for forty years until her death. Milk fever, as it was called, was thought to be the psychic manifestations of congealed milk within the ducts. The stagnant fluid infected the blood and fevered the brain. A madness of the body.

Milk fever ferments in my mouth. I would spit it out but language fails. Too rich (full fat) to write.

I try to give this familial story form. A stack of blank pages inscribed with invisible ink are lodged in my tissue. I taste words like Mother, sour, milk thistle, black milk, milk teeth, voodoo, Lakshmi, milky way.

Milk Fever haunts this writing.

At the inception of this paper I tested a milky lyric essay that would work through the matrilineal tale and trauma of milk fever, as a means of distilling the essence of the lactic liquescent body. After jamming my fingers into my computer keyboard for a couple of days, I shelved the idea. Each sentence fell flat, bland and without energy. I felt my words were ill equipped to speak to the thick folds and deep crevices of this story. I followed a different trajectory, with research initially focussing on formlessness, shapeshifting and metamorphosis. This in turn led me to water, body fluids and fluid bodies, and what is essentially the prima materia of this writing. Incredibly, these two works, Writing the Fluid Body and Milk Fever were entirely separate from one another in my mind’s eye. But now, clear as day, they are the same story. Milk fever seeps between my words and circles me back to the beginning, to the origin. It encompasses so much of what I have been trying to articulate about bodies, fluids and pathology. Milk fever embodies the weight of feminine corporeality and liquidity.

I ask my grandmother to send me a photo of Mona, my great-grandmother. I’m unsure if I have ever seen an image of her. She pulls one from the loft and shares it with me. Mona sits on the edge of a floral armchair, wearing a bright orange cardigan. She sucks on a cigarette looking to camera, there is a halo of crepe paper resting on her short brown hair. It was taken on her last ever christmas. She was sixty-five. When Mona was sectioned and admitted to Morpeth Lunatic Asylum my grandmother was four years old. She was passed around within the family until going to live in a convent aged seven. We speak candidly of this over video call. ‘It’s very easy to become institutionalised’ she reminds me. She tells me about her garden and how it’s growing wildly. She reminds me that I was a difficult teenager.

Milk fever stains my maternal lineage. A layered and complex illness and family history boiled down to two short and mild words. Milk fever with a hysterical after taste.

Mona’s breakdown was greased by the hands of her husband Frank. ‘A sadist’ according to my grandmother. She tells me that each time Mona would make progress and return home, within six months she would find herself back inside the hospital. It feels odd to hear my grandmother speaking of her mother. Grandmothers seem motherless. ‘My mother’ she says ‘was flighty and nervous.’ Mona was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with electric shock therapy from which she never recovered. My grandmother considers this an unauthorised experimentation at the hands of the hospital. ‘She was never the same again’ she affirms.

When I search the term ‘milk fever’ into Google only papers on dairy cows result. Wikipedia explains that calcium demands on the bovine body exceeds its capacity, causing hypersensitivity, restlessness, twitching, bloating, flaccid muscles, and lowered a heart rate.91 My only solid fragment of evidence that proves milk fever in human women existed beyond word of mouth and my grandmothers memories, is a poetry anthology entitled Milk Fever by contemporary writer Megan Ross, which chronicles the agonies and ecstasies of young motherhood. It’s blurb reads ‘hallucinatory, imagewet, and navigating the eternal tides of spirit and body.’92

To make work, textual or otherwise, that responds to milk fever, a deep dive into the lactic history of gendered madness and the pathology of female bodies and fluids should be undertaken. At the late and blind-sighting realisation that the story I was writing was a mirror image of Milk Fever, I felt it urgent not to force Milk Fever into one chapter. Instead this section lays out some preliminary thoughts on how I might approach my next area of research. Milk Fever is the expansive white space full of potentiality for a body of work.

If I was to create Milk Fever in whatever form it may assume, I would include an analysis of my five year old subconscious when I dreamed of sour milk just before my brother’s birth. I would consider the significance of my mother saving my milk teeth in a box on the windowsill next to my brother’s shrivelled up umbilical cord stump. Using medical, mythological, folkloric and matrilineal knowledge, as well as academic, theoretical, feminist and queer observations, I would explore breast milk as pathological substance, root of psychosis and fluid of feminine deviance. Writing the fluid body has endowed me with clarity to see the fecund potential of milk fever, in addition to stretching my ability to interrogate and articulate the epicentre of my area of interest.

Quick to spoil, milk is a potent fluid of duality. It ‘flows between purity and abjection,’93 nourishment and contamination. Milk shifts in significance and solidity. Vital, intimate, abject, poisonous, as it streams, curdles, dries, congeals. Kristeva’s abject is strongly stirred as she presses her lips to the skin of fat which sits on the surface of the lactic fluid. The slimy film upon the liquid threatens to fold the

outside in, dissolving the boundaries between self/(m)other. Milk fever gives rise to similar images of hot milk, boiled milk, coagulation, protein and fat separated, split. Milk as bodily binding between mother and child is severed in milk fever. It also speaks to the splintering of the mind and body unity, in addition to the social and cultural weight of womanhood and motherhood. ‘Feminine materiality and biology are not simply or unproblematically a source of difference or resistance; they are also the rationale for women’s historical silencing and exclusion,’ warns Elizabeth Stephens.94 Milk fever is the underbelly of the fluid body and displays how fluids, corporeality and ‘nature’ have been used against women. In milk fever the liquid of motherhood does not flow outwards but gets fixed inside the flesh, contaminating and infecting the body and brain. It allocates blame to the female body for causing and crystallizing madness within it. Here, the lactic fluid becomes pathological weaponry to dominate the female body and the feminine psyche. Physical manifestations of psychological gendered insanity are reflected in the white surface of milk, the colour of purity and silence. Mona’s illness can be read as a language of the body - a corporeal rejection of motherhood, womanhood, patriarchy and heterosexuality. Her madness speaks to the importance of mind-body cohesion. The image of the clotted milk stuck in the chest urgently reveals the necessity of corporeal fluidity. The fluid body must flow.