Beatrice-Joanna Foxe

Character Analysis

Twenty-nine years old, attractive, and dead-set on being a mother, Beatrice-Joanna stands out like a sore thumb in the dystopian, anti-reproduction society she inhabits. More than that, her conventional "womanliness" makes her seem almost primal—like a throwback to an earlier, less sophisticated phase in human evolutionary history. In the eyes of the people around her, she may as well be that caveman from those old Geico commercials.

What's In a Name?

It's possible that the "Beatrice" in Beatrice-Joanna's name is an allusion to the Beatrice of Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy. If so, the name would signal that Beatrice-Joanna represents an ideal vision of womanliness and feminine virtue. In the context of Tristram's life especially, it would mean that she represents a powerful guiding light.

Babies Make Her Feel Like A Natural Woman

Although Beatrice-Joanna has grown up in a world where married couples are supposed to limit themselves to one birth in the family, her own parents flouted that rule by having two children: Beatrice-Joanna, and her sister, Mavis. Mavis and her own husband have two children too, and when Beatrice-Joanna's own son dies, she wants desperately to have another. Somehow, despite massive State propaganda for population control, she's a woman surrounded by "[a] kind of aura of fertility" (1.8.13).

For precisely this reason, the narrator of The Wanting Seed has more than the usual fondness for her, describing her:

…a handsome woman of twenty-nine, handsome in the old way, a way no longer approved in a woman of her class. The straight graceless waistless black dress could not disguise the moving opulence of her haunches, nor could the splendid curve of her bosom be altogether flattened by its constraining bodice [. . .] she seemed to glow with flame and health and, what was to be disapproved strongly, the threat of fecundity. (1.1.11)

Whew—is it hot in here, or is it just us?

Throughout The Wanting Seed, Beatrice-Joanna's body is described in ways that suggest close connections with the animal kingdom. In the passage quoted above, the narrator chooses the word "haunches" instead of "butt" or "thighs"; she has a full set of strong, natural teeth—another primitive trait in this futuristic world, where most adults have dentures instead (1.2.15)—and, when she gives birth to a set of twins, her brother-in-law Shonny calls out:

Twins, by God. A litter, by the Lord Jesus. (3.6.22)

In another highly suggestive passage, the novel aligns Beatrice-Joanna with Bessie, Shonny and Mavis's sickly old pig:

Beatrice-Joanna's pains were starting.

"Poor old girl," said Shonny. "Poor, poor old lady." He and his wife and sister-in-law were standing, this bright snappy afternoon in February, by the sty of Bessie, the ailing sow. Bessie, all the slack grey deadweight of her, lay snorting feebly, a great ruin of flesh, on her side. Her uppermost flank, curiously mottled, heaved as in a dream of hunting. (3.6.1-2)

In this passage, the opening line—"Beatrice-Joanna's pains were starting"—is followed so closely by Shonny's sad exclamations "Poor old girl," and "Poor, poor old lady" that at first it seems as though Shonny is sympathizing with Beatrice-Joanna's labor pains. Although we soon realize that he's talking about Bessie, not Beatrice-Joanna, the passage prompts us to associate Beatrice-Joanna's labor pains with Bessie's heaving flanks.

And hey, let's not forget that Bessie's long piggy life has been spent breeding piglets for Shonny and Mavis to eat—a fact that becomes especially relevant later in the novel, when Beatrice-Joanna begins to suspect that England's new baby-making spirit is all part of a plot to supply more cannon fodder to the British Army, and, in doing so, more dead meat to the canning factories.

The Bottom Line

What all of this boils down to is the fact that Beatrice-Joanna isn't just a character in her own right: she's also the novel's most obvious symbol of "natural" womanliness, not to mention the "natural" human and animal instinct to breed. The narrator's logic goes something like this:

1. True Women are instinctively maternal, and their bodies are made for baby-making;
2. Beatrice-Joanna is instinctively maternal, and her body is made for baby-making;
3. Ergo, Beatrice-Joanna is a True Woman.

So, What's the Takeaway?

If you find all of this a little bit gross—i.e., deeply misogynistic—you've put your finger on one of the many elements that make The Wanting Seed such a contentious and potentially disturbing read.