Voyager: To Suckle, and Return to the Womb (Updated)

Not every post will relate to the Purgatorial theme.  Because certainly not every moment in the book evokes anything like Purgatory--even when Claire's absence from Jamie deprives her of light, she must continue her life with Frank.  And as they are husband and wife, there will be husband-and-wife moments, albeit not many.

The one truly erotic moment between Claire and Frank post-Jaime is one that is intimately bound to Claire's fertility--her motherhood--and it is a scene to which the books have been building since Outlander.  It begins with what is a very normal situation for a breastfeeding mother--the baby wakes, nurses on only one side, and then falls into a deep sleep, leaving the mother feeling engorged and, well--lopsided.  Claire is prepared to pump to relieve pressure, but Frank has other ideas... er, impulses:

Instead of leaving or answering, he took the pump from my hand and laid it down on the table. As though it moved of its own will, without direction from him, his hand rose slowly through the warm, dark air of the nursery and cupped itself gently around the swollen curve of my breast. 

His head bowed and his lips fastened softly on my nipple. I groaned, feeling the half-painful prickle of the milk rushing through the tiny ducts. I put a hand behind his head, and pressed him slightly closer. 

“Harder,” I whispered. His mouth was soft, gentle in its pressure, nothing like the relentless grasp of a baby’s hard, toothless gums, that fasten on like grim death, demanding and draining, releasing the bounteous fountain at once in response to their greed. Frank knelt before me, his mouth a supplicant. Was this how God felt, I wondered, seeing the adorers before Him—was He, too, filled with tenderness and pity? The haze of fatigue made me feel as though everything happened in slow motion, as though we were under water. 

Frank’s hands moved slowly as sea fronds, swaying in the current, moving over my flesh with a touch as gentle as the brush of kelp leaves, lifting me with the strength of a wave, and laying me down on the shore of the nursery rug. I closed my eyes, and let the tide carry me away.  (42)

The moment troubles me not because of the nature of the eroticism--I've been on the internet long enough to know that though some men have adverse reactions to their wives breastfeeding, others find partaking of breasts full of milk to be a rare treat.  It does get more bizarre when it becomes a regular husband-wife thing, but I'm not willing to address either extreme in any kind of nonfictional way.  I will say that adult male breastfeeding is not without literary or historical/legendary precedent, though in the case of The Grapes of Wrath and the story of Pero and Cimon, the act is about charity and starvation rather than motherhood and sexuality.

Frank's suckling bothers me for none of these reasons.  Rather, it registers as fetishism and objectification because his desire for Claire--and worship at her breast when the narrative picks up the thread of Adoration for one single, misplaced moment--seems indistinguishable from his desire for other women.  His desire perhaps derives from her mothering of Brianna, whom he has claimed as his own, but certainly taps into the primal instinct that men have (the novels argue) to turn to their wives as a way of returning to the womb.

In Outlander, Jamie's sister Jenny posits that men seek to return to the womb, a theory that Jamie and Claire discuss shortly afterward:

     "Do you think Jenny's right?" I asked later.  "Do men really want to come back inside? Is that why you make love to us?" A breath of laughter stirred the hair by my ear.

     "Well, it's no usually the first thing in my mind when I take ye to bed, Sassenach.  Far from it. But then..." [...] "I'd no say she was completely wrong either.  Sometimes... aye, sometimes it would be good, to be inside again, safe and... one.  Knowing we cannot, I suppose, is what makes us want to beget.  If we cannot go back ourselves, the best we can do is to give that precious gift to our sons, at least for a little while..." (Outlander 633)

Desire for the womb becomes a theme that surfaces in Dragonfly and broadens into a nurturing aspect of sexuality that manifests itself again in Dragonfly:

     "Will ye let me do this later?" he murmured, with a soft bite. "When the child's come, and your breasts fill wi' milk?  Will ye feed me, too, next to your heart?" 

     I clasped his head and cradled it, fingers deep in the baby-soft hair that grew thick at the base of his skull. 

     "Always," I whispered. (Dragonfly 249-50)

In fact, though I seem to have lost the scene--or haven't stumbled upon it again--it seems that Jamie dreamed of suckling at Claire's breast just as Frank did...  And this is strange because there is a dual link  (a somewhat disturbing one) between Frank and  Jamie--Claire, and also Jack Randall.  So when Jamie vicariously experiences Frank's erotic encounter with Claire, well... it is an odd moment, to say the least.

And again, the connection between the powerful emotional and physical bonding of sex, and the physical intimacy of mother and unborn child become conflated:

And when I had at length taken my last revenge of him, I did cradle him, stroking back the roughened, half-dry locks. 

"And sometimes," I whispered to him, "I wish it could be you inside me. That I could take you into me and keep you safe always." 

His hand, large and warm, lifted slowly from the bed and cupped the small round swell of my belly, sheltering and caressing. 

"You do, my own," he said. "You do," (Dragonfly 312)

With Jamie, each of these moments carries a tenderness--a quality of bonding, in which Claire's nurturing is appreciated, and Jamie's innocence, or the tragic impossibility of his innocence, becomes manifest.  The actual scene of suckling--with Frank--while it carries a tenderness of sorts, does seem to carry more eroticism and less emotion because of the missing bond.  What should exist between Claire and Frank is defective, and the act, if not precisely perverse, seems a violation of sorts, even if consensual.

Gabaldon, Diana (2004-10-26). Voyager (Outlander) (p. 42). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Addendum:

It is when Jamie is in Ardsmuir Prison that he dreams of suckling from Claire's breast, as Frank has done:

Then her breast pressed against his mouth, and he took it eagerly, drawing her body tight against him as he suckled her. Her milk was hot and sweet, with a faint taste of silver, like a deer’s blood. 

     “Harder,” she whispered to him, and put her hand behind his head, gripping the back of his neck, pressing him to her. “Harder.” 

     She lay at her length upon him, his hands holding for dear life to the sweet flesh of her buttocks, feeling the small solid weight of the child upon his own belly, as though they shared it now, protecting the small round thing between their bodies. (175-176)

The repetition of what Claire did, in fact, say to Frank, suggests that he is participating in some sense in the act.  It is a strange moment because Jamie lingers as a ghost of sorts over Claire's marriage to Frank, and her abandonment in the act rather suggests that Frank's presence--and identity--is somewhat unnecessary, since her real connection is to Jamie.

Another interesting point is that in his dream, Jamie shares in Claire's pregnancy here in a way that he could not in reality.  From the desire to return to the womb, we now have almost a "male womb"--he is able to protect Brianna as if she were in a womb, even though for suckling to occur, Brianna would have been born already.

Notable, too, is the way in which bodily fluids--blood and milk--become conflated.  Claire nourishes Jamie--in spirit--with her body and her (metaphorical) blood.  The reference to Adoration in the scene with Frank suggests a spiritual Communion between Jamie and Claire, though it somehow occurs through the body of Frank, which remains disturbing.  I confess to having a significant dislike for Frank.