A Greenhouse Research Talk by Julia Drewnowicz.
Utilising three twentieth-century Occult novels (Dennis Wheatley’s To the Devil – a Daughter, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist), this talk combines the disciplines of the Gothic (specifically the Occult), the Medical Humanities (obstetrics and gynaecology), and the Blue Humanities (deep sea exploration) to establish the female reproductive system, and particularly the womb-space, as a place of Deep. In the same way we classify spaces such as the Deep Sea and Deep Space as unknowable and unreachable, so, too, do we treat the womb-space, the Deep Womb, as a place to be conquered and exploited. Yet, like other spaces of the Deep, the Deep Womb resists this control. The Deep, whether the Sea, Space, or Womb, is presented in similar ways throughout literature: as erogenous, murky, slimy, fluid, and cavernous. The link between the water of seas and oceans, and the interiority of the female reproductive system will be presented in this talk, utilising texts documenting deep sea exploration in conjunction with obstetric and gynaecological medical accounts within the lens of Gothic literature.
Julia Drewnowicz is a PhD Candidate at the University of Bristol, merging together the Blue Humanities, Medical Humanities, and Gothic Studies within her research of the female reproductive system in twentieth-century occult fiction. She has delivered papers on transgressive reproduction within occult literature, the deep sea as Gothic amniotic fluid, and Catholic conceptions of pain and pleasure. Her article, ‘Hidden Violence of The Birth Trauma Report’, was published by The Polyphony in 2025.