Writing about the work of J. K. Rowling is something of an endless journey of discovery; there are always more clues and pointers to her artistry and meaning to be found in what she has written. I had just finished my most recent post, an extended comment on Nick Jeffery’s idea that Charlotte Campbell did not die a suicide but was murdered, when I realized that the first page of the first chapter of the first Part of Running Grave has a strong hint of that possibility, one that I missed the several times I had read it.
Private detective Cormoran Strike was standing in the corner of a small, stuffy, crowded marquee with a wailing baby in his arms. Heavy rain was falling onto the canvas above, its irregular drumbeat audible even over the chatter of guests and his newly baptised godson’s screams. The heater at Strike’s back was pumping out too much warmth, but he couldn’t move, because three blonde women, all of whom were around forty and holding plastic glasses of champagne, had him trapped while taking it in turns to shout questions about his most newsworthy cases. Strike had agreed to hold the baby ‘for a mo’ while the baby’s mother went to the bathroom, but she’d been gone for what felt like an hour.
‘When,’ asked the tallest of the blondes loudly, ‘did you realise it wasn’t suicide?’
‘Took a while,’ Strike shouted back, full of resentment that one of these women wasn’t offering to hold the baby. Surely they knew some arcane female trick that would soothe him? He tried gently bouncing the child up and down in his arms. It shrieked still more bitterly. (21, emphasis added)
Strike at book’s end, after a conversation with Charlotte’s sister, admits to Robin that he could have stopped Charlotte from committing suicide, but he nowhere considers the possibility, not to mention “realises,” that “it wasn’t suicide.” On structural points, this beginning and ending is another point in favor of the Jeffery’s thesis. I wish I had included that find in my extrapolation of his theory.
But there may be something more to this scene than a hint that Charlotte had not killed herself but was assisted in her suicide, unknown to herself and unwillingly. These “three blonde women, all of whom were around forty and holding plastic glasses of champagne” may be a clue to what may be revealed in Strike8 about Robin Ellacott, a possibility that Strike’s partner is infertile, effectively sterile, an idea I find as, well, striking as the possibility of Charlotte’s having been murdered.
The thesis of this Hogwarts Professor essay — what I hope will be the subject of our second ‘Rowling Studies’ podcast here — is that Robin Venetia Ellacott will not have children with Murphy, Strike, or any other partner, because she cannot, at least not without some extraordinary efforts via in vitro conception and surrogacy. I will attempt to explain how this infertility is possible, to detail the ‘Lake’ suggestions from Rowling’s life and personal experience that shows she is more than familiar with this condition among women, and to share the ‘Shed’ literary markers in Running Grave and Rowling’s other novels that this is indeed what she has in mind for Strike’s partner Robin.
Means Before Motive: How is it Possible that Robin is Sterile?
In a word, “Chlamydia.”
‘The vital energy, composed of Yin and Yang,’ said Zhou, nodding. ‘You have a slight imbalance already. Don’t worry,’ he said smoothly, still writing, ‘we’ll address it. Have you ever had an STD?’
‘No,’ lied Robin.
In fact, the rapist who’d ended her university career had given her chlamydia, for which she’d been given antibiotics. (257-258)
If you are like me, that was news. Offered as something of an aside and a matter of no consequence, it turns out that this STD has a particularly nasty side-effect if not treated promptly and thoroughly.
Chlamydia is a common STD that can cause infection among both men and women. It can cause permanent damage to a woman’s reproductive system. This can make it difficult or impossible to get pregnant later. Chlamydia can also cause a potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy (pregnancy that occurs outside the womb). The initial damage that chlamydia causes often goes unnoticed. However, chlamydia can lead to serious health problems.
In women, untreated chlamydia can cause pelvic inflammatory disease (PID). Some of the complications of PID are:
Formation of scar tissue that blocks fallopian tubes;
Ectopic pregnancy (pregnancy outside the womb);
Infertility (not being able to get pregnant); and
Long-term pelvic/abdominal pain.
How do I know if I have chlamydia?
Chlamydia often has no symptoms, but it can cause serious health problems, even without symptoms. If symptoms occur, they may not appear until several weeks after having sex with a partner who has chlamydia.
Even when chlamydia has no symptoms, it can damage a woman’s reproductive system.
I think we can assume that Robin does not have chlamydia, present tense, which is to say that the antibiotics she was given after she was raped to treat the condition were effective. This assumption is logical because Robin’s two sexual partners, consequent to her using chemical estrogen as her birth control method, would have been infected if she was a symptom-free carrier of the STD.
Readers, however, are not given any details of how promptly Robin was diagnosed with the condition after having been raped. If her antibiotic treatment was not immediate, which must be allowed at least as a possibility, or had advanced sufficiently before being treated successfully then she may have developed Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (PID), a condition that can be symptom free and which can also cause de facto sterility.
There are no tests for PID. A diagnosis is usually based on a combination of your medical history, physical exam, and other test results. You may not realize you have PID because your symptoms may be mild, or you may not experience any symptoms….
Yes, if PID is diagnosed early, it can be treated. However, treatment won’t undo any damage that has already happened to your reproductive system. The longer you wait to get treated, the more likely it is that you will have complications from PID. While taking antibiotics, your symptoms may go away before the infection is cured. Even if symptoms go away, you should finish taking all of your medicine. Be sure to tell your recent sex partner(s), so they can get tested and treated for STDs, too. It is also very important that you and your partner both finish your treatment before having any kind of sex so that you don’t re-infect each other.
So, if the diagnosis of chlamydia was slow in coming — thank you, NHS! — then it may have led to PID before the antibiotics for the STD worked their magic. If Robin was symptom free for PID and tests showed she was chlamydia-free, why would she be tested for it or suspect she had it?
I think this casual aside in Dr Zhou’s office, a seeming throw-away detail from Robin’s rape experience not shared previously, allows at a minimum the possibility that the otherwise healthy Ms. Ellacott has PID and its most jarring long-term “complication.” As a man and one largely clueless about the science of menstruation and conception, I apologize in advance if this speculation is entirely unfounded; the harpies women of Strike fandom will no doubt take some pleasure in correcting me on this point and I will accept that beat-down as a deserved one.
Until my ignorance on this point is exposed by the Subject Matter Experts, “people who menstruate,” though, I’ll charge on to explore the Lake and Shed evidence that Rowling may indeed be “going there,” that is, writing an epic series whose female lead is not able to bear children.
The Shed Evidence: Pointers from the Three Strike Mythological Templates
Rowling revealed four years ago this Western Christmas the way she thought about her writing process, from inspiration to publication. In a 2019 interview BBC4’s ‘Museum of Curiosity’ program she explained that her mental images of ‘how she writes’ are of a ‘Lake’ from which her story “stuff” or “inspiration” appears and a ‘Shed,’ the alocal place to which she takes this unformed material to craft into a proper narrative. She admitted the ‘Lake’ was simply a metaphor for her unconscious mind and its efforts to work through her unresolved psychological issues.
Until this 2019 interview I was very much resistant to discussing how much Rowling’s personal history was reflected in her stories. I was, frankly, loathe to connect the dots between biography and finished story, as obvious as those correspondences often were; if you doubt me on this, check out my Hogwarts Professor piece on Casual Vacancy in 2012 in which I simultaneously made the links between Rowling’s history and that story and disavowed the project as ‘The Personal Heresy.’ I saw my business and proper focus as a literary critic then to be less biography than bibliography and iconography, the literary and symbolic artistry of a work, whence my Harry Potter’s Bookshelf and The Deathly Hallows Lectures, respectively.
After Rowling’s statement on the ‘Museum of Curiosities’ program, I was forced to reconsider this position. I remain primarily a ‘Shed’ focused critic, but have come to appreciate, largely through conversation with Nick Jeffery and admiration for his work, efforts that are, as he insists, predominantly ‘Lake’ focused, that a true grasp of Rowling’s achievement is only possible after seeing how she has deliberately transformed the leaden “stuff” of her issues into story gold.
This new appreciation led one third-tier academic to dismiss my work as biography-focused consumption with the life of Rowling, a charge reflecting much more on his ignorance of my exclusively ‘Shed’ contributions to Rowling studies — alchemy, chiasmus, soul allegory, intertextuality, PSI, mythology, etc. — and on the absence of any contributions on his part than with reality. Which having noted, though, I’ll start my support here for the speculative thesis that Robin Ellacott is sterile with a ‘Shed’ rather than a ‘Lake’ argument, namely, how well that barren possibility matches with Rowling’s three mythological templates in play for the Strike novels. Those three backdrops are Castor and Pollux, Psyche and Cupid, and Artemis the Avenger.
The first of these three to have been spotted was the Castor and Pollux transparency through which Rowling has traced the Robin and Cormoran characters (hat tip to Joanne Gray and to our ‘Mythological Leda’). In a nut-shell, Leda Strike is a story-cipher for the woman impregnated by Zeus-as-a-Swan in the ‘Leda and the Swan’ legend. The groupie Leda and the rockstar Jonny pairing is not an especially opaque re-telling of the mortal and god status’ of the original Leda and Zeus. There were two sets of twins born of that divine-human tryst, believe it or not: twin girls, Hellen of Troy and Clytemnestra and twin boys, Castor and Pollux. If that and this progeny being hatched from eggs wasn’t exotic enough, only Pollux and Helen are Zeus’ offspring; Castor and Clytemnestra are the son and daughter of Leda’s human husband, Tyndareus, the King of Sparta.
As Joanne and I wrote in 2017:
[Leda’s] sons will be the ones that concern us here. The twin boys were named Castor and Pollux. Castor was known as a horse breaker and demigod Pollux was known as a boxer. Both were also known for their horsemanship and for their willingness to help those in trouble, especially travelers, guests, and sailors. For much more on these two, see Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia and the discussion therein on A Horse and His Boy; Cor and Corin in that C. S. Lewis tale are Archenland royalty separated as infants who are Castor and Pollux story ciphers.
Just as Leda the groupie and Jonny Jagger are stand-ins for the Spartan Queen and the King of the Gods, so Robin the expert driver and forever junior partner is a cipher for the mortal Castor and Strike the boxer and actual son of Leda and the God-like Rocher is for the demigod Pollux. These ‘twins’ — the mythological Gemini of constellation fame — die in battle with the Aphareides, sons of Neptune (yes, ‘Murphy’ means ‘sea-warrior,’ I know), are both raised from death to god-status, albeit with conditions. They brothers enjoy this Olympian grace only because of their “kindness and generosity” in service to others.
How is this mythological template a match with the thesis that Robin is sterile?
Though Robin and Cormoran are “best mates” and have even slept together, if only Platonically and literally rather than conjugally, they do not share even one parent, and more to the point, they are not brothers. The big problem, if you will, with this correspondence is that Strike and Ellacott are sexual contraries, man and woman, rather than fraternal mirror reflections.
Even if Robin is sterile, of course, that doesn’t change — but it is somehow different if the natural end-game of their relationship is no longer what they both anticipate, per the conventions in which they both live, namely, “married with children.” If their partnership in vocation as detective-avengers is the true focus of their life together rather than family, we are much closer to something like harmony with the Castor and Pollux model. Stated more baldly, if Robin and Strike are embodiments of this pair, the woman has to be childless for the parallel to be complete.
A less obvious but at least as important and interesting mythic template Rowling is deploying in the Strike series in addition to Castor and Pollux is ‘Psyche and Cupid.’ As I explained in the run-up to Ink Black Heart:
Rowling has a concurrent myth being re-told in the series, namely, that of Cupid and Psyche. As explained in my A Mythological Key to Cormoran Strike? The Myth of Eros, Psyche, and Venus and Troubled Blood: Robin’s Two Perfumes The Meaning of Philosychos and Narciso, psychologist-wannabe Robin plays the part of Psyche, Strike of Eros, and Charlotte as the furious Venus in Strike5 especially but in all the books so far. If she continues within the template of this myth in Ink Black Heart, having in the ‘Best Mate’ office scene in Blood reproduced Psyche’s exposure of Cupid with light and knife, we should see the trials of Psyche by Venus in Strike6. See Mythological Key and Robin’s Two Perfumes for the impossible tests the Goddess of Love sets for her rival in the myth and how they might be reproduced in the next novel.
There are no posts that are more boring to readers than score-cards of prediction hits-and-misses post publication (I should know because I invented the genre during the Potter years). It was fascinating, however, how Rowling advanced the Psyche and Cupid myth’s main events in Ink Black Heart as predicted; read about that in Ink Black Heart: The Mythic Backdrop. Rowling’s psychomachia or Shakespearean allegory of soul and spirit in the love between Strike and Ellacott has much of it’s gut or heart straight from this myth and how she has successfully re-written it as a modern love story. I’ll risk hyperbole to make a point; those Serious Strikers who aren’t seeing the Cupid and Psyche correspondences in this series are never going to appreciate the depths of Rowling’s artistry or her most profound meaning and message, even the transformative aim of her art.
Psyche the Soul-woman and Cupid the man-demigod, lover and son (!) of venereally-beautiful-but-insane Aphrodite have their equivalents in Robin the amateur psychologist with PTSD, Strike the lame and larger than life lover and archer, and Charlotte Campbell. How does a barren Ms. Ellacott make these correspondences more vivid?
Robin and Strike, as noted above and explained at great lengths in the linked-to posts, are characters who exteriorize the hallmarks of this myth.
The lovers in the myth, however, have no children while on the earthly plane, Cupid’s bower, when loving one another in blindness and erotically.
It is only after they have transcended the world through Psyche’s trials and Cupid’s escape from Venus that she is made a goddess (or demi-goddess) by Zeus on Mt Olympus and the pair conceive a child as equals.
[After appeasing and escaping Venus, Cupid] then takes his case to Zeus, who gives his consent in return for Cupid's future help whenever a choice maiden catches his eye. Zeus has Hermes convene an assembly of the gods in the theater of heaven, where he makes a public statement of approval, warns Venus to back off, and gives Psyche ambrosia, the drink of immortality, so the couple can be united in marriage as equals. Their union, he says, will redeem Cupid from his history of provoking adultery and sordid liaisons. Zeus's word is solemnized with a wedding banquet.
With its happy marriage and resolution of conflicts, the tale ends in the manner of classic comedy or Greek romances such as Daphnis and Chloe. The child born to the couple will be Voluptas (Greek Hedone ‘Ηδονή), "Pleasure"…. John Milton alludes to the story at the conclusion of Comus (1634), attributing not one but two children to the couple: Youth and Joy.
For the parallels between the Rowling series and the myth to continue to their end, as we should assume it will in one form or another, then Strike and Robin will have to achieve anterotic or selfless, sacrificial love, something world-transcending, for each other to be able to have a child, if that is ever possible on the incarnate plane. Frankly, Robin’s being sterile would mean the two have only pleasure, youth, and joy as the fruit of their married relations — which is a direct hit with this myth.
The third mythological template was revealed in Running Grave along with the chlamydia experience at Chapman Farm. No less a spiritual sage (sic) than Jonathan Wace, Papa J himself, tags Robin as ‘Artemis’ in their other-worldly conversation in his Chapman Farm office.
‘Well,’ said Wace, ‘I’m told you’re a very hard worker. You never complain of tiredness. You show resourcefulness and courage – the labour was long, I hear, and you forwent sleep to help. You also found our Emily in Norwich when she was taken ill, didn’t you? And I believe you previously rushed to her defence when Jiang was giving her instructions. Then, tonight, you were the first to go to Lin’s aid. I think I’ll have to call you Artemis. You know who Artemis is?’
‘Um… the Greek goddess of hunting?’
‘Hunting,’ repeated Jonathan. ‘Interesting that you speak of hunting first.’
‘Only because I’ve seen statues of her with a bow and arrow,’ said Robin, who was pressing her hands between her knees to stop them shaking. ‘I don’t really know much else about her.’
The door opened and Shawna reappeared with everything Wace had asked for. She laid out a plate, knife, fork and glass in front of Robin, bowed again to Wace, beaming, and disappeared, closing the door behind her.
‘Eat,’ Wace ordered Robin, filling her water glass himself. ‘There are many contradictions in Artemis, as in so many human representations of the divine. She’s a huntress, but also protector of the hunted, of girls up to marriageable age, the goddess of childbirth and… strangely… of chastity.’…
‘So I’m puzzled by you, Artemis. On the one hand, passivity, unquestioning obedience, an uncomplaining work ethic, a journal that asks no questions, a large donation to the church.
‘But on the other hand, a strong and dynamic individuality. Outside of doctrinal seminars, you challenge authority and resist deeper engagement with the church’s precepts. You demonstrate a strong materialist adherence to the importance of the body, over the requirements of the spirit. Why these contradictions, Artemis?’ (551-552, 553)
Rowling has a penchant for putting hard truths into the mouths of Bad Guys or on the book shelves in their bathrooms (!). [About Michael Fancourt’s claim in The Silkworm that “the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature” (298)? I wonder what Rowling the Austen fan and author of that statement in her ‘book within a book about books’ really thinks of that Fancourt “fact.”] Wace, serial abuser of women that he is and criminal cult leader to boot, ‘gets’ Robin Ellacott in a way that her family, friends, and even her best mate do not. The ‘Artemis’ nickname, as much as it is applied as Robin/Rowena observes “both to flatter and destabilize her” (553), is more than apt. It’s a great spot on his part because the Girl Friday really is a great defender of children and avenger of women despoiled before marriage.
And, contra to her not being a child of either Leda or Zeus/Rokeby as Cormoran is, ‘Artemis’ is almost the equal of Strike; the archer-goddess is a child of Zeus and Leto, really suggestive of a child of Zeus and Leda.
More to the point, Artemis is a goddess who has no children herself; indeed, she is a virgin. From the Wikipedia entry for ‘Artemis:’
An important aspect of Artemis' persona and worship was her virginity, which may seem contradictory, given her role as a goddess associated with childbirth. The idea of Artemis as a virgin goddess likely is related to her primary role as a huntress. Hunters traditionally abstained from sex prior to the hunt as a form of ritual purity and out of a belief that the scent would scare off potential prey. The ancient cultural context in which Artemis' worship emerged also held that virginity was a prerequisite to marriage, and that a married woman became subservient to her husband.
In this light, Artemis' virginity is also related to her power and independence. Rather than a form of asexuality, it is an attribute that signals Artemis as her own master, with power equal to that of male gods. Her virginity also possibly represents a concentration of fertility that can be spread among her followers, in the manner of earlier mother-goddess figures. However, some later Greek writers did come to treat Artemis as inherently asexual and as an opposite to Aphrodite. Furthermore, some have described Artemis along with the goddesses Hestia and Athena as being asexual; this is mainly supported by the fact that in the Homeric Hymns, 5, To Aphrodite, Aphrodite is described as having "no power" over the three goddesses.
Ah, “three goddesses.” Remember that.
Wace mentioned the “contradictions” of Robin and of Artemis. Perhaps the most important one is the seeming conflict with being simultaneously a warrior virgin and a “mother goddess:”
Despite her virginity, both modern scholars and ancient commentaries have linked Artemis to the archetype of the mother goddess. Artemis was traditionally linked to fertility and was petitioned to assist women with childbirth. According to Herodotus, Greek playwright Aeschylus identified Artemis with Persephone as a daughter of Demeter. Her worshipers in Arcadia also traditionally associated her with Demeter and Persephone. In Asia Minor, she was often conflated with local mother-goddess figures, such as Cybele, and Anahita in Iran.
Robin is not a virgin, of course, or in any way asexual or masculine in the ‘power-driven’ connotation of that word. She is, however, thirty years old and child-free — and the possibility that she will grow old without a family that cares about her is a future that alarms her. Remember her thoughts in Betty Fuller’s nursing home room in Troubled Blood?
Robin was thinking, is this where single people end up, people without children to look out for them, without double incomes? In small boxes, living vicariously through reality stars?
Next Christmas, no doubt, she’d run into Matthew, Sarah and their new baby in Masham. She could just imagine Sarah’s proud strut through the streets, pushing a top-of-the-range pushchair, Matthew beside her, and a baby with Sarah’s white-blonde hair peeking over the top of the blankets. Now, when Jenny and Stephen ran into them, there’d be common ground, the shared language of parenthood. Robin decided there and then, sitting on Betty Fuller’s bed, to make sure she didn’t go home next Christmas. She’d offer to work through it, if necessary….
There were a few small, cheaply framed photographs on the windowsill, Robin noticed. Two of them showed a fat tabby cat, presumably a lamented pet, but there were also a couple showing toddlers, and one of two big-haired teenaged girls, wearing puff-sleeved dresses from the eighties. So you could end up alone, in near squalor, even if you had children? Was it solely money, then, that made the difference? She thought of the ten thousand pounds she’d be receiving into her bank account later that week, which would be reduced immediately by legal bills and council tax. She’d need to be careful not to fritter it away. She really needed to start saving, to start paying into a pension. (689-690)
Note that Robin’s resolve here isn’t to think about starting a family in light of Betty Fuller’s single mother example, a more secure future with a husband as well as children, but to save money.
Her Artemis street cred as a defender of women and especially of children is solid gold, platinum even. Robin as huntress in this regard is shown in high relief in her exchange with mad Mama Mazu in the UHC London Temple’s upper chamber when they fight over a rifle and custody of a wailing baby, one that Robin had delivered as ad hoc midwife. She wins that battle decisively and batters in Mazu’s face with the rifle butt.
If Robin is sterile, as the chlamydia STD and possible PID makes plausible, the Artemis parallel as childless goddess, protector and avenger of women and children while not a mother herself comes into that much stronger focus. Robin as Castor, Psyche, and Artemis, the three mythological figures on which Rowling has transposed or fashioned Strike’s partner are all matches with her as an infertile woman focused on her vocation as truth-revealer and scourge of bad men.
The Mad Mother Wanna Bes of Cormoran Strike
Are there other Shed pointers to Robin being sterile in addition to these mythological clues? Perhaps the ‘mad mothers’ in Cormoran Strike novels qualify.
There’s Lady Yvette Bristow in Cuckoo’s Calling, who cannot have children because her rich husband was sterile.
‘Yvette has always been morbidly maternal. She adores babies.’ He spoke as though this was faintly disgusting, a kind of perversion. ‘She would have been one of those embarrassing women who have twenty children if she could have found a man of sufficient virility. Thank God Alec was sterile – or hasn’t John mentioned that?’
Rendered effectively sterile herself if she remained faithful to her husband, she adopts three children, the oldest of which, her least favorite, murders the other two.
The first novel is followed by another woman in the next book, Silkworm, Elspeth Fancourt, who married a sterile husband, Michael, the famous novelist quoted above. He had been rendered impotent by a case of the mumps, which, again, made his first wife effectively barren as well. Elspeth doesn’t choose to adopt children as had Yvette; she becomes a writer and when her writing is ridiculed as below standard, commits suicide.
The Silkworm was the first novel conceived in the series and its foundation crime is the Sylvia Plath copy-cat death of Elspeth Fancourt. The foundation crime of the first Strike novel published, Cuckoo’s Calling, the murder of Charlie Bristow, is also grounded in the madness of a de facto barren woman.
In the story turn, Lethal White, the foundation crimes are the conception of Raff Chiswell in a pregnancy trap which leads to the break-up of Sir Jasper’s marriage and the consequent sociopathic behaviors of his oldest son, Freddie. That young man not only strangles his half-brother in the eye of the Uffington White Horse but humiliates the teenage daughter of Della and Geraint Wynn sufficiently that the young woman commits suicide. Della was menopausal by the time of Rhiannon’s death presumably and Strike reflects on her grieving mommy issues at their meeting:
A large, framed photograph of a teenage girl sat on the mantelpiece. It occurred to Strike that her mother could not even enjoy the bittersweet solace of looking at Rhiannon Winn every day, and he found himself filled with inconvenient compassion. (468)
What motivates the accomplished Welshwoman to speak to Strike? It is her bizarre maternal affections, in a way almost incestuous, for Aamir Mallik, a young man she has rescued from the attentions of an abusive gay man and the rejection of Mallik’s traditional family.
She spends a good deal of her time with Strike, though, talking about the other effectively sterile woman in Strike4 with mother issues, Kinvarra Chiswell. Kinvarra had a still born child two years before the action of Lethal White, a death that, given the thirty years age difference between her and her elderly husband, caused her to despair of having children. The consensus in the family was that the event sent her around the twist:
“Of course I believe in mental illness, Raff!” said Izzy, apparently stung. “Of course I do! I was sorry for her when it happened—I was, Raff—Kinvara had a stillbirth two years ago,” Izzy explained, “and of course that’s sad, of course it is, and it was quite understandable that she was a bit, you know, afterwards, but—no, I’m sorry,” she said crossly, addressing Raphael, “but she uses it. She does, Raff. She thinks it entitles her to everything she wants and—well, she’d have been a dreadful mother, anyway,” said Izzy defiantly. “She can’t stand not being the center of attention. When she’s not getting enough she starts her little girl act—don’t leave me alone, Jasper, I get scared when you’re not here at night. Telling stupid lies… funny phone calls to the house, men hiding in the flowerbeds, fiddling with the horses.” (171)
Raff twists these anxieties of an aging woman into his murderous love-affair with her. The first Strike novels and the fourth, then, feature women who cannot have children being near the foundation crimes of the book’s plot or the actual murder and, in Lethal White, both. In Running Grave, the seven book ring’s close, Mama Mazu has two children with Papa J Wace after the unnatural death of her first child, Daiyu Graves, but she is still possessed of something of a maternal madness, taking babies born on Chapman Farm away from their biological mothers in order to care for each herself. Though not childless, she seems to have been driven half-mad (?) both by the death of Daiyu whom she has deified and by her husband’s choosing to sire children in serial fashion with other women in the UHC.
This catalog of mad mothers in the Strike series is not, I have to hope, an argument for the thesis that Robin Ellacott is sterile per se; it does demonstrate, though, that the author portrays women who cannot have children as almost by definition unstable, perhaps even dangerous in the ways their displacement efforts for the frustrated maternal drives play out. If Robin discovers that in fact she is sterile via the STD her rapist gave her, it will not be a condition that Rowling has not prepared her readers for with respect to other characters in that position for various reasons, a condition unique to women which the feminine lead in the series will not be expected to shrug off.
After the trauma of Ilsa Herbert’s miscarriage on Valentine’s Day in Troubled Blood, the precipitating event for that novel’s first crisis between the two Agency partners, and the anxiety of the lawyer’s unexpected pregnancy in Ink Black Heart, I think the line of women with fertility and mental issues in the novels gives Strike fans even more reason to celebrate the birth of Benjamin Herbert and his baptism in Running Grave.
The ‘Lake’ Arguments: Goddesses, Godmothers, and the Godmothers of Swing
At which baptism, Cormoran and Robin act as god-parents. This would be unusual if the Herbert family were religious with anything like devotion because people in that role are supposed to serve as the sponsored child’s guides in the faith, a role for which both detective partners are obviously not qualified. Strike isn’t a fan of children or of religion, though Mystic Bob was also chosen by a grateful family to be god-father to the son named for him, Timothy Cormoran Anstis, a child Strike had met “a handful of times and had not been impressed in his favour” (Silkworm, 132).
Rowling has a Troubled Blood character, Max Priestwood, explain why parents choose certain people to be godparents though obviously not religious in any orthodox sense. Given the religious resonance of his name, you have to think Priestwood knows what he’s talking about:
“Fine,” said Robin, with forced brightness. “Just found out I’m an aunt. My brother Stephen’s wife gave birth this morning.”
“Oh. Congratulations,” said Max, politely interested. “Um… boy or girl?”
“Girl,” said Robin, turning on the coffee machine.
“I’ve got about eight godchildren,” said Max gloomily. “Parents love giving the job to childless people. They think we’ll put more effort in, having no kids of our own.”
“True,” said Robin, trying to maintain her cheery tone. She’d been made godmother to Katie’s son. The christening had been the first time she’d been in the church in Masham since her wedding to Matthew. (253-254)
I bring this up as a decent segue to the ‘Lake’ arguments for Robin Ellacott being sterile. What evidence is there of infertility issues in Rowling’s life or, given that she has several children, in the lives of women she knows well?
Rowling’s children have been baptized, but, to my understanding at least, the godparents of her children is not public knowledge. The only “godmothers” in Rowling’s life that she has mentioned are the “Godmothers of Swing,” Jill Prewett and Aine Kiely, friends from Rowling’s year in Porto, Portugal, to which pair she dedicated Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The godmothers return in the dedication to The Running Grave, in which they are joined by a friend of even longer association, Lynne Corbett. They are not godmothers in this story tribute but astral goddesses: “To my goddesses, Lynne Corbett, Aine Riely, and Jill Prewett, Juno, Ceres, and Astarte.” If one takes the mythic names to be descriptive, Corbett is unhappily married as Juno was to Zeus but the most powerful and warlike of the Olympian pantheon’s women, Riely-Ceres is relatively fecund as the goddess of agriculture and fertility, and Prewett is another Artemis per Astarte.
All these named goddesses are, as one would expect, heroically female, divinely feminine; in sequence they are the goddesses of “marriage,” of “fertility and motherly relationships,” and of “sexuality” and “beauty.” Except for Riely, however, Rowling’s three goddesses have no children, at least according to first searches online, and the first, Lynne Corbett, makes her living as a celebrant of feminine infertility.
I asked the HogwartsProfessor’s ‘Lake’ data-mining expert to share what is known about the motherhood status of these “goddesses” cum “godmothers” and received the following report:
Aine Kiely has posted on social media that she has a son who was just starting University in 2018.
Jill Prewitt (as JJ Marsh) has talked in an interview of her husband and dogs, but not mentioned children.
I’ve got Swiss citizenship now. I applied for that immediately after the Brexit referendum. But being that little bit Welsh, it really never leaves you. I’ve even taught my Swiss husband to say, ach-y-fi, which he does rather well.
Jo: And what does that mean for people?
Jill: Ach-y-fi means…it’s, ‘Don’t be so disgusting.’ If a child picks something off the floor, you say, ‘Oh, no, don’t eat that, ach-y-fi.’ It’s a very strong one and it’s also got that kind of guttural sound and it really sounds like, ‘Put it down. That’s disgusting.’
Jo: That seems like an odd thing to teach him!
Jill: Well, it’s useful when you’ve got three dogs.
Ach-y-fi is certainly a phrase you would use to a child or a dog, or yourself, but not to a partner (it would seem infantilising to a Welsh person) so I think the phrase was taught by Marsh for her husband to use to the dogs.
Kiely and Prewett are the ‘Godmothers of Swing’ perhaps, per Max Priestwood, because motherhood is not their lot or, in Kiely’s case, her defining identity; they have chosen to be childfree or are involuntarily childless. Prewett the novelist who writes under the pseudonym ‘J. J. Marsh’ — almost all of whose books I have read, by the way, except for her latest — is best known for her fourteen novel ‘Beatrice Stubbs’ series. Stubbs, an international crime specialist with Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police, is in her fifties, mentally ill, and childless, though she acts in the role of mother to the offspring of her lover of many years (she broke up his marriage…).
Sterility isn’t the hallmark, I think, of either Kiely or Prewett, if the latter appears to be childfree. Lynne Corbett, in contrast, calls herself the ‘American Baroness,’ a play on “barren” or being infertile. She counsels and celebrates women who share her condition. Her weblog is AmericanBaroness.com, from which comes this biographical snippet:
For my dissertation [in positive psychology], I designed a study of 20 non-mothers, with a goal of theorizing about their sense of life meaning and purpose. As a childfree woman, I had over the years become increasingly fascinated by the stories of others like me who, for one reason or another, didn’t have kids. I had even started keeping a list of well-known non-parents. I read their biographies. I kept notes about my own experiences. Then, through my dissertation research, I found the statistics: approximately 20% of women worldwide are childless (also known as involuntarily or “by chance”, through infertility or other conditions) or childfree (referred to as voluntary or “by choice”).
One particular day, as I prepared to interview my research participants, I came across several stunningly misogynistic academic papers about infertility, all written in the 1950s and 60s, and I started to think deeply about the blithe use in those studies of the word “barren” as it applied to any woman who had not conceived. I was overwhelmed by a need to take back that word, to own it somehow, to empower it. But how? I played with it, capitalized it, sketched it, and then heard myself say it several times aloud: Barren…Barren….Being barren…Barren-ness…Barrenness…Baroness. Baroness! That’s it! The nobility of being childfree.
I began referring to myself, glibly and amongst friends, as a Baroness. I wanted to use the moniker Baroness on social media, but found it was already widely used to signify a certain haughtiness, having nothing to do with being childfree. I thought a funny twist might be to add my nationality to Baroness. American Baroness. After all, I told myself, we don’t have an American aristocracy, so maybe I’ll invent one. And so American Baroness was born. The title Baroness made me feel proud. Yes! I am one of the 20%—one amongst the vast number of women who did not, perhaps could not, conceive.
Her mantra?
Historically referred to as “ barren ” — to mean “ empty”—childfree and childless women are encouraged here to grow ever more fulfilled, not empty but rather open to their own limitless potential . In so doing, barrenness is transformed to Baroness, an elevated and full sense of personal identity. Our mothering peers, too, may self-title Baroness. All that’s required is a commitment to discovering your deepest, most self-reliant and self-loving center.
She who is sovereign unto herself, who rules her own estate, lives with dignity and is thereby ennobled—a Baroness.
Nick Jeffery has written about the fascinating Corbett and her relationship with Rowling, cf., ‘Lynne Corbett: Rowling’s Astrological Inspiration.’ He notes that Corbett became a ‘Baroness’ involuntarily, that is, the condition was a consequence of surgery:
After surgery she was not able to have children of her own, and she now advocates for childless women: Baron-esses, and offers life coaching through positive psychology….
Rowling has admitted the inspiration of both Lynne and William for Troubled Blood in terms of the astrological calculations and presumably the astrological symbolism. It is also tempting to speculate on the influence of Lynne’s psychological training and practice on the series. I don’t think that Lynne Corbett can be too close an analogue for Robin – her ‘voice’ is very different, based on her blog, but I do think that we may see more use of Robin’s psychological training used as a reaction to trauma. Lynne – in the American Baroness is positive, self empowering, articulate and thoughtful. This I think is something to look out for in the novels to come.
Nick deftly suggests that Prewett’s “positive psychology” is somehow analogous to Robin’s interest and skill in the subject while simultaneously disavowing the correspondence. If Robin, however, turns out to be a Yorkshire ‘Baroness,’ readers won’t have to look far for the most likely inspiration.
Rowling has not revealed the godmothers of her children, but the safest bet, if bookies were laying odds on this subject, would be that her sister Dianne Rowling Moore is godmother to at least one of the Rowling-Arantes-Murray brood. What evidence there is on the subject of Dianne’s fertility status — and it is more the ‘absence of evidence than the evidence of absence’ — is that she has no children. Per my ‘Lake’ focused friend:
Dianne Moore and her husband have almost no online presence beyond his directorships of companies linked to catering and real estate.
The only paparazzi photos of both Dianne and Roger (Rowling's Iceland holiday) contain JKR's youngest two children, but no others.
As Jo Rowling Murray has no contact with her father, her paternal uncle and cousins, and the Volant side of her family is only mentioned in the oddest of places (even though her maternal grandmother’s conception and birth seems a possible model for the Dark Lord’s!), Di is the only family Rowling has outside of the Murray clan she has joined. If the only sister is a Baroness as is Corbett, the likelihood that Rowling has decided to write about an Artemis woman of no little accomplishment and maternal power but without children seems even more likely to me.
Conclusions: Stray thoughts about Robin and Childless Women in Cormoran Strike
Running Grave’s opening interview, one done by Robin without Strike, is with Sheila Kennett, a woman who could not bring a pregnancy to term (“I couldn’t have none of my own. Miscarriages. I had nine all told”). Her husband Brian fancied Leda Strike, mother of two, perhaps in hopes of offspring himself. Sheila says they “rowed” about it (137).
Troubled Blood’s opening interview, Strike’s meeting with the Gandhi-esque Dr Gupta also has a note about a woman without children:
Mrs. Gupta, a tiny, slightly deaf, gray-haired woman, had already told Strike what degrees each of her daughters had taken—two medicine, one modern languages and one computing—and how well each was doing in her chosen career. She’d also shown him pictures of the six grandchildren she and her husband had been blessed with so far. Only the youngest girl remained childless, “but she will have them,” said Mrs. Gupta, with a Joan-ish certainty. “She’ll never be happy without.” (93-94)
Later in that book Robin seems to confirm this inability of a woman to be happy without children in her reaction to the news that her older brother is a father. She weeps:
Robin seemed to hear her cousin Katie’s words again: It’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us. In the old days with Matthew, before she’d started work at the agency, she’d expected to have children with him. Robin had no strong feelings against having children, it was simply that she knew, now, that the job she loved would be impossible if she were a mother, or at least, that it would stop being the job she loved. Motherhood, from her limited observation of those her age who were doing it, seemed to demand as much from a woman as she could possibly give. Katie had talked of the perennial tug on her heart when she wasn’t with her son, and Robin had tried to imagine an emotional tether even stronger than the guilt and anger with which Matthew had tried to retain her. The problem wasn’t that Robin didn’t think she’d love her child. On the contrary, she thought it likely that she would love that child to the extent that this job, for which she had voluntarily sacrificed a marriage, her safety, her sleep and her financial security, would have to be sacrificed in return. And how would she feel, afterward, about the person who’d made that sacrifice necessary?
Robin turned on the light and bent to pick up the things she had knocked off her bedside table: an empty glass, thankfully unbroken, and the thin, flimsy paperback entitled Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? by C. B. Oakden, which Robin had received in the post the previous morning, and which she’d already read.
Strike didn’t yet know that she had managed to get hold of a copy of Oakden’s book and Robin had been looking forward to showing him. She had a couple more fragments of Bamborough news, too, but now, perhaps because of her sheer exhaustion, the feeling of anticipation at sharing them had disappeared. Deciding that she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, she got out of bed.
As she showered, Robin realized, to her surprise, that she was crying.
This is ridiculous. You don’t even want a baby. Get a grip of yourself. (252-253)
Strike has never wanted children. It has been his sister Lucy that wants him to have children, a family, a mortgage. At the end of Running Grave, however, she allows that she has been wrong in not being accepting with regard to his unconventional unmarried condition.
Strike was thinking of Lucy as he spoke. He’d spent the previous day with his sister, accompanying her to view two prospective nursing homes for their uncle. Afterwards they’d had a coffee together in a café, and Strike had told his sister about Mazu attempting to kill Robin in the Rupert Court Temple.
‘That evil bitch,’ said the horrified Lucy.
‘Yeah, but we got her, Luce,’ said Strike, ‘and the baby’s back with her mother.’
Strike had half-expected more tears, but to his surprise, Lucy beamed at him.
‘I know I nag you, Stick,’ she said. ‘I know I do, but as long as you’re happy, I don’t care if you’re not – you know. Married with kids, and all that. You do wonderful things. You help people. You’ve helped me, taking this case, putting that woman behind bars. And what you said about Leda… you’ve really helped me, Stick.’
Touched, Strike reached out to squeeze her hand.
‘I s’pose you’re just not cut out for the whole settling down with one woman thing, and that’s OK,’ said Lucy, now smiling a little tearfully. ‘I promise I’ll never go on about it again.’ (932)
She doesn’t call him ‘Artemis’ for a variety of reasons, but having avenged her having been abused by Coates via Mazu, rescued Lin’s baby and returned it to her, and counselling her about the obscure shades of Leda’s maternal love, Lucy embraces her brother’s determination not to marry or have children.
Rowling being a ring-writer, though, is this the most likely outcome, that Robin is sterile and she and Cormoran will become an infertile and monogamous pair? I think Strike’s history suggests it is likely.
He has said that his Uncle Ted was his real father and that AuntJoan was as good as a mother to him:
“I know what went on,” [Aunt Joan] said. “He behaved very badly, but he’s still your father.”
“No, he isn’t,” said Strike. “Ted’s my dad.”
He’d never said it out loud before. Tears filled Joan’s eyes.
“He’d love to hear you say that,” she said softly. “Funny, isn’t it… years ago, years and years, I was just a girl, and I went to see a proper gypsy fortune teller. They used to camp up the road. I thought she’d tell me lots of nice things. You expect them to, don’t you? You’ve paid your money. D’you know what she said?”
Strike shook his head.
“‘You’ll never have children.’ Just like that. Straight out.”
“Well, she got that wrong, didn’t she?” said Strike.
Tears started again in Joan’s bleached eyes. Why had he never said these things before, Strike asked himself. It would have been so easy to give her pleasure, and instead he’d held tightly to his divided loyalties, angry that he had to choose, to label, and in doing so, to betray. He reached for her hand and she squeezed it surprisingly tightly. (Blood, 355-356)
It pays the Serious Striker to recall that Cormoran is the blood off-spring of a slightly mad woman and other-worldly celebrity, a 20th Century Leda and the Swan and at the same time the child raised by a barren woman and a man married to a woman who cannot have children (per Joan’s gypsy testimony; we don’t know if it was Joan or Ted that was sterile, cf., Elspeth Fancourt and Yvette Bristow for women who were childless because of their husbands).
It is inconceivable (forgive me) that Strike, all things coming around in a full circle, will be joined in matrimony as well as in vocation with a Baroness a la Uncle Ted and that he will sire a child as did Rokeby with a woman determined to land a husband via a pregnancy trap? Strike’s up-against-the-wall “displacement fuck” with Bijou/Bougie/Belinda Watkins, Esq., has all the marks of his playing the part of Zeus the swan with Leda/Leto — and a set-up for his coming to a new appreciation of his biological father and frustrated uncle, an appreciation born of arriving at last in situations very similar to theirs with respect to him as their offspring, i.e., a man saddled with a child he didn’t want with a woman who trapped him and the husband of a beloved woman with whom he cannot have children.
I began this ‘Robin Ellacott is Sterile: Change My Mind!’ essay with a note about the woman who asked Strike, “When did you realise it wasn’t Suicide?” That’s a great pointer to the possibility that Charlotte Campbell didn’t commit suicide, but there’s also something in this passage relevant to the issue (ahem) of Robin’s fertility:
Private detective Cormoran Strike was standing in the corner of a small, stuffy, crowded marquee with a wailing baby in his arms. Heavy rain was falling onto the canvas above, its irregular drumbeat audible even over the chatter of guests and his newly baptised godson’s screams. The heater at Strike’s back was pumping out too much warmth, but he couldn’t move, because three blonde women, all of whom were around forty and holding plastic glasses of champagne, had him trapped while taking it in turns to shout questions about his most newsworthy cases. Strike had agreed to hold the baby ‘for a mo’ while the baby’s mother went to the bathroom, but she’d been gone for what felt like an hour.
‘When,’ asked the tallest of the blondes loudly, ‘did you realise it wasn’t suicide?’
‘Took a while,’ Strike shouted back, full of resentment that one of these women wasn’t offering to hold the baby. Surely they knew some arcane female trick that would soothe him? He tried gently bouncing the child up and down in his arms. It shrieked still more bitterly. (21, emphasis added)
What are readers to make of “three blonde women, all of whom were around forty,” none of whom are “offering to hold the baby” despite Strike’s evident distress, in denial he thinks of their congenital knowledge as women of “some arcane female trick” to calm a screaming infant? I think it’s a fair guess that, surrounding Strike as they are, these women, near the end of (well-past?) their prime child-bearing years, with hair colored as likely as not to raise their game, are eager to win his attention, even a proposal. The reason they are still ‘available,’ assuming they are single, however, may be because they aren’t sufficiently feminine in the maternal sense. They certainly missed a prime opportunity to score points with the struggling godfather by not putting down their “plastic glasses of champagne” and giving the man a hand.
That there are three women of this sort that come into focus in the opening scene of the novel proper, when a reader may still be thinking unconsciously about the three “goddesses” of Rowling’s dedication, I think is a link. I’ll stretch that link to include the “three goddesses” featuring Artemis who were not subject to Aphrodite’s power because they were “asexual” and the two friends and one sister of Rowling who are not asexual but childless or childfree. This is not to mention the flock of lesbian women and activists with whom Rowling is more than an ally (see ‘London Ladies Liquid Lunch TERF Tea’ for a photo and discussion of this relationship), all of whom, again sans extraordinary medical intervention or departure from preference, are effectively sterile by choice.
There is material, in other words, in Rowling’s ‘Lake’ about the experience of infertile women, albeit second-hand rather than personal experience. The three mythological templates of Cormoran Strike, too, Castor and Pollux, Psyche and Cupid, and Fury Tisiphone and Artemis, are ‘Shed’ pointers to Rowling creating Robin as a character, feminine as a woman can be and desirous of children, who cannot. The mad wanna-be mothers in almost every book point as well to the psychological complications of this condition and the frustration of the maternal drive in women. The dropped hint of Robin’s chlamydia infection courtesy of her rapist makes that possibility plausible.
I hope that you will attempt to change my mind. One Serious Striker has already shared his preference for the idea that Robin is about to be caught in a Ryan Murphy pregnancy trap, that, far from sterile, she is Fertile Myrtle and a night of unprotected sex (or with an intentionally pierced condom?) leads to her being with child. I like that idea, of course, because it puts Strike in the awkward position of despising Murphy for having done what Leda did to win Rokeby, a trick leading to his existence. Can he really hate the guy or the conceived child and not be a risible hypocrite?
I have argued, though, that the evidence is pointing in a different direction, to Robin’s being a Yorkshire Baroness. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts about chlamydia-PID, about the ‘Shed’ arguments, and about the ‘Lake’ evidence. I’ll be talking with Nick Jeffery about this on the second Rowling Studies podcast and we’ll do our best to answer any questions raised here or on the podcast web site’s chat box, so have it!
Lots of good points. Some a little more tenuous than others. Of course, with our appreciation of the non-linear nature of much of Rowling's writing, there are some other possibilities. It may be that this is a garden path which we're being lead down, only for it to be subsequently subverted, with the birth of the Strike-Ellacott twins, Teddy Thierry and Lucy Pat. Or, it could be that there's an alternative parenting scenario, adoption, fostering, surrogacy, IVF, co-step-parenting the products of the ill-conceived clinches with Bijou and Ryan(foreshadowed by Shanker?)... With naturally all sorts of classical allusions, symbolism, echoes and reflections along the way.
SPOILER ALERT FOR THE HALLMARKED MAN
You were spot on with this, John!!