Storks

Storks enter Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion as a conventional explanation children use to make sense of birth. In Anna’s case, the story recurs as she tries to reconcile what adults tell her with what she observes: the bird can explain a baby’s arrival for a moment, but it does not settle her questions about pregnancy, birth, or how a child comes to be inside the mother. The episode makes the stork less a character than a durable piece of childhood lore, one that gives shape to uncertainty while a child’s understanding is still developing.

The Stork as an Early Explanation

De Beauvoir places the stork within a broader account of how children learn about reproduction. Girls may quickly stop believing that babies are born in cabbages or delivered by a stork, especially when a mother’s pregnancy and the arrival of a sibling make the subject immediate. Yet the child does not thereby gain a complete account: Anna initially supposes that pregnancy may follow from eating certain foods, a notion associated with fairy tales in which a queen gives birth after eating a particular fruit or fish. Such explanations reflect the child’s partial knowledge, rather than a settled theory.

Anna’s questions arise from curiosity about where babies come from and what happens to them before birth. At about three, she had heard that children were little angels and seemed to imagine that the dead went to heaven and returned as babies. When her younger brother arrived, her mother’s experience made the question more urgent. Anna looked at her the day after the birth with embarrassment and suspicion, then asked whether her mother was going to die. Later, suspecting that her mother had not told the truth about the infant’s birth, she asked whether she would become a different woman from her mother. The stork story belongs to this wider, unsettled inquiry, rather than standing alone as a charming misconception.

Anna’s Changing Account of Birth

When Anna’s mother explained that the baby had grown inside her, like a plant in the earth, Anna was delighted by the comparison. She immediately tested it with practical questions: had the baby come by itself, and how could it have come out if it could not yet walk? She wondered whether it had emerged through the chest or the mouth. Before her mother could answer, Anna returned to the stork explanation, saying she knew that the bird had brought the baby. The sequence shows her shifting between a new account based on growth inside the mother and a familiar story that supplied a ready-made answer for birth.

That explanation did not hold steadily. Later, Anna told her dolls about the stork, but with little conviction. In the meantime, she turned to other ways of picturing birth: after seeing a pregnant woman visit her mother, she put a doll under her skirts and slowly drew it out, announcing that the baby was coming. While eating an orange, she imagined swallowing it and then having a baby. The stork is therefore one element in a changing imaginative repertoire, alongside planting, eating, and the doll-play through which Anna tried out what she had heard and seen.

From the Stork to the Father’s Role

Anna’s questions also moved beyond the story of the bird toward the father’s contribution. She asked whether her father might have a plant inside him too, and wondered how her brother had got into her mother and who had put him there. Her father eventually explained that he supplied the seed. Anna appeared satisfied, but the next day she teasingly told her mother that her father had said the baby was a little angel brought down from heaven by the stork. Her repetition recast the old tale as a joke, now set against an explanation she had begun to understand.

De Beauvoir presents Anna’s case as unusually precise: many children ask less directly about the father’s role, or encounter greater evasion from adults. The stork story accordingly marks both the limits of what Anna initially knows and the uneven process by which that knowledge changes. It can be repeated after a more concrete answer has been given, but Anna’s questions and play show that she is not simply accepting it as fact.

Significance in the Account of Childhood

The passage uses the stork alongside other childhood beliefs to distinguish learned ideas from innate maternal feeling. De Beauvoir argues that girls are taught to associate themselves with future motherhood: adults direct them toward dolls, stories make children’s arrival imaginable, and everyday experience confirms that child care is assigned to women. The stork tale is one of the explanations circulating within that early world, while dolls let children represent pregnancy and birth for themselves.

The example also places children’s curiosity in a shared imaginative world, not exclusively a feminine one. De Beauvoir notes that boys as well as girls are fascinated by the apparent miracle of a child emerging from a mother’s body, and that boys may regret being unable to give birth. Against this wider fascination, Anna’s repeated return to the stork is a small but revealing measure of how a familiar story can coexist with observation, questions, and increasingly informed explanations. The bird belongs to the child’s effort to understand reproduction; it does not resolve that effort.