Introduction
Imagine a future America in which abortion has been banned by a conservative, theocratic government. People trying to fee in search of reproductive freedom are caught and imprisoned. Women slowly start to lose any power in society after they lose the fundamental right to decide what happens to their own bodies. This world may sound familiar to you from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which has become one of the predominant ways many of us picture a future devoid of reproductive justice over the past 35 years. The recent Hulu adaptation breathed new life into Atwood’s imaginings. In real life, activists protest abortion restrictions dressed in the red robes of Handmaids—women compelled to bear children for other families in Atwood’s novel.1
Yet this is also the future depicted in Leni Zumas’s 2018 novel Red Clocks, with a few important exceptions. In Red Clocks, a Personhood Amendment has been enacted in the US that bans both abortion and in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Zumas focuses both on that typical heroine of abortion narratives, the accidentally pregnant young woman denied a termination, and a very unusual dystopian protagonist—a single woman in her forties desperate to get pregnant through reproductive technologies. In The Handmaid’s Tale, as in many of our cultural narratives, pregnancy is depicted as regressive and dehumanising, as subservience to the status quo. Most women cannot get pregnant following some kind of environmental disaster, and the ones who can—who, inexplicably, seem to all be women who have committed past ‘crimes’ such as divorce—are forced to be surrogates to their supposed moral and social superiors, the legitimate but infertile Wives. Zumas’s novel, by contrast, makes space for pregnancy as a kind of resistance, thus returning the focus to people’s agency to determine their own reproductive futures in either direction: pregnancy or abortion.
Red Clocks also difers from The Handmaid’s Tale in the way it imagines American exceptionalism. Atwood’s novel posits Canada—her native country, of course—as a site of liberation: when Ofred escapes, she runs for the border. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the debate over abortion is
DOI: 10.4324/9781032709543-1
confned to the borders of America. Zumas, however, imagines the Canadian creation of a ‘Pink Wall’ preventing Americans from escaping north: far from standing up to America, the Canadian government agrees to give a pregnancy test to any woman trying to cross the border and send back any who test positive into a world of forced childbearing.
America is often imagined as a dystopian site of reproductive injustice, a convenient site for other countries to displace their own social tensions around gender and reproduction and the shrinking of the white population. Around the same time Atwood was writing about American theocracy under which abortion providers are hanged, the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island banned abortions; none were performed there for 35 years, from 1982 to 2017. Similarly, the British artist Grayson Perry’s 1993 quilt ‘Right to Life’, in which a cosy blanket is decorated with shocking images of bleeding fetuses, was created as a commentary on the American abortion debate even though just three years earlier in Britain, the time limit on abortion had been shortened from 28 to 24 weeks.
British people, like many others, tend to think that abortion is an American problem; many don’t know that the 28-week limit was established in England, Scotland, and Wales by the Abortion Act of 1967, which was rather restrictive. As the journalist Hilary Freeman put it in a 2019 article for The Guardian, ‘Many people are unaware that in the UK in 2019, abortion is still, technically, a criminal ofence’. In a 2017 poll, 69 percent of Britons surveyed incorrectly believed that abortion was ‘completely legal if the woman requests it’. Only 13 percent knew that ‘abortion is a criminal act unless certain strict conditions are met’.
The 1967 Act serves as a kind of loophole to a law criminalising abortion, the Ofences Against the Person Act of 1861. The 1967 Act permits abortion only if it is performed for health reasons with the approval of two doctors; as Freeman points out, ‘No other medical procedure requires legal authorisation as well as the patient’s own consent’. Ultimately, Freeman is arguing for the complete decriminalisation of abortion. To support her argument, however, she invokes the faulty belief that the US—not the UK—is the site of contested reproductive rights, insisting ‘We need to distance ourselves from the backward-looking US, where abortion rights are under attack’. Yet the US has no monopoly on anti-abortion ideology; these rights are under attack in the UK, as well. Since 1967, the Abortion Act has been challenged several times in Parliament, and under the Conservative Party, which has been in power since 2010, those who support abortion rights have been on the defensive. In 2011, Tory MP Nadine Dorries introduced an amendment that would strip abortion providers of their role in counselling patients and allow ‘independent’—mostly faith-based and anti-abortion— organisations to take their place. Her amendment failed, but in 2019, Jeremy Hunt, who now serves as chair of the Health
and Social Care Select Committee, announced his support for lowering the abortion ban in Great Britain from 24 to 12 weeks.
The reversal of Roe v. Wade and the end of a national right to abortion in June 2022 via the US Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson has only drawn further attention to restrictive abortion laws while reinforcing the idea that the US is the epicentre of abortion restriction; no article on British abortion law is complete without a dystopian reference to how atrocious the US situation is and how Britain might be going down the same path. In an August 19, 2022, article for the Guardian, the barrister Charlotte Proudman wrote, ‘Like many people in Britain, you probably watched with horror the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, thinking, “Thank goodness women could never be prosecuted for having an abortion here”. But let me tell you, it already happens here’. Proudman then details the cases of two women facing criminal charges for taking abortifacients during their pregnancies and calls for Britain to fnally legalise abortion.
Looking at how the abortion discussion difers in other contexts can help us denaturalise the American abortion debate and see it not as inevitable but as contingent and historically constructed, and thus subject to change. Britain is one of many countries where abortion rights are— falsely—assumed to be largely uncontested, but it presents opportunities to study how complex debates around abortion, pregnancy, motherhood, and the beginning of life can be and how they have evolved diferently in societies that are diferent from the US in religious, cultural, racial, and legal terms.
Britain’s is a particularly valuable history to examine as it is the site of important frsts in the development—as well as the imagining—of reproductive technology. Forceps are thought to have been developed in the seventeenth century by one of two brothers from a family of obstetricians, named Peter Chamberlen, who became surgeon to the queen; the Chamberlen family kept forceps a secret for almost a century by blindfolding women in labour. More than three hundred years later, the world’s frst test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in Manchester. In the intervening centuries, arguments raged about motherhood, eugenics, the British race, and reproductive technologies—arguments that intensifed in the twentieth century, when contraceptive technology advanced rapidly over the condoms made from animal intestines available to people in earlier days. Sex and reproduction have been undergoing a slow divorce over the last hundred years, and the UK has been at the vanguard of attempts to hasten this split; in interwar Britain, sex without reproduction became increasingly possible with contraception and improved surgical abortion techniques, and reproduction without sex was frst imagined by science-fction writers long before it became humanly possible.
In 1930, bestselling Scottish novelist and birth-control clinic volunteer Naomi Mitchison wrote in an essay entitled Comments on Birth Control that one ‘moral problem which our ancestors did not have to cope with, is this terrible responsibility of the deliberate creation or denial of life’. Aldous Huxley—a childhood friend of Mitchison’s who performed, as a teenager, in a 1913 play she had written about eugenics—was two years away from publishing Brave New World, whose vision of babymaking has captivated and terrifed us since. Huxley drew some of his ideas on reproduction without sex from Mitchison’s brother, J.B.S. Haldane, a geneticist at Cambridge who coined the term ‘ectogenesis’, meaning the use of artifcial wombs, in 1924.
Sex without babies became increasingly thinkable around this time as well; in 1921, Marie Stopes opened the frst birth-control clinic in the UK, which was likely the only one operating in the world at that time; the frst-ever clinic was founded in Amsterdam in 1882 but closed in 1894. Unlike the birth control clinic Margaret Sanger opened in New York City in 1916, which operated in secret and was shut down by police ten days later, Stopes’s clinic remained open. Stopes had purposefully established her clinic in a working-class neighbourhood of London and ofered care for free when necessary, and she even started a service that would travel around the country.
As I will later discuss, some supporters of birth control, including Stopes, invoked eugenic ideologies when working to make contraception more accessible to the poor, and some supporters of legal abortion did the same. There was no denying, however, that many people did want to have more control over their childbearing. In 1925, Stopes began to write an advice column about birth control for John Bull, a magazine that drew a largely working-class audience. She published many of these letters as a book entitled Mother England (1929) in which she wrote, ‘In three months I have had as many as twenty thousand requests for criminal abortion from women who did not apparently even know that it was criminal’. Stopes publicly championed birth control as a way of avoiding abortion, although she sometimes privately counselled women on how to terminate pregnancies.
As these letters to Stopes demonstrate, women at the time did not always regard birth control and abortion as separate practices; for example, to keep themselves ‘regular’, women sometimes took monthly pills that were sold, under coded language, as abortifacients. Even if relatively few could access birth-control clinics or methods in interwar Britain, more and more people were becoming aware that such control might be possible. In the 1920s, newspapers frst advertised birth-control devices, and Aldous Huxley’s brother Julian became the frst to say the words ‘birth control’ on the BBC.
Despite these advances and the evident desire for methods of fertility control, eforts to spread awareness about contraception were hotly
contested and often censored. Huxley was reprimanded for his daring, and birth control clinics were picketed by protestors who called their clients ‘whores’. The overall climate around sexuality in Britain in the frst half of the twentieth century was one of shame and secrecy; Simon Szreter notes that one commonality among women of all classes tended to be ‘the profound ignorance of reproductive biology at marriage, absence of the most rudimentary instruction from their own mothers, and often innocence of, fear and distaste at their own bodies’ sexual functionings’ (add citation). As late as 1942, Love without Fear, a guide to sex for married adults written by a respected gynaecologist, was prosecuted for obscenity.
Due to this climate of secrecy and censorship and the illegality of abortion, fction, whether it was historical, science fction, or realist and contemporary, ultimately became one of the freest spheres for the exploration of these new possibilities and, as Mitchison underscores, the new ethical choices and interpersonal relationships these new possibilities created. As the birth-control and abortion-legalisation movements gained ground starting in the 1920s and 1930s, writers battled censorship to make pregnancy and abortion central to their plots, even drawing on their own experiences. In the early twentieth century, abortion, which existed at the nexus of crime and sex, mainly entered into public discourse in sensationalist newspaper accounts of women found dead. Writers were discouraged from mentioning abortion even when they depicted it in a negative light as dangerous and even fatal, yet they managed to create a space in which ‘the secret operation’ could be discussed at the remove of fction.
If abortion was considered too scandalous a story to be told, pregnancy was considered not enough of a story—uninteresting, and disgusting to boot. What could be learned from the tale of a messy, biological, everyday experience? Pregnancy had been the assumed, of-page ending to the courtship plot, not a story in itself: babies generally appear out of nowhere in nineteenth-century literature.
Resistant Reproductions asks why narratives of pregnancy, including those of abortion, emerged in the early twentieth century and what kinds of new stories these narratives were able to convey. Is it only once pregnancy becomes plannable that it becomes a story worth telling? How do these narratives reveal not only the hidden private dimensions of these bodily, subjective experiences but also their hidden public dimensions, the interweaving of these supposedly private experiences with public questions of modernity, gender, class, and eugenics? As abortion stories begin to be told, how do they, as stories of nonreproduction, get cast as resistant and feminist, while pregnancy stories—when they emerge—are coded as domestic and conventional, even regressive or repressive? How can readings of literary narratives challenge this reductive binary?
Resistant Reproductions, the frst book-length study of both pregnancy and abortion in British culture, addresses these questions by examining pregnancy narratives, including abortion narratives, in British fction and flm from 1907, when abortion was frst used as a critical plot point in British literature to 1967, when abortion law was liberalised in England, Scotland, and Wales. Before pro-life and pro-choice positions crystallised after the legalisation of abortion, writers explored the question from a number of angles. The spectre of needing access to abortion haunted women writers, bohemians, and intellectuals of the interwar period, including Mina Loy and Virginia Woolf, who turn abortion into a metaphor in texts that allude to actual abortions. Other writers, such as Jean Rhys, Mary Renault, Rosamond Lehmann, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Alan Sillitoe, go further and write abortion into their plots. Fiction became a way for writers to explore what new possibilities of reproductive control would mean for the individual. Yet there was also much anxiety about who would have control: individuals, or the state?
While exploring intimate personal experiences of pregnancy and abortion, Resistant Reproductions also asks how literary narratives used reproductive plots to address political issues of gender, class, and eugenics. Reproductive control was imagined not only in personal terms, as a liberating choice or ‘terrible responsibility’, but also as state control. In the past, reproductive control was not generally thought of as possible or desirable; Robert Malthus, for example, opposed contraception and believed the poor would be kept in check by disease and starvation since they could not be trusted to control their birth rate through ‘moral restraint’ alone. Yet in the nineteenth century, along with industrial modernity’s obsession with planning came the idea that the state should take an active role in shaping its population: in Foucauldian terms, the rise of biopower, or the idea that population is at once a political, social, and biological problem. The British scientist Francis Galton’s ideology of eugenics—a term he coined in 1883—seemed to ofer a solution by suggesting that the state could encourage certain people to reproduce while discouraging others.
The earliest texts I focus on here were written in the Edwardian period, at the height of eugenics’s popularity in the UK. I demonstrate how ideas of the ‘power of life’ in the dramas of George Bernard Shaw and Harley Granville-Barker shape the frst substantive representations of abortion in British literature. In the interwar period, new technological and social developments—more efective and available female barrier methods of birth control, the recently perfected surgical abortion procedure of dilation and curettage (D&C)—as well as imagined technologies like artifcial wombs were hotly debated in the UK as means of achieving the eugenic aim of a stronger, healthier, more productive, more intelligent race of Britons. Eugenics was openly espoused by leaders and writers across the
political spectrum over the course of my period: although they are often thought to have petered out after the Second World War, I will argue that postwar fctional pregnancy and abortion narratives continued to circulate eugenic ideas.
Resistant Reproductions demonstrates that pregnancy emerged in literature as a disruptive force: frst, as a protest against the idea of state control of women’s bodies in interwar fction and then as a way to question social mobility in mid-century fction. Before my research, I fully expected, and certainly hoped, to be able to read abortion plots in literature as disruptive, feminist, and subversive, but to my surprise, I found that in contrast to many pregnancy plots that do not involve the question of termination, abortion plots in British literature often refect regressive ideologies about eugenics and class. By returning to a time when the narrative meanings of pregnancy and abortion were just being worked out, and by considering the two together, I aim with this book to challenge the binary between ‘reproduction’ and ‘nonreproduction’ evident in medical and legal representations as well as literary and cultural studies, in which the refusal of reproduction (both biological and metaphorical) is often invested with radical potential. Most critics of abortion narratives in fction see abortion as nonreproduction and consider nonreproduction to be an essentially subversive act, as do critics as diverse as Lee Edelman, in his analysis of reproduction futurism, and Peggy Phelan, in her writings on the nonreproducability of performance. This commitment to reading abortion narratives as subversive and feminist has prevented critics from examining how these narratives express contemporary anxieties and circulate antiabortion ideologies.
Resistant Reproductions establishes the need for a historicist approach to British pregnancy and abortion narratives. Instead of anachronistically interpreting abortion narratives as ‘pro-choice’, in this book I combine close readings of literary works with archival research that allows me to place these works in the contexts of medical, legal, and social histories. I fnd that illegal abortion in twentieth-century British literature is less about agency, sisterhood, and transgression and more about eugenic unease, class politics, anxiety about technology, and misogynistic backlash. When abortion is assumed to be radical, pregnancy is painted as conventional by default, but my fndings in this book demonstrate that pregnancy plots can lead to both narrative and formal innovations.
My historicist approach allows me to question our current understandings of concepts such as ‘birth control’ and ‘abortion’, which, as previously mentioned, many women did not see as distinct. A late period was not necessarily a sign of pregnancy but could also mean a ‘menstrual blockage’, treatable with commercially available medicines like ‘Widow Welch’s female pills’ that promised to cure ‘female irregularities’ and ‘remove
obstruction even in the most obstinate of cases’ (Fisher 224). Some may have realised they were pregnant, but the focus on menstruation rather than pregnancy created a space of ambiguity in which women could carve out their own defnitions of their actions.2
‘Abortion’, a sixteenth-century Latinate term combining the prefx ab, meaning ‘away from’, with orīrī, ‘to arise, appear, come into being’, was used interchangeably along with ‘miscarriage’ into the twentieth century. Rosemary Elliott writes,
in 1997, a Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists study group recommended that the word miscarriage be used to denote spontaneous early pregnancy loss. They suggested that the word abortion be avoided as this was associated in the public mind with planned termination of pregnancy,
which used to be labelled ‘induced’ or ‘deliberate’ abortion (1–2). Both terms have been whittled down to these medical meanings; ‘miscarriage’ had also denoted misconduct or a mistake (as in miscarriage of justice), whereas ‘abortion’ had been used for a ‘person or thing not fully or properly formed’ (OED). For example, in Gloriana, or, The Revolution of 1900 (1890), the New Woman novelist Lady Florence Dixie imagines a feminist utopia in which ‘the ghastly abortions, which in many parts pass muster nowadays, owing to the unnatural physical conditions of Society, as men, women, and children, will make room for a nobler and higher order of beings’ (137). Both ‘miscarriage’ and ‘abortion’ imply that a desired process has gone horribly awry.
The two mentions of abortion I have been able to fnd in eighteenthcentury literature demonstrate this interchangeability. In Penelope Aubin’s novel The Life and Adventures of Lady Lucy (1726), a minor character confesses that he got his wife’s sister pregnant and ‘purchas’d and gave her such Drugs as could cause Abortion, but in vain, and she grew big’ (34). In Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), the title character recounts of her midwife, Mother Midnight,
In discoursing about my being so far gone with child, she said something that looked as if she could help me of with my burthen sooner, if I was willing; or, in English, that she could give me something to make me miscarry . . . I soon let her see that I abhorr’d the thoughts of it. (168)
After abortion was criminalised in the nineteenth century,3 a history I will shortly discuss, references to ‘abortion’, which are rare, seemed even more coded. Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866) refers to ‘some woman’s
business’ being carried out in the cosmetics shop of Mother Jezebel, a character modelled on ‘Madame Rachel,’ a ‘lady-renovator’ whose fraud trial became a scandal (106). In Ménie Muriel Dowie’s eugenic novel Gallia (1895), a man’s mistress induces an abortion by dancing madly and then disappears from the story.
‘Abortion’ is not used to denote pregnancy termination in British twentieth-century literature until the 1930s and is not spoken aloud by characters until the late 1950s. While some critics consider the direct use of the term liberating, I would argue that it can also indicate increasing medicalisation and a silencing of alternative understandings. To see other expressions only as ‘euphemisms’ is to privilege the limited term ‘abortion’ at the expense of the complexities expressed in other phrasings. Historically, many women did not describe their behaviour using ‘abortion’, a clinical term associated with instruments and surgery; instead, they called it ‘bringing me round’ or ‘putting me right’, suggesting that by restoring menstruation they were curing themselves, restoring the natural, healthy state of things and their usual and preferred selves. Pregnancy was not necessarily recognised as such until ‘quickening’, the time around the fourth month when a woman starts to feel fetal movement.4
The frst statutory regulation of abortion in English law, the 1803 Ellenborough Act, recognised quickening by mandating the death penalty for causing the ‘miscarriage’ of any woman after quickening (those prior to quickening were punished by pillory or transportation), and an 1837 amendment removed both the quickening distinction and death penalty. The 1861 Ofences Against the Person Act, the most infuential abortion law until 1967, prohibited ‘unlawfully’ administered abortions, suggesting that some operations might be considered lawful if performed for medical reasons. Pro-choice historians such as Leslie Reagan argue that the nineteenth-century criminalisation of abortion in both the US and UK was primarily driven not by religious or ethical considerations but by doctors eager to consolidate their control over pregnancy and childbirth. Tanfer Tunç argues that this medicalisation was accomplished from 1850 to 1920 partly through D&C, in which knives are used to scrape the uterus’s lining.5 Doctors attempted to discredit other methods as inefective and unsafe.6 By 1920, ‘a leading [British] medical text declared that . . . the operation was “almost free from risk”’ (Brookes and Roth 314).
The 1861 Act created a legal grey area in which those with money could purchase ‘therapeutic’ abortions—D&Cs—from doctors whose reputations generally rendered them immune to prosecution; these were often known, rather London-centrically, as ‘Harley Street’ or ‘West End’ abortions. Those of lesser means often turned to criminal abortionists, who used riskier but sometimes efective techniques such as injecting soap into the uterus with a syringe; many women also attempted abortion at home
by falling down the stairs; drinking gin; dilating the cervix with slippery elm bark; and/or ingesting herbs, lead, gunpowder, quinine, and ergot. Many did not know that the 1861 Act made the woman herself criminally liable for attempting to ‘procure her own miscarriage’; the Act made no reference to quickening, an experience doctors disparaged as a women’s folk belief.
Ideas of quickening and menstrual blockage persisted into the twentieth century, however. ‘Women would exchange remedies for delayed menstruation yet “artifcial” birth control was seen as “a sin against the Holy Ghost”’, according to a survey of working-class attitudes in Salford circa 1925; in 1933, a London magistrate complained that women were reluctant to visit birth control clinics because ‘contraception is not considered ‘respectable’ . . . but harmful methods . . . of abortion are’ (Brookes 4). A female abortionist interviewed in Holloway Prison in the early 1960s insisted ‘abortion—that’s once a child’s formed . . . I was only bringing the period on’ (Woodside 108). Women’s everyday practices, therefore, can be read as resistance not only to a medico-legal diktat that ending pregnancy was wrong but the ofcial construction of pregnancy itself.
Although historical context is crucial to my readings of literature and flm, accounts of fctional representations of abortion by historians and sociologists have focused narrowly on their (in)accuracy, criticising them for portraying abortion as more dangerous than it really is. In a 2014 study, sociologists Gretchen Sisson and Katrina Kimport, in ‘Telling Stories about Abortion: Abortion-related Plots in American Film and Television, 1916–2013’, in the journal Contraception, identifed 310 relevant plots and found that 13.5 percent ended with the death of the woman who considered abortion whether or not she obtained one, which they regard as an exaggerated death rate. Most medical procedures receive the opposite treatment: CPR, for example, is shown as more efective on screen than it is in life (13). They argue that these narratives ‘support the social myth associating abortion with death’ (3).
The ‘distant reading’ exemplifed by Sisson and Kimport is valuable because fctional abortion narratives have consequences for the lived experiences of women seeking abortions. Researchers have shown that after watching The Cider House Rules (1999), a flm in which a victim of incest who has an abortion is portrayed in a sympathetic light, subjects were signifcantly more likely to support access to legal abortion in the case of incest.7 Yet its lack of contextualisation makes it a blunt tool. For example, this approach does not take into account that, as I will later discuss, the depiction of a fatal abortion can be an anti-abortion warning, or it could be an argument for legalised abortion so that such tragedies are not repeated.
Focusing narrowly on accuracy misses as much as the other common approach: reading literary works as disseminators of ideas. As Andrew
Mangham and Greta Depledge point out, considerations of literature and medicine often use the former ‘briefy and inadequately . . . as evidence of how a particular development in medicine became so pervasive that literary fgures exploited it as a means of making their novels marketable and topical’ (1). ‘In this form of linking the two disciplines’, they add, ‘the literary text thus becomes two-dimensional, a historical document, and not (which is really the case) a powerful forum for discussing and questioning the assumptions of clinical science’ (14 n4). Yet they include in their collection a chapter, ‘Representations of Illegal Abortionists in England, 1900–1967’, by Emma Jones, who scofs, ‘literary depictions perhaps owe more to the build-up of tension in abortion scenes than to accuracy’ and chides fctional representations for perpetrating the mainstream medical view that only abortions performed by reputable doctors were safe (207).
In these accounts by historians, literary texts are often reduced to plot summaries, with little consideration of the qualities that mark them as literary texts—metaphor, form, language, dialogue—as if how these stories are told can be separated from the stories themselves. Only close readings of literary narratives can reveal how the ways in which meaning is made are essential to that meaning itself. The neglected or misconstrued issue of abortion turns out to be central to the texts I discuss, and rereading them as abortion narratives can provide more nuanced accounts while shedding light on their distinctiveness. My approach also highlights generic structures; one problem every abortion narrative must solve, for example, is where the story goes once the pregnancy and parenthood plot—with its built-in timeline and inherent drama—is aborted.
By taking abortion as a theme rather than focusing on certain writers or periods, I challenge the canon and bring the work of writers like George Orwell into dialogue with that of lesser-known female writers such as Rosamond Lehmann and Naomi Mitchison. A thematic rather than canonical or period focus raises questions that enable us to see forgotten aspects of the picture. Who else was writing on this issue? What broader cultural trends were they responding to? Many of the narratives I examine have been sidelined by conceptions of modernism that focus on the formally experimental, relying on an overly narrow notion of the modernist aesthetic, as well as by challenges to those conceptions such as ‘intermodernism’ that rest on an overly narrow notion of the political. I argue that when these narratives are read for their engagement with the politics and aesthetics of reproduction, they prove not only more politically engaged but also more formally innovative. Pregnancy is disruptive not only to fctional plots but also to their forms, often hijacking a oncelinear narrative or introducing linearity into a dilatory one. Abortion, which often occurs at the end of a narrative, can lead to more conventional forms of closure.
In my attempt to destabilise the non/reproduction binary, I ask ‘reproductive of what, and for whom?’ Pregnancy can intrude as nonreproductive in its challenge to the status quo, whereas abortion plots can reproduce a character’s former life. Reading abortion narratives as pregnancy narratives destabilises the teleological construction of pregnancy evident in biomedical culture, exposing the contingency of pregnancy and opening it up to new readings. Pregnancy realisation and the sensations of early pregnancy are re-imagined as events that could lead to various outcomes both biological and narrative.
Another goal of mine with this book is to contribute to medical and social history through a contextualised exploration of abortion in literature. As the geographer Francesca Moore writes, ‘the topic of illegal abortion has received relatively little attention in academic research, primarily because of the diffculty of researching this hidden crime, but also because it has not always been considered a ‘respectable’ subject for research’ (264). Although the scant sources that do exist—coroners’ reports, sensationalised newspaper articles, pieces in medical journals, the deliberations of government committees—give a sense of big-picture concerns such as maternal mortality rates, debates about women’s rights and duties, and anxieties about the decline of the ‘British race’, novels provide some of the only contemporary windows into personal experiences of illegal abortion while also suggesting how these personal experiences are inseparable from concerns about race, class, and eugenics.
In exploring the ambiguities of abortion, Resistant Reproductions avoids some of the pro-life/pro-choice political bias that marks the few books that do exist on abortion in Britain. John Keown’s Abortion, Doctors and the Law: Some Aspects of the Legal Regulation of Abortion in England from 1803–1982 (1988) takes a Catholic perspective that not only casts abortion as an evil but also omits its social history. In the frst feminist history of abortion for any UK country, Abortion in England, 1900–1967, also published in 1988, Barbara Brookes admirably addresses a social history that is difcult to trace.
Brookes’s pro-choice determination to present abortion as a resistant ‘female subculture’, however, means that she is less able to explore the potential ambiguities of abortion for the women involved. More recently, historians have challenged Brookes’s insistence on abortion as empowerment. For example, in Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (1996), Simon Szreter suggests that women with more power in their households might have been able to get their husbands to agree to less dangerous forms of family limitation, such as abstinence and withdrawal. As the oral historian Kate Fisher writes, ‘We should no longer see the entire twentieth century as a series of increasingly successful attempts by women to determine their reproductive future’. Resistant Reproductions brings the insights of this historiographical shift to feminist literary criticism; instead
of wishfully reading literary abortion narratives as transgressive and feminist, I trace how these novels express ambivalence and anxiety. Literature and flm complicate triumphalist narratives: for example, the frst British flm to depict oral contraceptives, Prudence and the Pill (1968), is a farce that ends with fve characters pregnant.
Recent years have seen the publication of a number of scholarly monographs on reproduction in American and transatlantic literature and/ or flm, most focusing on the interwar period, that establish the centrality of cultural works to the development of reproductive politics. Three recent books analyse birth control in literature of the modernist period: Beth Widmaier Capo’s Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American Fiction (Ohio State University Press, 2007, $59.95), Layne Parish Craig’s When Sex Changed: Birth Control Politics and Literature Between the Wars (Rutgers University Press, 2013, $27.95), and Aimee Armande Wilson’s Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, £67.99).
However, there are very few books focusing on the cultural representations of abortion. Judith Wilt’s monograph Abortion, Choice, and Contemporary Fiction: The Armageddon of the Maternal Instinct (Chicago, 1990), written from a Catholic perspective, considers abortion an ‘evil’; Jef Koloze’s An Ethical Analysis of the Portrayal of Abortion in American Fiction takes an anti-abortion perspective (Edwin Mellen Press, 2005). Karen Weingarten’s Abortion and the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940 (Rutgers University Press, 2014, $25.95) is the only monograph on abortion in literature that does not consider abortion to be a regrettable, immoral act.
Capo, Craig, Wilson, and Weingarten focus on literature prior to 1945. In tracing representations of abortion until 1967, I am able to highlight a transition in sexual culture also suggested by historians such as Stephen Brooke. In the prewar period, sex and reproduction were considered from a less individualistic, more communal perspective. Objections to abortion did not generally focus on what we now term ‘fetal personhood’, the idea that a fetus must be protected as an individual with the same rights as a post-birth person. Instead, opponents of legal abortion were concerned that abortion would harm the community by leading to promiscuity and the decline of the ‘white race’. As I show, literary narratives refected this communal perspective by highlighting concerns about eugenics and class. In the postwar period, sex and reproduction increasingly come to be seen as personal matters.
Weingarten’s work is unusual in its nuanced insistence that abortion plots in American literature can express retrogressive anxieties; much academic work depicts abortion plots as necessarily transgressive. For example, in her unpublished 2007 thesis on abortion plots in American novels from
1900 to 1945, Meg Gillette concludes that these novels were ‘a portent of the feminist speak-outs to come . . . [they] educated readers about why women might seek abortion and the problems related to America’s abortion laws’ (144). Gillette adopts the language of second-wave feminism when she comments, ‘in modern abortion plots, the personal becomes the political’ (144). In Reproductive Acts: Sexual Politics in North American Fiction and Film, Heather Latimer reads Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) using Judith Roof’s analogising of abortion law to private property law; Roof argues that ‘abortion embodies the crux of the family crisis as the mother . . . threatens to separate from the child in defance of a father’ (50).8
The few critics to examine abortion in British literature (namely Sally Minogue, Andrew Palmer, and Andrea Lewis) who have written journal articles and book chapters on the topic have read these works ahistorically as feminist and subversive. Minogue and Palmer, for example, who in covering only four writers and thirty years provide the most extensive account of abortion in British literature available, focus on those ‘who took the brave step of representing abortion at a time when it was (for the 30s writers) a taboo subject or (for the 50s/60s writers) still outside the law and seen as morally reprehensible’ (104). They maintain that Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934)9 and Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (1936) were ‘groundbreaking in that they represented illegal abortions openly and with no apparent disapprobation . . . without a tradition of representations to draw on’ (104). This ignores the frst literary depictions of abortion in Edwardian political drama as well as its eruptions in 1920s fction, including Naomi Mitchison’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (1925) and Rose Macaulay’s Crewe Train (1926). Furthermore, ‘disapprobation’ is too binary a term to describe abortion narratives, in which abortion often represents both individual experience and social critique; for example, Mitchison’s novel decries the need for abortion but shows no ‘disapprobation’ toward the woman herself.
In telling this grand narrative of abortion as increasing empowerment, Minogue and Palmer paint an even rosier picture of abortion in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), emphasising the ‘comedic’ nature of its abortion narrative. Their approach demonstrates the perils of parachuting in theory while neglecting historical context; their use of Bakhtin to read the abortion in Sillitoe’s novel as carnivalesque reduces it to what Nicole Moore has termed a ‘cliché of abortion plots for working-class women . . . an amusing callous insouciance’ (77). Furthermore, they neglect indications that Brenda’s abortion fails to build a female community because they take the existence of a working-class female subculture for granted.
Minogue and Palmer assume that British abortion plots must be feminist, but abortion has always been a controversial issue in Britain, less for religious reasons and more because of eugenic anxieties around class. I
fnd that whereas American abortion fction charts the transgression and policing of racial boundaries, British abortion fction foregrounds class: working-class whites are depicted as subhuman, animalistic, and overbreeding. With a postwar increase in immigration, however, this class anxiety shifts into a racial anxiety, and the state, including the newly established National Health Service (NHS), is now concerned with promoting, not limiting, white working-class reproduction.
It is tempting, but too easy, to read every instance of abortion in British literature as subverting patriarchal domination. While I believe abortion plots can have subversive power (and will revel in this power when it appears), a tendency to see British abortion narratives as wholly transgressive has prevented an examination of how these narratives can both enable broadly based social and political critique and give voice to the expression of contemporary anxieties. The representation of abortion (carried out or merely contemplated) in twentieth-century British literature and flm has not yet been adequately theorised and historicised. With this dissertation, I will establish it as both producing and produced by a range of profound social, political, moral, and aesthetic concerns.
Critics determined to read abortion as negative distort their texts as much as critics determined to read abortion as positive. I, on the other hand—a supporter of legal abortion—am reading against the grain, reading disappointedly and even angrily rather than to confrm what I hope to see. I hope to demonstrate how anti-abortion tropes operate subtly in literature and flm but also to illustrate the knotty ambivalence in these novels and flms that is lost when they are misread as condemnations of abortion or celebrations of women’s bodily autonomy.
The book is also intended as a contribution to the critical medical humanities that challenges earlier concepts of the medical humanities in which literature was seen as necessarily humanising medicine or as pointing out its inhumanity. Instead, in the critical medical humanities, humanities and biomedical culture are viewed as mutually constitutive and inseparable. I aim to carve out a larger role for literature within the feld. Whereas earlier forms of the medical humanities have focused on how humanities might bring empathy to clinical practice, calling upon literature for its insights into the subjective, I proceed from the understanding that literature is not just about feelings: literature props up, engages with, and challenges ideas of power, justice, and diference.
Throughout the following chapters, I show that accounts of abortion in British literature are only able to read the act as wholly empowering by ignoring the social, legal, and medical complexities of abortion in the twentieth century. I attempt a historically informed criticism in which theoretical and conceptual ideas—from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of homosociality to my exploration of the muddled timescales of abortion—are employed,
adapted, and created as the need emerges though an analysis of texts and contexts instead of one in which theory is substituted for history or one in which literature is read against history for accuracy.
In my frst chapter, ‘Before Brave New World: Pregnancy as Protest in Early Twentieth-Century and Interwar British Women’s Writing’, I explore how Huxley’s famous 1932 novel, often taken as sui generis—born out of nothing, like its test-tube babies—is in fact imbricated in a matrix of writing about how technological change, both real and imagined, might reshape sex, reproduction, gender roles, and the family. In this chapter, I examine fctional and essayistic precursors to Brave New World by neglected women writers. Whereas Huxley’s female characters accept the end of pregnancy with only twinges of regret, women in these works express fear and grief at being deprived of their procreative power by new reproductive technologies, both imagined and real. Much attention has been given to writers of eugenic fction like Sarah Grand, but there has been little work on women’s anti-eugenic writing.
At a time when having children was often regarded as a woman’s ‘duty’ to the nation and the race, reproduction may seem the opposite of radical. Yet these works fgure pregnancy as protest against eugenic regimes, demonstrating that any automatic link between pregnancy and conformity is put into question when one considers those who are not encouraged, or allowed, to reproduce. Naomi Mitchison’s play ‘Saunes Bairos’ (1913) tells the story of a young woman’s resistance to the eugenic laws of her society. In Rose Macaulay’s novel What Not (1919), Britain is ruled by a Ministry of Brains that determines who is allowed to reproduce: a ‘dysgenic’ couple determined to have children rebels against the ban. Man’s World (1926) by Charlotte Haldane challenges her husband Jack’s insistence that separating sex and reproduction would lead to greater freedom. The novel is set in a future society ruled by male scientists in which women must choose whether to be vocational mothers, if deemed ft, or be sterilised: female characters rebel against being ‘divided of into breeders and non-breeders to serve the race’. In her essay Halcyon, or the Future of Monogamy (1929), Vera Brittain writes a history of the future in which Haldane’s eugenic scheme of artifcial wombs has failed because of a lack of mothering: instead, scientists devote themselves to making pregnancy pleasurable. In all four works, pregnancy is fgured as a natural impulse that disrupts male attempts to control women’s bodies and create a eugenic state through reproductive technology. I close this chapter with a brief look at an essay by Mitchison, ‘Comments on Birth Control (1930)’, that I will focus on in my second chapter.
My second chapter, ‘Terrible Responsibility: Birth Control and Abortion in the 1930s Writings of Naomi Mitchison’, traces a widening gulf between birth control and abortion in the frst half of the 1930s through
the fction and nonfction of Naomi Mitchison, author of ‘Saunes Bairos’, who continued to fgure pregnancy as protest while linking abortion and oppression. In early twentieth-century Britain, most women did not make much distinction between contraception and abortion.
This was beginning to change in the 1920s and 1930s, when many ideas familiar today—for example that birth control is morally preferable to abortion and in fact makes abortion immoral—gained traction, partly due to a widening discursive gulf between the two. In the early 1920s, birth control was a taboo topic: by the end of the decade, it was mentioned on radio and in newspapers, deemed acceptable within marriage by Anglican bishops, and distributed to married women in public clinics.
Mitchison volunteered in one of these clinics, motivated not by eugenic ideologies but by alleviating misery. Yet she wrote in her 1930 essay Comments on Birth Control that birth control was being accepted much too quickly as a universal good and that women were being pressured into having fewer children than they wanted. Mitchison draws on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, also seeing fertility as resistance against industrial modernity, even while criticising Lawrence for his fear of female sexual pleasure. Yet far from imagining contraception as enabling this pleasure, however, Mitchison insists that women fnd sex dull without the potential of pregnancy.
Mitchison takes a dark view of abortion, suggesting that contraception made it immoral and calling it ‘blood and pain and ugliness’ in a 1935 novel called We Have Been Warned. It is part of the oppressive past in her historical fction as well as a metaphor for failure and pain that haunts We Have Been Warned, based on both Mitchison’s personal rejection of abortion while pregnant with her sixth child in 1930 and a trip she took to the Soviet Union, where abortion was legalised in 1920. Like her fellow socialist writers Geofrey Trease, Alec Brown, and Simon Blumenfeld, Mitchison suggests in her fction that the need for abortion was a sign of the moral bankruptcy of capitalism.
In my third chapter, ‘The Shattered Mould: Abortion in 1930s Rhetoric and Fiction’, I explore not only novels but also the political case for abortion made by the Abortion Law Reform Association, founded to legalise abortion by a group of middle-class activists in 1938. While one member, Stella Browne, made the very modern argument that ‘women’s bodies are their own’, her colleagues stressed stories of overburdened working mothers—dealing with broken marriages and a dozen starving children, poisoning themselves with fake abortifacients, dying from backstreet operations—as the strongest arguments for legal abortion. The report of a 1937 British government hearing on abortion—which involved the testimony of doctors, midwives, religious groups, sexologists, and some working-class women themselves—further demonstrates that only economic reasons for
abortion could be articulated. The report also shows that objections to legalising abortion did not focus on individualistic ideas of fetal personhood but rather its perceived harm to the community: namely, fears that abortion would lead to promiscuity and the decline of the race.
In the 1930s, then, abortion was thought of as a class issue, not an individual freedom. Much abortion law reform rhetoric compared the horrors of working-class abortion with the safe abortions of women who could aford surgical procedures. This is a narrative familiar today from flms such as Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake (2004) and one popular movement, as I shall very briefy mention, in Weimar Germany, where cross-class protests helped to change an 1871 abortion ban to one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world by 1927.
Yet British literary abortion narratives do not adopt this strategy of class contrast in any bid for legalisation. As noted in the previous chapter, when abortion occurs in working-class fction of the period, it serves to condemn capitalism, not to argue for legal abortion. Instead of focusing on suicidal working-class mothers, most interwar literary abortion narratives generally feature unmarried middle-class characters, and abortion is always depicted as dangerous. I argue that this focus on the middle class and this emphasis on danger refect a wider anxiety about who is reproducing and who is not. In many 1930s novels, including F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934), Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets (1936), and George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), characters who have or contemplate an abortion are the products of families on the wane. After a brief discussion of the frst three, I discuss at length how The Weather in the Streets and Keep the Aspidistra Flying position abortion as a threat to middle-class survival amongst the irresponsible breeding of underclass characters, refecting the resurgence of eugenic discourse during the Great Depression.
In my fourth chapter, ‘A Bit of Himself: Male Fetuses and Male Authors in Abortion Narratives from Waste to Alfe’, I examine sixty years of social change through readings of abortion narratives written by men. Male poets and novelists have appropriated reproductive imagery for centuries, but only in the twentieth century do they appropriate nonreproductive language to turn abortion into metaphors for failure and male sufering. This chapter spans my historical period to demonstrate the remarkable persistence of a misogynist pattern in abortion narratives.
Since the advent of fetal imaging in the 1960s and 1970s, the fetus has been represented as an entity in itself, a pattern of representation that has furthered anti-abortion ideologies. I demonstrate that long before the 1960s, women were being written out of the story in plays and novels by men, including Waste (1907 and 1927) by Harley Granville-Barker; Rex
Warner’s 1941 novel The Aerodrome; Keep the Aspidistra Flying; and the radio, stage, novel, and flm versions of Bill Naughton’s Alfe (1962–66). I apply Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of male homosociality—triangular relationships in which the important connection is between two men and the woman is a mere conduit—to the pregnant woman/potential father/ fetus relationship. These narratives appropriate abortion to serve as a turning point for male characters and a metaphor for male sufering, and they imagine the endangered or aborted fetus as male, thus restricting sympathy to male channels.
In Waste, one of the frst works of British literature to make abortion central to the plot, a promising politician has a one-night stand with a woman who then dies of abortion between the acts. The lost chance to be a father makes him realise what is truly important in life, but he loses his job because of the scandal and commits suicide. The protagonist imagines his potential child as a lost son whose life was cut short, just like his father’s career. Male poets and novelists have appropriated reproductive imagery for centuries, but here Barker appropriates nonreproductive language to turn abortion and sterility into metaphors for failure and male sufering. I demonstrate that the 1927 revision of Waste made female characters more promiscuous and less sympathetic while making the politician more heroic.
I briefy revisit Keep the Aspidistra Flying, an uncanny echo of Waste: another plot in which a man’s rejection of abortion proves his moral worth. The fetus is imagined as ‘a bit of himself’, and abortion becomes a metaphor for this failed creative career of the protagonist, a would-be poet. Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941), an allegory of fascism, also links between abortion and materialism and makes the threat of abortion a turning point for the male protagonist.
I conclude by analysing Alfe as it was adapted from radio play to stage play to novel to flm from 1962 to 1966, showing that like Waste, it becomes more anti-abortion with each revision even as censorship relaxes. The radio version depicts Alfe’s misogyny negatively, while later versions make a bid for audience sympathy using Alfe’s rejection of abortion. While a woman is reluctantly aborting Alfe’s child, he poignantly encounters his lost son, being raised by another man because he refused to marry the boy’s mother: this compounds Alfe’s grief at his missed opportunities to be a father while equating the aborted fetus with a little boy.
Abortion literature is sparse during WWII, perhaps because of resurgent conservatism and ideas about preserving the ‘British race’, but authors energetically take up the subject in the 1950s, as I explore in my ffth chapter, ‘Bubble Baths for Brenda: Pregnancy and Abortion in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and “Angry Young Man” Narratives in Mid-century British Novels and Film’. If white working-class reproduction was often imagined as dysgenic by interwar politicians, birth-control activists such
as Stopes, and writers such as Lehmann and Orwell, it was encouraged in postwar Britain, as increased immigration and colonial conficts spurred anxiety about the decline of the white British race. Welfare state benefts, the new NHS, and the 1949 Royal Commission on Population marked an intensifcation of interest in the reproductive lives of the working class that was refected in mid-century fction and cinema, which challenged censorship by depicting sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and abortion more frankly than ever before, often from working-class, Northern perspectives.
Infuential examples of the new genre controversially dubbed ‘Angry Young Man’ such as ‘Look Back in Anger’ (1956), a play by John Osborne; Room at the Top, a 1957 novel by John Braine and 1959 flm; A Kind of Loving, a 1960 novel by Stan Barstow and 1962 flm; and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a 1958 novel by Alan Sillitoe and 1960 flm problematise this pronatalist turn by employing the unplanned-pregnancy plot to show what can be lost through upward mobility. The wartime advent of free secondary education had led to a new social phenomenon: working-class men marrying more afuent women. These works depict cross-class marriages as fraught, expressing an anxiety over the erosion of traditional working-class culture in a time of increasing afuence. Women are cast as agents of materialism and consumerism, while men represent beleaguered working-class authenticity.
In Room at the Top and A Kind of Loving, unplanned pregnancy induces ambitious young men to marry up, but not without misgivings expressed through the stop-and-start nature, a kind of narrative and stylistic heel-dragging, of both the novels and the flms. Despite their anxieties about marriage and social mobility, both protagonists prove their moral worth by rejecting abortion. My reading of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning shows how a focus on how abortion is represented in literature can not only uncover fuller histories of thinking about abortion, pregnancy, and parenthood but also produce a richer picture of the texts themselves. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a novel cobbled together from slice-of-life short stories set in working-class Nottingham, is more capacious than many abortion novels written by men, which enables it to treat abortion more sympathetically. Yet I challenge other critics’ readings of abortion as an empowering act that transforms the aborting woman into a Bakhtinian emblem of the communal body. Unlike the hero’s rebelliousness, her refusal to bear more children is not allowed a social dimension, and her abortion fails to engender female community. While the flm adaptations of these three novels were subject to pressure by the British Board of Film Censors—the successful abortion in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had to be made unsuccessful in the flm, for example—all three refect the dilatory nature of the novels by slowing the story down through nonnarrative shots.
My sixth and fnal chapter, ‘Babies Without Husbands: Unmarried Pregnancy in 1950s and 1960s British Fiction’, demonstrates that perceptions
of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ as a permissive society overstate the case. Sexuality was still strongly linked to marriage; when introduced in 1961, the pill was only available to married women. Psychiatrists believed that middle-class unwed mothers were more disturbed than their working-class counterparts because they had more social status to lose. Yet a new cultural phenomenon was appearing: triumphant lone-motherhood novels and flms in which middle-class protagonists experience unexpected pregnancy and parenthood as journeys of individual growth, most notably The L-Shaped Room (1960 novel by Lynne Reid Banks, 1962 flm) and The Millstone (1965) by Margaret Drabble (and the 1969 adaptation A Touch of Love).
These novels and flms have been praised as progressive for challenging stigma, but they also reject abortion as ‘the cheating way out’. Not all freedoms happily co-exist: the way unmarried motherhood is set of against the always-undesirable recourse to abortion recalls how birth control was set of against abortion in the interwar period. As Waste and Keep the Aspidistra Flying feature isolated men who could only be brought into society by fatherhood, The L-Shaped Room and The Millstone feature isolated women who, having rejected abortion, are rewarded with integration into the community through motherhood.
Created at a time of increasing immigration and racial confict, these works express tension between pregnancy as a biological leveller—an experience that brings people of diferent races and classes together—and an experience that highlights diference. Their white protagonists feel solidarity with fellow mothers-to-be, even Pakistani women, yet these women are described as an overbreeding underclass familiar from interwar literature. These unmarried-pregnancy plots create an image of British society as tolerant and diverse by drawing Jews, blacks, queers, foreigners, and working-class characters into a community, but then they undermine that utopia by dissolving that community when the pregnancy ends. The flms mitigate the racism of the source novels only by substituting class diferences for race diferences.
These works rewrite earlier narratives from George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) to Radclyfe Hall’s novel The Sixth Beatitude (1936) in which unwed motherhood leads to death. They also rework interwar abortion narratives such as The Weather in the Streets: if in Lehmann’s novel the social stigma of unmarried motherhood prevented the eugenic realisation of a middleclass pregnancy, these works challenge the social stigma while upholding the eugenic idea. Their babies are depicted as inherently superior, suggesting that only middle-class women, not all women, deserve reproductive freedom. They also suggest women can’t ‘have it all’: one protagonist gets a baby and romance, the other gets a baby and work. Like the other works I’ll discuss, The L-Shaped Room and The Millstone are concerned with the diferences between biological and creative reproduction: reproducing
women do not write novels, and novelists do not reproduce. I conclude by contrasting the similar politics and aesthetics of these novels and flms with Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play A Taste of Honey and its 1961 adaptation, which both tell a far more ambivalent story of working-class unmarried motherhood. Its teenage protagonist Jo is both excited and horrifed at the idea of having a baby—a biracial baby who, she fears, might inherit her own father’s mental disability.
With my conclusion I discuss abortion fction, flm, and politics since abortion was partially decriminalised in England, Wales, and Scotland by the 1967 Abortion Act. As that chapter shows, a lot has changed, but a lot has not.
Notes
1. The use of Handmaids’ costumes at protests has been criticized for marginalizing communities such as POC and/or economically disadvantaged people, who have disproportionally experienced reproductive injustice in the world we live in; those who say these costumes are problematic point out that for many people, reproductive control is an actual history and an ongoing present, not a future dystopia.
2. See Olszynko-Gryn, especially the introduction.
3. Historians debate whether until the 1803 ban English common law allowed abortion until quickening, considered by theologians to be the time when the soul enters the body. See Brookes 42.
4. Quickening provides an alternate point for the beginning of life to the current insistence of many anti-abortion activists on fetal personhood from conception, a belief some historians suggest developed gradually over the twentieth century. See Dubow on the American context; further historicisation in other contexts is needed.
5. Tunç writes in her 2008 book that she was surprised to fnd that ‘the science, technology and medicine behind [abortion] had gone virtually unexamined’ and ‘no historian has ever thoroughly explored the changing physician-controlled technologies of pregnancy termination during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ (4).
6. See Tunç, Chapter 2.
7. See Mulligan and Habel 79–98.
8. Contraception is less hostile to reproductive futurity; later, I discuss how since the 1920s it has been described as enabling family spacing and better mothering. Yet the idea of compulsory reproduction is so powerful that these historical diferences are elided, and birth control in literature is also read as inherently radical. Beth Widmaier Capo asks of American fction, ‘how could the traditional biological plot of women’s lives—virginity to marriage to pregnancy to motherhood and domesticity—be interrupted?’ (24). She concludes that ‘textual contraception, an interruption of the reproduction of the traditional plot(s), allowed for new conceptions of women and sexuality’ (24).
9. In 1990, Mary Lou Emery speculated that Voyage in the Dark was ‘probably the only work of fction in the early twentieth century that describes abortion from the woman’s point of view’ (79).
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