Bedside manners in Dorothy Parker's "Lady with a Lamp" and Kay Boyle's My Next Bride

Studies in American Fiction, Autumn, 2007 by Meg Gillette

A testament to the rising abortion rates of the depression, more abortion narratives were published between 1929 and 1934 than during any prior five year period. (7) Unlike today's abortion narratives, which, as Judith Wilt argues, climax with a crisis of choice ("will she have a baby or an abortion?"), the abortion narratives of the depression climax with a crisis of response ("how would and should the protagonist's lover, friends, and family treat her after her abortion?"). (8) More interested in the response to women's abortions than in the decision to have the abortion itself, abortion narratives from the late 1920s and early 1930s commonly begin in medias res, starting after the abortion. Josephine Herbst's Money For Love (1929) and Tess Slesinger's "Missis Flinders" (1932), for example, both open in the days following the protagonist's abortion: in Herbst's Money For Love the plot hinges on how an ex-lover will respond to the aborting woman's blackmail attempt, and in Slesinger's "Missis Flinders" (1932) the narration focuses almost obsessively on the post-abortion fruit basket the husband gives his wife (as if anxious about the quality of this response and others' perceptions of it). Margery Latimer's This Is My Body (1930) likewise dispenses with any pre-abortion deliberations to narrate instead an extended breakup scene, which, writing backwards, takes the protagonist's lover's lack of concern for her abortion as the very reason the protagonist had it. In Herbst's The Executioner Waits (1934), it is the family's response that takes center stage: early in the novel, a lead character dies in a car accident while contemplating an abortion, and in her absence, the novel details her family's attempts to come to terms with her abortion-related death. The responses of more distant relations also attracted literary attention. Chapters written from the pharmacist's and soda jerk's points of view in As I Lay Dying (1930) focus on their responses to a young girl seeking an abortion, while another of Faulkner's depression-era abortion narratives, "That Evening Sun" (1931), proceeds through the eyes of a young boy who tries to understand what it means for him that the woman who does his family's laundry has had an abortion. Langston Hughes's "Cora Unashamed" (1934) likewise views abortion in the context of an employee/employer relation, and the story climaxes with the cook's "unashamed" response to her employer's "shamed" response to her teenage daughter's illegitimate pregnancy and abortion. (9)

Depression-era films also expressed an interest in how others would and should respond to women having abortions. In Dr. Monica (1934), a Warner Brothers film starring Kay Francis, the eponymous heroine must decide whether to sympathize with the pregnant mistress of her husband who comes to her for an abortion. In Men in White (1934), an MGM film starring Clark Gable based on Sidney Kingsley's 1933 Pulitzer-prize winning play of the same name, a nurse dies of a botched abortion and her lover, a young doctor engaged to another woman, learns to set aside his guilt and go forward with his life and medical studies. Ann Vickers (1933), an RKO film starring Irene Dunn, based on Sinclair Lewis's 1932 novel of the same name, sends its aborting woman to jail after her abortion; Vickers, though (in keeping with the era's softening public opinion toward abortion), goes not as an inmate, but as a social reformer, intent on rehabilitating the criminals within, and herself, to conventional adult female roles. Anxious about the futures of women having abortions, depression-era abortion narratives brushed past the personal dilemma of whether to have an abortion to focus instead on the interpersonal dilemma of how to treat and rehabilitate women seeking and having abortions. Women having abortions, as constructed and confronted by depression-era fiction and film, were not nameless sexual deviants on the periphery of modernity, but familiar social beings tied into a network of relations and circulating across a modern landscape. (10)