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

At the time of My Next Bride's publication in 1934, Boyle had a reputation as one of modernity's foremost stylists. (27) The novel, however, drew only mixed reviews from critics who worried that Boyle was spending her talents on "trivial material" and "mov[ing] further and further away from ordinary life." (28) The novel's most scathing review came from Mary McCarthy who complained, "Miss Boyle's much touted modern prose cannot save her anachronistic novel from the category of peep-hole, wish fulfillment literature into which it inevitably falls." (29) Today, Boyle's distinctive melding of avant-garde aesthetics and activist ethics is attracting renewed attention from scholars, and My Next Bride--the last of Boyle's so-called personal expatriate novels before her turn to more overtly public and political matters--shows us how Boyle used modernist experiments with sentimentalism to speak to the social crises of depression-era abortion politics.

Abortion, as My Next Bride, characterizes it, is a pervasive, if not always immediately perceivable, presence in modern life. The abortificient pills Victoria takes ravage her body, not in the out of the way space of a doctor's office or in the privacy of her bedroom, but in the public space of the commune gift shop, just under the noses of the bourgeois shoppers who blithely peruse the commune's wares:

   Women came into the shop and touched the bright scarves, and while
   they hesitated between this colour and that, the war the body waged
   against the pills' destruction stood beside them, the scars of it
   written on Victoria's face.... There's another air [of hesitation]
   back there, Victoria thought, watching in anguish the quivering
   indecision of their minds; she was sick for it, stabbed for it, she
   could not wait until the door had closed behind them to run
   groaning to it. The gooseflesh was all over her, like a broken
   string of beads. (30)

Against the urgency of Victoria's illness, My Next Bride contrasts the hesitancy of the women's shopping, and from this incompatibility, the novel highlights the customers' obliviousness to the woman trying to have an abortion before them. Shortly thereafter, Victoria's humiliating collapse in a crowded metro station further underscores and makes uncomfortable her proximity:

   She fell down among all the people hanging to the straps, and her
   head went under the seat, and the coffee she drank at the corner
   for breakfast came out at the other end. They lifted her out under
   the arms and they put her lying down on a bench at the Place de
   l'Opera station, and people came around and looked at her. (283)

This theme of the pervasive yet unrecognized aborting woman persists during Victoria's search for an abortionist. This time, though, it is Victoria who finds herself in uncomfortable proximity to the era's ubiquitous aborting women. Standing in the abortionist's office, she recoils in horror as she imagines herself surrounded by the specters of "all the girls who had ever come into the place, the chambermaids from cheap hotels, and the girls from the Bon Marche and the nougat-stands in the traveling fairs, and the girls who must dance at Bobino or the Empire for a living, cheaply painted and cheaply paid" (302). Materializing from the walls and crowding around Victoria, women having abortions appear in My Next Bride as a ubiquitous, if not always immediately perceivable, presence in modern life.