Abortion, identity formation, and the expatriate woman writer: H.D. and Kay Boyle in the twenties

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1994 by Donna Hollenberg

Extreme self-abnegation as a condition of motherhood becomes more explicit in the fate of Bridget's favorite sister-in-law, Charlotte, the epitome of womanly graciousness and warmth. Pregnant with her sixth child at the age of thirty-two, Charlotte is unable to imagine any other existence: "One more won't matter," she replies to her brother's worried remonstrance. "It's my life, isn't it?" (128). When she falls ill with a disease resulting from her incestuous union with her husband, a first cousin, and the family tries to deny the seriousness of her illness, she expresses her growing distress as a longing for the nightingale that has disappeared from the ancient acacia tree outside her window. A powerful symbol of violation and enforced silence through its association with the myth of Philomel, and, ultimately, of the transformative power of sisterhood and song, the nightingale here becomes associated with Charlotte's death.

The bird also becomes associated with Bridget's failure to help Charlotte or to learn from her experience. To cheer her up, Bridget buys Charlotte a nightingale in a wooden cage, but it will not sing. When she discusses this problem with Luc, the young doctor who the family has assumed will marry one of Nicolas's sisters, Bridget suggests letting the bird go as a solution. Luc's reply mirrors Bridget's existential dilemma: "You can't just give freedom. It's a much more complicated thing than taking it away" (158). Indeed, Bridget's own desire for freedom is played out through her relationship with Luc, whom she manages to free from the grim prospect of marrying into the family. Eliciting his offer of love and then rejecting it, she gives him more freedom from the social script than either she or the nightingale has. Despite her insight, she is unable to extend this freedom to herself.

The emotionally flat ending of the novel becomes explicable when we consider that although Boyle began the novel during her marriage to Richard Brault, father of the first child she aborted, she did not complete it until after the birth of her daughter Sharon, who was conceived out of wedlock during a love affair with Ernest Walsh after she had separated from Brault. In a recent interview, in which she defends these early choices, Boyle poignantly remembers "the passing of the little thing," although she disavows guilt over the abortion, and she is adamant about having wanted Walsh's child, despite its illegitimacy. Perhaps the "very deep feeling" she recalls (198), which she associates with the birth of her daughter, was charged with the memory of her earlier loss, and these mixed feelings were displaced onto her first novel, resulting in the novel's ambiguity.

Her next novel, Year Before Last, chronicles her love affair with Walsh, omitting any reference to the pregnancy. On the surface a paean to free love and the pure life of the spirit, to bohemianism versus bourgeois philistinism, this novel contains a subtext of moral masochism that may also be a function of the author's internal conflict. Boyle's heroine, Hannah, whose palindromic name underscores her lack of self-definition, is an American woman in an Unhappy marriage to a conventional Frenchman, who falls madly in love with a tubercular young Irish poet and editor, Martin, as if commitment to his spiritual force will give her the courage she needs to live her own life. As the novel opens, they are living in a deserted French chateau with barely enough to eat, having abandoned their respective domestic obligations: she, her husband, Dilly, who has sent her to southern France to recuperate from a lung ailment, and he, his aunt Eve, a glamorous suffragette who bankrolls his literary magazine. The novel follows their life together during the year before Martin's death, as they move from village to village, looking for an inn that will permit them to stay, so that he can recover and put out his magazine. The intensity and instability of their lives, and their sense of homelessness in the face of those who fear contamination, could be read as a metaphor for the plight of pure art and love in an inhospitable world.