Saints, sinners, and the Dickensian novel: the ethics of storytelling in John Irving's 'The Cider House Rules.'

Style, Summer, 1998 by Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack

For this reason, Irving focuses significant time and energy upon narrating intricate accounts of numerous characters' lives. In The Cider House Rules, Irving offers detailed histories not only of the novel's two main characters, Wilbur Larch and Homer Wells, but also of Melony, Wally Worthington, and Candy Kendall, among others. In "The King of the Novel," John Irving observes that "you cannot encounter the prisons in Dickens's novels and ever again feel completely self-righteous about prisoners being where they belong; you cannot encounter a lawyer of Mr. Jaggers's terrifying ambiguity and ever again put yourself willingly in a lawyer's hands - Jaggers, although only a minor character in Great Expectations, may be our literature's greatest indictment of living by abstract rules" (349). The same might be said of Irving's own depiction of abortion and the figure of Wilbur Larch, obstetrician and abortionist, in The Cider House Rules. Like Dickens, Irving derides the notion of living by abstract rules, and in the person of Larch he begins his assault upon the "rules" that govern the concept of abortion.

Although his associates at the orphanage refer to him as St. Larch, Irving makes perfectly clear that Larch's sainthood comes with a price. Upon Larch's admission to and imminent departure for medical school, Larch's father purchases for Wilbur an evening with a local prostitute, Mrs. Eames. This rather embarrassing evening of sexual initiation concludes with Wilbur dressing in the glow of a cigar being smoked by Mrs. Eames's daughter, who enters unannounced while Wilbur drowses in post-coital bliss. What Larch seems to take from this experience - in addition to gonorrhea, which he studies in bacteriology at Harvard Medical School - is a substantial measure of remorse. Wilbur compounds his guilty conscience through a series of events that bring Mrs. Eames and her daughter back into his life. While working as a young intern at the South End Branch of the Boston Lying-In, Lurch treats Mrs. Eames, whom he discovers has been taking an aborticide that leaves her organs in a state of "fragile jelly." After six days of Larch's care, Mrs. Eames dies, and in the ensuing autopsy Larch learns from the pathologist that she has expired as a result of scurvy. A day later, as only happens in the fabulistic world of Dickens and Irving, where coincidences are indispensable to the connective tissue of characterscape, Mrs. Eames's daughter visits Lurch. She shows him the aborticide that her mother ingested - a "French Lunar Solution" said to restore "Female Monthly Regularity!" (57) - and asks him to perform an abortion for her: "I ain't quick! I ain't quick, I said!" she screams at Lurch (59). But the consequences of the procedure frighten Lurch and he hesitates. A week later Lurch finds her beaten and in grave condition after receiving an abortion at the shady clinic known only as "Off Harrison." He discovers a note pinned to her battered body: "DOCTOR LARCH - SHIT OR GET OFF THE POT!" (60). As with her mother only days before, Mrs. Eames's daughter also dies in the care of Lurch, but her death prompts him to visit "Off Harrison" and confront the abortionist who runs the clinic, an elderly woman known locally as Mrs. Santa Claus. This scene allows readers to see the tools of abortion, and, along with Larch, to be shocked by the awful conditions and misguided methods under which illegal abortions are conducted. This experience also serves as the catalyst for Larch's ultimate role as abortionist in the novel. In short, the kinds of metaphorical gifts that Mrs. Claus delivers challenge Lurch to seek a practical and immediate solution for such women in need as Mrs. Eames and her daughter - a solution generated out of the pragmatics of physical circumstance as opposed to legalistic ideology.