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

Later, when he would have occasion to doubt himself, he would force himself to remember: he had slept with someone's mother and dressed himself in the light of her daughter's cigar. He could quite comfortably abstain from having sex for the rest of his life, but how could he ever condemn another person for having sex? He would remember, too, what he hadn't done for Mrs. Eames's daughter, and what that had cost.

He would deliver babies. He would deliver mothers, too. (75)

Yet the most significant test of Larch's resolve comes not with the first abortion he performs for the young girl he rescues from "Off Harrison" or the subsequent requests by others in the neighborhood community who find themselves in similar straits, but from a wealthy family, the Channing-Peabodys of Boston, who summer in Portland, Maine. Latch has gone to Maine to apply for a position in obstetrics, escaping Boston where he "had become, in the view of the erring, the sanctuary to which to flee" (69). Latch ostensibly visits the Channing-Peabodys's palatial mansion for what he assumes will be a dinner party. Neither poor nor downtrodden like the women who sought out Latch in South Boston, the Channing-Peabodys prove insufferable in their moral superiority and in their presumption that their money can relieve them of any set of unpleasant or undesired circumstances. Despite such arrogance, Larch still cannot bring himself to pass judgment upon Missy, the woman in need of his services. Instead of refusing the Channing-Peabodys, he insists that the young man responsible for impregnating Missy be sent in to watch the procedure - and, as Larch hopes, the young man vomits all over himself. Additionally, taking the money with which the Channing-Peabodys attempt to "buy" his services and his silence, Larch chooses to distribute it among the servants who help him perform the abortion, as well as among those others who work throughout the great house. Such a scene, particularly important in the creation of Larch's own characterscape, demonstrates his ethical determination to refuse to judge the woman in need of his care. While Latch indeed passes judgment upon those characters who seem to stand in supposed moral superiority over Missy for becoming pregnant and over him for becoming a doctor who would perform abortions, he will not deny any woman, in this instance Missy, whom he clearly sees as a victim.

By availing himself of the ethos of characterscape, Irving establishes the motivations and the ideology of Larch, a man who claims to do both "the Lord's work and the Devil's work."(9) He further complicates our understanding of Latch as both saint and sinner by introducing the figure of Homer Wells, the eternal orphan who becomes a surrogate son for Latch, as well as his professional successor. Homer's presence in the frame of Irving's story exemplifies the ethics of characterscape by illustrating the marked importance of human interrelationships in the construction of characterscape. Just as a landscape artist needs a horizon and a sky, a foreground and a background to capture properly the spirit of a place, the writer who hopes to achieve a fully articulated portrait of a character must place the person in close relation to another character of consequence within a given narrative. While Irving devotes the bulk of The Cider House Rules's narrative space to Homer's story, the orphan would not achieve his full semblance of personhood without the character of Larch to bring him into bas-relief.