SOURCE: “‘We Are Not Dying’: Abortion and Recovery in Four Novels by Women,” in Abortion, Choice, and Contemporary Fiction: The Armageddon of the Maternal Instinct, University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 67-100.

[In the following excerpt, Wilt examines feminist themes surrounding reproduction, maternity, and Piercy's explicit argument for abortion rights in Braided Lives.]

The decade which saw the institutionalization of the right not to become a mother saw many women writers affirming daughterhood more powerfully than ever. If, as George Eliot says, every limit is a beginning as well as an ending, so also the response to a removal of limits may be an instinctive grasp at an anchor—mother, or motherhood.

In Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays （1970） and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing （1972）, the abortion on which the plot hinges is an encounter with nonbeing, which threatens the extinction of female personality. The plot conflates the imaginary recovery of the lost child with the recovery of the mother and of the self. In Didion's existential romance the aborted fetus was quite simply “the point” of being itself, the winning point in the game, key point in the argument, a point tragically and stupidly conceded to the philosophical nothingness and cultural emptiness which encroach at every level. In Atwood's Hemingwayan quest the empty space of the protagonist's womb acquires grim personification as death itself until the lost child surfaces in vision as the protagonist's mother, god, grail, self. Mary Gordon's Felicitas, protagonist of The Company of Women （1980）, suffers in vision this same presence: abortion is her death, death itself. She averts it, but only the many mothers of the company, recovered to her by her crisis, make the birth and survival of the new child and the new Felicitas possible.

Not until 1982, as the pro-life movement gathers momentum, do we find a full-throated cry for abortion rights in Marge Piercy's Braided Lives. This novel's stern and vulnerable poet-protagonist, undergoing at seventeen a nearly ruinous home abortion prepared by her fearful mother, lays the key on the table about the dark side of maternal desire: “Only I will know how I sometimes dream of that small changeling dribbling love on my breasts and how sick is that dream quivering with power. It would love me, poor bastard; it would have to.” The chapter in which this morally strict choice is made is called “The Agon.”

All these novels are set in those prelegal days when abortion itself meant an intimacy with death for the woman as well as the fetus. The heroines mostly experience both the choice that ends in birth and the choice that ends in abortion as male plots, part of the network of “sick arrangements,” as Didion's protagonist calls them, by which patriarchy manipulates women, coming or going, into the structures of its normalcy. The female counterplot inevitably turns on some kind of outlawry. Didion's Maria Wyeth and Atwood's nameless narrator skirt the edges of madness. Piercy's Jill Stuart forms an illegal abortion referral service. Even Gordon's Felicitas Taylor, who chooses against the abortion plot and makes a determined effort to adjust to “ordinary life. … the daughter of my mother, the mother of my daughter, caretaker of the property, soon to be a man's wife,” wears that camouflage of the ordinary uneasily, afflicted still with a noble and “specific hunger” for an as yet still alienated relationship with the absolute, with the sacred, with God.

The female counterplot also strives to transform the deaths of ordinary life, aborted fetus, aborted woman, into life. “We are not dying” is the elated final judgment of Felicitas's once-endangered daughter on her once-endangered and still not fully-actualized mother. “Take my death inside. Give birth to me!” cries the specter of Jill's beloved cousin, Donna, dead in a self-induced abortion, and “I will,” Jill answers. Sine qua non, the value of not dying, of giving birth, survives in these novels, whether attached to blood motherhood or not. …

Braided Lives: Women Giving Birth to Women

Mary Gordon, though she can see the possibility of “a radical life,” does not depict one. Marge Piercy does. Braided Lives is a flat-out feminist analysis of the fight for women's freedom and a call, in the face of the conservative rollback of the 1980s, for confirmation of the first article in that feminist bill of rights, reproductive freedom. The objects of the several abortions which braid the novel's plot are never understood to be babies, as in the other three books studied here. Pregnancy always symbolizes possession by one of the three forces—male lovers, the myth of motherhood, the truths of the female body itself—which in this society seek dominance over, instead of harmony with, the fourth force in life, the drive for female selfhood. The book is unashamed of its existence as argument but succeeds as a human story because of the passion of its argument, and because the protagonist sustains in the end a love for all humans: man and child as well as woman, for mother as well as self, for the body as integral with, and to, the will.

But Jill Stuart bears no children. Her fertility and creativity takes the form of seven books of poems （Piercy herself had written seven volumes at the time of Braided Lives）, and her human empathy takes the form of an increasingly confident participation in the right-to-life issues of the 1950s and 1960s: save the Rosenbergs, ban the bomb, feed the black children of Mississippi. And give life to women dying from botched abortions. Placed tellingly at the climax of the description of the self-induced abortion Jill barely survived at age seventeen in 1954 is this flash-forward to a birth differently chosen, fiercely wanted:

Brooklyn, 1963. The doctor botched the abortion. She is hemorrhaging. I am one of a group of women who help other women secure abortions. … Now this woman, fat, gentle, in her late 30's and the mother of 5, is bleeding like a slaughtered pig—like I did. I pack her vagina with ice. I hold her against me, a woman twice my size and twice my body weight, and rock her like a baby. … Live, live, I whisper to her, dear one, sweetheart, angel darling, live. Only live.

In her forties, a successful poet and lecturer, in the 1980s a feminist activist, Jill Stuart looks back on a life “braided,” and abraded, with the lives of two key women, her mother and her cousin, Donna Stuart. “Were I pointing out a different pattern in the weave,” the poet says, other women's lives would stand out as strands in the braid. But in this pattern the unifying topos is abortion; the central figures are the mother, who “is scared of the world and thinks if she punishes me first, I will be broken down enough to squeak through,” and the pretty blond cousin, “like negative and photo—me dark and you light,” who, like Jill's mother a generation before, tries to have her freedom within the complicit terms of, under the cover of, conformity to feminine stereotypes.

In the eight years of the novel's main focus—Jill's adolescence in Detroit, college in Ann Arbor, and early adulthood in New York City—classic battles between mother and daughter break all but one thread of that strand. Her own birth, Jill speculates, both cause and result of that “love, cannibal love,” which is the other side of maternal self-denial, initiated the war. But the narrative of the forty-three-year-old Jill is rich with slowly surfacing insight about the unbreakable last thread, the desire between women, especially between mother and daughter, for a final non-cannibal form of love. The daughter's understanding of the mother increases: “She is a figure shaped by troubles I will never have to know. Sometimes I do listen, even if what I hear isn't what she is trying to tell me.” As time goes on, understanding offers both a warning and a healing.

A year goes by while she never takes a cigarette out. Then one evening after supper on a day that feels no more unusual than any other, she appears with a slender brown cylinder cupped elegantly between her fingers, acting in her own movie. Then I see in her the young beauty from the slums, studying seductive graces in darkened theaters. All she had to save herself was encompassed in being female.

Having thus internalized “femininity” from the movies, from American culture of the thirties and forties, Jill's mother sensed the danger as her daughter grew up rough, self-motivated, ambitious for education, mysteriously committed to the uncertain life of a writer, and desirous of the rich and sometimes dangerous experiences that feed a writer's omnivorous imagination. The battle to “break” her daughter to the accepted female stereotype emerges from fear for her. What it bred in Jill was a ferocious desire to make her own choices: “I will escape you all. I will choose what I do.” Mother and motherhood, even daughterhood, become the enemy of choice-defined self. Rejecting all such ready-made roles, Jill nevertheless wins the beauty with the cigarette—the fear-ridden, punishing mother, the woman born into troubles—with the rock-bottom identity of poet and lover she creates for herself.

My mother; the miracle is that in middle age we are friends. … Why did she stop disapproving of me? She likes the row of books. … Now that I am in my forties, she tells me I'm beautiful … and we have the long, personal, and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. … I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

This relationship ends in lifegiving friendship, though its adult phase began with the devouring mother, witchlike and deadly, fearing the silent, destroying force of the father but complicit with his values, enforcing on the pregnant, seventeen-year-old daughter a home made abortion which nearly killed her.

The other key relationship in the braid ends in tragedy, though it began with physical and emotional love making between the thirteen-year-old cousins, Donna and Jill. Meeting again at college, the two women form a nonsexual, a metaphysical bond: “We strike against each other, chipping off the useless debris of our childhood. What one of us bites into, the other chews and swallows. … We define each other.” Donna, the bond, “negative” female image, anxious to move into the schizophrenic world of 1950s femininity, rushes into secret sex and forces herself into “love” and towards marriage with Jim, with Lennie, finally with Peter. Jill, Piercy's “positive” female image, reluctantly follows, imitating, with Mike, with Peter, with Kemp, finally with Howie. Donna fits her body into “iron-maiden bras” and high-heeled shoes, brightly and consciously seeking freedom through “accepting my destiny as a woman,” while inexplicable rages of resentment and self-loathing overpower her regularly: one of them results in her death by self-induced abortion. Jill, seeking to center life “on some good work you want to do,” experiences obsessions, loneliness, failures, but survives as the “scavenger,” the “alley cat,” finally the artist that she wants to be.

In this leapfrogging, braiding, finally diverging relationship between women, abortion is the key symbol for both Donna's and Jill's kind of “freedom.” First to enter a sexual relationship, Donna is first to fear pregnancy and seek money for an abortion. Trying to borrow money from her lover for this project, Jill finds him truculently “siding with the fathers … who say no to women” on the basis of sweeping generalizations about the sacredness of life. She responds, “That's just words. A fancy position for a man to take. I mean it. I care about Donna. I'm willing for chickens and cows to die to feed her, and this embryo to keep her free.”

Donna's plight turns out to be a false alarm this time, but later that summer Jill takes Donna's place in the female predicament for real, because she gave in to her lover's desire （he cited, poet to poet, man to woman, the dictums about “the natural” from D. H. Lawrence） to stop using condoms, “that damn armor.” Remembering his earlier attitude, knowing he won't marry her and won't free her for an abortion, Jill hides the fact from her lover, but her mother uncovers the truth. Obliquely hating/protecting her daughter, siding with the father—“If you go roaming around to doctors, and you can't trust a one of them, only in it for the money, I'll tell your father and he'll make you have it”—Jill's mother puts her through several harrowing home remedies. Finally, while gunshots from the father's TV western echo from the living room （the representation of pregnancy as gun appears again） and her mother holds her mouth to keep her silent, Jill carries out her choice in its enforced primitive mode: “Now I will go to work attacking my body in earnest … by force I open my womb.”

The rhetoric of attack Piercy uses here is carefully limited. It is not herself or her life, or a fetal life identified with hers, or even with her lover's that Jill feels she needs to attack. Rather it is the unruly body, cells subdividing without her volition, which she needs to confront, cherish, and rule, so that it can bear her free self. Jill had considered suicide, but a powerful will to live and to experience the variety of life dissolved that desire. After the abortion she lives a sexless life for a time—“sex … seems to me a device for converting will and energy into passivity and flesh”—but that kind of self-mutilation does not last either.

She makes friends with her body again through two simple expedients: she buys a diaphragm—“my first passport, something magical that permits passage out”—and she begins to collect the names of, and the personal funds for, competent abortionists for herself and any other woman in danger. The following year, ready to contract her upper-class dream marriage, Donna becomes pregnant after a rape from a lower-class hoodlum she had dated in one of her self-condemning fits of rage at herself and at that very dream. And Jill, deploring the feminine dream but steadfastly preserving Donna's freedom to pursue it, takes all necessary steps, even thievery, to procure money for an illegal but medically safe abortion.

It is interesting to note the ambiguous and important role of “the doctor” in this novel. He is cleanliness and training; he is safety, sought more heatedly than the lover, he is a necessary third presence in the procedure. Self-induced abortion, as represented here, seems much too close to suicide, not only pragmatically （the woman is untrained） but symbolically （the woman is deeply at odds with her own body）. Yet he is still a man, not, finally, to be trusted.

This ambiguity locates itself in a metaphorical displacement, at a few key moments, of “the doctor” by “the dentist.” At virtually the same time that she is helping Donna with the abortionist, Jill provides the money and the energy to get her mother to the dentist for work on her bad teeth. To the family's shock and rage, the dentist simply extracts all Mrs. Stuart's teeth, sound ones and decaying ones alike. The dire image of “dark blood welling” in the mouth here recapitulates and anticipates the abortion motif. Both procedures, necessary to health yet associated with damage, performed by men for money on the bodies of women who submit not exactly from choice but to keep open the possibility of choice, combine elements of woe and success for the women who rage at them while desiring them. Jill helps a friend rob a dental supply store for Donna's abortion money. Later, fetus successfully aborted, engagement back on track, Donna persuades the wealthy, intelligent, handsome, and faintly sinister Peter Crecy to marry her quickly: “Fast is painless. Like pulling a tooth.”

Marriage for Donna is growing up, accepting womanhood, giving order to life. Her “work,” she thinks, is her husband, Peter, a man in rebellion against his father and yet in training to be a junior patriarch just like him. Helpless to prevent it, sliding in her cousin/alter ego's wake towards marriage with Howie, her friend and lover, Jill watches Donna plan the compromises, engage in the psychic denials, of modern “femininity.” She defines health as love and domesticity and the career in television news she clearly desires and thrives on as merely a temporary expedient until “the relationship” and its finances settle down. Peter has agreed, she thinks, to postpone children indefinitely, so when she finds a tiny hole in her diaphragm she responsibly buys a new one, celebrating at the same time the “instant respectability” that Jill attains when she announces her engagement to Howie.

Donna believes, genuinely, that Howie will “save” Jill, as Peter “saved” her, through marriage, from the “bad patterns,” the disorderly-looking life—“Destroying myself. Ending up alone and crazy. Winding up a two-bit whore”—which is the only alternative society can envision for unmarried women. The major break-through in Jill's artistic life, a new, personal, poetic voice freed by an encounter with the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, goes by unrecognized by anyone but herself as she leaves Donna, her “negative” twin, the bright but self-denied woman she wanted to truly save, in New York while she goes to Detroit to be inspected by prospective in-laws.

When Jill returns the novel's tragic climax has occurred. The death by abortion that has lain in the braided lives of women since the novel's opening, fended off at seventeen by Jill, is taken instead by the conflicted, compromised, self-loathing, twenty-three-year-old Donna, “grown up” to her schizophrenic and finally deadly destiny as a woman. The novel's last “rose of blood” blooms under Donna's body on the sheets of Jill's apartment. And Jill, notifying Peter of a death whose nature he somehow knows before he is told, remembering the “small hole, like a pinprick” in Donna's diaphragm, grows “cold, cold through,” like the corpse on the bed. She believes he has pricked a hole in the diaphragm, deliberately made Donna pregnant without her consent or knowledge, killed her.

At the funeral it is all Jill can do to resist signing her name “Donna” in the visitors' book, so sunk is she in guilty identification with the lost twin, with the deadly archetype of femininity which Donna represents: the ancient fatality of women who either make a dead life bearing children to a betraying man, or who would rather die than give birth.

Separation from this archetype of femininity has been the struggle of Jill's life. A period of dreams and madness not unlike that undergone by the protagonist of Atwood's Surfacing climaxes at the novel's end with the mythic birth of a new and redeeming Donna. While Jill walks the night streets a bloody and ghostly Donna, “sharp ivory doppelganger,” wails for entrance like some frail indestructible Catherine Earnshaw.

“Leave me alone! Take me with you! It's cold and it hurts. It's getting colder. Mother. Make it stop! Momma! Momma!” “I will take you with me. I will!” “Take my death inside. Give birth to me!” “I will.”

Donna's voice, ambiguously that of child to mother, of aborting woman, or more deeply, of aborted woman, to self-saved woman, uses the ancient language of birth. Jill's “I will,” unlike Heathcliff's, which signals his final obliterating immersion in his demon, represents not possession but parturition, the erasure of abortion as death, the inauguration of a wider motherhood. It crystallizes at the end the early image of woman giving birth to woman that rode under the enactment of Jill's abortion at seventeen. Its material embodiment is an underground network of safe abortion referrals called “Donna.” This network functioned through the 1960s as that “small female government ＼of］ conspirators and mutual advisors” that Jill and Donna lived out in college together before Donna's choices, programmed by male lovers and her own entrapment in the myths of femininity, estranged them somewhat. Its spiritual legacy is a simple pledge in the teeth of mortality “to express my caring all the time” to women and to men, and ultimately to the readers of her poems. Its practical result for Jill is a diffused and fractious loving which precludes traditional marriage and children of the blood, to spend itself on all the worthy human encounters of her life （at novel's end Jill is living, working, amiably quarreling with a long-term lover named Josh, and mothering Howie's daughter by another woman, as well as producing books and lectures）.

As for the abortion freedom which paradoxically grounds this elliptical motherhood, this “death inside me” which makes births possible, both the narrator and the narrative structure argue forcefully for it. The bloody abortion that kills the protagonist's doppelganger at the climax does not contradict this. As a procedure which failed because its illegality made help impossible during the complications of aftermath, it stands starkly at one of the no exit gates—the other is death by immersion in unchosen maternity—of patriarchally-constructed “destiny as a woman.” As an accident of nature which proved fatal to a woman who had cast her lot with a “femininity” which makes no room for a fully trusting relationship with a husband or with other women, the episode speaks to the self-destructive quality of that myth. Some force in the world—woman's own complicit desire for the maternity of the myth, the disorderly energies of sex and the body, the malice of individual and collective men—stands ready to prick a hole in the diaphragm, to close down the freedom of the passage out. To define that force as “life” and condemn the counterforce, the diaphragm, the abortion, as death, is too simple, Piercy's narrative says. In fact, to women in patriarchal culture, “a society we do not control and scarcely influence, ＼in which］ we survive and perish both by taking lovers,” the opposite may be true.

“With my poems I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.” It is interesting to consider that the mother wooed and won by the poem-producing but childless Jill Stuart is the only one of the protagonists' mothers alive and in good health at the end of these four novels. Maria Wyeth's mother, dead in an “accidental” car crash, surfaces along with Maria's repressed, aborted self as the memory of a figure yearning to “fly the ocean in a silver plane.” The mother of the narrator of Surfacing, dead years before, returns along with the repressed memory of her aborted self both as the human mother who broke her ankles thinking she could fly from the roof of a barn and as the visionary maternal guide to the experience in the woods which exorcised “the old belief that I am powerless.” Felicitas Taylor's mother is included with her daughter in her granddaughter's vatic, final speech-act, “we are not dying,” but Felicitas has before this affirmed that her acceptance of her own maternity was precisely the signal that allowed her mother, and the others of that generation of mothers, to begin to grow old and die, since now “They could leave things to me.”

The mothers of the protagonists in these novels, in various degrees complicit with patriarchy, powerless and fearful, cannot keep their daughters free or themselves alive. When their daughters become biological mothers they are marked as mortal, but the imaginary child—the ghost children of Didion's and Atwood's abortion protagonists, the haunting Donna, and the other poetic fictions of Piercy's Jill—somehow restores the mother, the original “lover,” original home, the “imaginary” itself. The novels that close on an achieved biological motherhood—Maria “playing” for Kate, Felicitas protecting Linda—must accept some element of entrapment in that closing. Like Drabble's Rosamond these mothers are embedded in time, plotted into a game. They must look to an end, begin to die.

The novels that culminate in a meeting with ghosts, strive against closure. In these opened worlds, Surfacing's protagonist still follows her dead mother and father, harboring the mystic “baby in the bottle” of her womb, a kind of third eye. And Braided Lives's Jill still carries the ghost child “Donna” as the undeliverable source for her poems. And The Middle Ground's Kate Armstrong sees in the fairy tale windings of London's rivers and streets the “little sister” who was her mother, her child self and her aborted child, her full being, “always decaying yet always renewed … unplanned … intricate, enmeshed … the old and the new side by side.”