Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion

Abstract

For Dana Medoro, the female body can be a site where the destructive powers of masculinist nationalism are revealed and resisted, as she has argued in a 2002 study of fictional texts by William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison.1 Medoro builds on that work in Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion, a splendid analysis of the ways two American writers condemned the reproductive politics of their era. During that time, gynecology and obstetrics emerged as medical disciplines, and the professionalization of prenatal care had serious consequences for women, who increasingly found themselves under the supervision of male doctors rather than midwives. In the new regime, “antiabortion rhetoric” flourished as American men, through the press and legislative action, sanctioned “surveillance of pregnancy” (26) and criminal penalties for abortionists. According to Medoro, that activism was fueled by anxieties about a falling “white birth rate” (8). Facing a threat to their racial supremacy, many Americans of European descent took a hard line on abortion, arguing that women be compelled, if necessary, to fulfill their maternal obligations in a country with expansionist designs. Thus, nationalist imperatives drove antiabortionism during the antebellum period. Against that ideological tide stood Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both of whom, Medoro insists, adopted “a radical position on the right to terminate a pregnancy” (ix) and rejected, at least in their fiction, the staunch ethnocentrism characteristic of Americans frightened by white decline. Searching out sources for the two writers’ sympathy with women denied bodily autonomy, Medoro speculates that Poe and Hawthorne may themselves have been victims of sexual abuse—Poe at boarding school and Hawthorne in the home of a relative. She does not, however, press the point, focusing instead on tour de force close readings presented in two parts, each of which she subdivides into chapters.Part 1 deals with Poe’s Dupin trilogy. According to Medoro, all the solutions that the sleuth C. Auguste Dupin relays through detailed expositions are, in fact, nothing more than rhetorical feints. The man is, she insists, “a sham” (24), and his verbal charlatanry serves a truly malicious end: masking his own atrocities. With iconoclastic brilliance, Medoro introduces this idea in chapter 1. Here, she claims that “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is not a story about accidental deaths wrought by a razor-wielding ape but a narrative that reveals Dupin to be “a vicious misogynist” (25) who carried out the “executions” of two abortionists, Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter (29). This interpretation might seem far-fetched, especially for readers accustomed to identifying the French detective with Poe himself. Medoro makes, however, a persuasive case. In the first place, she assumes that Dupin is an arch deceiver, deducing that his account of the gruesome deaths in the L’Espanaye apartment must be unreliable. In addition, Medoro argues that Poe fills “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” with coded language to reveal truths concealed by Dupin. To illustrate, the herb rue is a traditional abortifacient, and “a . . . passing reference to the L’Espanayes as fortunetellers introduces the cover under which nineteenth-century abortionists advertised their services” (29). Such references would not have been lost on antebellum readers. More compelling still, Medoro explains anomalies in Dupin’s account that are perhaps otherwise inexplicable. For example, the “ten-minute long scream” heard during the attacks is out of keeping with “[a] rapid razor assault” (44), so the Frenchman’s assertion that an ape is responsible for the L’Espanayes’ deaths is likely an aural clue from Poe indicating that a “rape,” not an “ape,” caused the horrible shrieking (40). Medoro concludes that Dupin is not only a murderer but a rapist who wreaked a terrible vengeance on supporters of reproductive freedom.Developing this idea of a monstrous Dupin, Medoro turns to “The Mystery of Marie Rôget” in chapter 2, arguing that the devious Frenchman assaulted and killed the title character because she tried to get an abortion but later claimed the woman died after a bungled one. The Christian name of the victim’s mother—Estelle—is particularly significant. Medoro deems it an “echo” of “Restell,” the name of the abortionist whose furtive activities during the 1840s were judged scandalous in New York society (69). Associated with Madame Restell, Marie and her mother thus represented feminist efforts to control pregnancy that Dupin loathed, and Medoro draws attention to the coroner’s report, a document that contradicts Dupin’s account, suggests strangulation as the cause of Marie’s death, and “secures the fact of murder” (70). By strangling her, the deranged detective committed a ritual killing, “a symbolic form of infanticide,” through suppressing “the breath” that signals life “at birth” (57). His perverse rage against Marie was, Medoro suggests, intensified by nativist prejudice, for in addition to hating her for seeking an abortion, Dupin could not abide his white victim’s interest in a dark-hued sailor, a desire at odds “with conventions of gender and race” the French sleuth held sacrosanct (67). Such xenophobia resembles the white panic that influenced opposition to abortion in Poe’s time.Antebellum concerns about racial purity and patriarchal control are brought to the fore in chapter 3, an intriguing reexamination of “The Purloined Letter.” Ostensibly a tale in which Dupin saves a queen from a blackmailer who stole an incriminating missive, this story is something altogether different for Medoro, who reads it as a chilling account of men in league to control women’s secrets, to invade their bodily privacy. Attentive to double entendre in the text, she observes that “a French letter” was, “in the 1840s,” a euphemism “for condom,” a term associated with the interruption of the reproductive process and the exercise of personal control over pregnancy (80). Such control is precisely what men like Dupin cannot grant women, no matter how elevated, and the passing of the letter from one man to another in Poe’s tale represents the use of the female body as a unit of “patriarchal currency” (86). Thus objectified, it is subject to total surveillance. Completely visible within and without, that body can be appropriated for the cause of racial domination as men thwart the termination of pregnancies and interracial unions that constitute what Medoro calls “a crime against the blood—an attack on white supremacy and an opening up of bloodlines to uncontrolled circulation” (88). Obsessed with controlling women’s bodies, Dupin personifies, in Medoro’s reckoning, the spirit of antebellum reaction, a rejection of female liberation from patriarchal constraint, and the Frenchman’s homicidal tyranny is something Poe exposes with absolute contempt and horror. Although possibilities for feminist resistance seem minimal in the narrative world of the Dupin tales, those stories exhibit, through covert messaging, grim realities about antebellum sexual politics that call for redress.Three novels by Hawthorne receive critical scrutiny in part 2. Of particular interest to Medoro is the relationship between sexual control and expansionist fervor on display in these texts. In chapter 4, she takes up The Scarlet Letter. Throughout that novel,Hawthorne investigates communal obsession with the private life of Hester Prynne, the punitive A she wears being a sign of sexual transgression—adultery, to be precise. Medoro suggests that Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century readers might have associated Hester’s badge with another subversive act: “abortion,” a secret of the womb that many antebellum women were compelled to conceal (106). “Chillingsworth’s rather gynecological scrutiny of Dimmesdale’s interior,” which involves—in Hawthorne’s words—“delving,” “prying,” and “probing,” reinforces that association (118). Full of special meaning to those familiar with antebellum controversies surrounding reproductive rights, the text is a drama of surveillance that unfolds in the seventeenth century while white settlers displaced Indigenous peoples to build a society united in culture and faith, and the symbolic relevance of that history to Hawthorne’s America, a place where appeals to Manifest Destiny were common, is clear. National aggrandizement is also an important theme in The House of the Seven Gables, the subject of chapter 5. In that novel, the Pynchon family, established by a Puritan who seized land to build a mansion from Native Americans while appealing to “Providence,” represents America under the sway of imperialists dedicated to “slavery’s expansion into seized territories” (127). White nationalism of that sort depends upon “white fertility” (127) and coerced pregnancies of enslaved women. According to Medoro, the plantation-like Pynchon house that the Puritan founder constructed, with “outbuildings” redolent of human bondage (130), is “an obligatory reproductive space” just as the home was for antebellum women defined by maternity (136). His descendant Hepzibah resists, however, the imperative to procreate, neither marrying nor bearing children, and her actions suggest that female subjugation to the imperial fantasies of men is not a foregone conclusion. Those fantasies nevertheless flourished in Hawthorne’s time, as Medoro argues in chapter 6. Here, she claims that Miles Coverdale, the narrator of The Blithedale Romance, is full of “nostalgia” for “the America of New England Pilgrims,” sharing the racial hubris and misogyny that Hawthorne associates with that world in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables (153). According to Medoro, Coverdale’s racist utopianism turns him into a murderer, for the novel hints that he killed Zenobia, who represents a sexual autonomy and reproductive control threatening to the social order he envisions.Original and thought-provoking Medoro’s book certainly is, as the preceding summaries indicate, and although its merits far outweigh its weak points, the work contains some errors, critical missteps, and omissions worth mentioning. A dangling modifier (i.e., “Avenging fetal life . . . , his motives . . . .” on page 31), a peculiar word omission (i.e., “about what cast as coincidental or interconnected” on page 80), and at least three significant misspellings (i.e., “Phillip” and “Cook” on page 26 and “conscious-stricken” on page 100) are five examples that evince occasional editorial lapses. In addition, the association of the Free Soil Party with emancipationist politics in chapter 5 is misleading. Free Soilers opposed the spread of slavery into federal territories, but few members of the group embraced abolitionism, which was a minority position in the 1850s. Furthermore, Medoro’s observation that Poe moved into Madame Restell’s neighborhood in 1844 is interesting but irrelevant to the Dupin tales, all of which were published before that time. More important is the omission of references to thematically relevant tales written by Poe and Hawthorne during the 1830s. Consider Poe’s “Morella” and Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” to give only two examples. In the first tale, the subsumption of a mother’s identity within her daughter’s fails, challenging the precedence of the child that Medoro finds in antiabortion thought, and male surveillance of women and its corrupting effects are the subjects of “Wakefield.” Such stories prove that key issues discussed by Medoro were on Poe’s and Hawthorne’s minds before the 1840s; and although she cites the historian James Mohr while pointing out increased “practice of abortion and its cultural visibility” during this decade (7), Medoro acknowledges that “debates [about abortion] . . . surfaced with . . . intensity in the 1830s” (20). Focusing on texts published after 1840, she puts unnecessary limits on the scope of her project. Had Medoro devoted more attention to Poe’s works published before that year, she might have offered additional support for her claim that Poe was skeptical about the reproductive urgency of his time and found confirmation of that idea in an article about “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” published by Paul Christian Jones.2 Noting these omissions does not at all undermine Medoro’s claims about the Dupin trilogy, but she clearly missed some opportunities to corroborate Poe’s alienation from antebellum ideas about family life.Omissions of that sort might have escaped notice were not Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Nineteenth-Century Abortion an utterly captivating read. Sobering as it is, especially for Americans encountering it in a post-Dobbs political environment, the book is remarkably stimulating, the interpretive insights it conveys spore-like in their generative power, and a reader cannot help but make connections between the Poe and Hawthorne texts Medoro analyzes and other writings from the two authors’ respective canons. In addition, the meticulous close readings she offers are spectacular. Her careful attention to fine shades of meaning and figurative possibilities within scenes and phrases—within single words, even—is hard to capture through mere summary, so the chapter outlines provided above, necessary though they may be for a book review, have a Procrustean effect. That is a pity. Medoro’s fine-tooth explications are what make her arguments so potent. Anticipating critics who might judge those interpretations too speculative, too remote from prima facie evidence in the texts, she appeals to history, showing that Poe and Hawthorne, in their imaginative engagements with reproductive control, relied on a linguistic “medium of concealment and communication” that bore striking similarities to “the oblique tactics of abortion’s advertising in the 1800s” (181). To read their works aright, one must read between the lines, Medoro indicates. Her interpretations are, however, more than merely apposite. They exhibit the luminous power of criticism at its best—work that not only sheds light on texts themselves but also illuminates their worldly origins and their ongoing relevance. Hawthorne and Poe critics will certainly find much fresh food for thought in Medoro’s book. To the Poe section, in particular, the word “original” can be applied in its proper sense. Truly sui generis, Medoro’s take on the Dupin tales will force scholars to rethink their assumptions about Poe’s detective fiction. In addition, her insights into his contempt for those seeking absolute control over female bodies suggest that Poe cared about the sufferings of flesh-and-blood women, however prone he was to idealize dead, beautiful, and imaginary ones.