Invisible chain: breaking the taboo of abortion in Jeanne Caruchet’s L’Ensemencée (1904), Annie Ernaux’s L’événement (2000) and Audrey Diwan’s L’événement (2021)

Abstract

ABSTRACT In L’Événement (2000), the author’s retelling of her experience of an illicit abortion in 1964, Annie Ernaux writes of a ‘chaîne invisible où se côtoient des artistes, des écrivaines, des héroïnes de roman’, stating that ‘[s]on histoire est en elles’. There is a timelessness to Ernaux’s abortion narrative, jumping between two temporal spaces: the contemporary narrator’s experience of writing the novel at the turn of the millennium, and that of the young Annie in the 1960s. Twenty-one years after the novel’s publication, Audrey Diwan’s film adaptation of the same name became another link on this chain, further highlighting the relevance of the story of a young woman’s illicit abortion almost 50 years after the decriminalisation of abortion in France. This article extends Ernaux’s ‘chaîne’ further back in time, by adding another female-authored novel: L’Ensemencée (1904), by Jeanne Caruchet. The author explores how these women’s experiences of abortion are presented across these three works, examining the change in attitudes towards abortion, with particular focus on the evolution of female communities, from the Belle Époque, through the turn of the millennium and into the early 2020s.