Producing Abortion Epistemologies: Knowledge in / as Community

Looking at my nightstand, I noticed Tylenol and a chocolate bar and chuckled to myself. The juxtaposition of the objects seemed so obvious they bordered on cliché. If you know, you know, I thought. It struck me that anyone who walked into my bedroom and noticed the nightstand additions could know what they signify — that I was on my period — if the viewer knew about the experience of menstruation.1 The objects function as a language, signifiers that take on meaning when considered together. Reading them in this way suggests access to a system of knowledge regarding menstruation. "If you know, you know," bears witness to participation in an epistemology.

A resonant experience happened while I was teaching Joan Didion's novel, Play It As It Lays. The protagonist Maria anxiously awaits her period for evidence she is not pregnant, sleeping

I ask the class, what's going on here? What is this "charm" that Maria is attempting to invoke? Some students understand immediately. She's trying to get her period! Period-havers are well aware of The Curse,or, if you're hoping you aren't pregnant, The Charm.: Wear white pants? Go without a pad or tampon? That's when your period comes. If you know, you know.

Post-structuralist theory takes for granted the assertion that knowledge does things. Eve Sedgwick, for example, asks us to consider "What does knowledge do — the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it . . . How, in short, is knowledge performative?"3 A crucial function of knowledge, as I hope the above anecdotes elucidate, is to produce communities tied together by shared knowledge. Those with the capacity for menstruation, pregnancy, and — as this essay will examine — abortion, are connected in part by a shared knowledge of these experiences. But the experience need not be one's own; where our own experiences may fail, storytelling offers a powerful mechanism for producing knowledge.

Feminist literary critics including Meg Gillette and many of the other contributors to this cluster have addressed how literary texts function to disseminate information about abortion to readers. Gillette explains that "in modern literature, a community of women with like experiences was . . . being formed. Giving voice to women's experiential knowledge of abortion and linking together women's abortion experiences . . . modern literature . . . called forward a generation of women-experts to speak out."4 With this history in mind I want to argue that an examination of abortion stories in the American literary canon offers invaluable insight into what I am calling feminine communities of knowledge: women circulating knowledge about the experiences of having an abortion with the effect of usefully expanding the cultural language to discuss abortion. In other words, the publication and circulation of abortion stories is not just an exercise in solidarity building or "speaking out"; it is an epistemological endeavor. Speaking to and about highly varied modes of knowing, abortion stories produce complex discourses that put pressure on dominating and restrictive political conversations about the right to bodily autonomy for women and potentially pregnant people.

The fiction of Dorothy Parker and Gloria Naylor, two authors whose writing on abortion has gone largely under-appreciated, offer compelling grounds for illuminating these epistemic projects. Neither legality nor morality figure into these fictional representations of abortion, which makes them important additions to a canon of abortion narratives. These texts bear witness to the longevity of an epistemic project of understanding abortion that persists to this day: Parker writes about abortion first in her 1924 short story, "Mr. Durant," and nearly sixty years later, Naylor publishes Brewster Place. By eliding the logistical questions of how a character accesses abortion and the narrative drama of choosing abortion over childbearing, both authors make space for new modes of knowledge produced between women beyond the legal, medical, or governmental institutions they inhabit, albeit in different ways. Both authors wield these narrative strategies to encourage readers to understand abortion from a position of compassion, and to foster engagement in a community of knowledge about abortion that does not reify patriarchal systems of knowing.

For Parker, irony is central to the project of creating this community of knowledge, As it enables a critique of those who misunderstand abortion, it creates community through negative examples. Furthermore, this ironic centering of unsympathetic characters who lack access to epistemological communities constructs narratives in which overt discussion of abortion is markedly absent. That absence obligates Parker's readers to do significant interpretive work to even comprehend the text as an abortion narrative. By calling us to make that readerly effort, Parker brings us into a community of knowledge that her characters cannot access.   

Parker achieves this effect in "Mr. Durant," which uses third-person narration to tell the story of a self-absorbed male protagonist who gets his coworker pregnant Any expansiveness this narrative view could offer is diminished as the narrator stays firmly oriented in Mr. Durant's limited perspective. Before the character who gets the abortion is even named or made visible in the story as Rose — before the story even becomes legible as an abortion narrative — the experience is filtered through a lens of male emotional fulfillment and satisfaction. Readers gain access only to his thoughts, feelings, and observations, highlighting the irony of relying on patriarchal perspectives to understand abortion.

The story begins after the abortion is successful, noting Mr. Durant's pleasure from this success: the narrator notes that "Not for some ten days had Mr. Durant known any such ease of mind," repeatedly mentioning "his enjoyment," "his pleasure," and "his comfort."5 The narrator continues that "Now that the thing was comfortably over and done with, he could think of it easily, almost laughingly."6 While Mr. Durant revels in relief, readers never bear witness to Rose's reaction to the abortion, her feelings about it, or her resultant (dis)comfort. Mr. Durant is at the epistemological center of the text: everything related to the abortion is relayed through him.

Not until pages later do readers know what this "thing" is: after an affair with Mr. Durant, Rose comes to him to say that she is "in trouble."7 This is as explicit as the text gets: "Neither then nor in the succeeding days did she and Mr. Durant ever use any less delicate phrase to describe her condition. Even in their thoughts, they referred to it that way."8 Readers need to know the discursive cues that signal an unwanted pregnancy has occurred and must learn that being "in trouble" is a reliable signal of the unwanted pregnancy. If you know, you know.

And just as the story begins by framing the relief after the abortion as Mr. Durant's alone, so too does it narrate the stress and frustration of the unwanted pregnancy as if it affects him exclusively: "There daily arose in him an increasing anger that he should be drawn into conniving to find a way to break the law of his country — probably the law of every country in the world. Certainly of every decent, Christian place."9 The irony of his ire is palpable as he rails against the indecency of the situation with no regard for the fact that he is the reason Rose needs an abortion. As the narration constructs Mr. Durant as deeply unsympathetic — "a  model for how not to behave when confronted with an unplanned pregnancy"10 — it aligns his character with "the law," decency, and Christianity. It undermines the authority of those institutions to circumscribe knowledge of abortion. 

No matter how institutionally supported he feels in his moral position, however, Mr. Durant finds himself at the limits of his knowledge: "As he had often jovially remarked to his friends, he knew 'a thing or two' . . . But knowing a thing or two and putting the knowledge into practice turned out to be vastly different things. Mr. Durant did not know whom to seek for information."11 Mr. Durant lacks access to knowledge he was certain he could possess about access to abortion, because that knowledge is the property of women. It is not until another woman — Ruby — intervenes that Rose can access an abortion. With Mr. Durantout of the way, the women can orchestrate the abortion with apparent ease:12"Ruby had made it delightfully simple . . . had managed it all without any fuss. Mr. Durant was not directly concerned in the planning."13

Mr. Durant may occupy positions of gender and class power relative to Rose and Ruby, but this power does not help him gain access to knowledge of abortion. He is as ignorant about reproductive technologies as the "New York society women" who "think virtually nothing of" abortion, while Ruby is privy to networks of women that know how to attain an abortion — she has "some indistinct friend of hers," "a woman" — and legality does not appear to impose any serious impediments. Parker's story, with its ironic foregrounding of Mr. Durant's perspective, shows how essential feminine communities of knowledge circulate beyond the reach of those who devalue them.

Parker's attention to these divergent perspectives extends beyond men characters as well. Parker's later short story, "Lady with a Lamp," details a similar relationship in which one party lacks the knowledge required to go get an abortion. The story is narrated exclusively by an unsympathetic woman who addresses Mona, the character recovering from an abortion. This ungenerous speaker appears again as the text's sole narrator. And, again, this narrator's limited view leaves its readers unable to learn much about the experiences of pregnancy and abortion through the narration of them. Quite literally, in both stories, the voice of the person who experienced the abortion is absorbed by a privileged, misunderstanding interlocutor.

Readers witness the limits of the speaker's sympathy from the story's inception. The speaker tells Mona in the very first paragraph that "you might have known that I'm always for you, no matter what happens. I do admit, sometimes it's a little hard for me to understand how on earth you ever got into such — well."14) Passive aggression and scolding continue, demeaning the more vulnerable Mona and the relationship that led to her pregnancy. The speaker proclaims that "Three of the best years of your life you've given him, and all the time he's been deceiving you . . . all the times and times and times he promised you he'd give her up; and you, you poor little idiot, you'd believe him . . . Really, Mona! I'd have more pride." The speaker nevertheless insists that she can sympathize with Mona, creating an ironic distance between her assertion of intention and her behavior: "I absolutely sympathize with you. I don't see how you could possibly have done anything else. I know you've always talked about how you'd give anything to have a baby, but it would be so terribly unfair to the child to bring it into the world without being married."15 As in "Mr. Durant," this is the closest readers get to any clue that an abortion occurs. To read Parker's short stories, readers must participate in a language of abortion that is revelatory in its elisions, a specified discourse that demands attention to and participation within communities of knowledge.

While Parker's stories ask their readers to attend to failures and elisions in abortion knowledge, Naylor offers a more liberatory, care-full alternative that draws in both her characters and readers to participate. The Women of Brewster Place begins with an assertion of the material confines of Brewster Place by characterizing it as"the bastard child of several clandestine meetings between" a corrupt alderman and a realtor. This patriarchal control is asserted in the language of childbearing: "[The realtor and alderman] came together . . . and slowly worked out the consummation of their respective desires . . . And so, in a damp, smoke-filled room, Brewster Place was conceived."16 These opening pages prime their readers to understand how the forces of patriarchy and racism saturate the world of the women of Brewster, affecting their own reproduction and livelihood. This makes the women's radical redefining of family, motherhood, and sexuality all the more noteworthy.

Literary scholars have focused critical attention on the life-sustaining qualities of the relationships of the women of Brewster Place by reading ¹⁷ the oft-cited scene where Mattie bathes Lucielia "Ciel" Louise Turner, literally nursing Ciel back to life after a traumatic abortion and the accidental death of her young daughter Serena. The structural location of Ciel's chapter in the middle of the novel suggests its thematic centrality. Yet while Ciel's section and her relationship with Mattie have been analyzed thoroughly, Ciel's abortion has not. By neglecting to see how abortion — just as much as mothering — figures into the model of community care and knowledge-building that The Women of Brewster Place constructs, we have failed to understand the importance of abortion to the novel's epistemological project.

Unlike Parker, Naylor renders the language of abortion transparent. She places Ciel in what seems to be a medical setting to receive what is likely a legal abortion. Like Parker, however, Naylor does not make this experience legible through the paradigm of legality. While sharing Parker's focus on the personal and relational experiences of abortion, Naylor favors a more intimate portrayal of the post-abortion experience. Parker casts her unsympathetic characters out of communities of knowledge while Naylor draws outsiders in.

Readers of Brewster Place witness the abortion as it occurs: "The face over [Ciel's] was as calm and antiseptic as the room she lay in. 'Please, relax. I'm going to give you a local anesthetic and then perform a simple D&C, or what you'd call a scraping to clean out the uterus . . . ' The voice droned on its practiced monologue, peppered with sterile kindness."18 This shift to intimacy with the individual, however, does not reify the individual over the community.19 Ciel's reliance on her community becomes evident after her abortion is complete.

Like "Lady with a Lamp," Brewster Place resists a narrative of post-abortion ease: the novel is concerned with the epistemological potential of fraught, complicated experiences of abortion that do not necessarily produce a positive affective experience. Neither condemning abortion seekers nor assuming that abortion can only yield negative outcomes, Parker and Naylor place abortion seekers within obstructive relationships of power. Ciel is pressured into an abortion by her husband who feels another child would be detrimental to their economic precarity.20

Unlike Parker, however, Naylor gives her readers access to the complex feelings that attend abortion through the perspective of the character who has one. She mitigates the interpretive work Parker demands in favor of explicit depictions of intentional community building. Ciel's emotional turmoil after the procedure, narrated as a desire to create distance between herself and "when she had done all those terrible things for that other woman who had wanted an abortion," is at the foreground of her chapter, exacerbated after her daughter Serena's accidental death.21 This prompts Mattie to help nurse Ciel back to health. In what she describes as "one of the most moving scenes in the novel," Barbara Christian explains that "Mattie bathes the numb grief-stricken Ciel, bringing her from death into life as she reawakens her senses in a ritual of shared womanhood:"22

Sarah Foust Vinson argues that "What Mattie [brings], in addition to friendship and women's bonding, is a connection to a collective history of an imagined community of women — a community constituted by their shared pain, suffering, and loss."24 In other words, Mattie invites Ciel to participate in an epistemology that has been produced by and for women for centuries. This language of child loss can be used to develop an epistemology of abortion as well; the experiences are made resonant in Ciel's chapter.

This representation of abortion in a larger context of child loss might make some wary. Might it not construct abortion as a painful experience, or reify an understanding of the fetus-as-child and therefore encourage moral condemnation of abortion? I would argue instead that: this passage details scenes of survival, and abortion is indeed a survival technique. The scenes of abortion in this novel are scenes of both agency and powerlessness, refusing to condense either reproduction or its refusal into a singular ethic or experience. This scene places abortion in an expansive epistemological project that has space for survival and communion even at its most devastating.

The politicized abortion rhetoric of "choice" that dominated American culture when Naylor's novel was published, and remains prevalent today, is revealed to be a fiction: there is no choice without context, no perfect agentic space beyond the institutions of power that shape our lives. And nevertheless, women have survived, have cultivated this communal epistemology that, in the case of Ciel, is lifesaving. This is an epistemological project that demands definition on its own terms by those who exist within the correlative community of knowledge, that does not adopt patriarchal, white supremacist notions of reproduction and its meanings. It is essential to note as well that Naylor's text and the resultant critical analyses, with their capacious considerations of care, exist because Black and women of color feminist scholars have insisted on experiential knowledge as legitimate and valuable.25

Looking at Parker and Naylor's fiction together is an experience of discursive evolution and expansion. Resisting a simplistic (and inaccurate) teleology from silence pre-Roe to discursive proliferation, these texts not only narrate the communities of knowledge at work for abortion seekers. They also create knowledge themselves: about how to narrate an abortion beyond the claustrophobic discourses of legality or the ambiguous mythos of choice, how (not) to care for someone after their abortion, who gets abortions and why. These texts, like so many narratives of abortion, explode the possibilities of seemingly restrictive language: how the meaning of subtle signifiers multiply, how Tylenol bottles become signs. If you know, you know.

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Jena DiMaggio is a PhD candidate at the Boston University Department of English. Their work focuses on the epistemological work of narratives of abortion in twentieth-century American fiction. They are also a board member and the director of social media at the Student Coalition for Reproductive Justice, a student-founded, student-run 501c3 non-profit building power among repro-justice groups across Catholic colleges and universities. SCRJ works to provide students with both sexual health resources and to advocate for more inclusive and comprehensive sexual health and positivity practices at these universities. Read more at https://jenadimaggio.wordpress.com/.

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