Fictional Fertility

I recently finished reading James Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder and Dave Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife, and I was struck by the many parallels between the stories. Both are narratives containing a woman at their heart, Jennet Stearne and Ann Eliza Young respectively. Each of these female characters in turn devote their lives to the elimination of an “evil” borne of an overly religious society, an immoral reality conjured up as the inevitable double of the human striving for holiness. Finally, each woman ultimately depends on a system of legal justice to defend their own bodily integrity and identification, as well as to further their all-consuming missions. In a more modern context, I was fascinated by the implications which these two women’s disparate, yet uncannily linked, crusades have for our own society's conceptions and understandings of women, both in fiction and society.


It is perplexing that both authors chose a woman as their heroine and moral warrior. David Ebershoff, of course, was dealing with a true historical figure, one whose gender was established by God and biology rather than authorial intent. And yet, the role seems a uniquely feminine one. Perhaps this is merely a result of the coloring of our modern minds by echoes of Harriet Beecher Stowe (herself in later life an outspoken opponent of the same plural marriage which Ann Eliza Young combated), Margaret Sanger, or any of a number of Suffragettes from the early part of the twentieth century. Perhaps, it would be more accurate to label this a Joan of Arc complex in our brains: the young woman standing against the oppressing forces of a far more powerful enemy. Having a woman as hero enhances the David and Goliath effect of the combat; after all, the only thing more fragile to our minds than a child is a young woman.
And so, we are given Jennet and Ann Eliza as heroines, each willing and destined to give their lives’ purpose to an external cause. This is particularly effective for the reader since it marks a level of sacrifice which in a man, lacking both the biological investment and the social impetus to reproduce, would, however unjustly, be modified. Women’s lives are seen as rampant with maternal potential, a potential which both Ann Eliza and Jennet only imperfectly achieve, discarding their children for the higher good, with regret but also firm decision. To the reader, here is true sacrifice, the loss of fecundity, or as in the case of Joan of Arc, the tragic inability to realize reproductive capacity.



For these women, public good becomes their offspring, literally in both cases culminating with a book. Women produce literature instead of children; they succeed in their crusades by transforming their minds into substitute ovaries. There is a sterility embedded in the idea of in a determined, single-minded woman, from which only a birth, no matter if of flesh or paper, can preserve her a gendered integrity. Thus book-pregnant women are the ultimate heroines for authors, they allow a continuation of the birthing process of ideas into a tangible form. Our modern writers see demonstrable progress in human rights through history and they wish to detail the conception of individual triumphs for “morality” within human minds. It only makes sense to transplant that process into a female womb, so often considered to be synonymous with a female mind; it is through women that we can most directly see the process of humanity from generation to generation. No wonder, that in fiction, we look to women as well for the conception and reproduction of our basic ideals.