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The Midwife’s Tale
Gretchen Moran Laskas
The Dial Press, New York. 2003.
243 pp. $23.95.
ISBN 0-385-33551-2
This first novel by Gretchen Moran Laskas,The Midwife’s Tale, is about love, especially the passion between mother and daughter. The novel centers on women: in particular, it puts child birth and healing at the very heart of its world. Set in the early twentieth century, it is well-researched, with lots of interesting details of rural Appalachian life, especially herbal lore and the folkways of child birth in the mountains.
Laskas’s characters are not, however, quaint granny women: indeed, they are in many ways transgressors against what we at least imagine must have been the mores of their time. They also move back and forth between mountain cabins and town– in particular, the real town of Philippi, West Virginia with its covered bridge, claimed to be the site of the first land battle of the Civil War. It is a strength of this novel that the gap between town and hollow is no uncrossable abyss. Meribeth, for example, mother of the narrator Elizabeth, marries late in life, moves to town, and enjoys long drives in her husband’s Hupmobile.
The social background is sketched in with a sure hand: “Coal was booming, and shanty towns filled the Tygart River Valley. Families who had lived in the mountains for generations were coming down into the towns, taken by the idea of ready cash and a board-and-batten home. People flocked to where there were picture shows, bowling alleys, and fancy clothes sitting in the company store windows, waiting to be bought with the fancy written scrip that coal operators said was as good as money....” (page 130). This background is worn lightly, but creates a fully believable world that brings authenticity to some surprising events in the story.
Front and center in the novel, however, are the struggles and expressions of love. People heal and help one another through difficult passages like childbirth and illness. There are many types of healer in this novel, often in surprising harmony with one another: Meribeth is a skilled and dedicated midwife who is given further training by a local medical doctor. During the great influenza epidemic of 1919, she nurses dozens of her neighbors through the devastating illness, and Elizabeth nurses Meribeth in turn. Elizabeth is herself trained as a midwife, and her god-daughter Lauren turns out to have a supernatural healing gift that is both extraordinary and also limited in its scope, just as the more mundane healing powers of the midwives and medical doctors are limited. In other words, no single person or way of healing can do everything: the folk lore and scientific lore and the touches of supernatural are all connected and even interdependent.
Love between men and women often proves to be more problematic in the novel. Some women are beaten by drunken husbands; other men simply disappear, like Elizabeth’s father. Elizabeth’s romantic love for her neighbor Alvin sets the course of the novel, creates its plot, but the love is ultimately unsatisfying. Indeed, its most enriching aspect for Elizabeth is that it gives her the friendship of Alvin’s wife and a long-term relationship with his daughter.
If Elizabeth’s relationship with Alvin gives the novel its story line, it is Elizabeth’s relationship with her mother that gives the novel its emotional arc. Elizabeth and Meribeth have various conflicts large and small, and one actually comes close to separating them, turning Elizabeth away from midwifery. This conflict is about a midwife’s role when a newborn’s interests clash with those of the mother. What if the newborn is clearly deformed or facing a short life? What if the birth of one more baby is likely to tip the scales and destroy the mother’s health or the family’s economic future? Is the midwife’s mission always to do what is best for the woman? Meribeth stands solidly on the side of the over-burdened and sometimes abused women she attends. Elizabeth is more drawn to the infinite possibility and hope embodied in the just-born. She recoils from part of what her mother and grandmother consider to be a midwife’s duty.
Deciding between different kinds of helping, however, is not this novel’s business. In the end, what matters is the continuing bond between Meribeth and Elizabeth and between Elizabeth and the young healer Lauren. Elizabeth and Meribeth are reconciled, and the novel offers each of them a sort of prize in the form of a relationship with a good man. Meribeth’s late marriage to Doc Woodley is a great gift, and Elizabeth’s not-quite-so-late relationship with the patient and supportive carnival man David may require more suspension of disbelief than the miracle child Lauren’s supernatural gift of healing.
But by the this point in the novel, the reader cares so much for Elizabeth that we can only cheer when Gretchen Laskas gives her the hope of a satisfying future.
Meredith Sue Willis’s latest novel is Oradell at Sea about a rough-hewn Appalachian woman who becomes rich and tries to spend the rest of her life on vacation.
The Midwife’s Tale
Gretchen Moran Laskas
The Dial Press, New York. 2003.
243 pp. $23.95.
ISBN 0-385-33551-2
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