The Calamity of Unwanted Motherhood

[Celerity]

Penelope Mortimer’s 64-year-old novel is a powerful argument for letting women choose when and whether they become a parent.

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/05/penelope-mortimer-daddys-gone-a-hunting-abortion/629766/

https://archive.ph/L0NOq



The protagonist of Penelope Mortimer’s 1958 novel, Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, is a 37-year-old housewife named Ruth, who is sliding into a madness of midlife suffocation and despair. Alone in her kitchen early in the novel, Ruth drinks gin and tentatively confesses to an imagined listener the source of all her angst. When she married Rex, her trivial bully of a husband, at 18, she was three months pregnant with their daughter, Angela. “She doesn’t know, of course,” Ruth explains, to no one. “I didn’t want to get married. I didn’t want Angela. We had to get married. There was nothing else to do.”

The burden of consequence on Ruth is a dead weight. She has no perceptible life force, no desires, less shape than crumpled tissue paper. Her fuzziness is countered in the novel by Mortimer’s caustic narration, which laces Ruth’s ennui with a ferocious current of social critique. Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, now being reissued in the U.S., was published several years before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. But the novel, seemingly set in the late ’50s, appears to anticipate what Friedan proposed as “the problem that has no name”—the profound unhappiness of a generation of educated women trapped in the domestic sphere with no way out. In one chapter, Mortimer likens the women of “the Common,” Ruth’s suburban community, to icebergs, outwardly “bright and shining” but uniquely scratched up under the surface. “Some are happy,” she writes, “some poisoned with boredom; some drink too much and some, below the demarcation line, are slightly crazy; some love their husbands and some are dying from lack of love; a few have talent, as useless to them as a dying limb.” Together, “their energy could start a revolution, power half of Southern England, drive an atomic plant.” Deprived of an outlet, however, it tends to short-circuit.

Ruth’s despair is clearly rooted in her accidental pregnancy as a teenager, her necessary marriage to a man she despises, and her obligation to care for an unwanted child when she was still essentially a child herself. The novel’s animating force is a simple, repetitive plot point: Her daughter, the now 18-year-old Angela, announces to Ruth that she’s pregnant. Ruth becomes angry; she also finds, once again, that she’s being forced by circumstance into acting against her will. “It wasn’t that she had taken a step; she had been pushed, stumbling forward and finding responsibility thrust into her arms, finding herself committed without knowing how it had happened,” Mortimer writes. Angela is intent on having her pregnancy terminated, which was unlawful in the U.K. until 1968. To save her daughter from repeating history, Ruth has to balance conflicting impulses—her desire to protect Angela from the risk of an illegal procedure versus her desire to secure for her a future less miserable than her own.

Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting is largely based on Mortimer’s own experiences. Like Ruth, she was married at 19 and had her first child in short order; like Ruth, she helped her eldest daughter get an illegal abortion when she became pregnant while studying at a university. In a later, semi-autobiographical novel, The Pumpkin Eater, which explores marital infidelity and disaffection, Mortimer presented scenes of middle-class life with a remarkably acidic touch, stripping away any vestiges of illusion or pretense. With Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, she steps lightly into a sparse and immensely tricky genre, the literature of parental regret. Ruth’s resentment of Angela and Rex is an “unmentionable thing,” a secret “battened down so long that [it] had become almost unrecognizable as the truth.” And yet Angela has always felt it; her life has been defined by “being rejected, abandoned, betrayed by someone who ought to love her.” (Names shiver with symbolism throughout Mortimer’s story: Ruth, in British English, means “repentance,” “remorse,” “regret.” Rex is the cruel king of his sturdy, commuter-belt castle; during the week, he disappears Londonward to his job as a dentist, performing countless “careful excavations into rotting bone.” Angela, meaning “messenger,” is the character whose circumstances force Ruth into action.)

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British author Penelope Mortimer with her husband, writer and barrister John Mortimer, circa 1964.

[smirkymonkey]

1. Sounds like an interesting read.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention!