73 pages • 2 hours read
Ami McKayThe Birth House
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Struggle for Women’s Rights
The overarching theme of The Birth House is women’s struggle for independence and to be seen and respected, and the challenges inherent in that struggle. The story is set after the turn of the 20th century and coincides with the suffragette movement in the United States, which Dora witnesses while in Boston. However, there is also a timelessness to this theme, as women have faced these same challenges throughout history and still face many of them today in fighting for equal rights.
Throughout the book, Dora struggles against various masculine powers that seek to control her. First, her father: He may wish to protect her, but he views Dora as separate from and inferior to her brothers, especially after she reaches sexual maturity. Seeing she has matured, Dora notices, “he acted as if it made him sick just to look at me. He shook me so hard he put his fears right into my body” (44). He also makes Dora burn her books after reading a supposed scientific journal that asserted “overthinking and novel-reading causes, at the very least, fretting, nightmares and a bad complexion,” and at worst, “impure and sensual” thoughts and actions (39). Later, Dora’s husband Archer becomes a similar force in her life. He is sexually demanding, refusing to take no for an answer. He insists that frequent, violent sex “gives me the right to call myself a man” (172).
The most persistent and dangerous symbol of masculine power and the desire to control women is Dr. Thomas. Throughout the book, he maintains his firm belief in his own superiority to women and midwives, saying during his first meeting with Miss B.: “You, as well as the other generous women […] have had to serve in place of science for too long” (29). Later, demonstrating his modern techniques in childbirth, he explains: “these things hasten childbirth and put the labour process in the doctor’s hands. He has complete control” (57). In keeping with this conviction that even childbirth, undergone exclusively by women, should be controlled by men, Dr. Thomas repeatedly ignores the wisdom of the midwives, even at the risk of his patients’ health. He also diagnoses Dora with neurasthenia and hysteria, conditions with no basis in science that were frequently used to explain away female illnesses and emotions at the time.
However, McKay is careful not to make the plot a simple story of good women overcoming evil men. Key to Dora’s emancipation is her realization that she has, in many ways, allowed herself to be subjugated by men and by traditions meant to keep women without power. In her marriage to Archer, she frequently acknowledges that she puts aside her own wishes to please him and feels “shame that comes from not wanting to give him whatever he wants” (172). After her stay with Maxine in Boston, Dora realizes that she missed opportunities to assert her own independence. She writes to her brother: “Why is it that I have often thought to myself how unfair life has been for women […] but have never been strong or bold enough to protest? Women have been imprisoned, have died for these rights, while I was complacent, happy enough to sit at home and knit” (322).
Progress Versus Tradition
The struggle between progress and tradition is a constant throughout the novel, and the author takes the time to portray the positive and negative aspects of each. The town of Scots Bay is traditional; the people hold to old superstitions because “when there’s no good explanation for something, people of the Bay find it easier to believe in mermaids and moss babies” (5). The main industry is shipbuilding, which is a dying craft by the time World War I ends. Due to their superstitious natures, the residents of the town are easily seduced by the promise of progress, personified in Dr. Thomas and his maternity home.
However, Miss B. and her wisdom as a midwife are also symbolic of tradition and the many positive aspects of it. Her herbal remedies prove to be effective and safe on multiple occasions, in contrast to Dr. Thomas’s progressive, scientific procedures, which are often harmful. Dr. Thomas’s fanatical devotion to progress merely for the sake of progress causes him to ignore or dismiss the wisdom and effectiveness of many of Miss B.’s treatments.
Nevertheless, not all progress is harmful or malicious in the novel. Dora witnesses the progressive ideas of Max and her fellow suffragettes in Boston. She also embraces certain scientific breakthroughs, like the invention of the vibrator, as positive and empowering. In the end, Dora realizes that there is good on the sides of both progress and tradition, and she expresses as much during the women’s march on the maternity home. The newspaper reports: “She called for ‘cooperation and trust’ between doctors, midwives and the women they serve” (362).
Women’s History
The entire novel is written from a woman’s perspective and primarily deals with the everyday lives and relationships of women. Even Archer and Hart, the two most prominent men in Dora’s life, are not featured as often or as prominently as Dora’s female friends. This is unusual in history, as the stories of women generally do not have a place in historical records, and information about the everyday lives of ordinary women is rare before the present period.
The author structures the novel to echo this fact. The novel is told through a collection of letters, journal entries, advertisements, excerpts from the Willow Book, newspaper articles, and traditional first-person storytelling. However, all of these articles are ephemera—paper and things that generally do not stand the test of time. This is much like women’s history itself: It existed in these forms but usually has been lost to time. As part of her effort to record the usually unrecorded history of women, the author includes realistic, sometimes uncomfortable details about what her characters think and feel. For example, the women of the Occasional Knitters Society frequently discuss sex and contraception—conversations and opinions that would never have been recorded in reality.
This true look at women’s history is a marked contrast to the only examples of women’s stories that Dora has: her novels by Jane Austen and similar authors. Although these are rightfully regarded as feminist literature, there is a certain level of fantasy about them, such as the characters always ending up happily married. The readers of The Birth House discover, as Dora does herself, that the truth may not be prettier than fiction, but it is more meaningful.
