Faculty of Law University of Toronto
Law & Literature Workshop Series
presents
Alan Ackerman
University of Toronto
Lillian Hellman, Abortion, and the Right to Privacy
Tuesday, March 3, 2008
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (Room FA2) – 84 Queen’s Park
From the 1930s to the 70s, New-Orleans born playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman’s representations of birth control, abortion, and sex spoke to problems of defining and policing privacy, which Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer defines as “a person’s power to control what others can come to know about him or her.” Women’s reproductive rights raise questions about representation, interpretation, and about publishing. In focusing on relations between language, which people share, and more discrete features of their personhood (their property, their bodies, their memories), my paper brings together what may seem strange bedfellows: birth control, abortion, and sexual freedom with censorship, theories of authorship and of literary genre. The topics of birth control and linguistic control have long been conflated in American Law, specifically under a bill pushed through Congress in 1873 by Anthony Comstock, the first official censor of the United States. The Comstock Laws placed birth control and abortion under the same interdiction as “obscene” literature and publishing. This attempt to legislate public morality targeted literature, but its impact was felt in people’s most intimate lives. In understanding privacy as the ability of an individual to control what can be known about him or her, Lillian Hellman’s work forces us to examine our assumptions about what an individual is, where she begins and ends, or if she remains “unfinished.”
My paper will draw connections between Hellman’s 1953 play The Autumn Garden and the sexual-literary tensions she depicts in writing her own life as a girl in New Orleans in An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento. The Autumn Garden dramatizes the vulnerability of a young woman in a small Southern town not only to a sexual invasion but also, and more important, to an invasion of unfair comment, and the subsequent need to hush the town up. Hellman’s own life experience, as she represents it in An Unfinished Woman, speaks directly to the connections between sex and publishing. While working for Horace Liveright’s publishing house Hellman had the first of numerous abortions, at the time a dangerous, illegal operation. Hellman’s comic account of her own abortion satirizes the notion of secrecy in the male-dominated publishing house. The abortion story is further thrown into relief by stories of sexual awakening in An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento which draw on the secrecy surrounding racial identity and miscegenation in the segregated South of her youth. In an earlier chapter of An Unfinished Woman, Hellman depicts her sexual coming of age, when, running away from home, she found herself in the black neighborhood of New Orleans, where she acquired lodging in a boarding house by falsely asserting kinship with her nanny, Sophronia. When her father came to take her home, she confided, “Papa, I’ll tell you a secret. I’ve had very bad cramps and I am beginning to bleed. I’m changing life.” Conflating literary and biological reproduction, this chapter on crossing the racial divide, like the publishing-house chapter and like the book as a whole, is fully alive to the irony of literally publishing the intimacy of Hellman’s sexual experiences, her struggle to make choices about her own body and her capacity to assert her “rights” in America.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
