December 2002
Jessa Crispin
fiction
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories by Emma Donoghue
There
are strange bits of history that have been mostly forgotten. The back
story is lost, or perhaps you sense that the truly interesting perspective
is the one not saved. Over the last ten years or so, Emma Donoghue has
come across some of these small snippets of history and felt inspired
to fill in the blank spaces with a short story followed by the true story
and her sources.
These sources of her inspiration span five centuries of British, Irish,
and Scottish history and come from engravings, medical journals, ballads,
trial records. Some of the stories stem from just a sentence in another
person's history. She attempts to unearth these buried lives of women,
cripples, slaves, and other undesirables who were so infrequently able
to tell their own tales.
The stories are written so perfectly and with such authority that you
want to take Donoghue's word for it. We'll never know if her versions
of what happened are close to the truth, but it doesn't matter. If only
high school history classes were this entertaining. The stories taken
by themselves are fantastic; they stand alone from the premise quite nicely.
Taken in context, however, they light up. If only it were not so difficult
to wait until the end of the story to hear the history of it. I snuck
a peak more than once.
All sorts of nastiness are addressed. The woman in the remarkable "Cured"
- based on brief notes in a medical book about clitoridectomy - went to
a doctor for back pain and left mutilated and "cured". "I have performed
an operation to prevent you from harming yourself, from making yourself
gravely ill to the point of epilepsy, lunacy, and death," he tells her.
It's a difficult story to read, one that makes you want to buy the poor
girl a vibrator and do all kinds of horrible things to the doctor.
While stories like "Cured" and "The Fox on the Line" - a story about two
anti-vivisection crusaders - are political in nature, there is also "Acts
of Union", a slightly racy story about consummation of marriage and the
lack thereof. The collection is fairly balanced between feminist and light,
serious and playful which shows maturity on Donoghue's part.
Emma Donoghue has written a great collection of short stories, and I wish
she would write another volume of these forgotten histories.
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories by Emma Donoghue
Harcourt
ISBN: 0151009376
272 pages
