Modernism, Monsters, and Margaret Sanger440
f
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 59, number 2, Summer 2013. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
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modernism, monsters, and
margaret sanger
Aimee Armande Wilson
Tony Telura, the young protagonist of Mary Heaton Vorse's "The
Magnet," wakes up in a "spectral and dark" tenement hall to the
piercing sound of a woman's screams that "slithered through him"
like "a slashing knife" (8). These screams do not arise because of a
ghost, vampire, or any other supernatural demon despite the gothic
overtones of the story. Rather, Tony's nightmarish experience in
Vorse's 1921 short story is occasioned by his mother in childbirth. A
similarly disturbing picture of maternity develops in Rita Wellman's
"On the Dump," a story published three years earlier in the same
venue, Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review (BCR).
1
In Wellman's
story, a poor, pregnant woman allows herself to become human
trash, slipping to her death on a pile of "tobacco cans, old pans, dirty
ripped mattresses," and one "obscene" corset (7). Mrs. Robinson's
desperation at her perpetual pregnancies—she has "faced death" ten
times—leaves her thinking that death on a dump heap is a welcome
release and tting end for someone society has discarded like so
much trash (7). In these stories of madness and surprising violence,
indeed throughout the BCR, gothic aesthetics and contraception (or
the lack thereof) combine to create a singularly modernist narrative
of maternity.
This essay explores the intersection of modernist aesthetics
and the politicized narratives of the US birth control movement. By
examining the depiction of the maternal body within the texts of
Sanger, Vorse, and Wellman, we see a side of aesthetic autonomy that
is anything but autonomous: although artists may attempt to create
Wilson 441
a work of art that is complete onto itself, the narratives in BCR show
that the impulse toward autonomy obscures terrifying political and
ethical ramications of an apolitical, disengaged aesthetic. I analyze
this depiction of autonomy as a kind of doubling, a way of showing
the other as the same, which further suggests a way to understand
how the dominant rhetoric of the birth control movement could shift
from feminist revolution to patriarchal eugenics.
Although scholarship has been slow to recognize the connections
between literary modernism and the birth control movement, their
overlap is readily apparent. The symbolic possibilities of birth con-
trol unite major modernist concerns like linguistic uncertainty, rapid
technological change, and distrust in traditional institutions and grand
narratives. Through its ability to stop a family line, female-controlled
contraceptives such as the diaphragm can represent a break in the
connection with the future and with the nuclear family; because it
disrupts the denition of "woman" as inextricably also "mother," it
uncouples signier and signied while also making the usual female
life narrative (child-wife-mother) available for the analogous experi-
mentation that modernists exerted in ction.
The narrative that replaces the child-wife-mother trajectory in
the pages of BCR invokes a kind of neo-gothic vitalism. This narrative,
which I call the modernist conception narrative, appropriates gothic
features in order to show the female body as an organism with an
autonomous will to reproduce. This form of vitalism, although evolved
from gothic traditions, is no longer linked to the return of the dead
directly or literally. Instead, through fragmentation and linguistic
iteration the modernist conception narrative depicts corporal bodies
with an autonomous, at times mechanistic, existence. Zombies are a
close but inexact analogy. Similar to the zombie, the maternal body
here has a single purpose that it pursues unthinkingly and in a way
that confuses the border between life and death. Yet these women
have not returned from the dead. They are brought to the brink of
death by a body that has too much life: the vitalist body's fertility,
coupled with the incessant drive to reproduce, wears the body out
and frustrates the mind with efforts to control it. If, as Rachel Blau
DuPlessis has argued, the task of women writers in the twentieth
century was to imagine new narratives for the lives of women (4),
the stories by Vorse and Wellman demonstrate that this task was
undertaken in earnest in the intersection of modernist literature and
the birth control movement. By examining this intersection, we can
see that many of the birth control movement's discursive construc-
tions around gender, technology, and the maternal body can be traced
and understood through modernist concerns.
Modernism, Monsters, and Margaret Sanger442
Because aesthetic autonomy in the modernist conception narra-
tive draws an explicit connection between the art object and politics,
it is a far cry from the depictions of autonomy usually associated
with modernism. The traditional, and at one time monolithic, inter-
pretations held that modernists were obsessed with the art object's
removal from the daily, modernized world. In William K. Wimsatt and
Cleanth Brooks's archetypal, New Critical, understanding of aesthetic
autonomy, art establishes "its own kind of intrinsic worth . . . apart
from, and perhaps even in deance of, the rival norms of ethics and
politics" (476). Wimsatt and Brooks are concerned primarily with the
autonomy of the art object from politics, but this is, of course, only
one of the ways scholars use the concept of autonomy. Wimsatt and
Brooks's idea of autonomy eschews the sense in which it might refer
to the art object's independence from meanings given by the viewer/
reader, as Lisa Siraganian argues in Modernism's Other Work: The Art
Object's Political Life, or in which autonomy might refer to that of the
individual artist, as Peter Nicholls contends. Nevertheless, Nicholls's
argument is worth further comment because it contains a concept
that is useful for understanding the modernist conception narrative.
Nicholls identies a tradition of female modernism that rejects the
autonomy of the artist: H. D. and Gertrude Stein developed a poet-
ics "founded not on autonomy but on the continuities between self
and world" (200) and "preoccupied with what seems other but turns
out to be the same" (202). Nicholls identies this "doubleness" as a
critique of the impersonal, object-based poetics hailed by the "Men of
1914" (Pound, Eliot, and Lewis). Vorse, Wellman, and Sanger develop
a modernist poetics similar to that of H. D. and Stein by invoking
aesthetic autonomy to critique it. That this critique should be part of
a female tradition is understandable when we consider the fact that
writing itself was a political act for women. The history of women
writers, explains Sowon S. Park, is necessarily different from the
canonical history of literature because it is inextricably connected to
political concerns: "women's writing and political engagement have
always been evidently mutually dependent. Between 1890 and 1920,
for example, the rst-wave feminist movement ignited a veritable
explosion of literature about, by, and for women" (172–73). Female
modernists were positioned to understand and make use of the un-
easy relationship between an aesthetics of autonomy and political
engagement. The modernist conception narrative foregrounds this
relationship and directs our attention to the political ramications of
autonomy as an aesthetic goal. My main concern is the art object's
dissociation from the politics and ethics of the daily, material world.
As such, my argument wrestles with ideas of autonomy in the vein
of Wimsatt and Brooks.
Wilson 443
In the narratives of Sanger, Vorse, and Wellman, these rami-
cations are exemplied in the maternal body. As we will see, the
particular narrative of poverty constructed in the pages of BCR re-
duces the political autonomy of poor women while it simultaneously
and paradoxically argues for their increased independence. In these
narratives, such ideological doubling is literalized in an autonomously
reproducing body. Historically, the maternal body has been thought
of as outside politics and the public sphere altogether, granting it
a veneer of autonomy. Consider, for instance, certain nineteenth
century aesthetic traditions that explicitly gender concepts such as
the modern, the city, and the home. Rita Felski explains that these
traditions displace women from the public sphere:
. . . a recurring identication of the modern with the public
was largely responsible for the belief that women were situ-
ated outside processes of history and social change. In texts
of early Romanticism one nds some of the most explicitly
nostalgic representations of femininity as a redemptive
refuge from the constraints of civilization. Seen to be less
specialized and differentiated than man, located within the
household and an intimate web of familial relations, more
closely linked to nature through her reproductive capac-
ity, woman embodied a sphere of atemporal authenticity
seemingly untouched by the alienation and fragmentation
of modern life. (16)
Political arguments against birth control often followed the same lines.
Opponents frequently relied on ideas of the maternal body as sacred
and timeless and of birth control as obscene in order to argue that
the issue was simply too private, too embarrassing, and too immoral
to discuss in public. Members of the 1929 US House of Representa-
tives overwhelmingly refused to discuss birth control with Sanger
because they were embarrassed to broach the issue with a woman
or because "It is revolting to interfere in people's personal affairs"
(qtd. in Baker 207). The idea that women, especially mothers, were
timeless, private, and pure beings shaped political policy as much as
it did literary aesthetics.
These arguments, then, are not so much against birth control
as they are against the attempt to bring discussions of maternity and
female sexuality into the public sphere. But denying the realities of
a historically situated body does not make it autonomous. Rather,
thinking of the maternal body as autonomous makes it grotesque,
distorted, and senseless. The stories in BCR imply that the inability
of women to control their own bodies—signied as a lack of access
to birth control—results from the drive to make the female body
autonomous.
Modernism, Monsters, and Margaret Sanger444
Thus, in contrast to the aesthetic autonomy espoused by Pound
and Eliot, the modernist conception narrative depicts autonomy as
a ghastly punishment rather than a goal to be achieved. Through
repeated and undesired childbirth, women's bodies take on lives of
their own, reproducing "hordes" (a frequently used term in BCR) of
unwanted children that bring on poverty, ignorance, and war. Fittingly,
as John Paul Riquelme has shown, gothic literature is historically
connected to the politics of social change. "The gothic imaginary,"
argues Riquelme, "is frequently a vehicle for staging and challenging
ideological thinking rather than a means of furthering it" (588). The
modernist conception narrative employs this tradition of invoking
ideology to critique it: the stories in BCR literalize autonomy in the
female body as a way of critiquing the political and aesthetic impulses
to abstract that body from politics, history, and the public sphere.
Modernism's distinct inuence on the rhetoric of Sanger's birth
control movement is due to reasons both general and specic. First,
the concerns of literary modernism—the questions asked, ideas
championed, and values held—were salient throughout the educated
Anglo-American world at the turn of the twentieth century. Modernism
and the birth control movement were responses to much the same
social, political, and cultural milieu: both movements had roots in New
York City, both were responses to (and attempts to take advantage
of) radical social upheavals, and both were inuenced by thinkers
such as Freud, Nietzsche, and Darwin.
Second, and more specically, Sanger hailed from New York's
avant-garde community. She and the movement can be justiably
elided: Sanger, to a large extent, was the movement in America. Al-
though she had rivals for leadership of the birth control movement,
Sanger and her life story became the most prominent representations
of it. Indeed, the general public came to see Sanger as equivalent to
the movement; she even received letters addressed to "Mrs. Birth
Control" (Baker 133). This elision persisted at least into the 1950s
when a character in Philip Roth's novella Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
states that she "called Margaret Sanger Clinic," a phrasing B. W. Capo
argues merges the person with the clinic: "It is not the clinic named
for Sanger, or Sanger's clinic: the individual and the structure are
one and the same" (185).
Raised in Corning, New York, Sanger moved to the City with
her rst husband, William Sanger, and their three young children. In
these early years, both parents were active in anarchist and socialist
groups. She was later a vital part of the Heterodoxy Club and Mabel
Dodge's salon, where she mingled with artists and radicals such as
Djuna Barnes, Carl Van Vechten, and Alfred Stieglitz (Barnet 139–46).
Dodge's coterie viewed Sanger as a revolutionary, preaching open