Outlawed starts to get good-even funny-when Ada runs away again, to Hole in the Wall. The convent is relatively safe but Ada finds it just as confining as her village, even if she’s not expected to procreate. Ada’s first port after fleeing accusations of witchcraft is a convent of barren women. Women like Ada and her mother, who are midwives, are tolerated but barely. Women have limited roles: mother, wife, pre-wife, post-mother. That first chapter or so of Outlawed is very uncomfortable to read, as North throws in just about every anti-feminist trope into the narrative. Ada’s path to outlawry begins when she fails to get pregnant and is blamed for everything. Women who can’t get pregnant are viewed askance and heaven help them if anything bad happens to anyone or anything in their village. Women are expected to immediately start gestating as soon as the ink is dry on their marriage certificates and keep going until they die or their body gives out. The world left behind seems obsessed with growing the population. A few decades before Ada was even born, devastating influenza ripped across the country (and presumably, the rest of the world). Although biology and societal convention push Ada into it, she is really not cut out for an outlaw’s life in Outlawed, Anna North’s thought-provoking alternate history of late-nineteenth-century America.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |