Drums: More "Women's Issues" (Pt. 1)

It's an ambitious title for a post, no? [Refers to a previous title] And a long time coming.  It's the post that I really wanted to write when I intially finished the books, but the more I reread, the less I want to write about it because I've already got it all worked out in my head and now I want to move past it.  But it's very much a part of the Outlander books.  So here goes...

One thing that struck me when I was initially reading Outlander is that the novel did not toe the feminist line by denouncing historical gender roles as necessarily oppressive and unjust.  Rather, it is often the case that the historical limitations on what women could do in society, the need for women to be protected by their men (most often from other men), are validated, and the lot of women not so terrible--or at any rate, no worse than what men had to endure.  A good example of this is the should-be-scandalous spanking scene.  Reading the Little House Books to my daughters, I recently realized that the justification in those books for corporal punishment was much the same as Jamie's justification to Claire in Outlander, and while she is his wife rather than his child, the fact that her disobediance did endanger everyone does suggest the need for some type of consequence--at least in that society.  Repeatedly through the first two books, Claire's twentieth-century headstong nature, while one of her strengths, proves to be out-of bounds and dangerous to her and to those around her.  In the struggle between female independence and history, history prevails.

I was also struck after a while--though not at first--by representations of 18th Century women and their fertility.  Claire is the only major female character in Outlander, and she is unable to become pregnant--first in the Twentieth Century, and then in the Eighteeth Century.  She seems to be barren.  In the Twentieth Century, she and Frank want a child.  In the Eighteenth Century, she is expected to want a child, and while she is a bit more ambivalent about the prospect, she is still open to the possibility of life--and after a while, she wants to give Jamie a child.  The first book, then, treats fertility as something desirable, if risky.  Even the fecundity of Jenny and Ian (the elder) is basically a good thing, though she is weary.  Jenny wouldn't have it any other way, and expects to bear many children.  In Drums of Autumn, Jamie articulates it very simply in response to the implication, stated by his own (unknowing) offspring, that Scots breed like rabbits:

“Scottish families are sometimes large, aye.” Jamie plucked a wren’s down feather from the small box and laid it delicately against the shank of his hook. “We think children a blessing.”

However, as the books progress, the narrative seems to make an effort to correct the error inadvertantly committed in Outlander, the book that Diana Gabaldon wrote, according to her own account, as an experiment, never completely expecting it to be published.  It is a risky novel, and by implication (as a discourse on the dangers of pregnancy and the need to limit births creeps in) one of the bold and perhaps inadvisable moves (Books 2 through 7 suggest) is the depiction of unrestricted, unprotected sex.  It is perhaps the prominance of the birth control message in the subsequent books that make it seem not only like a backlash against its absence in the first book, but also like a particular, pointed message aimed at the reader.  Don't think, the books seem to suggest, that this is the right way to live.  Even Claire's Twentieth Century pregnancy is risky, and Claire denies medicated childbirth because she is afraid that she will die in childbirth, even with available medical interventions.

The discourse of birth control does not, however, revolve around Claire, though Claire is the source of much of the emotional and physical vulnerability that surrounds pregnancy and childbirth, including miscarriage.  In fact, it is striking that the sexual relationship between Jamie and Claire--which is the ideal around which the novels are built--remains largely untainted by concerns with birth control. Once or twice we do learn that the pre-menopausal Claire is not taking chances this time around, but for other characters, birth control is much more a part of the story, and in the case of Bree and Roger, it is much more an anxiety of the male.  More on this later, because I don't think it actually works out in poor Roger's favor.  The message we get, increasingly, is that children are good, childbirth, pregnancy, and unregulated births are dangerous to women and undermine their autonomy.  However, the contradictory message that we get is that children are good--very good--much to be desired, that children strenghten a family and provide a powerful bond between men and women that is not always respected, and that men for whom female fertility is a source of anxiety are comparatively weak.  This will require some proving, I know.  So my feeling is that the narrative of birth control is still somewhat reactionary, which makes it all that much more artificial to me--again, as if the reader is being cautioned not to see unrestrained sexuality as an absolute good.  If there's a discourse on chastity, I haven't found it--such would be the Catholic remedy for the tendency toward licentiousness.

But what begins in Dragonfly in Amber surfaces in a big way in Drums of Autumn.  In my next post, I plan to review how the theme builds.  Eventually, I will take a closer look at some of the scenes, dialogues, and curcumstances that build into the discourse on birth control.

Gabaldon, Diana (2004-10-26). Drums of Autumn (Outlander) (Kindle Locations 10291-10292). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.