Traps of womanhood: Reproductive coercion in Ruth Park’s Harp in the South (1948) and The Witch’s Thorn (1951)

This article is informed by and situated within a history project I am undertaking with Ann Curthoys and Zora Simic that takes a number of different routes to understanding the meanings of, conditions for, and experiences of domestic and family violence in Australia since 1850.¹ While the legal archive has been at the centre of most historical accounts written to date, including some of our own, we also examine political campaigns, government policy, visual representations, memoir and fiction. Ruth Park’s interest in intimate relationships and families in crisis makes her novels fruitful sites for exploring representations of domestic and family violence in fiction. One of the tasks we have set ourselves is to establish the heuristic utility of terms that have come to define a wider range of abuses that are now crucial to contemporary understandings of what constitutes domestic and family violence. Financial abuse, sexual and reproductive coercion and coercive control are three such terms, coined in recent decades, that we consider throughout.

In this essay, I am primarily interested in fictional representations of reproductive coercion. The term first appeared in the legal literature on interpersonal relationships and reproductive autonomy in 2008 (Priaulx 193–94). Research in Australia was first published in the late 2010s and pertains to control of fertility, such as contraceptive sabotage, and pregnancy outcomes such as abortion. In 2018, the Australian branch of MSI (formerly Marie Stopes International) drew attention to the wider context of structural reproductive coercion in Australia, such as legal and economic barriers to contraceptive and abortion services (Marie Stopes Australia 12).

I analyse scenes from The Witch’s Thorn (1951) and The Harp in the South (1948) in which the characters of Ella Gow and Roie Darcy, respectively, are subject to various forms of reproductive coercion. These scenes are embedded in wider contexts of intimacy and violence that are exacerbated by crowded domesticity and poverty. The obstacles to reproductive freedom faced by Ella and Roie are shaped by a range of forces. The structural and interpersonal elements of reproductive coercion in Park’s novels intersect and shed light on womanhood lived in relation to regimes of masculine dominance enacted by men who inhabit subordinate rather than hegemonic masculine subject positions due to their economic and racialised statuses.² The control they exert in their intimate relationships reveals where their limited power lies and the profound ways in which it shapes the lives of their victims. Exposure to these regimes compounds the limitations on access to safe and lawful aids to reproductive autonomy, including abortion, to generate conditions of reproductive and maternal coercion in the contexts of Depression-era rural Aotearoa New Zealand and the Sydney slums of the 1940s. Depicting a period that historians agree saw domestic violence retreat into an increasingly private domestic realm, narratives illuminate the imagined worlds of intimate relationships and characters’ attempts to make sense of them. Where the historical record offers testimonies rendered for courts and newspaper reporting, Park’s novels enliven moments of coercion and abuse – their intricate contexts and the interior worlds of each character caught up in the violent dynamic.

I place these scenes from the novels in conversation with a story told to me in 2020 by a domestic violence worker, ‘Fran’, who manages a service for women on the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia where she has worked for more than two decades. When I interviewed Fran, she recalled a client who had returned to the service more times than any other. Among the forms of physical and emotional abuse she endured, this client’s partner prevented her from accessing contraception. He told her he liked her being pregnant because it stopped other men from looking at her. This woman had five children with him before the relationship ended.³ Fran commented that most clients attending the service ‘would have experienced some form of sexual or reproductive coercion’.⁴ Despite her observation that reproductive and sexual coercion were common among her clients, Fran noted that many of the women working at the service would not be familiar with the term ‘reproductive coercion’, suggesting that this type of domestic abuse was not treated as a distinct category.

It is unsurprising then that accounts of reproductive coercion take some work to identify in the historical record, except in clear cases of forced abortion resulting in death or physical assaults on the pregnant body resulting in miscarriage, which are common in court reports relating to assault, attempted murder and divorce cases. The daily burdens of entrapment by forced pregnancy rarely figure in accounts of marital abuse found in the legal archive. To identify instances of reproductive coercion and abuse in the historical record, we must consider histories of sexual agency, contraception and abortion. So, with these histories in mind, I turn to Park’s texts.

Park’s novel The Witch’s Thorn is set in the fictional rural town Te Kana, in Aotearoa New Zealand, a creation that draws on memories of place and people in the town of Park’s childhood.⁵ Ella Gow lives on the outskirts of Te Kana in what Park refers to as ‘the sump’ and is married to the biological father of the central character, Bethell Jury. Twelve-year-old Bethell has been lovingly raised by her Irish immigrant grandmother, Mary; however, Mary dies in the first chapter. This prompts Bethell’s childlike and consumptive mother, Queenie, the youngest of Mary’s four daughters, to leave Te Kana for Auckland. This departure dispels any hope that Mary’s death might enliven Queenie’s sense of responsibility for her own child. In the absence of her grandmother, Bethell is bereft of a home and any loving family keen to take her in. She begins her new life with her reluctant host, Aunt Amy, who has risen above Mary’s social standing through marriage to the local grocer, a devout member of the Catholic parish. Amy’s disdain for Bethell and the threat she and her son pose to the child soon become clear. Bethell is then moved to live with her widowed uncle by marriage, the local mayor and publican. He is a cold figure, but his kind daughter takes a protective attitude to Bethell. When this situation becomes untenable, she moves to her warm and loving aunt, Gracie Hush, who lives on the edge of town. A widow, Gracie has been cast out of Te Kana society for supporting her eight children through prostitution. From here, Bethell is soon forcefully removed by her violent, alcoholic father Johnny Gow. Johnny brings her into his marital home to torment his wife Ella, reminding her of his infidelity with Queenie, who remains the object of his romantic desires. In the final pages of the book, the violence Bethell experiences in the Gow home brings to a climax the cruelty she has suffered at almost every turn since her grandmother’s death. The perpetrators are both Johnny and Ella Gow.

However, it is the violence that Ella Gow herself suffers earlier in the story that is relevant to the history of reproductive coercion and abuse. The most disturbing scene occurs in chapter twelve (there are sixteen in total). This is foreshadowed by chapter six in which Bethell, who has just learned who her father is, goes to the Gows’ house out of curiosity and is caught looking through the window at Ella and her children. When Ella discovers the identity of the child from her daughter Pearly, Bethell’s classmate, she attacks her viciously until Bethell is able to escape her blows and run from the house. In the immediate aftermath of this attack, Park writes of Ella Gow:

She heard the baby screaming behind her, and in her confused mind it was mixed with the kicking of the child in her womb. So many babies. Sometimes she forgot who was the youngest and who the eldest.

… Her terrible hopelessness and despair overwhelmed her. There was nothing in life for her but an endless pregnancy, with aching legs and tormented body, overtaxed kidneys and an exhausted bloodstream. (Witch’s Thorn 64–65)

The Gows live in one room and eat pumpkins that grow wild in the sump. There is always noise and always hunger, and Johnny Gow’s presence provides little comfort for his wife and innumerable children. Poverty and isolation would place any contraceptive treatments out of reach, but there are more violent constraints on Ella’s reproductive autonomy.

In chapter twelve, Queenie Jury dies, and her funeral occurs three days after the birth of Ella’s latest offspring. On this day, Johnny is immersed in grief for Queenie and self-pity; he drinks to excess and makes a spectacle of himself, first at the funeral and then at the town pub. He is leaving the pub when he sees his own horse and trap moving towards him. Park’s choice of words here – ‘trap’ rather than ‘carriage’ or ‘cart’ – is fitting, perhaps deliberate. The trap contains Johnny’s daughter who has taken her mother and the newborn to make sure that the tormenting figure of Queenie is dead and buried. Park writes of Johnny:

He saw the yellow look on the face of his wife, and knew instantly where she had been.

The trap had to pass him, so he waited, licking his lips and trying over the words. (143)

When they stop, he orders the child out of the trap with the newborn to make their own way home. Ella knows what this means. Park writes:

Mrs Gow’s racked body screamed for pity. ‘Don’t, don’t’, she gasped. ‘You’ll kill me. It’s only three days since.’ (143)

… He looked at her with such loathing that she hid her face in her hands.

‘If I had any guts, I’d murder you. But I haven’t. I haven’t the nerve to buck the rope, even for you. There’s only one way to get rid of you, Ella.’

She stared at him, terrified.

‘Get out’, he ordered.

‘No, Johnny,’ she quavered.

He threw the reins over the pony’s head and leapt to the ground. With fierce hating energy. He dragged his wife out of the trap. Her limp, flabby body both repelled and frenzied him.

‘Johnny’ she moaned, ‘give me a little time. Just a little while. I’ll do anything if only you’ll leave me alone for a while.’

He dragged her after him over the rough ground to the lonely paddock with the broom hedge spiking along the Ridge.

‘Johnny, I’ll die if I have to have another one so soon. Think of the children. What would happen to them? Oh, Johnny, please, please!’

He began to laugh. She felt his body rumbling with mirth.

‘Men have been murdering their wives this way for centuries,’ he said gently and softly ‘and it’s all so nice and legal, too.’ (144)

Given what we know about Ella Gow’s reproductive history and privation at this point, a death associated with forced pregnancy and birth is a plausible end. Histories of temperance have long shown that in the late nineteenth century, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and their allies in the suffrage campaigns were deeply concerned about sexual violence against women exacerbated by alcohol. Their emphasis was on the repeated and injurious pregnancies and deliveries, and deaths in childbirth, caused by this sexual violence (Pixley 502). Here, the risks of sexual coercion contained the risks of reproductive coercion and abuse. By the time rape in marriage was outlawed in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, a process that began in South Australia in 1976, the degree of attendant risk posed by unwanted pregnancy, life-threatening abortion and childbirth was significantly reduced (at a population level) by the contraceptive pill, lawful abortion and safer birthing conditions. However, prior to the criminalising of rape in marriage, a woman’s vows were widely interpreted, including in law, as jettisoning her right to sexual consent (Featherstone 91). Where a wife’s consent to sex was disregarded, the use of abstinence as a means of reproductive control was unavailable. It also seems highly unlikely that other forms of negotiated contraception were within reach. Johnny Gow’s trap is not just the horse-drawn carriage itself, but the proprietary control Johnny wields over the bodies of those who ride in it. The Gows’ marriage has robbed Ella of sexual and reproductive autonomy; Johnny’s abuse of his conjugal rights not only places her at risk of further pregnancies and births, but he expresses a hope that his rape is a violence that will reverberate in pregnancy, labour and overburdened motherhood to cause a slow death for Ella.

Park’s 1948 novel The Harp in the South, originally published as a series in the Sydney Morning Herald, is set in the inner-Sydney slums of Surry Hills where Park and her husband D’Arcy Niland lived in 1943. It centres on three generations of the Irish Catholic Australian family, the Darcys. A major turning point in the story is Roie Darcy’s sexual encounter with Tommy Mendel, a young Jewish man who wears a heavy boot to manage his paralysed foot. This event occurs outside of marriage and results in Roie’s pregnancy, her visit to an abortionist and her miscarriage after a violent assault by a group of Dutch sailors. Tommy and Roie are younger than Ella and Johnny Gow. Their courtship is short-lived, coming to an end soon after the sex occurs.

This incident provides fascinating insights into experiences of womanhood that are connected to agency and coercion and generate the question of whether rape occurred. I read their sex as rape – she verbally refuses twice as he lies on top of her. He won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. But the meaning of this event for Park is ambiguous, and contemporary reviewers did not refer to this episode as rape. They wrote instead of what they found ‘sordid’, ‘distasteful’ and ‘scandalous’ (‘Harp’ 2). This representation of the sex scene and its dismissive reception raises questions for the historian about how we define and historicise violence. If it reads as rape to me but is not described as such by the victim or perpetrator within the text, the author’s commentary on the book or her reviewers, was it rape?

Insight into Roie’s complex subject position is gained through her rich interpretation of Tommy’s and her own experiences as this long moment unfolds. When he presses himself to Roie, she can feel him trembling, and this reminds her of a time when ‘she had come across a rabbit in a trap’ (Harp 97). She tells him that this intimacy is not good for either of them, that they should stop. In the scene that follows the rape, she climbs into bed with her beloved younger sister Delour, who she also likens to a rabbit, recalling the recent reference to the trap and anticipating her sister’s womanhood. I read this as a reference back to Roie’s own feminine entrapment by Tommy earlier in the night. Indeed, all players are trapped here: she and Tommy and, she anticipates, in time her sister too.

When Tommy ‘snarls’ back to Roie’s imploring him to stop, his fury is nasty:

It’s the same with all you sheilas. Giving a bloke the come-on for all your worth, and then all at once, biff, it’s turned off at the main.

… God I wish you felt as I feel. I wish you were a man just for a minute. Then you wouldn’t say no to me again, ever. (86)

Roie’s response to this resentful insistence is to soften:

For a brief moment she had a wordless, almost uncomprehending glimpse into his mind; she saw, as he did, his drab room somewhere, the chafings of his daily life, the disillusionments that had always been his, the surgings of manhood which distorted his outlook, broke into his sleep and interrupted the flow of his whole existence. She felt such tenderness her heart nearly broke. (86)

Her empathy for what she understands as a sexual desire that is experienced as urgently requiring flow and expression, does not, however, make her want Tommy more. But, it is too late to retreat from his desire:

Roie struggled for an instant. She wanted to yell for her mother but the black panic which engulfed her became grey, and then faded into nothing at all. Did it matter? Did anything matter but to serve the blinding love and desire to please that possessed her.

‘No Tommy … please, Tommy no’.

But she knew, all the same, that it was the end. The stars swung down, and were blotted out by his shoulder. (86–87)

This rape extinguishes Tommy’s affection for Roie or reveals it to have been merely a disguise for his desire for sexual conquest. For Roie, the grey emotion that engulfed her in the midst of the rape remains with her. As she realises that she is pregnant, her sense of entrapment intensifies:

She imagined herself married to Tommy, who didn’t like her anymore. Perhaps they would have to live in the dark little room over old Mendel’s shop, and Tommy would get drunk because he hated her, and knock her around, and her life would be the long misery of the unwanted wife’s. (102–03)

Where Roie conjures up the spectre of the unwanted wife, in the character of Ella Gow, we see the unwanted wife writ large. She is trapped by her own body in relationship to her violent husband, who is determined to trap her until she can no longer survive.

What is explored in detail in Roie’s story but only assumed in Ella’s is the reality of living in a world without accessible contraception or legal, safe abortion. In Park’s Surry Hills, abortion is only available in shadowy establishments whose proprietors are mired in sin. While such perceptions of abortion held for many in mid-twentieth-century Australia, the Darcy’s Catholicism deepened their sense of the moral danger presented by its practice. Janet McCalman suggests that abstinence was a strategy for avoiding pregnancy used by working-class couples during the Great Depression (198), a strategy less available to women in sexually abusive relationships. Condoms could be bought but were, like other forms of contraception, expensive. McCalman’s oral histories of working-class Richmond in Melbourne reveal that many were too shy to purchase condoms in a shop and risked moral judgement if they made inquiries with a doctor (134–35). Even where these techniques were accessible, their effectiveness was far from guaranteed. So, abortion was a crucial form of fertility control in Australia, which the historian Judith Allen established in the 1980s by tracking the birthrate against the backdrop of a paucity of contraceptive options and traces of illegal abortion (67–73).

Roie takes the first steps towards an abortion, discovering who the abortionist is and then making contact with his business manager. When she attends the premises for her appointment ‘like the dozens and hundreds of girls before her’ (105), she shares the waiting room with Stella. Stella is described as ‘dark, oily-skinned’ and wearing ‘an old food-stained coat’ (111). She explains that she is married and waiting for her fourth abortion. She furnishes Roie with matter-of-fact descriptions of the procedure and its aftermath and professes to be a little scared. When Stella is called upstairs to see the doctor, Roie sits alone on the edge of her seat ‘trembling like a rabbit in a trap’ (110). The metaphor of the trapped rabbit, repeated here, further embeds the repertoire of fears associated with sexuality that are expressed through this image. The sound of Stella’s muffled screams and moans give rise to such terror in Roie that she flees the premises. Nicole Moore and Caitlin Still have examined this episode as a class-inflected representation of abortion (Moore, ‘Me Operation’ 29–30, 71; Still 105). The fecundity of Stella’s body, the drudgery of her maternal life and her familiarity with abortion align with other depictions of working-class women as abject in their abortion experiences. Moore has compared these with the depictions of middle-class women’s abortion experiences as exceptional and traumatising (Moore, ‘Me Operation’ 29–30). Within this analytic frame, Roie’s flight reaction destabilises her class position, suggesting finer sensibilities and her refusal to continue her association with ‘the miasma of cowardice and stealth and cruelty’ (Harp 111) that the place itself begins to exude.

En route away from the abortionist, Roie is viciously attacked by a group of drunk Dutch sailors, who cause her to miscarry. This neat plot device spares Park from negotiating the impact of the act of either abortion or illegitimate motherhood on the character of Roie, a wholly sympathetic figure of idealised femininity in the text. Refusing to end the pregnancy herself, she becomes a passive victim of the sailors and thus avoids giving birth to an illegitimate child.⁶ Still points out the novel’s celebration of an increasingly diverse postwar population through its affectionate depiction of Chinese and Italian neighbours to the Irish Darcys (10). The increasing size of Sydney’s Jewish population was part of this diversity and is reflected in the novel by the Mendels. Although neither Stella nor the Mendels are a party to this celebration of diversity, Roie’s flight from the abortion can be read as signalling Park’s awareness of the horrific legacies of the Holocaust through her refusal to have the future child of the Jewish Tommy Mendel wilfully aborted by the young heroine. While this episode is dense with commentary on class, race and femininity, it also illustrates the structural reproductive coercion imposed by a state that refused lawful abortion until 1971 in New South Wales and 1977 in Aotearoa New Zealand, a refusal that compounded coercion in intimate relationships. Park’s novel sympathises with Roie’s need to end the pregnancy; however, the circumstances in which this illegal operation is possible force her into contact with morally corrupting and bereft subjects.

Both Roie Darcy, in her courtship with Tommy Mendel, and Ella Gow, in her marriage to Johnny, are poor women of reproductive age in intimate relationships with men whose abuse of power is linked to their sense of their own inadequacy. Park gives us male protagonists whose prospects are limited and whose characters are flawed. Roie empathises with Tommy’s physical fragility, sexual frustration and low self-esteem. In this special issue, Eve Vincent argues persuasively that Tommy’s physical shame is transferred to Roie through her pregnancy (5), but Roie’s pregnancy loss forms a refusal of this narrative. First, there is the character’s refusal as she seeks an abortion; second, there is Park’s ultimate refusal when the path to Roie’s absolution is rerouted to the miscarriage caused by assault.

Johnny Gow is ultimately an irredeemably unsympathetic character, but Park does allow him experiences of loss and grief and deep feelings of inadequacy that are managed by alcohol. Elizabeth Nelson has shown that in the state of Victoria, the recognition of war trauma described as ‘shell shock’ after World War One generated a culture of tolerance for excessive alcohol consumption and domestic violence that extended beyond perpetrators who were shell-shocked returned soldiers to men who had never enlisted. In The Witch’s Thorn, Johnny Gow’s brother Lachie is a returned soldier suffering from severe shell shock that leaves him frightened, isolated and impoverished. Lachie is a victim rather than a perpetrator of violence, subject to financial abuse and bullying by his brother and the cruel stunts of the Wi brothers. Together, Lachie and Johnny Gow illustrate Nelson’s argument as one suffers from postwar trauma and the other, who never enlisted, inflicts unchecked violence and abuse on his family.

One purpose of this essay is to bring stories of sexual and reproductive coercion and abuse in Park’s two texts into conversation under the lens of contemporary feminist concerns, to illuminate the vagaries of heterosexuality where cultures of masculinity and material circumstances are both impoverished in ways that increase the risks to women’s happiness, health and survival. I have drawn on the historiography pertaining to the reproductive lives of Australian women and domestic violence to place Park’s stories in the contexts of the periods and locations in which they are set, contexts that Park herself had lived. I hope I have demonstrated that her stories of Ella Gow and Roie Darcy can in part be explained by the features of women’s working-class lives in these periods that have been established by historians and would have been observed by Park in her own life.

In this final section, I wish to further interrogate processes of coming to these texts as sources of insight into experiences of gendered violence and reproductive coercion and abuse. I began by describing my intention to apply the recent term ‘reproductive coercion’ to Park’s texts. I also offered ‘Fran’s’ 2020 story as a recent illustration of reproductive coercion in an intimate relationship. I am aware of the disjuncture between my own use of this term and the organisation of understandings of domestic abuse in the period in which Park was writing. However, the scenes I have analysed above offer narratives that combine forms of structural and interpersonal reproductive coercion to bring into view the profound challenges of sexual and reproductive agency in the legal, material and gendered cultures in which these characters existed.

Analysis of the aforementioned scenes seeks to show the power of fictional narratives to reveal something of the intricate dynamics of reproductive coercion, placing them within legal, material and gendered conditions that reflect the historical contexts within which they have been imagined. However, amidst this academic discourse, a personal reflection emerges, evoking memories of encountering The Harp in the South during my early high school years. This literary encounter profoundly shaped my understanding of maternity and abortion histories in the 1930s and 1940s. Recalling Roie Darcy’s plight, I couldn’t help but connect her struggles with the broader narrative of women navigating the complexities of unwanted pregnancies during that era. When I first came to study the twentieth-century Australian birthrate and saw that it declined to an unprecedented level in the 1930s and did not recover until the late 1940s, the image in my mind’s eye was Roie Darcy. I had forgotten that she did not ultimately have her abortion; so, for many years, she represented the desperate lengths women went to in this period to avoid giving birth to illegitimate and impoverished children. Park’s text entered my imagination and informed my understanding of women’s sexual, reproductive and maternal lives in the decades before the postwar baby boom, even as I misremembered it. As a student at a Catholic school with a strictly anti-abortion curriculum, this representation struck me as distinctly feminist in its reproductive politics. On rereading, I see both the ambivalence of Park’s depiction of the practice of abortion and the sympathy she has for the plight of a young woman facing an unwanted pregnancy. My memory of The Harp in the South has been both a reference point and guide to interpreting the experiences of those whose lives were expressed in birthrate data.

Amid the humour and affection of family life Park portrays, an undercurrent of male-on-female violence pulses through The Harp in the South. Reading in the twenty-first century in the context of a rich body of interdisciplinary research into gendered violence and wider public awareness and political alarm about the extent of domestic and family violence, readers are equipped with a conceptual toolbox and sense of cultural intolerance to its presence. These assist us in paying attention to forms of masculinity that are portrayed sympathetically within the text.

While Tommy Mendel’s sexual crime against Roie does not burden his character with villainy, the suffering of it is transferred to the pregnancy and miscarriage that it causes. It is here that the story dwells far longer. The hapless Hughie Darcy, Roie’s loving if undisciplined and unpredictable father, bears a fragile masculinity that threatens the wellbeing of the family’s matriarch. It is his frequent bouts of drunkenness that most powerfully disturb the peace:

And when he got home he started in on Mumma.

He hated her then, because in her fatness and untidiness and drabness she reminded him of what he himself was when he was sober.

When Mama heard his erratic feet stumping down the hall, her heart rushed sickeningly into her mouth and her face went yellow, not with fear, but with hatred and dread of the same old scene, the same old bellowings and crazy talk, the placatory words from herself, the brief spasms of anger, and Hughie’s louder and more triumphant bellowings, and then the maudlin last stage when he cried into his food and threw it at the wall with melodramatic expressions of distaste. (Harp 62)

Like Tommy, his drunken capacity for hatred of Mumma, his verbal and physical outbursts against her, do not burden him with villainy but are described as a symptom of his own propensity for self-loathing. Hughie is disappointing, but he is also the beloved patriarch of the family and fellow victim of poverty; indeed, his failure to articulate his longings to himself, let alone others, is presented as a working-class affliction (61–62). So, while these portrayals of masculinity thicken the descriptions of character and atmosphere, the presence of male violence is not centre stage, but rather the projection of Tommy and Hughie’s acute sense of their own inadequacy, an inadequacy that is pitiable and only partially within their control.

The plot of The Witch’s Thorn is propelled by violence that is perpetrated by both women and men. One reviewer, Osmar White, referred to this as Park’s ‘own creative sadism … heaped on [the characters’] already inevitable suffering’ (8). In his account of the novel, White directs the reader’s attention to the alleged source of the suffering, Park’s own sadism. His use of the term ‘inevitable’ leaves little room to seek further explanation for the violence in the conditions and emotional connections Park has created for her characters. Another tepid review named the rape of Ella Gow as one of the most memorable scenes in The Witch’s Thorn and described this book as more restrained and elegantly tailored than The Harp in the South (Bulletin 2). Both reviews of The Witch’s Thorn, like the many that described her earlier novels as ‘sordid’, no doubt assisted Park’s books to enter the public imagination, drawing readers into conversations about them. The language used to describe the violence – ‘sordid’, ‘inevitable’, ‘memorable’ – obscured its detail, and reviewers made little attempt to analyse the relationships in which it occurred. In the twenty-first century, readers are likely to be more practised at recognising forms of gendered violence that can be analysed using an increasingly common language that identifies its specific expressions and features. Indeed, an emergent understanding of forced pregnancy as a form of domestic and family violence that fits the criteria of reproductive coercion brings the scene of Ella’s rape as a murderous attempt to impregnate her, under a specific analytical lens. For contemporary readers, Park’s attention to the embodied experiences of gendered violence for victims and perpetrators alike is met with conceptual tools for identifying and describing it and, potentially, a politics that centres these episodes as revealing of gendered and classed subjectivities in the 1930s and 1940s.

In Park’s novels, men positioned as powerless within economic and social structures exert their remaining agency over their sexual partners. Subordinated to Johnny and Tommy in the gender order, Ella and Roie become the victims of their abuses. The reproductive coercion and abuse of Ella and Roie, bound so tightly with their sexual abuse, corrupts any sense of bodily autonomy or integrity these women possess. It threatens not only the quality of their lives but also life itself.

My purpose in this essay has been to train the historical gaze on fictional renderings of forms of violence enacted on women’s bodies over time. These push our historical imaginations past the bounded edges of the archive to access a rich account of complex embodied experiences. The use of contemporary terms in our historical investigations has revealed patterns of male behaviour that are repeated through the course of the twentieth century and into the present. Works of fiction like Park’s, written from life, assist us to do this historical work, attentive to context. But what I want to emphasise here is that while Park’s reviewers did not engage seriously with the detailed depictions of female subjectivity produced by structures of patriarchal violence in intimate and wider social and legal settings, in the context of current feminist preoccupations with violence, such depictions are vivid and illuminating. This connection of past and present does not deny the very specific social and cultural contexts that generate the conditions in which Park’s female characters exist but rather, as Rita Felski writes, ‘acknowledge[s] affinity and proximity alongside difference’ (587) as we work with texts that remain lively and relevant over seventy years after they were published.