With anti-abortion activists in the States chipping away at Roe vs Wade, it seemed a good time to revisit The Cider House Rules:
“To Nurse Edna, who was in
love, and to Nurse Angela, who wasn’t (but who had in her wisdom named both
Homer Wells and Fuzzy Stone), there was no fault to be found in the hearts of
either Dr. Stone or Dr. Larch, who were – if there ever were – Princes of
Maine, Kings of New England”.
Set in rural Maine in the
first half of the 20th century, Maine in the first half of the 20th century,
The Cider House Rules tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch, the director of an
orphanage in the town of St. Cloud’s, and his favourite, beloved orphan, Homer
Wells. Parallels have been drawn between this book and Oliver Twist, but I can
assure you that Charles Dickens never wrote a character like Dr. Larch, whose
story is told in flashbacks. An obstetrician, an abortionist, and a saint, the
doctor contracted gonorrhea from a prostitute while he was in medical school
and takes ether to relieve the pain. Later, while working as an intern at
Boston’s Lying-In Hospital, he’s called to deliver a dead baby and recognizes
the woman as Mrs. Eames, the prostitute. Her uterus is so terribly
disintegrated he has no choice but to remove it. She survives the operation but
dies a few days later when her abdomen fills with blood. The next day her
daughter comes to see him, and shows him a bottle of something that’s supposed
to induce a miscarriage. Her mother drank so much of this liquid her intestines
lost the ability to absorb Vitamin C, and she died of scurvy.
The woman’s daughter is also
pregnant, although not as far along as her mother. She wants Larch to give her
an abortion. The risks, for both doctor and patient, are significant. At the
time (near the end of the 19th century) performing an abortion was punishable
by a year in jail or a thousand-dollar fine, or both, and you could lose your
license to practice. When Larch refuses, she leaves, after telling him to “shit
or get off the pot”. A few days later she’s brought into the hospital with a
dead fetus imprisoned in her womb, the result of a failed abortion. Her panties
are pinned to one shoulder of her dress; to the other is a note that says,
“Shit or get off the pot”. Before Larch can operate on her, the young woman
dies.
This death weighs heavily on
his conscience, and will do so for the rest of his life. His guilt is
compounded by the discovery of an old photograph of that same young woman
posing with a pony’s penis in her mouth. Larch wonders if she agreed to
pose in order to pay for the abortion. He resolves that he will never again
turn away any woman who comes to him with such a request. As long as abortion
is illegal, he will be of use to these women. Under his directorship, the
orphanage becomes a place of sanctuary, where women can come to deliver their
babies or receive a safe abortion – free.
It’s a tough subject,
abortion, and it takes up much of the narrative. It’s definitely not easy
reading, no matter what you think about abortion rights. While one doctor calls
it the work of the Devil, Larch argues that what he’s doing is actually the
Lord’s work. And he’s disgusted with those who condemn the women who choose
that route:
“These same people who tell
us we must defend the lives of the unborn – they are the same people who seem
not so interested in defending anyone but themselves after the accident of
birth is complete! These same people who profess their love of the unborn’s
soul – they don’t care to make much of a contribution to the poor, they don’t
care to offer much assistance to the unwanted or the oppressed! How do they
justify such a concern for the fetus and such a lack of concern for unwanted
and abused children?”
In this endeavour, Larch is
assisted by his two nurses, Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela, and by the one orphan
who never finds a home. Larch cares for all the orphans, calling them “princes
of Maine, kings of New England”, but he grows to love Homer Wells like a son.
When Homer’s adoptions fail to work out, Larch accepts that Homer belongs to
the orphanage and begins to train him as an obstetrician. Although Homer
assists in these procedures, even delivering a child when the doctor’s
unavailable, he refuses to perform abortions. The “products of conception” are
human; he believes they have a soul.
Larch hopes Homer will attend
medical school; by the time he’s a teenager he’s already adept in many surgical
procedures and would make an excellent doctor if he can find a patron to put
him through school. But Homer is ambivalent, not sure what he wants to do, and
when a handsome young couple come to St. Cloud’s for an abortion, he ends up
leaving with them.
He and the young man, Wally,
become best friends, working together in the family apple orchard, Ocean View.
He secretly falls in love with Candy but is careful not to reveal it to Wally,
as he and Candy plan to be married. When the Second World War breaks out, Wally
joins up and is trained as a pilot. His plane is shot down over Burma and he’s
presumed dead. Homer stays working at the orchard; Dr. Larch has falsified
Homer’s records, stating that he has a heart condition, making him unfit to
fight. Believing Wally to be dead, he and Candy finally give in to their mutual
passion and make love. When Candy gets pregnant, they return to St. Cloud’s so
she can have the baby. They name him Angel and bring him back to Ocean View as
an orphan whom Homer decided to adopt. Angel grows up believing Homer to be his
adopted father and Candy a loving mother figure who isn’t really his mother.
When Wally eventually returns to Maine, having lost the use of his legs but
survived, he and Candy marry, and the four of them – Homer, Angel, Wally, and
Candy – live together in the big house on the orchard estate.
It’s a long book, with a few
too many characters and several subplots. One concerns Melony, another
orphan who was never adopted. A tough, angry young woman, she initiates Homer
into sex and makes him promise he’ll never leave the orphanage without her.
When he leaves with Wally and Candy, Melony devotes her life to looking for
him, but when she does eventually find him she immediately recognizes Angel as
the spitting image of Homer when he was young. She also sees traces of Candy in
the boy and is devastated that Homer, whom she considered a hero, would do
something so terrible: have sex with the wife of a man in a wheelchair. In the
end, she forgives him and when she dies, she has her body sent back to St.
Cloud’s so it can be used for anatomical research.
As for Homer, he ends up
doing what he refused to do for years. A young woman named Rose is impregnated
by her father, the head picker on the orchard estate. His son, Angel, is in
love with Rose and comes to his father for advice about procuring an
abortion. Homer calls the orphanage asking to speak to Dr. Larch only to learn
that the doctor has died, having succumbed to an accidental overdose of ether.
It’s up to Homer to be “of use”. He gives Rose a safe abortion and then heads
back to St. Cloud’s to succeed Wilbur Larch as the director of the orphanage.
He retains his distaste for abortions but decides that as long as they’re
illegal, he’ll honour the wishes of the women who come to him.
The cider house rules, by the
way, are a list of rules posted every year for migrant workers to follow. The
rules are consistently ignored, because the workers can’t read. Like the
antiquated laws against abortion, some rules are made to be broken.
By margietaylor| May 28th,
2019|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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The Cider House Rules; The Movie
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