“For Good or for Evil”: Abortion and Reproductive Ethics in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers how questions of reproduction and population intersect with issues of working-class motherhood in Elizabeth Gaskell's 1848 social problem novel Mary Barton — specifically regarding representations of abortion and women's reproductive health. Women’s ability to successfully perform maternity, especially for multiple children, often correlated with their socioeconomic status, as a working-class woman’s financial resources proved more limiting than those of her middle-class contemporaries. The possibility of multiple unplanned pregnancies for working-class women thus positioned maternity as a potential burden and source of anxiety. With a specific eye toward the historically classed associations behind herb gardens, midwifery, and access to different forms of medicine, the following essay illuminates abortion’s implicit yet critical place in the novel and how the subject, as a present-absence, informs the text’s treatment of population and concerns about social inequality.