A Not-So-Silent Scream: Gothic and the US Abortion Debate

In 1871 the New York Times ran an exposé on illicit abortion under the headline “The Evil of the Age.” An undercover investigation by the newspaper revealed that abortionists continued to sell their services in New York City with little interference from authorities despite an 1869 state law prohibiting abortion at any point in pregnancy.¹ Euphemistically referring to abortion as a “forbidden subject” that “cannot with propriety be here described,” the article denounces what it characterizes as a “systematic business in wholesale murder”:

Thousands of human beings are thus murdered before they have seen the light of this world, and thousands upon thousands more of adults are irremediably ruined in constitution, health and happiness. So secretly are these crimes committed, and so craftily do the perpetrators inveigle their victims, that it is next to impossible to obtain evidence and witnesses. Facts are so artfully concealed from the public mind, and appearances so carefully guarded, that very meager outlines of the horrible truth have thus been disclosed. But could even a portion of the facts that have been detected in frightful profusion, by the agents of the TIMES, be revealed in print, in their hideous truth, the reader would shrink from the appalling picture.²

As investigative journalism “The Evil of the Age” is nonfiction, but it resembles gothic fiction in both form and content: it promises to frighten and appall readers; it uncovers the “hideous truth” about secret crimes; it uses lurid description to simultaneously express moral outrage and excite fascination with the illicit activity it depicts; and it refuses to name the unmentionable topic it nonetheless discusses in colorful detail for more than two full columns.

Defined concisely, gothic is the literary genre that entertains readers by scaring them. The formal features of the genre include sensational rhetoric; suspense-driven narrative; plots involving persecuted heroines and sinister villains; ominous settings such as medieval castles or haunted houses; characteristic tropes such as the unspeakable; manifestations of the fantastic (supernatural encounters) and of the grotesque (monsters); and typical preoccupations such as purity and contamination, violence, death, confinement, blood and gore, sex, and conspiracy, to name a few.³ Although generally identified with fiction, gothic conventions also operate in the service of frightening nonfiction narratives.⁴ Gothic nonfiction invests actual people, places, and events with horrible significance by narrating them as victims and villains engaged in conflicts between forces of good and evil and by employing fear-producing literary devices in the process of narration.

The nonfiction gothic narrative that unfolds in “The Evil of the Age” portrays abortionists as depraved villains who prey on female victims in viceridden urban spaces. The exposé discredits as criminals those trained physicians who do abortion work. It also cautions readers against “imposters” who defraud women by selling them placebos and warns of incompetent practitioners with little or no medical training who “compound and prescribe the most dangerous drugs, with reckless disregard of human suffering and life, and venture upon operations that are always hazardous and not unfrequently fatal.”⁵ Much of the article focuses on the villainy of abortionists, but it also imagines their patients in the role of gothic heroines, describing the “pale—ghastly pale and remorseful-looking countenances” of these women as “indexes to romances in real life more startling in their stern reality than any web of fiction.”⁶ This comparison asserts the similarities between real life and fiction at the same time that it distinguishes between them: it invites readers to draw on their familiarity with fictional “romances” and to substitute those stories for the details not provided in the present account, while it simultaneously reminds readers that what they are reading is not fiction but “stern reality.”⁷ If one purpose of this gothic narrative is to sell newspapers with a sensational story, another explicit purpose is to provoke outrage in readers in order to engender support for change; the closing sentence of the article urges, “Certainly enough is here given to arouse the general public sentiment to the necessity of taking some decided and effectual action.”⁸ Not least of all...