Embroidering the Scarlet A: Unwed Mothers and Illegitimate Children in American Fiction and Film by Janet Mason Ellerby (review)

Janet Mason Ellerby’s Embroidering the Scarlet A traces the narrative of the “fallen woman” across American literature from the eighteenth century to the present, including its appearance in recent mainstream movies. Of particular importance is Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which, though hardly the first iteration of the trope, exercises a substantial influence over later representations of unwed mothers and illegitimate children, as Ellerby demonstrates through her impressively large archive of novels, short stories, and films. Ellerby’s core claim is that the basic structure of the fallen woman narrative has remarkable durability despite the diversity of literary movements and styles in which it appears, despite switching media from fiction to film, and despite changing social mores regarding female sexuality and out-of-wedlock childbirth. Instead of evolving, representations of fallen women persist in casting judgment against women who have sex outside of marriage, rendering them social outcasts and emblems of sexual immorality. Such texts also visit judgment on the children who are the product of unauthorized sexual encounters, making literary texts about orphans, illegitimate children, and adoption a significant subset of this literary motif.

Ellerby’s approach to this broad swath of literary history takes an unusual form. She interweaves standard close readings of literary texts with a personal narrative recounting her experiences as an unwed mother who was forced to hide her pregnancy and to give up her daughter for adoption, and who struggled over the course of her life with intense feelings of guilt, shame, and remorse, even after she was reunited with her daughter years later—experiences she previously depicted in her memoir, Following the Tambourine Man: A Birthmother’s Memoir (Syracuse UP, 2007). Ellerby states that her use of autobiographical or confessional criticism reflects the inadequacy of the standard impersonal style of academic criticism; she is simply too close to the unwed mother narrative to employ a detached stance. Instead, she brings her experiences and their emotional legacy to bear upon her reading of fallen woman narratives through recurring memoir-like passages. Many readers will find Ellerby’s approach innovative and appealing. Although feminist literary critics often call for a more autobiographical and self-reflective style of analysis, such approaches remain rare. Yet, there is something to be said for breaking away from the pretense of objective analysis to acknowledge how deeply emotional our responses to texts may be. In particular, I think that students will find Ellerby’s method a refreshing change from the impersonal voice of academic writing that many consider artificial and alienating.

Other readers will not be so open-minded. There are undoubtedly some who will find Ellerby’s recourse to personal experience a poor substitute for rigorous literary analysis. There are moments when Ellerby’s goal of establishing parallels between herself and literary characters results in imprecise and unpersuasive claims. For instance, in her analysis of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Ellerby writes, “Celie’s babies were stolen from her, and I understand how that feels. Although the morning my daughter was taken away from me was much different, I too can use the word ‘stolen’….My experience and Celie’s are like other birthmothers who stress that they did not willingly ‘give away’ their babies. Our relinquishments were involuntary” (112). The comparison is intended to convey the depth of Celie’s loss but it results in a troubling erasure of the considerable race, class, and historical differences that exist between the literary critic and the character. Moreover, Ellerby turns from this claim of commonality to evaluate another of Walker’s novels, Meridian, in which the title character gives up her son without apparent emotional distress; Ellerby uses her own experience as the measure against which to judge Meridian’s response as unbelievable: “she is not representing the experience of real birthmothers” (112). This moment is one of...