Lady With a Lamp

                Of all the Dorothy Parker stories I’ve read, “Lady with a Lamp” has had the biggest impact on me.  In my humble opinion this is her finest and most provocative work. This short story deals with a subject that people still don’t like to talk about today and it amazes me that Dorothy Parker wrote about it in the 1920’s.

                It’s about Abortion.

                As I have said in my previous posts, Parker herself had at least one abortion. She is quoted as saying “Don’t put all your eggs in one bastard.” It doesn’t surprise me one bit that she used that experience for a story, as the old saying goes “write what you know.” But I am surprised that she was able to write about it in the 20’s, abortion was not even legal!

                “Lady with a Lamp” is one of Parker’s short stories that is only dialogue. The story is not told from the perspective of the woman who had the abortion. The dialogue is everything that her best friend is saying to her. The story is not outright in saying that she had an abortion, it is very subtle.

                The story begins with the nameless narrator visiting her friend Mona who has been bedridden for ten days.  I would describe the narrator as a frienemy. She does not care that her friend has gone through a traumatic experience. She only wants the latest gossip from Mona. The narrator goes on to do more damage to her friend over the next few pages. The narrator knows that her friend had the procedure done, but still tells her how a woman should live her life, marrying a good man and having babies. Mona had been in a long term relationship with her boyfriend who has abandoned her. The narrator, thinking that she is doing her friend a favor, tells Mona that she saw Gerry with another woman at a club. Mona cries, and the Narrator tries to calm her down.

                When I was reading this the first time I thought that Mona was just an unmarried pregnant woman. That’s pretty scandalous for the 20’s. But when the Narrator started talking about doctors, I had a suspicion that Mona had been pregnant.  When the Narrator said, “I know you’ve always talked about how much you’d give to have a baby, but it would have been so terribly unfair to the child to bring it into the world without being married…You did the only possible thing,” I knew that this story was about abortion.  Mona then goes on to have a complete melt down and the story ends with the narrator calling for her maid.

                Personally my heart aches for Mona. Parker made it clear that she did not want to have the abortion. She had it because society demanded that she be a married woman to be a mother.  I wish that she was living today. I’m glad the sigma is mostly gone from being a single mother. But for poor Mona it would have been incredibly hard.

                Abortion, in my own personal opinion (You don’t have to agree with me) should be legal. It is not a choice that I would choose for myself, but the important thing is that it’s my choice to keep any pregnancies I may have. And whether or not a woman chooses to keep or abort a pregnancy is her choice alone. “Lady with a Lamp” is about how society chose for a woman to make the hardest decision of her life, when it should have been her own decision.