The Pull of the Stars

Julia’s specialty as a nurse is midwifery. In the novel, the hospital has reassigned Julia from the main Maternity ward to a makeshift ward called Maternity/Fever, which keeps pregnant women who have flu infections quarantined from those who don’t. In Julia’s early 20th-century Ireland, women typically marry young and have many children. A common expression goes, “She doesn’t love him unless she gives him twelve” (24). Julia explains that contraception, or other methods of preventing pregnancy, are illegal and looked down upon, saying, “In other countries, women might take discreet measures to avoid this, but in Ireland, such things were not only illegal but unmentionable” (24). However, given the poverty and poor living conditions of many Irish families at the time, repeated pregnancies can be dangerous for mothers and babies. Dr. Lynn tells Julia, “Did you know, [...] we lose half again as many lying-in cases here as they do in England? […] Mostly because Irish mothers have too many babies […] I rather wish your Holy Father would let them off after their sixth” (141). Julia’s patient Ita Noonan, for instance, has seven living children but has been pregnant twelve times. This exemplifies both the commonness of having many children and the high infant and child mortality rates in Ireland at the time.

In addition, much shame and stigma surround pregnancy, partly because of Catholicism’s predominance in Ireland. If a woman is unmarried, older, or simply didn’t expect to become pregnant, she might be ashamed of her situation. When Honor White refuses to take whiskey and other drugs to help with her pain, Julia thinks, “[P]erhaps she was putting herself through this labour in a spirit of grim penance for what the nuns called her second lapse, her second offence” (214). Julia reflects, “I’d occasionally been called in to see a woman who’d been labouring away at home quite unsupported, and it often went badly, even after my arrival; it was as if the isolation had snapped her spirit. That wasn’t only the unwed either. One wife near fifty was so embarrassed to find herself in that condition again that she hadn’t told a soul, not even her husband” (214). Sister Luke, the nun who oversees the Maternity/Fever ward at night, makes judgmental comments about Honor White becoming pregnant for the second time as an unmarried woman. Sister Luke thinks that Honor White’s piousness might just be for show and comments, “Well, if it’s sincere. But a year of praying did nothing to reclaim her nibs” (172). Sister Luke then explains that Honor White will have to live in a mother-and-baby home after she gives birth, staying on to work off the cost of her room and board. When Julia asks if the home allows mothers to take their babies home after their year of servitude is up, Sister Luke responds, “Take it away and do what with it? Sure most of these lassies want nothing more than to be freed from the shame and nuisance” (173). Sister Luke adds that because this is Honor’s second unwanted pregnancy, she is “a hardened sinner” (173) and “will have to stay two years this time. Some are kept on after that, even, if they’re incorrigible—if it’s the only way to prevent another lapse” (173). Honor White’s story exemplifies the shame surrounding pregnancy in Ireland at the time.