The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2009, Qupperneq 15

Vol. 62 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
57
one’s role, as a woman, is to merely gener-
ate a reserve army of degraded workers.
For instance, she is quite caustic in her
details of the suffering of women who
come to her aunt’s midwife establishment
to be “eased of their unwelcome burden,
and to hide from society” (271).
She describes her first experience of a
birthing:
“My impulse was to flee, but my feet
refused to move. What followed was so
hideous, I felt as though my own flesh were
riddled and torn with a battery of javelins.
That sudden assault upon the nerves was
nothing compared with the subsequent
shock of horror when the significance of
those ghastly cries flashed upon me ... Yes,
now I understood what was going on up
there. What, my terrified mind told me,
was going on and on and on all over the
whole wide world.” (259).
She then continually references her
contempt for this aspect of misery, its pro-
creation, through out the piece:
“To what conceivable end, I wonder
was it so important to perpetuate this drea-
ry existence?” (291).
“Nature be damned, said we ... If
other laws of nature were circumvented
and controlled, why should generation be
the one exception?” (288).
“Mrs. Wilmot rocked in the shade,
grumbling at the everlasting babies” (313).
“(T)he same intuition which had
quickened my first understanding left me
in no doubt as to my mother’s own secret
resentment. She had had enough of babies.
Yet, there she was, absorbed and utilized in
the unwelcome business, and daily more
oppressed by the approaching event” (211).
There are a couple of specific episodes
from the women’s hospital in Duluth,
Minnesota. Chapter forty-one, entitled
‘The face of virtue’ is basically a rundown
of a few memorable cases that came
through Aunt Halldora’s doors. Two of
whom, experience the mortality of their
infants as the path to the freedom from
their lives’ burden:
“There was a young stenographer from
St. Paul, who looked like a scared kitten, all
eyes and quivering nerves ... The morning
after her baby was born I was wondering
what sort of collapse to expect, when I
brought up her breakfast. What I saw was a
pair of glowing eyes and a broad grin.
‘Gee!’ she piped. ‘The kid’s dead - ain’t
that great!’ (370).
The other is an instance where
Salverson recollects walking in on a young
mother attempting to stifle her baby’s
breath:
“There she was, white as a sheet, a
crazy light in her eye, her hands on the
baby’s neck, shutting off the maddening
yowls” (373).
Salverson’s non-fictional piece has a
decidedly feminist, albeit first wave,
rhetoric. And its not just because her good
friend and advisor happened to be
Manitoba’s most notorious “suffragette”,
Nellie McClung, but because this autobi-
ography, without specifically referencing
the women’s suffrage movement, makes a
strong appeal for social change in the lives
of lower class women. In an age that
expected nothing but piety, modesty and
obedience from its female contingent,
Salverson quite radically shines the stark
light of truth on what lower and working
class women would have faced, especially
in pregnancy and childbirth.
But feminism will always be a compli-
cated movement, and will always bound up
in historical circumstances. It won’t be
long before the second wave rhetoric
appears on the scene, complete with its
very own temporally based philosophy on
femininity and its own subsequent
methodologies of literary criticism, based
on a philosophy of “universal feminism.”
Helen Buss’ piece on women’s autobi-
ographical writing, tellingly entitled
Mapping Our Selves (1993), devotes a siz-
able section to the criticism of Confessions
of an Immigrant’s Daughter. Buss’ prob-
lem with Salverson’s autobiography is that
as a confessional piece, written by a
woman, it fails to explore what she calls the
“maternal pre-text” (179). Salverson wrote
deliberately corrosive words on her wit-
ness to the labourings of women, and then
went on to give scant detail of her own
experience of pregnancy and the delivery of
her one son. According to Buss, Salverson
did indeed adequately map the origins of