Finding the Truth in Gretchen Moran Laskas’s The Midwife’s Tale Essay

Finding the Truth in Gretchen Moran Laskass The accoucheuses TaleThe prologue to Gretchen Moran Laskass brisk, The Midwifes Tale, begins with her narrator protagonist, Elizabeth, telling readers, mammary gland always said that most of being a good accoucheuse was in have intercourseing the family memoir. Not just the birthing story of some(prenominal) given woman--although that was a good thing to keep in mind--but the all history. Assuming the whole history is a thing possible to know in the first place, a dubious aim in itself, Moran Laskass wise ends up reading as a sort of family history at times exultant, heartbreaking, occasionally comic, and more than once bone-chillingly grim. Beginning at the turn of the century and ending roughly forty years posterior as the Depression enters its last stages, Laskass novel follows the passions, failures, and triumphs of sometimes-midwife Elizabeth and the small crowd of mountain folk and family she shares her life with along the ba nks of Kettle Creek. Feeding her readers a painfully, if beautifully, detailed fare of the arduous lives endured by turn-of-the-century Appalachians, Moran Laskas serves up a novel that journeys between sorrow and triumph without ever indulging in unkemptness as her characters try to survive p overty, mountain life, a world war, an influenza epidemic, and the Depression. With image-rich descriptions of Appalachias natural landscape, Moran Laskas shares the stirring, at times comic, rural language of Elizabeth and the novels other midwives, Elizabeths mother and maternal grandmother, to construct a believable, if sometimes haunting world that periodically resembles a feminized utopia as a great deal as it does an historical account of life in the mountains.Although Moran Laskass p... ...being told may very well be something other than what appears to be real, consequently implying a possible difference between macrocosm and truth. While Moran Laskas is probably not hinting at a postmodern spin on the unreality of cognizance or the ultimate absence of a universal truth, her novel does, nevertheless, designate a kind of nebulous and unstable relationship between the reality we are initially dealt, the choices we make, and the arguable degree of control we have over our destiny. Using Appalachian folklore, consistently rich language, and a heroine who defies sympathy or sentimentality, The Midwifes Tale generates for its readers a story of women who face and curb physical and emotional hurdles that would otherwise cripple the strongest among many. Work citedGretchen Moran Laskas, The Midwifes Tale. New York, New York The Dial Press, 2003.