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

Finding the Truth in Gretchen Moran Laskass The Midwifes TaleThe prologue to Gretchen Moran Laskass novel, The Midwifes Tale, begins with her narrator protagonist, Elizabeth, telling readers, Mama always said that most of being a good midwife was in knowing the family history. Not still the bir thing story of any given woman--although that was a good thing to keep in mind--but the whole history. Assuming the whole history is a thing possible to know in the first place, a in question(p) aim in itself, Moran Laskass novel ends up reading as a sort of family history at multiplication exultant, heartbreaking, occasionally comic, and more than than once bone-chillingly grim. Beginning at the turn of the century and ending about forty years later as the Depression enters its last stages, Laskass novel follows the passions, failures, and triumphs of sometimes-midwife Elizabeth and the small group of can folk and family she shares her invigoration with on the banks of Kettle Creek. F eeding 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 incessantly indulging in sentimentality as her characters try to survive poverty, mountain life, a world war, an influenza epidemic, and the Depression. With image- abstruse descriptions of Appalachias natural landscape, Moran Laskas shares the stirring, at times comic, rural language of Elizabeth and the novels opposite midwives, Elizabeths arrest and maternal grandmother, to construct a believable, if sometimes haunting world that periodically resembles a feminized utopia as much 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 mankind and truth. While Moran Laskas is probably not hinting at a postmodern gyr ate on the unreality of knowingness or the ultimate absence of a universal truth, her novel does, nevertheless, suggest a kind of nebulous and dubious relationship between the reality we are initially dealt, the choices we make, and the arguable grade 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 overcome physical and emotional hurdles that would other cripple the strongest among many. Work citedGretchen Moran Laskas, The Midwifes Tale. New York, New York The control Press, 2003.