Book Review: Clair Wills is razor-sharp on mother-and-baby homes, abortion and psychiatry in The Family Plot
Clair Wills, author, writer and academic. Picture: Zahid Chaudhary
- The Family Plot
- Clair Wills
- London Review of Books, £12.99
Cultural historian Clair Wills succeeds in combining two things that all too rarely go together — razor-sharp academic analysis and crystal-clear prose. More than that, she has the impulse of a detective which means is not only an in-depth exploration of the institutions that imprison us, but a compelling read.
The book’s subtitle, Three Pieces about Containment, sets the tone for her rigorous exploration of mother and baby institutions, abortion, and psychiatric hospitals.
The essays first appeared in the which has reissued them in this beautifully produced volume, the first in a new series designed to tease out “exceptional threads of recent writing”.
And Clair Wills’s writing is truly exceptional. She presents her deep research with a light touch and adds her own take on subjects we think we know.
If you read just one piece on mother and baby institutions, read the first essay in this book: 'Architecture of Containment'. It brings the reader into spaces rarely illuminated and explains, as she puts it, how women were “both kept in and cast out”.
Wills, the King Edward Vll Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, is not afraid to offer her own take on the evidence either. In one shocking section, she speculates how the babies, whose remains are now about to be excavated, ended up in sewage tanks in Tuam.
There isn’t enough space in those chambers for a ladder, which prompts Wills to ask if those babies were simply “dropped in”? If so, by whom? And what stories did those people tell themselves to justify their actions.
As Wills argues, it is not just buildings that imprison us. The bricks and mortar of asylums, orphanages and mother and baby ‘homes’ might physically contain, restrain and control, but it is the stories we tell ourselves about them that allow that to happen.
She exposes those often-ignored narratives around the divisive issue of abortion and shows that the termination of pregnancy is neither simply a moral issue nor a legal one; rather “a means of leveraging broader struggles, over the family, gender, citizenship and the idea of the nation”.
In the UK, for instance, abortion is still prohibited under the 1861 Offences against the Person Act. The Abortion Act of 1967 allows a legal defence for doctors to perform abortions, but you have to have a reason, a story. The reason given in close to 98% of abortion cases is the risk to the woman’s mental health.
The repeal of the Eighth Amendment here does not free women of the need to provide justifiable ‘reasons’ either.
In the final essay, Clair Wills turns her laser focus to psychiatric hospitals. In 'Life Pushed Aside: The Last Asylum', she sets out to trace JJ Beegan, a patient in an English asylum in the 1940s whose work featured in an Art Brut exhibition she happened to see in Paris.
He used whatever material he had to hand — the char from burned matches applied to toilet paper; a nurse’s blue pencil used on the pages of a book — to draw strange birds and curious creatures with human features. Clair Wills wants to believe the curator’s note that art was, by then, no longer used to ‘read’ a psychiatric patient’s symptoms, but as a way to give them back their humanity. She is not so sure.
In several of his drawings, some of which are reproduced in the book, JJ Beegan includes his name and an address in Co Galway. This is where Clair Wills turns detective and spends “several months inside the world of the Beegans of Ballinasloe”.
No spoiler alert here other than to say her investigation humanises the experience of one man whose life came to a stop when he was shut away in an asylum.
But she does much more. She makes the story of the institution personal and in doing so illustrates how we collectively buy into ideas — or stories — of what constitutes progress. Or treatment. Or best practice. Or who's 'in' and who’s 'out'.
Coincidentally, JJ Beegan was a patient of Netherne Hospital at Coulsdon, Surrey, the hospital where Clair Wills’s mother, a nurse from the west of Ireland, spent her working life. Wills’s grandparents worked there too. She even considers the possibility her grandfather might once have turned the key on JJ Beegan.
Indeed, as Clair Wills writes, her own family, which was formed in the shadow of these British and Irish institutions, were both victims and perpetrators.
questions, challenges, enlightens, even entertains. It is an essential read.
