52 pages • 1 hour read
Heather MarshallLooking for Jane
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Bodily Autonomy and Reproductive Rights
Content Warning: This section discusses death by suicide, miscarriage, abortion, and sexual assault.
Marshall contends that bodily autonomy is central to self-determination and a person’s ability to control their fate. Further, the author portrays reproductive rights as an essential component of that bodily autonomy, using the central characters’ arcs to show the cascading effects that an unplanned pregnancy can have.
Evelyn and Maggie are denied bodily autonomy when they are forced to live at St. Agnes’s and to give their children up for adoption. This lack of control over their own bodies begins a chain of events that drastically alters the course of their lives. For Evelyn, the trauma and grief of losing her child leads her to suicide. Maggie responds by violently attacking Sister Teresa and attempting to die by suicide as well. Eventually, Maggie (under the name Evelyn Taylor) is motivated by her experience at St. Agnes’s to dedicate her life to defending the bodily autonomy of others through her work with the Jane Network.
Marshall uses abortion rights as the central lens through which to portray reproductive rights as an essential component of bodily autonomy. Inability to access legal abortion leads Clara (Nancy’s cousin) to seek a dangerous underground abortion. The experience is horrific and ends with Clara in the emergency room. Nancy’s abortion, though much safer due to the support of Evelyn, Alice, and the Jane Network, is interrupted by a police raid. In both cases, the women’s inability to exercise their reproductive rights jeopardizes their safety. Nor are their lives the only thing at stake: The novel draws a clear connection between reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and self-determination. Evelyn gives voice to this connection in a conversation with a waitress on the day the Supreme Court legalizes abortion in Canada. The waitress, one of the many women for whom Evelyn provided an underground abortion, asks Evelyn if she thinks women will always need abortions: “All the stories her patients ever told her run through her mind like a film reel. Their reasons are numerous and varied and hardly any two are exactly the same. Suddenly she feels tired. ‘Yes. There will always be a need’” (307-08). Throughout her career, Evelyn has seen the strong connection between a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions and a woman’s right to control the direction of her life.
Marshall furthers that connection by developing the modern plotline of Angela’s story. Angela, living in the 2010s, is free to exercise her reproductive rights in a way that the characters in the earlier decades were not. She and Tina have decided to have a child through fertility treatments and are free to seek those services. Angela is also free to seek abortion services when she experiences a miscarriage that requires medical attention. Her bodily autonomy stands in strong counterpoint to the lack of autonomy experienced by Evelyn, Maggie, and Nancy.
Justice Under Unjust Systems
Looking for Jane explores the way individuals are forced to seek their own justice when the systems they rely upon adhere to unjust principles.
St. Agnes’s Home for Unwed Mothers embodies exactly this kind of unjust system. The home is supported by the Catholic Church, a religious institution that people rely on for justice and help. Rather than caring well for the young mothers whose families have rejected them, St. Agnes’s reinforces their status as undesirables, calling them “inmates” and prohibiting them from using their last names or forming friendships with each other. The leadership at St. Agnes’s, primarily represented by Sister Teresa, misleads the women about the fate of their children, who are sold into adoption rather than given freely. The women receive no pain medication during childbirth and are denied the chance to hold their babies until they sign release forms relinquishing their rights to their children. The treatment they receive is, in short, cruel and unjust.
Within this unjust system, Evelyn and Maggie seek their own justice, but because they must act outside the normal bounds of the system, the justice that they find is unconventional and at times incomplete. In the wake of Evelyn’s death, Maggie stabs Sister Teresa as a way to avenge herself and Evelyn; the physicality of the attack directly parallels the way in which her and Evelyn’s bodies have been subject to Sister Teresa’s mercy. However, while Maggie (under the name Evelyn Taylor) builds a long, rich life for herself, it isn’t until she finally reunites with her daughter at the end of the novel that she feels like justice has been served: “She whispers into her daughter’s hair, rubbing her hand in soothing circles on Jane’s back as they press their grief into one another, holding each other up against the gravity of all of those years of lost time” (372). Even then, the passage calls attention to what is irremediable: Nothing can make up for the decades Maggie/Evelyn and Nancy/Jane spent not knowing their relationship to one another.
The Canadian government’s prohibition of abortion is the novel’s other key example of injustice. Marshall contends that reproductive rights are an essential personal freedom—one that laws banning access to abortions deny. In this case, it is the Jane Network that provides justice around the edges of the unjust system. As a well-organized group of people working together toward a common goal, the Jane Network stands as a direct counterpoint to the legal system, illustrating how institutions can provide justice and protection when they are working well. Of course, because the Jane Network is an attempt to seek justice under an unjust system, the doctors, nurses, and other volunteers involved take great personal risks. Evelyn, Alice, and Nancy are arrested for their work, and only their own careful planning and quick thinking save them from prison time. Nancy must keep her work with the Jane Network a secret from her family, and this secret causes a great rift between Nancy and her husband, Michael. Like the partial justice that survivors of St. Agnes’s receive, these sacrifices imply that justice through official channels is preferable to the justice individuals seek when those channels are closed.
Motherhood as Both Universal and Personal
In the Author’s Note, Heather Marshall writes, “Looking for Jane is about motherhood. About wanting to be a mother and not wanting to be a mother, and all the grey areas in between” (373). Through the experiences of the characters and the variety of mother-daughter relationships the novel explores, Looking for Jane highlights both the universal and personal sides of motherhood. The main characters form strong relationships with each other and with other women based on their shared experiences as mothers. At the same time, motherhood is a deeply personal experience for each of the women: a crucial component to her self-identity and a truly intimate emotional journey. This dichotomy is a central theme.
The novel frames motherhood as a core, universal human experience that connects the three protagonists across the distance of decades and propels the novel’s plot. It is Angela’s empathy and understanding for Nancy, Frances, and Maggie that motivate her to hunt them down:
She thinks of her own family, of the mother she knows as Mom, and the woman who gave birth to her, Sheila, whom she finally met five years ago […] Her heart bleeds for all three of these women: the daughter Nancy; her mother Frances, who carried the weight of this secret for so long only to have the confession go astray; and Margaret Roberts, scribbling in a hidden note that she was forced to give her baby up for adoption (13-14).
Angela’s understanding of how motherhood can define a person’s life is the novel’s inciting incident; it is this empathy that moves Angela to search for Nancy and to find Evelyn so that the two can reunite.
The shared experience of motherhood is central to the novel in other ways as well. Every female character—with the exception of Sister Teresa, who proves the point by being such an extreme outlier—embodies and is characterized by her maternal role. Angela and Tina are striving to become mothers and have a successful pregnancy by the end of the novel. Evelyn’s and Maggie’s futures become defined by their experiences as young mothers. Sister Agatha, although not a mother herself, is an emblem of feminine caregiving. Frances Mitchell and Nancy Mitchell have a complex mother-daughter relationship that shapes Nancy’s relationship with her husband and her own daughter.
While these characters all experience motherhood’s power to shape the course of one’s life, this aspect of motherhood also speaks to its deeply personal nature—its existence as a defining feature of their self-identities. When Evelyn gives birth to her daughter, she feels “like her heart has been split in two and is now part of this tiny person in the doctor’s hands” (91); becoming a mother fundamentally changes her sense of self. The novel also frames the choice to become a mother as a deeply personal, defining decision, as evidenced through the various patients of the Jane Network. There are many examples of mothers in the novel, and motherhood looks different for them all. Adoption, abortion, fertility treatments, loving partnerships, one-night stands, pregnancies resulting from abuse—these are all experiences detailed in the novel, and each one gives the woman involved a unique relationship to motherhood.
