63 pages • 2-hour read
Midwives
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Part 2, Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child death, sexual content, graphic violence, and gender discrimination.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary
Sibyl reflects on her pride in the way Connie is growing up. Connie is emotionally mature for her age, almost a young woman now. Sibyl is impressed by the way Connie studies the newspapers and debates the news, as well as by her knack for diplomacy, as evidenced in the way she interacted with Stephen. However, Sibyl is also aware that Connie is still a child, scared of everything that is going on. That is why, even though Connie has developed the grown-up habit of drinking coffee, Sibyl will make sure she does not drink coffee before bedtime.
The Danforths’ house is flooded with lay midwives in the days before the results of Charlotte’s autopsy are released. Midwives arrive from New Hampshire and Massachusetts, bringing the family casseroles and dinners. They envelop Sibyl and Connie and Rand in warm hugs. Connie is glad for the company and the food, but Rand sometimes thinks that their house has turned into a circus. He is particularly annoyed by a middle-aged, striking midwife called Cheryl Visco, who is in the habit of delivering long monologues without a pause. Connie can hear her parents fight over Cheryl, though the fights always blow over.
A few days before the autopsy report comes out, Sibyl gets a visit from Dr. Brian Hewitt, known by his initials, B. P. As the doctor to whom Sibyl takes her complicated cases, he is one of the few physicians in town who is sympathetic to Sibyl. In all the years Sibyl and B. P. have worked together, no mother died between them, and they only had one stillborn child, who would have passed away even if the labor had progressed entirely at the hospital. Therefore, B. P. trusts Sibyl’s judgment as a midwife.
B. P. brings troubling news. Anne reached out to him, claiming that she saw blood spurt from Charlotte’s belly when Sibyl cut into it, indicating that Charlotte was alive. When Sibyl tells B. P. that she will clear things up with Anne, he tells her to avoid contacting her assistant. Anne has called both Asa Bedford and the state attorney about her misgivings. Worse, B. P. was interviewed by state troopers about Sibyl. Though B. P. assured them that Sibyl is an experienced midwife who must have ensured Charlotte had passed before operating on her, the troopers did not seem sympathetic to Sibyl.
B. P.’s news scares Connie. That night, she lies in bed, trying to distract herself with a magazine. Sibyl drops in, making careful small talk. Sibyl asks about Tom, telling Connie that they should visit Planned Parenthood when Connie becomes sexually active. Connie protests that she and Tom have done nothing but kiss. Sibyl wishes Connie good night, assuring her that she is fine. However, Connie knows her mother is lying.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary
When Sibyl and Rand signed a check for $25,000 to Stephen, Sibyl knew that they were depleting all their savings, including Connie’s college fund. Stephen is an odd choice for Sibyl, who views herself as a hippie, since he is slick and polished. Nevertheless, Sibyl trusts him.
The question of Charlotte’s spurting blood ends up being debated endlessly during Sibyl’s trial. Since Asa and Anne testify that they saw the blood spurt, Stephen’s defense rests on the unreliability of Asa and Ann’s observations. He asks Asa how he could have seen the blood arc so clearly when he was weary with sleeplessness, far from Charlotte at the time, and in a room dimly lit by dawn light. Stephen also asks Asa why he did not stop Sibyl if he indeed believed his wife was alive.
In the meantime, Stephen begins building his case even before the verdict of Charlotte’s autopsy is released. The report comes out on April Fool’s Day, 1981, as if to make fun of the Danforths. Connie returns home from school to see her parents looking morose. She learns that the autopsy stated Charlotte’s cause of death as “hemorrhagic shock due to a cesarean section during home childbirth” (177). Connie realizes with a sinking feeling that this is enough ammunition for the state attorney to file charges against Sibyl.
Stephen hires a private investigator for Sibyl’s case. The investigator is Patty Dunlevy, the state’s first female PI. Her first assignment is to collect a list of doctors and midwives who could be sympathetic witnesses in Sibyl’s favor. Meanwhile, Stephen immerses himself in research on midwifery and home birth to make the case that midwives are different from obstetricians in their philosophy: While ob-gyns are physicians first, midwives appreciate the sanctity of labor and birth. Though Stephen is neither a woman nor a parent, he has a theory that midwives are the little girls who never outgrow playing with dolls that look like babies. Ob-gyns, on the other hand, move on to Barbies that embody their professional ambitions. Looking back, Connie supposes that there may be a grain of truth in Stephen’s hypothesis, since she herself outgrew babyish dolls and ended up becoming an obstetrician.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary
In Vermont, April is a month of hope, signaling the end of winter. For the Danforths, however, April 1981 is a tense month. They’re aware that Sibyl will be charged with a crime, but the nature of the charges is unknown. Stephen has asked the family to prepare themselves for charges of murder in the second degree. Rand and Sibyl cannot comprehend how this is possible since Sibyl had no motive to kill Charlotte. Further, Sibyl tried to resuscitate Charlotte right in front of Asa. Stephen tells them that the charge is preposterous, yet the state might want to make an example of Sibyl.
When her parents are alone downstairs, Connie overhears Rand ask Sibyl if she felt Charlotte may have been alive when she performed the cesarean. Sibyl is surprised that Rand would even doubt her. Rand says that Sibyl’s surprise is proof enough for him that she did nothing wrong. The next few weeks are an emotional roller coaster as Stephen tries hard to negotiate for the most lenient charges against Sibyl.
One afternoon, Connie returns from school to find Stephen and Sibyl sitting on the front porch. Sibyl tells Connie that Stephen has relatively good news: Sibyl will be tried on charges of involuntary manslaughter, rather than second-degree murder. The state will try to prove that Sibyl acted illegally in performing the C-section, but the charges acknowledge that her intent was not to hurt Charlotte and that Charlotte’s death was an accident. Connie is glad to hear her mother is not in immediate danger but still feels restless at the prospect of a trial.
When Connie goes indoors to fix herself a snack, she can hear Stephen and Sibyl talk about the case. Stephen wants to delay the trial until the coming winter. He also thinks Sibyl may have to “settle” with the state: plead guilty to her charges so that she is let off with a fine and a temporary ban on practicing midwifery. Sibyl finds the settlement option unworkable. Midwifery is her craft, which she simply cannot abandon. Stehen drops the topic for now. As the talk turns to Sibyl’s past, Connie senses that Sibyl and Stephen are flirting with each other, Stephen teasing Sibyl for being a revolutionary, and Sibyl playfully hitting him in response.
When Rand gets home, Stephen has already left. Rand tells Sibyl that he finds it strange that Stephen would drive all the way from Burlington to give her news that he could just as easily deliver over the phone. He hates the fact that Stephen, who charges $100 an hour, does not yet have a concrete plan for Sibyl’s trial and is already trying to persuade her to settle. Later that night, Sibyl gets a call from one of her midwife friends. They discuss one of Sibyl’s clients, a professor, who has decided to drop Sibyl since she learned about Charlotte. Sibyl becomes distressed, and Rand comforts her.
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary
On Wednesday, April 9, Sibyl is charged with “involuntary manslaughter and practicing medicine without a license” (205). Connie knows that Sibyl will be arrested the next day, but her parents send her to school to maintain a semblance of normalcy. Connie can barely concentrate in class, imagining the slow progress of the police cruiser coming for her mother. She later learns that Sibyl was arrested by the same troopers who came to their house the prior month, Leland Rhodes and Richard Tilley.
Sibyl is taken to the police station to be photographed and fingerprinted and is then brought to the courthouse, Stephen and Rand riding behind her in a separate car. Only Stephen is allowed to accompany Sibyl before the judge; Rand waits outside. As planned, Stephen pleads not guilty on Sibyl’s behalf to Judge Dorset at the arraignment. However, the process of bail is not as simple as Stephen led the Danforths to believe. Even though Sibyl agrees not to practice midwifery until her trial concludes, State Attorney Bill Tanner protests the bail, asking for it to be raised to $35,000. Nevertheless, the judge agrees to grant the bail without monetary conditions.
Sibyl returns home without having to spend any time in prison. What follows is a “summer of motions” (210), with Stephen filing motions to outmaneuver the state’s case. One motion seeks to obtain Charlotte’s complete medical records, while another is to suppress Sibyl’s testimony from the night the troopers visited the Danforths. The former motion is granted and the latter rejected.
As the grown-ups are busy building Sibyl’s case, Connie often feels neglected. She develops pains in her side—possibly a response to stress—that make riding Witch Grass nearly impossible. Connie notes that the pain affects her to this day. Connie’s greatest respite that summer is Tom, who has turned 16 and can drive. Tom often takes Connie on long drives, distracting her from her troubles. Tom’s devotion to Connie doesn’t go unnoticed by Rand and Sibyl. Though they previously disapproved of the older boy, they now begin to like him for sticking by Connie despite the negative attention around her family.
One night, Tom and Connie head to Burlington for a rock concert. Sibyl asks them to drop off an envelope to Stephen and to pick up some papers he has for her. On the way to Burlington, Sibyl looks at the papers in the envelope and discovers that they are xeroxed copies of Charlotte’s medical records, with her mother’s comments. Sibyl has circled the fact that Charlotte was once treated for anemia and hypertension, which she did not share with Sibyl. At his office, Stephen gives Tom and Connie a tour of the workspace that he and Patty have set up for Sibyl’s case, the walls marked with words like “vagal.” Stephen asks Connie and Tom to keep to themselves everything they have noticed in the room.
During this period, Connie encounters many unknown terms and words that she later pieces together. For instance, she is puzzled by one sentence in her mother’s journal entry detailing the night of Veil’s birth: Sibyl notes that since Charlotte’s body was too big to wrap in a blanket, she sewed it up after delivering Veil. Connie doesn’t understand the context until she comes across another entry from years before, in which Sibyl writes of wrapping up a stillborn baby so that his parents wouldn’t be traumatized by the sight. She realizes that Sibyl wanted to spare Asa the sight of Charlotte’s cut-open body.
Part 2, Chapters 10-13 Analysis
As the threat looming over the Danforth family takes shape, the theme of Growing Up in the Shadow of a Family Scandal takes center stage. In the aftermath of Charlotte’s death, Connie immediately retreats from ordinary teenage life and takes on the emotional burden of the family. Her parents try to prevent this, as when they send Connie to school on the day that Sibyl is arrested. However, these attempts to preserve normalcy do not fully address the emotional trauma Connie is experiencing. Connie notes, for instance, that she can barely focus on her schoolwork because “the idea that [her] mother [is] being arrested fuel[s] the darkest parts of [her] adolescent imagination” (205). Connie imagines peril for both herself and her mother: Sibyl subjected to police brutality while Connie, now a motherless child, “stretche[s] tall in a teenager’s body” (205). Connie’s juxtaposition of the tall teenager’s body with the feelings of the little child shows that she is in a state of flux. While she may appear nearly grown-up to others, she is still evolving and vulnerable in childlike ways.
Sibyl’s view of Connie at this time underscores the tension between Connie’s exterior and interior. Sibyl’s journals note that Connie is becoming a “young woman emotionally” with the fortitude to stoically analyze the Sunday morning stories, “practically dissecting them like she [is] one of those Sunday-morning news commentators on TV” (141). However, in an instance of dramatic irony, Sibyl also notes that Connie sounds a lot more childlike when she is talking over the phone to Tom and Rollie. While Sibyl recognizes that Connie is “scared,” she does not grasp the full extent to which Connie is only pretending to be stoic before her parents to spare them emotional pain.
As such journal entries show, the gulf between truth and perception widens all the more in this section, illustrating the theme of The Legal System’s Power to Define the Truth. The narrative now often includes transcripts from Sibyl’s trial, highlighting how lawyers quibble over semantics to undermine a witness’s recollection. For instance, Stephen’s cross-examination of Asa focuses on logistics such as the distance of the window from the bed and the amount of lighting in the room, establishing that his position did not qualify him to assess the way his wife’s blood spurted when Sibyl made the incision. While Connie suggests that Asa’s memory may indeed have been faulty, the point of Stephen’s aggressive questioning is not to determine what actually happened but rather to persuade jurors of a particular scenario.
In foregrounding the truth as a construction, the courtroom inserts also add to the ambiguity that dominates the novel. One of the facts that underpins Connie’s account of her midwife mother’s trial is that Connie chose to become an obstetrician. On the one hand, when Connie juxtaposes her mother’s attitude toward childbirth with that of many doctors, she is therefore doing so as an expert, lending credence to her views. On the other hand, the very fact that Connie chose this profession implies her emotional entanglement with the events she is recounting. Connie’s choice of profession thus injects additional uncertainty into the primary narrative while also highlighting the interplay of experience, recollection, and emotion in shaping truth. To complicate matters further, Connie’s view of Sibyl’s trial and Connie’s journey toward becoming an ob-gyn reflect what Connie gleans from Sibyl’s journals. Not only her narration but also her life itself is thus refracted through her interpretation of someone else’s account—a point that underscores the power of narrative, even when it is ambiguous, to shape reality.
Connie’s narrative style is likewise important in showcasing subjectivity and the unreliable nature of memory. Much like consciousness, her narration is nonlinear and collage-like: Connie often jumps between timelines to emphasize the fluidity of perception, juxtaposing events separated in time to illustrate how meaning accrues through the accumulation of apparently unrelated incidents. Similarly, she also revisits previous incidents, adding new details, to show how memory keeps yielding fresh results. For instance, in Chapter 13, she uses her mother’s journals to segue into a particular detail from the night Charlotte died: her mother sewing up Charlotte’s body out of respect for Asa, who was sobbing nearby. Connie’s remembrance adds to the pathos of the scene and builds on its gruesomeness and tragedy, the bedding described as burgundy with blood. It is as though the memory has intensified as the repercussions of the moment have unfolded. She also notes that the tender act of sewing up Charlotte’s body will be picked apart by the state, which will try to prove a sinister design in Sibyl having left Charlotte’s uterus cut open. Thus, Connie’s revisiting of the scene also highlights how the truth can be twisted by the legal system.
The manner in which the Vermont midwives rally around Sibyl illustrates the novel’s exploration of midwifery and The Debate Between Alternative and Institutionalized Medicine. The imagery used to characterize the midwives is warm, maternal, and bountiful, with the midwives bringing the Danforths pots of soup and baking for them breads and muffins and cakes. Connie notes that the hugs of the midwives are unlike any other, particularly in mainstream society—far more embracing and warmer. In stark contrast to this earth-mother imagery is the clinical, cold world of doctors and medical settings, as seen through the midwives’ eyes: Cheryl Visco describes a hospital as a “sterile little world […] where forceps replace fingers” (147), an image of dehumanization. However, the character of B. P. shows that the dichotomy is not absolute. B. P., a physician, is empathetic and friendly, choosing to risk his reputation for Sibyl’s sake. His characterization implies that a middle ground in medical care is possible—one that unites formal expertise with human connection.
The sub-plot of the brewing flirtation between Sibyl and Stephen calls Stephen’s objectivity into question. Connie’s account of Sibyl and Stephen’s manner as they inform her that Sibyl may not receive criminal charges is laced with discomfort. Later, Connie ducks under the kitchen counter so that she can listen in on the conversation between Sibyl and Stephen, noting each silent interlude and imagining the pair looking out at the sunset. Connie keeps a keen eye on the two since she is already tense about the loving but volatile relationship between her parents. The flirtation underscores Stephen’s moral ambiguity as a character while also highlighting Connie’s perceptiveness, even as a child.
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