What She Left Behind: A Haunting and Heartbreaking Story of 1920s Historical Fiction

All of the major female characters in What She Left Behind experience some form of misogyny, sometimes in their personal lives (as with the bullying and sexual abuse Izzy experiences), but just as often in their interactions with public institutions like prisons and hospitals. Ultimately, the novel draws a throughline between the abuse women experience in public and in private, suggesting that what connects the two is an effort to control women’s bodies.

Clara’s storyline furnishes the most explicit example. Her ordeal begins because her father wants to control whom she marries; a match with his business partner would be financially advantageous, and he disapproves of her boyfriend, the working-class immigrant Bruno, anyway. When Clara resists this attempt to commodify her body, he locks her in his home for three weeks, which “[makes] her feel like an inmate being kept in a prison” (11). The comparison to prison underscores the systemic nature of this abuse; Henry is not merely a renegade actor in his efforts to control Clara. When Clara still refuses to give her body to the man Henry has chosen, he has her put in the Long Island Home and then into Willard, suggesting that such institutions served in large part to manage women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity.

Sure enough, Clara is subject to much more rigorous policing in these hospitals. She is not only forcibly kept from her loved ones—most of her letters to Bruno are never sent—but she is also abused in myriad ways. She loses all privacy; her body is put on display in front of patients and staff frequently. Additionally, Clara is hit, slapped, and fondled. Physical abuse extends into so-called treatments, which are more like tortures: ice baths, being chained to a bed, and isolation. Clara also experiences medical trauma, including being drugged with laudanum and put in an insulin coma—all attempts to discipline her body into compliance. Clara’s forced sterilization and the kidnapping of her child reveal the ultimate logic of such control. The hospital frames her sterilization as a form of benevolent eugenics, arguing that it is “keep[ing] the unfit from passing along the insanity gene” (166). Roach, however, has no problem raising her “unfit” child as his own. Like Henry’s imprisonment of her, the function of such abuse is therefore merely to bring Clara’s reproductive ability under patriarchal control.

That so much of the misogyny Izzy endures in the 1990s is sexually inflected underscores this point. While the practice of hospitalizing “troublesome” women has largely ended, the disciplining of the female body persists. For instance, Shannon pushes Izzy into the boys’ locker room, forcing her into a sexualized position she did not choose. Moreover, places like Willard still exist. When Izzy visits her mother in prison, it “remind[s] her of Willard State. The only differences between the asylum and the prison [are] the watchtowers and the curling barbed wire above the metal fences” (242). Joyce is in prison because she killed her husband for molesting their daughter—a reminder that women who resist patriarchal authority control of their bodies still face institutional repercussions.