An Inheritance of Suffering
This is a continuation of a short series on The Jersey Devil (and mother grief and rural mythos). Read the first email about it here.
Content Warning: Discussion of historical ableism, “monstrous births”, reproductive trauma, maternal death, violence against women, violence against animals, medical exploitation
I keep thinking about the moment Mother Leeds supposedly cursed her 13th child. "Let this one be the devil!" The story goes that she was at the end of her rope. In the version I grew up with, she had those twelve children already. They lived in a one-room, brick home in the middle of the Pine Barrens. I never imagined that there were any paths leading to the house, that the family existed as part of any sort of community. In my child's eye, Mother Leeds, her children, the man who had once again impregnated her: they were all completely isolated.
In the 6th grade, my teacher (my favorite teacher), had this book called “The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits” in her classroom library. We could “take books out” on an honor system. I don’t remember if I ever read the book, though the cover and the title haunted me. For a long time, I thought I had made the book up, until I found someone talking about Mary Toft, the book’s subject, in a reddit thread.
Here's Mary Toft's story: In the 1720s, around the same time the Jersey Devil legend was born, she convinced doctors across England that she was giving birth to rabbits. Not rabbit-like creatures. Actual rabbits. She would produce rabbit parts and claim that they had emerged from her body during labor. The medical world went absolutely wild. Scientific papers were written.
If I'm remembering correctly, Mary Toft claimed to have watched a field of hares during her pregnancies, to have been dreaming about them every night. This detail made her story especially believable to doctors because it fit perfectly into a medical theory called "maternal impression."
I only learned about maternal impression at that "Imperfecta" exhibit at the Mütter Museum in Philly. It argued that what a pregnant woman saw, thought about, or experienced could literally shape the body of her unborn child. A woman frightened by a dog might give birth to an infant with canine features. A woman who craved strawberries might birth a baby with a strawberry-shaped birthmark. A woman who surrounded herself with too much yellow might give birth to a baby suffering from jaundice.
It was all a hoax, of course. I'll leave it up to your imagination how she successfully performed these lagomorphic births. If society was going to insist that women's thoughts could reshape reality, then Mary was going to give them the most impossible reality she could dream up. Rabbits tumbling from her body, scientific papers written about her womb, doctors traveling from London to witness her miraculous births. She took their own logic, that women's inner lives were so powerful they could create monsters, and used it to create care, attention, food for her starving family.
"Monstrous births," in historical context, were always explained away as punishment for the actions, feelings, or fleeting thoughts of the mother. A child born with a physical difference was seen as proof that the woman had done something wrong.
The women were monsters, and they made monsters of the children they carried.
Everything you think, everything you see, everything that frightens you, it can all become flesh. Your inner life is so powerful it can reshape reality. But also, if something goes wrong, it's your fault for thinking it.
I love you,
Liah Bean