By Kaylie Seed
Canadian author Mallory Tater had her debut novel The Birth Yard “birthed” into this world in March of this year and it is filled with so many important themes that we need to be discussing around women’s rights. This coming-of-age story follows eighteen-year-old Sable Ursu as she navigates her way through an intense patriarchal cult called The Den all while trying to make her family proud. Throughout the novel, Sable is left to struggle with the oppressive world she finds herself in. The Den believes that men are superior and that women need to be controlled. This includes who they marry, when they conceive, and The Den requires women to take pills to keep their hysteria at bay. This cult is extremely misogynistic and while The Den wants to take care of the women who live there they (the men of The Den) view women only as vessels who are meant to serve them and carry children.
The Birth Yard is chock full of intense themes including women’s rights, reproductive rights, misogyny, birth control, and womanhood. All of these themes are mixed in with Sable’s narrative as she goes from timid, conforming girl to boisterous, freethinking woman. Sable begins to question the ways of The Den when she is in the Birth Yard preparing to give birth to her daughter and while she wants to make her family proud she also realizes that staying in The Den will put her daughter in harm’s way - something she does not want to do. Tater weaves all of these themes effortlessly through the plot and has created a distinct narrative that can take a bit of time for the reader to get used to. Visually, Tater takes all of the male words in The Birth Yard and capitalizes them so that it is reinforced to the reader that men are superior to the women in this world. The way Tater writes Sable’s narration also changes as Sable goes through her journey in the story. It is brilliant!
It’s clear to the reader that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale was an influence in Tater’s The Birth Yard but it should be made known that The Birth Yard is its own novel with so many different aspects including, and prominently, that it is not a totalitarian dystopia but rather The Den is a cult that exists in life as we know it. Tater deserves praise for creating this intense world that Sable has to navigate and there are a lot of parallels in The Birth Yard that ring true to the treatment of women in society today (even if it’s not as extreme in real life). Without giving anything away, the ending to The Birth Yard has the reader craving for more and leaves a lot of unanswered questions, so naturally the reader hopes that Sable’s story is not over yet. Tater has created a world that the reader wants to be both immersed in and free from and that shows just how well done this novel is. As a fellow Canadian, I cannot wait to see what Tater ends up writing next.
*Readers who enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale would thoroughly enjoy The Birth Yard.