Finding Purpose and Possibilities: Review of We, Jane by Aimee Wall
Aimee Wall, We, Jane.
Book*hug Press, 2021. $23 CAD.
Buy a copy from Book*hug Press.
As its title suggests, We, Jane is not about one story or one woman, but the complex kaleidoscope that is the experience of womanhood and how that refracts off of the choices we make and the ones that make us.
The novel follows Marthe and a woman she meets, whom she calls Jane, in Montreal. The two become unlikely companions and eventually embark on a journey back to their shared home of Newfoundland to carry on “the work”: abortion services.
On the face of that two-line summary, it may seem like the book is about a noble sisterhood—a journey of duty and resilience, its promises made sharp under bloody bed sheets and tense moments late at night. Marthe believes in this vision too after she meets Jane. She becomes enraptured with the myth of her: a tall, confident woman with a no-frills personality who attracts those seeking to find that very unbridled courage within themselves.
Once Jane explains the underground abortion movement in Newfoundland that she was once a part of, inspired by a similar 1960s movement in Chicago, and the need to pass on the knowledge to others, Marthe finally feels like she has found her calling. A chance to be a part of a community bonded by something important and necessary.
“Marthe was wondering what would happen if she fully leaned into Jane’s aesthetic, the matriarchal inheritance, the purpose, the duty. Marthe was wondering what would happen if she went right up to the very edge of the sentimental. Touched it to be sure of the distance” (Wall 58).
We learn much about Marthe over the course of the novel. She is a quiet, but intensely relatable character who wanders aimlessly in her life as a waitress, quite aware of her lack of direction but not sure how to remedy it. In a tech-obsessed, exposure-hungry world that is always moving, there is nothing and everything happening at once. Marthe’s search for identity and meaning is philosophical and, in a world of hustlers and Instagram stars and pop-up store entrepreneurs, practically mandatory. She must answer, who am I? Where do I fit in a world where it is a crime to not do?
Make no mistake: while Marthe is vulnerable and individual, she is also expansive in the way the best characters are. The edges around her are present and her perceptions about the world are sharp, but her essence is large and familiar for the reader. Wall has a special ability to unravel Marthe’s inner thoughts in a way that expresses what we’ve all been feeling and more importantly, ignoring. Marthe becomes a vessel for a generation of longing, anxiety, and wonder.
Once Jane and Marthe get to Newfoundland, the brakes are hit and the narrative begins to hang in the balance as the realities of small town life overtake the women’s worlds. While the first half of the novel is about purpose and helping people take control of their bodies, the second half is about the characters trying to overcome themselves and the realities of life in the twenty-first century. As more women get involved, all a little off-kilter to what she was expecting, Marthe begins to contemplate her role in the movement and the person she is/was in a place she once left with no plan to return. Doubts rise to the surface and things start to spiral in boring ways.
With the shift from the macro of the abortion movement to the micro of the women’s personal experiences in their hometown, there grows a line of strong dichotomies built from earlier in the novel: control/freedom, wanting/getting, expectations/reality, and past/present. These appear through Marthe’s fear of running into old acquaintances, Jane’s sudden cavalier attitude to “the work,” and more. The interior debates, while Wall made them interesting and funny to read, removed the novel’s potential to be a new voice in the centuries-old battle for reproductive rights (if that is what it was meant to be). The novel strikes me as one that explores more the desperate corners, sunny ideals, and infinite possibilities of women and the relationships we have to ourselves and others. How we betray, love, and dream. How extraordinary and utterly mundane these things can be in life’s thorny landscape.
Despite a storyline that fizzles, Wall’s first novel is still electric in its fragmented, almost screenplay-like prose that dizzies the mind. The fragments capture abortion’s place in public discourse faithfully: something we gesture to, tip toe around, but never quite say openly (outside of this review, of course). The personal and external worlds of the characters, along with the abortion movement, are set up interestingly in the first half of the novel but ultimately do not have authentic tension in the second. Wall still manages to beautifully capture life’s possibilities, ironies, and devastations in jolting language. We, Jane provides a personal, honest glimpse into the big questions we as women ask out loud and the small, private ones we only think about.
Rebecca Mangra is a writer and editor based in Toronto. She is a graduate of York University's Creative Writing program. She has a passion for books, clothes, intersectional feminism, and chocolate-covered almonds. You can follow her on Twitter.