Reproductive Trauma and Archival Reconstruction in Postwar Canada: Heather Marshall’s Looking for Jane

Abstract

This article examines Heather Marshall’s Looking for Jane as a literary engagement with the history of reproductive control in postwar Canada. It contends that the novel redefines trauma as a structurally generated condition, influenced by institutional and social constraints. Through its fragmented, multi-generational narrative, comprising letters, testimonies, and disjointed timelines, the text reconstructs a history that survives only in partial, mediated, and often unstable traces, foregrounding the difficulties of rendering reproductive trauma historically visible. By contextualising individual experiences within a broader framework of institutional oversight and referencing documented practices such as forced adoption and restricted access to abortion, the novel links literary form to historical realities. Its concluding paratext extends this dialogue into the present, engaging the reader directly and emphasising the ongoing significance of reproductive trauma in contemporary discourses on responsibility and recognition.

1. Introduction

Heather Marshall’s Looking for Jane (2022) reevaluates the history of reproductive control in postwar Canada through the interconnected narratives of women impacted by forced adoption, unsafe abortions, and maternity homes. Set across multiple decades in the latter half of the twentieth century, the novel reconstructs histories that are frequently marginalised within the official narratives of Canadian social progress. This article argues that Looking for Jane portrays trauma as the consequence of legal, institutional, and social structures governing reproductive life. Anchored in trauma studies, disability theory, feminist historiography, and reproductive politics, the article explores how the novel connects fragmented narrative structures to histories of reproductive coercion. The first part situates the discussion within critical approaches to trauma and reproductive governance. The next section analyses the novel’s fragmented structure and archival logic, while the final two examine the connections between reproductive trauma and institutional control, political memory, and public accountability.

2. Trauma Beyond the Clinical: Towards a Political Understanding

Trauma has traditionally been understood through medical and psychiatric frameworks that privilege individual pathology over systemic causation. Nineteenth-century accounts of “traumatic neurosis” and early twentieth-century diagnoses such as “shell shock” established a model in which psychic disturbance was understood as the aftermath of an overwhelming event. To be traumatised is to be seen as “psychologically wounded and vulnerable” and “therapeutic practices were aimed at ‘restoring’ normalcy or stasis” (Casper and Wertheimer 2016, p. 3).

This model persists in contemporary diagnostic formulations of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), where trauma is defined as exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence (American Psychiatric Association 2013).

Trauma appears as a disorder of memory and temporality. It has been argued that traumatic events are not fully assimilated as they occur but return belatedly through flashbacks, nightmares, and intrusive repetitions (Caruth 1996, p. 91). While this model has been foundational to trauma studies, it has also attracted criticism for universalising and decontextualising suffering. Trauma theory risks becoming “a globalising discourse” that abstracts trauma from specific historical and political contexts (Luckhurst 2008, pp. 3–4). By focusing primarily on psychological dimensions, early trauma theory often sidelines the material realities—legal, institutional, and economic—that produce traumatic circumstances in the first place.

Disability studies criticise the clinical model by challenging its norm of recovery. Theorists argue that bodily and psychic vulnerabilities are influenced by social, institutional, and cultural factors. (Garland-Thomson 1997; Kafer 2013). This approach shifts attention from the injured individual to the social conditions that define some forms of suffering as individual pathology while obscuring their social production.

More recent work in critical trauma studies extends this criticism by insisting on the structural production of trauma. Angela M. Carter’s concept of ‘disabling trauma’ is useful here. She argues that trauma should not be understood solely as an individual psychological response but as generated and sustained by social systems that expose certain populations to disproportionate harm (Carter 2019). Trauma is inseparable from power: it is unevenly distributed, normalised by institutional practices, and often rendered invisible in dominant narratives.

The so-called “problem” of trauma cannot be solved through medical or clinical intervention, but rather through broad social change. This is because the “problem” of trauma is located not in the bodyminds of the individuals who live with trauma, but rather in the social structures that unequally distribute life chances. Again, while on an individual level trauma can reach any demographic, socially and culturally, it is more likely to reach those who are marginalised.

(Carter 2019, p. 114)

Within feminist scholarship, this reconceptualisation has notably influenced analyses of reproductive politics. Research on forced adoption, single motherhood, and limited abortion access illustrates how trauma is embedded in regulations governing female bodies. Briggs (2012, 2020) and Solinger (1992, 2013) have shown how reproductive control operates through legal restrictions and social pressure, resulting in lasting social and psychological impacts. Reproductive justice frameworks extend these discussions by linking reproductive rights to broader questions of social inequality, access, and institutional power (Ross and Solinger 2017). This perspective is particularly relevant to Looking for Jane, where reproductive vulnerability is shaped by class, social stigma, and unequal access to healthcare.

Trauma emerges from legal restrictions, institutional coercion, and the social stigma surrounding women’s reproductive choices. The novel foregrounds forced adoption, unsafe abortion, and confinement in maternity homes to show how suffering is unevenly produced by structures that regulate women’s bodies and lives. The text aligns with critical trauma approaches that link psychic suffering to broader systems of power and social organisation. (Carter 2019, p. 118).

The novel also resists the therapeutic logic that underpins much clinical discourse on trauma. Trauma continues to shape lives and relationships over time. In Looking for Jane, suffering remains tied to the legal, religious, and social systems that govern reproductive life. The novel approaches trauma as a political and historical condition rather than solely as an individual psychological experience.

3. Narrative Form as Archival Reconstruction

Heather Marshall’s Looking for Jane constructs its narrative through fragmentation, temporal disjunction, and the circulation of partial documents. The novel’s tripartite structure follows three interwoven narrative strands. In 2017, Angela Creighton discovers a misdelivered letter that prompts her to investigate the history of a clandestine abortion network known as “Jane”. Evelyn Taylor’s narrative begins with her confinement as an unmarried pregnant teenager in a home for “fallen” women and later follows her work as Dr Taylor within the Jane Network. Nancy Mitchell’s story unfolds around family secrecy, unwanted pregnancy, and her eventual contact with the same network. Through these intersecting trajectories, the novel reconstructs histories of maternity homes, unsafe abortion, forced adoption, and reproductive surveillance across generations. These narratives intersect through letters, memories, and delayed revelations, rejecting linear chronology in favour of a structure in which the past is accessed belatedly. This organisation mirrors the temporal structure of trauma, in which the event is not fully assimilated as it occurs but returns later in indirect, repetitive forms. (Caruth 1996, p. 91).

The narrative is set in motion by a misdelivered letter, a device that functions as both a plot catalyst and an archival fragment. The letter remains detached from its original context and cannot be immediately interpreted. Because neither Angela nor the reader initially understands the letter’s significance, the document functions less as evidence than as an incomplete trace, whose meaning depends on later narrative connections. Marshall’s fragmented reconstruction of reproductive history resembles what Hutcheon (1988) describes as historiographic metafiction: narratives that expose the instability of historical knowledge while relying on archival traces and documentary forms. Letters, testimonies, and multiple timelines create the impression of documentary realism, while simultaneously exposing the limits of archival knowledge. As Hutcheon (1988) argues, such texts expose the narrative construction of history. In Looking for Jane, history is an assemblage of mediated traces.

In “In Search of Alias Grace,” Atwood (1998) discusses historical fiction as a genre shaped by archival gaps, competing stories, and the uncertain nature of historical truth. These themes are also central to Looking for Jane, where letters, fragmented testimonies, and delayed disclosures highlight the challenges of reconstructing histories missing from official records. Marshall’s work aligns with a feminist tradition focused on recovering women’s experiences from institutional silences and incomplete records. The novel rebuilds lives that are only partially documented, using fiction to fill gaps in history. Its nonlinear, multi-generational narrative blurs the line between past and present, connecting the injustices of the 1960s–1980s with ongoing debates about women’s rights and bodily autonomy.

The novel’s fragmented structure mirrors the difficulty of reconstructing traumatic histories from incomplete traces. The past emerges gradually through memories and delayed revelations. Felman and Laub (1992) describe testimony as partial and mediated rather than fully transparent. Evelyn’s and Nancy’s narratives are testimonial fragments: incomplete accounts that require reconstruction. Information is distributed unevenly across the three narrative strands, so that scenes acquire new meanings retrospectively as previously disconnected histories intersect.

At the same time, the novel foregrounds the politics of archival absence. The histories it reconstructs (forced adoption, institutional confinement, and underground abortion networks) are excluded from or marginalised in official records. The reliance on private letters and personal testimonies shifts authority from archives to lived experience, revealing the archive as a site structured by power. Looking for Jane exposes these mechanisms by reconstructing histories that official archives have failed to retain.

The novel also reflects the difficulty of representing traumatic experience through coherent narrative forms, a problem discussed by Gilmore (2001). Trauma often exceeds the capacities of conventional narrative forms and requires strategies such as fragmentation, displacement, and fictionalisation to render it narratable. Marshall’s novel uses fragmentation and fictionalisation to reconstruct histories that remain incomplete in official records.

The shifting perspectives prevent the past from consolidating into a single authoritative account. Angela’s present-day investigation renders the past visible, while Evelyn’s and Nancy’s narratives serve as partial testimonies that remain, at times, contradictory. The narrative begins to clarify as the storylines intersect. This process is already visible in Angela’s discovery of Frances Mitchell’s misplaced letter at the beginning of the novel. The document survives through accident and delay: “Its contents wouldn’t be discovered for another seven years.” (Marshall 2022, p. 2). Historical knowledge is materially fragile, dependent on partial records and lost correspondence. The document bears the marks of near-destruction, turning archival recovery into a physical encounter with historical vulnerability. The letter contains another concealed document, a note hidden inside a baby bootie: “When she shakes the envelope, a small piece of paper flutters onto the desk like confetti. It’s yellowed and a bit wrinkled. One of its edges is singed, as though it were nearly burned at some point.” (Marshall 2022, p. 14), which embeds acts of preservation and secrecy. The novel will then reconstruct the past through scattered textual fragments whose meaning becomes legible as information accumulates. Angela’s investigation recontextualises earlier scenes involving Evelyn and Nancy, forcing both protagonist and reader to reinterpret previously partial information. The novel’s refusal to offer full resolution reflects its understanding of trauma as ongoing into the present.

Through these formal strategies, Looking for Jane intervenes in how reproductive history is remembered. It reconstructs the conditions through which the past becomes known. Fragmented timelines, multiple perspectives, and archival fragments are not simply stylistic choices. They reflect the instability of historical knowledge and the difficulty of reconstructing suppressed histories. By embedding fictional testimonies within a structure that mimics archival recovery, the novel exposes the silences and erasures that shape official histories of reproductive control in twentieth-century Canada, challenging memory and foregrounding women’s experiences of coercion, surveillance, and trauma. Marshall’s use of lost letters, fragmented timelines, and testimonial voices reframes the narrative, preserving and destabilising its authority at once and drawing attention to the processes by which histories are mediated and interpreted.

4. Reproductive Trauma and the Production of Disability

If Looking for Jane reconstructs trauma through narrative form, it also locates it in the material conditions of reproductive control. Set against the backdrop of restrictive anti-abortion legislation in twentieth-century Canada, the novel foregrounds the limited and often coercive choices available to women: unsafe illegal abortion, institutional confinement in maternity homes, or forced adoption. These experiences expose women to both physical and psychological harm as part of a broader structure of reproductive control. The novel differentiates between historical experiences of reproductive trauma. Evelyn’s narrative unfolds within the rigid environment of maternity homes and forced adoption practices in the 1960s, while Nancy’s experiences reflect the contradictory conditions of the post-1969 period, when abortion was accessible but heavily restricted. Angela’s present-day investigation encounters these histories retrospectively, through archival fragments.

Historically, reproductive autonomy in Canada remained constrained by legal restrictions well into the late twentieth century. Prior to the 1969 amendments to the Criminal Code, abortion was illegal in all circumstances. Even after reform, access remained limited by the requirement that procedures be approved by hospital-based Therapeutic Abortion Committees, a system that excluded many women on geographic, economic, and social grounds. Abortion was fully decriminalised only in 1988, following the Supreme Court’s decision in R. v. Morgentaler, which struck down the existing provisions as unconstitutional (Supreme Court of Canada 1988; Stettner et al. 2018; Erdman 2018; Johnstone 2017).

Within the same legislative framework, unmarried pregnant women were often confined to maternity homes, where they faced moral regulation, social isolation, and sustained pressure to relinquish their children for adoption. These institutions operated through a combination of religious authority, social stigma, and state complicity, framing pregnancy outside marriage as a problem to be controlled (Strong-Boag 2006; Senate of Canada 2018). Although fictional, the experiences reconstructed in Looking for Jane thus correspond to documented practices.

The novel depicts both abortion and childbirth as traumatic experiences, illustrating how they are influenced by coercion and control. Labour, particularly inside the coercive environment of maternity homes, is marked by surveillance, loss of agency, and enforced separation. Sister Teresa makes clear that childbirth is reduced to an institutional transfer procedure.

“Given your situation, we would expect that you prepare to give the child up for adoption. We have a list of several couples who are hoping to adopt in the next few months. Lovely married couples. Devout to the faith, well-off, established. Honourable.” She lingers over the last word. “You will relinquish the baby at the end of your term.”

(Marshall 2022, p. 20)

Terms such as “prepare,” “relinquish,” and “honourable” frame forced adoption as a moral and institutional necessity. The scene suppresses maternal attachment in favour of bureaucratic control, transforming reproduction into a regulated transfer of custody.

All the “inmates,” as Sister Teresa calls them, were given the same day dresses and nightgowns. The term reflects the grim, punitively militaristic environment the nun has curated within the home. The staff keep the girls busy with cooking and cleaning, shining shoes, and scrubbing the laundry they take in from the neighbourhood to subsidise the home’s upkeep. They have scheduled outdoor time in the back garden only at predetermined hours of the day, and under strict supervision. The home is intended to be a place of anonymity. The girls aren’t allowed to talk much with each other. No one uses their last name. No one is supposed to talk about how they got pregnant. But the one thing all the girls whisper about, obsess over, is everyone else’s due date. It’s the first thing each new girl gets asked.

(Marshall 2022, p. 40)

Marshall depicts these institutions through the specifics of routine surveillance and limited communication. Upon her arrival at St. Agnes’s, Evelyn discovers that the girls are prohibited from using their surnames, that their letters are screened, and even the windows are kept closed. Daily schedules, restricted movement, monitored communication, and the erasure of surnames collectively create an institutional environment structured by depersonalisation. The term “inmates” cancels the distinction between care institutions and penal enclosures. Marshall’s lexical choice reframes maternity as a condition administered through disciplinary isolation, transforming the home into a space organised around containment and behavioural regulation.

Women facing unwanted pregnancy are subjected to systems that produce trauma. Psychological suffering manifests through depression, persistent feelings of incompleteness, and, in extreme cases, suicide. The trajectories of women subjected to maternity homes are particularly marked by this dynamic: the forced separation from their children produces long-term psychological damage, with at least two women driven to suicide.

Unsafe abortions and poor medical care also cause lasting physical damage. A central scene portrays the procedure as an experience of extreme vulnerability, in which even the most basic forms of care are absent: “Hold her down! the man shouts at Nancy. She can’t move!” (Marshall 2022, p. 30) The imperative highlights bodily vulnerability and the lack of consent or medical attention. This scenario exemplifies the discussion of how trauma is unevenly distributed socially, with institutional structures exposing specific populations to greater harm. (Carter 2019).

Reproductive trauma is connected to social silence. During Clara’s illegal abortion, the practitioner turns up the radio to drown out her screams, while “all the neighbours hear are the cheery upbeat notes” and “the saccharine lyrics” of a Donny Osmond song (Marshall 2022, p. 30). The scene derives much of its violence from tonal dissonance. Clara’s physical suffering unfolds beneath the artificially cheerful soundscape of “Sweet and Innocent,” which transforms popular music into a mechanism of acoustic concealment. The song neutralises the sound of the procedure, allowing it to fade beneath the sonic textures of everyday normality.

The argument is supported by the 2018 report of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, which documents the long-term impact of forced adoption practices in postwar Canada. The report records that 82% of women subjected to such conditions experienced major depression, while 21% attempted suicide at least once. Many reported persistent anxiety, pathological grief, and an enduring inability to form stable relationships.

Emotions were still raw, and the trauma was still evident when mothers bravely told their stories of heartbreak, humiliation, shame and longing; stories that date back up to 55 years. Committee members heard the tragic accounts of women who, at the most vulnerable points in their young lives, were abandoned by family, banished from society, and mistreated during pregnancy and labour.

(Senate of Canada 2018, p. 3)

The committee’s findings reinforce the novel’s representation of trauma as systemic. Women confined to maternity homes experienced forms of control that extended beyond childbirth, shaping their bodies, social identities, and relationships long after the event. The removal of children for adoption did not simply resolve a perceived social problem; long-term psychological consequences continue to shape the lives of those involved decades later.

Importantly, the novel does not portray women solely as passive subjects of these processes. The emergence of the underground abortion network “Jane” introduces an alternative structure of care and resistance. After the violent abortion experience mentioned above, Nancy is told: “If you, or a friend, or any other girl close to you ends up pregnant when they don’t want to be, you need to call around to doctors’ offices and ask for Jane.” (Marshall 2022, p. 56) The exchange frames reproductive care as a hidden communicative network operating alongside official medical institutions that fail to protect vulnerable women. The network uses informal channels and coded communication, being described as “a code name for this network that’s connecting women with doctors who will provide abortions. A whisper network, basically” (Marshall 2022, p. 155). The network provides access to safer procedures while creating a space of solidarity. Its reach extends far beyond isolated cases, as one organiser notes: “We’ve been able to save a lot of lives through the Jane Network, and we couldn’t have done that without all the time, energy, and sacrifice you’ve put into making it happen. So, thank you. But there are still a lot of women waiting” (Marshall 2022, p. 165). The network also creates forms of collective support that challenge reproductive isolation and institutional control. By situating reproductive trauma within a network of legal, religious, and social constraints, the novel exposes the mechanisms through which certain bodies are rendered vulnerable and others protected. The narrative thus reinforces the broader argument of this article: Reproductive governance shapes both the bodily and psychological consequences experienced by the women in the novel.

5. Trauma Fiction as Political Intervention

If Looking for Jane reconstructs trauma through narrative form, it also extends this engagement into the political sphere. The novel connects past injustices to contemporary public discourse, presenting reproductive trauma as an ongoing political issue. Heather Marshall’s background in politics and communication shapes the novel’s engagement with reproductive rights and public memory, keeping individual experiences tied to broader legal structures. The occupation of Parliament staged by the women moves the question of reproductive control into the public sphere, turning it into a site of direct political confrontation.

THE WOMEN ARE COMING, indeed. Several of them had set off from Vancouver several weeks ago, stopping in smaller towns and cities along the way to hold rallies, collect more troops, and stir up media coverage. Women’s liberation is hot news, after all. This protest is overdue and necessary. The radical feminists who started the abortion caravan in Vancouver say something needs to be done on a bigger scale. “A radical overhaul of the system,” one woman shouted into the camera on last night’s news. […]. “The state needs to recognise women’s rights to their own bodies,” the woman said, “and make sure all women can exercise those rights regardless of their race or income.”

(Marshall 2022, pp. 131–32)

The capitalised declaration “THE WOMEN ARE COMING” adopts the rhetoric of headline urgency, transforming feminist mobilisation into a public spectacle that disrupts institutional attempts to confine reproductive politics to the private sphere. The excerpt reproduces the cadence of both media narration and protest discourse, enabling political resistance to circulate through the same channels that have historically regulated women’s bodies.

The political orientation becomes more explicit in the closing paratext, where Marshall cites the 2018 Senate report The Shame Is Ours. This reference places the practices depicted in Looking for Jane within an officially documented history, while exposing the absence of an adequate institutional response. By placing fictional narratives alongside documented accounts, the text collapses the distance between literary representation and historical testimony, showing how these histories continue to shape public debate.

The paratext also calls for accountability from the public and institutions. It recalls the Committee’s recommendation that the Canadian government formally acknowledge forced adoption practices and issue an official apology, while noting that “as of the time of writing, no such apology or reparation proposal has been offered” (Marshall 2022, p. 379). It then addresses the reader directly, urging civic action: “I would strongly encourage you to call or write to your Member of Parliament” (Marshall 2022, p. 380). Trauma is framed as a matter of public accountability. The novel emphasises the absence of institutional recognition and repair, linking narrative to political action.

Looking for Jane keeps reproductive trauma tied to the legal and institutional structures that produced it. The novel repeatedly returns to the social conditions that shaped these experiences and to the absence of meaningful repair.

6. Conclusions

Reproductive trauma does not end with the event itself. It continues in memory and in everyday lives. The women in the novel do not simply endure these conditions. They respond by creating networks of care and resistance, from underground abortion services to forms of mutual support that operate outside institutional control.

These histories extend across generations. The protagonists are not always direct victims of the events described, yet their lives remain shaped by their consequences. Letters, silences, and recovered testimonies connect past experiences of reproductive control to the present, showing how unresolved state violence continues to structure personal and collective memory.

Looking for Jane redefines reproductive trauma as a condition produced through restriction, coercion, and erasure. Marshall’s novel expands trauma beyond the model of singular psychological rupture by showing how reproductive control continues to shape bodies, relationships, and collective memory across time. At the same time, the novel situates Canadian historical fiction within ongoing debates surrounding reproductive freedom, institutional accountability, and public memory. The past does not appear as closed or fully recoverable. Looking for Jane presents reproductive history as unresolved, mediated through silences, fragmented testimonies, and incomplete archival traces that continue to structure the present.

The true horror in Looking for Jane is legitimacy. The institutions that confined women, removed children, and restricted reproductive autonomy were part of the moral consensus. Marshall’s novel, therefore, challenges much more than historical forgetting or collective memory. It interrogates how easily violence becomes ordinary when embedded in institutions that claim to protect social order, morality, and respectability.