Streaming American Consciousness

Streaming American Consciousness: Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger became a young adult during the Modernist movement of the late nineteenth century. Rejecting Victorian perfectionism and the stifling views of defining morality in dichotomous terms (right or wrong, superior or inferior), the post-Victorians started to demand a truer view of life (Singal 1987). During this time, Sanger was working as a nurse, doing house calls for working families, (Chesler 2003) and seeing, along with the Modernists, that the perfect society image revealed little actual truth. The strict values imposed by the Victorians, in an attempt to create a “peaceful society, free from sin and discord” (Singal 1987), actually attributed to the dire consequences Sanger found in the working class. Sex was considered savage and as such was kept under strict guidelines (1987). One of these was to make not only contraceptives themselves, but also any spread of knowledge about how to prevent pregnancy, illegal (Chesler 2003). The true human effect of the law was that it added to the burdens of the already overworked poor by forcing them to have more children than could be provided for by their low-paying jobs.

Sanger, after watching a young married woman die from an unsafe abortion, saw the vicious cycle that was the every day experience of working families: unprotected sex led to too many children and to deaths of mothers, leaving generations of children without proper care and more mouths to feed than jobs that would provide (2003).

Change was occurring swiftly, and the arts were affected by those noticing the irony of society’s perfect laws creating so much misery and suffering. Daniel Joseph Singal, in “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” says that Modernism changed not only all of the arts, including literature, but also thought itself (Singal 1987). French Symbolist poets began writing their thoughts as they occurred, trying to capture the human effect of life experiences instead of simply relating the experiences (1987). French painters, such as Claude Monet, began emphasizing emotion more than focusing on the actual subject matter (1987). And novelists, such as Virginia Woolf, let their thoughts flow into their stories, creating a truer expression (Lodge 2002). The open and candid interpretive literary movement that came to be known as stream-of-consciousness provided the perfect platform for Sanger’s fight to bring birth control measures to real-life women who desperately needed the freedom to control their own bodies.

David Lodge, in Consciousness and the Novel (2002), defines stream-of-consciousness by describing what Virginia Woolf tried to accomplish with her novels: “By breaking up the formal railway line of the sentence, by the use of ellipses and parentheses, by blurring the boundaries between what is thought and what is spoken, and by switching point of view and narrative voice with bewildering frequency – by these and similar devices she tried to imitate in her fiction the elusiveness of the phenomenon of consciousness” (Lodge 2002, 63). Woolf and James Joyce both applied first-person point of view in the present tense to aid in their use of this style (2002, 35).

Although Lodge refers strictly to fiction, asserting that the novel is the best way to describe a person’s thoughts and experiences (2002), Sanger applies the same method in her writing of real life events. She begins the section of “Awakening and Revolt” by stating her purpose in first person narrative: “Early in the year 1912 I came to a sudden realization that my work as a nurse and my activities in social service were entirely palliative and consequently futile and useless to relieve the misery I saw all about me…” (Sanger 1931). The ellipses are included in the text here and in other places throughout the essay, indicating her thought process streaming from one idea to the next, jumping from the incidents to the thoughts the incidents provoked. Using present tense also involves the reader more than if the essay had been written as though it were in the past. “The way they live is almost beyond belief” (1931). It is not possible to read this and escape the knowledge that it is going on now, or was in the time of the writing.

The harsh realities of the fight for reproductive rights required undiluted, honest facts about what was happening in the lives of working class women and their families. Overpopulation was starving the poor and the women were helpless to prevent it, putting emotional shields up against the all-too-often occurrence of losing a child to malnutrition or disease. The stream-of-consciousness style of blurring speech and thoughts allowed Sanger to make this statement bluntly, combining her own thoughts with those of the suffering women: “a baby born dead – great relief; an older child dies – sorrow, but nevertheless relief – insurance helps; a mother’s death – children scattered into institutions…” (1931). The coldness and acceptance relayed here in only a few words hit the reader more sharply than if Sanger had related the facts in perfect sentences of the Victorian style.

Singal cites the main objective of the new artistic style as “the desire to heighten, savor and share all varieties of experience” (1987). It was not the facts that Modernists were interested in bringing to light; it was the experience, the emotion, and the reality (1987). Speaking of her arrest at the Brooklyn clinic, Sanger reveals her insult at the methods used by the police: “the shock and horror of it was that a woman, with a squad of five plain clothes men, conducted the raid and made the arrest. A woman – the irony of it!” (1931) The repetition of the word “woman” along with italics, exclamation point, and phrase “shock and horror” reveals the whole reality of the incident. If Sanger had simply said that one female and five male officers arrested her, there would be little or no emotional impact.

In a study of the illusive concept of “consciousness,” Donald Dryden refers to a 1957 writing by Susanne Langer, an American philosopher, who stated that language was not able to relate the stream of thoughts that serves as an important background to what we say and write (2001). A “discourse” that we plan out to say exactly what we mean, Langer says, is “certainly not a spontaneous reaction” (2001). Sanger, on the other hand, does manage to be spontaneous while writing her experiences. She does this by relating her personal thoughts: “I walked […] for hours […] thinking, regretting, dreading to stop; fearful of my conscience, dreading to face my own accusing soul” (Sanger 1931). The repetition of the word “dreading” shows not a perfectly planned discourse, but the wandering thoughts of someone more interested in relating the thoughts than in perfecting the writing of them.

While not strictly stream-of consciousness (authors use varying degrees of the style depending on their purpose), Sanger’s writing grabs the essence of it – relating her own thoughts freely so the reader can enter her mind. Dryden may argue, summarizing that “the life of feeling is ineffable – beyond the power of words to articulate” (2001), but when we read, “I dreaded to face that woman. I was tempted to send someone else in my place. I longed for an accident on the subway, or on the street – anything to prevent my going into that home” (Sanger 1931), we very clearly perceive the sense of helplessness, fear, and frustration of the particular moment, of Sanger’s mindset. We realize she is near panic and would rather deal with bodily harm than to have to face a woman who had asked for help Sanger couldn’t give. We actually see the life-changing event from her eyes.

Not only did her style of writing open us to her thoughts, but the actual thoughts written bring questions to our own minds. The last paragraph of the essay shows Sanger, arrested and being hauled away, looking out at the “seething mob of humans,” the women who desperately wanted her help (1931). Her mind was not on her own predicament, but on theirs. “I wondered, and asked myself what had gone out of the race [of women]. Something had gone from them which silenced them, made them impotent to defend their rights” (1931). This leaves us, figuratively being hauled away from the scene as the essay ends, contemplating her question. Why were these women subjected, and letting themselves be subjected, by the laws of middle-class males? We have been inside Sanger’s head long enough to want the question answered.

More than seventy years after Sanger’s writing of the essay, the truth of her thoughts is still evident. Women continue to fight for health and mental issues, and we see that the vicious cycle of poverty and lack of birth control has, indeed, taken its toll. Margaret Mead, in Culture and Commitment, states that even by 1978, “the numbers of homeless children … have swollen to millions in the United States alone. … bound in love to no one, never having known the binding power of parental love and care” (Mead 1978, 111); issues Sanger warned about over fifty years before.

The issue of consciousness is still being debated, as seen in Dryden’s question: “Is a science of consciousness that aspires to do justice to the protean character of conscious mental life possible at all?” (2001) However, putting aside the scientific facts and reading the thoughts of real-life people about their real-life experiences, we can see the consciousness of the authors. The facts of contraceptives and birth control have no meaning without looking into the lives of those they affect. Sanger, in stream-of-consciousness style, invited the upper-class rule makers into the actual lives of the working class. Only then did change come about which led to the legalization of contraceptives and birth control information. Only by allowing others into women’s lives did the lives of women begin to change.

“… For hours I stood, motionless and tense, expecting something to happen. I watched the lights go out, I saw the darkness gradually give way to the first shimmer of dawn, and then a colorful sky heralded the rise of the sun. I knew a new day had come for me and a new world as well.” (Sanger 1931)

Works Cited

Chesler, Ellen. “Margaret Sanger.” The Nation 277.3 (July 21-28 2003): 24-6. WilsonSelectPlus.
UMUC Library and Information Services. 17 Sep. 2003 <http://www.umuc.edu/library>.

Dryden, Donald. “Susanne Langer and William James: Art and the Dynamics of the Stream of
Consciousness.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (2001):15(4). University Park, PA:
The Pennsylvania State University. ProjectMuse. UMUC Library and Information Services.
17 Sep. 2003 <http://www.umuc.edu/library>.

Lodge, David. Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays. (2002): 35, 63. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Mead, Margaret. Culture and Commitment: The new relationships between the generations in the 1970s. (1978): 111. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Sanger, Margaret. (1931). My fight for birth control. In The feminist papers (1973): 522-532. New York, NY: Bantam Books. UMUC WebTycho. ENGL354. Sep. 2003 <http://tychousa8.umuc.edu/ENGL354>.

Singal, Daniel Joseph. “Towards a Definition of American Modernism.” American Quarterly 39.1
(Spring 1987): 7-26. Special Issue: Modernist Culture in America. Jstor. UMUC Library and
Information Services. 17 Sep. 2003 <http://www.umuc.edu/library>.