Harrison Pellerin

World Science Fiction

2/28/2020

Lying for the Right Reasons

In the midst of a world awash with nuclear paranoia, Judith Merril’s 1948 short story “That Only a Mother” channeled the anguish and angst of new parents in the unknown future of post-war America. Merril transports the reader into the mind of Margaret, a domestic American housewife, as she waits for her husband Hank, a Technical Lieutenant in the military, to return home from a government deployment. Merril’s structure creates an intimate and striking effect by placing the reader firmly within Margaret’s worldview, understanding her thoughts, worries, and actions as she awaits Hank’s arrival. Through this lens, Merril writes a chilling account that drills into the anxieties, fears, and self-deception of a mother raising a child in a nuclear future.

Margaret’s anxieties and inner monologue communicate an intimate understanding of her personal state, ranging from nervous longing for Hank to pride for her newborn genius. Merril uses a mix of forms to communicate Margaret’s state, personal thoughts are italicized, letters to Hank are offset from the prose, and Hank’s short telegrams are BOLD AND ALL-CAPS. It is the combination of this form and the story’s tight third-person point of view that seem to offer a confident, reliable account of a strong, independent mother raising a newborn with her husband away. The inner thoughts show the personal manifestation of fear in the nuclear area. As Margaret, still pregnant, reads the news about the effects of radiation on newborn children, her inner monologue elucidates the expecting mother’s condition. “Stop it. Maggie, stop it! The radiologist said Hank’s job couldn’t have exposed him” (Merril, p.213). Margaret’s thoughts express a pressing vulnerability, could she be carrying a child injured by nuclear radiation? The weight of this question is not lost and Merril’s choice to present an omniscient narrator emphasizes the importance of this question to Margaret. By the time of her pregnancy, the stress of life without a partner seems to be weighing on Margaret, her letters with Hank toe a border of appropriateness, joking about infanticide and downplaying her own anxiety about the expected child (Merril, p.214). Once the child is born, the intimate point of view shows the shift toward confident self-belief, Margaret disregards the “battle-ax of a nurse” and testifies the good news to Hank, “We’re so lucky, Hank…” (Merril, p.215). The confidence of her statements of maternal self-knowledge are a strong affirmation of the title: Margaret knows her daughter in the way “That Only a Mother” would and no one can tell her otherwise.

Writing in 1948, Merril carefully and deliberately constructs a near future wrought with the present anxieties of the years of story’s publication: nuclear radiation and its unknown effects on humankind. Later, as Margaret reads the newspaper after giving birth to her child, the reader gets a quick summary of the world as it is— a reality where the aftereffects of nuclear weapons are seeping into the human genome. Margaret reads, “Mutations, [a geneticist] said, were increasing disproportionately” and “there was some degree of free radiation from atomic explosions causing the trouble” (Merril, p.213). Merril is grounding the main scientific conflict of the story, nuclear radiation, within real science and real events. That reality alone is striking; however, Merrill expands upon the situation by unpacking Margaret’s connection to the mutational sources. “There was that little notice in the paper in spring of ’47. That was when Hank quit at Oak Ridge. “Only two or three per cent of those guilty of infanticide are being caught and punished in Japan today’” (Merril, p.218). This one sentence draws Margaret to the core of the question of nuclear effects. Merrill clues the reader in on the severity of the situation that as early as 1947, the effects of atomic bombs have begun to effect the world. Also, we learn that Hank worked at Oak Ridge—Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the United States largest uranium enrichers and one of the governments biggest secrets. Hank’s proximity, and therefore Margaret and the baby’s proximity, is striking. The protagonist is at the scientific front line of the conflict, a crisis of such angst and magnitude that not only are parents murdering their newborns in Japan, the government is neglecting to prosecute the case. In a few short lines, Merril transports the reader into an environment of social angst and physical calamity.

Operating from the third-person omniscient, Merril shifts the reader’s perspective from a focus upon Hank’s return home, a dramatic shift that creates a break in the readers understanding of the story and exposes the cold and heartbreaking reality of the situation. When Hank arrives, Margaret is effusive to show her husband their beautiful, exceptional intelligent child. As Hank picks up young Henrietta he notices something is off, Henrietta can talk and think at a level years beyond her age but she has no limbs. Merril shifts to Hank’s thoughts: “She didn’t know” (Merril, p.220). For some reason or another, Margaret had been willfully ignorant of her young daughter’s condition. The story ends in ambiguity, with Hank hands tightening around his newborn daughter, trying to comprehend the new, nuclear reality. By delaying the reveal, Merril thrusts the reader into some emotional space similar to the new father—shock, astonishment, sadness. The abruptness paints a gut-wrenching picture of a world touched by radiation, a world that Merril, as a mother, was living in. For Margaret, self-deception had been the only way to survive in a world that had harmed her child, it was the only way to make sense of the incomprehensible and that was a reality “That Only a Mother” would understand.

Works Cited

Merril, Judith. “That Only a Mother” (1948). The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur B Evans, et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010.