In Edith Wharton’s 1917 novel Summer, Charity visits an abortionist in the city closest to her sleepy hometown in order to confirm her suspicion that she’s pregnant after an illicit summer love affair. Dr. Merkle, the woman who examines her, fulfills every early twentieth-century stereotype of an abortionist: she’s wealthy and crass; she has a foreign accent; and she tries to swindle Charity for as much money as possible during a brief visit that only results in a pregnancy confirmation and not an abortion. In her biography of Wharton, Hermione Lee supposes that Dr. Merkle might be Jewish. Dale Bauer links Dr. Merkle to stereotypes of German immigrants in the United States. Jennie Kassanoff furthers that analysis to observe that Merkle’s name is drawn from the Latin root that means “to decay,” and marks the character as “an agent of race suicide” (145). As Kassanoff also notes, the young...
