In the short time since its publication, Dana Medoro’s Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion has sparked enthusiastic discussion due to the much-needed perspective it offers on how to read what is suggested or unsaid by canonical American authors, in this case, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Medoro reads Poe and Hawthorne’s fiction closely, and she reveals how seemingly well-known texts like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and The Scarlet Letter participate in contemporaneous discourse about abortion in American life. I come to Medoro’s book not as an expert on Poe or Hawthorne, but as someone who studies abortion stories in American literary history. I trust the audience of this publication is well suited to judge Medoro’s close readings of Hawthorne’s novels, and as such I focus my review on Medoro’s engagement with the literary history of abortion.
In the preface, Medoro notes that her argument...
