50 pages • 1 hour read
Danielle ValentineDelicate Condition
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Patriarchal Institutions’ Failure to Acknowledge Female Pain
Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to miscarriage, depictions of self-harm, sexism, and misogyny.
Throughout Delicate Condition, Anna’s feelings, opinions, and desires—especially those having to do with her own body—are consistently ignored or downright denied by the people and institutions in her life. Early in Anna’s IVF treatment, she has a conversation with Dex in which he misquotes a line from The Notebook. Anna, as a professional actress, is an expert in this field while Dex “never watched movies” (10), but Dex still pushes back against her gentle correction of his misquote, insisting that he is right. In response to Dex’s mansplaining, Anna thinks “I was sure I was right, but it didn’t matter” (10). This encounter sets the tone for how institutional structures treat Anna throughout the rest of the novel. Although this moment has low stakes, it exemplifies Anna’s predicament even in higher-stakes situations. Namely, Anna qualifying her certainty, in the face of Dex’s incorrect assertion, as unimportant demonstrates the degree to which her position in a patriarchal, male-dominated industry has already diminished her self-belief. Her assessment that “it didn’t matter” also gives insight into how she has learned to cope with Dex’s inability to acknowledge her expertise and his own failings: by self-silencing to avoid conflict.
Dex’s consistent downplaying of Anna’s pain represents and is enabled, in part, by the ways in which the medical institutions in Anna’s life also fail to acknowledge the reality of her experiences. Just as Dex continues to disbelieve Anna in increasingly high-stakes situations regarding her pregnancy, doctors consistently dismiss Anna’s perception of reality. Dr. Hill does not believe the severity of Anna’s pain, suggesting that an aspirin should be sufficient, and Dr. Crawford refuses to believe that Anna had an unauthorized ultrasound until Dex confirms her version of events. Delicate Condition explores the effects that this failure to acknowledge female pain and violation has on the women who are disregarded by the systems and people that purport to help them. A key effect that links many of the women in this novel is desperation: Financial desperation drives Io Preecher to become a surrogate; emotional desperation prompts Judy Marshall to confess her childbearing fears to her neighbor; and Anna’s ever-escalating desperation pushes her to self-harm. The medical establishment downplays the desperation that these women feel, demanding they accept it as a “normal” part of pregnancy. This normalization of desperation leaves Anna, and many of the women whose stories are told in the interludes, feeling isolated from any systems that might actually help them. As a result, these women are vulnerable to potentially predatory institutions. Valentine uses horror as a genre to take the consequences of normalized desperation to their extremes, albeit with a twist. As Anna comes to trust a witch coven over her medical institution, she also learns to break out of her self-silencing and conflict-avoidant tendencies. As these fellow women offer empathy for her profound desperation, Anna steps into a more powerful role, terminating her relationship with Dex and embracing her impulses—regardless of how horrifying society may perceive them to be.
The Necessity and Limits of Female Friendship
Anna spends most of Delicate Condition completely isolated from other women. Her primary point of contact is Dex and, once they’ve moved into Talia’s empty house, the only other person she regularly sees is Kamal. From the novel’s opening section, Anna is desperate for contact with other women. She admits that she’s lonely. She starts doing yoga just to spend “one hour surrounded by other pregnant women, a small taste of the village I’d heard so much about” (81). For much of the novel, Anna’s only contact with this “village” is Siobhan. Though Anna only speaks to her best friend a handful of times before Siobhan’s cancer recurrence, Siobhan is a powerful presence. Anna’s female friend is the only person in Anna’s life who can ease the spiraling anxiety that threatens to consume her. Anna’s conversation with Siobhan in the restaurant bathroom, in which the women joke about Anna giving birth to spiders, represents one of the few moments in the novel in which Anna is able to center herself through humor. Her friendship with Siobhan opens her to modes of expression and understanding that aren’t accessible to her through her relationships with men. Shared humor, though, isn’t the only benefit to female connection for Anna. Throughout the novel, Anna wonders about Dex’s previous wife, Adeline, and only late in her pregnancy learns that Adeline resisted the idea of children because her sister “had a bad pregnancy” (237). This revelation gives Anna a small window into what she’s missing due to her lack of connection to other women: the wealth of knowledge built from shared personal experiences that could guide her. The lack of female friendship that Anna experiences once Siobhan is hospitalized exacerbates the horror she experiences as the novel progresses.
At the end of Delicate Condition, however, the takeaway regarding female friendship is somewhat ambiguous or at least mixed. Anna ultimately finds herself in the fold of a coven of women who use their communally built knowledge and magic to help other women conceive and extend their own lifespans. For Anna, there is substantial power to be had in this community. Anna comes into this community, though, at great personal cost: She’s never told that she’s being impregnated with a child that could serve as a host for Siobhan’s reincarnation, and she’s never given the opportunity to consent to the pregnancy. The only time Anna gains the chance to consent—after the car accident, as Siobhan and the coven are already preparing to complete the ritual transfer—comes at a moment of great duress. Anna is in labor and has only just learned that if she doesn’t consent, her child might be marred by the magic.
Rather than being the idealized “village” that Anna dreamt of, the coven is an ambiguously motivated and often self-serving collective. What commentary, then, does this create about the importance of female friendship? On the one hand, it’s possible to view the coven as a triumph of female friendship despite the limitations of an oppressive society. The women in the coven are doing what they must to survive and thrive. After all, Siobhan wanted to get Anna’s consent but simply couldn’t until the last minute due to the men and representatives of male-dominated institutions who ensured Anna’s isolation. Arguably, Anna consents implicitly during their phone calls, as she makes clear her intense desire for a baby, whatever the costs. The coven also does try to alleviate the pain of Anna’s unusual pregnancy. Furthermore, the novel indicates that the coven works to pass on knowledge about pregnancy that is kept from women by modern medicine. On the other hand, though, the coven members use other women’s bodies to extend their own lifespans and, as seen through Anna’s story, this process can result in great trauma for the woman giving birth—at least, in those cases where the women reject or are removed from the coven’s ministrations. This ambiguous conclusion to the story leaves the question of the benefit of female friendship open to multiple interpretations. Broadly speaking, though female connection may not always manifest in an traditionally wholesome manner, it is sometimes the only way to build and transmit female-focused knowledge.
Monstrosity as Female Survival
The notion of pregnancy as an unnatural or even monstrous state is seeded throughout the novel, from Abigail Rowe’s insistence that her own child is a monster (123) to Cora’s suspicion that Anna is gestating a monster (343). In her time at the beach house, Anna’s unborn child does seem to act in monstrous ways—it bruises her ribs and undergoes a transformation in Anna’s mind, growing a claw-like appendage to pierce through her stomach. The end of the book reveals that this monstrosity was all imagined, all part of the hallucinations that come of Siobhan’s magic. However, Anna’s pregnancy is monstrous in a very real sense, too. Anna undergoes a series of physical changes over the course of the novel that render her body monstrous: Her hair falls out in bloody clumps; she grows a scale-like layer on the skin of her legs; and, most gruesomely, she gains an appetite for raw meat and live animals. Anna’s own body is visited by an escalating monstrosity that threatens to consume her entirely by the novel’s end.
The scene of the car crash represents a turning point for Anna’s relationship to her monstrosity. Before this moment, Anna sees her monstrous body as something in need of medical treatment, and her monstrous appetite as something to hide. Anna even goes so far as to push the memory of her consumption of the live cat out of her mind; it happens off the page and is never narratively recounted. Seeing herself through the lens of the patriarchal institutions in which she lives, she is prey, destined to be consumed by the all-important infant. However, in the moments after Dex insists that Anna “calm down” (358)—while she is in labor and has just learned of his infidelity—Anna embraces her monstrosity for the first time. Her consumption of Dex’s finger recalls her previous consumption of living animals, but it’s also different: Anna chooses to eat the finger but spit out the wedding ring. This choice of what to consume suggests that Anna is not only embracing her monstrosity but also channeling her monstrous capacity, choosing how and when to apply it. The controlled embrace of her monstrosity allows Anna to finally reject the self-policing she’s had to engage in throughout her marriage with Dex and to (quite literally) free herself of his clutches. Viewing herself instead through the coven’s lens, Anna becomes a consenting predator, and her child is (literally) a newly vulnerable friend in need of her care and companionship. In short, it’s only through the embrace of the monstrous that Anna can escape the people and systems that have tried to control her mind and body.
