This is the second in a series of posts that detail the various Pregnancy Trap plot points that run through the work of J. K. Rowling from Harry Potter to Cormoran Strike. For the ‘Fourth Generation Rowling Studies’ context of this series, see the introduction to the first post in it, ‘Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Merope Gaunt.‘
In brief, each post in this series will explain the importance of the specific Pregnancy Trap being explored to the specific title in which it appears or to the series in question, will detail its textual appearance and what if anything Rowling has said about in her interviews, and will compare and contrast the Trap with others Rowling has used, i.e., what makes it a typical one and what makes it unique. At the conclusion of the series, I will be sending my summary and conclusions from it to HogwartsProfessor Substack subscribers.
Merope Gaunt’s nightmare relationship with her abusive father and brother and her decision to trap Muggle charmster Thomas Riddle were the foundation crime and point of origin respectively for the Harry Potter novels. Rowling’s first post Potter piece was the stand-alone novel Casual Vacancy in which two women characters try to win a man by sexual favors, one of whom deploys a Pregnancy Trap intentionally and with tragic results. A third woman traps her husband with a child he does not want albeit through adoption not pregnancy and the trap is post nuptials not prior. Join me after the jump for all that!
(1) The Importance of the Pregnancy Trap in Casual Vacancy
All the narrative threads in Rowling’s astonishingly autobiographical text with its remarkably varied ensemble cast come together in the end around Krystall’s decision to pursue unprotected sex with ‘Fats’ in order to spring a Pregnancy Trap that will enable her to provide a home for her little brother, Robbie. Her desperation results in the boy’s death and her own suicide as well as the revelation of all the secrets teased out by the ‘Ghost of Barry Fairbrother.’ It isn’t the foundation event of the novel but it’s trigger climax, though, as with Merope Gaunt, it springs from this remarkable young woman’s experience of abuse, neglect, and finally rape.
Kay and Gaia Bawden are a two-fer in the Rowling Autobiographical Image sweepstakes. Rowling as a woman who relocates to her own disadvantage in hopes of winning a ring from ‘Manchester Michael’ is represented by the social worker Kay. Rowling as the child conceived illegitimately and who moved as a child from a home she loved to a relatively hostile school environment has her reflection in the unhappy, hip, and clever Gaia. Kay is not consciously working a Pregnancy Trap with Gavin, but she is shamelessly trying to force his hand to commit to her by her move to Pagford and sexual generosity; the illegitimate conception of Gaia years prior may or may not have been a Pregnancy Trap, although, either way, it failed to capture its target. These near Pregnancy Traps are not central to the novel’s storyline in the way that Krystall’s is but they are the defining points of the Bawden subplot.
Stuart ‘Fats’ Wall is the adopted son of Colin and Tessa Wall and the Catcher in the Rye Junior Varsity sociopath of his Comprehensive. He is the biological child of a fourteen year old woman and, after the death of Krystall and Robbie Weedon, Tessa explains to him that it was possible, even probable that he was the product of incest, a necessarily “coercive” union. There is no Pregnancy Trap there, but Tessa reveals to the shell-shocked and suddenly sober post suicide Stuart that she had forced the adoption on her mentally ill husband in her desperation to have a child (as a Type 1 diabetic, pregnancy was not in her cards). The trapped father, the self-important and empathy-free child of coercive love, and the suffering mother check key Pregnancy Trap boxes.
(2) Textual Appearance of the Pregnancy Traps
- Krystal Weedon’s ‘Pregnancy Trap’
Krystall has sex with Fats behind a Tesco, in the Pagford graveyard, and then in the bushes by the bridge at story’s end. She is pursued by Stuart the first two times while she offers herself at the story’s end.
The Pregnancy Trap springs to her mind as a real escape hatch for her and Robbie after she is raped by Obbo, her mother’s dealer and lover, which gives that nightmare scene more than a hint of incest. At the end of that chapter (Part 3, chapter XI), Krystall runs through the town, distraught, thinking repeatedly of ‘Mist’ Fairbrother,’ the only father figure she ever had.
A clear lucid voice in Krystal’s head was speaking to Mr. Fairbrother, who was the only adult who had ever talked to her the way she needed, unlike Mrs Wall, so well-intentioned and so blinkered, and Nana Cath, refusing to hear the whole truth.
I gotta get Robbie out here. How can I get away? I gotta get away.
Her one sure refuge, the little house in Hope Street, was already being gobbled up by squabbling relatives…
She scurried around a corner underneath a streetlamp, looking over her shoulder in case {Obbo} was watching her, following.
And then the answer came to her, as though Mr. Fairbrother had shown her the way.
If she got knocked up by Fats Wall, she would be able to get her own place from the council. She would be able to take Robbie to live with her and the baby if Terri used again. And Obbo would never enter her house, not ever. There would be bolts and chains and locks on the door, and her house would be clean, always clean, like Nana Cath’s house.
Half running along the dark street, Krystall’s sobs slowed and subsided.
The Walls would probably give her money. They were like that. She could imagine Tessa’s plain, concerned face, bending over a cot. Krystal would have their grandchild.
She would lose Fats in getting pregnant; they always went, once you were expecting; she had watched it happen nearly every time in the Fields. But perhaps he would be interested; he was so strange. It did not much matter to her either way. Her interest in him, except as the essential component in her plan, had dwindled to almost nothing.
What she wanted was the baby: the baby was more than a means to an end. She liked babies; she had always loved Robbie. She would keep the two of them safe together; she would be like a better, kinder, younger Nana Cath to her family.
And she gives it her best shot. Tragically, the “essential component” in her plan, Stuart Walls sleeping with her, leads to both sex and death, the only “real” things in life according to Fats.
- The Bawden Traps
Kay Bawden reflects on the hopelessness of her relationship with Gavin Hughes when calling him from her workplace (Tuesday, chapter IV):
(They had met in London at Gavin’s brother’s birthday party. Kay had not known anyone there, except for the friend who had dragged her along for support. Gavin had just split up with Lisa; he had been a little drunk, but had seemed decent, reliable, and conventional, not at all the kind of man that Kay usually went for. He had poured out the story of his broken relationship and then gone home with her to the flat in Hackney. He had been keen while the affair remained long distance, visiting at weekends and telephoning her regularly; but when, by a miracle, she had got a job in Yarvil, for less money, and put her flat in Hackney on the market, he had seemed to take fright…) …
(If she and Gavin did not work out… but they had to work out. She had moved for him, changed jobs for him, uprooted her daughter for him. He would never have let that happen, surely, unless his intentions were serious? He must have thought through the consequences if they split up; how awful and awkward it would be, running across each other constantly in a tiny town like Pagford?)
That entrapment by love-bombing is not technically a Pregnancy Trap, of course, though there is clearly coercive love involved. In Part 2, chapter VII, Kay relates to Samantha Mollinson the circumstances of Gaia’s conception which hints of a Pregnancy Trap without being one explicitly.
“Divorced? asked Samantha delicately.
“No,” said Kay. “We weren’t married. He was a university boyfriend and we split up not long after she was born.”
“Yeah, Miles and I had barely left university ourselves,” said Samantha.
Kay did not know whether Samantha meant to draw a distinction between herself, who had married the big smug father of her children, and Kay, who had been left…not that Samantha could know that Brendan had left her…
Gaia had tried her own kind of trap for her boyfriend Marco before she left London:
Gaia had sex with Marco four times before leaving Hackney, each time stealing condoms out of Kay’s bedside table. She had half wanted Kay to know to what lengths she was driven, to brand herself on Marco’s memory because she was being forced to leave him. (Part 3, chapter VIII)
The Bawdens, mother and daughter, have little success at “capturing” their men, an accomplishment Ruth Price and Shirley Mollinson pride themselves on though each of them married monsters. ((Wednesday, chapter II)
- The Wall Family ‘Pregnancy Trap’
Tessa Wall wins the love of her husband not because she became pregnant with his child and forced him to propose out of moral obligation. She “captured” her man despite the fact she was unable to conceive a child. But she trapped him, nonetheless, with “coercive love” to get the child she wanted. After telling her adopted son Stuart that his birth mother was fourteen years old at his birth and it seemed as likely as not that his conception was incestuous, she spilled out the circunstances of the Wall family decision to adopt the boy (Part 6, chapter II):
“I was desperate to adopt you,” she said. “Desperate. But Dad was very ill. He said to me, ‘I can’t do it. I’m scared I’ll hurt a baby. I need to get better before we do this, and I can’t do that and cope with the new baby as well.’
“But I was so determined to have you,” said Tessa, “That I pressured him into lying, and telling the social workers that he was fine, and pretending to be happy and normal. We brought you home, and you were tiny and premature, and on the fifth night we had you, Dad slipped out of bed and went to the garage, put a hosepipe on the exhaust of the car and tried to kill himself, because he was convinced he’d smothered you. And he almost died.
“So you can blame me,” said Tessa, “for your and Dad’s bad start, and maybe you can blame me for everything that’s come since. But I’ll tell you this, Stuart. Your father’s spent his life facing up to things he never did. I don’t expect you to understand his kind of courage. But,” her voice broke at last, and he heard the mother he knew, “he loves you, Stuart.”
She tells herself that last bit was a lie and worries that her whole life has been a lie, but Colin rises to the occasion and protects Fats from his outraged mother’s determination that he fulfill his “moral obligation” and go to the Weedon double funeral.
“Coercive love” in straight up and sideways pregnancy traps are everywhere in Casual Vacancy.
(3) Compare and Contrast with Previous Rowling Pregnancy Traps
I hope in this series of Pregnancy Trap posts to catalog the common qualities and differences between the various traps sprung by women to capture husbands in the works of J. K. Rowling.
Merope-Riddle trap qualities: abused woman, clueless, disinterested, and self-important man, dishonest conception of child (Love Potion), coercive marriage, ‘divorce’ after father learns about trap, figurative and literal death of mother consequent to that break, love-less and consequently psychopathic child reflecting union of parents
Krystall Weedon trap qualities: abused woman, clueless, disinterested, and self-important adolescent, dishonest conception-attempt (no birth control), transformation of father-target ex post facto (a psychological death and rebirth), figurative and literal death of mother consequent to trap-event, death (and community apotheosis) of child associated with trap-event
Kay Bawden trap qualities (Brendan/Gaia): no information on state of mother beyond being a university girlfriend, father leaves mother and child, no transformation of mother it seems ex post facto as she works to entrap Gavin Hughes, daughter seems fairly well adjusted at least until her mother “uprooted” her to Padford
Tessa Wall trap qualities: sick woman, mentally ill man, already married but childless, forced creation of family that ‘father’ does not want or welcome, figurative death of father (ultimate rebirth at child’s psychological death, being the target of a woman’s Pregnancy Trap), revelation of mother’s coercive maternity, psychological death and rebirth of child
I have spent more than a week re-reading Casual Vacancy and hope to write much more about the ‘Ghost of Barry Fairbrother,’ the three instances of incest in Rowling’s first post Potter effort, and the remarkable puzzle of a structure that it has. I even learned a slang term for the process of working an idiomatic Pregnancy Trap, namely, “To pull the goalie “~ Stop contraception to work a pregnancy trap or just to become pregnant intentionally with a partner.
More anon. The next Pregnancy Trap — Bellatrix Lestrange! Stay tuned…
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