American Experience: The Midwife's Tale

In 1997, PBS broadcast an film adaptation of the renowned book by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “The Midwife’s Tale”  aninterpretation of a diary written by a Maine woman, Martha Ballard.   The program is a typical PBS American Experience production, long on atmospherics and good intentions and short on substantive information, a non-fiction film that occupies an uneasy middle ground between documentary and drama.  Ballard was a midwife and delivered 816 babies.  She seems to have been indefatigable, operating various small enterprises from her home, managing children, and making terse, if eloquent, entries in her diary.  Ballard’s diary spans the years 1787 through 1811 when she died and provides an intimate perspective on daily life in frontier Maine.  The PBS show is interesting, but clumsy and raises far more questions than it answers.  Rather pointlessly, the program is designed as a dialogue between Professor Ulrich, who speaks with an annoying lisp and provides a mostly superfluous commentary on the images staging scenes from the life of the midwife.  Professor Ulrich’s  book is fantastically well researched, thorough and, no doubt, comprehensive, apparently a monument of its kind and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1991.  It is scholarly and very different from the impressionistic approach to the material taken by the TV adaptation.  Ballard was a formidable woman and, certainly, can’t be conceived as a victim of any kind -- if anything, she may have bullied others and was a battle-ax.   The PBS program begins by showing us Martha Ballard canoeing through the mist and, then, we are spectators at several deliveries, a handful of women holding the laboring mother upright while the midwife gropes between her thighs.  Sometimes, the laboring women are frog-marched in circles in their spare wooden rooms and, on the soundtrack, we hear a chorus of shape-singers proclaiming God’s glory.  But Martha wasn’t particularly religious, during one period didn’t attend church for four years, and, although she ends her diary entries with hash-tags about God’s mercy or justice, this seems mostly perfunctory.  She was practical, detail-oriented, prosaic-minded, and had a keen sense of her rights and perquisites as well as the rights and perquisites of her family members -- these people were litigious and there is considerable discussion of lawsuits and court cases.  Her husband, whom she always refers to as “Mr. Ballard”, was a surveyor, possibly a British sympathizer (hence, the move to remote Maine), and he ran afoul of local settlers when surveying  their stakes for wealthy interests in Boston.  Accused of disenfranchising pioneers in the neighborhood, Mr. Ballard is beaten, his instruments destroyed, and he becomes a tax-collector -- apparently, Mr. Ballard didn’t mind being despised.  Some level of malfeasance or ineptitude runs as a vein through the Ballard family -- several of the son’s seem to be ne’er-do-wells and the patriarch misappropriated tax revenues, or was accused of such misappropriation, since the poor fellow was tossed into Debtor’s Prison for failing to remit collections and remained imprisoned there for much of his 80th and 81st year.  During the course of the program, we learn some things about late 18th century sexual morality on the frontier -- it was surprisingly casual -- and there is pestilence, infant mortality, rape, and, even, a mass murder.  The actors and actresses don’t have much to do but look concerned, cough, and, then, sometimes spasm and lapse into comas.  There is much representation of death and dying in the show and, although it’s not gory, the program is generally depressing.  In the few scenes when people sing drinking songs or dance, the mood appreciably lightens but, then, we are back to the salt mine -- the depiction of mortal illness and sorrow in an icy, bleak environment (the program was shot in Canada in New Brunswick).  At first, the scenes dramatizing Ballard’s quotidian existence are intercut with shots of Professor Ulrich handling the diary -- surprisingly in 1996, scholars mauled the delicate paper without wearing the gloves that we see on all recent programs featuring old artifacts.  Ulrich’s commentary drops out of the film about midway and doesn’t return until the last few minutes.  The show is useful for reminding us about the sheer strangeness of the past, how people’s lives were unrecognizably different from the way we live today -- in one scene, the Midwife lovingly binds an onion to the sole of someone's foot.  This austere, minimalist material seems to call for long sequence shots, inexpressive framing and staging, and few close-ups -- it’s the kind of material that Kelly Reichardt brilliantly managed in her harrowing film “Meek’s Cut-off” and that approach to the diary seems appropriate to me.  But PBS treats the material with Masterpiece Theater respect -- too many close-ups and a film-making style that is well-suited to melodrama and detective shows, but really too conventional for this subject.  The program is reasonably well-done and useful if it nudges you to read the book on which it is based.  But I kept wishing that a real film artist -- someone like Reichardt or Peter Watkins or Straub  had been enlisted to direct the movie.