The Cider House Rules
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This article is about the novel. For information on the movie, see The Cider House Rules (film).
The Cider House Rules is a novel by John Irving published in 1985. It has been adapted into a film and a stage play.
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[edit] Plot of The Cider House Rules
Homer Wells, an un-adopted orphan, is one of the book's two central protagonists, along with Dr. Wilbur Larch, who directs the orphanage in which Homer grows up.
From Homer's point of view (the one emphasized in the film), this is a coming-of-age story. After a childhood spent "being useful" as a medical assistant to Dr. Larch, Homer follows the classical Platonic arc from erotic love through love of family to love of civitas. This arc begins when Homer decides to leave the orphanage with Candy Kendall and her boyfriend Wally Worthington, a young couple who work at the Worthington family apple orchard. Wally leaves to fight in World War II, but his plane is shot down over Burma. Believing Wally to be dead, Homer and Candy have an affair and Candy subsequently becomes pregnant. Candy secretly gives birth to a boy named Angel at the orphanage (the first child to go home with its mother). Wally is found alive, so Candy and Homer return home, lying to the family about Angel's parentage (they claim that Homer decided to adopt him). Wally and Candy marry shortly afterwards.
Wilbur Larch's coming-of-age, told in flashbacks, in a sense follows the Platonic arc backward. After a traumatic misadventure with a prostitute as a young man, Wilbur turns his back on sex and on love, choosing instead to serve the community helping women with unwanted pregnancies give birth and then keeping the babies in the orphanage. He makes a point of maintaining an emotional distance from the orphans, so that they can more easily make the transition into an adoptive family, but when it becomes clear that Homer is going to spend his entire childhood at the orphanage, and as he spends a lot of time training Homer as a doctor, Wilbur comes to love Homer almost against his will. Thus, late in life, he comes to a kind of familial love.
Wilbur's life and Homer's are complicated by the fact that Dr. Larch is also secretly an abortionist, at a time when abortion is illegal. He believes that he is doing the world a service because "one way the poor can help themselves would be to be in control of the size of their families." He comes to this work reluctantly, disliking abortion, but driven by seeing the horrors of back-alley abortions. When Homer learns about this secret, he considers it evil, which leads to some angry interchanges between Homer and Wilbur.
Many years later, when Angel is a teenager, he makes friends with Rose Rose, the daughter of Mr. Rose, a migrant worker. Rose Rose becomes pregnant with her father's child, and Homer performs an abortion on her. Homer decides to return to the orphanage after the death of Dr. Larch, and works as the new director. (This is the culminating love-of-civitas step in Homer's life.) Homer and Candy eventually tell Angel that they are his biological parents.
The novel also follows a sub-plot of Melony, Homer's fellow orphan, and her lesbian lover, Lorna.
[edit] Controversy
The novel clearly supports a woman's right to an abortion. Dr. Larch, the novel's primary abortion-advocate, feels strongly towards the "left" on the subject because he believes an infant who is unwanted is too emotionally painful for the mother and the child. Homer is initially reluctant with the subject, but understands Dr. Larch's perception when he must perform an abortion on Rose Rose. The novel also introduces adoption as an alternative.
Many pro-life groups contend [citation needed] that what they feel is an uncommon scenario, of a father-daughter rape, is not a strong argument for the legalization of all abortions. The novel also takes on many other cases of an abortion being a necessary option for a woman, including the extremely poor, prostitutes who are incapable of raising a child, and in one instance a young woman who had a botched abortion and died after her "abortionist" left the crochet hook in her uterus. Irving uses her as an example for people who are going to perform their own "back alley" abortions and need medical assistance for their own safety. Pro-life organizations state [citation needed] that the novel is pro-choice propaganda, and the assumption that Homer will grow up to be a moral man if he performs abortions is a poor image.
