What A Young Wife Ought To Know Analysis

Hannah Moscovitch’s play What A Young Wife Ought to Know takes viewers on an emotional journey back to the 1920s in Ottawa, whereby they are immersed into the startling reality of the status of reproductive health. In a post-world- war one era, issues of love, sex, pregnancy, and abortion are explored. The play follows the life of Sophie (Lisa Repo-Martell), her sister Alma (Rebecca Parent), and Sophie’s eventual husband (David Patrick Flemming) who all end up facing physical and emotional repercussions for succumbing to their individual sexual desires.

Prior to entering the theatre, I had little expectation as to what I was walking in to in terms of stage appearance. Upon entering, the simplicity of the stage setup, paired with the smoke

Much like reading a Shakespearean tragedy, the play’s audience requires a taste of emotional respite. One of the key laugh-out-loud moment that comes directly to mind is the sex scene that is garnered by desperation, whereby the couple experiments with a method of birth control that leaves viewers, including me, cringing. I gather the use of cocoa butter and tartaric acid as a method of birth control should not be tried at home, and that is one of the many things the play has taught me about the lack of sex education in the 20s. This touch of humour has a twofold effect; the audience is given the opportunity to purge themselves of pent-up emotion, and, in doing so, inevitably prepare themselves for more, while being educated on a dated method of birth-prevention. One assessment I have made following my viewing, is that the play manages to make its viewers laugh at things that could just as easily simultaneously make one’s stomach turn. In the previously used example, the couple’s innocence regarding sex education is undoubtedly funny, but it is also troublesome. Works of art are not meant to communicate one affect, and the play follows in this tradition by perpetuating the complicated dichotomy of feeling both amused and concerned by and for the

She questions, “ladies, is this the type of birth prevention you use?” Perhaps this was meant as a way to continue engaging the audience by forcing upon them a type of self-introspection, but in my view, this address mid-way through the play simply served to distract. What a Young Wife Ought to Know was inspired by a compilation of letters from the 1920s where women voiced their sexual concerns explicitly and unapologetically. Most of the literature of the 1920s negated to document intimate and libidinous pursuits, and perhaps this is attributable to the fact that Sophie’s mid-play probing seems so out of play. Her voice, much like women’s sexual identities in the 1920s, is out-of-place. In this way, my critiquing of this aspect of the play is apropos for this assessment. Sophie’s voice is out of place in this circumstance, but that is part of the brilliance of this modern rendition of a dated