The Cider House Rules

The Cider House Rules takes place over a large sweep of time. Its main action is set from the 1930s through to the 1950s; it also looks backwards to the early 1900s, in a chapter on Dr. Larch’s early life. This is a timespan that encompasses two world wars, as well as periods of both national prosperity and depression. At the same time, most of the novel is set in rural Maine, at a remove from much of this upheaval. Dr. Larch has kept his orphanage deliberately separate from the world so that it can be a place of routine and predictability; even the Ocean’s View orchard, which to Homer is cosmopolitan, is quiet and set in its rhythms. When the outside world intrudes on these sealed-off smaller worlds, it is especially dramatic and startling.

This is seen in Wally Worthington’s experience as a fighter pilot during World War II. Wally is a conventional character with romantic ideas about joining the army and becoming a war hero. He has adventures in the war and comports himself bravely. But his experiences are also often strange and embarrassing to him, as when he is rescued by Burmese peasants and disguised as a woman to escape detection by the Japanese, a wartime enemy. Nothing in his sheltered life has prepared him for such experiences, and when he returns to Maine he finds that he cannot reconcile his wartime reality with his old familiar surroundings. His experiences in the war are disconnected from the rest of the narrative in a way that dramatizes this estrangement; readers are dropped into his adventures in Burma suddenly and then just as suddenly returned to rural Maine. The only continuity between these two different worlds is in the ether reveries of Dr. Larch, who is himself a World War I veteran. Dr. Larch is able to imagine Wally’s wartime experience from his post at St. Cloud’s orphanage, envisioning it as a surreal dream.

Dr. Larch is a secret abortionist, at a time when abortion was illegal. The fight for abortion rights was not yet widespread nor understood within the context of feminism; Dr. Larch, while very traditional in many respects, is also a feminist without knowing it. He understands that expectant mothers have rights of their own, including the right to terminate their pregnancies. He is also sympathetic to poor and vulnerable women, and suspicious of the wealthy and isolated. In reflecting on one wealthy family, he says that “rich people […] were the last to learn about anything” (64). While he lives in a remote part of Maine, he is not isolated in his attitude or his sympathies. Dr. Larch is described in the novel as a typical Yankee, meaning that he is stubborn and independent. He uses his isolated position at St. Cloud’s as a means to effect radical social change, in a way that he would not have been able to do in a big city like Boston.

The upheaval of the larger world also reaches these characters in the form of Mr. Rose and his crew of Black migrant workers. Just as the novel is set before the abortion rights movement, it is also set before the civil rights movement, both of which began in the 1960s. At the same time, the tensions that set these movements in motion are felt by all of the characters, altering their lives. The drama of Mr. Rose and his daughter impacts the Worthington family directly and turns them into a less conventional family. In performing an abortion on Rose, who is pregnant by her own father, Homer comes to understand the necessity of abortions; he decides to follow in Dr. Larch’s footsteps and to take up his post at St. Cloud’s. Homer remains a father to his son, Angel, and stays in touch with Candy and Wally; all of the central characters stay in rural Maine, where they began. At the same time, they are now a more scattered and less traditional family, which would be much more common today.