understand, they want you to believe it’s their power, not yours. They stick needles into you so you won’t hear anything, you might as well be a dead pig, your legs are up in a metal frame, they bend over you,
technicians, mechanics, butchers, students clumsy or sniggering practising on your body, they take the baby out with a fork like a pickle out of a pickle jar” (79-80). …. “Nobody must find out [about the current
pregnancy] or they will do that to me again, strap me to the death machine, emptiness machine, legs in the metal framework, secret knives. This time I won’t let them” (165). This is the practice of the phallocentric
order, the women should appear as what men want them to. Her lover forced the abortion on her. By becoming pregnant with the child and going against the Law of the Father it places her outside the phallocentric
order and she is whole again. That part of herself she lost through abortion can be raised again outside the phallocentric order that she has left. Her journey from her position in the Symbolic to the Real is now
complete and she feels whole, the goal of becoming an adult in Lacanian physchoanalysis.
Lacan?s theories of development and the structure of society explain the actions of the narrator in the novel. Her psychological breakdown is understood because she does not fit into society. By having a child and
protecting it from society she knows that it will not be taken from her. Therefore, because of the child, she is whole again and exists outside of dominant culture in the Real.