Jennifer's surgical knife

Jenny Fields’s scalpel is a castaway surgical instrument that she carries in her purse for self-defense. It gives concrete form to the novel’s opening reversal: Jenny is a nurse prepared to care for injured people, but when a soldier violates her in a Boston movie theater, she uses the scalpel to stop him. Its defining significance lies in that union of medical knowledge and self-protection, which the novel introduces before Jenny’s pregnancy or her decision to raise a child without a husband.

Origin and Purpose

The scalpel was not stolen from an operating room. It had been discarded after a deep nick in its point made it unsuitable for fine work. Jenny kept it because she did not need it for surgery: she was an unmarried woman who wanted nothing to do with men and carried the instrument as protection against unwanted advances. The book’s selected beginning makes this purpose central to her introduction, placing the scalpel in her purse before it places her in the role of mother.

The blade initially damaged the purse’s small silk pockets. Jenny then fitted a section of an old thermometer container over its head, making a cap like the one on a fountain pen. This improvised cover made the scalpel something she could keep close and carry routinely. In the theater, as the soldier moved into the adjacent seat and reached toward her, Jenny removed the cap while keeping the instrument inside her purse. The ordinary object was thus both concealed and immediately available; her preparation precedes the encounter rather than being improvised after it begins.

The Movie-Theater Encounter

The soldier first moved seats and then touched Jenny’s knee. She told him to stop. When he ignored her and reached beneath her uniform, she used the scalpel to wound him and prevent the assault. The attack on her is the immediate cause of the instrument’s use: the scene presents the scalpel not as a weapon of aggression but as the means by which Jenny defends herself when a clear verbal refusal fails.

The soldier struck her as he recoiled, and Jenny continued to fend him off. She later explained to police that she had not intended to kill him. After he left the theater, she wiped the scalpel on the seat, returned it to her purse, and replaced its thermometer-container cap. The sequence matters: once the immediate danger passed, she put the instrument away and went to the lobby to offer medical assistance. Her use of the scalpel and her nursing response belong to the same episode, rather than marking separate identities.

Nurse and Self-Defender

In the lobby, someone called for a doctor. Jenny, a nurse, went to help. The soldier fainted when he saw her, while the people in the theater treated her as the aggressor and took her purse. Jenny understood that the visible blood did not mean he was dying; the deeper wound required prompt care, but she believed the situation was not fatal. Her assessment draws on the same professional knowledge that shapes her response to danger, even as others interpret her through the spectacle of the confrontation.

The scalpel’s place in the scene therefore complicates any simple division between care and violence. Jenny does not abandon her nursing role when she defends herself, nor does her willingness to help the injured soldier erase the fact that she acted to protect herself. The purse contains an instrument that belongs to her practical understanding of bodily vulnerability, while her actions distinguish medical care from submission to an assailant.

Opening, Character, and Meaning

The novel begins its main story with Jenny’s arrest in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater. That choice of beginning makes the scalpel a narrative threshold: before the story turns to Jenny’s pregnancy and Garp’s birth, it shows her making a decision about her own safety and autonomy. The object is not merely a biographical detail but part of the scene that establishes the conditions under which Jenny will act.

The scalpel also condenses the novel’s contrast between how Jenny understands herself and how others label her. She remains calm while the theater workers and police respond to the incident with suspicion; the instrument that has allowed her to resist an assault becomes evidence against her in their eyes. Yet her conduct in the lobby restores the other half of the picture: after protecting herself, she returns to the work of a nurse. Its meaning rests in that unresolved combination—an instrument of care carried for defense, used when a boundary is violated, and put away when Jenny turns to help.