Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (11 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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Page 24
"I cannot write"
Margaret Oliphant bore six children and outlived them all. Three died in infancy; the eldest, Maggie, died in 1864, aged ten; her two sons died in their thirties, when she was over sixty, leaving her desolate: "all gone, all gone, and no light to come to this sorrow any more." Shortly after Maggie's death, she wrote an account of her feelings; and in the last ten years of her life she incorporated this into an autobiographical sketch, much of which dealt with her children's deaths, and her reaction to them. The pages about Maggie's death are a cry of pain. Her husband had died in 1859, after only seven years of married life, and just before the birth of the last child; the further blow of losing her "one woman-child" seemed at times unbearable:
The hardest moment in my present sad life is the morning, when I must wake up and begin the dreary world again. I can sleep during the night, and I sleep as long as I can; but when it is no longer possible, when the light can no longer be gainsaid, and life is going on everywhere, then I, too, rise up to bear my burden. How different it used to be! When I was a girl I remember the feeling I had when the fresh morning light came round. Whatever grief there had been the night before, the new day triumphed over it. Things must be better than one thought, must be well, in a world which woke up to that new light, to the sweet dews and sweet air which renewed one's soul. Now I am thankful for the night and the darkness, and shudder to see the light and the day returning.
14
Sometimes her sorrow breaks into exclamations ("Help me, Oh help me Lord"), sometimes into despairing questions ("Where are you, oh my child, my child"), sometimes into puzzlement over the after-life: "She is with God, she is in his hands. I know nothing, cannot even imagine anything. Can I trust her with Him? Can I trust Him that He has done what was best for her?"
Some of the funeral notices on Princess Charlotte had tried to suggest that a death such as hers might be a blessing: "If she has been suddenly taken," wrote the
Sun
, "by the awful visitation of God, from all the pleasures and high distinctions of this transitory life, she is, mercifully, spared from its future trials, cares and sorrows." This is a rather half-hearted version of what some stern preachers stated much more aggressively, that since the world is a vale of sinfulness, we should give thanks for an early death because it enables the young person to avoid temptation (though the theology
 
Page 25
of this assertion is, as we shall see, tricky.) And in the pages of Catherine Tait and Elizabeth Prentiss we have met, without the specious argument that it was for the best, the effort to accept the death without repining,, to believe that it would be "unchristian and ungrateful" to feel anything like discontent.
As we read Margaret Oliphant's autobiography, these pious assurances crumple before our eyes. Preachers can urge resignation, because God decreed the death: she writes, "I have not been resigned, I cannot feel resigned, my heart is sore as if it was an injury." Preachers can know it is all for the best, because God means everything for the best, and if we cannot see the blessing that is because our mortal sight is limited: she writes, "I keep on always upbraiding and reproaching God. I can't help thinking of the question somebody once asked a grieving woman, Have you not yet forgiven God? I feel like that myself." In the end, she does not trust God: "I come round again to the one misused unfailing answerGod must ever have a reason."
Thirty years later, facing the loss first of one son then of the other, she was still thinking of Maggie's death and of the two children who died in infancy. Of her "dear little Marjorie," who died at eight months, she writes, "I have never forgot the look with which that baby died." Her elder son Cecil had been a disappointment, the younger had had bad health, but it was the sheer fact of losing them that overwhelmed all previous disappointments and worries, and led to a recurrence of the despair she had felt after Maggie's death. She is clear-sighted enough to see how helpful people are trying to be, but she knows it is useless: "Everybody is very kind of coursepeople are always kind and I am like Job, such a monument of endless sorrow, always beginning and beginning once again." Reading Scott's account of his wife's death in his journal she is deeply impressed, but she adds: "No child died before him. It occurs to me that anything in the world could be lightly borne with that exception."
Margaret Oliphant wrote nearly a hundred novels, and though none has quite become a classic they deserve their modest place in literary history as well as the mild revival they have recently had. They are carefully plotted with a good deal of melodrama, some sharp social observation, and some effective comedy. But you will search in vain in the pages of
Miss Marjoriebanks
and
Hester
, probably her two best, for anything like the raw power of this autobiographical sketch. The meticulous plots of the novels are of course totally absent from the disjointed fragments of autobiography, which
 
Page 26
she never published or even arranged into a coherent whole; but the contrast shows us what perhaps we have always knownthat plot is after all a kind of substitute for death, a way of producing in fiction the emotional intensity that is thrust into our lives by the death of those we love.
This reading of the
Autobiography
, I must now pause to observe, is directly at odds with that of its most recent editor, Elisabeth Jay. In her Introduction, she insists that it is a literary artifact and that the self it offers to us is a deliberate creation:
It is important to make this point about the literariness of the
Autobiography
if only to dispel the long-held notion that this fragmented self-disclosure is merely a naive compilation of diary, chronicle and anecdote, eliciting compassion for a series of personal tragedies. The self that Oliphant presents in thee
Autobiography
is a deliberate creation.
Jay even sees the work as an anticipation of modernism, suggesting that this accounts for Virginia Woolf's praise of it, because it approached the condition to which she believed fiction should aspire, with "no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style."
Jay's reading of the
Autobiography
is so consonant with current critical theory, and so much at odds with mine, that it seems necessary to offer a short discussion of it, and a defense of what may be seen as a naive reading. The theoretical question at issue concerns the determinants of any piece of writing: how far it is the result of preceding, often nonverbal experience that was there before the act of writing began, and how far it is the result of the strategies of the act of writing itselfin other words, how far our world is shaped by the language we use to articulate it.
15
Once we grant that any act of writing has a double input, from experience and from the strategies of writing, we can then observe that the respective share of each can vary from one writing act to another. I claim that the
Autobiography
derives far more from experience than the novels do and that it
does
"elicit compassion for a series of personal tragedies." To deny this is (I return to Ricoeur's terminology) to confine ourselves to the semioticand, in a case like this, would be deeply insulting to Oliphant's grief. To assert it is not to refuse interest in writing strategies but to see them as a way of exploring the interface between text and experience.
This enables me to claim what Jay's position would have difficulty in claiming (even had she wished to, which it appears she does not), that the
 
Page 27
Autobiography
is the most powerful of Oliphant's writings because it is the least literary, the closest to experience, refusing the stereotypes she employed so competently in her novels. I do not want to make this claim in its extreme, anti-literary form, to assert that the language of even the greatest poet "must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions": in this notorious passage, Wordsworth is indeed being naive, overlooking the likelihood that the immediacy of real language will fall into cliché.
Trying, then, to step briefly outside the hermeneutic circle, I propose that there are moments in the
Autobiography
when the power of the writing comes from sheer immediacy. Such a moment occurs in the last two sentences. A long paragraph rehearses her son's faults, his virtues, their intimacy, and the progress of his illness, and ends, "but all through he was getting weaker; and I knew it, and tried not to know." After all this come two brief one-sentence paragraphs:
And now here I am all alone.
I cannot write any more.
The isolation of those two blunt statements into separate paragraphs is a stroke of genius. I have no proof, but I feel sure it was not pondered, it resulted from the author forgetting her craftsmanship and her principles of construction and letting her grief speak. It is misleading, therefore, to call it a strategy of writing (though it is one). For the reader, that touch of genius in the writing creates the emotion; for the writer, it was the emotion that shaped the writing. For both, the total experience is semantic, not just semiotic.
I will add a word on Jay's parallel with modernism. Modernist narrative strategies, as is well known, disperse and disintegrate the unitary characters of traditional realist fiction. We can explain this either by saying that modernism was a revolution in sensibility, in our awareness of ourselves, and that human beings today are less certain of a coherent identity than were their great-grandparents; or by saying that experience has always been more fragmentary than the conventions of narrative have found convenient, so that modernism is actually more realistic than realism. Has human nature changed, or has its representation?
It would be an oversimplification to choose one of these views and reject the other, but the shift of emphasis is important. On the one hand,

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