 | | must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.
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Lewis's account of grief can stand as an emphatic Christian alternative to, even a contemptuous dismissal of, the recognition of friends in heaven, a standard by which to look at such attempts at comfort, and lay them aside as merely bogus. It is a modern traditionalist's dismissal of Victorian sentimentality, but it can be matched from the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Fry, grieving for her young daughter Betsy, drew great consolation from her religious faith (and even uses the word "consolation") but she was aware of its limitations:
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| | Although faith tells us that the spirit is indeed fled from its earthly house, yet the distress felt in parting with the body, I can hardly describe; for the body of little children, their innocent and beautiful faces and forms, we are prone to delight in; and there is a sort of personal attachment towards little children, that partakes of the nature of animal life, which I believe is hardly to be described, but only fully known to parents.
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Lewis, whom one would not think of as intuitively aware of women's feelings, turns out to be uncannily accurate in his account of a mother's "natural unhappiness" (Fry's "distress felt in parting with the body"). Religious faith may transcend this grief but cannot eliminate it.
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Freud, then, and Lewis: unlikely allies. And not really allies, for though they both reject a view of religion as consolation, they do so for opposite reasons: the lower reason and the higher reason? or the honest reason and another form of wish-fulfillment? No scholarly study can settle that for us.
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In discussing Coleridge's epitaphs I used the term "reversal" to claim that the same poem could, if we shift the way we look at it, turn into something like its opposite. A well-known graphic figure, that of the duck-rabbit, produces this effect in experiments on perception. A blink or other minor stimulus can cause the long ears to turn into a bill and, thus, the same drawing to turn from one animal into the other. Such a cartoon figure, for
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