Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (54 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 141
going
there
, to the spirits bright, Tom; I'm going
before long
"this enables the text to tell us explicitly, "It is as if heaven had an especial band of angels, whose office it was to sojourn for a season here, and endear to them the wayward human heart, that they might bear it upwards with them in their homeward flight" (chapter 22). There is even a toying with etymology for the child's name: "O Evangeline! rightly named," her father says, "hath not God made thee an evangel to me?" (chapter 16). ''Angel" derives from the Greek word for "messenger," "evangel" and (the older term in English) "evangelist" derive from the Greek for "good news," and the two are connected, because a messenger brings news, but it is doubtful if St. Clare was thinking of that; he was simply leaping at the opportunity to call his child an angel.
As a spiritualized beinga proto-angelEva is very like Nell, but there is nothing in
The Old Curiosity Shop
like her public oration just before dying: "'I want to see all our people together. I have some things I
must
say to them,' said Eva." What she must say is, first, that she loves them all and is soon going to leave them; this leads to "bursts of groans, sobs and lamentations," to which she replies, "If you love me, you must not interrupt me so. Listen to what I say." Since it was her announcement that caused the outburst, what we are being shown is a contradiction inherent in such exhortation: the grief which makes it harder to hear her message is also what makes the hearers more receptive to it. The message itself is a simple Christian call to repentance and conversion, in which she becomes so explicitly a Christ figure that the heartbroken slaves "sobbed and prayed and kissed the hem of her garment" (chapter 26).
Uncle Tom's Cabin
was Stowe's first novel, but not her last child death; and I will add an example from
The Pearl of Orr's Island
(1862). Strictly speaking, the death of Mara is not a child's death, since the novel is a love story, and she is already engaged to Moses; but when it comes to the deathbed she is no longer seen as nubile, but functions just as a child might; and the elements are taken straight from the tradition that runs through Nell and Eva:
Mara seemed to rule all around her with calm sweetness and wisdom, speaking unconsciously only the speech of heaven. She seemed like one of the sweet friendly angels one reads of in the Old Testament, so lovingly companionable, walking and talking, eating and drinking, with mortals, yet ready at any unknown moment to ascend with the flames of some sacrifice and be gone.
 
Page 142
When the moment comes "when heaven claims its own," the details are almost identical to those surrounding little Eva:
The bed was then all snowy white, and that soft still sealed face, the parted waves of golden hair, the little hands folded over the white robe, all had a sacred and wonderful calm, a rapture of repose that seemed to say "it is done." (Chapter 43)
He Never Called Me Mother
Grief is a personal experience and may seem essentially private, but it needs the presence of others for its full release: we weep not only to relieve our inner distress but also to obtain comfort. Even when we weep alone, we are partly aware of ourselves as social beings. Grief will therefore be intensified if the weeping has to be suppressed and the comfort is not available. A mother who has to watch her child die without being able to weep openly will give an extra twist to the pathos.
This bright idea occurred to Mrs. Henry Wood, and the result was
East Lynne
(1861), one of the most popular novels of the century, and even more popular as a play. Isabel Carlyle, having by a series of rather improbable coincidences run away from her husband with a melodramatic villain, and then been abandoned and later disfigured in a railway accident in which she is thought to have died, returns incognito to her now remarried husband as governess to her own children and, without being able to reveal her identity, watches the older boy, William, die: "Oh, Willie, my child! dead, dead, dead! and he never knew me, never called me mother!" This, perhaps the most famous line in Victorian melodrama, does not actually occur in the novel, but was added in the stage adaptation by T. A. Palmer in 1874.
Having thought of this device for increasing pathos, Wood then executed it in totally predictable language:
By the side of William Carlyle's dying bed, knelt the Lady Isabel. The time was at hand, and the boy was quite reconciled to his fate. Merciful indeed is God to dying children! It is astonishing how very readily, where the right means are taken, they may be brought to look with pleasure, rather than fear, upon their unknown journey.
William's vision of heaven belongs in the tradition that stems from Paul Dombey and is very circumstantial in its filling in of the details:
 
Page 143
There will be the beautiful city, with its gates of pearl and its shining precious stones, and its streets of gold; and there will be the clear river, and the trees with their fruits and their healing leaves, and the lovely flowers; and there will be harps, and music, and singing; and what else will there be? (Part iii, chapter 20).
"Not much else," it is tempting to reply to a child who has read improving tracts with such thoroughness!
To intensify the pathos, Isabel needs to speak as well as think her grief at having to conceal her identity, and the novel therefore allows her to be recognized at the end, so that when dying she can say to her husband,
Think what it was, to watch William's decaying strength; to be alone with you in his dying hour, and not to be able to say, he is my child as well as yours! (Chapter 23)
The Ironic Deathbed
Isabel's exclusion from full participation in the deathbed is a form of irony (she is mother and not mother); but it is irony as a tactic for intensifying the pathos. There is no hint that conventional pathos is being subverted, there is simply her distress at not being allowed to indulge it. This is stable not radical irony.
For deeper instability we turn naturally to that most ironic of English novelists, Thomas Hardy. A child dies in each of Hardy's last two novels, in scenes that mock the conventional reader's expectations. The death of Tess's infant, though necessary for the plot, is used by Hardy mainly to write a scene of anti-Christian mockery. The child has no real existence except as the cause of Tess's distress that by dying unbaptized it will be "consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy"; the baptism that she carries out herself, waking her brothers and sisters and making them kneel round the washing-stand, "putting their hands together with fingers exactly vertical," is a grim parody of the service itself, transformed, by Tess's urgent love and fear, into something more valuable than the original. Tess's theological notions are crude, even ridiculous ("she saw the arch-fiend tossing it with his three-forked prong, like the one they used for heating the oven on baking days"), but her ''ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her" and she looked to the kneeling children like "a being large, towering, and awful

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