Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (59 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 156
comparable to his. The opportunity to tell the reader tactfully that Paul had consumption has not been taken.
And did he? There are other possibilities: he could have had asthma, or an iron deficiency that would have made him especially susceptible to infection. These are technically possible, but who can doubt that Paul died of consumption, the poetic disease, the disease that killed Keats and Emily Brontë, the disease that spiritualizes its victims, as Susan Sonntag convincingly argues:
While TB takes on qualities assigned to the lungs, which are part of the upper, spiritualised body, cancer is notorious for attacking parts of the body (colon, bladder, rectum, breast, cervix, prostate, testicles) that are embarrassing to acknowledge.
18
Cancer, for Sonntag, is the disease that in the twentieth century we do not name, but whose presence we assume when death is generalized, incurable, and vaguely metaphorical. In the nineteenth century it was TB, whose symptoms are much easier to treat euphemistically, and which, because it seems to spiritualize the body, slips easily into the conventions of bodily reticence.
In fictional deaths, then, we find the same tendency to generalize and evade that we saw in the case of real deaths; but there is a qualification to be made. When the novelist's point is not medical but moral or political, he is sometimes prepared to be very specific and very confident. In the opening chapters of Elizabeth Gaskell's
Mary Barton
(1848), John Barton's wife dies in childbirth. Her sister had run away to live as a prostitute, on the edge of society and on the edge of the novel, and this had caused her great distress. When the doctor breaks the news of her death to the husband, he says, "Nothing could have saved herthere has been some shock to the system" (chapter 3). No doctor, examining the body of a woman dying in labor (the doctor does not arrive until she is already dead) could possibly conclude anything about a mental shock: this is not a medical opinion but a nudge from the novelist.
Interestingly enough it is Dinah Mulock, so vague on Muriel's actual death, who is more precise than her contemporaries in the case of smallpox. When John Halifax realizes that little Tommy has brought smallpox into the house, he recalls that he (rather against his wife's wishes) had vaccinated his children (clearly his trust in God had its limits): the virus had
 
Page 157
taken effect with all but Muriel. We are then told, quite correctly, that "though inoculation and vaccination had made it less fatal among the upper classes, this frightful scourge still decimated the poor, especially children" (chapter 25)a statement still true, perhaps truer, in the 1850s, when it was written, than at the beginning of the century, when the novel takes place. Though the symptoms are not described in any detail, there is no evasiveness about what the illness is: author and hero share a matter-of-fact interest in smallpoxor perhaps the author assumed it because it was in character for her hero.
But if we want matter-of-factness, no English novelist can touch Flaubert. I have already pointed out the vivid and rather unpleasant detail in which the dead or dying children are described in
l'Education sentimentale
; now I add that Flaubert took the trouble to go and study the symptoms of croup at the hospital Sainte-Eugénie (did that suggest the name of Mme. Arnoux's child, Eugène?). He found the experience tiring and disgusting, and he wrote to his niece, "It's abominable and I'm heartbroken at it; but Art for ever!
19
This meticulous collecting of authentic detail is associated with the realist school and can cast a certain skepticism over Flaubert's refusal to be thought of as a realist. In the end, despite his staunch assertion "l'Art avant tout!" he found the experience too much to endure and did not have the nerve to watch Dr. Marjolin perform a tracheotomy; conscientiously, he then decided not to have one performed on Eugène, as he had originally intended. Instead, finding in the
Clinique Médicale
of Trousseau, which he studied with great care, a description of the expulsion of false membranes by coughing, with immediate relief for the patient, he put that in the novel as a way of saving the child's lifeconveniently ignoring Trousseau's observation that very often another false membrane forms, and the illness begins again.
If realism is, at least in part, the opposite to vagueness, then Flaubert certainly wrote the most realistic account of a child's illness in the nineteenth century novel; and the obvious way to avoid being vague is to observe with clinical accuracy. I have already quoted the description of Eugène's cough, and I now give it again along with the passage from Trousseau's textbook from which it was drawn:
La toux n'est pas sonore, éclatante, mais rauque et sourde comme l'aboiement lointain d'un jeune chien. Apès chaque quinte de toux, le sifflement est encore plus marqué; il est produit par une inspiration courte, sèche, comme métallique, se percevant parfaitement á distance.
 
Page 158
(The cough is not sonorous or loud, but hoarse and muffled, like the distant barking of a young dog. After each fit of coughing, the whistling sound is yet more marked: it is produced by a short dry intake of breath, a metallic sound perfectly audible at a distance. (Trousseau)
*
La toux ressemblait au bruit de ces mécaniques barbares qui font japper les chiens de carton. Il s'echappait de son larynx un sifflement produit par chaque inspiration de plus en plus courte, sèche et come métallique.
(The cough was like the noise of those barbarous mechanisms that cause cardboard dogs to yap. A whistling sound escaped from his larynx, produced by the ever shorter intakes of breath, dry and metallic in sound. (Flaubert)
20
Flaubert has followed his authority carefully and seems to have taken great trouble to get the facts right; he even uses, indirectly, the detail about the distant barking of the dog: Mme. Arnoux is woken by Eugène's coughing, after dreaming that a fierce little dog was biting at her dress and barking louder and louder, so that the distance is now that between sleep and waking. The change from barking to yapping may just be to avoid verbal repetition, but the striking new detail, the barbarous mechanism and the cardboard dogs, have surely nothing to do with accuracy of observation. If realism directs our attention to the signified rather than to the nature of the writing, Flaubert here shows himself not a realist after all: he has indulged in a little stylistic elegance, showing us that precision can manifest itself not only in observation but in the choice of signifiers.
Why?
I now intend to ask, in as cautious a spirit as possible, why child death becomes so prominent in nineteenth century literature, when it was so rare before?
Two kinds of answer are possible, depending on whether we look within the evolving institution of literature or outside it. For many centuries love and adventure were the dominant material of stories, and not until well after the rise of realistic prose fiction are they joined by class relations and the material conditions of the poor (in the Condition-of-England novels of the 1840s), by the hero's work as well as his sexual involvements or picaresque adventures (Balzac, George Eliot), and by family life, in

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