Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (69 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 189
I have suffered more than ever I thought I could have done for a child still born: I fancy I should not have cared so much if he had been a seven months spindling, but he was the grandest looking child I had ever seen. Pardon my saying this. I do not speak only as a father but as an Artistif you do not despise the word from German associations. I mean as a man who has eyes and can judge from seeing. I refused to see the little body at first, fearing to find some pallid abortion which would have haunted me all my lifebut he looked (if it be not absurd to call a newborn babe so) even majestic in his mysterious silence after all the turmoil of the night before.
34
He drops at times into the usual sentimental vocabulary ("dear little nameless one"), but in a passage like this there is a kind of double presencethe grieving father, and the detached, curious observer, surprised at what he sees and even at his own feelings, able to slip in a touch of self-congratulation (he knows what an artista real oneneeds to notice), able to analyse his own feelings. Perhaps this is more self-centered than Mrs. Tait's conventional vocabulary, but it is also more independent, and it enables Tennyson to be very direct about the cause of death: "the child got suffocated in being born"he wrote a variant of this sentence several times. There is even a sprightliness about the prose: "The whole night before he was born he was vigorously alive, but in being born he died." All this, without undermining the emotion, diverts the language from the commonplace, and the result is perhaps more, not less, moving. The contrast is very striking with the gushing poem he wrote about the event ("Little bosom not yet cold"), which uses "little'' three times in its thirteen lines and which he had the sense not to publish. Who would expect Tennyson of all peoplethe consummate poetic artist who hated writing lettersto be more skilled, less conventional, in letters than in poetry?
Woman Power: Rehabilitating Sentimentality
The whirligig of taste has performed many somersaults, but none more drastic than that concerning the sentimental child death. Sentimentality, which entered literature so self-consciously in the later eighteenth century, rode high in mid-Victorian times but by the twentieth century had disappeared from high culture, though it remained very much alive in popular cultureand the savagery with which Huxley and Leavis attack it may be partly directed at the "romantic" novels and tear-jerking films of their own day. Only in the last decade has there been a serious attempt to rehabilitate it.
 
Page 190
The new case for sentimentality is feminist: it claims that the sentimental tradition is important because it is a way of empowering women. This view belongs primarily to American academic discourse, the tradition that it rehabilitates is above all that of the American sentimental novel, and the novel it concentrates on is, of course,
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Much of the basis for this new view is set forth by Ann Douglas in
The Feminization of American Culture
, which maintains that sentimentality can be seen as "a strategy by which many women and ministers espoused at least in theory to (
sic
) so-called passive virtues, admirable in themselves, and sorely needed in American life."
35
The most vigorous and influential proponent in literary studies is Jane Tompkins, whose book
Sensational Designs
defends Harriet Beecher Stowe, along with other popular women novelists of the time, against "the male-dominated scholarly tradition that controls both the canon of American literature and the critical perspective that interprets the canon for society." This tradition has "taught generations of students to equate popularity with debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness, religiosity with fakery, domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority." In contrast to this, Tompkins argues that ''the work of the sentimental writers is complex and significant in ways
other than
those that characterize the established masterpieces." To do this, she quite explicitly shifts her literary criteria, seeing literary texts "not as works of art embodying enduring themes in complex forms, but as attempts to redefine the social order." Seeing them in this way enables us to attach these works to "a cultural myth which invests the suffering and death of an innocent victim with just the kind of power that critics deny to Stowe's novel: the power to work in, and change, the world." Stowe writes out of a conviction that "historical change takes place only through religious conversion, which is a theory of power as old as Christianity itself." The sentimental novel should then be seen as an agent of cultural change which "represents the interests of middle-class women."
36
This approach will enable the reader, if he lays aside his "modernist" prejudices, his bias against "melodrama," "pathos" and "sunday school fiction," to appreciate the sentimental novel on its own terms:
The vocabulary of clasping hands and falling tears is one which we associate with emotional exhibitionism, with the overacting that kills off true feeling through exaggeration. But the tears and gestures of Stowe's characters are not in excess of what they feel; if anything they fall short of expressing the experiences they point tosalvation, communion, reconciliation.
37
 
Page 191
The work of Ann Douglas, which lies behind this, is both more ambitious and more complex. Its argument that American mass culture in the twentieth century is partly a result of an extensive process of feminization in the nineteenth would lead us far from the present topic, and I will look only at her defense of sentimentalism as a valuable agent of cultural change, which is more qualified than Tompkins's. Douglas considers sentimentalism a way of protesting against "a power to which one has already in part capitulated . It always borders on dishonesty, but it is a dishonesty for which there is no known substitute in a capitalist country." And so she points out that "Little Eva's beautiful death, which Stowe presents as part of a protest against slavery, in no way hinders the working of that system"; and she is critical too of the language of sentimentality, which she describes as "rancid," and contrasts with that of Romanticism, which though it may sometimes sound grandiose to our ears, has a relationship to its age that is fundamentally healthy. But she too treats sentimentalism as an aspect of feminization and an agent of cultural change.
38
There is now quite a body of criticism that derives from and develops this position, treating sentimentalism in general, and
Uncle Tom's Cabin
in particular, as an intervention in American culture that sets out to resist its predominantly masculine and aggressive ethic. Gillian Brown claims that "abolishing slavery means, in Stowe's politics of the kitchen, erasing the sign and reminder of the precariousness of the feminine sphere."
39
Jean Fagan Yellin claims that Stowe's female exemplar, "powerless on earth, powerful in heaven, is less an advocate of mundane emancipation than a model of heavenly salvation. As her conversion of Topsy demonstrates, she is a spiritual, not a political liberator."
40
And Elizabeth Ammons, too, defends the novel as a cultural intervention to which feminine values are central. Emphasizing the Christ-like qualities of both Eva and Tom, she treats this as part of the feminization of Christianity: since Tom's qualities are all feminine, she describes him as "the ultimate heroine of
Uncle Tom's Cabin."
Stowe thus offers ''the maternal Christ, the divine motherly love and light" as the means to "lead America out of the night of slavery."
41
The extension of this agenda from women's fiction to women's poetry is best represented by
The Contours of Masculine Desire,
by Marlon Ross, a learned and trenchant attempt to undermine the male canon of Romanticism and cause us to change drastically our notion of literary history. Corresponding to the rehabilitation of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, Ross argues for serious consideration of a neglected phenomenon of the early nineteenth century, the rise of the "female affectional poets":
 
Page 192
Reclaiming these first women poets does not simply mean that we should attach them to the house of romantic poetry for the sake of liberal inclusiveness. It means more fundamentally that we must re-examine romanticism itself, and enriched with the knowledge garnered from these recovered sources, that we must rewrite their history and in so doing rewrite our own.
The female poet closest to the concerns of this book is Felicia Hemans, whose celebration of the affections is explicitly linked by Ross to the feminine, and the modern refusal to take her poetry seriously is seen as "a way of fighting off the feminization of literature which is so integral and influential an aspect of the literary process since the mid-eighteenth century. By reclaiming Hemans' affectional poetics, then, we are representatively also reclaiming the power of the 'feminine' within literature and within ourselves."
42
At this point, Ross explicitly claims alliance with the agenda of
Sensational Designs.
This campaign has not, so far, done much for the reputation of Hemans, but it has at least had the effect of bringing
Uncle Tom's Cabin
back into print and onto the syllabus of courses in American Literature. If the literary canon is now determined not by the judgment of the common reader with whom the critic rejoices to concur, as Johnson believed, but, as American professors universally believe, by the academic profession, then Harriet Beecher Stowe has rejoined the canon. How permanent this rehabilitation will be depends on whether the whirligig can ever be made to keep still.
I Take My Stand
That then is the story of readers' responses to the sentimental child death, which I have told as objectively as I can; now in conclusion it is time to abandon neutrality and take a stand.
When we put next to each other the Victorian and the modern response to child pathos, each completely confident of its rightness and passing diametrically opposed judgments, what do we see? Is one of these groups simply mistaken? Are there universal criteria by which their judgments can be compared and one of them preferred? Or are we seeing judgment passed by one age upon another, to be followed no doubt by the judgment of a future age on the later one? (If the feminists I have cited are representative of the future, this process has already begun.) This example raises, more neatly and in more extreme form than any other example I know, the question

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