Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (10 page)

Read Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century Online

Authors: Laurence Lerner

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

 
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who cannot use Christian faith to "understand himself in front of the text"? To such a reader the faith may seem like a statement of what one was expected to say, whereas the grief can leave us convinced of its genuineness and immediacy. This does not mean that the statements of faith were hypocritical: it means that if we view them from the outside, we shall see them as a semiotic system, governing systematically the way experience is talked about, but pouring no meaning into our world. Even the modern Christian, if he is of a sophisticated, demythologizing turn of thought, might say this. But to say the same of grief would open us to the charge of reading as desiccated, inhuman computers: a computer can analyze with ever-increasing competence, but does not inhabit a semantic world. Computers do not grieve.
But this distinction can in its turn be challengedand in two ways. In the first place, there is the reader for whom religious experience is as real as any other experience, who will refuse to reduce the statements of faith to the purely semiotic. And second, there is the reader who will be prepared to treat grief as I have proposed treating faith and who can cite, as support for his position, the case of fiction.
For it is easy enough to imagine that the text of these journals came from a novel, and in Canton's narrative we see this transition taking place; in later chapters we shall come across abundant examples. If the accounts were fiction, we would subject them to a kind of examination that when applied to actual bereaved mothers seems impertinent. We would ask if they were mere repetitions of the cliches of grieving or if they showed any verbal distinction, were linguistically inventive and the result of literary talent. We might even make this point by asking if they sounded like real grief, but if we did we would need reminding that actual grieving does not require any literary talent.
That truth and fiction have much in common has been one of the insights of recent literary theory; but it is necessary to remember that they are not identical. This is true not only in the obvious sense that we sometimes want, like W.V., to know whether events actually took place; it is also true when we are considering the relation between texts and the emotion they arouse. We need to say that a text can move us in two ways. The first is by its semiotic properties: it may command our response because it is powerfully written. The second is by our knowledge that it has a real referent, that Catherine Tait and Elizabeth Prentiss really did lose their children. We can, that is, be moved because we are sensitive to literature, or
 
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because we respect real suffering. This difference is important and necessary, but it is not watertight. Literature that impresses us because we enjoy the verbal skill operates on the semiotic level only; literature that speaks to our condition moves us by requiring us, in Ricoeur's formulation, to understand ourselves in front of the text. Analysis of technique, whether in termss of traditional literary devices or in those of structuralism, deals with the former; much of this book is an attempt to deal with the latter too.
The Sudden Cry, and Then the Silence
The death of little Eva Butler came not from illness but from an accidentan accident so painful that it is frightening to think about it. George and Josephine Butler returned home from a dinner party one evening in 1864, and Eva leapt out of bed to greet them. The banisters gave way, and she fell onto the tiled floor. She died after convulsions a few hours later, never regaining consciousness. She was five years old.
It was difficult to endure at first the shock of the suddenness of that agonising death. Little gentle spirit! the softest death for her would have seemed sad enough. Never can I lose that memorythe fall, the sudden cry, and then the silence. It was pitiful to see her, helpless in her father's arms, her little drooping head resting on his shoulder, and her beautiful golden hair, all stained with blood, falling over his arm. Would to God that I had died that death for her!
George Butler was a clergyman, and Josephine was deeply religious, so it was inevitable that they should feel led to question their God and speculate about his providence:
It was a wonderful repose for me, a good gift of God, when troubled by the evils in the world or my own thoughts, to turn to the perfect innocence and purity of that little maiden. But that joy is now gone for us. I am troubled for my husband. His grief is so deep and silent; but he is very very patient. He loves children and all young creatures, and his love for her was wonderful."
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F. D. Maurice's letter of condolence is interesting both for itself and for its glimpse of the parents' response:
I am not surprised that you cannot acquiesce in the notion of your own growth in goodness being the reward of separation from the child who was so dear to
 
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you. As far as my experience goes, we want to be united to each other more, to love each other better and better. You cannot think that your child is really severed from you. The yearning you feel is the pledge and assurance that it is not so.
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Maurice was a Broad Church clergyman, responsive to the skeptical and secularizing currents of his time, and this reference to reunion with the child is so hesitant that it seems to suggest a corresponding hesitation about the belief. Yet even the Broad Church Christian of 1864 probably still believed in an afterlife: the hesitation points to a greater undermining of faith than has yet taken place. It contrasts vividly with the detailed scenarios of reunion in heaven that we shall notice in the next chapter.
The Butlers found it very difficult to accept Eva's death. In her old age, Josephine wrote to her son Stanley that Eva's death "had a horrible sting in it. She was 5 1/2, never had a day's illnesshealthy, strong, beautiful, our only daughterfather and I just adored her, and in a moment she fell,
smashed
, her head broken, and after hours of awful convulsions she died."
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For the next twenty-five years she had never woken from sleep, she said, without a vision of Eva's falling figure and without the sound of her head hitting the ground ringing sickeningly in her ears. She dreamed constantly of Eva; and she worried about her silent, brooding husband. When a "ray of light" appearedpresumably a feeling that his grief was growing less intenseshe gave the credit to God with a passion that shows how desperate she must have been.
Josephine claimed that this event was what turned her to the social work for which she is now so famous, her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts and her work on behalf of prostitutes and against licensed prostitution. Despite what she had said to Maurice, then, she did come to believe that her own growth in goodness was the reward of her loss, and when she claimed that she could not acquiesce in this, she was clearly fighting against herself. There is obviously no way of testing the truth of that belief, and if we say that she needed to believe it in order to be able to accept the death (even though she also, at first, needed not to believe it), that does not diminish its emotional importance for her. To the modern reader, this death may be the most painful of all those recorded in this chapter, because it cannot be locked up in its century: death in childbirth and child death from illness are so much less likely today, but accidents will be with us as long as there are children, and no modern parent can fail to hear the sound of that head hitting the ground ringing sickeningly in the ear.

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