Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (44 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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Even the denial of sexuality must mention it and, so, raise the possibility that what is being denied is actually there. Am I then justified in treating the child as a nonsexual being, as I have been doing? The strongest assertion to the contrary that I know is that of James Kincaid. Paul Dombey, in Kincaid's view, is "a pedophile pin-up," "laid before us from the very first as a tidily arranged bundle of morbid childish eroticism," capable, like Peter Pan, of "pumping up enormous gushers of desire in onlookers," and he describes Nell's blissful death as "a model of perfect eros." The ''child-loving" that provides the title of Kincaid's book is quite explicitly erotic: as we read about Nell we are "driven by desire." If one asks why Kincaid believes that these children are erotic creatures whom the reader sees in erotic terms, the answer seems to be that he assumes it because he believes that all children are seen erotically.
29
A discussion of that must become a psycho-analytic discussion, taking in Freud's claims on infantile sexuality; and this book is written from a position that is highly sceptical about psycho-analysis. If we are to operate with the possibility of distinguishing an erotic from an innocent view of childhood, a more useful starting point is provided by Robert Polhemus, who observes: "it seems crucial that Nell die a virgin, unpolluted by sexuality, but sexual vulnerability and peril are very much a part of her story and destiny."
30
This invites us to ask what elements in the book present Nell as pre-sexual and what elements eroticize her, and once we do that the answer is obvious. It is Quilp.
Many critics have realized that Nell and Quilp are not in the same novel by accident. Her purity and devotion, his violent energy; her ethereal spirituality, his vividly portrayed bodily existence; her passivity, his leering, sadistic eloquence, spreading fear and horrified fascination all around himall this makes Quilp her antiself. She is angel, he is devil. The offensiveness of Quilp's constant referencesto Nell "going to bed in her own little room," the invitation to "come to sit upon Quilp's knee" or to be his "number two my second; my Mrs Quilp"-depends on the fact that our view of her is so different from his; but we could shrug them off more easily if they did not strike a chord in the reader, either because we are all incipient pedophiles (Kincaid's view) or because we are aware that she is on the threshold of adulthood (the view that makes liminality central).
One more Dickens heroine, now, to show the importance, and the complexity, of liminality. Amy Dorrit is twenty years old, and so technically is an adult, but she is small, and she keeps the nickname "little." She looks after the half-witted Maggie, who is younger than she is, but much bigger.
 
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On the night when she is locked out of the Marshalsea, she and Maggie wander the streets together. Occasional voices call out, when they meet prowlers, to "let the woman and the child go by." They meet a prostitute who says to Maggie, "What are you doing with the child?," then to Amy, "Kiss a poor lost creature, dear, and tell me where she's taking you." With a shock, she realizes that Amy is a woman, and Amy's compassion then can do nothing for her: "I should never have touched you, but I thought you were a child'' (
Little Dorritt
, book 1, chapter 14).
The ironies are quite complicated here. Neither of them is literally a child, but retarded Maggie is a kind of big overgrown child. The prostitute, calling out to Maggie, "What are you doing with the child?" was wrong but also, if we reverse the figures, right. And when she refuses Amy's help and compassion ("You are kind and innocent; but can't look at me out of a child's eyes") she is quite right: childhood is the cure for sex, and Amy can no longer help the sexual offender, for she is past puberty.
I can now suggest a way of relating the death of Mary to the young girls and women in the novels. Dickens joined Mary to Nell because both figures were liminal: child and young woman blend, as I have suggested, through the process of idealizing desexualization. But Nell, like Rose Maylie, like Kate Nickleby and Madeline Bray, is never seen sexually, and the ambivalence results only in a vague idealized blurthough Madeline, like Nell,
is
seen sexuallyby the villain: Gride's gloating references to "having that dainty chick for my wife" bracket off the sexualizing of the virginal heroine as coming only from a desiccated, elderly villain; but even as they bracket it off, they allow it, like Quilp's view of Nell, to enter the book. Amy, in this scene from
Little Dorritt
, and Jenny throughout, are not simply presexual children but are more interesting, for in them the liminality is explicit. The psychological complexity that is excluded from thee usual Dickens heroine, and from the presentation of the real life Mary, becomes a controlling principle in the case of the doll's dressmaker.
The Theatricality of Pathos
Pathos is central to the dying Dickens child, and to see the basic recipe for it we can look at little Dick, who dies midway through
Oliver Twist
. He has no identity except that of the helpless sufferer awaiting death. "How pale you are," Oliver remarks to him, and he replies, "I heard the doctor tell them I was dying." He knows the doctor must be right, because "I dream
Illustration section has been moved to the back of this book
 
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so much of Heaven and Angels, and kind faces that I never see when I am awake" (chapter 7). Having uttered the necessary pieties, Dick kisses Oliver and is left behind, to make one more appearance, ten chapters later, for the purpose of sending a message to Oliver and to produce a further variant on why it is best to die young: "for perhaps if I had lived to be a man, and had grown old, my little sister who is in Heaven might forget me, or be unlike me; and it would be so much happier if we were both children there together" (chapter 17). Since
Oliver Twist
is an attack on the workhouses set up under the New Poor Law, we are then nudged into indignation by the remarks of the beadle and the baby-farmer: "I never see such a hardened little wretch." Hard-heartedness from the authorities is, of course, a signal for tears from the reader.
The most famous use of hard-heartedness to offset child pathos is of course
A Christmas Carol
: who can imagine Tiny Tim without Scrooge? Tiny Tim, like Dick, is pure pathos all through. In a tale intended as a modern morality, to show the spirit of Christmas overcoming meanness, we should perhaps expect nothing else, and certainly we get nothing else. Bob Cratchit, Scrooge's clerk, has a large family to keep on his fifteen shillings a week ("Bob had but fifteen 'Bob' a week himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name"), but to suggest that it was improvident to beget so many children would savor of the Malthusian spirit of calculation that the tale sets out to refutewell, not to refute, for it uses no arguments, but to show the meanness of. There appear to be six children (but whoexcept Scroogecounts in this tale?), and the youngest is crippled and dying. He comes in on Bob's shoulder carrying his crutch (inevitably, his "little crutch"), his limbs supported by an iron frame, having been at church where, Bob tells us, his imagination has indulged in an ecstasy of unselfishness:
"He told me coming home that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see." Bob's voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty. (Stave 3)
The trembling announces to readers much less cute than Mrs. Marcet that Tiny Tim is going to die, and die he doestemporarily. This glimpse of the Cratchits at home is shown to Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Present,
 
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and the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come shows a sadder scene, though Bob and his wife are doing their best to cheer each other up. Mrs. Cratchit has to lay her sewing aside because the color hurts her eyes; Bob "walks a little slower than he used," a detail noticed by Peter, the eldest son, who now acts as guide to the reader's emotions. When Bob comes in he has been to see Tiny Tim's grave, and as he speaks of it his effort to be cheerful collapses:
It would have done you good to see how green a place it is. But you'll see it often. I promised him that I would walk there on a Sunday. My little, little child!" cried Bob. "My little child!"
He broke down all at once. He couldn't help it. If he could have helped it, he and his child would have been farther apart than they were. (Stave 4)
The memory of Tiny Tim will live on, wrapped in a plethora of "littles" and exerting a moral influence on the family:
"And I know," said Bob, "I know, my dears, that when we recollect how patient and how mild he was; although he was a little, little child; we shall not quarrel easily among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it." "No, never, father," they all cried again. (Stave 4)
But because this is a ghost story, nothing is final, not even pathos as fulsome as this. The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, it turns out, is the spirit only of a conditional futureof what will come if Scrooge does not mend his ways. When he repents, gives up meanness for charity, and becomes "as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old golden world," we are offered an alternative ending (for this supposedly modernist device belongs with very traditional forms of narrative, as long as they are nonrealistic), in which Scrooge raises Bob's salary and becomes a second father to Tiny Tim, "who did NOT die." The capitalized NOT is a device that belongs to writing, but when Dickens adapted the story for reading it turned out to belong far more triumphantly to oral delivery, for on one occasion, at this point, the whole audience, "rising spontaneously, greeted the renowned and popular author with a tremendous burst of cheering."
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In this nonrealist world we need not expect plausibility; but it is still worth remarking that if Tiny Tim had died, it would not have been because

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