Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (51 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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of Henry: "let no-one speak to her during the remainder of the day." Henry, it is true, does not have to stand on a stool in front of everyone, but he is sent to Coventry for much longer, indeed indefinitely: only after he has come to his father to beg his pardon are others allowed to speak to him.
But there are of course two important differences between the novels. In the first place, Mr. Brocklehurst is a hypocrite: his own daughters are elaborately and expensively dressed, their tresses are artificially curled, and his wife "was enveloped in a costly velvet shawl, trimmed with ermine, and she wore a false front of French curls." There can be no doubt that this weakens the book: an attack on Puritan strictness, if the Puritan turns out to transgress his own precepts so flagrantly, is not an attack on Puritanism at all. Hypocrisy is always an easy target and diverts the satire from its true object.
The representation of hypocrisy, too, is always problematic. Explicit authorial assurance of hypocrisy instructs us to listen with distrust and therefore preprograms our responsethus distracting us from genuinely listening and from the more interesting question, whether we would know, just by hearing or reading it, that a speech was hypocritical. Would we, for instance, know that Goneril is putting on an act when she insists, in the first scene of
King Lear,
"Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter, / Dearer than eyesight, space or liberty"? To "wield the matter": does this suggest a labored effort and, so, imply that she does not mean it? and even if it does, could we not say that this is the inevitable consequence of being asked to make a public declaration of a private feeling, so that even if she did love her father, it would sound like an act?
Mr. Brocklehurst's speeches do not offer that degree of verbal subtlety, but the issue is still raised. There is a hypocrite in
The Fairchild Family
too, the children's cousin Louisa, a worldly, selfish girl, who, when she is given a lecture (her word) by Mrs. Fairchild, thinks "that her aunt required some answer, and that the shortest way to close the lecture would be to seem to agree with what she said," and so replies:
Dear aunt, how can I be grateful enough for the pains you have taken to explain these things to me? I only wish that since I came here I had paid more attention to the instructions which you and my kind uncle give in the family. (499)
Mrs. Fairchild hears this answer "with a sigh," yet when her own daughter Lucy says to Mrs. Colvin, "Oh ma'am, you are very, very kind; and will you please, today, to tell us everything we do wrong, as mamma would? We wish
 
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to behave well, but sometimes we do not"we are meant to accept this as genuine. The representation of hypocrisy as hypocrisy is clearly beyond Mrs. Sherwood's powers (it might almost be beyond Shakespeare's), and we need authorial assurance to tell us that we are to believe Lucy and disbelieve Louisa. If then we ignore Mr. Brocklehurst's wife and daughters (whose appearance constitutes a kind of authorial assurance), we could be forgiven for perceiving him as a version of Mr. Fairchild.
Mr. Fairchild's disciplinary method succeeds with Henry, but Mr. Brocklehurst's fails with Jane, who does not repent, as Henry does, but is filled with resentment, rather like Louisa. What enables her to bear the punishment is the glance she gets from her friend Helen Burns:
What an extraordinary sensation that ray sent through me! How the new feeling bore me up! It was as if a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim, and imparted strength in the transit. (Chapter 7)
Helen it is who dies an edifying death, and this glance of love is our first preparation for it. Her compassion is a Christian virtue, and at this moment she is almost a type of Christ, but her influence on Jane would draw no approval from Mrs. Sherwood or Mr. Brocklehurst, for it brings no awakening to a sense of sin. Jane is moved by Helen's loving glance but not to a recognition of her own wicked heartindeed, she is never moved to this, no more than Louisa is. Louisa's response to death could belong to the late twentieth century: it is to think about something else:
Louisa shuddered, for she had within the last few days permitted her watch to go down, that she might not hear its measured tickings when she lay awake in the silent hours of night; she exclaimed: "What, then, if such is our miserable conditionif we must always live with the fear of death preying on our inmost heartswhat must we dowhat can we do? Nothing seems to me to be left for us, for me at least, but to fill my mind with other things; and I must try to do so." (498)
Of course this is meant to be thoroughly deplorable, and it unleashes Mrs. Fairchild's "lecture." Yet how it resembles Jane's famous retort to Mr. Brocklehurst. Asked where the wicked go after death, Jane is ready with the orthodox reply, "They go to hell"; asked, then, what she must do to avoid this fate, she is not at all orthodox: "I must keep in good health, and
 
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not die" (chapter 4). The only reason we cannot imagine Louisa saying this is because of its succintness and forcefulness. Her more long-winded reply has not the blunt strength of Jane's shocking sentence, and of course this causes Jane to come to life in a way that Louisa never does (the nearest thing, perhaps, is when she slips in "for me at least"). To the reader, this is an invitation to identify with Jane; if we wish to state it in terms of authorial involvement, it can mean that Brontë is drawn to identify with Jane as Mrs. Sherwood is never drawn to identify with Louisa. This directness of Jane is far more important, in terms of our reading experience, than the moral question of what approval or disapproval the author thrusts at us: it is an effect that could not be undone by any number of assurances of Brontë's orthodoxy.
The death of Helen forms a kind of conclusion to Jane Eyre's childhood. It takes place during an epidemic of typhus, more than half the pupils of Lowood falling ill, and many of them dying; though since none are named, these other deaths function simply as background. Jane escapes infection, and, because of the relaxation of discipline, is allowed to run wild in the countryside; and this serves to make her far more intensely alive. Helen dies not of typhus but of consumption, as befits so ethereal a creature. Her death is both like and unlike the model deaths in
The Fairchild Family:
we would not expect, in this more complex novel, anything so straightforwardly exemplary. She dies in Christian confidence and uses the familiar image that she is going "to my long homemy last home." Jane is deeply moved, but in ways that are subtly different from a Fairchild deathbed. First, her presence at the deathbed is surreptitious. She is told not to go into the sick room and steals there furtively at night: her presence is not an obligatory attendance, in order to be improved, it is stolen by her, as a private experience. Then she trespasses even further by climbing into bed with Helen. Little Miles climbs into bed with the dying Humphrey in
Misunderstood,
to produce a vignette of childhood innocence:
There in the golden sunset they lay. The sun kissed their little faces, and touched with a lovely hand their curly hair. It lingered lovingly round them, as if it knew that the lambs would be frisking when it rose again. (316)
The pathetic fallacy of the loving sun in this must have drawn warm tears from many a sentimental reader; its conventional innocence contrasts vividly with the strange stolen intimacy between Jane and Helen. Their

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