Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (55 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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a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common." If the pain of child death is smoothed over by sentimental reassurance in conventional Victorian novels, it is hard to know if Tess's intense, ridiculous, and touching distress about damnation intensifies or pushes aside the motherly grief.
12
That is savage enough; Hardy's most famous child death, the suicide of Little Father Time in
Jude the Obscure
, is more sardonic still, a clear anticipation of modern black comedy. The one form of dying we would never expect for a child is suicide; and double murder followed by suicide seems grotesque to the point of parody. Little Father Time (even his name is not ordinary), the unwanted child who travels by train with his half-ticket stuck in his hat, whose stare "seemed mutely to say, 'All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun'," is a child only in years. His suicide note after hanging the two younger children and then himself, "Done because we are too menny," wears its misspelling as the boy wears his small size, as a transparent disguise for the aged pessimist who seems to have been reading Schopenhauer, or at least Hardy. The description of him on his first appearance ("He was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that his real self showed through crevices") is offered as the author's comment on the character, but how easily it could be a critic's comment on the strained effect achieved by the author.
Little Father Time is the mouthpiece of Hardy's Spirit Ironic, who looms so menacingly over
The Dynasts;
and it would seem obvious that he is not really a child at all, except that Hardy goes out of his way to insist that he is. The doctor who is called when the children die tells Jude that
"there are such boys springing up amongst usboys of a sort unknown in the last generationthe outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live." (VI, ii)
We are presumably being invited to share this opinion, but boys of this sort exist only in the pages of Thomas Hardy. It is even tempting to wonder if Hardy speaks only of boys, not of children, out of mere linguistic habit, or if he is signalling to us that girls have the sense to remain uninfected by the "new views of life." We know that such views were not shared by Hardy the man, who liked to declare himself a meliorist rather
 
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than a pessimist; and the manifestation of this mad pessimism in children who have not yet learned it through experience looks like the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
The labored, grotesque, yet somehow shocking death of Jude's children seems to announce the end of the pathetic child-death, undermined by a weird irony inherent in the scheme of things; but it had been undermined thirty years earlier across the channel. No one thinks of Flaubert as a sentimental novelist, but
l'Education sentimentale
does contain one child death, and one near death, that brush against conventional effects only to invert them.
Frédéric Moreau, the hero, has worshipped Mme. Arnoux with an idealizing love from the moment he set eyes upon her, on the second page of the novel; when at last they declare their love for each other and arrange a rendezvous, it turns out to be a day of popular demonstrations (it is 1848, and Flaubert's novel is full of the interplay between love and politics). For Frédéric, politics, now as always, must take second place to love: he is determined that the long platonic relationship with Mme. Arnoux shall finally be consummated, hires an apartment and lays elaborate plans, but his own revolution is less successful than the political one: she does not turn up, and only after a detailed account of his long anxious wait do we learn that her son had fallen ill and seems to be dying. The account of his symptoms is vivid and gruesome:
Eugène tenait sa tête de coté, sur le traversin, en fronçant toujours ses sourcils, en dilatant ses narines; sa pauvre petite figure devenait plus blême que ses draps; et il s'échappait de son larynx un sifflement produit par chaque inspiration, de plus en plus courte, sèche et comme métallique.
13
Eugène held his head to one side on the bolster, continually frowning and dilating his nostrils; his poor little face grew paler than the sheets; and from his larynx came a whistling sound with each dry, metallic intake of breath, which came shorter and shorter.
Mme. Arnouxand probably the reader toois convinced that the child is dying, and things are made worse by a series of mix-ups over finding the right doctor. When eventually Dr. Colot arrives, Eugène has vomited something strange, looking like a tube of parchment. She imagines that it must be a piece of his intestines, but he now starts breathing freely and regularly,
 
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and the doctor tells her that her child is saved. Only then does she remember the appointment with Frédéric.
This broken appointment is crucial in Frédéric's sentimental education, since it throws him finally into the arms of Rosannette, the prostitute. The near death of the child is there for its function in the plotas was the death of the child in Goethe's
Wahlverwandschaften
, which may have influenced Flaubert.
14
The child in Goethe's novel dies by drowning, an accident which could happen at any time: its death is as anomalous in the nineteenth century as was the real death of Eva Butler.
Goethe has no interest in the child for its own sake. When it is baptized, several people notice that it resembles not its parents but those whom its parents love; and when it drowns, this is taken as a sign that the elective affinities of the title are doomed, and the happy ending that the rearrangement of couples could so easily have brought about is abandoned. In both these books, the child is an instrument of fate: "C'était un avertissement de la Providence," thinks Mme. Arnoux. It is an episode in the lives of the adults, in whom, in these sophisticated novels, we are alone invited to be interested. The child in
Die Wahlverwandschaften
is not even named.
The child who does die in
l'Education sentimentale
is not named either. This is the little son of Frédéric and Rosannette, who delights his mother but leaves his father indifferent: when Frédéric comes to see him just after his birth, he feels no attraction to the "yellowish-red something, extremely wrinkled, which smelled bad and wailed" (quelque chose d'un rouge jaunâtre, extrèmement ridé, qui sentait mauvais et vagissait (part iii, chapter 4), and even has to conceal his repugnance. Since Rosannette, for Frédéric, represents sexual pleasure and dissipation, not maternity or family feeling, the child is of no importance to him and of little importance to the novel until he dies. He is boarded out in the country, and though Frédéric when he sees him has a moment in which he imagines him as a young man and companion, this touch of fatherhood is soon obscured by an "incompréhensible tristesse"yet sadness is not all that incomprehensible for a child who is both illegitimate and unwanted, and of whom the father thinks that it would have been better if he had not been born.
When the child dies, a dozen pages later, the contrast is striking between the passionate if short-lived grief of Rosannette and the coolness with which Flaubert handles the scene: after she tells Frédéric that the infant is no longer moving, Flaubert introduces the account of her distress with the terse sentence, "In fact, he was dead" (En effet, il était mort). The

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