Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (56 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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novelist's ideal of remaining detached from his characters is here carried about as far as it could be. Why does this child die? The question is always ambiguous in the case of fiction: within the world of the novel, the answer will be in medical terms, and when we consider the novel as an artefact, the answer will be in terms of plot devices and authorial intention. The first answer will concern us in a later section; the second takes us very close to the heart of Flaubert's imaginative world.
Rosannette and Frédéric keep a vigil next to the body, which by then is unrecognizablehere follows some of Flaubert's bleak naturalism, reducing a human body to a physical object as, most famously, with the death of Emma Bovary. Even before it died, the child had been reduced to something like vegetable matter: Frédéric is alarmed by
ces taches bleuâtres, pareilles à de la moississure, comme si la vie, abandonnant déjà ce pauvre petit corps, n'eût laissé qu'une matière où la végétation poussait. (the bluish spots, resembling mildew, as if life, already abandoning the poor little body, had left nothing but matter for vegetation to grow on). (Part iii, chapter 4)
Rosannette keeps opening the curtains to look at the child, seeing images of the future it might have had, while Frédéric sits unmoving in the other chair, thinking about Mme. Arnoux. He is tortured by his ignorance of what she is now doing and tells himself that he is her true husband; this leads to a tearing apart of his whole being, and the tears that had been accumulating all day start to overflow:
Rosannette s'en aperçut.
"Ah! tu pleures comme moi! Tu as du chagrin?"
"Oui! oui! j'en ai! ."
Il la serra contre son coeur, et tous deux sanglotaient en se tenant embrassés.
Rosanette noticed.
"Ah! You're crying, like me. Are you miserable?"
"Yes, yes, I am!"
He pressed her to his heart, and both of them sobbed, holding each other in an embrace. (Chapter 5)
Tennyson's poem "As through the land at eve we went" tells how the speaker and his wife fell out, and then,
 
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When we came where lies the child
We lost in other years,
There above the little grave,
O there above the little grave,
We kissed again with tears.
15
So that is the function of child death in Flaubert. Sharing their grief over a dead child, Tennyson tells us, is the way for parents to draw together: he makes the point simply in this very simple poem, not even telling us what the quarrel was about ("We fell out, I know not why"). Flaubert has explored in great detail the growing distance between Frédéric and Rosannette and leads very skilfully up to this moment of reconciliation, perhaps the truest union they ever attainand based completely on a misunderstanding. It is as if Flaubert set out to mock Tennyson's sentiment by means of a carefully placed irony, a tiny explosion to wreck the perfect pathos. Compared to this destructive neatness, Hardy seems to indulge in a flurry of words.
Destroyed by Opium
Charlotte M. Yonge has notor not yetbenefited from the revival of interest in dead female novelists, either because she wrote so much or because of her formidable reputation as an Anglo-Catholic of uncompromising piety; but she is not without her interest today, and
The Daisy Chain
> (1856) handles child death in a way that partly fits and partly departs from the now familiar stereotypes.
Dr. Richard May is a country physician whose wife dies at the beginning of the book, leaving him with eleven children to bring up. The "daisy chain" is the image he affectionately uses to describe his family, and the novel is an exploration of the complex and shifting emotional relationships within the family, the distribution of responsibilities, the growing up of the children, and the gradual rearrangement of functions. Our concern is with the second daughter, Flora, whose baby dies in part ii, chapter 20. Flora is beautiful, competent, and unsentimental: her one fault as a child had been love of admiration, and as she grows up she finds "temptation in the being everywhere liked and sought after." She marries the stolid and wealthy George Rivers, well-meaning and dull, choosing him out of prudence, not romance, pleased at the thought that she will be influential (her husband gets into Parliament largely through her urging) and that she will be able to
 
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help her brothers and sisters. She makes George a good wife and enjoys tactfully organizing his life.
Their daughter, happy and healthy at first, suddenly turns sleepy and fretful. Dr. May rushes to see her, arriving in time to watch her die. It turns out that she has been "destroyed" by a popular preparation called Godfrey's cordial, administered freely by the nursemaid, who "had not known that the cordial was injurious, deeming it a panacea against fretfulness, precious to nurses, but against which ladies always had a prejudice, and, therefore, to be kept secret." The death has a shattering effect on the family. George, the father, reacts with anger, insisting that the police should be called and the nurse punished, and his insensitive raging adds to his wife's distress, so that Dr. May has to persuade him to leave her alone. Flora, the mother, reacts with bitter self-reproach, and when her husband declares that the nurse should be turned out of the house at once, she bursts out: "George, turn me out of the house too! If Preston killed her, I did!" and gives a "ghastly laugh.'' She is convinced that she is to blame for neglecting her child: she had devoted herself too wholeheartedly to her husband's career and to her own social success, leaving the baby too much to the care of the nurse:
I have never set my heart right. I am not like you nor my sisters. I have seemed to myself, and to you, to be trying to do right, but it was all hollow, for the sake of praise and credit. I know it, now it is too late; and He has let me destroy my child here, lest I should have destroyed her Everlasting Life, like my own.
It is never quite clear how far Flora recovers from this despair. The one duty she throws herself into whole-heartedly is keeping her husband happy, in order to atone for the wrong she feels she has done him:
For George her attention was always ready, and was perpetually claimed. He was forlorn and at a loss without her, every moment; and, in the sorrow which he too felt most acutely, could not have a minute's peace unless soothed by her presence.
When the funeral takes place, Flora does all that is expected of her but does not derive from the ritual the comfort that it is designed to bring:
The burial, however, failed to bring any peaceful comfort to the mourning mother. Meta's tears flowed freely, as much for her father as for her little niece;

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