Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (68 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

 
Page 185
said to share it with them. He not only feels a sorrow of the same kind with that which they feel, but, as if he had derived a part of it to himself, what he feels seems to alleviate the weight of what they feel. Hence it is that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.
29
Here is the argument for valuing highly an "indulgence in soothing emotions that turns sorrow into something like pleasure." The case against is made by Johnson, for whom man is led to do good by reason not by sentiment, since human nature is untrustworthy: "If man is by nature prompted to act virtuously and rightly, all the divine precepts of the Gospel had been needless." Johnson's belief in sin led far more strongly to the distrust of feeling than to the distrust of reason. The Man of Feeling is consequently given short shrift:
Sir, it is an affectation to pretend to feel the distress of others, as much as they do themselves. It is equally so, as if one should pretend to feel as much pain while a friend's leg is cutting off, as he does."
30
It could even be claimed that the inadequacy of sentiment as a basis for morality is adumbrated by Mackenzie himself in the last clause of the quotation above: lying down and dying (or pretending to die, for "could have" means of course "felt inclined to," and does not refer to action) would prevent any attempt to remedy the situation. Indulging in sentiment can therefore be seen as a way of avoiding responsibility, giving oneself the "delight" of tears, instead of acting. And Sterne himself, the greatest of the sentimentalists, offers the same possibility of ambivalence, since his man of feeling, on his sentimental journey through France and Italy, is constantly on the edge of being made a figure of fun. Every sentimental moment in the book is followed or preceded by an ironic undercutting that never completely destroys the reader's sympathy with Yorick but that prevents full identification with him, and certainly prevents any unqualified moral approval.
In sentimentality, grief is so represented that its intensity is mollified and its effect pleasing. If the less comforting elements of an experience are omitted, we can naturally ask if they are in some way implied, even obliquely present, in the writing. Asking this about Florence Dombey, who is clearly sentimentalized, I will look at the scene in chapter 18 in which
 
Page 186
she tries to comfort her father after Paul's death and is sternly rejected. We are continually assured, in this scene, of the glowing love within her breast; sent back to her room she embraces the dog, Diogenes, and sobs out, "Oh, Di! Oh, dear Di! Love me for his sake!" Presumably she means for Paul's sake, since that is what her father will not do; but it would fit equally well to read it as "love me for Papa's sake, since he will not love me himself." The moral situation here is very plain: Florence loves unconditionally and will not accept, or even see, that her father does not deserve her loveif she accepted that, the love would not be unconditional. But Dickens of course knows that he does not deserve it and tells us so insistently. This means that there is a gap between Florence's view of Mr. Dombey and the author's, and he keeps singing her praises for it. She is praised, in short, for her imperceptiveness.
The figure of the holy fool is not sentimental, because it embodies a paradox: to be foolish in this world can be wisdom by God's standard. But Florence is not a holy fool, because we are not meant to laugh at her or find her ridiculous. Although she fails to see what is in front of her eyes, she receives only credit for that. This is clear if we compare her to the two figures who act as foils to her selfless love, Susan and Toots. Susan Nipper is much more clear-sighted, and knows that Mr. Dombey does not deserve Florence's loveand tells him so. The scene (chapter 44) could easily be made pathetic (for it does cost Susan her place), but it is in fact comic ("I may not be a Peacock; but I have my eyes"), and so there is no danger of Susan displacing Florence as the heroine. Toots, on the other hand, is the holy fool, constantly ridiculous and selflessly devoted. His worship of Florence is expressed in a parody of romantic love: "Miss Dombey, I really amm in that state of adoration of you that I don't know what to do with myself. If it wasn't at the corner of the Square at present, I should go down on my knees" (chapter 41). But this devotion is quite compatible with his marrying Susan, as a kind of demonstration that, though it is a sublimation of sexual feeling, the sexual element is not to be taken seriously. Susan and Toots represent two ways of avoiding sentimentality, and Florence is caught between them.
The sentimentalist, we can say, is blinded by his tears, so that he can share Florence's imperceptiveness, even when he knows the truth. If we take the term "blinded" literally, we shall then be using the mimetic criterion invoked by all three of our twentieth century critics, that sentimentality misrepresents reality: a child's death, even when it is not of meningitis,
 
Page 187
is not so peaceful or so full of uncomplicated uplift as are the deaths of Paul, Eva, Rose, and the rest. But if we take "blinded" more figuratively, we will attack sentimentality by declaring that the experience is distasteful (sticky overflowings) or deplorable (self-indulgence).
Sentimentality can be a quality both of literary and of actual experiences. To show this, I revert to the death of the Tait daughters, discussed in chapter 1, and I will begin with a linguistic point. That sentimental writing will be heavily adjectival is only to be expected, and of all the sentimentalizing adjectives dear to the Victorians
sweet, soft, delightful, darling,
> etc.the most effective will be those that do not name warm feeling directly but attach it to what passes for description, and the prime candidate here is
little
. It is a word that has cropped up often enough in our quotations.. Paul is "little Dombey" at school, he is Dr Blimber's "little friend" (of course that is ironic, but only at Dr Blimber's expense: the Doctor has through his condescension hit on the right word), and when discussed by Mrs. Pipchin and the apothecary, he is (repeatedly) "the little fellow." In the case of little Eva and little Nell, the adjective has been incorporated into the child's name. But I have come across nothing quite as concentrated as Mrs. Tait's account of the aftermath of Chatty's death, which contains ''a little sweet talk" with her daughters, the "little funeral" is to be on Monday, the dead child is "the little one," the children gather flowers from "their own little gardens," a friend sends flowers as "her little offering of love," the placing of the wreath on "little Susan's" head is a "little scene," in the nursery "one little bed" was gone, she takes a last look at the "little form," and so ontwelve usages in just under three pages.
31
Diminutive size is associated with harmlessness, with helplessness, and so with pathos, and there is not a single usage whose connotations are of size only.
Sentimentality, then, minimizes the ugliness of death in order to make sadness pleasing. Mrs. Tait does not completely ignore the unpleasantness (Susan's "little body was quite stiff, the arms and legs twitching, the eyes open, but no sight for anything more in this world"), but she devotes far more space to Catty's more peaceful death. May also suffered a great deal, and at one time they could hardly hold her in bed. Yet more prominence is given to the peacefulness that follows and to the ultimate peaceful departure: "then her summons came, and the brightness of those beautiful eyes closed for ever on this world of sin and sorrow, and opened in Heaven."
32
But there is of course one crucial and obvious difference between sentimentality in literary representation and in the representation of actual
 
Page 188
grief: in the first case it could be the entire experience, but not in the second. For the reader of a novel, there is no substratum of actual grief that is being rendered more gentle and delightful: his response is equal to his reading of the text. It would be an affront to Mrs. Tait's grief, however, to reduce it to the sentimentalizing undoubtedly present in the writing: it would amount to saying that she had no experience outside the text, not as a philosophical point but as a kind of insult. What we can say is that she is assimilating it to the less painful emotion that might be offered by a novelist. The experience of the novel reader is sentimental; that of Mrs. Tait is sentimentalized.
But, like most distinctions between fact and fiction, this is less clear-cut than it at first appears. What are we to make of Macready, who reacted to Nell much as Jeffrey reacted to Paul but who added, "this beautiful fiction comes too close upon what is miserably real to me to enable me to taste [the] portion of pleasure?"
33
He had recently lost his own daughter: hence the "recurrence of painful sensations." Macready's experience in reading
The Old Curiosity Shop
can therefore be seen not only as the arousing of vicarious grief but also as a modification of real grief: hence his reluctance too read the episodethough it clearly did not enter his head that he could put it down unread. Jeffrey too, though not recently, had lost the only child of his first marriage. And what we know to be the case with them could in some sense be true of any reader: if he (or she) had not lost a child, her friends or relatives might have, and she could very probably in the nineteenth century (though improbably today) have watched a child die. Contrariwise, the Catherine Tait who watched her children die had certainly read sermons, probably read novels, and had thought about the meaning of death, so that her grief was culturally formed. Real and vicarious grief do not exist independently of each other.
Not many Victorians were able to describe the death of their child without some touch of sentimentality; it may, indeed, be a need that parents will feel in any age. But there are different degrees, and different ways, of yielding to or resisting it, and for a contrast I turn (perhaps surprisingly) to Tennyson. The first child of Alfred and Emily Tennyson was still-born on Easter Sunday 1851; "I would not send the notice of my misfortune to the
Times
," Tennyson wrote, "and I have had to write some sixty letters." (We can wonder if the letters were the burdensome consequence of his refusal to publish his grief, or if the refusal to publish was obscurely motivated by the need to write to all his friends about it). The longest account that has survived speaks of his grief with something like surprise:

Other books

The Regulators - 02 by Michael Clary
Finding Perfect by Susan Mallery
Relentless (Relentless #1) by Alyson Reynolds
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Payment by Mysty McPartland
Speak Through the Wind by Allison Pittman
Mother by Tamara Thorne, Alistair Cross