Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (66 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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tears, and that some of the responses are better described as protest than sorrow.
The nature of these protests is worth looking at more closely. Why did Poe think that the death of Nell should have been avoided, even though it was "of the highest order of literary excellence"? And why did Mrs. Greene's uncle get so indignant? Both these readers seem to have responded to the pathos as Dickens wished, then to have added a demurrer on other groundsethical in Poe's case, and rather splendidly personal in Mr. Greene's.
It is often maintained nowadays that traditional realist fiction, in which the author decides exactly what happens in the story and tells it to us unambiguously, is authoritarian because it leaves insufficient freedom for the reader. This view, which has become almost a commonplace in some post-structuralist criticism, derives largely from Barthes, for whom what is taken for granted linguistically is the great enemy of freedom. In this view, open-ended narrative is seen as liberating and realism as false to the world which we, the readers, know and in which "profusion, as a result of mass information processes and political generalization, prevents us from finding figures to represent it." The way to free us from what Barthes goes so far as to call the totalitarian power of language is for the author to abdicate, renouncing his power to control a fictive world that only pretends to be a version of the world we inhabit. That is why the death of the author, in Barthes's famous assertion, will be the birth of the reader.
13
As an example of the application of this view to the novel, we can turn to Thomas Docherty's
Reading (Absent) Character
, which claims that in realist theories of fiction "the reader's activity of creating character and meaning is being elided, and with that elision goes any notion of real interaction in dialogic form, or common production of meaning by the writer and reader working together." So in contrasting the authorial confidence underlying the realist tradition with the epistemological skepticism underlying post-modern fiction ("whereas Dickens has the confidence to begin a novel with a proper name a new novelist such as Nathalie Sarraute refuses to attribute a proper name to her pronominal presences"), Docherty claims that the latter has the advantage of radically involving the reader, not evading his activity, giving him or her "greater existential presence and authoritative or authentic life."
14
>
As a theoretical issue, this is too complex to explore fully here: Docherty's position, representative of much post-structuralist thought, perhaps needs to confront more openly than it does the literal sense in
 
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which any novelist, realist or modernist, by choosing the words of his text, preempts any actual reader-involvement. Indeed, the reader's struggle to find coherence in a
nouveau roman
could be seen as a more complete enslavement by the writer than anything in the realist tradition, for the power which is exercised by such a writer is more arbitrary and thus more dictatorial. What I do wish to do, however, is to use Mrs. Greene's uncle as an example to test the theory in a crude but telling empirical way, for he both refutes and colorfully confirms it. He refutes it in the sense that Dickens's closure was far from reducing him to a passive role; indeed, it went with intense and vigorous involvementas has always been the case with the traditional realist-sentimental novel: the readers of Donald Barthelme or Philippe Sollers do not intervene in the narration by writing to the author begging for a particular ending, as did the readers of Richardson's
Clarissaor
of
The Old Curiosity Shophappily
ignorant of the theory that their reader-involvement had been "preempted." ("I am inundated," Dickens wrote to his publishers, "with imploring letters recommending poor little Nell to mercy.Six yesterday and four today!")
15
But at the same time Mrs. Greene's uncle did hold, inarticulately, a version of Barthes's position, in that he resented the outcome imposed by thee author. If he happened to have read the facetious "Inquest on the late Master Paul Dombey," published in a comic periodical called
The Man in the Moon
in 1847, he would have come across the same opinion from ''Miss Jane Dickybird," who declares that she "thought the author of the dear child's existence very cruela nasty, sad, naughty man, for killing such a sweet poppetof course he killed it. Fie for shame upon him. How could he be so wicked?"
16
In order to say this they postulated, Mr. Greene unthinkingly, and Miss Dickybird's author mischievously, an extreme version of the autonomy of the text: for Dickens can only "murder" Nell if she has an existence independent of him. It would have been as logical for them to have exclaimed, "The hero! the splendid fellow!! He created my Nelly, whom cruel Fate has now snatched away." But so great was Mr. Greene's emotional identification with Nell that it led him to transfer the credit for Nell's existence to the autonomous text, and direct his anger for her death at the author. This anger, it is necessary to point out in reply to House and Storey, is a consequence of, not an alternative to, grief at Nell's death.
As for actual tears, we are brought back to the distinction between inward feelings and outward manifestations. The
Times
's version of this distinction, when Princess Charlotte died, was quoted in chapter 1:
 
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To assert that we, or that the whole British nation, is at this moment dissolved in tearswould be absurd, though many a tear will be shed for her fate by those who have never seen her; but if we say that deep regret, that calm sorrow, produced by pity for her sufferingsare universally prevalent, we say no more than every tongue confirms.
17
There are plenty of tongues to confirm the sorrow for little Nell, entirely, of course, from those who had never seen her; and there is actually more evidence for tears being shed in her case than in Charlotte's and, because her death was not a public occasion, with less restraint. Francis Jeffrey was a sterner and more austere man than Prince Leopold, but he did not find it necessary to make "evident efforts to preserve calmness and fortitude." If he made any efforts, one suspects, it might have been to weep even more.
Sticky Overflowings
In 1895 Oscar Wilde made his famous remark, "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."
18
It shows, forty-odd years after the novel was published, that we have entered another worldperhaps not completely, since the remark was still intended to shock, but by the twentieth century even the shock has abated. The writing that had so moved the Victorians seemed, a hundred years later, to be (depending on the temperament of the critic) comic or repellent or deplorable. As our first representative of mid-twentieth century opinion I choose Aldous Huxley:
It is evident that Dickens felt most poignantly for and with his Little Nell; and that he wept over her sufferings, piously revered her goodness, and exulted in her joys. He had an overflowing heart; but the trouble was that it overflowed with such curious and even repellent secretions. The overflowing of his heart drowns his head and even dims his eyes; for, whenever he is in the melting mood, Dickens ceases to be able and probably ceases even to wish to see reality. His one and only desire on these occasions is just to overflow, nothing else. Mentally drowned and blinded by the sticky overflowings of his heart, Dickens was incapable, when moved, of recreating, in terms of art, the reality which had moved him, was even, it would seem, unable to perceive that reality. The history of Little Nell is distressing indeed, but not as Dickens presumably meant it to be distressing; it is distressing in its ineptitude and vulgar sentimentality.
19
 
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This opinion pervaded both the world of letters and the world of the academy for several generations. F. R. Leavis was no admirer of Huxley, but his comment on little Nell echoes him very closely:
To suggest taking Little Nell seriously would be absurd: there's nothing there. She doesn't derive from any perception of the real; she's a contrived unreality, the function of which is to facilitate in the reader a gross and virtuous self-indulgence.
20
And John Carey, no great admirer of Leavis, says of Nell's fidelity to her "disgraceful grandfather" that it "is as sanctimonious as it is improbable," and after quoting Nell's attempts to cheer her grandfather he comments: "this sickly scene carries the usual implications that Dickens is becoming besotted."
21
An opinion common to three such diverse critics is clearly widespread, and there is no need to document further what can be regarded as the twentieth century orthodoxy on the death of Nell or Paul. It would equally be the orthodox view of the death of Rose Harrington or of Muriel, if kindly oblivion had not (completely in some cases, partly in others) removed these other children from view: the centrality of Dickens has kept him before everyone's eyes and, so, made him the prominent case of child pathos and the victim of the critical reaction. Now by what criterion are these scenes being judged and found so dreadfully wanting? I suggest that each critic has two criteria, one common and one peculiar to himself. All three of them appeal to reality. Huxley uses the term explicitly, Leavis invokes "the real," and Carey finds Nell's devotion "improbable." Reality is always a slippery concept for the philosophically unsophisticated (which is how all these critics present themselves), but some such appeal is inevitable if we are too claim, as part of our criticism of these scenes, that they distort. Reality is both indefensible and unavoidable as a criterion for the literary critic passing judgment.
When it comes to their other criterion, the critics differ sharply. Huxley shows distaste, Leavis shows moral disapproval, and Carey looks at the social implications. So we have Huxley wrinkling his nose at the "curious and repellent secretions," and with the confidence of a novelist whose own fictional child, when dying, "began to screamcry after shrill cry, repeated with an almost clockwork regularity," he looks down on Dickens as inept and vulgar.
22
Leavis in contrast shakes an admonitory finger at "gross and virtuous

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