Read Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century Online

Authors: Laurence Lerner

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

Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (74 page)

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Page 205
This is important for the present argument, since what we need is not alien spirits who by some freakish time-warp are found to have stumbled into the sensibility of a later age. They would be of much less interest to us than these men of their time who disliked the child-pathos. I ought to add here that Philip Collins, from his unrivalled knowledge of the period, suggests that sentimentality may have been on the decline from about 1860.
57
No doubt there are epicycles on the somersaults performed by the whirligig of taste, but there is also no doubt that Dickens remained popular throughout his life, that readers continued to prefer his earlier novels, and that the audiences at his readings in the 1860s, though they may have sobbed less than Macready, were still spellbound by the death of Paul.
But though this evidence is important, in showing us that negative modern judgments are not necessarily completely locked up in their own time, it is in a sense only negative evidence. Positive evidence would be a case of nineteenth century child pathos that is artistically acceptable to the modern reader.
Huxley himself gives us a clue here, when he picks out Dostoyevsky's account of the death of Ilyusha as "agonizingly moving." The date of
The Brothers Karamazov
(1880) places it, perhaps, just within the cultural world of Dickens, and the way in which the death of Ilyusha is represented is without doubt pathetic and redemptive: it moves to tears, and it brings out the best in the survivors. It is known that Dostoyevsky had read
Dombey and Son
, and there are a large number of parallels between the two deaths. We are given a description of the dead child with many of the icons of pathos: the heart-broken grief of the father, the dying wish of the child, and a very moral sermon delivered by Alyosha after the funeral. I even notice (through, I must admit, the mists of translation) the presence of our touchstone adjective, "little." This is surely enough to locate the episode firmly within the topos of child-pathosfirmly but not simply, for it is surrounded by a far more complex set of circumstances than the death of Paul or Eva or Helen Burns. There is, in the first place, the use of the dog Zhutchka. When Paul Dombey was alive he took to a "blundering, ill-favoured, clumsy, bullet-headed dog, far from good-tempered and certainly not clever, [with] hair all over his eyes, and a comic nose" called Diogenes, and after his death this dog is presented to Florence, to whom he is dearer, because of the link with Paul, "than the most valuable and beautiful of his kind." It is a typical Dickensian blend of comedy and pathos. Diogenes may well have given the idea for Zhutchka, the dog who is brought to cheer
 
Page 206
the dying Ilyushabut with a difference. Ilyusha had taken a fancy to Zhutchka, who is lost; and when he is ill, Kolya Krassotkin turns up with a dog called Perezvon, which he insists on bringing to the child's bedside, despite protests, and appears to taunt Ilyusha about the loss until he produces the dog who turns out to be none other than Zutchka, to Ilyusha's delight.
This episode is a conventional example of child sentimentality, except for two elements. First, the trick of Kolya's that produces such delight in the sick child is very nearly disastrous:
Ilyusha could not speak. White as a sheet, he gazed open-mouthed at Kolya, with his great eyes almost staring out of his head. And if Krassotkin, who had no suspicion of it, had known what a disastrous and fatal effect such a moment might have on the sick child's health, nothing would have induced him to play such a trick on him.
58
The trick has also been a trick on the reader. Keeping us in suspense, in order to arouse in us the same surprised delight that Alyusha felt, is a normal and effective writing strategy: but what is effective rhetorically might be dangerous in actuality, and Dostoyevsky, in telling us this, is being critical not only of Kolya but also of the fictional technique that he has made use of.
Second, there is the reason Zhutchka was lost. He had been tormented by being offered a piece of bread with a pin inside it, which he had snapped up, and then run off howling; it had been assumed that he was dead, but, as it happened, he had spat the pin out. Such cruelty is quite conceivable in Dickens and would be presented with indignation, the death of the child being offered as a redemptive contrast to itas is done by Dostoyevsky, except that the bread with a pin was thrown to the dog by Ilyusha himself! He had repented and cried bitterly, then, when reproached, shouted defiantly that he would throw bread with pins to all the dogs"allall of them." There is no neat division here between saintly child and surrounding evil, and we are all the more justified in speaking of redemption.
Then there is Kolya, a character with no real equivalent in any of the comparable deathbeds. He is a precocious, self-justifying lad of about fourteen ("I am not thirteen, but fourteen, fourteen in a fortnight"!), who acts out his own moodiness in his dealings with Ilyusha: he stays away and refuses to visit him when urged by Alyosha, insisting when he does go that
 
Page 207
it is of his own volition only, showing off his knowledge, trying to make a fool of anyone who answers him, yet at the same time taking enormous pains to be kind to Ilyusha. Kolya's own development is as important a theme as Ilyusha's death and keeps intermeshing with it, then spinning off into impulsive, self-regarding conversations with Alyosha.
If we ask how all this differs from a Dickensian child death, the obvious answer will be its complexity. Pathos depends on simplification. Dostoyevsky achieves this at particular moments, but just as he surrounds his dying child with disturbed, immature, and involved bystanders, he surrounds the pathos with sordidness, hostility, and selfishness, not just as foils but as parts of a complex effect.
This would appear to implywhat in a sense is obviously truethat a full appreciation of the death of Ilyusha must rest on a complete response to the whole novel; and indeed it may not sound like much of a defense of the episode in itself to insist that its sentimentality is redeemed by the complexity of the context. Literary criticism obviously needs to respect the wholeness of a novel or poem; but I have written this book in the belief that to single out parts, and compare the same theme in book after book, also has its value. When we compare whole novels by Dickens and Dostoyevsky, the immeasurable superiority of Dostoyevsky's account of the spiritual growth of his heroes is matched only by the immeasurable superiority of Dickens's comic inventiveness and linguistic exuberance. In Dickens's case, we have seen how this invades and transforms the sentimentality of Jenny Wren radically, of Paul Dombey in part, of little Nell hardly at all.
In order to ask whether there is a comparable redemption of local sentimentality in Dostoyevsky's case, I shall look at a particular moment in some detail; and in order to draw together the whole discussion I shall do this by way of a comparison with comparable passages from the two deathbeds by which we have already lingered so long, those of Eva and Paul. I begin with Eva.
Topsy gave the short, blunt laugh that was her common mode of expressing incredulity
"No; she can't bar me, 'cause I'm a nigger!she'd's soon have a toad touch her! There can't nobody love niggers, and niggers can't do nothin'!
I
don't care," said Topsy, beginning to whistle.
"O Topsy, poor child, I love you!" said Eva, with a sudden burst of feeling,
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