Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (57 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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and George's sobs were deep and choking; but Flora, externally, only seemed absorbed in helping him to go through with it; she, herself, never lost her fixed, composed, hopeless look." (Part ii, chapter 20)
We seem to be watching Flora at this funeral with very much the same eyes with which the public watched Prince Leopold at Charlotte's funeral, observing outward behavior and speculating on inner feeling. Prince Leopold's feelings were not directly accessible because a public occasion does not reveal private grief; Flora's are not available because the novelist has chosen, for a time at least, to hold us at bay, inviting us to share the ignorance of the family and wonder just how Flora is reacting, to be slightly puzzled by her shift of attention from lost child to husband, to suspect that what this shows is despair.
During this whole episode, Flora is pregnanta fact that we do not learn until the end of the novel, for another daughter is born in the penultimate chapter. Even the fact is not quite certain, because the passage off time is not very clearly marked. The disaster seems to have occurred in the summer, and the new child is born on December 24. With her fierce Victorian reticence, Yonge does not, of course, drop even a hint that Flora's despair might be the result of her conditionjust as there was no hint that Mrs. May, who produced the daisy chain, might have found eleven pregnancies burdensome. The exclusion of pregnancy as an experience limits the Victorian novel as much as the exclusion of sexperhaps more, since there are so many traditional ways of representing sex obliquely.
The new daughter is named Margaret. This is certainly significant, Margaret being the name both of Flora's beloved eldest sister and of her affectionate sister-in-law, whereas the dead child had been called after George's wealthy and rather interfering aunt, whom Flora manages with great skill. Names are value-coded, and the rather fancy and affected "Leonora" has now been replaced by a good English forename.
But the new infant "is not nearly so fine and healthy as her sister was," and although renewed motherhood brings back some of Flora's energy, she has not, by the end, ceased her self-reproaches: her passionate insistence that she will never join her mother in heaven has passed, but she does claim, immediately after the birth, that she can now die, declaring that Ethel (her sister) will be the best mother to her child. She gets over that too, but in the end we realize that
 
Page 151
the shock of her child's death had taken away the zest and energy which had rejoiced in her chosen way of life, and opened her eyes to see what Master she had been serving; and the perception of the hollowness of all that had been apparently good in her, had filled her with remorse and despair. (Part ii, chapter 26)
The Daisy Chain
has a palpable design on the reader, for Charlotte Yonge is more overtly didactic than most Victorian novelists; but she is also more complex than some, and her handling of this death is more interesting than most of the others that this chapter deals with. It raises, for instance, the question of class.
Godfrey's cordial was a mixture of opium, treacle, and infusion of sassafras. Its use was widespread in the nineteenth century, and there is no doubt that it was responsible for an enormous number of child deaths. In Coventry alone, ten gallons (enough for twelve thousand doses) were sold each week; and Dr. H. Julian Hunter wrote in 1863, "there is not a little village shop in the country that sells anything that does not sell its own Godfrey."
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Doctors were agreed that narcotics was a principal cause of infant death, caused sometimes through well-meaning ignorance on the part of the mother, sometimes by "wilful neglect with the hope of deathin fact, infanticide"and of course all the gradations in between. But the children who took Godfrey's cordial were the children of the poor and (in Victorian terminology) of the undeserving poor; the Floras would never have dreamed of using it. What is shocking in the case of little Leonora is that a procedure which belongs with the lower classes has invaded a respectable family: hence the importance of the nursemaid Preston (calling women by their surname only, nowironicallya sign of emancipation, was of course a class marker in the nineteenth century). The contrast between George's anger and Dr. May's stern but kind treatment of Preston is not only a moral contrast; it is also about the ways of warding off a threat from below. George thinks of punishment and of calling the police (those protectors of the bourgeoisie), while Dr. May, just as staunch a Tory in theory, tries to use the occasion to teach the nurse. And Flora, when eventually she brings herself to see Preston, turns her away with a gift of money and the assurance, ''If you are ever in any distress, I hope you will let me know." Meta, her sister-in-law, is "a little disappointed to see sovereigns instead of a book," and gently suggests that she might, instead, have given her a Bible. "You may
 
Page 152
give her one if you like," Flora replies. "I could not." This is of course about degrees of forgiveness (the one less involved can forgive more fully); but it is also about the cash nexus as the bond between classes. With an irony she would not have wished, Yonge has shown that the less complete forgiveness has produced what the working-class maid, surely, will value more.
Now this strategy of presenting with shocked horror an occurrence that was common enough among the poor is not unique in the Victorian novel. A parallel would be the treatment of illegitimacy in such novels as
Adam Bede
and
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
. Hetty's disgrace and Tess's shame, along with the emotional intensity of everyone's reactioncondemnation, tact, or compassionbelong to respectable bourgeois society, to the world of the readers rather than to that of the novel.
The ideological implications of this are ambivalent. It can of course be seen as hypocrisy or avoidance: the pretence, conscious or otherwise, that such things do not happen, that all of society can afford to be as scrupulous as the bourgeois reader undoubtedly is. That is the radical reading. But it can also be seen as protest, as a way of showing the outrageousness of the whole process, a way of compelling us to be shocked, not to take refuge in the knowledge that what is widespread in the lower classes will not affect us. These two readings seem to me equally plausible, and no doubt it will be the ideological preference of the critic that will determine the choice between them.
As well as class, there are issues of gender raised by the episode. What are a woman's duties? Flora's despair is caused by deciding she had been a bad mother; but is this not an example of how the conservative imagination stigmatizes progress as wicked? Flora seems to have behaved like a modern professional mother, used child care, and while conscientiously loving and visiting her child regularly, taken care that it did not interfere too much with her own life.
But not quite. The tasks for which Flora had "neglected" Leonora were just as feminine as mothering: she had encouraged her husband to go into Parliament and supported him when there, both socially, as a hostess, and by unobtrusively making sure that he said the right things and gave the right speeches. The choice lies between her duties as a mother and her duties as a wife, with a strong suggestion that "worldly motives" loom larger in the latter: motherhood on the other hand is so sacred a function that the motives in carrying it out can hardly be anything but pure. This
 
Page 153
dilemma is explored in a way that is both rigidly conventional and interestingly complex:
The sorrow that had fallen on the Grange seemed to have changed none of the usual habits therevisiting, riding, driving, dinners, and music, went on with little check. Flora was sure to be found the animated, attentive lady of the house, or else sharing her husband's pursuits, helping him with his business, or assisting him in seeking pleasure, spending whole afternoons at the coach-maker's, over a carriage that they were building, and, it was reported, playing ecarté in the evening. (Part ii, chapter 21)
Does this contrast the selfishness of her grief with the dutiful carrying out of wifely support, or the profundity of grief with the triviality of the daily round? No simple didactic point can be folded into this part of the narrative. And Flora's final decision has a similar ambivalence. She has what seems a cathartic experience at the very end of the book, when she announces that she wants to give up "dinners and parties, empty talk and vain show," persuade George to give up his Parliamentary seat, and live in peace in the country. This has the ring of redemptive self-discovery, but she is finally persuaded out of it by her wise clerical brotherreinforced by the bracing sharpness of Ethel's remark: "I don't think it is for his dignity for you to put him into Parliament to please you, and then take him out to please you" (chapter 27). The clear choice between self-indulgence and duty is as muddied here as it is in reality: Flora's future life will continue to wind its way among moral ambiguities.
And, finally, what of the pathos and uplift that we have come to expect when a child dies? Does little Leonora become an angel and see the bright light shining, casting an improving influence on all around? The difference between child death and infant death is of course important here: an infant who cannot yet speak is obviously not able to say "the print upon the stairs at school is not divine enough. The light about the head is shining on me as I go!" But little Nell had no dying words, and could not the static vignette of her death be that of an infant? Nell, who dies either of TB or of the nameless wasting that is unsullied by diagnosis, naturally comes to a peaceful end, whereas Leonora's death is meant to shock us into awareness of the abuse; so she must suffer and not die in tranquillity. The "poor little sufferer" becomes not an angel but a "little corpse."
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So devout a novelist as Charlotte Yonge could not avoid emphasizing

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