 | | was disconcerted. The captain fidgeted uneasily.
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| | ''Mamma, mamma," he ran to her, "the cannon's yours, of course, but let Ilyusha have it, because it's a present to him, but it's just as good as yours. Ilyusha will always let you play with it, it shall belong to both of you, both of you."
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| | "No, I don't want it to belong to both of us, I want it to be mine altogether, not Ilysuha's," persisted mamma, on the point of tears.
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| | "Take it mother, here, keep it!" Ilyusha cried. "Ilyusha darling, he's the one who loves his mamma!" she said tenderly, and at once began wheeling the cannon to and fro on her lap again. (Part iv, book 10, chapter 5).
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The central figure of any child death must surely be the mother, and most of the real deaths described in chapter 1 were narrated by the mother. It is astonishing, then, how few of the fictional deaths involve mothers. Neither Little Nell nor Paul; Eva's mother is carefully placed in opposition to the sympathy and pathos; Helen Burns is an orphan; even in
The Daisy Chain,
though Flora is involved, the real grief for the child seems to be that of Dr May, the grandfather. Only in the case of Dickens is there any obvious explanationif we can call it that. Happy families in Dickens are hardly ever biologically normalfather or mother (usually mother) is often missing and replaced by a substitute. This can be seen either as a rhetorical device to assert that family values are more enduring than the family itself (as is done here through the very motherly figure of Polly Toodle, the "old nurse"), or as the expression of a profound uncertainty (real families are never real families).
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Dostoyevsky does give us a mother; but in a manner that subverts the family coherence as much as anything in Dickens. Ilyusha's mother is a half-wit, with the mental age and emotional development of a child, and in this scene she not only takes the child's cannon, she usurps his role as the object of pity. The childishness that makes her into a pathetic figure also makes her a disturbing element, so that she both arrogates the pathos to herself and destroys it altogether by her egoism. The result is a deep ambivalence, a twisted and disturbing pathos.
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Dostoyevsky, then, is using much the same material as Dickens and some of the same material as Stowe: it is easy to find details in his narrative that locate it among the sticky secretionsor the beautiful fictions that transcend mere literature (depending whose judgment we use). But whereas Dickens redeems his novels for sophisticated modern readers by
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