 | | empty hands, a worn-out exhausted body, and unutterable longings to flee from a world that has had for me so many sharp experiences. God help me, my baby, my baby! God help me, my little lost Eddy!
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There are two kinds of comment possible about such writing. The first is immediate and untheoretical, to record how moving it is: for some purposes this is all we want to say, and it may, given the original document, not be necessary to say anything. But for other purposes we might want to make a theoretical point: that as readers we are confronted only with words, from which we derive the visceral experience of a mother's grief, and can be moved to a similar, if less intense, visceral experience of our own.
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When Elizabeth Prentiss writes "God has been most merciful to us in this affliction, and, if a bereaved, we are still a
happy
household and full of thanksgiving," this claim will sound, to many a modern reader, like the rote repetition of a formula. Are we entitled to demand something more than rote formulae before we can be convinced of the reality of grief? That is clearly a literary question, and in later chapters it will be thrust on us. We know that such faith was expected (especially from clergymen's wives), and therefore we can say that, however despairing the women felt, they would still feel obliged to affirm the strength of their faith. The fact that we are reading a private diary does not affect this, not only because the possibility of publication might well have been present to her mind (justifiably, in this case) but also because conforming to expectations is best done if consistent. These women inhabited their public belief system even when alone.
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The Tait and Prentiss children really lived and really died, and there is no hint of fiction in the accounts; I shall now, for comparison, turn to a narrative which hovers between fact and fiction.
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William Canton had two daughters, and lost them both. In 1874, at the age of twenty-nine, he married Emma Moore; their small daughter Violet died in 1877, and his wife died in 1880. Two years later he married again, and his wife Annie bore two children, a daughter, Winifred Vida (known usually as W.V.) in 1890, and a son, Guy, in 1896. W.V. died in 1901, just before her eleventh birthday.
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The sketches, stories, and poems that Canton wrote about her are now more or less forgotten but were very popular at the time. Many of these
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