Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture (Warwick Studies in the Humanities)

Citation preview

REPRESENTATIONS OF DEATH IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY US WRITING AND CULTURE

Warwick Studies in the Humanities The Humanities Research Centre of the University of Warwick in collaboration with Ashgate has re-launched its book series. Warwick Studies in the Humanities aims to bring together innovative work of a high academic standard which crosses disciplinary borders in the Arts and Humanities. It provides a forum for volumes exploring new dimensions of cultural history from the early modern period to the present, and for works that investigate aspects of contemporary cultural production within and across national boundaries. The series reflects the breadth of the interdisciplinary work carried out at Warwick’s Humanities Research Centre, and includes work of both European and extra-European scope.

Series Editors Dr Samantha Haigh (French Studies) Dr Karen O’Brien (English & Comparative Literature) Dr Loredana Polezzi (Italian Studies)

Series Advisory Board Professor Susan Bassnett (Warwick) Dr David Bradshaw (Worcester College, Oxford) Professor Chris Clark (Warwick) Professor Stuart Clark (Swansea) Professor Richard Dyer (Warwick) Professor Jo Labanyi (Institute of Romance Studies, London) Professor Carolyn Steedman (Warwick)

Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture

Edited by LUCY E. FRANK

University of Warwick, UK

” Lucy E. Frank 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Lucy E. Frank has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Representations of death in nineteenth-century US writing and culture. – (Warwick studies in the humanities) 1. American literature – 19th century – History and criticism 2. Death in literature I. Frank, Lucy 810.9’3548’09034 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Representations of death in nineteenth-century US writing and culture / edited by Lucy Frank. p. cm. — (Warwick studies in the humanities) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5528-2 (alk. paper) 1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Death in literature. 3. Death—Social aspects—United States—History—19th century. 4. United States— Intellectual life—19th century. 5. Mourning customs in literature. 6. Indians in literature. 7. African Americans in literature. 8. Children in literature. 9. Suicide in literature. I. Frank, Lucy, 1973PS217.D43R47 2007 810.9’3548—dc22 2006033510 ISBN: 978-0-7546-5528-2 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Curious Dreams: Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture Lucy Frank Part 1

vii viii xi

1

Death, Citizenship and the Politics of Mourning

1 Chief Seattle’s Afterlife: Mourning and Cross-Cultural Synthesis In Nineteenth-Century America John J. Kucich

15

2 Escaping the ‘benumbing influence of a present embodied death’: The Politics of Mourning in 1850s African-American Writing Jeffrey Steele

29

3 Representative Mournfulness: Nation and Race in the Time of Lincoln Dana Luciano

43

4 ‘Stock in dead folk’: The Value of Black Mortality in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Stephen Shapiro

61

5 ‘I cannot bear to be hurted any more’: Suicide as Dialectical Ideological Sign in Nineteenth-Century American Realism Kevin Grauke

77

6 Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality: W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt Joanne van der Woude

89

vi Part 2

Representations of Death Signatures and Elegies

7 ‘I think I was enchanted’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Haunting of American Women Poets Alison Chapman

109

8 God’s Will, Not Mine: Child Death as a Theodicean Problem in Poetry by Nineteenth-Century American Women Paula Bernat Bennett

125

9 ‘The little coffin’: Anthologies, Conventions and Dead Children Jessica F. Roberts Part 3

141

Cultures of Death

10 The Fashion of Mourning Ann Schofield 11 ‘At a distance from the scene of the atrocity’: Death and Detachment in Poe’s ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ Elizabeth Carolyn Miller 12 Spectres on the New York Stage: The (Pepper’s) Ghost Craze of 1863 Dassia N. Posner

157

173 189

13 Medusa’s Blinding Art: Mesmerism and Female Artistic Agency In Louisa May Alcott’s ‘A Pair of Eyes; or, Modern Magic’ Ann Heilmann

205

14 “To surprise immortality”: Spiritualism and Shakerism in William Dean Howells’s The Undiscovered Country Kelly Richardson

217

Index

231

List of Illustrations

Fig. 10.1 Reproduced from B. Altman’s Catalogue, Spring and Summer, 1917

167

Fig. 10.2 Reproduced from a Lord and Taylor advertisement, circa 1907

168

Fig. 10.3 Reproduced from Harper’s Bazaar, circa 1905

168

Fig. 10.4 Reproduced from the Bloomington Catalogue, 1886

169

Fig. 10.5 Reproduced from Pictorial Review, June 1907

169

Fig. 12.1 Mrs W.R. Floyd as the ghost of Agnes Darke and Mr H.F. Daly as Dr Henry Haws in True to the Last. Unmounted carte-de-visite, 85 x 53mm. Laurence Senelick Collection of Theatrical Imagery

195

Fig. 12.2 A simplified illustration of the Pepper’s Ghost mechanism. Reproduced from ‘Correct Explanation of the Ghost’ (Scientific American, 29 August 1863), 132

199

Fig. 12.3 A modification of Pepper’s technique. The original caption reads: ‘AN X-RAY ILLUSION UPON THE STAGE CONVERSION OF A LIVING MAN INTO A SKELETON’. Reproduced from ‘The Cabaret Du Neant’ (Scientific American, 7 March 1896), 152

200

Notes on Contributors

PAULA BERNAT BENNETT recently retired as Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her publications include My Life a Loaded Gun: Dickinson, Plath, Rich and Female Creativity (1990), and Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet (1990). She is co-editor of Solitary Pleasures: The Literary, Historical and Artistic Discourses of Auto-Eroticism (1995), and editor of NineteenthCentury American Women Poets (1998) and Palace Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt (2001). Her most recent publication is Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (2003). ALISON CHAPMAN is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Glasgow and, from 2005, a Visiting Professor at the University of Victoria. She is the author of The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (2000), the editor of Victorian Women Poets (Essays and Studies series, 2003), and the co-editor of A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2003) and Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Artists and Writers in Italy (2003). She is completing a monograph on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s circle in Risorgimento, Italy. LUCY FRANK teaches nineteenth and twentieth-century American Literature at Warwick University. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, literary and popular literary responses to the Civil War, and representations of death and mourning in American literature. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Suturing the Nation: The Politics of Mourning in Postbellum America, 1865–1886. KEVIN GRAUKE is Assistant Professor of English at La Salle University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His interests include nineteenth-century American literature, contemporary American fiction and creative writing. He has published articles on Rebecca Harding Davis, Charles Frazier and Michael Shaara. His fiction has been published in a number of literary journals, including Southern Review, Story Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Quarterly West, and Third Coast. ANN HEILMANN is Professor of English at the University of Hull. The author of New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Macmillan, 2000) and New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird

Notes on Contributors

ix

(Manchester University Press, 2004), she has co-edited (with Mark Llewellyn) a five-volume critical edition of The Collected Short Stories of George Moore (Pickering and Chatto, 2007). She is the editor of three essay collections, Feminist Forerunners (Pandora, 2003), (with Margaret Beetham) New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture 1880–1930 (Routledge, 2004), and (with Mark Llewellyn) Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Palgrave, 2007). She has also edited four anthologies, most recently Anti-Feminism in Edwardian Literature (with Lucy Delap and a contribution by Sue Thomas, Thoemmes Continuum and Edition Synapse, 2006). She is the general editor of Routledge’s Major Works ‘History of Feminism’ series. JOHN J. KUCICH earned his doctorate in English from Tufts University in 2001, where he specialized in cross-cultural dynamics of nineteenth-century American literature. He is currently Assistant Professor of English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. He is the author of Ghostly Communion: CrossCultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Dartmouth College Press, 2004), and has published articles on spiritualism in two collections, Spectral America (2004) and The Occult in Nineteenth-Century America (2004). His current research interests include animism and ecocriticism, and the connections between Native American and European American culture in the late nineteenth century. DANA LUCIANO teaches sexuality and gender studies and nineteenth-century US literature in the English Department at Georgetown University. Recent publications include ‘Melville’s Untimely History: “Benito Cereno” as Counter-Monumental Narrative’, in Arizona Quarterly, ‘Passing Shadows: Melancholy Nationality and Black Publicity in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood’, in David Eng and David Kazanjian, eds, Loss: The Psychic and Social Contexts of Melancholia, and ‘Invalid Relations: Queer Kinship in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady’ in The Henry James Review. She is currently completing a book entitled Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America. ELIZABETH CAROLYN MILLER is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University. Her research interests include crime fiction, gender, consumer culture and visual culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is currently completing a manuscript on ‘The New Woman Criminal’ in British crime fiction and film of the fin de siecle. She has published two articles in Victorian Literature and Culture and one in The Henry James Review. DASSIA N. POSNER is currently in the final year of her Ph.D program in theatre history at Tufts University. Her scholarly interests include nineteenth-century popular entertainment, Russian avant-garde theatre and the history of puppetry. Her dissertation traces the influence of E.T.A. Hoffman’s theatrical history on

x

Representations of Death

Russian Silver-Age theatre. She was recently awarded a Mellon Fellowship through the Council on Library and Information Resources for dissertation research in original sources. She teaches in the theatre department at Boston College and serves on the advisory board of Puppetry International. KELLY RICHARDSON is an Assistant Professor at Winthrop University. A recent graduate of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Richardson completed her dissertation on themes of spirituality and female independence in nineteenth-century American literature. She has recently published work on Lizette Woodworth Reese and Sarah Orne Jewett. Her primary research interests include American literature, religion and women’s studies. JESSICA F. ROBERTS is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Albion College. She has edited, with William Spengemann, Penguin’s anthology Nineteenth-Century American Poetry and an unpublished variorum edition of Sarah Piatt’s American poems. Currently, she is working on a book about the poetry of Sarah Piatt and Herman Melville and the formation of poetic conventions in the nineteenth-century American culture of anthologies. ANN SCHOFIELD is Professor of American Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the author of ‘to do and to be’: Portraits of Four Women Activists, 1893–1986 (1997). She currently has a book in progress on the cultural history of respectability in turn-of-the-century America. STEPHEN SHAPIRO teaches American writing and cultural materialism at Warwick University. His interests focus on world-systems analyses and critical genealogies of bourgeois experience. Recent and forthcoming publications include: co-editing Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Politics, Culture and Sexuality in the Early American Republic (University of Tennessee Press, 2004); Culture and Commerce: The Early American Novel in the Atlantic World-System; and Approaching Capital (Pluto, 2007) JEFFREY STEELE is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His publications include The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance (1987), The Essential Margaret Fuller (editor, 1992), and Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (2001). JOANNE VAN DER WOUDE is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation, entitled ‘Towards a Transatlantic Aesthetic: Immigration, Translation, and Mourning in the Seventeenth Century’ examines how the representational strategies of early immigrant communities render the emergence of a distinct cultural consciousness in the contact zones of colonial North America. Her articles and reviews have appeared in American Literature, Psalms in the Early Modern World, Seventeenth-Century News and Britain and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History.

Acknowledgements My thanks go to all the scholars who responded to my initial call for papers, as well as to all the contributors, for their excellent and illuminating essays. I also owe a debt of thanks to the two anonymous readers from Ashgate Press, for their comments on the draft of the Introduction, and to Ann Donahue, the editor at Ashgate Press. Several people provided invaluable assistance at various stages of the volume’s preparation. First of all I wish to thank Roger Starling, whose ‘Inventions of Death’ conference at Warwick University (2001) instigated this whole project. I am much indebted to him for all his generosity and advice. I am very grateful to Paula Bernat Bennett and Karen O’Brien for all their help and support, and to Nicholas Ray, whose comments and advice are always invaluable. I would also like to thank Helena Sedgwick for all her patient work formatting this volume. Thanks are also due to Victoria Rumble and Denice Hargrove for their kind permission to reproduce the ‘Confederate Memorial Service’ photograph for the cover image.

For Harley Davis Frank (1930–2004)

Introduction

Curious Dreams Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture Lucy Frank

Our descendents have forgotten us. My grandson lives in a stately house built with money made by these old hands of mine, and I sleep in a neglected grave with invading vermin that gnaw my shroud to build them nests withal! I and my friends that lie with me founded and secured the prosperity of this fine city, and the stately bantling of our loves leaves us to rot in a dilapidated cemetery which neighbors curse and strangers scoff at. Mark Twain ‘The Curious Dream’1

In his 1870 short story ‘The Curious Dream’, Mark Twain envisages a bizarrely comic encounter with the dead. The narrator of the story is at once horrified and pitying when he is brought face to face with the spectacle of the inhabitants of the city cemetery voting with their feet as it were, and emigrating westward. This exodus, as one of the dead explains to him, has come about because of the appalling neglect and lack of respect shown by the living descendants of the city’s founders. Yet, as the narrator converses with his deceased interlocutor, it emerges that the dead are themselves less than angelic characters. The skeleton speaker admits to his listener, with ‘a deep sly smile,’ that ‘about the time he acquired his present [shroud], a ghost in a neighbouring cemetery missed one’ (36). It also quickly becomes apparent that the community of the dead is every bit as obsessed with social status and respectability as that of the living. Nevertheless, at the end of the tale the narrator is filled with sympathy for the dead and vows to publish an account of ‘this curious and very sorrowful exodus’ (39). In a slyly comic way, the story mocks the materialism of the Gilded Age; but it goes further than this in suggesting that not only is the US obsessed with wealth and status, it always has been. Those who ‘founded and secured the prosperity of this fine city’ appear to have been cut-throat rather than heroic, and, Twain implies, are now getting their just deserts. The neglect of the dead by the living is a symptom that something is rotten within the fine ‘city’ of the United States. Its inhabitants may enjoy the legacy of the Founding Fathers, but in banishing the dead to the very margins of society, they remain cut off from their own national history.

2

Representations of Death/Lucy Frank

It becomes clear, however, that the dead, for all their discontent, still view themselves as – in fact still are – citizens, or at least the ‘remnants’ of citizens (35). It seems to be the very tenuousness of their status, the marginalization and ignominy they suffer, which has made them so militant. ‘We are all leaving’ confides the skeleton to the narrator, ‘[w]e cannot tolerate the treatment we are receiving at the hands of our descendents’: It was decided in public conclave, last night, to emigrate, and by the time the sun rises there won’t be a bone left in our old habitations [...] My opinion is the general opinion. If you doubt it, go and see how the departing ghosts upset things before they started. They were almost riotous in their demonstrations of distaste [...] (38)

For the dead, citizenship has assumed a vitality that contrasts conspicuously with the complacency and enervation of their privileged descendants. For the living, citizenship is an empty category; empty because it is taken for granted, apolitical, privatized. Yet Twain resists the temptation to relegate the true spirit of democracy to the dead past. Thus, the forefathers of American democracy hardly seem to be heroic; instead, as we noted earlier, the dead are every bit as quarrelsome, crafty and status-conscious as the living. What, then, is the reader to make of this story? Twain’s narrator seems to be saying that citizenship has itself been effectively killed off by the living and has been reduced to haunting the margins of ‘this fine city’. The moral of this grotesquely gothic little tale is that citizenship, for those who take it for granted, is moribund. It is only when a particular group is excluded from political representation, deprived of their rights and rendered invisible, that democracy awakens from its deathly slumber, regains its animation and begins to march. Twain’s wry scrutiny of the relationship – or lack of one – between the dead and the living, foregrounds the aim of this volume, which is to explore how death was conceptualized and symbolized in nineteenth-century US culture. The essays in this collection investigate the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans understood their relationship to the dead: how, for example, did they articulate a sense of responsibility to the dead? And what was the relationship between the dead and the national body politic in the popular imagination? Twain’s tale is especially pertinent to this latter question because of the way in which it juxtaposes death with issues of democracy. For all their petty quarrels amongst themselves, the dead appear to be a homogenous group with a welldeveloped sense of entitlement as well as a sense of injustice. The fate of those who were never counted as citizens in the first place is excluded from the purview of the tale. Thus Twain, quite unwittingly, enacts a forgetting not unlike that which he seeks to criticize. In fact, as Julia Stern eloquently points out, the foundation of the American Republic is like a crypt where ‘[...] the nation’s non-citizens – women, the poor, Native Americans, African Americans [...] lie socially dead and inadequately buried’ beneath the ‘great national edifice’ (2). The absent presence of these socially dead and silenced non-citizens has been a key factor in the

Introduction

3

definition of Republican privilege and national belonging. It is therefore crucial, if we wish to expand our understanding of American history and culture, to make audible these silenced voices and to hear them alongside the voices of those who enjoyed the privileges of citizenship. To this end, this volume explores not only the ways in which ‘the living’ represented ‘the dead’, but also how those who were deemed to be non-citizens, and therefore socially dead, experienced a relationship to mortality that was quite different from that of the socially privileged. Consequently, the knowledge of death and the dead that these groups articulated – their mourning rituals and their modes of representing death – was different from that of the dominant, white, bourgeois culture. As Karla Holloway explains in relation to African-American society, Black culture’s stories of death and dying were inextricably linked to the ways in which the nation experienced, perceived, and represented African America. Sometimes it was a subtext, but even then the ghostly presence of those narratives reminded us that something about America was, for black folk, disjointed. Instead of death and dying being unusual, untoward events, or despite being inevitable, end-of-lifespan events, the cycles of our daily lives were so persistently interrupted by specters of death that we worked this experience into the culture’s iconography and included it as an aspect of black cultural sensibility [...] death was an untimely accompaniment to the life of black folk – a sensibility that was, unfortunately, based on hard facts. (6)

Mindful of Holloway’s analysis of African-American culture, this volume investigates how the experience of social death configures different subcultures’ representations of death. Accordingly, the collection brings together scholarship on a range of different writers, some of whom were among the cultural elite, some of whom were marginalized. Likewise, although a number of the texts and the forms of cultural production considered in this book now have a relatively secure place in the canon, others have only recently become the subject of scholarly discussion. It is striking that Philippe Ariès, in his famous analyses of death and western culture, evinces a marked sense of unease – even suspicion – when it comes to American attitudes towards death.2 It isn’t so much that he sees American culture as differing radically from European countries in its treatment of death, but rather that the US frequently seems for Ariès to be the limit case, the extreme: the contradictions in its treatment of death are more marked, its fetishization of the dead more exaggerated. Thus, according to Ariès, authors of sentimental consolation literature (by which he means female authors) were particularly morbid in the US (The Hour of Our Death, 451), their rhetorical style especially ‘naive and crude, without nuance or nicety’ (454). It is also in the United States, Ariès argues, that we find the first ‘major manifestations of the funeral cult of the hero’ (Western Attitudes towards Death, 78) (an assertion which contrasts with the spectacle of the neglected dead in Twain’s story). Washington, DC, filled with commemorative monuments of the famous and exemplary dead – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, the war dead at Arlington – epitomizes the formative role of the ‘national necropolis’ in the nation’s sense of its own identity, the

4

Representations of Death/Lucy Frank

monuments of the dead marking ‘the visible sign of the permanence of the city’ (74). For Ariès, America is representative of the fact that societies and nations are ‘composed of both the dead and the living’ (74). When discussing the development of attitudes towards death, particularly since the eighteenth century, Ariès tends to assume that the dead are white, wealthy and male. His fascinating and insightful work thus presents a difficulty, in that while he seeks to historicize death, the impressively broad scope of his project means that – at least in the context of US culture – he does not historicize enough, and leaves out many of the specificities and complexities of US history and society. Following Ariès’ ground-breaking work, however, and Orlando Patterson’s subsequent Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982), a number of recent scholars have begun to examine the unique configuration of America’s national necropolis, and in particular its troubling exclusions. Gary Laderman’s The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Towards Death, 1799–1883 (1996) provides a detailed exploration of the transitions in American attitudes towards death. Laderman examines how key historical moments, most notably the Civil War, brought mortality sharply into focus, and how these events impacted on the popular imagination. As he points out, the most striking aspect of nineteenthcentury American attitudes towards death consisted of the numerous unconventional interpretative responses to death and the degree of conflict over the place of the dead in society (10). Sharon Patricia Holland’s study Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and Black Subjectivity (2000) is concerned with how death in both figurative and literal terms is bound up with the American social landscape, and especially with questions of power and exclusion in relation to African-American experience. The United States’s history of slavery, removal and conquest, she argues, has been relegated to the national unconscious, comprising a ‘space of death’ in the national imaginary (4). Her exploration of twentieth-century African-American culture is suggestive of the ways in which death functions in a number of different registers: as a cultural/national phenomenon or discourse, as a figurative silencing or process of erasure, and as an embodied entity or subject capable of transgression. Similarly, Russ Castronovo’s recent book Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism And The Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2001) engages with questions of death and social power, exploring how social death, the disembodiment of living citizens and the numerous ‘hauntings’ of American memory are linked to – indeed are at the core of – US democracy. Castronovo argues that citizenship in nineteenth-century America was governed by an insidious ‘necro ideology’. He identifies this as, [...] a set of deathly effects specific to the nineteenth-century United States [which] eternalizes sociohistorical relations as neither social nor historical by conceptualizing the unmarked soul as refuge from the politicized body, idealizing the afterlife as a perfected social order, and representing passivity and somnolence as democratic virtues. (13)

Introduction

5

Death in nineteenth-century America, in other words, is not just a biological event but also an ideological operation, whereby the cultural meanings invested in particular bodies are overcome, and historically specific material conditions producing alienation, political difference and lack of freedom no longer signify. This deathly ideology ‘secures the body’s passage from political life to afterlife, quite literally a region after history where temporality, substance and change no longer matter’ (12). Freedom and death, then, turn out to have been intertwined in complex ways from the founding of American democracy onwards. In his exploration of the ways in which death structures political life in the nineteenthcentury body politic, Castronovo does identify some fractures in this necroideology – moments where the nation’s morbid political ideology can be held up to scrutiny and interrogated. It is a key aim of this volume to explore some of these fault-lines. How, for example, did the work of mourning allow displaced and silenced noncitizens to contest the racial and gendered barriers that stood in the way of ‘national’ belonging? How did the cataclysmic Civil War transform attitudes towards death and the afterlife? And in what ways did infant death lead women writers to challenge prevailing gender ideology? The essays in this collection will examine the ways in which the voices of the marginalised and socially dead are audible in nineteenth-century texts. US culture in the nineteenth century is notable for its numerous emergent discourses dedicated to understanding and accepting the inevitability of death. This book examines a range of different representations of death from this turbulent era, and highlights the development of disturbing and original figurations of mortality in American writing and culture during the nineteenth century. The rising literacy rates and the explosion in print culture that occurred between 1830 and 1890 mean that there is a wealth of material for modern scholars to explore, much of it now becoming increasingly easy to access via online archives. Yet nineteenth-century literature, especially popular writing, has often been seen in reductive and clichéd terms when it comes to the representation of death and mourning. Authors of the period have been stereotyped as representing mortality solely in terms of lachrymose deathbed scenes. Certainly there are plenty of these in nineteenth-century texts, the death of Stowe’s little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) is probably the most obvious, closely followed by Twain’s Emmeline Grangerford in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Since the famous Tompkins/Douglas debate of the early 1980s, much vital scholarship has been done to reclaim sentimental writing, especially women’s writing. The important work of Joanne Dobson, Mary Louise Kete and Elizabeth Petrino, for example, deals with sentimental discourse as a mode of elegy that articulated the voice of the female mourner and allowed for the reaffirmation of relational ties severed by death. Yet, death as an object of literary study seems to have emerged as a by-product of the sentimental, rather than being explored directly. As the essays in this book demonstrate, however, if the question of death is essential to the concerns of sentimental literature, sentimental discourse is not – and in the nineteenth century was not perceived to be – the only discursive mode for addressing death. Rather than merely repeating the

6

Representations of Death/Lucy Frank

terms of Tompkins’ and Douglas’s earlier debate, then, this volume places sentimental writing about death within a broader framework. In spite of its dominance, sentimental consolatory writing is situated as just one of a range of literary responses to the perpetual enigma of mortality. Finally, I want to turn to Elizabeth Bronfen’s important book on death and representation, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992). In the Introduction to her study, Bronfen states that: ‘[n]arrative and visual representations of death [draw] their material from a common cultural image repertoire’ (xi). As their inclusion in her study demonstrates, a number of the most iconic death scenes in nineteenth-century literature were produced by American writers. Thus some of the most memorable images of death, in a period that was saturated with them, include the death of Stowe’s little Eva, Zenobia’s corpse in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), and Poe’s ethereal female revenants such as ‘Ligeia’ (1838), as well as his infamous statement in ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) that the death of a beautiful woman ‘is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’ (Poe, 144). Bronfen’s work therefore allows us to situate a small number of key American texts within her compelling, overarching narrative of death, gender and representation in western culture.3 Yet she leaves unanswered the question of how much of this ‘cultural image repertoire’, as she evocatively terms it, is actually common to these different societies. Undoubtedly, American writing was heavily influenced by British and other European literatures, yet there are certain modes of figuring death that are unique to American culture during this period. And, as one might expect given the extremely violent and traumatic nature of its short history as a nation, the US – in common with other previously colonized countries – is populated by a great many ghosts. This volume explores some of the ways in which the country’s unique history and culture generated particular forms of haunting and figurations of death, as well as examining how nineteenth-century America’s extensive repertoire of death images both conjures up and attempts to contain some of the nation’s profoundest anxieties and contradictions. The essays in this book are arranged in three sections. The first, ‘Death, Citizenship and the Politics of Mourning’ examines how death and mourning were entwined with political agency in nineteenth-century society. In the first essay, John Kucich looks at the cross-cultural transmission of attitudes towards death and mourning between Native American culture and that of whites. The essay focuses on the 1887 translation of a speech spoken over three decades earlier by Chief Seattle, to white settlers on the shores of Puget Sound. The speech immediately raises problems of recovery, authenticity and appropriation. But as Kucich argues, the text’s very status as a hybrid work that draws on the beliefs and mourning rituals of both Native Americans and whites, makes it valuable for the insight that it provides into the tangled synthesis of two very different cultures. Seattle’s mourning speech did not, at the time, dissuade his white listeners from appropriating his territory. As Kucich shows, however, the speech takes on a disturbing

Introduction

7

afterlife in a number of ways: as a warning to white settlers of the watchful presence of the Native American dead, as an expression of mourning, as a statement to his people of the power of their culture’s spiritual beliefs at a time of immense crisis, and most crucially, as a reminder of their own resilience and capacity for survival in the face of dispossession. The second essay, by Jeffrey Steele, explores how African-American writers of the 1850s sought to alleviate the damaging emotional and political effects of slavery. Focusing on the work of Hannah Craft, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, Steele looks at how these black writers faced the problem of how to represent the losses of slavery, both in terms of the many lives that slavery had claimed, and its ongoing deathly effects on the living. How could racial melancholia be represented and transformed into a politics of mourning? How, in other words, could grief be transformed into grievance in the context of slavery, and communicated to a white audience? Steele argues that AfricanAmerican authors articulated their sense of grievance through a strategy of metonymic displacement, extending mourning for specific deaths to a generalized sense of mourning occasioned by slavery. By doing so, black authors demanded from white readers a recognition of the true costs of enslavement in terms of human lives, and the realization that the burden of mourning extended beyond African Americans to include the entire nation. Dana Luciano’s ‘Representative Mournfulness: Nation and Race in the Time of Lincoln’ discusses the centrality of imagined participation in another’s mourning, or ‘representative bereavement’, to the modern nation form, in the context of African-American experience at the end of the Civil War. The essay begins with an examination of the framework for national feeling established through Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and the sermons preached after his assassination. Luciano then moves on to investigate the ways in which African Americans participated in the national work of mourning Lincoln. Through their participation in this labour of mourning, she argues, black Americans claimed Lincoln as their emancipator, while refusing the sentimental, melancholy mystification of Lincoln’s part in the nation’s history, which characterized much of memorial discourse. They also resisted the accompanying displacement of national ideals – and the failure of those ideals – to a transcendent, timeless realm beyond the reach of history and of questions of guilt and responsibility. Stephen Shapiro’s essay investigates how tropes of death represent competing anxieties about race and class in postbellum society. Focusing on Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, he explores how images of death and public displays of mourning frequently function as a means of reinforcing, rather than overcoming, social divisions and inequalities. The pervasive melancholia of The Marrow of Tradition, Shapiro contends, is attributable not only to the dire state of race relations in the South, but also to Chesnutt’s growing awareness of the inadequacy of the sentimental discursive mode when faced with the failed promises of Reconstruction. For Chesnutt, the possibility of cross-racial identification in post-Reconstruction America will come

8

Representations of Death/Lucy Frank

about only when whites themselves are faced with great trauma and, bereft of other possibilities, will seek to draw on the perceived resilience and greater psychic resources of blacks. But, as Shapiro goes on to argue, the recurrent racially encoded tropes of death and suffering in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn suggest otherwise. Twain’s deathly imagery functions as a form of self-reflexive cultural ventriloquism that allows middle-class whites to undermine, rather than empathize with, black claims for social justice, and to stage anxieties about the assimilation and control of a rapidly increasing population of predominantly immigrant, and potentially threatening, urban youth. The subject of Kevin Grauke’s essay is the treatment of suicide in social reform novels during the mid and late nineteenth century. Focusing in particular on Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861), Grauke discusses how suicide operates both as trope of sympathy and as a trope of discipline. While the power to take their own lives does grant working-class characters a degree of agency, he argues, the act of suicide also undermines this agency by presenting the working class as self-destructive. Thus, the many suicides of working-class characters in nineteenth-century texts operate not only as a plea for reform but also as a device through which middle-class authors can contemplate, and attempt to contain, gnawing anxieties about working-class demands for political rights and representation. Joanne van der Woude’s essay ‘Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality: W.E.B Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt’ moves us to the cusp of the twentieth century. Van der Woude compares the responses of these two writers to the elevated death rates among the black community in the South, and to white racist theories concerning death. She investigates how Du Bois and Chesnutt attempt to subvert the myth of black mortality and expose the harm and injury inflicted on black bodies, and how each writer, in his different way, engages with the problem of racial reconciliation. Van der Woude looks first at how Du Bois’s work draws on eighteenth-century moral theory in his engagement with this problem. She then moves on to examine how Chesnutt rejects racist associations of blacks with death, as he grapples with the violent realities of the post-Reconstruction South. The second part of the volume, ‘Signatures and Elegies’ explores questions of gender, authorship and political engagement in popular poetic genres. The section opens with Alison Chapman’s essay ‘“I think I was enchanted”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Haunting of American Women Poets’. Chapman considers the many homage poems to Elizabeth Barrett Browning by American women poets, and observes that these poems forged a transatlantic subgenre, the poetess praise poem. Tracing these many tribute poems, she explores the Anglo-American network of female poets and praise poems, and the broader history of Barrett Browning’s contemporary reception on both sides of the Atlantic. As female poets attempt to negotiate Barrett Browning’s legendary reputation and formidable allure, Chapman asserts, their tributes not only spiritualize her in the elegiac tradition, but also insistently materialize her as a tangible and eroticized presence. American women’s poetic tributes to Elizabeth Barrett Browning are especially significant, she

Introduction

9

argues, because many American female poets use their homage poems to investigate the geographical, national and political limits of their own lyric poetry. For these women, Barrett Browning represents not just a legendary transnational figure; her politically engaged poetics also constituted a model for women poets, representing their own potential to transform a consolatory tradition of poetry into a muscular public poetics. In the second essay, Paula Bennett investigates how American women poets attempt to reconcile child death with religious doctrine in the context of the nineteenth-century’s extremely high infant mortality rates. Bennett is concerned with how women writers’ elegies for dead infants treat the question of why a loving God uses the suffering of children as a means of achieving his ends – a theodicy that Stowe famously asked readers to accept with the death of Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Bennett analyzes elegies produced by a range of women poets, including Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, Emily Dickinson and Sarah Piatt, as well as other, minor, voices. She asserts that their work registers a tension between, on the one hand, the impulse to present child death in idealized and consolatory terms, and on the other hand, a reality and protest oriented sensibility that leads them to rebel against ‘God’s will’. Far from being simply ‘sob stories’, Bennett argues, much of women’s poetry actually contests the resignation demanded of them by evangelical religion, troubling the discursive parameters of sentimentality and critiquing contemporary gender ideology. The final essay in this section, Jessica Roberts’ ‘“The Little Coffin”: Anthologies, Conventions and Dead Children’, examines the literary and cultural economy surrounding nineteenth-century anthologies of an eerily popular literary genre, the infant elegy. Volumes of infant elegies were widespread in most major publishing cities in the US. These collections included the poetry of well-known literary figures from both sides of the Atlantic – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Sigourney, James Russell Lowell, Felicia Hemans, Ralph Waldo Emerson – as well as numerous anonymous or now forgotten voices chronicling the deaths of infants. Exploring the reception of such anthologies, Roberts argues, provides valuable insight into the production, circulation and reception of the infant elegy in nineteenth-century America. These texts are also significant because they challenge the view that sentimental elegy was predominantly the domain of female writers, and demonstrate that sentimental poetry composed by men and women was aesthetically indistinguishable. The five essays in the final part of the volume, ‘Cultures of Death’, consider the social rituals, popular discourses and mass cultural phenomena through which Americans expressed their fascination with, and anxieties about, death and the afterlife. A number of the essays in this section also focus on major literary figures of the nineteenth century and explore their investment in and their ambivalent relationship to popular cultural forms. The section begins with Ann Schofield’s ‘The Fashion of Mourning’, which examines mourning as a material manifestation of bourgeois culture during the nineteenth century. During the Victorian period, elaborate rituals of mourning expressed the sentimental culture of middle-class

10

Representations of Death/Lucy Frank

America, via a social performance mediated through objects – clothing, jewellery, miniature portraits and photographs of the deceased. Both the task of performance and the display of objects largely fell to women. Examining the tension between mourning as genteel performance and as an expression of deeply felt grief, Schofield discusses how this dynamic was played out via the figure of the mourning woman. Through an exploration of etiquette manuals, advertisements, fashion magazines and popular literature, she traces how the earlier sentimental ideal of the white, middle-class widow had been transformed by the end of the century, into an eroticized figure of popular culture. Elizabeth Miller’s essay discusses Poe’s fictionalized account of the real-life ‘murder’ of the cigar girl Mary Rogers in 1840s New York (the actual cause of Rogers’ death was a botched abortion). Poe, like everyone else at the time, was fascinated by this ‘murder’, which had received sensational coverage in the popular press. Miller argues that although his narrative participates in this popular fascination with Rogers’ death, Poe also attempts to distance himself from the emotionalism of the press via the emerging discourse of forensic science. The cold professionalism of Poe’s detective, she suggests, and his emotional distance from the victim, reflects the anonymity and alienation of life in the modern metropolis. Further, Miller argues, the death of a beautiful young woman functions in this story as a trope for the objectification and deathliness of female sexuality in the consumer marketplace. Miller’s essay shows Poe to be deeply ambivalent about the mass media; at once dubious about its sensationalism and treatment of the female victim as a commodity, he was also enthralled by the case and capitalized on the public’s frenzied response to it. Dassia Posner examines the fascination for ghost plays that swept New York City in the summer of 1863. Although it did not last long, the public’s interest in plays that featured spectral illusions and ghostly special effects developed into a craze. Posner looks at how the appearance of these spectres on the stage – made possible by an ingenious invention using careful choreography and huge sheets of glass – coincided with the violent draft riots in New York, and with people’s increasing sense of anxiety about the raging Civil War. As with modern horror movies, these theatrical apparitions provided a frisson of terror for the audience, while also having a comfortingly ‘rational’ explanation. Posner argues that the sudden popularity of the ghost plays reflected the public’s need to try to come to terms with the unprecedented levels of death caused by the war, as well as the recent eruption of mob violence and murder in the city. Ann Heilmann’s essay is concerned with Lousia May Alcott’s 1863 short story ‘A Pair of Eyes’. Heilmann discusses how Alcott’s tale of mesmerism and artistic creativity draws on and subverts the gendered spaces of spiritualism. By presenting mesmerism as the particular province of the female, Alcott inverts the gender dynamics of the conventional mesmeric relationship (male mesmerist, female medium). Yet in this tale, the forces unleashed by the mesmeric relationship between husband and wife become destructive: the female protagonist dies, and her husband is left haunted by her spirit. The spectacle of destruction caused by

Introduction

11

mesmerism in this story, Heilmann argues, operates as a metaphor for the damage wreaked upon nineteenth-century women when their energies were frustrated and misdirected by patriarchal injunctions. In harnessing the popular appeal of Gothic and sensation fiction to the contemporary cultural and scientific interest in the psychological ramifications of the mesmerist gaze, Alcott was able to explore the gender configurations in the construction of aesthetic discourses, raising troubling questions about the nature of artistic identity and its interaction with the aestheticized subject. Kelly Richardson’s essay ‘“To Surprise Immortality”: Spiritualism and Shakerism in William Dean Howells’s The Undiscovered Country’, discusses the impact of spiritualism on the literary world. Focusing on Howells’s underrated early novel, Richardson investigates how the text reflects Howells’s ambivalence toward spiritualism. More sceptical of spiritualism than other popular realist and local colour writers such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, but not as hostile to it as Henry James, Howells’s treatment of spiritualists in the novel is compassionate. He is sympathetic towards the quest for spiritual truth in the face of bereavement, but is also cautious about the dangers of unrestrained grief and the desire for spiritual ‘knowledge’. This collection aims to highlight, from a number of critical perspectives, the multiplicity of discourses through which nineteenth-century Americans sought to elegize and to communicate with the dead. This book also seeks to explore how Americans from different social groups envisaged death and the afterlife, and how these different visions of death were affected by the violent social upheavals and political transformations of the nineteenth century. Slavery, the unabated genocide of Native Americans, the Civil War, racial violence in the South, and the nation’s growing sense of its imperial mission all gave rise to curious, often uneasy dreams of death and haunting within American culture. Above all, this volume is intended to contribute to the developing critical discussion of how death and mourning – and most importantly whose death and whose mourning – are represented in the United States.

Notes 1 2

3

Mark Twain, ‘The Curious Dream’ (1870), pp. 34–5. See Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, translated by Patricia M. Ranum (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1976) and The Hour of Our Death, translated by Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981). For an extended discussion of Poe’s poetics, beginning with a reference to his famous comment about the death of a beautiful woman, see Over Her Dead Body (59–73), and for a discussion of ‘Ligeia’ see pp. 330–6. Bronfen also examines the deathbed scene of Stowe’s Eva (90–2) and discusses Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and ‘The BirthMark’ in some detail (see 241–9 and 126–30 respectively). Surprisingly, Bronfen makes

12

Representations of Death/Lucy Frank no reference at all to Emily Dickinson in her long and detailed exploration of death, femininity and aesthetics in nineteenth-century culture. For another useful theoretically inflected discussion of death and modern culture see Death and Representation, edited by Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen. The essays in their collection address the representation of death in a number of different cultural contexts, although only one essay, Margaret Higonnet’s ‘Women in the Forbidden Zone: War, Women, and Death’ (192–212), specifically considers American writers.

Works Cited Ariès, Philippe. Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1976). ——, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981). Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). Castronovo, Russ. Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001). Goodwin, Sarah Webster, and Elisabeth Bronfen, eds. Death and Representation (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Holland, Sharon Patricia. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and Black Subjectivity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000). Holloway, Karla F.C. Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003). Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799– 1883 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). Poe, Edgar Allan. Poems and Essays on Poetry. Ed. C.H. Sisson (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd, 1995). Stern, Julia. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Twain, Mark. ‘The Curious Dream’. In The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. Ed. Charles Neider (New York: Doubleday & Company Inc, 1957).

PART 1 Death, Citizenship and the Politics of Mourning

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

Chief Seattle’s Afterlife Mourning and Cross-Cultural Synthesis in Nineteenth-Century America John J. Kucich

It was supposed that lost spirits were roving about everywhere in the invisible air, waiting for children to find them if they were patient enough. Mourning Dove, A Salishan Autobiography, 36

Chief Seattle’s speech is as famous as it is problematic. Its appropriation by an environmental movement eager to claim a Native American voice has been carefully untangled and strongly criticized. The politics of the Suquamish and Duwamish chief have come under fire for yielding too willingly to the white settlers who took his name for their principal city, while the origins of the speech itself have grown only murkier with increased scrutiny.1 Whatever words Seattle may have spoken on the shores of Puget Sound in 1854 or 1855 are as elusive and haunting as the ancestral ghosts summoned in the speech itself. Yet the ongoing critical arguments about the authenticity of Seattle’s speech and its merits as a ‘fifth gospel’ for the ecology movement have tended to obscure the fact that the speech as reconstructed by Henry Smith in 1887 is not primarily an environmental text, but a spiritual one, a text whose purpose, ultimately, is to remember the dead. Seattle’s speech, one of the most powerful statements of mourning produced in nineteenth-century America, takes shape across a sharp cultural divide. It is one long keening expression of loss, spoken to a white official eager to dispossess Seattle’s people of most of their ancestral land. The power of this expression of mourning for an environment, for a people, and for a culture, may not have swayed the territorial governor, Isaac Stevens, from his course. It was barbed enough, however, to haunt the young doctor who took notes as the speech was translated, and it spurred him to recapture that power some thirty years later. What made Seattle’s words, powerfully delivered and haltingly translated, so compelling to this settler recently arrived from the East? What attitudes and ideologies shaped his reception of the Salish elder’s words about his people, their land and the spirits that inhabited it? How did the cultural landscape of the late 1880s shape the transmission of those words into a column written for a provincial newspaper?

16

Representations of Death/John J. Kucich

The crucial meaning of Chief Seattle’s speech, it seems to me, lies not in whatever measure of ‘authenticity’ we can recover from this great distance and against which we can measure its later iterations. It lies instead in the text’s ability to cross cultural boundaries and to take shape at an important discursive frontier. Seattle’s speech should not be understood as an authentic expression buried under Victorian effusions, a true Indian spirit lost in the colonial wilderness. Nor is it merely one in a series of blithe inventions of ‘white Indians’, an effort by rootless European Americans to claim Native spirituality as their own. The speech is best approached, I argue, as a borderland work that signifies both in Native and European-American culture, drawing on the mourning rituals and spiritual sensibilities of both and forging, in its efforts to accommodate these divergent worldviews, a middle ground between them. While Seattle’s speech may not represent a ‘pure’ Native American sensibility, it nevertheless offers powerful insight into a cross-cultural synthesis in American attitudes towards death and mourning that emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century. The fact that the speech is a document of mourning, as well as an attempt to make white settlers come to terms with the aboriginal inhabitants of the Northwest, underscores its status as a liminal text. Seattle’s speech summons two great cultural traditions as it summons spirits of the dead, fashioning in that space between worlds a synthesis as tangled and as contradictory as America itself. Seattle delivered his most famous speech against a backdrop of intense cultural conflict. The son of a Suquamish father and a Duwamish mother, he was a boy when Europeans first explored Puget Sound in the late 1700s, and in his youth, he saw the traditional lifeways of his people (part of the larger Coastal Salish language and cultural group that had long inhabited what is now Western Oregon, Washington and British Columbia) gradually become integrated into the networks of British and American trade. By the 1830s, American Protestant missionaries formed the advance guard of a wave of white settlers; by 1846, Great Britain and the United States had divided the Oregon territory on the 49th parallel. Isaac Stevens, to whom Seattle addressed his speech, arrived as the first governor of the newly formed Washington territory in 1853; his primary goals were to scout locations for a railroad terminus and to resolve Indian land titles in favour of the few thousand white settlers scattered around Puget Sound and the inland valleys (Furtwangler 62–6). By then, Puget Sound’s natives had suffered from devastating epidemics and engaged in a series of clashes with white settlers. Some groups, lead by the Nisqually chief Leschi, advocated continued resistance, which erupted into bloody warfare throughout Washington and Oregon in 1855–1856.2 Others, like Seattle, were willing to sign treaties giving up most of their traditional land and to confine themselves to nearby reservations in order to preserve good relations with white settlers. Henry Smith was one of those early settlers, having in 1852 found his way to the cluster of cabins on a heavily wooded shore that would become Seattle. The most likely date of the speech is 12 January 1854, when Stevens paid his first official visit to the area and announced his intentions of formulating a treaty before

Chief Seattle’s Afterlife

17

some 1200 Indians and 120 whites. Smith’s is the only record of this remarkable speech, a fact that has raised doubts about its authenticity. To this is added the problem of translation. During his brief time in the area, Smith may have learned some of the Chinook jargon that was the local trade language used throughout the Northwest, but it is unlikely he would have learned to speak the Lutootsheed dialect of Coastal Salish that was Seattle’s own language (Furtwangler 36–7; 47– 55). At best, then, Smith’s 1887 text is a singular reconstruction of a speech given in a somewhat tenuously understood trade jargon, though it is more likely that the speech had been translated from Lutootsheed into English before Smith recorded his notes in his diary. It is also possible, though, that the lack of any independent record means that there was no single speech as Smith presented it, and that the 1887 text is a pastiche that may include remarks made by Seattle along with scraps and inventions derived from the wide variety of sources available to Smith in the decades between the speech’s putative delivery and its writing. In either case, an authentic version of the speech, one unmarked by the problems and politics of cultural mediation, is beyond us, and we are left instead with a document that bears the marks of cross-cultural transmission in a colonial setting.3 Any text that takes shape in the context of a colonial encounter is problematic; such texts are created and received in conditions freighted with often lethal politics, and are subject to conflicting interpretations and multiple meanings. Such a context doesn’t so much diminish a text’s validity as heighten its resonance, offering, from the margins, a better stance from which to read the cultures that intersect within its textual borders, and a place to glimpse the creative adaptations such cross-cultural texts engender.4 Chief Seattle’s speech, then, is a hybrid text that signifies in the liminal space between Indian and white cultures. Our task is to read how it signifies in its multiple discursive fields and how it mediates between them. While much recent criticism has focused on debunking Chief Seattle’s speech, particularly the free renditions that began spreading along environmentalist channels in the 1970s, other critics have traced a number of elements in Smith’s 1887 text that seem firmly rooted in traditional Salish culture. David Buerge cites the comparative woodenness of Henry Smith’s other writing to suggest that the eloquence of the speech indeed belongs to Seattle, and also notes that the number of very specific historical details embedded within the speech, which include the recent boundary disputes, the arrival of Stevens, and the unfolding treaty negotiations, suggest that Smith was working from actual notes rather than freely assembling the speech from a variety of elements. Buerge notes further that the speech follows a five-part pattern typical of Salish oral traditions, a feature unlikely to have been invented by Smith. Denise Low and Crisca Bierwert have further traced the Salish resonance of the speech. Bierwert, in her essay ‘Remembering Chief Seattle’, develops a reference to a Salish winter spirit ceremony in which young men wear black paint to summon the warrior spirits of their ancestors. She explains that Seattle himself had been a black paint dancer, and

18

Representations of Death/John J. Kucich

while he had recently converted to Christianity, he remained fully immersed in his tribal ceremonial life. The degree to which the speech aligns with traditional Salish beliefs is one measure of the power of the native voice that survives in Smith’s text; the manner with which it resonates with white attitudes towards religion, spirits and the afterlife help measure its cross-cultural dimension. The speech is framed as a clash of religions: ‘Your God loves your people and hates mine; he folds his strong arms lovingly around the white man and leads him as a father leads his infant son, but he has forsaken his red children’ Seattle begins, before listing the differences between the white man’s Christianity and traditional Salish religion: Your God […] came to the white man. We never saw him […] The ashes of our ancestors are sacred […] while you wander away from the tombs of your fathers […] Your religion is written on tables of stone […] Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors. (14–15)5

The speech is structured as a binary between a religion based on a culture-bound, written revelation on the one hand and a communal, traditional faith centred on a landscape hallowed by ancestral spirits. If Seattle had converted to Christianity some years before giving the speech, some of its language becomes suspect – surely, a Christian Indian wouldn’t claim of the Bible that ‘the red man could never remember nor comprehend it’, and he wouldn’t speak of ‘your God’. Yet while such language may well be Smith’s invention, designed to place Seattle firmly within the ideology of the unassimilable and vanishing Indian, the language at times slips. Seattle suggests that God has ‘forsaken his red children’, quickly shifting from a discourse of religious difference to one of spiritual brotherhood. Such slips suggest that Christianity and the Salish religion managed to coexist in Smith’s text, and perhaps in Seattle’s mind – a pattern consistent with at least one modern Coast Salish culture, the Nooksack, whose religion features several semiautonomous supernatural systems (Amoss 43). Certainly, much of the speech is permeated by traditional Salish attitudes towards the spirit world. The text signals this register with a key word: ‘Men come and go like the waves of the sea. A tear, a tamanawus, a dirge, and they are gone from our longing eyes forever’ (16). ‘Tamanawus’ is a common Chinook jargon term among Salish tribes, though its precise meaning has proven as elusive as its proper spelling. In different contexts, and to different observers, the term means a guardian spirit, any supernatural power, or a ritual song or secret ceremony meant to contact such a being, often when death appears to be imminent.6 As the speech – and Salish culture more generally – suggest, the souls of the dead remain accessible. The conclusion of the speech summons the ghosts of the tribe’s ancestors: The sable braves, and fond mothers, and glad-hearted maidens, and the little children who lived and rejoiced here, and whose very names are now forgotten, still love these

Chief Seattle’s Afterlife

19

solitudes, and their deep fastnesses at eventide grow shadowy with the presence of dusky spirits. (17)

This representation of a landscape alive with spirits signifies in a very specific cultural matrix. Ghosts of the dead were indeed a feature of Salish culture, though tribal beliefs varied. For the Twana, on the southeast border of Suquamish territory, they were not common. They could appear to nonshamans in a recognizable, though slightly ominous form, usually around graveyards (Elmendorf, Twana Culture, 513–14). For the Nooksack farther north, they wandered freely between the earth and the land of the dead, often gathering around villages and smokehouses, eager to snatch food and keeping a close eye on their living kin (Amoss 73–7). Salish peoples did (and do) live in a land filled with spirits that were the source of human agency and power. In the Interior Salish writer Mourning Dove’s account, they are nonhuman beings tied to the various features of the environment. ‘Indian theory holds that each spirit has the same strengths as its animal counterpart’, and they can be found ‘almost anyplace: water, cliffs, forests, mountains, remains of lighting-struck trees, animal carcasses, old campfires, or the sweat lodge itself’ (36–7). Children were encouraged from the age of six or seven to seek these spirits, and ‘the more spirits a child found, the greater future success, influence and importance that person would have’ (36–7). Shamans had the most powerful of the guardian spirits, and one of the centrepieces of the Salish calendar was the winter spirit dance, during which shamans (and other members of the tribe as well) were ritually possessed by their guardian spirits.7 These guardian spirits are noticeably absent from Seattle’s speech, a feature, perhaps, of Smith’s imperfect sense of Salish culture. Smith may simply have understood ‘spirit’ to be the soul of the dead. It may also be the case, however, that Seattle left guardian spirits out of his speech. Duwamish people, like their Nooksack neighbours to the north, may have afforded ghosts a more prominent presence in the landscape than did their Twana neighbors to the south; if Seattle had indeed recently converted to Christianity, then he may have seen such spirits as demonic or simply imaginary. He may also have emphasized the kind of spiritual presence most likely to have an effect on his white audience. Whatever the reason, the supernatural register of the speech shifts from the animist sensibility typical of Northwest Indian religion to one of mourning. The dead inhabit Seattle’s speech, and they have a power clearly defined in Salish culture. The speech’s conclusion, oft revised in later versions to highlight Seattle’s status as a passive victim poised to vanish, carries in Smith’s version an unmistakable air of menace: And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among white men shall have become a myth, these shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children shall think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway or in the silence of the woods they will not be alone. In all the earth there is not one place dedicated to solitude. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will

20

Representations of Death/John J. Kucich throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless. (17)

If Seattle did give this speech in January of 1854, the power of spirits would have been on his Salish listeners’ minds, for midwinter was the season for the spirit dances that summoned people’s guardian spirits – indeed, the fact that over a thousand natives were on hand to meet with Stevens suggests that they may have gathered for that very purpose. The speech itself, given by a prominent tribal leader summoning the power of his ancestors on an important ritual occasion, is something of a spirit ceremony. At the end of the speech, Seattle not only asks that he and his people be allowed to return to their ancestors’ graves, he also passes on those ancestral spirits to the people who will take over his land. If the spirits he refers to in his speech are the traditional guardian spirits, then the gesture is generous – lost spirits, once found and adopted, were a source of power.8 But if Smith got Seattle’s meaning right, then the watchful presence of the dead had a very different meaning. Ghosts could be a source of power in Salish culture, though it took a different form from that provided by guardian spirits. A number of tribes offer a formula for capturing a ghost – one waits patiently in an area where ghosts are to be found, and then grabs onto one when it appears. If the ghost-catcher can hold on, the ghost will then serve the person by spying on the living and reporting events in the spirit world. In contrast to the guardian spirits’ power over the environment, offering skill in hunting or canoe building, for example, ghosts offered primarily an extra set of watchful eyes. Yet, they did not engage in idle snooping. While the different roles of the guardian spirits and the ghosts of the dead in Northwest cultures is ambiguous and variable, several anthropologists argue that the dead were primarily responsible for maintaining the social order of their living kin. ‘The ghosts of the dead’, suggests Pamela Amoss, ‘bore the responsibility of monitoring relations between men’ (18). The dead were not, however, entirely benign watchers. Salish peoples took elaborate care in their mortuary rituals, partly for fear of contamination and partly for fear that the soul of the dead might pull the soul of the living after it into the land of the dead (Elmendorf, Twana Culture, 447, 514–15). A wake, mourning rituals and a potlatch in honour of the deceased assured the departed soul that it was not being hurried off to the land of the dead and helped ensure that it wouldn’t linger too close to its former home. In their liminal state, before they gradually settled into a social structure that mirrored that of the living, ghosts of the newly dead were at their most dangerous. Failure to honour properly the ghosts of one’s ancestors might cause them to crowd around the offending person out of hunger and out of anger (Amoss 18–19). The principal danger from ghosts is soul stealing – a recently deceased ghost might take along the soul of a relative to the land of the dead, leaving the victim listless, weak, and soon to die. The Duwamish were particularly noted for their

Chief Seattle’s Afterlife

21

skill in recovering stolen souls, performing a dramatic ritual journey to the land of the dead (Elmendorf, Twana Narratives, 233–7). Dreaming of the dead was a sign that such kidnapping was taking place (512). Seattle’s speech, then, with its vision of a landscape teeming with the souls of the dead, inhabits a rich matrix of Salish religious belief, a worldview in which the dead were an intimate presence in the lives of the living, watchful of social behaviour and mindful of the respect that was their due. Such a presence alone is a source of real power, and if Seattle did indeed believe that he and his people were fated by some Nemesis to die, he made it clear that they did not intend to vanish. And if his people were not honoured in their life or in their death, what recourse could they take? A curious gesture that Seattle used when giving the speech may offer a clue. Smith reports that Seattle spoke while ‘placing one hand on the governor’s head, and slowly pointing heavenward with the index finger of the other’ (11). Salish peoples share the concept of a ‘life soul’, which could be perceived by those gifted with second sight, in the form of a miniature image of its owner, perched above the head (512). If Seattle adopts the role of a dying man in the speech, he goes to his afterlife clutching the soul of the man who wants to take his place. And once Stevens – and the whites whom he represents – have lost their souls to the Indians they have dishonoured, Seattle leaves no indication of how to get them back. Seattle’s speech, then, offers a very specific, and aggressive, message to his Indian audience. Yet he also shifts the register of ghosts from a strictly Salish context to a cross-cultural one. Where once they monitored the doings of a particular family and tribe and mediated between the land of the dead and living, Seattle presses them into the conflict between whites and Indians. He was not the last to do so. Melville Jacobs, who gathered a great deal of ethnographic material in the early twentieth century, notes that after the 1857 war, Northwest natives became increasingly interested in dreams and interpretations. The exact nature of the interest is unclear, but Michael Harkins suggests that it focused on the dead, whose own land preserved the traditional features and social structures fast vanishing from the land of the living (273). Seattle himself died in 1866, after faithfully maintaining peaceful relations with ever increasing numbers of white neighbours. By the 1870s, a ghost dance movement spread among the Indians of northern California and the Northwest Coast. Called the Warm House Cult in Oregon, participants danced around a pole in a smoke-filled lodge in order to bring visions of the dead and, it was hoped, summon them back to life. Though the movement petered out quickly, due to its failure to fulfil its promises, and to the sexual license that accompanied the dances, it suggested the power of ghosts to help manage the profound cultural stress Native peoples suffered in the late nineteenth century.9 If the spectral eyes and menacing presence of spirits in Seattle’s speech were intended in part to help check the single-minded expansion of white settlement, his ghosts had a powerful message for his Indian listeners as well: they demonstrated Seattle’s own spiritual power. His vision of a landscape filled with the spirits of ancestors would also have had the same effect as the visions repeated in Warm House and Ghost Dance rituals across the West. By

22

Representations of Death/John J. Kucich

fixing his people’s attention on a vital, accessible afterlife where their traditional culture retained all the features so gravely threatened by white encroachment, Seattle affirmed their cultural identity in a moment of its greatest challenge.10 From this perspective, Seattle’s speech, to some degree, worked. Despite the rhetoric of an imminent vanishing, the Suquamish and Duwamish people he led did not die out; through adaptation, resourcefulness and sheer persistence, they managed to survive on and off the reservations near their ancestral homelands, with their populations rebounding and their culture very much intact.11 How might Seattle’s speech have been received by his smaller number of white listeners? The notes surviving from Stevens’ meetings with local tribes paint Seattle as a friend of the white settlers, willing to sign treaties, embrace the reservation system, and accept the authority of the US government (Furtwangler 55–7). Stevens and his aides may simply have ignored the religious dimension of the speech because they were so intently focused on their own political manoeuvring. Other white listeners, too, may not have been disposed to absorb its spiritual import. If the local Methodist missionary, David E. Blaine, heard the speech, he made no record of it. Instead, his letters home are filled with scorn for his Salish neighbours: ‘The intercourse between white and Indians is such as to debase both. The Indians are at best but a poor degraded race, far inferior to even the lowest of those among us [...] However, they are fast passing away and will soon disappear’. Blaine eagerly greeted the prospect of the Port Elliott treaty: ‘It is supposed they will be removed from our midst. What a blessing it will be to both them and us if this can be effected’ (qtd. in Norwood 53). Not all white settlers were so dismissive of Indians and their beliefs. Another Methodist, John Beeson, was so outraged by the treatment of local Indians prior to, and during, the Rogue River War in 1853, that he tried to rally sympathetic whites to their cause. Although his attempts to do this were unsuccessful, he did privately print a book exposing settlers’ abuses, A Plea for the Indians (1857). His account includes a remarkably positive summary of Northwest Indian religion: They look up to the blue canopy and meditate on the starry heavens; they bask on the sunny hill-side, or recline under the spreading trees; they retire into the deep aisles of the forest, and find there God’s solemn temples, where the babbling brook, the sighing zepher, and the singing birds, all have ministries of love and worship; and with them they unite, in adoration of the Great Spirit, whose informing presence animates the whole, and in whom the Indian, as well as the Christian, lives, and moves, and has his being. (qtd. in Norwood 53)

These two views by devout Methodists suggest the range of white attitudes that greeted Seattle’s speech, and the conflicted cultural norms that Henry Smith had to sort through as he took his notes and, many years later, recorded Seattle’s words in print. Smith avoided (at least in his published writing) the kind of Indian-hating rhetoric used by Blaine, but both attitudes – that of a divinely ordained

Chief Seattle’s Afterlife

23

disappearance of Native peoples and of a respectful, ecumenical spirituality – appear in his version of the speech. Other developments in nineteenth-century European American culture resonate with specific elements of Seattle’s speech. The mid-1850s were the heyday of Spiritualism in America, and settlers new to Puget Sound, such as Henry Smith, would have brought with them news of mediums, spirit-rappings, séances and trance speaking that were novel indeed to white culture, though more familiar to their Salish neighbours. The spirit world as manifested by the Fox sisters and theorized by Andrew Jackson Davis lacked the nonhuman animist inhabitants signified by the Salish term tamanamis, but it was richly populated by the souls of the dead, who kept a careful eye on the doings of their living kin and were eager to communicate their approval or disapproval through the spiritual telegraph.12 This conception of the spirit world is in many ways far closer to the vision at the end of Seattle’s speech than the more traditional spirit world of Northwest Indian cultures. Smith need not have been a practising Spiritualist to have understood Seattle’s supernatural protest through the prism of an analogous system sweeping through his own culture. Moreover, the world of the dead, in the minds of many white Americans, bore an increasing resemblance to an idealized American landscape, a landscape suggested in the garden cemeteries fashioned after Mount Auburn, outside Boston, and the increasingly ubiquitous paintings of the Hudson River School. This kind of heavenly naturalism meshed nicely with the literary pantheism that emerged in the nineteenth century. Vast tribes of the dead have wandered in the landscapes of literary imagination long before Smith published Seattle’s speech, from Philip Freneau’s ‘The Indian Burying Ground’ (1787) to William Cullen Bryant’s ‘Thanatopsis’ (1817) to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Hamatreya’ (1847). Those arguing that the speech is largely Smith’s invention have, in the European American literary context for Smith’s writing, a strong case. Yet, as I hope to have shown, such strong affinities do not so much narrow the provenance of Seattle’s speech as broaden it. Situated at the borderland between two cultures, the speech resonates in both, drawing freely on the key spiritual touchstones in each rather than unambiguously rooting its identity in either. In this, the speech is rather characteristic of religion even today in the Northwest, which Patricia Killen O’Connell and Mark Silk describe as a particularly open and mobile religious environment, relatively free from the institutional constraints and sectarian divides characteristic of other parts of the United States – a feature they trace back to the 1890s. One cause they cite is particularly relevant to Seattle’s speech, namely ‘the region’s unsurpassed physical grandeur and topographic variety pervade people’s experience, overwhelming them and awing them [...] topography dwarfs human community’ (10–11). This reverence for a particular landscape, which is at the core of Seattle’s message, resonates even today in the spiritual life of the Northwest, forming an important locus of cross-cultural exchange.

24

Representations of Death/John J. Kucich

Catherine Albanese has traced the development in America of what she terms ‘nature religion’, a loose and at times contradictory constellation of doctrines and attitudes that nevertheless has formed a central category of American culture. She finds its origins in the interaction between the Puritans and the Algonkians in New England. This sense of nature as a source of divine revelation and as a focus of regular spiritual practice, she argues, is part of the legacy of cultural contact (Nature Religion in America 40–2). The Puritans ‘had absorbed something of the power of Amerindian spirits who haunted the land […] The ghosts of times past (native and biblical) would make their claims on the future’ (40). In Albanese’s view, nature religion played a key role in the formation of a cross-cultural religious synthesis, as can be seen in the work of a number of Native American writers at the end of the nineteenth century. Unlike Seattle, these authors did not need to rely on the vagaries of translation and transcription to present their views to a white audience. Both Sarah Winnemucca (Northern Paiute) and Zitkala-Sa (Lakota Sioux), to cite two examples, wrote accounts of Indian spirituality that specifically engaged with white norms, using landscape as their focal point. Winnemucca began relating traditional Paiute courtship rituals to white audiences in lectures in California and Nevada in the 1860s, and then across the East in the 1880s. Her account of the Flower Ceremony, in which adolescent girls take on the persona of their namesake flowers, sketches a nostalgic connection to a spiritualized landscape that has strong affinities to Salish conceptions of nature. The description of this ceremony proved to be a popular set piece in her lectures and her autobiography (46–8). Zitkala-Sa, in her series of autobiographical sketches published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900–1901, concluded with a credo, entitled ‘Why I Am a Pagan’, that sharply criticized missionary Protestantism, offering in its place a nature religion that was at once deeply rooted in traditional Lakota teachings about the Great Spirit and instantly recognizable to European Americans, who had been reimagining Christianity along transcendental lines. Seattle’s speech clearly belongs to this group of texts that fashion a syncretic spirituality out of Native and European elements, using a spiritualized American environment as its gospel.13 Yet while Seattle’s speech clearly partakes of a larger movement towards a cross-cultural nature religion that would fully flower in the twentieth century, the rhetorical force of the speech falls not so much on the landscape as on the Indian ghosts who inhabit it. Seattle’s landscape is at once sacred and haunted. In this, the speech participates in a long tradition of Indian ghosts in European-American literature, a tradition that Renee Bergland traces to the earliest English settlement. Bergland’s formulation of the ‘national uncanny’ traces a doubled trajectory: Indian ghosts are, first, a technique of removal, an effort to consign native peoples to the afterlife even while they stubbornly persist in a colonized landscape (1–7). Thus Smith begins his account of Seattle’s speech by describing the Indian spectators as ‘a living mass of swaying, writhing dusky humanity’ and ends the speech with ‘swarms’ of ‘dusky spirits’. As Bergland argues, however, Indians refuse to stay put on their ghostly reservations. Drawing on Freud’s work, she

Chief Seattle’s Afterlife

25

characterizes the uncanny as ‘the unsettled, the not-yet-colonized, the unsuccessfully colonized, or the decolonized’ (10) – Indian ghosts, in other words, are the symptom of unsuccessful political and psychic repression. They are therefore the source of a powerful counternationalist argument, a radical critique of American expansionism. And indeed, the counter-hegemonic force of Indian ghosts is apparent throughout American literature, whether anxiously contained, as in James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826), or explicitly critical, as in Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1909). The dead, as Seattle suggests, are not altogether powerless – they haunt the living, generating a dissonance within the ideology of Manifest Destiny – a dissonance which would remain in the mind of at least one ambitious young doctor for some thirty years. Smith’s rendering of Seattle’s speech certainly has the marks of haunting, of the unsuccessful repression of a colonizer’s guilt. It is also, however, an act of cross-cultural mourning. By 1887, Smith was a leading figure in a city that was moving beyond its roots as a frontier settlement, and his columns in the local newspaper were meant to claim the ancestry of Seattle even as they tried to lay his ghost to rest. This act of mourning, however, summoned a spirit that he could not fully control. Such are the dynamics of the contact zone. The effort to reach across a cultural divide to summon an ancestral spirit produces a text – Seattle’s speech – that is contradictory, politicized, and too richly over-determined to fit within any one cultural framework. The elusive, multifarious quality of the speech may in part explain its popularity as well as its many improvisational iterations as it shapes and, in turn, is reshaped by the many different contexts through which it moves. Such is the nature of mourning in an America that remains deeply marked by the deadly legacy of cultural contact. Chief Seattle’s afterlife is an American landscape filled with the unsettled ghosts of its past.

Notes 1

2

3

On the environmental movement, see Rudolf Kaiser, ‘Chief Seattle’s Speech(es): American Origins and European Receptions’. Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). On Seattle’s politics, see Jerry Clark, ‘Thus Spoke Seattle: The Story of an Undocumented Speech’, Prologue (spring 1985), 58–65. On the murky origins of the speech, see Albert Furtwangler, Answering Chief Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). The best account of Leschi’s resistance are the oral traditions related by the Twana elder Frank Allen in the 1940s. See W.W. Elmendorf, Twana Narratives: Native Historical Accounts of a Coast Salish Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 153–60. Much of my interpretive framework draws on Mary Louise Pratt’s formulation of the contact zone. For a brief discussion of the key terms she uses, see Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.

Representations of Death/John J. Kucich

26 4

5 6

7 8 9

10

11

12

13

The term ‘creative adaptation’ is from Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For the text of the speech, I use Furtwangler’s reprint of Smith’s 1887 column (10–17). Edward Thomas spells the word ‘tahmanawis’ in his Chinook: A History and Dictionary of the Northwest Coast Trade Jargon, 2nd edn (Portland: Binfords and Mort, 1970). Elmendorf prefers ‘tamanamis’, and presents a number of death songs addressed to guardian spirits and journeys to the land of the dead in Twana Narratives, 159 and passim. Furtwangler cites Franz Boas using the term to refer to shamanistic ceremonies in Frederick Wedge Hodge (ed.), Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (Reprint, New York: Pantheon Books, 1959) 2: 681. Elmendorf, Twana Culture, 496–8. Amoss devotes her whole study to the recent revival of this ceremony. For a description of lost spirits, see Amoss, 53. Ibid., 272–3. The recent failure of the Warm House Cult may be one reason why the Ghost Dance of 1890 didn’t spread to the Northwest; nevertheless, it shared a similar cultural dynamic. Alice Beck Kehoe, The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization (Fort Worth, Texas: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1980), understands the Ghost Dance of 1890 as being what A.F.C. Wallace has termed a revitalization movement, in other words, an effort by the spiritual leaders of a culture under stress to use a visionary episteme to recast the terms of their existence in order to better accommodate changed social conditions. The memory of Seattle himself has proved a critical element in that cultural revival. Crisca Bierwert has traced the revitalization of traditional Suquamish identity to an annual commemoration of Seattle sponsored by tribal members and city leaders beginning in 1911. One of the best recent accounts of Spiritualism is Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). I have explored the cross-cultural dimension of spiritualism in America in Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2004). Nature was also used to justify colonization, with the succession of Anglo-Saxon peoples seen as an exorable natural (evolutionary) force. Hence Seattle’s description of the Port Elliott treaty as ‘the voice of nature speaking to my people out of the thick darkness that is fast gathering around my people like a dense fog floating inward from a midnight sea’.

Works Cited Albanese, Catherine L. Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). ——, Nature Religion Reconsidered (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 2002). Amoss, Pamela. Coast Salish Spirit Dancing: The Survival of an Ancestral Religion (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978).

Chief Seattle’s Afterlife

27

Beeson, John. A Plea for the Indians (New York: 1857). Bergland, Renee. The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2000). Bierwert, Crisca. ‘Remembering Chief Seattle’, American Indian Quarterly 22.3 (Summer 1998), 280–305. Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in NineteenthCentury America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). Buerge, David. ‘Seattle’s King Arthur’, Seattle Weekly (17 July 1991), 27–8. Clark, Jerry L. ‘Thus Spoke Seattle: The Story of an Undocumented Speech’, Prologue 17 (Spring 1985), 58–65. Elmendorf, W.W. The Structure of Twana Culture. Washington State University Research Studies 28, No. 3, supplement. (1960). ——, Twana Narratives: Native Historical Accounts of a Coast Salish Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). Furtwangler, Albert. Answering Chief Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). Harkins, Michael. ‘Feeling and Thinking in Memory and Forgetting: Towards an Ethnohistory of the Emotions’, Ethnohistory 50.2 (2003) 261–84. Hodge, Frederick Webb (ed.), Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 30. 1905. 2 vols. Reprint (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959). Kaiser, Rudolf. ‘Chief Seattle’s Speech(es): American Origins and European Receptions’. Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Kehoe, Alice Beck. The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization (Fort Worth, Texas: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1989). Killen, Patricia O’Connell and Mark Silk (eds), Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone (Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira, 2004). Kucich, John J. Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in NineteenthCentury American Literature (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2004). Low, Denise. ‘Contemporary Reinvention of Chief Seattle: Variant Texts of Chief Seattle’s 1854 Speech’, American Indian Quarterly 19.3 (Fall 1995) 407–21. Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography. Ed. Jay Miller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). Norwood, Frederick. ‘Two Contrasting Views of the Indians: Methodist Involvement in the Indian Troubles in Oregon and Washington’. Religion and Society in the American West: Historical Essays. Ed. Carl Guanari and David Alvarez (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1987). Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).

28

Representations of Death/John J. Kucich

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Winnemucca Hopkins, Sarah. Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims. 1883. Reprint (Bishop, California: Sierra Media, 1969). Zitkala-Sa. American Indian Stories. 1921. Reprint (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

Chapter 2

Escaping the ‘benumbing influence of a present embodied death’ The Politics of Mourning in 1850s AfricanAmerican Writing Jeffrey Steele

African-American writing in the 1850s provides an important chapter in the history of ‘public sentiment’, demonstrating the political power of publicly displayed affect (Hendler 15). Expressing what has been termed the ‘melancholy of race’, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown and Harriet Jacobs began constructing narrative strategies designed to alleviate the emotional and political damage caused by slavery.1 Rather than allowing themselves, their characters, or their audience to remain in a debilitating state of melancholia, these former slaves made visible the ways in which racial injustice ‘works through silencing the effects and affects of oppression’ (Oliver 88). The 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass had demonstrated that slavery shackled the spirit as well as the body, necessitating the liberation of both sinews and soul. As Douglass, Brown and Jacobs realized, effective political resistance depended upon the freeing of their readers’ minds and the awakening of what Jacobs termed a ‘realizing sense’ (1) of the condition of those still in bondage. While this ‘sense’ entailed an understanding of both the conditions of slavery and of principles of human justice, it was fuelled by feeling. Designed to move their audiences and to motivate political change, the major African-American writers of the 1850s assumed that they could not change the racial status quo unless their readers’ hearts were moved. Many of the most powerful moments in the texts of these writers circled around issues of death, dying and mortality. By depicting individuals physically brutalized and killed by vicious overseers and masters, as well as the suicides of individuals who chose self-destruction over degradation, they shocked readers into recognition of the human expense of slavery. But in confronting the physical terrors of mortality, they ran the risk of leaving their audience in the position of the young Frederick Douglass, numbed into silence by the beating of his Aunt Hester. ‘I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it’ (34), Douglass selfconsciously recorded in his 1845 Narrative, as he carefully began to draw into his text an expression of the public grieving that American culture seemed to

30

Representations of Death/Jeffrey Steele

foreclose. In order to articulate for their readers the horror of slavery, Douglass, Brown and Jacobs began displacing the affective rituals and language of mourning onto their representations of African-American bondage. The public act of mourning the dead – in their texts – modulated into generalized scenes that extended their sense of mourning to the living and to the nation as a whole. Most recently, the discovery of Hannah Crafts’ novel The Bondwoman’s Narrative has deepened, but also complicated, our understanding of antebellum African-American writing. Slavery, in Crafts’ text, involves both a confrontation with physical suffering but also a kind of ‘marriage’ with death itself. In one of the novel’s most powerful moments, the fugitive Hannah encounters two other runaways in the deep forest – Jacob and his unnamed sister, who is delirious and dying of fever. After his sister dies, Jacob leaves Hannah alone with her corpse as he goes out to gather berries for their supper. Overwhelmed by anxiety and terror, Hannah lapses into an ‘unquiet slumber’ punctuated by the following nightmare: The corpse seemed to rise and stand over me, and press with its cold leaden hand against my heart. In vain I struggled to free myself, by that perversity common to dreams I was unable to move. I could not shriek, but remained spell-bound under the hedious [sic] benumbing influence of a present embodied death. Then it seemed that some one was calling me. I knew the voice to be Jacob’s, and strove to answer, but my tongue seemed palsied and my lips immovable. (229)

In extraordinary fashion, this passage articulates the traumatic effects of slavery addressed by many of Crafts’ African-American contemporaries: how could they prevent themselves and their audiences from remaining ‘spell-bound under the [...] benumbing influence of a present embodied death’? What would break the spell of slavery and the mute numbness of terror and melancholia – the ‘palsied’ tongue created by its deathly hold on the living. William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel Clotel addresses this problem in a number of important ways. Fictionally recreating the lives of Thomas Jefferson’s AfricanAmerican mistress (named Currer), her two children (Clotel and Althesa), and three grandchildren (Mary, Ellen and Jane), Brown provides a devastating portrait of slavery and, especially, its effect upon women who are trapped outside of respectable marriage and often subjected to sexual bondage. The plot of Brown’s novel reveals a deep investment in mourning. Out of the six African-American women linked to Jefferson, only one remains living at the end of the novel. Two women (Clotel and Ellen) commit suicide to escape the degradation of slavery, another (Jane) dies of a ‘broken heart’ after her lover is murdered by her master, and two (Currer and Althesa) die of yellow fever. This plot structure potentially places the reader in the position of mourning the deaths of most of the novel’s major characters. But it is clear from the very first page that such grief extends from specific deaths to slavery as a whole. In addition to a number of harrowing scenes that depict the degrading practices of the slave trade and the cruelty of slave-owners, several episodes focus upon fugitives who are hunted down and

Escaping the ‘benumbering influence of a present embodied death’

31

killed for their resistance. It is not surprising, then, that most of the novel’s leading characters exhibit a deep ‘anguish’, ‘melancholy’ and ‘sorrow’. But more important, Brown demonstrates that such grief is motivated by the barbarous system in which these characters are trapped. In the process, he ‘allow[s] racial grief to have its say’ (Cheng 4). If, as Anne Anlin Cheng asserts, the formulation of racial injustice has focused on ‘the urgencies and complications surrounding formulations of racial injury’ (5), we find in Brown’s novel one of the earliest expressions of this complicated cultural issue. In Clotel, the reader sees ‘the consciousness of the slave’ as ‘an extended act of mourning’.2 Establishing a crucial link, Brown demonstrates that this grief is motivated by the abuses of slavery. In a key passage that sets the tone for the entire novel, Althesa (who has married and been freed by Henry Morton) asks one of her servants, a slave who has hired her time,3 ‘Why is it you often look sad, and with tears in your eyes?’ When ‘the slave woman put her check apron to her face and wept’, her mistress ‘saw plainly that there was cause for this expression of grief’ (146, emphasis added). At the same time that such receptivity to a slave’s grief is established as a model of response for the novel’s readers, it is shown to be lacking in those whose hearts have been hardened by slavery. Earlier when Althesa awaited her fate in a New Orleans slave pen, she saw around her women overwhelmed by ‘anguish’. ‘What are you wiping your eyes for?’ a potential buyer asks one enslaved woman; ‘Why do you cry?’ (103). The entire burden of Brown’s novel is to overcome the insensitivity behind that question (which circulated in the culture at large), as he illustrates the physical horrors motivating such sorrow and the moral necessity of responding to the grief of enslaved human beings by seeing the grievances occasioned by slavery. In recent years, a number of scholars have begun extending our understanding of this ‘politics of mourning’ by examining the crucial role played by melancholia.4 In a groundbreaking study of Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood, for example, Dana Luciano argues that ‘racial melancholia [...] is transformed in Hopkins’s work, from an individual pathology to a historical condition’, as she uses melancholic characters and narrative structures to ‘direct [...] attention to the psychic impact of racial segregation and silencing’ (149). In Luciano’s evocative reading, Of One Blood brings into visibility the personal impact and cultural trauma of racism through its ‘fixation with melancholia as a kind of living death’ (170). While this line of argumentation goes far toward uncovering the racial anxieties and traumas experienced by African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the period when Hopkins’s novel was written and published), it does not completely explain the dynamic connection between representations of racial melancholia and a politics of mourning. Although the editors of Loss assert that the melancholic ‘attention to remains generates a politics of mourning’ that might be ‘active’, ‘social’ and ‘militant’ (Eng and Kazanjian 2), neither they nor Luciano explain how one moves from melancholy to mourning or why a stage of mourning is at all necessary, since the ‘work of mourning [...] becomes possible through melancholia’s continued engagement with the various and ongoing forms of loss’

32

Representations of Death/Jeffrey Steele

(5, emphasis added). Indeed, if melancholia is an ongoing state of consciousness uncovering the dimensions of unexpressed losses, there might be advantages to remaining within melancholia and not attempting to relieve it at all through acts of mourning. Given the widespread acceptance of Judith Butler’s argument that consciousness itself is founded upon melancholia, which ‘produce[s] not only psychic life but also the domain of remains’ (Eng and Kazanjian 4), then all forms of melancholia, including racial melancholia, might be interpreted as pervasive and ongoing conditions that cannot be resolved.5 But despite the contemporary critical tendency to blur the line between melancholia and mourning, African-American writing in the 1850s clearly suggests that conditions of loss, expressed through melancholy, can be addressed and potentially healed through processes of grief-work leading to political action. Although melancholia, as Luciano asserts, is a kind of ‘living death’ that traps one in a state of abjection, the act of representing melancholia – especially the melancholia of a literary character – establishes a plane of reflection that lifts narrators and readers above the abyss of sorrow. For example, William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass both establish the existence of a pervasive racial melancholy afflicting those touched by slavery but also insist upon the necessity of witnessing that sorrow in order to alleviate it. In many instances, they identify the combined act of witnessing and responding as a process of cultural grief-work. At other moments, this politics of mourning is implicated in narrative structures that position readers as mourners able to link their own grief at the suffering and deaths of African-American characters to the unjust political circumstances that occasioned such losses. In this regard, the suicide of Clotel, who throws herself from the Long Bridge in Washington, DC, to escape being captured and re-enslaved, is a paradigmatic moment that occasions a scathing narrative commentary on the misplacement of political sympathy and grief: But she was a slave, and therefore out of the pale of [the American people’s] sympathy. They have tears to shed over Greece and Poland; they have an abundance of sympathy for ‘poor Ireland’ [...] The body of Clotel was picked up from the bank of the river, where it had been washed by the strong current, a hole dug in the sand, and there deposited, without either inquest being held over it, or religious service being performed. (207)

But if the characters within Brown’s novel fail to mourn the death of Clotel, the implication is clear – his readers will express their sorrow in a politics of mourning that connects their grief to a political awareness of the brutalizing effects of slavery. In some of the most effective passages in his text, Brown establishes the link between grief and political awareness through generalizing moments that posit an ideal mourner (akin to the ‘ideal reader’) able to see and feel the wrongs experienced by African Americans. After a harrowing description of the conditions found in a New Orleans slave pen, for example, he observes:

Escaping the ‘benumbering influence of a present embodied death’

33

Known only to God is the amount of human […] suffering which sends its cry from the slave markets and negro pens, unheard and unheeded by man, up to his ear; mothers weeping for their children, breaking the night-silence with the shrieks of their breaking hearts. (105)

Providing a vivid example of what I term the ‘melancholic sublime’, this passage brings to the threshold of audibility and visibility a depth of human suffering that surpasses representation. At the moment, only ‘God’ occupies the position of sorrowful response, but the image of divine compassion functions as a challenge to the text’s readers to expand their sensibilities to the point where they too can begin to perceive the ‘human agony and suffering’ in the South’s slave pens. If they can do so, they will be motivated to counteract the sorrow caused by the entire system of slavery. A second moment in Brown’s novel is even more revealing, since it appends an important moment of narrative reflection to material borrowed from Lydia Maria Child’s 1842 short story ‘The Quadroons’. Child’s narrative ends with the ‘intense melancholy’, mania and death of Xarifa (renamed Jane by Brown) after a friend attempting to rescue her is shot and killed by her master (Child 284). But Brown reads beyond this ending by resituating readerly attention onto a larger terrain than Xarifa’s/Jane’s grave. In a vivid example of his ‘brilliant effort to recontextualize his source materials’ (Levine 233), Brown pulls back from the scene to connect it to an entire history of wrongs: This, reader, is an unvarnished narrative of one doomed by the laws of the Southern States to be a slave. It tells not only its own story of grief, but speaks of a thousand wrongs and woes beside, which never see the light; all the more bitter and dreadful, because no help can relieve, no sympathy can mitigate, and no hope can cheer. (199, emphasis added)

Bringing into the narrative field of reflection the ‘thousand wrongs and woes’ of slavery, this passage generalizes the death of Jane into a meditation on all those injured by slavery, at the same time that it solicits its readers to provide the ‘help’, ‘sympathy’ and ‘hope’ missing in the current political climate. The word ‘help’ is telling in this context. For Brown is calling for much more than sentimental tears; he positions such affective response as a motive underlying potential political action. One final moment solidifies William Wells Brown’s representation of the cultural politics of mourning. A slave character introduced late in the novel, George, is tried and condemned for his involvement in a slave rebellion. In his address to the court, George echoes Frederick Douglass’s famous oration ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ by linking his act of rebellion to the ‘American revolutionists’, who were ‘revolters’ whose ‘success made [...] patriots’ commemorated on the fourth of July (212). But the current generation of leaders, he cautions, has lost sight of the legacy of freedom. ‘Worse for you’, he continues,

34

Representations of Death/Jeffrey Steele that you have such an inheritance, if you spend it foolishly and are unable to appreciate its worth. Sad if the genius of a true humanity, beholding you with tearful eyes from the mount of vision, shall fold his wings in sorrowing pity, and repeat the strain, ‘O land of Washington, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not; behold your house is left unto you desolate’. (213)

Adapting Jesus’ famous warning to Jerusalem in Matthew 23, this passage extends grief from afflicted slaves to the entire nation. The burden of mourning, it warns, may not be borne solely by African Americans in bondage but extends outward to all those who may suffer the weight of divine judgement. But at the same time, George’s words model a political sympathy founded on ‘the genius of a true humanity’ able to link ‘tearful eyes’ to ‘vision’. ‘Nearly every one present’, Brown continues, ‘was melted to tears’ (213) by George’s words; but, despite this brief outpouring of sympathy, he is still condemned. The challenge that Brown offers to his readers is to lift themselves above such moral blindness, into a realm of mournful apprehension in which they can understand the historical and political conditions occasioning the revolt and condemnation of a man like George. If they can do so, they will perceive the moral damage being done to the nation, which another character asserts elsewhere ‘is losing its character’ and slipping into ‘degradation’ (178). Brown’s use of his fellow abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, in this scene is telling, since Douglass was one of the pioneers in articulating an African-American politics of mourning. The 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, is filled with scenes of mourning that position Douglass as the object of his reader’s political sympathy.6 What is particularly striking is that Douglass in the 1850s continued his interest in the racial politics of mourning, at the same time that he expanded his repertoire of rhetorical and narrative strategies. The two most important texts, in this regard, are the 1852 oration, ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ and the 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave. Like Clotel (which was influenced by it), Douglass’s oration challenges its audiences to compare their patriotic celebration of the nation’s struggle for freedom to the current struggle of slaves for freedom. Given Douglass’s active participation in the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, where a similar connection had been made to America’s revolutionary heritage, it is intriguing to consider the extent to which his vision of political grievance was influenced by early feminist leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton.7 In ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ Douglass asserts that the revolutionary patriots ‘felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity’ (111). The phrase ‘grievous wrongs’, literally, injustices occasioning pain and anguish, efficiently articulates the politics of mourning that stands as the centrepiece of his oration. The victims of chattel

Escaping the ‘benumbering influence of a present embodied death’

35

slavery, Douglass asserts, are also experiencing ‘grievous wrongs’; but no one seems to be paying attention. Positioning himself as an ‘exemplary’ persona8 modelling a more impassioned moral political sensibility than his contemporaries, Douglass memorably asserts: This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony [...] I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people! ‘By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. [...]’ Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, [sic] rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. (116)

Exhibiting the conviction that ‘the individual can speak for the universal’ (Buell 289), Douglass dramatizes a grief that links his own affective stance to the ‘plaintive lament’ of a ‘woe-smitten people’. Adapting the lamentation of the Israelites in captivity, he repeats the famous words of Psalm 137. This linkage not only provides Douglass with scriptural authority for his political observations, it also deepens the historical understanding of captivity as a condition that has occasioned grief for thousands of years. Douglass’s mourning for the ‘children of sorrow’ (116) currently in bondage anchors his reflections in an ancient theme – the personal expense of a widespread injustice that must be mourned. In the remainder of ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’, Douglass never lets his readers forget the grief that fuels his anger. In many respects, this expression of grief justifies the high moral tone and prophetic indignation of the remainder of his oration. ‘At a time like this’, he proclaims: scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. (118)

Tapping into a powerful affective reservoir, this passage transforms grief into action; sorrow, into ‘fire’ and ‘thunder’. Lifting himself to the heights of Old Testament prophecy, Douglass constructs a jeremiad that both threatens divine retribution and highlights the power of his rhetorical position. The key to effective political action, this passage (as the earlier scene of lamentation asserts) resides in the ‘quicken[ing]’ of the ‘feeling of the nation’. Like his contemporary William Wells Brown, Douglass understood that one of the keys to this quickening

36

Representations of Death/Jeffrey Steele

involved the focusing and channelling of grief, the transformation of racial melancholy into concentrated political action. The following year, Douglass’s 1853 novella The Heroic Slave takes his representation of mourning a step further by disrupting the normal causality of grief. In the centre of Douglass’s story, the fugitive slave Madison Washington returns to Virginia from his safe haven in Canada to rescue his wife from bondage. As they are escaping, Madison later recounts, shots ring out, ‘and my poor wife fell by my side dead, while I received but a slight flesh wound’ (154). In most narratives, such an event – the murder of a spouse – would occasion a lengthy scene of mourning. But in Douglass’s story, the mourning comes first, the death afterwards. By displacing the scene of mourning to the beginning of his text, Douglass detaches grief from a specific cause and attaches it to the generalized situation of his protagonist. After a brief prologue, the action of the story opens with a ‘Northern traveller’ who overhears an impassioned ‘soliloquy’ (132–3) modelled in part on Douglass’s own lament on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay (one of the most memorable scenes in his 1845 Narrative). The identity of the speaker is initially unclear, but his lamentation over the condition of being ‘an abject slave’ (133) is unmistakable and heart-rending. As the scene unfolds, Douglass stresses both the dignified humanity of the speaker, ‘standing erect’ with a ‘triumphant’ air (134), but also the effect of his grief-stricken words upon the Northern traveller, Mr Listwell, who ‘had long desired to sound the mysterious depths of the thoughts and feelings of a slave’. The act of overhearing Madison Washington’s ‘mournful accents’ and ‘heart-touching narrations of [...] personal suffering’ (134) permanently alters the direction of Listwell’s life. Encountering a man who can only ‘utter in the vacant air complaints and grief, which the religion of his times and his country can neither console nor relieve’, Listwell is profoundly moved, asserting, ‘From this hour I am an abolitionist’ (135). Responding to the emotional power of a black speaker’s mournful rhetoric, Listwell has listened well, since he is able to surmount the unresponsiveness of his compatriots by allowing Madison’s sorrowful tones to touch his heart and awaken a fervent dedication to racial justice. Kelly Oliver’s recent study, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Oppression, provides a critical vocabulary that brings into focus the psychological and cultural dynamics of such scenes of mourning. Racial or ‘social melancholy’, she argues, involves ‘the loss of a positive or loveable image of oneself and the incorporation of abject or denigrated self-images widely circulating in mainstream culture’ (89). Cut off from the ‘operations of meaningmaking’ (128) and lacking positive self-images, the abjected are reduced to melancholic feelings of ‘inferiority and defect’ (90) and made to feel ‘shame over [their] very being’ (123). Interiorizing patterns of law and meaning that exclude them, they are cut off from social acceptance, as their ‘interest’ in the world and their agency are eroded and ‘the structure of subjectivity itself is undermined’ (114). The psychic and social effects of oppression, Oliver asserts, can be overcome by replacing ‘the stern, punishing superego’ of an oppressive culture

Escaping the ‘benumbering influence of a present embodied death’

37

with ‘a loving social agency’ that supports the development of the self and the construction of meaning (118). If ‘the loss of a positive self-image is formative in the melancholy of oppression’ (121), then the construction of a supportive social agency endorsing this missing image can help heal such melancholic effects. This social acceptance, Oliver observes, is not the activity of a single person but the construction of a ‘safe social space’ (192). Oliver’s arguments read like a roadmap to Douglass’s The Heroic Slave. In the opening scene, Madison Washington’s expression of racial melancholy is given a ‘safe social space’ when he is overheard and accepted by Mr Listwell, whose ensuing commitment to abolitionism represents the restructuring of social values necessary to recognize African-American humanity. Listwell’s presence in the story dramatizes a model of reception and ‘reading’ that facilitates Madison’s movement from the position of being ‘an abject slave’ to a figure who takes on heroic stature. In the process, Douglass both constructs a powerful image of African-American heroism and structures an accepting social order in which the negative self-images can be replaced by positive models of African-American agency. Listwell facilitates Madison’s speech at the beginning of the story and his action at the end, when he provides him with a file to cut through his chains. One of the most provocative aspects of Oliver’s theory, adapted from Julia Kristeva, is that the development of subjectivity (and the cure for ‘social melancholy’) depends upon a stage of ‘revolt’ in which the ‘individual displaces the authority that is associated with the law and now sees that authority as its own’. ‘Social authority’, she continues, ‘becomes individual authority through the individual’s revolt against that very authority; and only through revolt against the social order can the individual belong to that order as one who means’ (143–4). Individuals ‘oppressed within Western cultures’ are not allowed the privilege of challenging and reshaping the social order; instead their ‘revolt is not forgiven’ (197). These observations resonate powerfully both with scenes in The Heroic Slave and Clotel, where George declares at his trial: You say your fathers fought for freedom – so did we. You tell me that I am to be put to death for violating the laws of the land. Did not the American revolutionists violate the laws when they struck for liberty? They were revolters, but their success made them patriots – we were revolters, and our failure makes us rebels. Had we succeeded, we would have been patriots too. (212)

George’s words draw attention to the absence of an accepting social order in which African-American revolt can be forgiven. Rather than being allowed to challenge and revise the cultural structures defining them, the rebellious slave and his compatriots are given no place to stand within society. In The Heroic Slave, Douglass extends the argument for rebellion by representing Madison Washington’s revolt, on board a slave-ship bound for New Orleans, as being ‘heroic’. Overcoming oppressive social conditions that can only occasion ‘weeping and mourning’ (151), he moves beyond a realm in which ‘the

38

Representations of Death/Jeffrey Steele

dealers of human flesh have no respect for [...] sorrow’ (153). ‘I say, gal, what in the devil are you crying about?’ one of the slave-keepers exclaims to a griefstricken girl awaiting her fate in slavery. Like Brown, Douglass’s politics of mourning depends upon showing that such grief is motivated, since ‘her tears were but the natural expression of her sorrow, and the only solace’ (153). But the path out of such racial melancholy, Douglass suggests, involves not only the presence of social acceptance (dramatized by Mr Listwell) but also a process of revolt that restores human dignity. By casting the final section of The Heroic Slave as a dialogue between two white sailors, Douglass dramatizes the social restructuring necessary to create a forgiving social order. While one of the men, embodying the racist status quo, cannot understand how a whole crew was overwhelmed by ‘a set of rebellious darkies’ (157), the other, the first mate on board the slave-ship carrying Madison Washington, begrudgingly affirms both the slave’s manhood and his right to revolt against injustice. By the end of his narrative, the mate confesses that if Madison had ‘been a white man, I would have followed [him] willingly and gladly in any honorable enterprise’. Recognizing his own racial prejudice, he is still able to affirm that Madison’s principles were not ‘wrong [...] for they are the principles of 1776’. Taking the vision of a forgiving social order a step further, Douglass concludes the story by affirming ‘the triumphant leadership of [the] heroic chief and deliverer, MADISON WASHINGTON’ (163, emphasis added). If the nation must learn to mourn the victims of slavery, Douglass’s oration and novella both contend, it must also find a way construct a social order in which African-American agency, embodied in the right to revolt against injustice, can be affirmed. Harriet Jacobs might have shared Douglass’s vision of revolt, if she had not accepted Lydia Maria Child’s urging to omit from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl a concluding chapter ‘about John Brown’.9 Although it was published in 1861, much of Jacobs’ text was written in the 1850s and thus can be placed alongside works by Brown and Douglass. A number of striking moments in Incidents provide important contributions to our understanding of the racial politics of mourning. Two episodes, especially, stand out: the first is the funeral of Aunt Nancy; the second, the moment when Linda Brent reveals the causes of her sorrow to Mrs Bruce. Aunt Nancy’s death, Jacobs exclaims, ‘was an inexpressible sorrow’ (145). But the impact of the twenty-eighth chapter, ‘Aunt Nancy’, is to alleviate that racial melancholy both by motivating it and generalizing it to the slave-system as a whole. The motivation for her grief, Jacobs reveals, was not just the death of a ‘kind relative’ but the realization that ‘she had been slowly murdered’ by a system that weakened her constitution and drove her into the grave (145). Jacobs connects her grief, in other words, to a specific set of historical and political causes – a vivid example of the racial politics of mourning. Ironically, such mourning is beyond the ken of Jacobs’ mistress, Mrs Flint, who never imagined ‘that slaves could have any feelings’ (146). Countering such views, the final scene at Aunt Nancy’s grave articulates a vision of grief that challenges the moral blindness of slavery. Imagining that the scene might have been witnessed by ‘Northern travellers,

Escaping the ‘benumbering influence of a present embodied death’

39

passing through the place’, Jacobs carefully reframes the significance of AfricanAmerican mourning. Although the scene might have been mistaken for a traditional funeral, exemplifying the emotional ties between masters and servant, Jacobs asserts that ‘We could have told them a different story. We could have given them a chapter of wrongs and sufferings that would have touched their hearts, if they had any hearts to feel for the coloured people’ (146–7). But taking her argument a step further, Jacobs effects a momentous displacement of grief, shifting it from her dead relative onto her autobiographical alter ego, positioning herself as a representative victim of slavery. ‘We could have also told them of a poor, blighted young creature’, Jacobs writes, ‘shut up in a living grave for years, to avoid the tortures that would be inflicted on her, if she ventured to come out and look on the face of her departed friend’ (147). Like Douglass in his 1845 Narrative, she represents African Americans in bondage as the object of collective mourning. The pathway out of the ‘living grave’ of ‘inexpressible sorrow’, she affirms, involves the restructuring of the avenues of feeling and attention. This act of national forgiveness, in Oliver’s terms, opens up a new space for dignity, since it allows ‘the affects of oppression’ (87) a forum in which they can be expressed. At the same time, this grief-work contributes to the ‘realizing sense’ that Jacobs defined as the purpose of her autobiography: ‘arous[ing] the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered’ (1). Generalizing the process of mourning from her own painful experiences to the unnamed others ‘still in bondage’, Jacobs looks forward to a social acceptance and forgiveness that might include herself and other African-American females in the honorific (and racially unmarked) category ‘women’. Near the end of Jacobs’ text, this process of social acceptance is given a memorable formulation in the scene in which Linda reveals the source of her sorrow to Mrs Bruce. The ‘sadness of my face’, Jacobs writes, ‘attracted her attention, and in answer to her kind inquiries, I poured out my full heart to her, before bed time. She listened with true womanly sympathy, and told me she would do all she could to protect me’ (180). In this scene, Linda’s grief (as well as that of all enslaved African Americans) is given a space in which it can be articulated. But equally important, it occasions a listener’s response. Like Mr Listwell overhearing Madison Washington, and unlike the audience at George’s trial, Mrs Bruce is an ideal reader whose response maps a political response to the losses occasioned by slavery. As a result, Jacobs is able to loosen the disabling bonds of racial melancholy. Rather than remaining ‘spell-bound under the [...] benumbing influence of a present embodied death’, she takes her own grief, as well as the grief of all those scarred by slavery, as the occasion for a liberating discourse that transforms sorrow into insight and grief into political action. Unwilling to dwell within disabling states of racial melancholia, many AfricanAmerican writers in the 1850s pioneered narrative and rhetorical structures that took the losses of slavery as the occasion for focused acts of mourning. Witnessing the personal damage caused by slavery, they found ways to generalize the

40

Representations of Death/Jeffrey Steele

overwhelming grief of its victims into political grievance. At times, they positioned their readers as mourners lamenting the deaths or losses of specific characters. But at other moments, they shaped models of response that measured contemporary political insensitivity against the imagined ideal of a divine mourner totally receptive to the sorrow being generated on earth. It was not enough, Brown, Douglass, and Jacobs asserted, to celebrate their own escapes to freedom. The burden that each writer accepted was the cumulative pain of those remaining in bondage. Giving voice to the mute suffering of enslaved millions, they imagined a society in which the extent of African-American suffering could be articulated. Extending their sense of sorrow to the nation as a whole, these pioneering writers transformed their representations of racial grief and melancholy into sorrowful political resistance.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6 7

8 9

For a detailed analysis of the ‘melancholy of race’, see Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000). Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993), 63; cited by Cheng, 20. Althesa and her husband refuse to own slaves but are dependent on a labour market in which many servants are slaves who contract their own labour and turn over their earnings to their masters. For an analysis of the ‘politics of mourning’, see Jeffrey Steele, ‘The Politics of Mourning: Cultural Grief-Work from Frederick Douglass to Fanny Fern’ and ‘The Gender and Racial Politics of Mourning in Antebellum America’. Eng and Kazanjian are summarizing Judith Butler’s argument in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), where she argues that ‘melancholia involves the production of an internal world as well as a topographical set of fictions that structures the psyche’ (171), as the internalization of loss generates ‘a spatialized landscape of the mind’ (174). See Jeffrey Steele, ‘Douglass and Sentimental Rhetoric’. Douglass attended the Seneca Falls Convention, took part in the discussion as he argued for extending the elective franchise to women, signed the ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ and printed a favourable review of the proceedings in The North Star. The concept of the ‘exemplary persona’ is developed in Buell’s Literary Transcendentalism (285–9). Lydia Maria Child to Harriet Jacobs, letter of 13 August 1860, reprint in Jacobs, Incidents (244).

Escaping the ‘benumbering influence of a present embodied death’

41

Works Cited Brown, William Wells. Clotel or The President’s Daughter, 1853. Ed. Robert S. Levine (Boston and New York: Bedford Cultural Edition, 2000). Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1973). Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997). Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Child, Lydia Maria. ‘The Quadroons’, 1842, reprint in William Wells Brown, Clotel or the President’s Daughter. Ed. Robert S. Levine (Boston and New York: Bedford Cultural Edition, 2000), 274–84. Crafts, Hannah. The Bondwoman’s Narrative, 185?. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. 2002; reprint (New York: Warner Books, 2003). Douglass, Frederick. The Heroic Slave, 1853. The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, ed. William L. Andrews (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 131–63. ——, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, 1845. The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, 21–97. ——, ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ 1852. The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, 108–30. Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian. ‘Introduction: Mourning Remains’. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003), 1–25. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993). Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, 1861. Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987). Levine, Robert S., ‘Sources and Revisions’. Clotel or the President’s Daughter. Ed. Robert S. Levine (Boston and New York: Bedford Cultural Edition, 2000), 231–3 Luciano, Dana. ‘Passing Shadows: Melancholic Nationality and Black Critical Publicity in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood’. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003), 148–87. Oliver, Kelly. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

42

Representations of Death/Jeffrey Steele

Steele, Jeffrey. ‘The Politics of Mourning: Cultural Grief-Work from Frederick Douglass to Fanny Fern’. Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies. Ed. Henry B. Wonham (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 95–111. ——, ‘The Gender and Racial Politics of Mourning in Antebellum America’, in Jan Lewis and Peter N. Stearns (eds), An Emotional History of the United States (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998), 91–106. ——, ‘Douglass and Sentimental Rhetoric’ in James C. Hall (ed.), Approaches to Teaching the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: MLA, 1999), 66–72.

Chapter 3

Representative Mournfulness Nation and Race in the Time of Lincoln Dana Luciano

On 14 April 1879, Walt Whitman delivered the first version of his lecture on the ‘Death of President Lincoln’, a talk he would deliver a number of times over the following decade. To his dramatic depiction of the main event promised in the lecture’s title – the scene of assassination and its panicky aftermath – the poet appended the suggestion that the episode, in the end, would prove most significant as drama; its ‘flash of lightning-illumination’ would highlight ‘those climaxmoments on the stage of universal Time, when the Historic Muse at one entrance, and the Tragic Muse at the other, suddenly ringing down the curtain, close an immense act in the long drama of creative thought, and give it radiation, tableau, stranger than fiction’ (11). Whitman’s insistence on representing this historic event in theatrical language suggests that it can only be apprehended outside the traditional narrative mode of conventional historiography. His focus on the death of the president assigns a distinctly nationalizing power to the spectacle of Lincoln’s death, one that provides it with the possibility of furnishing ‘a cement to the whole People, subtler, more underlying, than any thing in the written Constitution’ – the affective glue of a ‘first-class tragic incident thoroughly identified with that People, at its head, and for its sake’ (12). The identification of the sixteenth President with ‘the people’ is a familiar enough move in the memorial discourse for Lincoln, which stresses his extraordinary, and historically new, ordinariness. His distinction was that of exemplifying the possibility of an American life, of rising from an undistinguished family in the nation’s backcountry to a seat at its centre – without, as his eulogists repeated again and again, losing touch with the virtues and values of the common citizenry from which he had emerged. The commemorative discourse, in this sense, emphasizes what we might call his representativeness, in the Emersonian sense. The representative individual, for Emerson, was one ‘who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others’, yet who somehow ‘must be related to us, and our lives receive from him some promise of explanation’ (Emerson, Representative Men, 5). Emerson’s own eulogy for Lincoln identified him along precisely these lines: as ‘the true representative of this continent […] a heroic figure in the centre of a heroic epoch […] the true history of the American people

44

Representations of Death/Dana Luciano

in his time’ (‘A Plain Man of the People’, 33). But as Emerson’s language suggests, Lincoln both kept pace with American history and moved, predictively, ahead of it: ‘Step by step he walked before [the people]; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs […]’. (33, emphasis added). The double temporal movement sketched in the depiction of Lincoln’s life-history as representative, then, is that of actualizing the potential of the nation, the becoming-present of its most promising possibilities; as the Reverend C.M. Butler of Philadelphia insisted, ‘we loved him as a second and better self – the possible self which we wished to be’ (11). The proleptic capacity of the President’s life, in these assessments, appears, at first, incongruous with Whitman’s depiction of the spectacular temporality of his death. For Whitman, the resonance of the tragic is its ability to alter the flow of time, to make the ordinary narrative progression of ‘history’ flash into another temporality. The national temporal alterity accessed through the figure of Lincoln was associated, in Whitman’s writing, not only with his death but with the affective peculiarity of his nature while alive, which gestured, in its insistent mournfulness, toward a past that exceeded the conventions of the present. In a passage from Memoranda During the War, Whitman comments on the melancholy appearance of the president: ‘I see very plainly ABRAHAM LINCOLN’s dark brown face, with the deep cut lines, the eyes, &c, and always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression […]’ (23). Whitman muses, ‘None of the artists or pictures have caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed’ (24). The expression that Whitman read as remarkably untimely – a sadness so pronounced that decorum could not hide it, yet so subtle the dead must be called up to reproduce it – appeared, to many observers, entirely timely during the years of the Civil War. Sadness was, after all, a historically appropriate affect during a prolonged and bloody conflict, and Lincoln’s mournfulness read as yet another demonstration that he belonged above all to the people; the melancholy face of the President reflected, to a bereaved public, its own intense anxiety and grief. Yet Whitman’s emphasis on the unexpressed ‘something else’ that lurked within the President’s mournful expression suggests a distinction that sets it apart from the daily life of the country; his melancholy exceeds the history of the American pictorial arts, opening the nation not simply to the possibility but to the necessity of another form of time that can capture its significance. The dual temporality of mournful nationality – the peculiarly retrospective aspect of this essentially proleptic form of representativeness – will be my focus in these pages. I will begin by considering the symbolic temporal transcendence assigned to death in the Gettysburg Address against the allegorical justification of national suffering in the Second Inaugural, emphasizing the contrast between the impersonal monumental ideal that gives modern nationality its distinct temporal form and the sacralization of personal feeling in sentimental nationality. I will then examine the complex timing of national feeling in the eulogies that followed

Representative Mournfulness

45

Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. In these eulogies, Lincoln’s characteristic personal sadness is embraced as a deeply personal feeling for the nation that justifies, in turn, its intense mourning for him. Mournfulness, in this view, functions as a substitute for the as-yet-unfulfilled realization of democracy’s promise; its retrospective longing indicates a prospective claim on the future, one that demands further progress toward national goals as compensation for historical losses suffered in their name. But the sentimental attachment, visible in the eulogies, to national feeling as an end in itself created a desire to preserve the expression of such feeling against the passage of time, despite the necessity of returning to everyday life as a means of beginning the work of compensation. Accordingly, the eulogies embraced two forms of corporeal preservation for national mournfulness: that of the mournful president himself, the ‘sad-eyed Emancipator’ weeping for the injustices of history, and that of the freedmen and women whose anguish appeared, in many white-authored eulogies, as a time-space apart from the progress of the nation, resounding within ‘wailing in places which no minister shall be able to reach’ (Beecher 47). African-American writing on Lincoln, however, refused this temporal split, depicting black grief over the assassination as a mode of affirmative national belonging, a form of affective labour that enabled African Americans to move forward in national time.

National History and Sacred Time For Whitman, the kind of dramatic moment represented by Lincoln’s death brought ordinary time to a standstill, turning history into a ‘tableau’. Eventually, however, he believed that such radiant spectacles would be reinserted into genealogical time, becoming the nation’s ‘most important inheritance-value’ (12). Benedict Anderson’s influential study of modern nationalism, Imagined Communities, considers precisely this mode of using the dead to order the nation in time. For Anderson, the nation’s dead possess a symbolic value enabling them to underwrite the narrative form favoured by modern nationalism: they allow the inscription of national history as an unruptured genealogical progression, the story of a ‘solid community moving down (or up) history’ (26). Modern nationalism depends upon a conception of ‘secular, serial time’, which charts citizens in relation to a specific place in the nation’s geography and a distinct time in its history (205). Yet the revolutionary rupture that founds the nation, the radical break with the past enacted by the first generation of nationalists, threatens to confound the continuity of national narrative; accordingly, postrevolutionary nationalist genealogy buries its origins, so to speak, by conscripting the dead into its history. In this sense, Anderson observes, nationalist commemoration entails ‘a curious inversion of conventional genealogy [which] start[s] from an originary present’ (205). While Anderson glosses the mechanics of this inversion, we may surmize that it is enabled by the temporal slippage entailed in identifying with the dead. For as he stresses, the deaths that found the nation (typically ‘exemplary suicides, poignant

46

Representations of Death/Dana Luciano

martyrdom’s, assassinations, executions, wars and holocausts’) are those that the citizenry can recognize as in some sense its own (206). Hence while the citizens, located in serial time, are cognizant of their historical distance from the nation’s dead, the consolidation Whitman describes as the ‘cementing’ effect of national death functions precisely by drawing the people together, with the dead and with one another, in relation to national principles that occupy another form of time – what we tend to call the ‘timeless’ or ‘eternal’ truths of the nation. The unifying function of nationalism is expressed, in other words, in monumental time: the motionless space of identity between past and present that supports the day-to-day work of progress. The stasis of the monumental registers as an earthly correspondence to the completeness of the eternal, demonstrating the fundamentally secular nature of nationalist discourse.1 In a later essay, Anderson points out that one of the monumental forms favoured by official nationalism is the National Cemetery, a form that was, he asserts, first pioneered at Gettysburg in 1863 (Spectre of Comparisons). Anderson focuses on the spatial organization of the dead at Gettysburg as it reveals an evolving conception of the ‘people’ in a democratic nation. Here, however, I want to examine the temporal relation of the nation to its dead, framed in the renowned short speech Lincoln delivered on that site during the November 19, 1863 dedicatory ceremonies. The site of a bloody midsummer battle, Gettysburg had been at best an ambivalent military victory for the Union army; consequently, both the cemetery itself and the ceremonial opening were designed to create a more lasting symbolic victory.2 The time of national crisis that necessitated the Gettysburg ceremony is stabilized – grounded, as it were – by the monumental association of time with place in Lincoln’s speech. In his brief remarks, the place of the speech expands in space, rather than in time, and it does so, ironically, by seeming to contract. The locus of action in the speech narrows, from ‘this continent’ in the first sentence, to ‘a great battle-field’, to ‘a portion of that field’, to ‘this ground’, finally becoming simply ‘here’, a word repeated eight times in the speech, with seven of those repetitions occurring in the last four sentences alone (Lincoln, ‘Address’, 536). But while the immediate referent of ‘here’ is the space of the cemetery itself, it is also, in a deferred sense, the taking-place of the ‘new nation [brought forth] on this continent’ introduced in the Address’s opening sentence, linked to the present location by a pronominal echo effect (536). The cemetery is thus both a physical portion, a part, of the nation and a symbolic representation of the whole, just as the present is at once a transient moment, a piece of time, and a highly significant instance of the ever-unfolding event that is the nation. The conversion of the present moment into a place of memory – a place apart from ordinary time – takes place in the Address’s eighth sentence, which reflects on its own place in history: ‘The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they [the soldiers] did here’ (536). Latter-day commentators on the Address often point to the apparent irony of this sentence, which has, over time, become technically incorrect; most Americans can recite at

Representative Mournfulness

47

least part of Lincoln’s speech, but few know much about the battle of Gettysburg itself. Yet accounting this development as ironic posits a distinction between words and deeds that is out of place in the logic of monumentality. The essence of the soldiers’ action is not the particularities of the battle, but the consecration of a symbolic site; in this sense, Lincoln’s words contain the soldier’s deeds by defining them and rendering them (com)memorable. In urging his audience to carry on their unfinished work, Lincoln is, as Priscilla Wald has observed, asking them to become ‘symbols of the nation – before America, Americans’ (66). Nationalist action, here, is a process of becoming symbolic; it enables citizens to mimic the temporal transcendence of the symbol, rising above particularities to align themselves with monumental time. While the Address initially foregrounds revolutionary rupture in its opening emphasis on the founding of a new nation, its appeal to the monumental offers a reassuring continuity, rhetorically creating a sense of American newness as an unbroken, unbreakable tradition. Hence the ‘new birth of freedom’ promised in the final sentence resonates not as a departure from the past but a confirmation of it, a rebirth of the newness that is the nation’s tradition, rendering the nation’s present tense, in effect, a taking-place of already-known principles originating in that past (536). The Address creates this impression of spatiotemporal continuity by enfolding the present within the ongoing action emanating from the past, an enfolding effected most notably in the much-remarked rhetorical inversion in the middle of the Address: ‘[W]e cannot dedicate […] this ground […] It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced’ (536). The inversion performed in this sentence transposes the present-tense concrete act performed by the President and his audience – the dedication of the cemetery – into the time-defying work of the infinitive, locating the present as a necessary moment in the unfolding of an action already underway. The dedication to the ‘unfinished work’ carries the present forward, that is, toward a destined future: not simply the completion of the war, but the completeness of the nation, its defence against spatial fragmentation and temporal rupture. The Gettysburg Address is noteworthy for its omission, in an era that aligned mortality with a distinctly sentimental pedagogy, of the deliberate solicitation of personal feeling that characterizes the nineteenth-century rhetoric of grief. Although the Address represents the nation as a living entity, it is one that, despite repeated births, strangely lacks a body; or rather, it might be more accurate to say that the national body, birthed under masculine agency, emphasizes a vision of endurance over appeals to corporeal vulnerability and transience. Lincoln’s Address accordingly works even harder than the cemetery to keep the physical bodies of the nation’s dead soldiers out of sight. In this way, like the Gettysburg cemetery itself, his speech can seem strangely ahead of its time, looking forward from its location in the mid-1860s to the twentieth-century cenotaphic nationalism Anderson considers. Anderson’s insistence on the statistical anonymity of the citizen, derived from an electoral conception of the citizen as a ‘substitutable

48

Representations of Death/Dana Luciano

symbolic integer’ organized horizontally, in token of democratic equality, takes shape, in his assessment, in the even horizontal rows featured in so many twentieth-century national cemeteries (Spectre of Comparisons 52).3 The Gettysburg Address’s affinity with an abstracted, horizontal-conceived equality (rather than, say, a meritocratic apportionment of citizenship on the basis of differing degrees of heroism or passionate national feeling) manifests in its rhetorical levelling of ‘these dead’, all of whom, Union and Confederate, belong equally to the nation; its avoidance of the body and the rhetoric of embodied feeling buries corporeally-linked specificities that might otherwise puncture or pervert its unbroken national/monumental continuum, introducing potential variations in the course of (national) time.4 Counterposed to the disembodied monumental aesthetic featured in the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s last major speech, the Second Inaugural Address, delivered on 4 March 1865, can seem positively heavy with the flesh. Delivered when the outcome of the war was yet uncertain, the Gettysburg Address sought to minimize this uncertainty by emphasizing the continuity of the nation in space and time. But in early March 1865, although Lincoln might not have known the war would end as quickly as it did, the surrender of the secessionist forces seemed likely. With this promise of closure, Lincoln could represent the time of the war as a limited rupture in national time – a traumatic historical wound, vast in its magnitude but capable of recuperation. The Second Inaugural accordingly emphasizes the awe-inspiring suffering of the living over the timeless principles underwritten by the dead; mining the rhetorical archive of sentimental culture, it foregrounds the language of affect and authorizes national action through an appeal to divine law. The centrepiece of the Second Inaugural is the rendering of the Civil War as an exemplification of Matthew 18.7: ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses! For it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!’ Lincoln identifies slavery as the ‘offense’ that, ‘having continued through His appointed time, [God] now wills to remove’ (‘Second Inaugural’ 687). Human suffering becomes a divinely-ordained medium of compensatory exchange: ‘this terrible war’, according to Lincoln, is the ‘woe’ the nation must suffer for the offence of slavery, itself a conversion of the bodily pain of blacks into the earthly material gain of whites who ‘[wring] their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces’. The long history of bodily and emotional suffering that slavery represents is called into play directly in the speech, diminishing, by comparison, the relatively short duration of both the war and the nation itself: [I]f God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether’. (687)

Representative Mournfulness

49

The Second Inaugural’s revision of the cause of the war – from ‘testing’ the durability of national principles to exonerating the sin of slavery – opens a temporal frame larger than the one invoked in the Gettysburg Address, dislocating the historical importance of the Revolution in its graphic depiction of the still-older material practice of chattel slavery. Yet the extensive duration of the slave’s suffering is itself diminished in relation to the longevity of Biblical truths, whose citation encompasses the ostensible history of civilization and whose resonance within Psalm 19, quoted at the end of the passage, invokes the completeness of eternity. The affective language of embodied suffering thus calls into play a sacred temporality different from the proto-modern monumental nationalism that resounds throughout the Gettysburg Address; in contrast to the symbolic tropes favoured in the Address, the theodicity at the Second Inaugural’s core aligns it with the messianic temporality of exegetic allegory, in which all earthly experience is the exemplification of Biblical principles. In this sense, the exegetic allegory introduces a vision of timelessness that aligns American national history and the monumental appeal of democratic truth with the dictates of divine law. At the same time as they de-centre the nation, then, the Biblical appeals in the speech also authorize that nation’s historical actions, providing spiritual compensation for the physical and emotional suffering of the war. After the reference to the 19th Psalm, the Second Inaugural relocates itself according to the narrative of national history with which it opened, the story of the war itself; its final paragraph moves to bring the temporal rupture represented by the war to a close, exhorting the citizens to: strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. (687)

The restoration of linear-historical time is thus brought about through the language of remediation: physical healing for the veteran, and emotional healing for the bereaved. The speech thus surrounds the potential interminability of the war’s awesome degree of woe, the suffering that sacralizes the nation’s efforts, within a narrative of loss and recuperation that will restore the nation to corporeal and temporal wholeness, miming the reparative work of mourning. Yet unlike the temporal transcendence of the nationally symbolic death in the Gettysburg Address, the allegorical authorizing of national suffering in the Second Inaugural cannot be fully reconciled with the history of the nation. For while, as Paul de Man notes, the symbol encapsulates the fantasy of transcending time, allegory, by virtue of its dependence on a prior narrative, demonstrates the irreducibility of the temporal gap that makes its mode of signification possible. In this sense, the timespace of divine woe may coexist with national history, but it cannot be dissolved into the timeline of the nation; it remains, instead, a (sacred) time apart, associated not with serial but with sentimental nationality, which insists on the significance of the ordinary life to the nation, rather than its substitutability.

50

Representations of Death/Dana Luciano

The temporal implications of the body that suffers for the nation, then, differ from those of the one that dies for it; the latter may be dissolved into an abstracted monumentality, but the former maintains a personal particularity – the particularity of the personal – that gestures insistently toward the painful passage of time as the cause of its suffering. It is, then, the distinct temporality of the suffering body in articulations of national mournfulness to which we will now turn.

Representative Mournfulness and National Feeling A little over a month after Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address, the movement toward national restoration and healing it expressed would be fractured by his assassination. Lincoln’s death became the occasion for an unprecedented exercise in national mourning, one that sought to bring closure to the national disruption occasioned not simply by the assassination of the President but by the prolonged and brutal conflict as a whole. The sermons and eulogies produced during this period exerted a strong influence on public opinion about how the nation should proceed after the war.5 But these sermons also laid the foundation for the particularly resonant image of Lincoln that exists in national memory, transforming him from a president about whom public opinion was deeply divided into a symbol of national unity. They accomplished this transformation not by circulating new information about the President but, as Barry Schwartz has observed, by ‘generating an emotional context in which people felt differently about what they knew about him’, turning known facts about Lincoln into newlyappreciated truths (30). The new ‘emotional context’ created during the national mourning for Lincoln incorporated, significantly, a specific context for understanding the president’s own emotions. A number of the sermons depicted Lincoln as unusually sensitive to the nation’s sorrows, a sensitivity that explained and legitimated the extraordinary anguish that they maintained the citizens felt in response to his death. And while some sermons urged Americans not to overvalue their emotional responses to the event, most allotted feeling for the president a significant measure of importance, depicting grief as a measure of national belonging.6 In this context, Lincoln’s emotions appeared as a form of sentimental leadership, making him, in effect, a role model for a feeling nation.7 Eulogists emphasized the extraordinary depth of the President’s pain. Charles Everett challenged his audience, ‘Who mourned like him, for our country’s sorrow? Who shed such bitter tears over her sons fallen in battle? Who felt with such keen agony the woe of each repulse?’ (18). Lincoln’s extraordinary mournfulness, in these accounts, was the effect of taking on national losses as personal, sympathetically mourning each death individually. The exceptional capacity for feeling attributed to Lincoln as the nation’s Mourner-in-Chief emphasized the fundamentally democratic orientation of the president’s emotions, which linked the nation’s fallen ‘sons’ with his own son William, who died in

Representative Mournfulness

51

1862. Haven, for example, proclaimed that Lincoln ‘felt a deep and individual regard for each and all; he wept over the nation’s dead boys at Gettysburg as heartily as over his own dead boy at Washington’ (12). The equation of personal and national grief here rewrites recent history, turning the Gettysburg Address’s impersonal language into a rhetorical bout of weeping that confirmed the President’s deep, and deeply democratic, feeling for the country. Accounts like this not only worked to legitimize the exercise of Presidential power in ordering the nation to war, but also permitted a peculiar intimacy between the people and their president. One oft-cited story used a solider to validate the tender manliness of Lincoln’s mourning, reporting the testimony of a colonel in the Union army who, at the end of ten days spent working with Lincoln, declares, ‘I found that I was in love with him, and I could not help it’ (McClintock 135). The President’s seductiveness is attributed to his touching enquiry, one afternoon, as to whether the Colonel ever finds himself addressing loved ones who are dead. When the Colonel admits that he does, the President announces that he is glad to hear it, for he himself holds daily conversations with his dead son, which are a great solace to him. The ‘love’ excited in the soldier by the revelation of his commander’s sentimental mourning is at once a personal sympathy, connected to the individual experience of loss, and potentially reproducible by any citizen-mourner who wants to identify his or her feelings with the President’s. This revelation places the President on a par with the people; the fact that he mourns his son just as they do theirs gives ordinary expressions of love and grief a certain proximity to power. This affective authority is represented, in the eulogies, as a historically new form of association, as the mutual embrace of President and people radically transforms the nature of power: Never did a great people so universally recognize and repay such love in its ruler. Never did a ruler so love his people […]. All the great leaders of the revolution, all the great living leaders, reform, civil, and military, are devoted to the idea that controls them: this to liberty, that to union; this, America’s glory, that, her destiny; this, philanthropy, that, piety; this, justice, that, honor; this, empire, that, prosperity. Not one of them can in a peculiar, profound, and personal sense be said to love the American people. […] Not that they do not love the nation; far from it. All have, all do; but it is a general, not a special regard; an affection that reveals itself in other forms than mere love. Not so with our great President. He held every one in his heart of hearts; he felt a deep and individual regard for each and all […]. (Haven 13)

Lincoln’s love heralds an American second coming: the arrival of a postpolitical nationalism characterized by a substitution of the unifying power of affection for the divisive and uncertain labour of statesmanship, the selfish pursuit of power and glory, and the abstracted dedication to ideas. Yet the narrative of national love installs this newly-arrived principle as retrospectively foundational, coding it in the language of domestic affection, as eulogists insisted that Lincoln was ‘singularly identified with us all […] like a relative – one of your household’ (Robinson 90). In accordance with their

52

Representations of Death/Dana Luciano

relocation of the space of national regeneration to the family hearth, the 1865 eulogies reshape the monumental time of the nation using sentimentality’s characteristic inflections; figuring isolated moments of intensified emotional experience as privileged instances of American history, they work to transport deep feeling across time, protecting it from both political turbulence and mortal transience. Henry Ward Beecher described the sorrow that attended Lincoln’s death as the perfect form of memorial: Rear to his name monuments, found charitable institutions, and write his name above their lintels; but no monument will ever equal the universal, spontaneous and sublime sorrow that in a moment swept down lines and parties, and covered up animosities, and in an hour brought a divided people into unity of grief and indivisible fellowship of anguish. (38)

The monumental significance of this wave of sorrow, according to Beecher, is its ability to dissolve ideological differences in emotional unanimity; as a spontaneous event, it will always overshadow even the sincerest intentional efforts at memorialization, privileging the temporal transcendence of the memorable moment over the centuries-long endurance of an edifice or a shrine. The preface to a volume in which Beecher’s sermon was reprinted, a collection of sermons preached in New York City in the weeks following the assassination titled Our Martyr President, insisted that national feeling both could and should transcend time, depicting its own contents as a contribution to American affective history: When the flowers have many times bloomed and faded on the grave of our martyred President; when the banner of Peace floats over every acre of the broad territory of our glorious Union; when the hearts that felt the pangs of awful bereavement are still, men will assent to the facts recorded by the historian, but they cannot feel with the generation whose bosom received the fiery darts, unless they come in contact with their feelings. (viii)

The monumental grief that Beecher represented as an appropriate memorial for the president is here seen as a good in its own right, a death-defying ability to make the nation meaningful by facilitating affective contact across generations. This transgenerational contact, a vitalizing supplement to the ‘facts recorded by the historian’, offers a kind of embodied knowledge that will keep the pain of the moment alive. The attachment of the Lincoln eulogists to this expression of national affect is indicated in their repeated, reverential caressing of the suffering bodies of Americans whose grief spoke more clearly than words could: ‘Trembling lips, tearful eyes, saddened countenances, and suppressed tones, evinced the unspeakable emotions of the soul […]. America mourns as she never mourned before’ (Morehouse, quoted in Chesebrough 3). Moments of intense suffering take place, in this view, in a particular timespace set aside for the exposure of deep feeling, which escapes conventional historical representation in its unspeakable intensity, its resistance to the linear order of words. Yet while such feelings cannot

Representative Mournfulness

53

themselves be communicated in language, they can nevertheless be shared through the rhetoric of feeling-in-common that crosses both space and time, bonding the nation together across regions and generations. While the space assigned to this intensity of mourning was co-extensive with that of the nation, its time, however, was understood to be of limited duration, as even the most emotion-laden of the sermons insisted upon the liminality of the national dwelling-in-trauma. Addressing an audience in New York’s Union Square while Lincoln’s corpse lay in state in City Hall, George Bancroft speculated that ‘[t]he country may have needed an imperishable grief to touch its inmost feeling’, but he insisted that this ‘[g]rief must take the character of action’ (71). In the context of mourning Lincoln’s assassination, then, the familiar American ambivalence about the embodied play of emotion in grief articulated itself through a specific historical dilemma: grief seemed both especially relevant as a response to the highly visible death of the president, as well as the accumulated psychic toll of a long and bloody war, and especially risky at a moment where displays of national strength and solidarity were deemed essential to prevent a relapse into sectional conflict.8 Accordingly, the ‘great national sorrow’ was organized into acceptable forms of mourning, given orderly distribution across both space and time, as the sermons and eulogies posited consolation for the nation’s loss by exhorting their audience to translate their sensations of sorrow into present-tense patriotism. Yet these gestures of containment are not entirely moves toward closure; for while the national period of mourning for Lincoln worked to order feeling toward a renewal of ‘action’, it also sought to establish the monumental significance of national bereavement, what Bancroft called an ‘imperishable grief’, in order to remain permanently in touch with what this sorrow signified. That space was held open, as the preface to Our Martyr President suggests, by the eulogistic texts and by the bodies that those texts imagined as permanently in sympathy with their project. In particular, their rhetorical suturing of Lincoln’s characteristic sadness to the woes of the nation allowed the figure of the mournful president himself to carry some of the weight of national feeling. The preservation of Lincoln’s mournfulness in the image of the sad-eyed Emancipator, the sorrowful champion of the suffering, made him permanently available to be tapped as a fund of sympathy for the downtrodden and a surplus source of love for all citizens. The mourner-president posthumously took his place as a figure of the nation’s permanent affective connectedness; his sacred sorrow stood as a mnemonic to that nation, taking the measure of the gap between democracy’s theoretically limitless potential and the history of its inequalities in practice. The legacy of the Lincoln memorial discourse was, then, a temporal division of national feeling that managed both to set American grief in motion, narrativizing it into productive mourning, and to set it monumentally aside, preserving an affective space in which the timeless value of the nation’s highest ideals can be most effectively demonstrated by the pain experienced when it falls short of them.9

54

Representations of Death/Dana Luciano

Lincoln’s body was, however, not the only one situated in this timespace by the post-assassination eulogies. Rather, the ‘peculiar, wild, and touching’ intensity of black grief seems, in the imagination of many of these eulogies, to defy conventional consolation, locating African-American mourners in an affectivetemporal national annex, at once irrefutably American and held apart from the progress of the nation (Hardinge 17). The memorial discourse for Lincoln nationalized the Romantic fascination with the ‘peculiar’ mourning customs of African Americans, projecting the ideal form of grief’s pre-linguistic eloquence onto the mournful black body as spectacular testimony to the depth of the national anguish caused by the assassination. J.G. Holland’s eulogy, for instance, suggests that Lincoln’s truest monument would not be simply the American, but specifically the African-American response to his death: We who are white know little of the emotions which thrill the black man’s heart to-day. There are no such mourners here as those simple souls among the freedmen who regarded Mr Lincoln as the noblest personage, next to Jesus Christ, that ever lived. Their love is deeper than ours; their power of expression less. The tears that stream down those dark faces are charged with a pathos beyond the power of words. (24)

The deeper feelings and weaker powers of expression attributed to black mourners here enable them to bypass the emotionally muting conventions of civil society, speaking directly from the bleeding heart of the nation. Holland goes on to insist that white Americans may join hands ‘in perfect sympathy’ with black mourners, for, if their grief is less spectacular, whites nevertheless owe Lincoln equal gratitude (25–6). Other eulogists, however, underscored the greater affective intensity of black mourning for Lincoln by imagining, for their white audiences, a break in their ability to console: Intense as is our grief, who shall fathom the sorrow of those to whom he brought the boon of freedom, when they shall learn of the death of their liberator? What wails shall mingle with the voices of the sea along Carolina’s shore! Miriam’s timbrel in a moment drowned in Rachel’s cry of anguish! (Cuyler 170)

Black grief over Lincoln’s death is imagined here as a sublime spectacle of communicative speechlessness: the oceanic testimony of the body in anguish, too profound for mere words, and thus resistant to the solace offered by white eulogists. The spectacle of black mourning itself, however, offered consolation for the nation, as it provided a vehicle for the preservation of its deepest, truest feelings, permitting it to move on toward the work of national healing that Lincoln, in his last major speech, had approved. Touched by spiritual as well as emotional significance, black feeling completed the circuit of affective exchange when the words of whites failed. Following his dramatic depiction of the fathomless grief of the freedmen, Cuyler’s eulogy uses the speech of a black woman to endow the national trauma with spiritual significance:

Representative Mournfulness

55

‘Yes, sah,’ spake out a gray-haired Aunt Chloe – ‘yes, sah! Linkum’s dead! They killed our best friend. But God be libin yet. Dey can’t kill him. I’se sure of dat!’ […] In that poor freedwoman’s broken ejaculation, ‘Linkum dead – but God, God still libin,’ I find the only solace for your smitten heart and mine. (Cuyler 171)

Yet this location deep in the heart of the nation’s grief tended to bury the black mourner rhetorically; African Americans were embraced by many eulogists as spiritual reminders of the nation’s ‘imperishable grief’, only to be left behind as guardians of that grief while the eulogies moved the rest of the nation toward patriotic closure. In this sense, the image of anguished black mourning for Lincoln complemented the sacred mournfulness ascribed to the President himself; both appeared as the embodiment of a representative sense of national melancholy, the spirit of prolonged mournfulness to which ordinary citizens might periodically return in order to effectively reorient themselves toward the future. If melancholia, as it is conventionally understood, signals a pathological defiance of the linear structure that ordains mourning’s closure, the utopic dimension of melancholia, as recently outlined by Giorgio Agamben, explains how this ostensible pathology may signify as a national virtue. Agamben notes that in its tenacious refusal to abandon attachment to a past object, melancholia suggests the possibility that the object being mourned was never actually possessed. Thus melancholy, in Agamben’s account, appears as a strategy, one that ‘opens a space for the existence of the unreal’ (20).10 It is, I want to suggest, the utopic promise of the nation as unrealized potential that is at play in the embrace of such sentimentalized images of national mournfulness as the sad-eyed Emancipator and the weeping freedman; both gestured toward a nation whose timeless power of love exceeded the historical reach of its laws, but whose painful failure to live up to its own democratic ideals could always be cherished as the promise of a future in which it might. Against this sentimental vision of representative mournfulness, AfricanAmerican eulogies for Lincoln assigned a different significance to the temporality of black grief for the President. Echoing the general sense that black mourning for Lincoln was particularly intense, African-American eulogists depicted this intensity as the effect of the historical novelty of Lincoln’s regard for the rights of African Americans. As the Reverend Jacob Thomas of Troy, New York, contended: We, as a people, feel more than all others that we are bereaved. We had learned to love Mr Lincoln as we had never loved man before […] He had taught us to love him. The interest he manifested in behalf of the oppressed, the weak, and those who had none to help them, had won for him a large place in our hearts. It was something so new to us to see such sentiments manifested by the chief magistrate of the United Sates that we could not help but love him. Is it to be wondered at that we mourn to-day? (44–5)

56

Representations of Death/Dana Luciano

African-American mourning for Lincoln becomes, in this account, not simply a testimony to the greatness of Lincoln but also a critical assessment of the failures of those who preceded him.11 In addition to providing a means of historical critique, demonstrating the historic distancing of justice by the nation’s leadership, black mourning for Lincoln, Thomas suggests, also furnished a new means of present-tense connection to other Americans: ‘Abraham Lincoln is no more, and we mingle our tears with that of the mourning widow and bereaved friend’ (47).12 In accounts like Thomas’s, black mourning for Lincoln became a vehicle for African-American national agency in the present tense. Avoiding the domesticated rhetoric that retrospectively installed Lincoln’s love for the people as foundational, African-American eulogists acclaimed Lincoln as the Emancipator without suggesting that his existence somehow compensated for history. The refusal, here, of the sentimental temporal split assigned to national mournfulness implies a critique of its melancholy mystification of history, which emerges from the need to represent the unreal – the unimpeded practice of democratic ideals – as a lost reality; cognizant of both the historical newness of justice for the slave and the possibility that the ideals of the nation, in the case of the freedman, would continue to fall short, black writers avoided monumentalizing the temporal split that enabled the nation to embrace national ideals as temporally transcendent while appealing to their failure in time as, paradoxically, an assurance of their timelessness. This refusal of historical mystification, and the consequent lack of distinction between affective and progressive labour on behalf of the nation, meant that AfricanAmerican eulogists for Lincoln could avoid the sentimental tendency to find others who would permanently be available to perform the nation’s grief-work.

Notes 1

2 3

In a later essay addressing the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, Anderson points out that the ‘ghostly and indefinitely replicable’ memories enshrined in the monuments of official nationalism point toward a ‘forever’ which is ‘visibly coterminous with this nation, this people, rather than pointing toward Judgment Day’. See ‘Replica, Aura, and Late Nationalist Imaginings’, in Spectre of Comparisons (48). For a thorough discussion of the historical context of the Gettysburg Address, see Wills. While Anderson identifies Gettysburg as the origin of the National Cemetery, he notes that its graves, which mingle Union and Confederate soldiers but maintain a degree of historical specificity by corresponding in layout to the course of the battle, do not correspond to the serial model later adopted at Arlington and elsewhere. See also ‘Nationalism, Identity, and The Logic of Seriality’, in Spectre of Comparisons (29–45). In an astute recent essay, Marc Redfield considers the resistance of the corpse to the abstraction of the dead favored by serial nationalism; this resistance, for Redfield, explains the thanatographic erasure of the bodies of the dead in nationalist discourse. See Redfield.

Representative Mournfulness 4

57

The political attachments of the dead Confederate soldiers buried at Gettysburg, for instance, linked them to a national future quite different from the one Lincoln wished to depict, in the Address, as the one to which all Americans were devoted. For a discussion of Confederate images of Lincoln in general, see Davis. 5 See especially David B. Chesebrough, No Sorrow Like Our Sorrow: Northern Protestant Ministers and the Assassination of Lincoln (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1994) and Thomas Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of President Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). 6 Richard Morris astutely notes that one of the key issues at play in the memorial discourse about Lincoln is an ambivalence about the role of emotion; however, in his analytic division of the eulogistic discourse into three separate ‘cultures’, Religionists, Romanticists and Heroists, Morris neglects to consider the ambivalence about emotion that permeated even the most Romanticized and/or sentimentalized approaches to grief in the nineteenth century. See Morris. 7 It is this aspect of the national mourning for Lincoln that differs most significantly from the memorialization of other important national figures; for while Americans were encouraged, in response to the death of Washington and others, to display grief as a flag of national belonging, that grief was never so closely identified with the feelings of its object as it was in the case of Lincoln. 8 On the conventional obligation to limit indulgence in grief, see Halttunen. 9 This tradition has continued through the twentieth century, visible, for example, in Bill Maudlin’s 1963 cartoon commemorating the Kennedy assassination by showing the Lincoln Memorial statue in Washington DC hiding its face mournfully in its hands. For a discussion of this cartoon, see Fischer. 10 Agamben’s essay critiques this strategy, noting that ‘it is what the ancient humoral theorists rightly identified in the will to transform into an object of amorous embrace what should have remained only an object of contemplation’ (Agamben 20). This critique, I want to suggest, can be extended to sentimental nationalism’s affective response to the rational question of injustice. 11 See also Reverend Joseph A. Prime, ‘Sermon Preached in the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church’, in A Tribute of Respect by the Citizens of Troy, pp. 151–7; Prime observes that Lincoln was superior even to George Washington in many respects, including ‘moral integrity’ (154) and argues that, while ‘the American people have reason to rejoice in the life and labors of a Washington, the colored people of our country have a much greater reason to rejoice that Abraham Lincoln was permitted to occupy the executive chair’ (156). 12 The national emotional unity demonstrated in black mourning for Lincoln furnished other African-American writers with arguments against racial segregation. In response to the threatened ban of black mourners from the funeral procession for Lincoln in New York City, J. Sella Martin wrote the New York Evening Post demanding for African Americans the ‘much-coveted though melancholy satisfaction of following the corpse of the best public benefactor the country had ever given them’. Insisting that Lincoln would have wanted African Americans to participate in the procession, Sella observed that, ‘In the lowest forms of civilized life, the most puerile wishes and most insignificant directions of the dead are carried out […] [S]hall the most highly civilized people do

58

Representations of Death/Dana Luciano what the most barbarous would scorn to be guilty of doing?’ (Martin 319). After a telegram from the War Department, city officials allowed black mourners to participate in the procession; the Evening Post, however, did not print Sella’s letter.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). ——, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998). Bancroft, George. ‘How Shall the Nation Show Its Sorrow?’ Building the Myth: Selected Speeches Memorializing Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Waldo W. Braden (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 62-71. Butler, C.M. Funeral Address on the Death of Abraham Lincoln, delivered in the Church of the Covenant, April 19, 1865. (Philadelphia: Henry B. Ashmead, 1865). Beecher, Henry Ward. Sermon in Our Martyr President, Abraham Lincoln: Voices from the Pulpit of New York and Brooklyn (New York: Tibbals and Whiting, 1865), 33–48. Chesebrough, David B. No Sorrow Like Our Sorrow: Northern Protestant Ministers and the Assassination of Lincoln (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1994). Cuyler, T. L., Sermon in Our Martyr President, Abraham Lincoln: Voices from the Pulpit of New York and Brooklyn (New York: Tibbals and Whiting, 1865), 158–72. Davis, Michael. The Image of Lincoln in the South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1971). deMan, Paul. ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. ‘A Plain Man of the People’. Building the Myth: Selected Speeches Memorializing Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Waldo W. Braden (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 28-34 ——, Representative Men. Ed. Pamela Schirmeister (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1995). Everett, Charles Carroll. A Sermon in Commemoration of the Death of Abraham Lincoln, Late President of the United States, Bangor ME, 1865 (Bangor: Benjamin Burr, 1865).

Representative Mournfulness

59

Fischer, Roger A. ‘The “Monumental” Lincoln as an American Cartoon Convention’, Inks: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies. 2:1 (February 1995), 12– 25. Halttunen, Karen. ‘Mourning the Dead: A Study in Sentimental Ritual’. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Hardinge, Emma. The Great Funeral Oration on Abraham Lincoln, Delivered Sunday, April 16, 1865 at Cooper Institute (New York: American News Company, 1865). Haven, Gilbert. The Uniter and Liberator of America: A Memorial Discourse on the Character and Career of Abraham Lincoln (Boston: James P. Magee, 1865). Holland, J.G. ‘Eulogy’. The Nation Weeping for its Dead: Observances at Springfield, Massachusetts, on President Lincoln’s Funeral Day, Wednesday, April 19, 1865, including Dr. Holland’s Eulogy. From the Springfield Republican’s Report (Springfield, Mass: Samuel Bowles and Company; L.J. Powers, 1865), 15-30. Lincoln, Abraham. ‘Address at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863’. Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, volume II, 1859–1865 (New York: Library of America, 1989), 536. ——, ‘Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865’, in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, volume II, 686–7. Martin, J. Sella. ‘Letter to the Editor of the New York Evening Post, 24 April 1865’. Ed. C. Peter Ripley The Black Abolitionist Papers, volume V: The United States, 1859–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 317–20. McClintock, John. Sermon in Our Martyr President, Abraham Lincoln: Voices from the Pulpit of New York and Brooklyn (New York: Tibbals and Whiting, 1865), 129–44. Morris, Richard. Sinners, Lovers and Heroes: An Essay on Memorializing in Three American Cultures (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1997). Prime, Joseph A. ‘Sermon Preached in the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church’. A Tribute of Respect by the Citizens of Troy to the Memory of Abraham Lincoln (Troy, New York: Young and Benson, 1865), 151–7. Redfield, Marc. ‘Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning’, Diacritics 29:4 (Winter 1999), 58–83. Robinson, Charles S. Sermon in Our Martyr President, Abraham Lincoln: Voices from the Pulpit of New York and Brooklyn (New York: Tibbals and Whiting, 1865), 85–109. Schwartz, Barry. Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

60

Representations of Death/Dana Luciano

Thomas, Jacob. ‘Sermon Preached in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church’. A Tribute of Respect by the Citizens of Troy to the Memory of Abraham Lincoln (Troy, New York: Young and Benson, 1865), 43–7. Turner, Thomas Reed. Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of President Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Whitman, Walt. Memoranda During the War and Death of President Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972). Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

Chapter 4

‘Stock in dead folk’ The Value of Black Mortality in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn1 Stephen Shapiro

Who profits from the representation of death in modern liberal societies? Are there ways in which morbid images not only fail to dignify the departed or speed the onset of social justice, but continue to benefit already empowered interests, many of whom were responsible for the acts of mortality in the first instance? Russ Castronovo argues that the proliferation of deathly visions and their constant pairing with slogans of freedom in nineteenth-century America functions as a means of containing democratic enfranchizement and not as a collectivizing device of shared experience.2 Instead of death’s penumbra acting as a public sphere of social equality through disembodiment, and displays of sentimentalized trauma providing an emotional space for overcoming the exclusions of (racial, gendered, classed) social death, the production of mournful affect in bourgeois societies exacerbates the separation of activity into public/private spheres, a division that operates as a mode of maintaining social inequalities. The logic for this argument rests on the young Marx’s claim, in ‘On the Jewish Question’, that a discourse of emotive humanism paradoxically resists the extension of political emancipation beyond the (white, male, Christian, heterosexual) middle classes and that an intrinsic contradiction lies within the notion that Enlightenment humanism produces both political enfranchizement and human liberation (212–41). Marx argues that the division between public sphere citizenship and the privatized realms of civil bourgeois society locates private concerns as the foundation of the authentic self. When the process of enfranchizement takes as its ideal the form of universalizing citizenship, with its performance of instrumental reason and the juridical bracketing of particularist desires and personalizing drives, the ensuing political subject seems like an inorganic, spectral fiction. What is a citizen, if not an inanimate ghost, a soulless bundle of will-of-the-wisp abstractions called rights? Because neutral citizenship seems inauthentic, the private, emotive self conversely appears nowhere more freely than when it retreats from the perceived artifice of democratic politics and its regulation of equality. If the persona of the citizen is felt as a crabbed negativity, then the desire for citizenship rights by the

62

Representations of Death/Stephen Shapiro

socially disenfranchized only reinforces the sense by those already with that entitlement that the former deserve to be ostracized. Since only perverse subjects would mistake the empty, heartless zone of citizenship identity for the organic warmth of white, straight, Christian brotherhood, agents’ struggle for civic protections displays the damage that legitimized their initial and continuing exclusion. Castronovo extends Marx’s argument as he notes that with the bourgeois separation between public and private spheres, the representation of intense emotions, like intimations of death and spectral morbidity, actually functions as a means of obstructing redistributive social justice since it participates in evacuating the worth of citizenship. If Marx and Castronovo are right to implicate the felt naturalness of the modern psyche and its emotional retinue as being a tactical response to and blockage of democratic impulses, then both past and present enactments of public mourning may have less to do with transcending social divisions than with further territorializing the space for a critical evaluation of power asymmetries in favor of inserting difference through public displays of feeling. The goal of this essay is to suggest the ways in which deathly images organized by themes of racialized slavery’s actual and social death function in nineteenth-century American writing as a device to claim the authority of production for the middle classes by appropriating the codes of black narrative experience as a means of dampening industrial conflict and resistance. The greater implication is that no modern act of heartfelt commemoration will sufficiently remove the nightmares of history unless it contains an inquiry into how class hierarchies produced these horrors in the first instance. To juggle the vectors of death, race, and class, I want to consider Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by way of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, as representative of nineteenth-century American discourse, but with two provisos to Castronovo’s claims. First, while representations of death often seem scripted as retrospective accounts, their projection always intervenes within and remains organized around their contemporary context. While it has become something of a truism in criticism of late nineteenth-century American writing to locate morbid images as always an aftershock of the Civil War’s new technologies of slaughter, and means of recording that slaughter with mass communication technologies, like photography, I want to challenge the War’s assumed primacy as a collective primal scene for postbellum writing by claiming that its representations of antebellum society and morbid allusions to events of the 1860s mainly emerge as a working response to the writing’s contemporary instabilities. The language of trauma and mourning are nearly always much less of a nachträglichkeit, a delayed response to the past, than a recodification, or imaginary, of the past to respond to ongoing conditions. The political orientation of writers’ responses is variable, but they must be seen as a mode of indirect communication to the challenges of their current location. For postbellum America, a major source of tension came from the question of how Northern capitalism could incorporate large swathes of weakly or peripheralized capitalist labour geographies both within the North American continent (the

‘Stock in dead folk’

63

‘disappearing’ Western frontier of aboriginal populations, the Reconstruction South) and beyond (imperial incursions against a fragmenting Spanish empire, the deruralization and oceanic transhumance of Chinese and Southern European labour by immigration). The North’s victory over the South and emancipation of the slaves was clearly the template for thinking about the effects of rapidly reorganizing populations into the conditions of industrial society, and the medium of race operated as a chief code for thinking about how the passage to late modernity depends on discovering and incorporating new sources of exploited labour. The prevalence of this rhetorical manoeuvre is hardly surprising since more than a century of abolitionist arguments had already worked in a subterranean fashion to contemplate such a transformation. Whatever its relative positions about emancipation, nearly all of the abolitionists’ debate had as its actual object not the ethics of emancipation, but rather the question of what ought to be done with coerced black Americans afterward. Abolitionist thought, consequently, ought to be recognized as one of the antebellum’s modes for thinking generally about periodicity, the recognition that modern temporality has different phases, and, specifically, capitalist periodicity, the notion that an influx of free labour would inaugurate a new phase of capitalist development. Because the United States was only in its initial phases of labouring-class immigration before the Civil War, the race/slave question operates as a privileged mode for its contemporaries to conceptualize the expansion of class relations beyond the conditions of the early Republic and Jacksonian-era configurations. Similarly, post-Civil War representations of racially encoded death function as a means of responding to the exigencies of the rapid transformation and incorporation of territorialized populations, of which Southern slaves are just one, albeit a significant, category. An example of this narrative technique appears with Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad (1893–1894).3 Returning to the cast of Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s tale narrates, in Huck’s first-person voice, how Huck, Tom Sawyer, and the ex-slave Jim, end up alone on a machine-driven balloon that takes them to northern Africa, a result which causes Jim ‘no end of interest, because that’s where his originals come from’ (286). Flying over the Sahara, they watch a gang of nomads attack a caravan. When a robber steals a child (as portable merchandise), Jim recaptures the ‘cub’ and reunites the child with its mother (290). They next come upon a mass of mummified corpses in the sand and later learn the cause of death when they watch a second caravan of ‘black figures’ buried alive by a sandstorm (319). Because the three had observed the caravan for a day and had given the figures personal names, Huck says that they were especially sorry and mournful for the silent dead, since: the more you join in with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you […] We had knowed these in their lives, and was fond of them, too, and now to have death snatch them right before our faces whilst we was looking, and leave us so lonesome and friendless in the middle of that big Desert, it did hurt so, and […] we couldn’t keep from talking about them, and they was all the time

64

Representations of Death/Stephen Shapiro coming up in our memory, and looking just the way they looked when we was all alive and happy together. (321–2)

After Jim works hard on the balloon and thanks the boys for giving him a rest break, Huck reaffirms that Jim ‘was only nigger outside; inside he was as white as you be’ (327). The proof for this certification comes as the trio drift over the Pyramids and the Nile, where Jim regains his enthusiasm, since this is the geography of the Biblical tales of exodus from slavery. As they fly over the Sphinx, the boys ‘landed Jim on top of the head, with an American flag to protect him’ (330), where he has to be rescued from an attack by the natives below. Leaving Jim in the balloon, the boys then explore Cairo, take relics for American museums and hire a guide to take them to Mecca and Medina. When the three reach the Red Sea, Jim gets even more excited at seeing where the Israelites crossed into freedom. The adventure abruptly ends when Tom sends Jim and Huck back to America to retrieve Tom’s replacement cob pipe. Jim is caught by Aunt Polly, and she forces him to bring Tom back to Missouri. Two aspects of Twain’s tale are pertinent here. Any pan-Africanist desire by Jim to be reconnected to the historical narrative and geography of ethnic origins and (Jewish) slave liberation, which provides narrative resources for black Americans to imagine a course of liberation, is simultaneously elicited and blocked by Twain’s negations (Africa is a ‘wasteland’; it lacks civility and needs foreign intervention to learn how to achieve the ideals of Western governance). Jim is encouraged to rehearse the memory of slave exodus, but only to recapture him within an ‘American’ identity. Secondly, Twain invokes morbid allusions to the Civil War’s killing fields and a traumatized, sentimental response to human mortality, but only to route these energies into a consideration of American imperialism and control over foreign labour and natural resources for speculative purposes (an embedded section involves a plot to take Saharan sand and sell it to Americans as a mattress-substitute, a scheme that is dropped because of anti-free market import tariffs). Twain’s caution about US imperialism is that it risks allowing domestic nonwhites the opportunity of aligning themselves with foreign nonwhites. The double play of Tom’s speculation in schemes of romantic adventure and economic gain leads to my second provision, which is that Castronovo’s argument needs further elaboration. My second proviso to Castronovo’s thesis involves its selective use of Marx. Because ‘On the Jewish Question’ was written early in Marx’s career, before his introduction to matters of political economy, the argument about the public/private antimony illustrates a dynamic within bourgeois civil society, but it is a largely descriptive one and thus not substantially different from other contemporaneous accounts, such as Tocqueville’s claims about the rise of individualism as the retreat from the tyranny of the majority. Marx’s real contribution to a theory of social stratification lies with his insight into the twofold nature of the commodity in order to specify capitalism as a system that produces commodities in order to profit from their exchange-value, rather than to satisfy

‘Stock in dead folk’

65

use-value needs. This is to say that while the essay on the pitfalls of seeking political emancipation reveals the contradictory nature of bourgeois society, it does not help much to explain the relation of cultural distinction to the actual practices of constantly expanding capitalist accumulation. If matters of morbid privacy can explain cultural status and its reconsolidation in modern forms through the essentialized vectors of racial and sexualized identity, they do not self-evidently clarify the relationship between techniques of textual production and the procedures of cultural capital. While the latter term has become prevalent in literary and cultural studies, primarily through Bourdieu’s influence, most usages of cultural capital misuse the term to characterize it for what is more properly cultural status, if we understand status as a mode of consumption and capital/class as a mode of production for increasing and reinvestable benefit. The significance of the distinction between status and class matters for how we actually evaluate the position of writers like Chesnutt and Twain. Chesnutt’s interest for modern readers lies primarily as a limit case at the end of a long cultural passage. Writing on the cusp between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chesnutt stands as one of the last significant writers who deploy generic sentimental narrative devices before the onset of modernism’s rejection of these techniques. Between Chesnutt and the Harlem Renaissance writers, no matter how we define that category, a historical gap exists that cannot be covered up by claiming the two as belonging to a homogeneous black American ‘tradition’. Chesnutt himself had deeply aversive reactions to the next generation of nonwhite writers on race, but his condemnations of their immorality might more satisfyingly be taken as his recognition that these writers exist in a cognitive and social milieu (an ‘episteme’) that no longer configures itself according to the representational syntax that Chesnutt relies upon to structure his novels.4 The mournful quality of Chesnutt’s writing emerges not only as an intentional argument about the state of post-Reconstruction race relations, but increasingly as a self-conscious awareness of the dead-end of his mode of argument. The grounds for Chesnutt’s blocked transmission can be seen with Mark Twain’s own investigation into deathly representations, race and bourgeois privilege. Seeing himself mainly in a lineage formed by Frederick Douglass’s emphasis on literacy and education as the prerequisites to black settlement within postemancipation America and W.E.B. Du Bois’s hope that an highly educated black elite could use culture as a means of overcoming the public/private splits that structure racial divisions, Chesnutt consistently investigates the private realms of unregulated association as sites that withstand the winds of political liberation. In an 1882 speech on ‘The Future of the Negro’, Chesnutt admits that, ‘social equality is something that cannot be forced. The law can give us our political and civil rights and protect us in the exercise of them. But no man can compel us to associate with those we do not like’ (29). The key to actual liberty for Chesnutt is not only public, juridical equality, but also the gains of dignity through shared private associations. American blacks will achieve this position by a course of mental and corporeal self-cultivation. Chesnutt’s early speeches like ‘Etiquette

66

Representations of Death/Stephen Shapiro

(Good Manners)’ have ‘self-possession’ and ‘self-control’ as their keywords and could practically be used by Norbert Elias as evidence of a history of internalizing bodily control.5 The advantage of a scholastic and corporeal training for blacks in displaying fine manners, as Chesnutt in the 1880s sees it, is that (Southern) whites will lose their nearly physical reaction to black freedom. By the turn of the century, Chesnutt begins to doubt the Du Boisean formulation of education and politeness as a winning strategy. Chesnutt telegraphs his revised position in The Marrow of Tradition (1901) as the novel’s title has both a dystopian and utopian aspect. On the one hand, Chesnutt indicates his sense that a history of racism is so deeply embedded within America’s extrajuridical private sphere that prejudice has become nearly structural. On the other hand, if black Americans can discover a mechanism that breaks through the bony armour of intolerance, then a matter more pliable and vigorous can rejuvenate the United States. The novel is structured around two Southern half-sisters, one nominated by a legitimate white lineage, the other made socially unrecognizable, as she is descended from a slave woman. The black female descendent marries Dr William Miller, himself a black slave’s grandson. Miller’s father had saved enough money to have his son educated in the North and Europe and then to purchase a mansion for a hospital and nurse training school for the son to administer for the region’s black community. Dr Miller stands as the Du Boisean ideal. Highly educated and respected by his Northern white colleagues, Miller returns to the South because ‘his people had needed him, and he had wished to help them, and had sought by means of this institution to contribute to their uplifting’ (51). Miller’s intelligence and civic weal is recognized by his Southern white neighbours, but this cannot overcome their private barriers, such as when the town newspaper’s editor, the husband of his white half-sister-in-law, prohibits Miller from entering his home to assist in a critical operation on the editor’s baby son, which is carried out by a Northern surgeon. As the narrative unfolds, a series of private grudges, involving race, class, and regional bigotry, generates a race riot that burns Miller’s hospital to the ground and is responsible for his own infant dying from a stray bullet. Amidst the tumult, the white editor’s infant requires immediate medical care, and the man finally seeks out the black doctor’s aid. Miller only agrees to help his enemy after his wife has gained recognition by her white sister of their shared parentage, a recognition that ‘had come, not with frank kindliness and sisterly love, but in a storm of blood and tears; not freely given, from an open heart, but extorted from a reluctant conscience by the agony of a mother’s fears’ (328). Chesnutt’s point is that racial recognition will only occur when whites experience so massive a trauma that, bereft of any possible other resources, they will finally seek out and embrace black Americans, who are seen as having greater resilience and psychic resources than middle-class whites as a result of their long experience with enduring injustice. As a black character in Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars notes: ‘W’ite folks has deir troubles jes’ ez well ez black folks, an’ sometimes feels ‘em mo’, cause dey ain’t ez use’ ter ‘em’ (38). Chesnutt here

‘Stock in dead folk’

67

teases out an incompletely stated argument within Du Bois’s call for a distinctive American culture as the sublation of European classical artefacts and black American blues performances. While Du Bois offers black musical soul as his group’s contribution to the cultural marketplace, he has not fully explained what might be the psychodynamic desires that would create the impulse on the part of whites to incorporate the songs of sorrow that are slavery’s record and psychic referent within the canon of social taste. Chesnutt’s novel provides an answer, but as Mark Twain had already implicitly suggested in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, death’s value does not become automatically channeled in the ways that Chesnutt imagines, not least because of Chesnutt’s own allegiance to the protocols of American business. Few novels of the nineteenth century are so consistently preoccupied with death as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Not only are the words ‘death’ and ‘dead’ among the most frequently used, the dead make appearances, either fantasmically or in their full rotting glory, in nearly every chapter. From Pap’s ‘tramp-tramptramp; that’s the dead’ and the numerous floating corpses alongside the Mississippi’s river banks to Peter Wilks’s body, which not even the weight of gold bullion can submerge, there’s no holding back the dead. Even empty Nature remains thoroughly occupied by the dead. When he first sees the Phelps’s farm, Huck senses it as ‘still and Sunday-like […] lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone’ except that the breeze feels like the talk of ghost ‘spirits that’s been dead ever so many years – and you always think they’re talking about you’ (197). Their talk is persuasive because ‘it make a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all’. Previously lying awake at night, Huck desires that he ‘was dead’, as an owl screeches about ‘somebody that was dead’ and a dog cries about ‘somebody that was going to die’ (65). If Huck feels like the empire of the departed is constantly crowding in on him, this claustrophobia makes sense, as for most of the narrative Huck is dead, since everyone in the village assumes that he has been murdered by Pap. Following the generic conventions of the hero’s journey into the Underworld, Huck’s journey downstream is metaphorically a descent into Hades, and Huck’s presence often sets a train of morbid events in motion. As bodies insistently float up or face down, they usually do so in the wake of Huck’s arrival. Death’s dull familiarity for Huck emerges as the novel locates itself at the crux of two intertexts. The first is the Tom-iad, the events of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its many prequels and sequels, which provides the dramatic context and personae to the novel. The second comes in the fourth paragraph when the Widow Douglas tells Huck about ‘Moses and the Bulrushers’. When he discovers that the story occurred in the past, Huck claims that he has lost interest in its message because he ‘don’t take no stock in dead people’, especially those who are not ‘kin’ (21). The comment is triply ironic for readers. First, the tale of the foundling Moses is a present concern precisely because Huck Finn is about a boy who is adopted into a world of privilege that his natural born parents lack, spends much of the novel literally wading about the shore’s weeds and thickets, and who

68

Representations of Death/Stephen Shapiro

makes a decision to reject the belief codes of the dominant society that raises him. Secondly, muddy Moses’ tale about group emancipation lies at the heart of Jim’s concerns for escaping slavery. Lastly, Huck is preoccupied by ‘dead people’. They form the chief actors of his imaginary landscape. Twain’s purpose here, however, is to show that Huck’s society does take ‘stock’ in the dead in the sense that it continually produces their representations as circulating images and iconic equivalences that culturally service a (postbellum) political economy of class compliance. Specifically, the fusion of images of the dead and that of Moses and the Bulrushers reveals how the representation of slavery’s woes becomes transvalued for the benefit of middle-class interests. As often noted, Twain structures Huck Finn through a series of descriptive binaries that are anchored by gender divisions. The feminized lifeworld is associated with the ‘civilization’ of rationality, literacy, organized religion, domestic claustration, and, above all, a ‘soft’ bodily regulation tied to moral reform. Masculinity is conversely associated with oral tale-telling (‘stretchers’), open-air movement, and physical violence. The gendered distinction applies even to slavery, where female-associated domestic slavery is often portrayed as maternal, uncoerced and inclusive. When the Wilks’s slave families are broken up, the white daughters become emotionally distraught and are only comforted by Huck’s assurance that they can regain, without having to emancipate, their slaves. When a recaptured Jim is chained at the Phelps’s farm, Twain has him testify that, ‘Uncle Silas came in every day or two to pray with him, and Aunt Sally came in to see if he was comfortable and had plenty to eat’ (223). Because the unpalatable trade in slave bodies is always carried out by men, Huckleberry Finn oddly affirms a matriarchal mode of control akin to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s vision of domesticity. Yet despite his parting words about lighting out for the territory, Huck is remarkably compliant with maternal regulation. While he ‘liked the old ways best’, the ones associated with his father, he admits that, ‘I was getting so I liked the new ones, too, a little bit’ (16). Assimilating the rules, ‘the longer I went to school the easier it got to be’. When Huck initially runs away from this (wo)mannered regime, ‘Tom Sawyer, he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back’ (3). Tom’s unexpected advocacy for civilized life as the prerequisite for romantic projects reveals that boyish adventure does not undermine civilized life, but supplements its will to install Huck within codes of behavioural refinement. Huck recognizes the congruity when he says that Tom Sawyer’s tales about ‘A-rabs and the elephants’ were just one of Sawyer’s ‘lies’ and ‘it had all the marks of a Sunday school’ (15). The convergence between the widow’s and Tom’s tales also appears when Sawyer’s boy-gang of cut-throats decides not to compete with that school since ‘all the boys said it would be wicked to [meet] on Sunday’ (10). The subterranean alliance between boyish adventure and feminized moral reform operates as a compensatory resolution to the narrative’s unease about the violence perpetrated by older males – a violence which is mainly configured as

‘Stock in dead folk’

69

child abuse, and as a no longer efficacious mode of socialization. Despite its status as a children’s book, Huckleberry Finn testifies to the routine violence laid upon Huck’s back. Huck is frequently shaken and roughly held. The main source of violence is his father Pap, who often lays drunk hands on the boy; Huck says, ‘Pap got too handy with his hick’ry and I couldn’t stand it. I was all over welts’ (24). It is Pap’s increasing crescendo of nearly-murderous force that leads to Huck staging his own slaughter as if killing himself would be a sort of revenge against cruel authority, just as the Adventures of Tom Sawyer begins with and then enacts Tom’s fantasy of watching the responses to his own funeral. Huck’s fear of the brutal, abusive father continually resurfaces as Pap’s unrationalized spots of violence become fantastically manifested for Huck as spectral and floating corpses, one of which is, literally, Pap. Despite Huck’s escape from the reach of his father’s hands, Huck cannot entirely remove his reiterated spasms of anxiety about parental abuse as Pap’s drunkenness and rage reappears in avatars of old regime patriarchal authority like Colonel Grangerford, Colonel Sherburn, and the Duke and Dauphin. In ways prescient of how abused children internalize responsibility for violence as their fault, Huck cannot entirely shake off feelings of guilt as he is frequently attracted to abusive, older men as if compulsively rehearsing these encounters as a psychic means of working through and up to a revolutionary act wherein the father would himself be cruelly humiliated or destroyed. Huck’s problem is not simply a personal one since it speaks to a larger question for postbellum American society: is force-fitting non-elite youth into American society the best option? The controversy around the Concord Public Library’s banning of Huckleberry Finn as too welcoming of the underclass neatly indicates an older New England elite’s phobic concern about industrial America’s growth of a metropolitan (foreign) poor unmoored from deferential codes of conduct to their social superiors.6 Throughout the nineteenth century, however, an increasing strand of bourgeois reformers argued against a repressive control by stern patriarchs in favour of a softer means of avuncular social tutelage, a claim often conveyed in paedophilic reportage. From Horatio Alger’s ‘Ragged Dick’, who becomes increasingly less threatening as he is transformed into Richard Hunter through the gentle force of thoughtful older men, to Jacob Riis’s photographs of urban ‘street Arabs’, sleeping as if they ought to be cuddled by the male camera’s gaze, the problem of a potentially restive proletariat and lumpen proletariat was posed as the replacement of public violence with a nurturing care that will not crush boyish insouciance lest its energies be lost for the needs of bourgeois entrepreneurialism. Twain participates in this project as he triangulates feminized reform and boyish adventure with a set of avuncular father surrogates who represent the professional apparatuses of civil society and its career aspirations: Judge Thatcher, who selflessly handles Huck’s investments, and the doctors who mediate between male regional violence and female nurturing. Twain, however, realizes that the transition from precapitalist patriarchy to bourgeois modes of masculinity is too great a transformation for the new holy family of feminized domesticity, male professionalism, and adolescent brio to accomplish. His work, which uses images

70

Representations of Death/Stephen Shapiro

of intergenerational violence to enunciate worries about class conflict, insists on the need to appropriate black experiential codes of suffering and suffrage through a logic of narrative exchanges to ballast a postbellum nation-state increasingly oriented to imperialist territorialization. Marx’s insight into the nature of capitalist society relates to how it inverts the trade of one commodity for another through the mediation of money (commoditymoney-commodity) to become a systemic logic where exchange-values become circulated to generate profit (money-commodity-money) that obscures the source of the commodity’s production. Twain’s novel similarly depends on a circulation that introduces comic scenes, the tragic source of which is then briefly shown before being recoded again as comic. For instance, the matter of family violence and mortality initially appears as humorous when Tom Sawyer’s gang requires a family member’s murder as surety. Huck then offers Miss Watson. The tragic reality of the humorous aside appears afterward as Huck, who has left Tom’s group, sees the marks of a gang’s violence with the sight of a body in a house, this time the one floating down the river with Pap’s ‘gashly’ corpse inside. The body of a necrotic family member is then comedically inverted by Huck’s trick on the rivermen with the lies about his ‘pap, and mam, and sis’ on the sinking steamship and again with the tale about his father having smallpox (84). The joke of intimate violence becomes inverted into tragedy again with the ensuing Grangerford narrative of family feuds, where Pap’s sickly paleness reappears with the Colonel’s painfully white linen clothes and Huck finds himself doubled with the Colonel’s son, Buck. The episode ends with Buck being gunned down, as Pap had tried to do with Huck, and a scopic Huck admitting that seeing his double’s murder generates continual nightmares (160). The violence of this ‘Bourbon’ feud then becomes comic as it is followed by the Duke and Dauphin’s arrival, and then is made serious again with Pap’s alcoholic rage being split into Colonel Sherburn’s assassination of the drunken Boggs. The assassination is then made comic again as Bogg’s tirades morph into the ‘drunk’ man in the circus evading the ring-master’s control before delivering a set of crowd-pleasing acrobatics. These constant inversions, however, do not simply continue in an endless series of reversals, but produce a specific cultural advantage as its procedures then allow for the same operation to be applied to the vector of race. In Twain’s regional legends, nonwhites function like money that can easily be converted into other objects. A black Jim might effortlessly be turned into a blue-skinned ‘sick Arab’ or a French convict; ‘Injun Joe’ might easily be a mute and half-blind Spaniard. This racial ambivalence is at once fixed and incoherent. It is fixed because the social connotation of all nonwhite figures inevitably grounds itself on the master referent of black slavery, due to Jim’s centrality. It is incoherent because the convertibility of the slave’s body into other racial mediums allows the black body to become the fantastical medium wherein (white) class tensions and traumas are resolved for bourgeois gain. The circulation of identities elicits sympathy with blacks, in order to harness this emotion for the greater middle-class project of rising off the backs of labouring-class compliance. The fusion of boyish adventure, a hinterground

‘Stock in dead folk’

71

older male oversight, and feminized reform, with the catalyst of black tribulations produces the figure who remains the real focus of Twain’s Missouri mythology: Tom Sawyer, the boy who Twain’s 1891 notes indicate will rise to be a world explorer, while Huck ends his days, like his father, as a displaced madman.7 The difference between the status of a globetrotter and a homeless man is simply the presence or absence of capital. With Judge Thatcher no longer alive to oversee him, Huck has lost his fortune because he, unlike Tom, does not understand how money can be invested to accrue and manifest social prestige. The utility of converting race into class appears as Huckleberry Finn constantly appropriates the genre of antebellum slave narratives and its Mosaic conventions for its chief symbolic syntax. The trope of the white overseer/master’s whipping of his own black lovers and children is evoked by Huck’s tale of paternal cruelty and murderous caprice. The slave narrative elements of urgent escape alongside the riverbank’s weeds and of being hunted down by armed men on horseback, is replicated with Huck’s staging of his ‘murder’, and with Huck watching the young Grangerfords hiding behind the wood-pile shortly before running out to midstream, in a scene more suggestive of the hunt for a runaway slave than a white family feud. The recoding of slave tales is nowhere more salient than with the text’s inclusion of a scene of writing a slave narrative, which is the one that Tom dictates to Jim, in a reversal of white literacy/black orality, and the novel’s final evasion sequence, which quickly becomes a tale about Tom’s, not Jim’s, wounded flight from captivity. The effect of appropriating black slave narratives for white boys’ adventure, and adventure for Sunday school reform, is twofold. Amidst Reconstruction-era claims for black enfranchisement and redistributive justice that attempt to address or ameliorate the legacies of slavery and its recursions in a host of Jim Crow legislation, the transcoding of black slave narratives works to delegitimize their moral authority by presenting them as young boys’ braggadocio. Huck’s surface carelessness about beatings – ‘I didn’t mind the lickings, because they didn’t amount to nothing’ (239) – the forced separation from biological parents, and pleasure in an escape experience suggests that if slavery’s sadness can be easily borne and shrugged off by whites, then why should blacks complain about the past or cite its events to justify citizenship inclusion in the present? Moreover, Tom gains pleasure from the evasion (he keeps the bullet as a souvenir) and profits from it because he understands how bourgeois economies can utilize narrative and other cultural performances as speculative investments where fictions and the ‘fictitious’ capital of credit and investment become mutually enabling. Tom produces cultural capital as he exchanges the reenactment of another group’s captivity codes for the white community’s solicitude for his damaged body, in ways that allow for his renewed control of Huck (and Jim’s) activity. While critics have cheered Huck’s conclusion of ‘lighting out for the Territory’ as his individual rebellion, the idea for this evasion, which is to say its entire cognitive realm of possibilities, comes from Tom who suggests that Huck, Jim, and himself ‘slide out of here, one of these nights, and get an outfit, and go for

72

Representations of Death/Stephen Shapiro

howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory, for a couple of weeks or two’ (261). Because this idea repeats the earlier scenario of Tom Sawyer’s ‘gang’ (if not the Duke and Dauphin’s) all over again, it suggests that Huck’s conclusion is far less anarchic than critics have understood it to be and actually resembles ‘one of Tom Sawyer’s lies [with] all the marks of a Sunday School’ (15). When the three do go out West, in an unpublished fragment, they do so according to the codes of Tom’s romanticized vision.8 Tom manages this control over Huck and Jim because the class difference between Tom and Huck descends from different cognitive approaches to monetary economies. Huck’s lifeworld depends on a ‘magic’ economy mentality, where money exists mainly as hoards to be found, like Injun Joe’s or Wilks’s pot of gold, or received as ‘gifts’, like the food he receives from Mrs Loftus or the forty dollars the river-men give him for his ‘small-pox’ family. Huck repeatedly has only a vague sense of how his invested money generates interest, or of the nature of the contracts that Judge Thatcher negotiates for him. Similarly, Jim’s lifeworld depends on an economy that has trouble recognizing and protecting itself from fiscal fraud. While Huck’s and Jim’s economic imagination involves getting or giving money, Tom realizes that it can be used as capital to be exchanged for prestige gained from the result of others’ bodily labour. While most of the characters attempt to hoard money, Tom actively distributes it to silence other’s experience and gain their consent for his own narrative authority. When little Tommy Barnes cries and complains that he no longer wants to be part of Tom’s robber gang and will tell its secrets, ‘Tom give him five cents to keep quiet’ (10). When the slave at the Phelps’ is about to declare that Jim knows Tom and Huck, ‘Tom give him a dime’ to be quiet (213). Tom’s culminating exchange comes when he gives forty dollars to Jim ‘for being prisoner for us so patient’ and performing slavery (260). It is Tom’s price-setting that more often than not becomes the final determination of value. Throughout the narrative, Jim has various valuations placed upon him. The slave-dealer offers eight hundred dollars to Miss Watson (41); Mrs Loftus says that there is a three hundred dollar reward for Jim’s recapture (53); the Duke and Dauphin advertise this reward as two hundred dollars (122); the two then claim to have sold Jim for forty dollars (191); and the doctor who treats Tom says that ‘a nigger like that’ is worth a thousand dollars (255). While Jim believes that he owns eight hundred dollars as capital in his own body, he actually only receives Tom’s forty dollars for Tom’s right to command and then narrate Jim’s experience in ways that will accrue prestige for Tom. Tom’s investment of money for the intellectual property rights to tell Jim’s tale speaks directly to a cultural capital of traumatic and morbid experience that operates in the postbellum period and beyond. Tom’s purchase of Jim’s experience mediates two separate death milieus – that of slavery (Jim), and that of class struggle expressed as parental abuse (Huck). While one strand of ‘whiteness’ criticism argues that labouring class European immigrants were pacified by their inclusion within the privileges of whiteness by differentiating themselves from black Americans, Eric Lott has added that the

‘Stock in dead folk’

73

cultural representations and performances of coerced black culture remained attractive to labouring class whites as a field through which they could indirectly enunciate dissatisfaction with normative bourgeois experience while refusing solidarity with black Americans.9 This attraction to black culture alongside a resistance to blacks’ social inclusion suggests why significations of morbid experience might be embraced even while actual civil rights incorporation is refused. We can extend Lott’s argument that to understand the ‘love and theft’ of black forms as a mode of bourgeois investment in these representations by the middle class is to create a form of class hegemony that increasingly binds the restive white ‘trash’ and ‘slum’ population to their superiors, as labouring class access (Huck) to black experience (Jim) must be acquired through the terms of exchange dictated by the bourgeoisie (Tom/Judge Thatcher/the widow Watson). A great deal of critical heat has been generated by either the celebration or denunciation of Twain’s attitude towards race, as represented by his depiction of Jim. The analytically more interesting position is not Twain’s personal position or our adjudication of it, but what Huckleberry Finn reveals about the coinage of race relations in cultural discourse. In this sense, Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s claim that the original voice for Huck was that of a young black boy does not exculpate Twain from implication in racial hierarchies in the ways that Fishkin imagines.10 If we follow the argument that black experience becomes represented as a middle-class means of constructing labouring class subordination through cultural capitalist modes of exchange, then the black ‘origin’ of Huck’s voice and the authenticity of various other dialects functions less as an inclusive or consensual-driven act, than as a now recognizable production of cultural ventriloquism of fatal events for the ideological purpose of reconsolidating class hierarchy in times of historical transformation that might potentially disrupt the ability of American capitalism to ensure its ongoing trajectory. Twain’s recognition of the value of black mortality as a representational device cuts to the heart of why Chesnutt tacitly acknowledged the dead-end of sentimentalized representations of trauma within an era of expanding American imperialism. The gesture of refusing claims for affect’s restorative qualities needs taking seriously, especially in a time when the morbid production of American domestic trauma seems largely constructed to serve little other purpose than to position a ‘mother and widow’s tears’ as the ethical justification for a new round of restructuring capitalist geography through the mechanism of neocolonial boys’ adventures.

74

Representations of Death/Stephen Shapiro

Notes 1 2

For David Lionel Smith, who tried to teach me a thing or two. See Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 3 Mark Twain, ‘Tom Sawyer Abroad’. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective. Ed. John C. Gerber, Paul Baender, and Terry Firkins. The Works of Mark Twain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 251–341. 4 Charles W. Chesnutt, ‘The Negro in Present Day Fiction’. Essays and Speeches. Ed. McElrath Jr., Joseph R., Robert C. Leitz and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 516–29 and ‘Post-Bellum–Pre-Harlem’, 543–549. 5 Charles W Chesnutt, ‘Etiquette (Good Manners)’. Ibid., 1–12. 6 Justin Kaplan, ‘Born to Trouble: One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn’. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), 348–59. 7 Walter Blair, ‘Introduction’. Hannibal, Huck and Tom. Ed. Walter Blair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 15. 8 Mark Twain, ‘Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians’. Ibid., 81–140. 9 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 10 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Works Cited Castronovo, Russ. Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Chesnutt, Charles. ‘Etiquette (Good Manners)’. Essays and Speeches. Ed. McElrath Jr. et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1–12. ——, ‘The Future of the Negro’. Essays and Speeches. Ed. McElrath Jr. et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 29. ——, The House Behind the Cedars (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969). ——, The Marrow of Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). ——, ‘The Negro in Present Day Fiction’. Essays and Speeches. Ed. McElrath Jr. et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 543–9. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Kaplan, Justin. ‘Born to Trouble: One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn’. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), 348–59.

‘Stock in dead folk’

75

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Marx, Karl. ‘On the Jewish Question’. Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1975), 212–41. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Twain, Mark. ‘Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians’. Hannibal, Huck and Tom. Ed. Walter Blair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 5

‘I cannot bear to be hurted any more’ Suicide as Dialectical Ideological Sign in Nineteenth-Century American Realism Kevin Grauke

It is not surprising that suicide – once a crime, since it was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign alone, whether the one here below or the Lord above, had the right to exercise – became, in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality1 [T]he representation of death may be peculiarly apt to figure the gaps in a culture’s articulate meanings. Since death is most often powerful – supremely so – the representation of death may covertly, or incidentally, assign power in ways that cannot be directly realized within a particular culture at a given moment in history. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen, Death and Representation2

Surprisingly, very little has been written on the topic of suicide in American literature, particularly literature of the nineteenth century, and relatively little has even been written about suicide in literature in general.3 Arguably the best-known work on the subject is the poet A. Alvarez’s The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (1971), but even this work, as Alvarez himself notes, primarily concerns ‘suicide and literature, not suicide in literature’ (166). In other words, when literature and suicide are discussed in terms of each other, the discussion usually centres upon the seemingly disproportionate number of writers and poets who have committed the act. Certainly, the suicides of fictional characters have often been discussed by critics, but these critical discussions are usually limited to the novels in which a suicide appears. For instance, Madame Bovary’s suicide is frequently discussed in terms of the rest of Gustave Flaubert’s novel, but rarely is it addressed in terms of any more expansive contexts, such as the manner in which it might be read in relation to the suicides that depopulate other French novels of the period. A few book-length studies of how suicide as a figure functions thematically in the oeuvres of such authors as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy and Henry James do

78

Representations of Death/Kevin Grauke

exist, as do broad studies of the role of suicide in Greek tragedy, Elizabethan tragedy, Jacobean drama, the Flavian epics, nineteenth-century Spanish literature, Italian literature, Yiddish literature, Rabbinic literature, Japanese literature and modernist narrative.4 Only four works, however, have been written that examine the representation of suicide across any sort of range of American literature. Of these four (three of which are dissertations), three read suicide primarily in terms of the gender of the authors discussed (most of whom were writing in the twentieth century), while the fourth concerns itself with the manner in which the suicides represented in a number of nineteenth-century texts can be read in light of recent suicidological theories.5 Lorna Ruth Wiedmann, the author of this latter study, correctly notes that no critical works have dealt with suicide in the American nineteenth century as a whole (2). Indeed, the suicides in the American novels of the nineteenth century are deserving of a collective analysis for the reason that, as she points out, ‘it is in the nineteenth century [...] where novelistic suicide patterns first emerge’ (2). Wiedmann focuses primarily on the ways in which these patterns foreshadow those of the twentieth century. She seeks to provide ‘a formula for what a reader should also look for in other suicide novels’ (2), through her categorization of suicides in these nineteenth-century works. This categorization is based on five current themes in social-scientific research: ‘murder-followed-by suicide; the survivor of suicide; age and suicide; the suicide’s choice of method; and gender and suicide’ (16). While our attention absolutely should be drawn to the very large number of suicides in American novels of this period, I interpret its significance differently from Wiedmann. She reads the significance of fictional suicides in terms of how we can make psychological sense of them via the modern-day theories of suicidologists such as Edwin S. Shneidman, Norman L. Farberow and Robert E. Litman (10). Ron M. Brown’s The Art of Suicide addresses more productively the question of why suicide is so widespread in nineteenth-century fiction. For Brown, representations of suicide serve as ‘a site for ascribing meanings of inequality and difference [...]’ (10). Following his approach, I read the significance of the volume of suicides in nineteenth-century American novels in terms of what it has to tell us about the social, cultural and political dynamics of the United States during the 1860s and the postbellum period. For Wiedmann, the representation of suicide in nineteenth-century fiction is worthy of study because it is prophetic of our own culture’s preoccupation with suicide. I want to argue, however, that it deserves close examination because it tellingly distils as a complexly ambivalent symbol, a concern very particular to the nineteenth century, namely, the conflictive class anxieties spawned by the rise of industrial capitalism. Following the lead of V.N. Vološinov, I believe that we should read the representation of suicide in late nineteenth-century fiction as a dialectical ideological sign, one that serves as a window onto a number of complex issues that were manifested by the rapid transformations transpiring at all levels of American society during the years between the Civil War and World War I. Vološinov argues that the sign community, ‘which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for

‘I cannot bear to be hurted any more’

79

ideological communication’, incorporates a number of social classes; therefore, ‘various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of the class struggle’ (23). He then goes on to say that the ruling class: strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgments which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual […] In actual fact, each living ideological sign has two faces, like Janus. [...] This inner dialectic quality of the sign comes out fully in the open only in times of social crises or revolutionary changes. (23)

The latter half of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly a time of social crisis, and the figure of the suicide certainly functions in a Janus-faced, or dialectical, fashion in the fiction of this era. This is especially true of reform-minded fiction, as exemplified by Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861). For the most part, the character that commits suicide in this text is portrayed in a compassionate manner. In this work, a middle-class narrator tells, retrospectively, the story of Hugh Wolfe, a Welsh immigrant who works as a furnace tender at the town’s iron mill, and his cousin Deborah, who secretly loves him. One night, Wolfe encounters a group of bourgeois men visiting the mill for an inspection. He listens to them as they discuss their responsibility to workers such as himself. One of the visitors, Mitchell, is startled by a figure that he sees in the darkness. After learning that it is a statue that Wolfe has sculpted out of scrap iron, Mitchell is intrigued and attempts to discuss the meaning of the figure with him. His efforts are in vain, however, due to the insurmountable gap that exists between his world and Wolfe’s. Later, while Wolfe himself bewails this unbridgeable gulf of caste and class, Deborah reveals that she has stolen Mitchell’s wallet in order to allow Wolfe to escape from his own world and enter that of Mitchell. At first, Wolfe intends to return the money, but then he determines to follow the path that Deborah has convinced him that the money will pave before him. Briefly, he comes to a nascent consciousness of class, and of his own unfairly low position within this hierarchy. Soon, however, he is arrested and sentenced to nineteen years of hard labour. Faced with such a dismal future, he commits suicide in jail. Throughout, the narrator directly addresses the reader, calling attention to the wretched conditions endured by Wolfe and those around him, and to the necessity for sweeping social change. Ultimately, it is Wolfe’s suicide that is intended to impel readers to seek this change, via the power of sympathy. To resist being affected by the pathos of this self-inflicted death is to risk remaining like the bourgeois visitors to the mill: untransformed. Davis intends Wolfe’s suicide to be viewed as tragic – as something that is attributable not to any biological or spiritual failing, but rather to the failure of his social environment to nourish him as an individual. Emphasizing Wolfe’s suicide as a blameless, sympathy-inducing call to action, the narrator stresses the reasonableness of Wolfe’s preference for death. Davis’s intention, then, is that the working-class protagonist’s tragic death should

80

Representations of Death/Kevin Grauke

impel bourgeois readers to take action in order to ameliorate the conditions that have effected his downfall. Running counter to this reading, however, is an aspect of the sign of the suicide that performs a different sort of cultural work. In addition to evoking sympathy, the suicides that take place in works like Davis’s short novel simultaneously deny all that they would seem to grant, in that they frequently isolate and disempower the working class in a fashion that denies its actual increasing organization, mobilization, and agency at this time (as was most clearly illustrated by the Great New England Strike of 1860). Explicitly, Wolfe’s suicide is intended to be seen as the logical conclusion to a life led by a man too sensitive (he is a sculptor) for his surroundings. Therefore his death is lamentable, and the class of people whom Wolfe represents is deserving of aid, be it material or spiritual. Wolfe, then, stands out as being an exception to his class by virtue of his sensitivity. Paradoxically, however, Davis also intends him to be viewed as being representative of his class precisely because his plight demands the reader’s sympathy. Wolfe’s sensitivity allows him to recognize (though only barely) the structurally inequitable relationship that exists between capital and labour. It is the structural nature of this inequality that the text disavows. Therefore, Wolfe’s sensitivity, which facilitates his heightened awareness of his plight, must also be self-regulating. The very thing that permits him to comprehend his oppression and thereby elicit the reader’s sympathy is also what compels him to kill himself, within the logic of Davis’s narrative. In other words, his insight is incompatible with his social role. The text therefore condemns him to death because he has inappropriately transgressed the boundary between classes that, at this time, was becoming firmly entrenched by the mechanisms of industrial capitalism. In order for the mill owners for whom Wolfe works to succeed in making a profit, what is expected from Wolfe is the production of his labour, not the articulation of his sensitive nature. The statue, as a manifestation of this ‘artistic’ sensitivity, therefore, also mutely attests to the potential threat of the working class if it were to become sensitized to its own oppression. Prior to the nineteenth century, a character’s suicide would not have – could not have – served such an ambivalent rhetorical function as it does in the realist novels of the nineteenth century. As Howard Kushner illustrates in Self-Destruction in the Promised Land (the only significant book-length study to be written on the history of suicide in the United States), by the early decades of the nineteenth century, the perception of suicide in America had, for the most part, been transformed. Once considered a punishable criminal and sinful action, suicide had come to be viewed as the result of the medical illness of ‘melancholia’, and accordingly was rarely condemned as a crime (13–34). Therefore, as Kushner goes on to point out, by the 1840s, ‘much of the discussion of suicide in the United States had moved from the pulpit and the courtroom to medical journals’ (37). Although the etiology of suicide, by the nineteenth century, had come to be thought of more in terms of biology than in terms of morality, biological predisposition was not believed to be the sole causal factor. As the century

‘I cannot bear to be hurted any more’

81

progressed, the intertwined pressures exerted by the environment – particularly those of ‘civilization’, modernity, and the city – came to be seen as exacerbatory. As Charles Rosenberg explains, disease – the root of suicidal behaviour – as well as health, was believed to result ‘from a cumulative interaction between constitutional endowment and environmental circumstance’ (qtd. in Kushner 39). Statistics seemed to reinforce the belief that there existed a significant relationship between one’s environment and one’s chances of committing suicide, especially if that environment was an urban one. Kushner also notes, however, that ‘[g]iven the assumptions which had informed the collection of this data, it was almost inevitable that what constituted a suicide would be defined in ways that reinforced assertions about the disruptive consequences of urbanization and modernization’ (‘Suicide, Gender’ 461). Nevertheless, because ‘self-destructive behaviour became a prima facie example of the corrupting effects of urbanization, the incidence of suicide developed into a barometer for social health’ (461). These environmental circumstances gradually came to receive most of the culture’s attention when it came to the question of both the aetiology and the prevention of suicide, particularly in the popular press. For example, an editorial from the 9 August 1859 issue of the New York Times entitled, ‘The Alarming Increase of Suicides’, directly attributes the twenty-six suicides that the Times had reported over a recent two-week period to the conditions fostered by urban life. The environment of the city was believed to encourage the use of tobacco, alcohol and opium, which ‘are sowing for us a horrid harvest of suicides at an early day’. Beyond this, ‘the wicked devotion to business, scarcely intermitted for a day through the year’, along with ‘selfish employers who grudge their employees a week’s relaxation in the year from incessant toil’ were culpable for ‘many of the suicides that the daily press will hereafter chronicle’ (qtd. in Kushner, SelfDestruction 44). This belief about the effect of the urban environment on those who inhabited it would become more entrenched as the century progressed. As the thinking on the aetiology of suicide shifted from the individual to society, ‘from morals to problems’ (92) as Alvarez nicely puts it, society’s response to suicide became less severe and more compassionate.6 ‘In real life, as in fiction, the response most commonly expected to suicide was evidently pity’, writes Olive Anderson (215). Although Anderson is referring specifically to midVictorian London here, the same can be said of the United States during this period. Because individuals were believed to become suicidal due to reasons beyond their control, they came to be seen as victims rather than sinners or criminals. Thus, the act of suicide, in most instances, came to seem ‘understandable enough, and a deed which could be expected to be forgiven by a man’s Maker as well as by his fellows’ (250). The representation of suicides in the novels of the nineteenth century must be viewed with this transformed social conceptualization of suicide in mind. Although Alvarez overstates the degree to which suicide came to be an acceptable action, he is, for the most part, accurate when he states:

82

Representations of Death/Kevin Grauke Once suicide was accepted as a common fact of society – not as a noble Roman alternative, nor as the mortal sin it had been in the Middle Ages, nor as a simple cause to be pleaded or warned against – but simply as something people did, often and without much hesitation, like committing adultery, then it automatically became a common property of art. (235)

And as suicide became a ‘common property of art’, because its practitioners had come to be viewed with sympathy rather than with opprobrium, it came to be used in fiction as a means to garner the reader’s sympathy for a character. In a number of reform-minded realist works of the nineteenth century, the sign of the suicide specifically acknowledges the humanity of the working class to a middle and upper class readership, by presenting workers’ self-willed deaths as justifiable actions taken to escape the misery of their circumstances. These works intend to call their readers’ attention to the disparity between the classes in an effort to incite either philanthropy or social reform. From this perspective, the trope of suicide functions within the discourse of what Jane Tompkins calls ‘sentimental power’, in that it allows ‘the pure and powerless [to] die to save the powerful and corrupt, and thereby show themselves more powerful than those they save’ (127–8). Regardless of authorial intention, however, all of these works, to varying degrees, converse with the understood discourse of social reform, in that they explicitly portray the lower classes in an empathetic fashion, for the benefit of a bourgeois readership. When Hugh Wolfe slits his wrists in Life in the Iron Mills, or when Maggie Johnson apparently drowns herself in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, for example, the texts compel us to ignore distinctions made by social class and to sympathize with them as fellow human sufferers. We must remember, however, that such a conceptualization remains only one aspect of the dialectical sign of the suicide. For some critics, these works reflect what François Jost, echoing the sentiment of Michel Foucault’s epigraphic quotation above, says about many works that contain suicides: that they frequently ‘show man’s liberation from his feelings of entrapment and bondage. Freely chosen, death represents the supreme proof of man’s free will and superiority to blind destiny’ (237). Though some works may seem to some to acknowledge and celebrate the agency of the members of the working class to assert their will by means of taking their own lives, these reform-minded authors deny the working class the ability to represent – and act for – itself because they depict working-class people as being incompetent and self-destructive. As a result, what has frequently come to be seen as a metaphor for self-assertion is really an elision of the actual capacity of the working class; a repudiation that assuages the anxieties held by the target audience of middle and upper-class readers, regarding the menace – at once latent and genuine – of the working class. Although he does not specifically discuss suicide, Raymond Williams’ argument about the violence enacted by many of the working-class characters of the English industrial novels of the mid-nineteenth century can be applied to the issue of suicide. Williams writes that the portrayal of the working-class as violent

‘I cannot bear to be hurted any more’

83

in these novels ‘is a dramatization of the fear of violence which was widespread among the upper and middle classes at the time [...]. This fear that the working people might take matters into their own hands was widespread and characteristic’ (90). He reads John Barton’s murder of Harry Carson in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) as well as the involvement in riots of the title characters of Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850) and George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866) in light of this fear (90; 104). Williams interprets the murder committed by John Barton in Mary Barton as an ‘imaginative working-out’ of this fear of working-class violence (90), and similarly the suicide of John Boucher in another of Elizabeth Gaskell’s works, North and South (1855), can also be read as an imaginative retaliation that simultaneously appeases this fear and reconstitutes the perceived equilibrium disturbed by working-class transgression.7 Unlike other available means of death in works of fiction produced by and for the middle and upper classes, the suicide of a member of the working class who refuses to perform his proletarian role in an unquestioning fashion serves as a particularly potent means of reprisal for past and existing threats, as well as obviating the perceived threat of future working-class insubordination. In the actual world, however, the nexus of suicide, self-discipline and the proletariat is configured differently. In Self-Destruction in the Promised Land, Howard Kushner comments upon the transformation of the treatment of the insane and the suicidal that took place at this time. Relying upon Michel Foucault’s argument regarding the transformation of discipline and punishment (although, oddly, without mention or citation of Foucault), he writes: As urbanization and factories began to make their first serious inroads into American life in the 1840s, a growing national consensus emerged (outside the slave South) that emphasized self-discipline as an alternative to external authority. [...] What was desired in the emerging factory society [...] (as it had been desired several decades earlier in industrializing England), was that factory workers [...] identify with and internalize the moral standards of the emerging bourgeois culture. (37–8)

He points to this development as a primary influence upon the rise of the asylum as a provider of treatment, the idea being that [n]ot only could artisans, farm girls, and immigrants be molded into good factory workers, but also, [...] many madmen and madwomen [i.e., those who seem to possess a predilection for suicide] could be transformed into useful and productive citizens. Thus, a conviction emerged that the insane could be reformed and that the suicidal could be cured. (38)

Such a transformation of the attitude toward those who commit (or attempt or threaten to commit) suicide, from one that was concerned with punishment (because of the believed diabolical aetiology of suicide) to one concerned with prevention, makes sense in light of the expansion of industrial capitalism. Because of the inescapable interdependency of individuals within this system, suicide

84

Representations of Death/Kevin Grauke

becomes much less of a transgression against God (and, by extension, the Law) and much more of a transgression against the economy and, therefore, the wellbeing of all fellow members of society. Such interdependence had manifested itself as early as the Panic of 1857, as Robert H. Bremner notes: [a]lthough relatively short, the depression brought hardship to people in all layers of society because more Americans than ever before were dependent for livelihood on the production and distribution of consumer goods, professional and service occupations, factory jobs, and construction work. (10)

So, to kill oneself within an industrialist system is to remove oneself from the circulation of the market, thus affecting all consumers reliant upon the goods which one’s labour produces. This notion of the individual’s relationship to society of course runs counter to David Hume’s preindustrial argument that ‘a man who retires from life does no harm to society, he only ceases to do good and which, if it is an injury, is of the lowest kind’ (qtd. in Farberow 10). In order to maintain the system, logic dictates that the hands that power the system must be prevented from removing themselves and disrupting the order of the machinery. As Jean Baudrillard explains in Symbolic Exchange and Death: The prohibition of suicide coincides with the advent of the law of value. Whether religious, moral or economic, the same law states ‘no-one has the right to remove any capital or value.’ Yet each individual is a parcel of capital (just as every Christian is a soul to be saved), and therefore has no right to destroy himself. It is against this orthodoxy of value that the suicide revolts by destroying the parcel of capital he has at his disposal. This is unpardonable: we will go so far as to hang the suicide for having succeeded. It is therefore symptomatic that suicide increases in a society saturated by the law of value, as a challenge to its fundamental rule. (175–6)

The dialectical nature of the sign of the suicide in the reform-minded realist novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended entirely on the contemporary belief that suicides frequently were catalyzed, at least in part, by environmental factors. Since two of capitalism’s primary manifestations, industrialization and urbanization, were seen as major precipitating forces in the perceived rise in national suicide rates, it is not surprising that a number of authors from this period had their characters commit suicide. It is even less surprising when we consider that many of these writers were directly or indirectly concerned with another of capitalism’s manifestations, the reification of the social classes, and the discontent that such reification effected amongst those who benefited the least from it, namely the workers. The figure of the working-class character who commits suicide functions in a number of texts during this period as a flash point, of sorts, becoming a volatile site where the frequently disparate cultural beliefs and hopes which the nation’s bourgeoisie invested in the working classes reveal themselves simultaneously.

‘I cannot bear to be hurted any more’

85

At one point in his discussion of the social aetiology of suicide, Emile Durkheim, the French moral statistician whose study of suicide was the foundation upon which modern sociological investigations were built, makes this observation: Though it is true that collective sadness has, normally, a role to play in the life of societies, it is not ordinarily general or intense enough to reach the higher centers of the social body. It remains a submerged current [...]. Only when such sentiments acquire unusual strength do they sufficiently absorb public attention to be seen as a whole, coordinated and systematized, and then become the bases of complete theories of life. [...]. The formation of such great systems is therefore an indication that the current of pessimism has reached a degree of abnormal intensity which is due to some disturbance of the social organism. We well know how these systems have recently multiplied. To form a true idea of their number and importance it is not enough to consider the philosophies avowedly of this nature [...]. We must also consider all the others which derive from the same spirit under different names. The anarchist, the aesthete, the mystic, the socialist revolutionary, even if they do not despair of the future, have in common with the pessimist a single sentiment of hatred and disgust for the existing order, a single craving to destroy or to escape from reality. Collective melancholy would not have penetrated so far, if it had not undergone a morbid development; and so the development of suicide resulting from it is of the same nature. (369–70)

In regard to this, Irina Paperno argues that, for Durkheim, the ‘ideational and the individual appear to have no real existence; the only reality is the collective body’ (40). The characters that commit suicide in a number of realist novels from the nineteenth century must be thought of in a similar fashion; per the logic of each novel, a character is necessitated to take – or to attempt to take – his/her own life in order to serve the ‘collective body’ of their community that serves, in turn, as the representative of the national body. In the case of Hugh Wolfe in Life in the Iron Mills, this is due precisely to what Durkheim claims are the possible results of ‘collective melancholy’; a ‘craving to destroy or to escape from reality’. To the nineteenth-century mind, suicide shared the same aetiology as anarchy and revolution.8 Therefore, authors who concerned themselves with the lives of those who benefited the least from – and who often held a ‘sentiment of hatred and disgust’ for – the ‘existing order’ really allowed only their downtrodden workingclass characters two choices: rise up or drop out. In works such as John Hay’s The Bread-Winners (1884), Joaquin Miller’s The Destruction of Gotham (1886) and Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1891), they rise up. The message that these works send to middle and upper class readers is thus a cautionary one: here is the future unless you take care to prevent it. In works such as Life in the Iron Mills and Gaskell’s North and South, they drop out. The implied message of these works is therefore palliative rather than cautionary: sigh a sigh of relief, reader, because these people are too enervated, too disorganized to be a threat, they are killing themselves instead. The environmental theory of the aetiology of suicide would continue to have its proponents throughout the twentieth century (primarily amongst sociologists,

86

Representations of Death/Kevin Grauke

rather than psychiatrists), but its primacy was waning already by the end of the nineteenth century, though ‘support for Durkheimian [environmental/sociological] views [continued to appear] in the popular press and in fictionalized portrayals of suicide’, as Howard I. Kushner notes (Self-Destruction 59). Kushner goes on to point out that, ironically, American social reformers and novelists concluded that the tensions in the social structure were the root causes of suicide at the very moment when American psychiatrists were moving toward a consensus that suicide could be understood only as a symptom of individual rather than social dysfunction (61). As a result of this shift, ‘Freud’s psychoanalytic explanation of the cause of suicide was [...] easily integrated into American psychiatry because Freud’s writings seemed to reinforce views already accepted by mainstream American psychiatrists’ (61). Soon thereafter, the environmental theory of the aetiology of suicide would wane in the public consciousness, as well. Suicide would soon come to be thought of in terms of the ‘death instinct’ and the ‘splitting of the ego’, as Freud would elucidate in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), rather than in terms of the effects exacted upon the individual by dense population, dirt, poverty and vice.9 The ‘medicalization of suicide’ returned the aetiology of suicide to the individual, and thus the ambivalent sign of the suicide faded, and became less effective as a way for realist texts to attempt to address the intractable social problems of their day (Colt 199). In the end, the suicides of characters – no matter the genre or period of the work in which they are found – are never neutral actions that function only at the level of plot; our readings of them must always be complicated by an understanding of their inherent ideological implications, as the epigraphic quotation from Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen above suggests. To ignore these implications as they manifest themselves in the realist American novels of the nineteenth century is to ignore the degree to which such works were in influential conversation – sometimes explicitly, and always implicitly – with the chaotic social, cultural, and political transformations that were wrought upon the nation by industrialization and urbanization.

Notes 1 2 3

4

Vol. 1, trans. By Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978) 138–9. Introduction, Death and Representation, eds Goodwin and Bronfen, Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 4, 17. Brief portions of this essay first appeared in my article, ‘Suicide, Social Reform, and the Elision of Working-Class Resistance in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills’, Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 27 (2002), 137–75. See A.O. Kellogg, Shakespeare’s Delineations of Insanity, Imbecility, and Suicide (New York: AMS Press, 1971); Juliette Marie Cunico, ‘Audience Attitudes Toward Suicide in Shakespeare’s Tragedies’, diss., University of New Mexico, 1991; James Holly Hanford, Suicide in the Plays of Shakespeare (New York: MLA, 1912); M.D. Faber, Suicide in Shakespeare, diss., University of California-Los Angeles, 1964, (Ann Arbor:

‘I cannot bear to be hurted any more’

5

6

7

8

9

87

UMI, 1980); Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); N.N. Shneidman, Dostoevsky and Suicide (New York: Mosaic, 1984); Frank R. Giordano, Jr., ‘I’d Have My Life Unbe’: Thomas Hardy’s Self-destructive Characters (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1984); Mary J. Joseph, Suicide in Henry James’s Fiction (New York: Peter Lang, 1994). For more general studies, see Elise P. Garrison, Groaning Tears: Ethical and Dramatic Aspects of Suicide in Greek Tragedy (New York: Brill, 1995); Cora E. Hicks, Suicide in English Tragedy, 1587–1622, diss. University of Texas (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1968); Rowland Wymer, Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); Donald T. McGuire, Acts of Silence: Civil War, Tyranny, and Suicide in the Flavian Epics (New York: Olms-Weidmann, 1997); David A. Goldin, ‘Suicide: From Romanticism Through Naturalism’, diss., Tulane University, 1980 (Spanish literature); Daniel Rolfs, The Last Cross: a History of the Suicide Theme in Italian Literature (Ravenna, Italy: Longo, 1981); Janet Hadda, Passionate Women, Passive Men: Suicide in Yiddish Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); Rabbi Sidney Goldstein, Suicide in Rabbinic Literature (Hoboken, New Jersey: Ktav Publishing House, 1989); Robert George Sewell, The Theme of Suicide: A Study of Human Values in Japanese and Western Literature, diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1976 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1977); Jared Louis Stark, Beyond Words: Suicide and Modern Narrative, diss., Yale University (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1998). See Kathleen O. Ryan, The Intentional Turn: Suicide in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Women, diss., University of Massachusetts (Ann Arbor: UMI, 2000); Stacy Dianne Southerland, ‘Suicidal Acts in Dramas by Contemporary Latin American Women: Acquiescence or Empowerment?’ diss., Indiana University, 1994; Deborah S. Gentry, The Art of Dying: Suicide in the Works of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Sylvia Plath (New York: Peter Lang, 1998); Lorna Ruth Wiedmann, ‘Suicide in American Fiction, 1798–1909’, diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995. See Charles E. Rosenberg, ‘The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America’. The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of Medicine. Ed. Morris J. Vogel and Charles E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979) 5–6. In North and South, John Boucher, a striking mill worker, leads a rioting mob against an imported group of Irish labourers hired in the strikers’ stead. When Mr Thornton, the factory owner, attempts to pacify their anger, a member of the mob hurls a stone which strikes the novel’s heroine, a crime that Boucher is later falsely accused of committing. When he later seeks a position at the factory at a rate lower than that agreed upon by the union, he is denied. No longer able to face his wife and eight children without work or money, Boucher drowns himself in a shallow brook. Although Durkheim’s work Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897) has come to be perceived as seminal in its theory of the social etiology of suicide, it should be understood that it was not a revolutionary work as much as it was an empirical validation of certain existing contemporary assumptions. See Robert E. Litman, ‘Sigmund Freud on Suicide’. Essays in Self-Destruction. Ed. Edwin S. Schneidman (New York: Jason Aronson, 1967), 338.

88

Representations of Death/Kevin Grauke

Works Cited Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, 1971 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). Anderson, Olive. Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, Theory, Culture, & Society Ser. (London: Sage, 1993). Bremner, Robert H. The Public Good: Philanthropy and Welfare in the Civil War Era (New York: Knopf, 1980). Brown, Ron M. The Art of Suicide (London: Reaktion Books, 2001). Colt, George Howe. The Enigma of Suicide (New York: Summit Books, 1991). Durkheim, Emile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (New York: The Free Press, 1951). Farberow, Norman L. ‘Cultural History of Suicide’. Suicide in Different Cultures. Ed. Norman L. Farberow (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1975), 1–15. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), vol. 1. Goodwin, Sarah Webster, and Elisabeth Bronfen. ‘Introduction’. Death and Representation. Ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen. Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Jost, François. Introduction to Comparative Literature (Indianapolis: PegasusBobbs-Merrill, 1974). Kushner, Howard I. Self-Destruction in the Promised Land: A Psychocultural Biology of American Suicide (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989). ——, ‘Suicide, Gender, and the Fear of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Medical and Social Thought’. Journal of Social History 26 (Spring 1993), 461–90. Litman, Robert E. ‘Sigmund Freud on Suicide’. Essays in Self-Destruction. Ed. Edwin S. Schneidman (New York: Jason Aronson, 1967), 324–44. Paperno, Irina. Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Vološinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973). Wiedmann, Lorna Ruth. ‘Suicide in American Fiction, 1798–1909’, diss. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).

Chapter 6

Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt Joanne van der Woude

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the death rate for African Americans soared, leading to the development of sociological theories concerning racial mortality. Observing the disproportionately high mortality figures for urban blacks in comparison to those of white Americans, including immigrant groups, scientists concluded that African Americans exhibited a natural propensity for, and a particular affinity with, death. Meanwhile, in the South, violence against black bodies escalated. Ida B. Wells noted in 1902 that the list of lynchings ‘is larger than for four years past, [and] the barbarism of this lawlessness is on the increase’.1 Race riots, like the one in Wilmington, North Carolina, left hundreds of African Americans dead. Cities proudly displayed the spoils of recent lynchings: in Atlanta, for example, W.E.B. Du Bois saw the charred knuckles of Sam Hose still lying in a butcher’s shop weeks after his execution.2 Thus, while academics sought to articulate a cultural correlative between African Americans and death, Southern whites made sure there was a physical correspondence. Du Bois, who was familiar with what white sociologists such as Philip Bruce and Frederick L. Hoffman had to say on the topic of race and death, was concerned about the increasing violence. In his Autobiography, he observed that: Murder, killing, and maiming Negroes, raping Negro women – in the 80’s and in the southern South, this was not even news; it got no publicity, it caused no arrest; and punishment for such transgression was so unusual that the fact was telegraphed North. (122)

When Du Bois compiled previously published articles for The Souls of Black Folk, he added four new, elegiac chapters in order to ‘sketch […] the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand [sic] Americans live and strive’ (5). Du Bois’s book is replete with metaphors of mourning and mortality, presenting death as one of the most significant constituents of African-American experience. In doing so, however, he reconfigures the negative symbolics of death, casting expressions of black sorrow as the ‘singular spiritual heritage’ and even ‘the greatest gift of the Negro people to America’ (155). Yet in some instances, Du Bois’s response to black mortality is far more conflicted. This is most strikingly exemplified in Souls

90

Representations of Death/Joanne van der Woude

by the story of the death of John, an educated young black man, at the hands of a lynch mob, and by Du Bois’s account of the death and burial of his own son. Although Du Bois interprets the devastating loss of his son as a representative experience that enables him to speak for the entire race, employing grief as both a privileged and privileging emotion, his son’s funeral also serves to expose the wide and unbridgeable division between the races. I argue that the scenes of lynching, death, and burial depicted in The Souls of Black Folk represent Du Bois’s emotional response to the appalling black mortality rates that he encountered as a social scientist. Constructing African-American cultural utterance around the two black male corpses that are figured in his text, Du Bois not only responds to the endemic violence of the post-Civil War South, but also seeks to offer a scenario of reconciliation and redemption, made possible by cross-racial sympathy. Conversely, Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), written in response to racist propaganda, tries to refute the association of African Americans with death.3 Set in the town of Wellington, North Carolina (clearly modelled on Wilmington), The Marrow of Tradition figures a race riot in which blacks are punished for a crime perpetrated within the white community. Chesnutt imagines the racial conflict as a familial one, focusing on the biracial Carteret family, whose white members do not recognize or acknowledge their black relatives. Although the white branch of the family is weak, imperilled, and moribund, it is the black family that suffers when their small son is killed by a stray bullet from the riot. In this way, paradoxically, Chesnutt associates both racial groups with mourning and mortality, but the association, in the end, remains unproductive. Ultimately, it is the African-American family that bears the full burden of loss and grief, a burden that, for the white spectator, remains no more than a hypothetical possibility. As I shall show, Chesnutt’s ambivalent attempts to subvert the connection between blacks and death founder because they contradict sentimental theories of mourning without proposing satisfactory alternatives. I take both The Souls of Black Folk and The Marrow of Tradition to be conscious literary responses to the extremely high African-American mortality rates, and to the injury inflicted on black male bodies in turn-of-the-century America. My argument consists of three parts: Part I discusses early twentiethcentury African-American mortality rates, racist theories concerning death that were formulated by white sociologists, and the black community’s responses to these theories. Part II studies the function of sympathy in Du Bois’s work and the correspondence between his use of emotion and eighteenth-century moral theory. Part III examines the descriptions of racial mortality in The Souls of Black Folk and The Marrow of Tradition, concluding with Du Bois’s and Chesnutt’s use of the rituals of surrogation.

Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality

91

Part I: The Myth of Black Mortality The exact mortality index for African Americans around 1900 is difficult to estimate. The Death Registration Act (DRA) from 1900 covered only 26 percent of the population, while the 1900 United States Census relied on the DRA registrars and enumerators for its information on deaths, and thus reprinted the same mortality statistics.4 Nonetheless, the DRA and Census remain informative with regard to racial differentials in death rates. Whereas mortality rates declined for whites and the total population in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, no such improvement can be seen for blacks. Census statistics that have been recalculated with modern epidemiological methods yield reliable estimates for the child mortality index in various racial, social and economic groups at the turn of the twentieth century. For whites (native and foreign born) the mortality index was 0.94. For blacks it was 1.46, which means that nationwide, African Americans had a 58 percent higher death rate than whites, and in some urban areas that figure reached 88 percent (Preston and Haines 92–4). Several reasons contributed to the elevated death rate for blacks, including a lack of adequate housing and sanitation, insufficient diet and little or no access to medical attention. Still, recent researchers conclude that ‘whatever approach is used, race stands out as a dominant influence on mortality at the time. Blacks had higher child mortality for reasons that are not primarily explicable in terms of other measured characteristics, such as their low levels of literacy and poor occupational standing’ (Preston and Haines xix). At the beginning of the twentieth century, white scientists seized on these statistics to develop theories of racial inferiority and an African-American ‘propensity’ for death. Casting black mortality rates as completely independent from socioeconomic circumstances, contemporary sociologists suggested an inherent and intimate racial relationship with death. Frederick Hoffman ascribed high African-American mortality to constitutional inferiority and immorality. Blacks had ‘smaller or tropical lungs’ (Race Traits 76) according to Hoffman, which rendered them more susceptible to tuberculosis. Also, parents’ ‘innate’ tendencies toward vice, immorality, and debauchery could not but impart an enfeebled constitution to their offspring (67). Mixing racist science with Victorian morals, these so-called empirical observations rapidly descended into racist propaganda. Blacks’ perceived natural affinity for death led some analysts to conclude that they were incapable of surviving in North America.5 Others bypassed the realm of statistics and ‘science’ altogether, simply assuming a cultural predilection for death on the part of African Americans. In The Plantation Negro as a Free Man, Philip Bruce writes, ‘the thought of death is not absent for a great length of time from their minds’. Presenting black culture as fundamentally pathological, he claims that blacks look at ‘a dying companion far more curious[ly] in the stages of dissolution than keenly aware of the great loss that is soon to befall them’ (96). In this account, blacks seem simultaneously obsessed with the appearance of death and oblivious of its

92

Representations of Death/Joanne van der Woude

consequences. Although African Americans are always expiring, they never seem to grieve. Take, for example, Frederick Hoffman’s claim: Whoever has witnessed the pauper funeral of a negro, the bare pine box and the common cart, the absence of all that makes less sorrowful the last rites over the dead, has seen a phase of negro life and manners more disheartening perhaps than anything else in the whole range of human misery. Perhaps only the dreary aspect of the negroes’ ‘potter’s field,’ […] unrelieved by a single mark of human kindness, without a flower and without a cross, only the pauper lot itself, may be more sad and gruesome than the display of almost inhuman apathy at the funeral.6

The poverty of the burial, evinced in ‘the bare pine box’ and ‘the common cart’, makes the scene more ‘sorrowful’ to Hoffman, because it contrasts with the aestheticization of funerals among bourgeois whites. Elaborately decorated coffins, headstones and memorabilia, all conspicuously lacking here, were believed by whites to have an anaesthetizing effect upon the bereaved, taking away the sting of death.7 The superlative sadness of the white observer jars with the ‘apathy’ of the black mourners, who appear to him to be dehumanized by their lack of affect. The purpose of Hoffman’s passage is twofold: while offering the narrator an opportunity to display his own emotional gentility, it also implies that the black community’s frequent, and reputably stoic, encounters with death make them unlike, and by extension unequal to, whites. The black academic community was also concerned with the rising mortality rates. Starting in 1896, Atlanta University organized annual conferences to inquire ‘into the causes of excessive mortality among Negroes’.8 Strikingly, the conclusions of African-American scientists largely concurred with contemporary racist theories: The excessive mortality of their people cannot be attributed in any large degree to unfavorable conditions of environment, but must be chiefly attributed to the ignorance of the masses of the people and their disregard of the laws of health and morality.9

Parroting the warnings of whites, black professors claimed that if immorality and sexual vice did not diminish among nonwhites, the Anglo-Saxons would exterminate the other races.10 The suggested solutions to the problem of black mortality focused on such measures as cleanliness (in particular the brushing of teeth), the prevention of contagious diseases, and friendly visitation.11 This emphasis on domestic, middle-class values pervades most papers at the conference. Although African-American scientists did not seek to reinforce the black ‘death-drive’ diagnosed by white researchers, they did little to combat the idea either. W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the few voices arguing against racist theories of death. He realized that the ‘dialogue of death’, as the mortality debate was called, demoralized and demonized blacks on the basis of fictional cultural characteristics. Du Bois first refuted the myths about blacks and death in 1896, when he was instructed to study the morbidity and mortality of the black population of

Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality

93

Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. Social problems in that area were thought to result from the peculiar susceptibility of African Americans to disease and death. Du Bois, however, challenged the notion that black mortality rates were elevated at all, and if they were, he claimed, this situation was wholly the result of context and circumstance.12 He showed nonblack immigrant groups to have comparable mortality rates to blacks in similar conditions: in the Chicago stockyards, for example, the levels of white mortality far surpassed those of blacks. Du Bois continued his efforts to counteract theories of African-American physical and moral inferiority by changing the emphasis of the Atlanta conference, which, under his leadership, focused on segregation instead of mortality, concluding in its third publication: First, the Negro death rate is on the decline; second, high mortality is the product of social conditions; third, there is a pressing need for more Negro doctors and health facilities; fourth, the health and endurance of the nation as a whole is dependent on the fate of Negro Americans; and finally, there must be greater ‘sympathy’ for Negro problems throughout America. (qtd. in Mizruchi, 418)

This was not the first time that interracial sympathy had been suggested as the solution to African-American problems. At the second Atlanta conference, a black undertaker’s statement, ‘You have no idea, how many people are dying from a lack of sympathy’, already identified the absence of sympathy on the part of the larger (white) community as the cause for elevated black mortality.13 The paper that features this quote advocates concrete acts of sympathy such as visitation, neighbourly care and community surveillance. Du Bois, on the other hand, who predicates the promise of Reconstruction on sympathy and fellow feeling, never actually transforms affect into practical measures. By the 1890s, sympathy had become a well-worn concept in race debates; so much so, in fact, that it needed to be invoked with caution, as the quotation marks in the conference proceedings above indicate. Scientists used the concept of reciprocal sympathy to assess the assimilation of different races, and sympathy was also believed to form the basis for a socially cohesive community. Given that sympathy plays such a prominent role in scenes figuring racial death in The Souls of Black Folk and The Marrow of Tradition, I will now turn to an exploration of how feeling operates in the context of such elevated rates of black mortality.

Part II: Structures of Sympathy Du Bois and Chesnutt both lament the lack of cross-racial understanding and sympathy that results from social segregation. Chesnutt writes: ‘There would have seemed, to a stranger, a lack of spontaneous friendliness between the people of these two races, as though each felt that it had no part or lot in the other’s life’.14 ‘There is almost no community’, complains Du Bois, ‘where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the thoughts

94

Representations of Death/Joanne van der Woude

and feelings of the other’ (116). Yet Chesnutt’s and Du Bois’s engagement with the issue is hardly unique. In 1900, Theodore Roosevelt wrote in Century Magazine, ‘Fellow-feeling, sympathy in the broadest sense, is the most important factor in producing a healthy political and social life’.15 Traditionally, sensibility, or the capacity to experience emotion, was confined to bourgeois men, for whom, in eighteenth-century literature, expressing the right feeling at the right time became a litmus test of class and character.16 In America, emotive capacity was configured racially as an exclusively white phenomenon,17 as is exemplified by Major Carteret’s assessment of Dr Miller in The Marrow of Tradition: ‘That this doctor was a man of some education he knew; and he had been told that he was a man of fine feeling, – for a negro’ (318, emphasis added). Miller’s race modifies and mitigates his status as a ‘man of fine feeling’, because blackness and sensibility are seen as being mutually exclusive. Du Bois, however, democratizes affect: ‘Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question […]. How does it feel to be a problem?’ (Souls 9, emphasis added), and ‘One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro’ (Souls 11, emphasis added). Du Bois consistently casts race as an emotion, and an experience, instead of a biological fact. He not only self-consciously styled himself as a man of feeling in his journal notations and correspondence, but also suggested incorporating emotion into sociological and ethnographical descriptions.18 On the transformative potential of affect, Du Bois wrote that ‘the future of the South depends on the ability of the representatives of […] opposing views to see and appreciate and sympathize with each other’s position’ (118), thereby locating sympathy in the sentiments of individuals before translating it to groups. In this sense, his interpretation of sympathy is analogous to that of Adam Smith. Smith defined sympathy as the apprehension, and experience, of another’s physical sensations. His most famous example of sympathy describes observing one’s brother upon the rack: By imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him […] his agonies, where they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us. (11–12)

Smith emphasizes the entirely voluntary imaginative leap that is necessary for sympathetic identification. The spectacle of suffering is not affecting in itself, rather it is the appropriation of it on the spectator’s part that leads to sympathy. This emphasis on the body and on sensory observation recurs in Du Bois’s description of sympathetic interaction as a process whereby it is necessary ‘to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood’ (117). Besides requiring the onlooker to possess a willing and able imagination, sympathy also demands an emptying of self in this scenario; a vacating of one’s individual subjectivity in favour of physical oneness and sameness with another, or conversely, an appropriation of the sufferer’s

Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality

95 19

identity without the complexity or urgency of actual agony. articulated the conditions upon which this process depends:

Hume more fully

[As] nature has preserv’d a great resemblance among all human creatures, this resemblance must very much contribute to make us enter into the sentiments of others […] Accordingly we find that where, beside the general resemblance of our natures, there is any peculiar similarity in our manners, of character, or country, or language, it facilitates the sympathy.20

Cultural difference here appears to obstruct the workings of spectatorial sympathy. Du Bois directly addresses this problem – which would obviously hamper interracial fellow feeling – by reformulating sympathy as the recognition of diverse identities. He writes: The nineteenth century was the first century of human sympathy, – the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires, and – sometimes – Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise. (Souls 136)

Initially, this sympathetic recognition crosses class boundaries, before, hesitantly, approaching those of race, ‘and – sometimes – Negroes’. The process of identification operates in reverse here. Instead of imagining ourselves in the other’s position, the other is made to resemble us through the discovery of some shared trait, ‘that transfigured spark of divinity’ which is, presumably, humanity itself. In Du Bois’s definition, sympathy is no longer situationally dependent on scenes of suffering and spectatorship, but can be enacted in any place and at any time. Yet proximity remains a key condition of sympathetic identification, which means that slavery, rather than segregation, is actually more likely to facilitate sympathy: ‘nothing has come to replace that finer sympathy and love between some masters and house servants’ (117). Sympathy, therefore, does not imply or bring about social equality. While Du Bois does not concretely state its larger societal effects, the conference proceedings which advocate sympathy as the solution to racial problems contain the threat that ‘the health and endurance of the nation as a whole is dependent on the fate of Negro Americans’. In these terms, sympathy functions as a hermetic system that affects everyone. Imagined as a country-wide closed circuit of different parties that are condemned to witness and recognize each other, sympathy would spontaneously spawn racial reconciliation and consequent measures to decrease black mortality.21 In nineteenth-century sentimental literature, sympathy often achieved the effect Du Bois envisioned. Abolitionist texts assumed that by inviting the white reader to visualize and incorporate the suffering of the slave, the resulting vicarious experience of pain on the reader’s part would generate political activism. In early American fiction, death and mourning became the standard sites for sentimental relations and the bonding of different social groups.22 The trope of mothers brought

96

Representations of Death/Joanne van der Woude

together in mourning was particularly popular. In this scenario, however, their sympathy was prompted by an identical situation of suffering, rather than a wider recognition of a shared humanity. Collective grief thus creates a temporary similarity between the bereaved, whereas Du Bois attempts to envision a more permanent realization of sameness between the races. At the funeral of his son, as described in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois experiences a distinct lack of sympathy from white bystanders. This lack contrasts with his expectations, which are based on a Smithian mode of sympathy, and shatters his faith in fellow feeling as the means for interracial reconciliation: Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird and song and sweet-smelling flowers. The trees whispered to the grass, but the children sat with hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal day, – the wraith of Life. We seemed to rumble down an unknown street behind a little white bunch of posies, with the shadow of a song in our ears. The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say much, – they only glanced and said, ‘Niggers!’ (133)

Du Bois’s observations are themselves muted, hushed and surreal in this scene, the day appearing as ‘the wraith of Life’, as if lifelike qualities have left the world with the expiration of his son. Song, which is an important expression of mourning for Du Bois, is mentioned twice, but the last time only as a ‘shadow’. Though ‘the busy city dinned about us’, he hears the epithet slung at the procession by a ‘palefaced’ passer-by as another insult to his already overwhelming grief. The slur casts Du Bois’s mourning as a racial trait, automatically associating death with African Americans. The child’s corpse, which might be presumed to facilitate sympathetic exchange, is subjected to an abusive expression of racist ideology. Yet while the responses of white onlookers contradict sentimental standards of mourning, Du Bois’s complaint in itself rehearses another hallmark of late nineteenth-century fiction: ‘“the tearless crowd,” [the] “thoughtless throng,” who gave to “the hearse, the coffin and the shroud, a passing glance,” and then carelessly hurried on’.23 By presenting Du Bois’s account in the context of contemporary descriptions of mourning, I do not mean to suggest that his remarks are standard or unoriginal. Rather, his high hopes for racial reconciliation, which seem to hark back to an earlier period, are undermined by his disappointment in the white onlookers, whose slurs are motivated by the very theories that he sought to disprove.24 In The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt also centres the opportunity for interracial recognition on a black corpse. The mulatto Janet Miller, whose son has been killed, confronts her white sister Olivia Carteret with the body of the child (325). The direct doubling of characters, the black and white ‘twins’ each with an infant son, creates a similitude between their situations. Olivia’s son is dangerously ill and only Janet’s surgeon husband can save him. It is only when Olivia is in dire need of assistance from Janet that she finally acknowledges her as kin and as fellow heir to the family fortune. Janet scornfully rejects this much belated recognition, realizing that it arises from pity for her son’s death, and from Olivia’s

Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality

97

fear for her own child. (328). In a gesture of moral superiority, Janet decides to let her husband help her nephew. While the book’s final scene appears to rehearse the sentimental stereotype of mothers mourning collectively, the work of bereavement is in fact relegated solely to the black community. The sympathy between Janet and Olivia, such as it is, works entirely to the advantage of the whites, who get to keep their wealth and their son. Chesnutt thus achieves a more troubling equilibrium than Du Bois, sketching racial similarity in ways of life, but not in moments of death and mourning. The representations of sympathy in the work of Du Bois and Chesnutt therefore differ significantly from earlier sentimental writing. Instead of operating as a social lubricant, as it does in abolitionist literature, sympathy in response to racial violence and mortality has become a weapon that can be inflicted or withheld by the white community at will. It seems not to indicate the decline of a category as Susan Mizruchi has claimed (331), but rather the emergence of a new racist instrument.

Part III: Reconfiguring Racial Death The Souls of Black Folk features Du Bois’s most extended treatment of AfricanAmerican mourning. He opens and closes the book with references to death, bracketing it between two markers of mortality. The Forethought reads: ‘Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century’ (5). The fact that things lie ‘buried’ evokes the image of digging for treasure, but also of uncovering a grave. In the After-Thought, Du Bois pleads: ‘Hear my cry, O God the Reader, vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves a vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful’ (164). This metaphor personifies the book and engages the reader in an economy of care. The text’s survival seems precarious, but it can be assured by sympathetic engagement, and even transformed into a ‘harvest wonderful’. Similarly, the address to ‘God the Reader’ empowers the reader as the agent of creative interpretation. Contrary to his sociological refutations, Du Bois strengthens the association of African Americans with death in Souls. In Southern Georgia, he notes the practical consequences of the elevated death rates, ‘Societies meet there – societies “to care for the sick and bury the dead”; and these societies grow and flourish’ (80). ‘Lo! We are diseased and dying, cried the black hosts; […] behold the suicide of a race!’ he writes (15). Although such exclamations appear to support theories of racial morbidity, Du Bois shifts seamlessly into an impassioned plea for black enfranchisement: ‘we cannot write, our voting is in vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve?’ (15) He argues that when blacks are excluded from society, they suffer a ‘civic death’, leading to demoralization and despair (43).25

98

Representations of Death/Joanne van der Woude

Du Bois thus expands the singularity of death into various categories of experience: sociological, political, and spiritual. He challenges superficial observations about the phenomenon of black mortality, ‘You might have noted only the physical dying, the shattered frame and hacking cough; but in that soul lay deeper death than that’ (140). In some of the most disturbing passages, he sketches a cultural correlative between African Americans and death: ‘Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it familiarly and fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps – who knows? – back to his ancient forests again’ (161). These sections are clearly escapist; death seems a natural flight from the circumstances of the postbellum South. Du Bois also remarks that on the death of his son, ‘there sat an awful gladness in my heart, […] – and my soul whispers ever to me, saying, “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, [sic] but free.” No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it dies a living death’ (133). Here, the predicament of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century is still rendered as bondage, with daily discrimination causing a ‘living death’, to which actual death appears preferable. Similarly, in ‘Of the Coming of John’, John tells his mother as he goes out to wait for the lynching-gang, ‘Mammy, I’m going away, – I’m going to be free’ (Souls 153). Yet the obvious parable between his plight and that of John the Baptist defers true deliverance until the coming of Christ.26 Read in this Scriptural strain, death provides a passage to safety for those who die, leaving the mourners without salvation. Although Du Bois does not voice any of the sacrificial tenets of Christianity, the promise of a peaceful afterlife haunts these sections, creating an uneasy mix of activism and submission. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois acknowledges a cultural link between African Americans and death. But in his view, this familiarity benefits the black community because it is the source of ‘the greatest gift of the Negro people’, namely, the spirituals (155). The ‘sorrow songs’, as he calls the spirituals, preface each chapter melodically, though not verbally, in a few bars of musical notation (6). Though the inclusion of spirituals in his book is an obvious gesture towards the importance of black folk culture, it is telling that he should include them in such a way as to render them inaccessible to the majority of his readers. His transcription is only legible to classically trained musicians, excluding those that know the spirituals through oral transmission.27 Nevertheless, Du Bois stresses the cultural significance of the sorrow songs, claiming that they are the most direct expression of black sensibility, ‘[S]prung from the African forests, where its counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted, changed, and intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the stress of law and whip, it became the one true expression of a people’s sorrow, despair and hope’ (120). By locating the source of the spirituals in Africa, Du Bois takes a stand in the politically charged debate about whether the spirituals were versions of Southern revivalist hymns.28 Escapism recurs in his notes on the spirituals, which ‘tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world’ (157). Calling one of the spirituals ‘the cradle song of death’, Du Bois converts the relationship of African Americans with mortality into an opportunity for cultural production (158). The connection of ‘cradle’ with ‘death’

Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality

99

emphasizes the simultaneity of fertility and mortality, which recalls the description of Souls as a stillborn infant with reproductive possibilities. Du Bois thus reconfigures the association of blacks with death by presenting African-American expressions of mourning as viable cultural capital.29 Charles Chesnutt’s descriptions of racial death are more ambiguous. He describes neo-Darwinist discussions of black mortality in the white community, ‘It was sad, they said, to witness this spectacle of a dying race, unable to withstand the competition of a superior type’ (115), with some characters actively advocating the extermination of the black population, ‘“they’re a scrub race, an affliction to the country, and the quicker we’re rid of’em all the better”’ (87). Chesnutt parodies white supremacist ideologues who conclude that ‘with inspiration from whatever supernatural source the discriminating reader may elect, that the darker race […] was an incubus, a corpse chained to the body politic’ (80). To expose the non sequiturs of racist science, this passage reverses Du Bois’s reasoning in which the denial of access to the state’s services perpetuates a ‘civic death’. On a symbolic level, the African-American community itself displays no special interest in mourning or mortality in The Marrow of Tradition. Instead, a distinctly deathly atmosphere pervades the white households of Wellington. Major Carteret’s house feels like a permanent funeral parlour, ‘The heavy scent of magnolias, overpowering even the strong smell of drugs in the sickroom, suggested death and funeral wreaths’ (1). The impoverished gentility of the Old South exudes defeat and death. Significantly, the Major’s marriage was childless for many years before the arrival of his son, Dodie, and the infant heir is in constant peril throughout the book. He chokes on a white marble rattle (as if suffocated by whiteness itself), he almost falls out of a window, and finally catches the croup. His mole is an ominous imperfection on his otherwise blanched skin, ‘like the germs of some deadly disease, awaiting its opportunity to strike at an unguarded spot’ (105). Old Mr Delamere, who cannot walk unless supported by black servants, symbolizes the fragility and impotence of Southern manhood. Learning of his grandson’s crime leads to the old man’s final demise. The narrator tells us that on hearing this news, ‘there was death in his eyes’ (220) and his words ‘fell upon the ear like clods dropping upon the coffin in an open grave’ (231). Contrasting the gradually expiring Carteret family with the happy Miller household, Chesnutt projects the stigma of mortality back upon the white community. Rather than incubi, the blacks appear as scavengers of the white corpses that are to come, ‘job-hunting negroes [sit like] a string of buzzards sitting on a rail, awaiting their opportunity to batten upon the helpless corpse of a moribund city’ (31). Chesnutt’s narrative intrusions reject the cultural connection between African Americans and death put forth by Du Bois and others. Yet, in his rendering of the race riot, Chesnutt is forced to conform to the realities of the post-Reconstruction South. He graphically describes the results of the unrest, imagining the whites’ response to the mute, mutilated black body, ‘they stretched his neck, or carried off the fragments of his mangled body as souvenirs, in much the same way that

100

Representations of Death/Joanne van der Woude

savages preserve the scalps or eat the hearts of their enemies’ (296). A central dilemma in the book is whether to resist segregation violently. It is this dilemma which fuels the argument between Miller and Josh: ‘These are bad times for bad negroes. You’ll get into a quarrel with a white man, and at the end of it there’ll be a lynching, or a funeral. You’d better be peaceable and endure a little injustice, rather than run the risk of a sudden and violent death.’ ‘I expec’s ter die a vi’lent death in a quarrel wid a w’ite man,’ replied Josh. (110)

Predictably, Josh dies, but he does so willingly, as he buries his knife into his enemy’s heart (309). Miller, meanwhile, sets off to help those who instigated the riot which has killed his only child. Having cast Josh as the aggressive, inarticulate foil to the educated Dr Miller, Chesnutt shrouds the resolution of their conflict in ambivalence. Josh’s death may be unredemptive, but ultimately, so is Miller’s mourning. The only thing that can be salvaged from the African-American family’s tragedy is Janet’s forgiveness, based on her woman’s heart and maternal understanding (329). Women occupy a privileged place in the mourning process in the writings of both Chesnutt and Du Bois. Carteret, for example, realizes ‘his own great sorrow became of secondary importance beside the grief which his wife must soon feel at the inevitable loss of her only child […] In such a crisis a mother’s heart usurps the place of intellect’ (322). Women seem to feel grief more acutely than men do, and to suffer more intensely from it. Describing his wife’s grief at the loss of their infant son, Du Bois writes, ‘in the chamber of death writhed the world’s most piteous thing – a childless mother’ (Souls 132).30 Figuratively, Du Bois also prioritizes female grief. Of the ‘two figures [that] stand to typify’ the New South, one is ‘a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries [who has seen] her dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after “cursed Niggers”’ (27). But the restorative value of such archetypes remains unclear. At its worst, the emphasis on female grief reduces both men and women to placeholders in a static drama of racial discrimination. In their reactions to and depictions of black mortality, Chesnutt and Du Bois both turn to rituals of surrogation. Surrogation refers to the attempts by survivors to fill the gap left by death or departure through artistic expression, creative performance, or material acts of remembrance. Spirituals or ‘sorrow songs’ are therefore clear surrogates (6). Du Bois’s formulation of the sorrow songs as ‘cradle songs of death’ captures perfectly the possibility of cultural regeneration and reproduction at the exact site of trauma and loss, which characterizes surrogation. Surrogation is such an apt word in this context because it denotes the intrinsic difficulty of representing grief. The titles of both texts reflect an attempt to reach an original essence: The Souls of Black Folk, The Marrow of Tradition. Such gestures already seem to show an awareness of the derivative and duplicative practice of mourning. Du Bois’s and Chesnutt’s equivocal engagements with

Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality

101

African-American mortality in turn-of-the century America further demonstrate the difficulty of recovering and reclaiming the experiences of racial violence and death.31 Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9.

10 11 12

13 14 15

Ida B. Wells, ‘To the Members of the Anti-Lynching Bureau in Chicago’ (Chicago, 1902); Richard Wormser, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2002). Accessed 9 May 2003. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903. Ed. Henry Louis Gates and Terry Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999), 5. Unless otherwise noted, all other citations of Du Bois in my essay refer to this edition of Souls. According to Sandra Gunning, Chesnutt ‘set himself up as a direct opponent to Thomas Dixon’, sending copies of The Marrow of Tradition to President Roosevelt and members of Congress upon publication of The Leopard’s Spots in 1902. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 53. See Samuel Preston and Michael Haines, Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), 3. See Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Scribner, 1920). Pauper Burials and the Interment of the Dead in Large Cities (Newark, New Jersey: Prudential Press, 1917), 246–7. Cited in Susan Mizruchi, The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), 284. All references are to the 1917 edition of Hoffman’s text. For a discussion of funeral traditions, see James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 183. Social and Physical Conditions of Negroes in Cities: Report of an Investigation under the Direction of Atlanta University (Atlanta, Georgia: Atlanta University Press, 1897), 3. Social and Physical Conditions, 3. Frederick Hoffman was even cited as an expert on the black physique, though some of his findings, particularly on the lungs, were contested. Ibid., 23, 27. Ibid., 28. The concern for dental hygiene predates Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901), which prominently figures the author’s preoccupation with clean teeth. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: Published for the University, 1899), 161, 163. My reading of The Philadelphia Negro is indebted to Susan Mizruchi’s analysis. Social and Physical Conditions, 44. The Marrow of Tradition, 1901. Ed. Eric Sunquist (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993), 142. All references to this edition. ‘Fellow-feeling as a Political Factor’, Century Illustrated Magazine, vol. LIX.3 (January 1900), 466. Roosevelt comments that ‘the two sections […] are both entirely ignorant of their community of feeling as regards the essentials of manhood and […] humanity’ (emphasis added).

102

Representations of Death/Joanne van der Woude

16 This is particularly apparent in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768). 17 See Peter Coviello, ‘Agonizing Affect: Affect and Nation in Early America’, Early American Literature 37.3 (2002), 439–468. 18 Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 27–8; The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois. Ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973–78), 1.66. For a passage advocating an ethnographical description of ‘the feeling of the land’ see Souls, 115. 19 Glenn Hendler notes the ‘depersonalizing’ effects of sympathy in Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 123. Franny Nudelman writes: ‘At its most successful, identification loses sight of its object, and […] the reader’s projections give rise to her experience of pain.’ ‘“The Blood of Millions”: John Brown’s Body, Public Violence, and Political Community’, American Literary History 13.4 (2001), 645. 20 Cited in Kristin Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002), 11. 21 David W. Blight identifies this strategy as central to Du Bois’s writings on race. ‘W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory’. Geneviève History and Memory in African-American Culture. Ed. Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 49. 22 See Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) and Nancy Armstrong, ‘Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 7.2 (1994), 1–27. 23 Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), 132. 24 Du Bois’s description of unsympathetic onlookers differs from the standard paradigm in that his exclusion from the community is clearly based on sociological suppositions about racial mortality. 25 The concept of ‘civic death’ – the denial of the rights of citizens of a purportedly democratic polity – is distinct from Orlando Patterson’s notion of ‘social death’ which is based on the genealogical exclusion of slaves. See Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982). 26 The gospel of Luke casts John as the harbinger of Christ in fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophesy. Luke 3.1–6. 27 The rendering of the spirituals is typical of Du Bois’s ‘representational hesitancy’ when it comes to folk or so-called low culture, according to Shamoon Zamir ‘“The Sorrow Songs”/“Song of Myself”: Du Bois, the Crisis of Leadership, and Prophetic Imagination’, The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994). Reprinted in Souls, 347. 28 See Newman I. White, ‘The White Man in the Woodpile: Some Influences on Negro Secular Folk-Songs’, American Speech 4 (1928–1929), 207–15. 29 A host of recent criticism has appeared on the subject of African-American death: Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Karla F.C. Holloway, Passed On: African

Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality

103

American Mourning Stories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Anissa Janine Wardi, Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2003). 30 The primary responsibility of mourning thereby falls upon women, a division of labour that is still intact today, as Deborah E. McDowell observes: ‘the black mother becomes the central figure in a tableau of death that ultimately marginalizes all other survivors.’ ‘Viewing the Remains: A Polemic on Death, Spectacle, and the [Black] Family’. The Familial Gaze. Ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1999) 157. 31 See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2, and René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 3.

Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. ‘Why Daughters Die: the Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 7.2 (1994), 1–272. Atlanta University. Social and Physical Conditions of Negroes in Cities: Report of An Investigation under the Direction of Atlanta University (Atlanta, Georgia: Atlanta University Press, 1897). Blight, David W. ‘W.E.B Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory’. History and Memory in African-American Culture. Ed. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Boudreau, Kristin. Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2002). Bruce, Philip. The Plantation Negro as a Free Man: Observations on his Character, Condition and Prospects in Virginia (New York: Putnam’s, 1889). Chesnutt, Charles. The Marrow of Tradition. Ed. Eric Sundquist (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993). Coviello, Peter. ‘Agonizing Affect: Affect and Nation in Early America’, Early American Literature 37.3 (2002), 439–68. Du Bois, W.E.B. Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887– 1961. Ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985). ——, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. Ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: International Publishers, 1968). ——, The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois. Ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973–78). ——, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Published for Philadelphia University (1899). ——, The Souls of Black Folk. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terry Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999).

104

Representations of Death/Joanne van der Woude

Farrell, James J. Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Gunning, Sandra. Race, Rape and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Haltunnen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982). Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Hoffman, Frederick. Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (New York: Macmillan, 1896). ——, Pauper Burials and the Interment of the Dead in Large Cities (Newark, New Jersey: Prudential Press, 1917). Holland, Sharon Patricia. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Holloway, Karla F.C. Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). McDowell, Deborah E. ‘Viewing the Remains: A Polemic on Death, Spectacle, and the [Black] Family’. The Familial Gaze. Ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1999). Mizruchi, Susan. The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998). Nudelman, Franny. ‘“The Blood of Millions”: John Brown’s Body, Public Violence, and Political Community’. American Literary History 13.4 (2001), 639–70. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982). Preston, Samuel, and Michael Haines. Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991). Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Roosevelt, Theodore. ‘Fellow-feeling as a Political Factor’, Century Illustrated Magazine, vol. LIX. 3 (January 1900). Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Stern, Julia. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Stoddard, Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Scribner, 1920).

Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality

105

Wells, Ida B. ‘To the Members of the Anti-Lynching Bureau in Chicago’, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2002). Accessed 9 May 2003. White, Newman I. ‘The White Man in the Woodpile: Some Influences on Negro Secular Folk-Songs’. American Speech 4 (1928–29), 207–15. Zamir, Shamoon ‘“The Sorrow Songs”/“Song of Myself”: Du Bois, the Crisis of Leadership and the Prophetic Imagination’. The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Ed. Werner Sollers and Maria Diedrich (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994).

This page intentionally left blank

PART 2 Signatures and Elegies

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 7

‘I think I was enchanted’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Haunting of American Women Poets Alison Chapman

Homage poems to Elizabeth Barrett Browning by American women poets, celebrating her imaginative genius and bodily fragility, forged a transatlantic subgenre, the poetess praise poem. Tracing these many tributes sheds light on the history of Barrett Browning’s contemporary reception as a monumental figure on both sides of the Atlantic, a figure represented as deanimated yet insistently present, and also on an Anglo-American network of poetesses and poems. Barrett Browning carefully cultivated her American readership, in particular through magazine publication, and American reviews were, as she put it herself in 1843, ‘extravagant in their appreciation’ (Letters 1: 120). American poets Anne C. Lynch Botta, Sarah Helen Whitman and Emily Dickinson repeat this extravagance in their praise poems, as they negotiate Barrett Browning’s legendary presence and literary allure. At stake for these writers is a sense of national and cultural poetic identity, and their lyric enchantment allows them to conceive a transatlantic conception of poetic lineage predicated on an eroticized haunting by their precursor. Throughout her life, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was mythologized as the ‘legendary poet-recluse’ (Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1). Even at midcentury, while publishing her most strident political and social poems such as Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Aurora Leigh (1856) and Poems Before Congress (1860), contemporary commentary developed an increasing obsession with her physical frailty. For example, after visiting the Brownings in Italy, in 1853, the American George Stillman Hillard declared: she is a type of the most sensitive and delicate womanhood. She has been a great sufferer of ill health, and the marks of pain are stamped upon her person and manner. Her figure is slight, her countenance expressive of genius and sensibility, shaded by a veil of long brown locks; and her tremulous voice often flutters over her words, like the flame of a dying candle over the wick. I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. She is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl. (1: 140)

110

Representations of Death/Alison Chapman

In a circulation of the conventional feminine poetic modality associated with nineteenth-century sensibility – a modality which Barrett Browning’s poetry resists1 – her legendary body is constructed as part of the discourse of expressivity, on the point of exhalation and expiration. Barrett Browning’s public persona had been established as early as 1844 in Richard Henry Horne’s New Spirit of the Age, in which he suggests that her status as the foremost British woman poet is contingent on her seclusion from the London literary world; indeed, Horne playfully suggests that her very existence is in doubt (2: 132–3). But she was not beyond rather wryly playing up such a persona. When, early in the courtship correspondence, Robert Browning tactlessly compared her to ‘some world’s wonder in chapel or crypt’, to which he had almost been introduced in the past, she ironically replied ‘if you had entered the “crypt”, you might have caught cold, or been tired to death’ (Correspondence, 10: 17, 19). As Tricia Lootens notes, contemporary representations of Barrett Browning focus primarily on ‘her lack of corporeal presence’ (125). Indeed, homage poems by men insist on their subject’s intangibility. For example, Thomas Holley Chivers inscribes her as already posthumous in his ‘Sonnet on Reading Mrs Browning’s Drama of Exile’ (1845), and Madison Julius Cawein tropes her as a disembodied song: ‘O voice of ecstasy and lyric pain, / Divinely throated and divinely heard’. Sydney Dobell’s ‘On the Death of Mrs Browning’ describes her death as an ascension into Heaven, a death in the manner of the Virgin Mary: ‘thou, and thy lyre / Sudden ascended out of sight’. As Elisabeth Bronfen notes, from the Virgin’s miraculous death ‘derives the notion of the disembodied, ethereal, non-essential muse, mediatrix and angel as a bridge to the beyond’, involving ‘the notion of an absence of the body to signify a triumph over death’ (Over Her Dead Body, 67). In her poetic representations by male poets even before her demise, however, Barrett Browning did not have a body to decay. She was always already spirit. These examples suggest that even those praise poems written before Barrett Browning’s death in 1861 are types of elegy, for they inscribe an apotheosis of the dead as, in Celeste Schenck’s words, a ‘vertical transcendence’ that ‘lifts [the precursor] out of nature, out of the poem, and out of the successor’s way’.2 While for Schenck the male-authored elegy is ‘a gesture of aspiring careerism’ (14), female elegists ‘protest [against] final separation’ and ‘seem unwilling to give up their dead’ (15): The female elegy is a poem of connectedness; women inheritors seem to achieve poetic identity in relation to ancestresses, in connection with the dead, whereas male initiates need to eliminate the competition to come into their own. [...] The female elegist inverts or suspends the masculinist elegiac in two ways: she both deconstructs the genre’s valorization of separation by means of apotheosis (by refusing resolution and the absolute rupture that is death), and she reconstructs by imagining new or alternative elegiac scenarios that arise from a distinctly feminine psycho-sexual experience. (15, 18)3

‘I think I was enchanted’

111

Schenck’s description of female elegy is extremely useful for its conception of the relationship between woman poet and precursor as one of relation rather than elimination. Indeed, American women’s praise poems to Barrett Browning use the form for an articulation of their connections both to Anglo-American literary culture and to each other. Furthermore, while women’s tributes to Barrett Browning (even those written before her death) spiritualize her figure in the elegiac tradition, they also insistently materialize her as tangible and seductive. This problematic eroticized double of deanimation and presence, seen in particular in tribute poems by Anne C. Lynch Botta, Sarah Helen Whitman and Emily Dickinson, suggests an ambivalence about these poets’ own place in a transnational poetess network.4 Tribute poems often translate such ambivalence in terms of proximity and distance. Indeed, American women also turn the homage into something else: an investigation into the geographical, national and political limits of their lyric poetry. For Barrett Browning represented not just a legendary figure, but also the potential to transform a sentimental feminized tradition of poetry into a more muscular public poetics; and, as a British writer resident in Italy and acclaimed in America, especially for her political poems such as the abolitionist ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’, a public poetics that by-passed national as well as gendered borders. As an aspirational and overtly foreign precursor, Barrett Browning was seen as a transnational poetess who offered a model for American women’s public agency.5 Anne C. Lynch Botta’s ‘Notes on Poetry’, reprinted in her 1894 Memoirs, epitomizes the sense of urgency felt by American women poets in their negotiations with Old World precursors. Many poets felt this urgency in nineteenthcentury America, often expressed in terms of fears about the rise of print (and especially magazines) that threatened to debase literary value. For women poets, whose claims to poetic achievement were often culturally fraught, the public celebrity of Barrett Browning provided an example through which to explore their own place in literary culture. Botta argues that the age of great poetry is about to be born, ‘No era has been when mightier poetic elements existed than in the present; but they are chaotic, and await the brooding of some great spirit to give them form and utterance’ (Memoirs, 380). The question she poses is whether such a poet will come from the New World or the old. America does have the upper hand, she argues, because it is ‘Fettered by no antiquity, borne down by no hereditary aristocracy’ (381). A ‘great national literature’ might be heralded, if there was a poet able to combine the two differing impulses of the age: ‘The great end of all literature has been to idealize the actual. The new and higher literature must aim at the realization of the ideal’ (381–2). Botta’s successful literary career as salon hostess (in Providence and New York City), essayist and poet attempted to cultivate the conditions for a new age of American poetry, exemplified for example in her hugely ambitious and meticulously researched Hand-Book of Universal Literature, which surveys various national literatures, presenting and classifying the best examples.6 As a poet, Botta’s ambitions for a new era of American literature presented themselves in

112

Representations of Death/Alison Chapman

terms of her own secondariness, as she explicitly offered her poetry as a medium for negotiating with other poets in order to bring about ‘the realization of the ideal’. Often, as Silva Gruesz suggests in a reading of Botta’s poetic relationship with Longfellow, this involves the thematization of literary influence in terms of spatial metaphors, in which negotiations with sites of power are imagined in relational terms, in particular as a ‘carefully managed poetic-erotic continuance’ (55). In addition, and as her 1853 Poems testifies, with its quantity of titles ‘To –’, her poems are relational, imitative and echoic. Indeed, ‘To a Poet’s Wife’ advises that ‘higher happiness’ comes from hearing ‘the voice of Fame / Re-echo in her silver tines, / The one beloved name’, and in ‘Dedication To My Mother’ she describes her poetry as ‘fragments of song’ and ‘passing echoes’ (lines: 48, 49). While Botta figures her position as a woman poet as both provisional and relational, her praise poem to Barrett Browning, also published in her 1853 collection, both deanimates and eroticizes her precursor while also conferring upon her a performative agency. Her ‘Notes on Poetry’ looks for ‘some great spirit’ to give ‘form and utterance’ to the new poetic age, and in her praise poem this newly forged poetic ideal, mediated and circulated by Botta’s own poem, is transnational. While the speaker has not met Barrett Browning in person, ‘in this outward world, / Bounded by time and space’, their spirits have met ‘in that realm, / O’er which imagination holds her reign’ (1–4). Botta is a disciple in this imagined encounter, sitting at Barrett Browning’s feet to listen to her voice, and the space that both speaker and addressee share is at once intimate, sanctified and erotic: There have I sat at thy feet to listen to thy voice, And as the symphony sublimely rose, Reverence and awe had held me spell-bound there, The under-tone of human love and woe, That touched the trembling chords of sympathy, And drew me near to thy great woman’s heart. (5–13)

Barrett Browning is both spiritualized and manifested as physically present through the stock in trade features of women’s sentimental modality: sighs, tears, sympathy, heart. While this poem was published in 1853, several years before its addressee’s death in 1861, its spiritualization of Barrett Browning fashions this praise poem as a proleptic elegy manqué.7 Although Barrett Browning is etherealized at the end of the poem as the ‘crownéd queen of Song!’, she is also reified into an erotic and magnetizing tactility. The poem’s conclusion, in fact, shapes itself into a courtly proposal: ‘oe’er the sea / I send my vows of homage, and my heart / Sends love and blessings unto thee and thine’ (16–18). The means of imaginative communion, significantly, are the ‘trembling chords of sympathy’ that link and pull together the women poets, like the tug of the omphalos, out of a sense of loss, absence and commemoration.8 Crucial also is the space that this tribute traverses, both ‘o’er the sea’ and within the closeted space of the imagined communion. Botta represents the figure of Barrett Browning as the realization of the poetic ideal, and also reifies Barrett Browning’s influence in terms of both a spatial distance and the collapse of that distance, operating in an ‘outward world’

‘I think I was enchanted’

113

where they are separated by a sea, and also an inner world where they are united by ‘the trembling chords of sympathy’. Barrett Browning is an uncanny figure for influence and agency, incorporated into the homage poem as a haunting and tangible presence, appropriated into Botta’s very own poetic signature as the condition of her secondary echoic utterance. Indeed, this echoic relationship is established by the homage’s recycling of the courtly discourse of Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, first published in her 1850 Poems. Botta, in her homage poem, reverses the terms of Barrett Browning’s sequence addressed to Robert Browning, so that for Botta’s speaker Barrett Browning is both muse/beloved and poet, paying homage to her precursor yet also forging a new poetics in which the ideal is realized. The relationship between primary and secondary, original and copy, body and spirit, praise and elegy here are deeply provisional. The very condition of Botta’s tribute to Barrett Browning, sending her ‘vows of homage’ ‘o’er the sea’, depends on the imaginative communion of ‘trembling chords of sympathy’ that eradicates the geographical and national limits of ‘this outer world, / Bounded by time and space’. But this tribute is also, at the end of the poem, sent specifically from ‘this free land / That owes allegiance only unto God / And Genius’: Botta’s American homage to the ‘crownéd queen of Song’ thus both invokes and denies national identities, borders and ideals. While the distance between Botta and Barrett Browning is obliterated via the imagination in the first section of the poem, the conclusion replaces the sea and pointedly salutes a British ‘queen’ from the American ‘free’ nation. The encounter between other American women poets and their legendary British precursor also presents homage as deanimation and tangibility, and the praise poem becomes an ambivalent scene of erotic enchantment. Recent accounts of literary influence between nineteenth-century women poets offer a conception of influence as a subversive if anxious seduction. For Susan Gubar, the term ‘Sapphistry’ connotes an erotic union between women writers, founded on a beneficial and restorative access to their ancient female lyric precursor, Sappho. Although she understands the term in the sense of modernist literary relationships with a biographical basis, the imagined erotic networks between women can also be understood as enabling. Furthermore, Gubar’s ‘Sapphistry’ can be fruitfully placed alongside what Terry Castle terms the spiritualization of love between women in the western rhetorical tradition, which fashions the lesbian as a ghostly figure, existing on the margins of our vision: ‘The literary history of lesbianism [...] is first of all a history of derealization’ (34). The lesbian is ‘apparitional’: insubstantial, unacknowledged, obscured, disembodied. Castle’s study is a polemical attempt to exorcise these ghosts and bring the lesbian back into vision and bodiliness. But her account of the insubstantiality of Sapphism, its very ghostly presence and fleeting representations, allows us to uncover a hidden history of female literary desire in the nineteenth century, even if not necessarily a desire that comfortably fits the stabilizing label of lesbian love.9 A nineteenth-century Sapphistry, then, might be taken to mean literary representational axioms that are

114

Representations of Death/Alison Chapman

haunted and inhabited by the ghostliness of secret, transgressive and erotic desire for other women poets. Indeed, the relationship between eroticism, literary influence and women poets is closely bound up with conceptions of authorship itself. For Bette London, for example, women’s (often secret) collaborative writing challenges dominant conceptions of the author’s singular identity, while figuring authorship as mediumship, erasing the boundaries of identity and positing writing as the other.10 Similarly, Eliza Richards’ study of Poe’s circle of American women poets argues that the traditionally negative associations of women’s sentimental poetry – its mimesis, reiteration, and lack of originality – were also the very conditions of women’s spiritualist mediumship, and that women’s poetry aligns literary influence with the ability to receive and transmit the voices and texts of others. Implicit in these accounts of literary mediumship is the sense of possession as both a seduction and a haunting, and the foundation for an ambivalent transatlantic female poetic network. The figure of Barrett Browning possesses American women poets and inhabits their poems in what Susan Stewart terms the paradox of ‘willed possession’, whereby ‘one cannot intend to be possessed; one is helpless before the power of the magnet and one’s helplessness is contagious’ (‘Lyric Possession’ 34). Barrett Browning circulates in their poetry as a haunting figure that subverts poetic will and authorial mastery but, ironically, also endows them with a secondary performative agency. Writing three tribute poems in the early 1850s, Sarah Helen Whitman overtly thematizes literary influence as an eroticized spirit possession, but one that gives her own poems a public political voice. In a discussion of Whitman’s literary indebtedness to Poe, Richards suggests that Whitman’s poetry is a ‘doubled lyric voice’ that receives the spectral texts of the other: ‘In spiritualist poetry, the living speaker performed her compatibility with the dead by overdubbing the spirit visitor’s voice. The dead and living exchange places: the spectral voice of the medium haunts the literal voice of the visiting spirit’ (122). In her tribute poems to Barrett Browning, who was at this stage very much alive, this textual manifestation becomes eroticized, as the homage shades into a dense field of textual allusion and romantic courtship that gives Whitman some of Barrett Browning’s controversial political agency. Whitman’s three sonnets are shadowed by Barrett Browning’s celebrated 1850 Poems, which has the effect of constructing her own homage as both imitation and scene of seduction, blurring active and passive, poet and precursor, subject and object. The first two sonnets were published in the New York Tribune on 13 April 1853, republished with a third sonnet in Whitman’s 1853 Hours of Life, and Other Poems (see Lohrli). Each sonnet is prefaced by an epigraph from Dante’s Commedia that compares the figure of Barrett Browning with the image of Divine Justice in Il Paradiso (Canto 19), the concern of Michal in Il Purgatorio (Canto 10), and the movement from penitence to grace in L’Inferno (Canto 7). While these quotations underline the monumental figure of the precursor, they also highlight the echoic and allusive nature of the sonnets themselves, which are in many ways a bricolage of references to Barrett

‘I think I was enchanted’

115

Browning’s poems, just as they incorporate their own translations of Dante into the metaphors of the poem itself (for example, so that Michal’s ‘dispettosa e trista’, the epigraph from sonnet 2, becomes translated into a description of Barrett Browning as ‘pale with scorn and sorrow’ [1]). Indeed, the first sonnet is in many ways a catalogue of titles and phrases from Barrett Browning’s poems, mentioning directly her ‘House of Clouds’, ‘Lost Bower’, and the ‘Gods of Hellas’. This sonnet deanimates the precursor poet as a ‘Fair sybil, sitting in thy “House of Clouds”’ and in the ‘Lost Bower’, as if Barrett Browning inhabits both her own poem and Whitman’s poem of homage. Barrett Browning is ‘some solitary star above’ to whom the speaker looks ‘in love’. While already ascended into heaven, and accessed in the speaker’s dreams (5), Barrett Browning is still vividly present through the vitality of her voice, her dirge, her sighs and her strains. The second stanza turns to another scene of imagining, when the speaker sees her ‘At a great palace window looking forth, / Today on plumed Florentines, tomorrow / Upon the stern battallions of the North’ (2–4), a reference to Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Barrett Browning’s narrative poem about the failure of the first Tuscan Revolution. The poem goes on to collapse the figure of Barrett Browning with her other controversial political poems ‘The Cry of the Children’ and ‘A Curse for a Nation’, which condemn child labour in England and American slavery respectively. This conjuring up of Barrett Browning – ‘Sometimes I see thee’ (1) – manifests her as a powerful political, sanctified and seductive figure; she has ‘a saint’s aureole of anguish crowned’, and also a passionate ‘wild stormy splendour’ in the ‘mystic glory’ of her condemnation of slavery, which is when Whitman’s speaker declares she loves her the most. The final sonnet was not published in the Tribune, perhaps out of a concern that the culmination of borrowings from Barrett Browning are overly imbued with her political vehemence: Ay, most I love thee when thy starry song Stoops to the plague-spot that we dare not name, And bears with burning breath the envenomed wrong – Our country’s dark inheritance of shame. (1–4)

This sonnet is a more overt love poem, celebrating Barrett Browning for her antislavery poem ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’. Whitman turns ‘the mark beside the shore / Of the first white pilgrim’s bended knee’ (stanza 1) in Barrett Browning’s poem into a ‘plague spot that we dare not name’ (1), that is rather borne by Barrett Browning herself in her ‘burning breath’. Whitman’s abolitionist message is rhetorically carried by Barrett Browning herself, as if Whitman acts as the medium for the political poetics. Indeed, by the end of the poem the ‘burning breath’ becomes a lucid ray to bring new light to her ‘realm’, in a curious anticipation of the apocalyptic light repeatedly figured in Aurora Leigh, which would be published in 1856:

116

Representations of Death/Alison Chapman

A woman, loyal to God’s living truth – Hath uttered calm, clear words whose rays shall dart Like sunbeams through our realm’s tartarean gloom, Till love’s own holy light is stygian depths illume. (11–14)

While Barrett Browning is overtly this loyal woman, Whitman herself also implicitly fills this role as the bearer of the message to America, and thus her homage poem materializes and performs Barrett Browning’s political agency in a proleptic vision. Whitman’s sonnet trio thus spiritualizes its beloved precursor, as well as mimicking and reproducing her political voice. The best known American tribute poems to Barrett Browning are by Emily Dickinson, who also responds explicitly to the prophetic vision of Aurora Leigh’s symbolism as a new spiritual and social order, by describing the very reading process as a ‘Lunacy of Light’ (Poems 2: 454). As critics such as Moers and Swyderski note, Dickinsons’ elegies are embedded with allusions to Barrett Browning’s most famous work, Aurora Leigh, ingesting the precursor’s poetry and insisting on its continuities. This elegy for Barrett Browning, written around 1862, returns to her magnetizing effect: I think I was enchanted When first a sombre Girl – I read that Foreign Lady – The Dark – felt Beautiful – (stanza 1)

The scene of earlier bewitching presents Barrett Browning as a specifically foreign enchantress, a ‘Dark’ and ‘Foreign Lady’, a monumental figure and a type of Petrarchan muse that retains a distance from the poet. Reading in this elegy is figured as not only a seduction of foreignness, but also initiates a continuing haunting by the precursor that is transformative, in which bees become butterflies, butterflies swans: I could not have defined the change – Conversion of the Mind Like Sanctifying in the Soul – Is witnessed – not explained – (stanza 6)

The elegiac scene of the poem returns to the first reading of Barrett Browning’s poems as an epiphanic moment that defies narrative, expressed in terms of a sudden spiritual conversion both saintly and magical. Barrett Browning here is precursor poet and muse, rendered both distant and other – ‘that Foreign Lady’ – yet immediately present and vibrant in her transformative power and agency. Dickinson figures Barrett Browning as dark, foreign, unknown, and yet also, in her very absence and otherness, supremely, dangerously and erotically seductive.

‘I think I was enchanted’

117

Furthermore, the poem memorializes the original scene of reading the dead woman poet as proleptic, recalling both the enchantment of her poetry ‘When first a somber Girl’ (indeed, originally ‘little Girl’ in the manuscript), and also projecting that fascination onto her future death. This elegy manqué traverses differences in geography, nationhood, time, and represents the enchantment of the precursor in terms of the collapse of otherness itself as the moment of conversion and seduction: ‘whether it was noon or night – / Or only Heaven – at Noon’, she confesses, ‘I had not power to tell’ (stanza 2). This conversion, this poetic epiphany, is also a type of the sublime, a ‘Divine Insanity’, so that, even if Barrett Browning as the magician should ‘be asleep’, ‘Magic – hath an Element / Like Deity – to keep –’ (stanza 8). Although ‘that Foreign Lady’ is asleep, her ‘Tomes of solid Witchcraft’ (stanza 8) still have their enchanting power of conversion. As a sleeping enchantress, Barrett Browning may be troped as a figure of difference and otherness, but the poem swerves away from acknowledging the finality of her absence and, instead, insists on the continuing seductive presence of her poetry. This is a magical, occult canonization that continues to insist on the seductive tangible draw of the precursor’s presence. Dickinson’s elegy tropes Barrett Browning as a haunting figure of doubled otherness even before her death – a foreign muse – as it describes how the effects of first reading continue to haunt. Her comments about Barrett Browning’s death in her letters suggest its profound and traumatic impact. ‘I had a terror – since September – I could tell no one – and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burial Ground – because I am afraid – You inquire my Books – For Poets – I have Keats – and Mr and Mrs Browning’.11 This famously enigmatic comment in a letter to Higginson seems to refer to news of Barrett Browning’s unexpected death in Florence, described in Kate Field’s tribute essay in September’s Atlantic Monthly. Field’s essay had lamented the death of Barrett Browning as the passing of ‘the world’s greatest poetess’ (369), aligning her with other great poets of Italian patriotism such as Dante and Keats, and lamenting the public and private cost of her loss to the world, her Anglo-American network, and her family.12 The Brownings are praised for their beneficial magnetizing presence: ‘Association with the Brownings, even though of the slightest nature, made one better in mind and soul. It was impossible to escape the influence of the magnetic fluid of love and poetry that was constantly passing between husband and wife’ (373). Dickinson’s elegies seem to be deeply marked by Field’s obituary. While Field celebrates her personal and literary friendship with the Brownings in Florence, Dickinson’s homage poems lament her absence from Barrett Browning, the inability to pay personal tribute to her of the kind Field ascribes to herself and other expatriates; and yet, while Dickinson internalizes the death of the precursor as a ‘terror’, she also appears to align herself with Barrett Browning’s son, the Boy in the Burial Ground, who sings out of fear, in a reversal of the lyric joy sung by a boy at the start of Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows. But Dickinson also presents Barrett Browning as thrillingly present, as if her death was both deanimation and manifestation. Dickinson’s poems imagine her homage as a journey and a

118

Representations of Death/Alison Chapman

courtship, paying tribute by the Burial Ground in the guise of a lover and as a son. In turn, Barrett Browning haunts Dickinson’s poem as an uncanny other, an influence that resists the narrative of transcendence often attributed to these elegies and, as Schenck argues, is more typical of the male elegy. Another poem written about the same time describes an imaginative journey to visit the deathbed of Barrett Browning in Italy, and also figures the homage as a traversal of difference: I went to thank Her – But She Slept – Her Bed – a funnelled Stone – With Nosegays at the Head and Foot – That Travellers – had thrown Who went to thank Her – But She slept – ’Twas Short – to cross the Sea – To look upon Her like – alive – But turning back – ’twas slow – (288)

As with Kate Field’s obituary essay, this poem aligns Barrett Browning with Anglo-Americans in Italy, ‘Travellers’, who pay homage to her in death as in life. In a letter written during the summer of 1862 to Samuel Bowles, who was about to leave for Italy, Dickinson writes: ‘Should anybody where you go, talk of Mrs Browning, you must hear for us – and if you touch her Grave, put one hand on the Head, for me – her unmentioned Mourner’ (Letters, 410). While this portrayal of herself as an ‘unmentioned Mourner’ has prompted critics such as Swyderski to read an ambiguity into her relationship with the dead woman poet, it also underlines the privacy and secrecy of her grief, in contrast to the public displays of loss by other poets. The contingent act of a substitute touching the head of the grave, a problematic putative act of commemoration on her behalf, further displaces Dickinson as a mourner. The pilgrimage after death is compared to a journey while Barrett Browning was alive, like those described by Field, where her home (Casa Guidi) is portrayed as the centre of Anglo-American literary life: ‘For nearly fifteen years Florence and the Brownings have been one in the thoughts of many English and Americans; and Casa Guidi [...] will be as dear to the AngloSaxon traveller as Milton’s Florentine residence has been heretofore’ (Field, 369). Furthermore, in the salon where Barrett Browning received her British and American visitors, ‘there was something about this room that seemed to make it a proper and especial haunt for poets’ (370). For Dickinson to imagine a journey of homage to Italy, where Barrett Browning haunts her, is also to recall her own displacement from her precursor and from an Anglo-American transatlantic network. This scene of paying homage to the dead woman poet is a kind of elegiac drag – ‘But turning back – ’twas slow’ – the slowness of the return journey to

‘I think I was enchanted’

119

America and home signifying an acknowledgement of geographical and poetic displacement. This elegy does not present a scene of transcendence or triumph over the dead woman poet, but a rhetorical and spatial performance of loss and connection. One further elegy was written by Dickinson after reading Barrett Browning’s posthumously published Last Poems (1862). This elegy’s anxiety on the death of Barrett Browning is presented in stark literary terms, for the death of the representative woman poet represents the death of women’s poetry itself. By becoming truly posthumous, in other words, Barrett Browning’s death has reminded Dickinson of her own cultural and literary displacement: Her ‘last Poems’ – Poets – ended – Silver – perished – with her Tongue – Not on Record – bubbled other, Flute – or Woman – So divine – Not unto its Summer – Morning Robin – uttered Half the Tune – Gushed too free for the Adoring – From the Anglo-Florentine – Late – the Praise – ’Tis dull – conferring On the Head too High to Crown – Diadem – or Ducal Showing – Be its Grace – sufficient sign – Nought – that We – No Poet’s Kinsman – Suffocate – with easy woe – What, and if, Ourself the Bridegroom – Put Her down – in Italy? (234)

This poem recalls the ‘Terror’ of her letter to Higginson, terror for the death of the precursor, whose demise threatens Dickinson’s creativity with a reminder of the ideological constructions she was writing against. These constructions are offered in the poem as criticisms also faced by Barrett Browning, who ‘Gushed too free for the Adoring’ (‘too full’ in another version), a lyricism that goes beyond even that of the robin, who only ‘uttered Half the Tune’. Barrett Browning exceeds this sentimental lyricism, rather than being fully determined by it, and indeed, with a head ‘too high to crown’ she exceeds poetic tributes too.13 Praise is too late, and Dickinson’s own poem is itself painfully belated, just like Barrett Browning’s posthumous volume Last Poems. Dickinson fashions her own last poem for her precursor out of connection as well as loss, positioning the ‘Anglo-Florentine’ in the centre of a transnational network (a magnet for Americans in the old world as described by Field) that the elegy’s belatedness both marks and mourns. In addition, the speaker positions herself, after the terms of Field’s Atlantic Monthly

120

Representations of Death/Alison Chapman

homage, as the widow who had taken Barrett Browning to Italy. While the conflation of Dickinson with Robert Browning is a gesture of her own overwhelming loss, it also positions Barrett Browning as a seductive and yet safely displaced muse, and the rhetorical question with its ambivalent qualification (‘What, and if’) and present tense (‘Put Her down’) carries this doubleness of Barrett Browning’s erotic pull. Like praise poems by Botta and Whitman, Dickinson’s elegies are haunted by Barrett Browning as a seductively doubled figure of both loss and presence, spiritualization and materialization. This ‘willed possession’ inscribes a double poetic signature, a shadow text inhabited by the dead precursor, in an attempt to position the poem within an enabling transatlantic network of poems and poets, legitimated by the legacy of Barrett Browning’s own politicized challenge to the sentimental tradition. Such an appropriation, however, also undermines the autonomy and agency of the writing hand, which is perhaps why Dickinson deputizes the mourner’s hand on the grave. Although Dickinson famously removes herself from her contemporary poetic culture and its textual circulation, gesturing repeatedly in her poetry to the alienating effects of publication as the ‘Auction of the Mind’, recent critics have urged the importance of placing her poetry back in a relationship with the American literary scene without erasing Dickinson’s own difference from her contexts.14 Indeed, read alongside other women’s praise poems for Barrett Browning, it is clear that Dickinson shares a desire for and ambivalence about transnational connections. Praise poems by Dickinson, Whitman and Botta all imply that transatlantic networks potentially empower their poetry with a performative agency borrowed from their precursor. American women poets work both within and against the conventional deanimation of Barrett Browning’s figure, inscribing a spiritualized ‘chord of sympathy’ with Barrett Browning that manifests her as a tangible eroticized presence. As Bridget Bennett argues, transatlantic spiritualism afforded ‘pluralist possibilities that overcome merely human and national boundaries’, as a form of ‘cultural migration’ and a ‘mode of transformation’ (103–5). Similarly, Barrett Browning’s haunting of American women poets as enchanting precursor is an erotic and potentially dangerous seduction, flirting with geographic, national and subjective boundaries. Barrett Browning’s erotic haunting achieves its apotheosis at the very end of the century in Lilian Whiting, American spiritualist, poet, and author of the earliest book length studies of the poet. A Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning associates the memory of the poet with spiritualist trance, and casts Whiting’s intimate friend Kate Field – who had given her material on the Brownings and to whose memory the book is dedicated – as the medium. The memoir begins by describing her ghostly possession by the spirit and texts of the dead poet through ‘spiritual magnetism’ (8), and suggests that the process of writing involves a habitation by its subject, who, for Whiting, is a prophet of spiritualism and, implicitly, of ‘Sapphistry’. Not only is Barrett Browning’s poetry the medium for her spiritual communications – ‘Her genius was of that highest order which is the spiritualization of the intellect’ (146) – but Whiting’s memoir itself suggestively

‘I think I was enchanted’

121

implies that she has access to Barrett Browning’s spirit, telepathically, through her romantic intimacy with Kate Field (e.g. 163–84). For Whiting and Field, as for Dickinson, Botta and Whitman, the seductive spirit of Barrett Browning offers them a place in a transnational network, and yet also questions their own individual autonomy and agency. This may indeed be the cost of poetic enchantment.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14

For example, see Leighton. On the relation between praise poems and elegies, see Stewart’s ‘What Praise Poems Are For’. Susan Conley also draws on Schenck in her study of Michael Field’s elegy for Christina Rossetti (237). While a full history of American and transatlantic poetess networks is yet to be written, important studies of American women poets and their literary contexts include Marchalonis, Petrino and Richards. For a formative account of women’s sentimental poetic tradition in America, see Walker. For an analysis of the hybrid national poetess in Britain, see Chapman. Stone explores Barrett Browning’s abolitionist networks in ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians’. See Jacqueline N. Leonardi’s entry on Botta in Knight (12). For Botta’s reputation as a salon hostess, see the lengthy accounts in her Memoirs, and also Jones. I am indebted for the term ‘elegy manqué’ to Conley. See Bronfen, The Knotted Subject, 21. Compare Vicinus, who suggests that nineteenth-century transgressive female love was coded in a variety of forms as an ‘open secret’. Bette London, Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships (Ithaca, 1999), Introduction. Dickinson to T.W. Higginson, 25 April 1862 (Letters 404). Biographers have speculated at length about the terror: for example, that it signifies a lost lover, lesbianism, or plagiarism from Aurora Leigh (see Swyderski ‘Dickinson and “that Foreign Lady –”’ 54). Swyderski also suggests that Field’s essay had an impact on Dickinson, but only in terms of both poets’ shared seclusion and heightened sensibilities (‘Dickinson and “that Foreign Lady –”’ 51). Compare Swyderski (2000), who interprets Dickinson’s elegies as an occasion for praise and critique (63). See, for example, Paula Bennett.

Works Cited Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Poems (New York and Boston: C.S. Francis & Co., 1850).

122

Representations of Death/Alison Chapman

——, Last Poems (New York: J. Miller, 1862). ——, Aurora Leigh (New York and Boston: C.S. Francis & Co., 1857). Bennett, Bridget. ‘Crossing Over: Spiritualism and the Atlantic Divide’. Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms 1854–1936. Ed. Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). Bennett, Paula. ‘Dickinson and her American Women Poet Peers’. The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Ed. Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Botta, Anne C. Lynch. Hand-Book of Universal Literature (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1860). ——, Memoirs of Anne C.L. Botta Written by her Friends With a Selections from her Correspondence and From her Writings in Prose and Poetry (New York: J.S. Tait & Sons, 1894). ——, Poems (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853). Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). ——, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, and Robert Browning, The Brownings’ Correspondence. Ed. Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson (Winfield, Kansas: Wedgestone Press, 1971). Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Frederick G. Kenyon (2 vols, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1897). Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Cawein, Madison Julius. New Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1909). Chapman, Alison. ‘The Expatriate Poetess: Nationhood, Poetics and Politics’. Victorian Women Poets. Ed. Alison Chapman. Essays and Studies series (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003). Chivers, Thomas Holley. Virginali; or, Song of my Summer Nights (Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co., 1853). Conley, Susan. ‘“Poet’s Right”: Elegy and the Woman Poet’. Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader. Ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson (3 vols, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955). ——, The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1986). Dobell, Sydney. The Poetical Works (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1875). Field, Kate. ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’. Atlantic Monthly (September 1862), 368–76.

‘I think I was enchanted’

123

Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. ‘Feeling for the Fireside: Longfellow, Lynch, and the Topography of Poetic Power’. Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. Ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Gubar, Susan. ‘Sapphistries’, Signs 10 (1984), 43–62. Hillard, George Stillman. Six Months in Italy (2 vols, London: Murray, 1853). Horne, Richard Henry. Ed. New Spirit of the Age (2 vols, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1844). Jones, Tamara. ‘Hawthorne’s Appearance After Being “Lynched”’. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 18 (1992), 22. Knight, Denise D. Ed. Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A BioBibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Westport: Greenwood, 1997). Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). Lohrli, Anne. ‘Sonnets to Mrs Browning’, Studies in Browning and His Circle 6 (1978), 71–3. London, Bette. Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Lootens, Tricia. Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1996). Moers, Ellen. Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976). Petrino, Elizabeth. ‘Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry’. The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing. Ed. Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Richards, Eliza. Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Marchalonis, Shirley. Patrons and Protégées: Gender, Friendship and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Schenck, Celeste M. ‘Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 5 (1986), 13–27. Stone, Marjorie. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1995). ——‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians: “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and Abolitionist Discourse in the Liberty Bell’. Victorian Women Poets. Ed. Alison Chapman. Essays and Studies series (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003). Stewart, Susan. ‘Lyric Possession’, Critical Inquiry 22 (1995), 34–63. ——, ‘What Praise Poems are For’, PMLA, 120 (January 2005), 235–45. Swyderski, Ann. ‘Dickinson and “that Foreign Lady –”’, Symbiosis, 4.1 (2000), 51–65.

124

Representations of Death/Alison Chapman

——, ‘Dickinson’s Enchantment: The Barrett Browning Fascicles’, Symbiosis, 7 (2003), 76–98. Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). Walker, Cheryl. The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Whiting, Lilian. A Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: Gay and Bird, 1899). Whitman, Sarah Helen. Hours of Life, and Other Poems (Providence: G.H. Whitney, 1853).

Chapter 8

God’s Will, Not Mine Child Death as a Theodicean Problem in Poetry by Nineteenth-Century American Women Paula Bernat Bennett

In [...] its literal meaning [...] theodicy is understood as the (or a) vindication of the divine providence or government in view of the existence of evil. The ‘theodicean’ assumes the validity of the theistic conception of God as powerful, wise, and good, and on this basis seeks to defend the divine administration. William Fulton It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world [...] created by God [...] I have a childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed [...] and that ultimately, at the world’s finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur [...] something so precious that it will suffice [...] not only to make forgiveness possible but also to justify everything that has happened with men [...] but I do not and do not want to accept it. Let the parallel lines [...] meet before my own eyes [...] and still I will not accept it. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 235–6

In her ground-breaking essay, ‘Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of American Literary History’, Jane Tompkins identified Little Eva’s death as the event in Stowe’s novel ‘most often cited as the epitome of Victorian sentimentalism [...] because it is the kind of incident most offensive to the sensibilities of twentieth-century academic critics. It is’, she declared, ‘on the belief that this incident is nothing more than a sob story that the whole case against sentimentalism rests’ (127). Tompkins’s phrasing may have been hyperbolic, but her point was well taken. Even today, for all the work done on sentimentality’s key role in fashioning nineteenth-century middle-class culture, scenes of excessive grief, especially around child death, alienate many academics. Since such scenes are ubiquitous in nineteenth-century American women’s writing generally, redeeming their importance has peculiar urgency for those wishing to recuperate their verse today. Tompkins’s defence of Eva’s death scene is straightforward enough. Accepting as given the novel’s Christian-evangelical framework, she justifies ‘the little evangelist’s’ death by reinserting it within a system of belief that privileged

126

Representations of Death/Paula Bernat Bennett

suffering as a means of transcendence. Such scenes, she argues, are not mere occasions for emotional excess but instruments for social and spiritual transformation, their emotional intensity sanctioned by the cultural work they do. Far from being exercises in self-indulgence, they teach a stern self-discipline that subordinates the interests of the self to the will of God, modelling – typically, through the dying child’s submissiveness and ‘child-like’ faith – that unquestioning acceptance of God’s will which is faith’s essence. To be ‘moved’ by little Eva’s death is to be moved toward God. Taken on its own grounds, Tompkins’s reading of Stowe’s fusion of religious and socially-reformist intentions in Eva’s death scene cannot be faulted. Stowe has, after all, come down to us as ‘the little lady who started the big war’, a description which, if nothing else, points to her contemporaries’ recognition of her novel’s sociopolitical, not just its religious, intent. However, the renewed appreciation for Stowe’s accomplishment that Tompkins’s essay precipitated has not necessarily eased academic discomfort with Eva’s death scene itself. On the contrary, for some academics what makes little Eva’s death so problematic is precisely the (evangelical) interpretative framework Stowe builds around it. Committed to a theodicy that justifies suffering sub specie aeternitatis, Stowe asks readers to accept the unacceptable: that an all-good, all-powerful God would use the suffering of innocents as a means to achieve his ends. And it is this – not Stowe’s sentimentalization of child death per se – that puts such readers off. Whether one begins with Abel and Isaac in the Pentateuch or with the multiple instances of child sacrifice in classical literature, the slaughter of innocents ranks among Western literature’s most enduring and powerful themes. That many of these scenes of slaughter are included for their sheer emotional effect is also true. With the introduction of Astyanax, even the Iliad has a sentimental and, not coincidentally, domestic moment, made that much more heart-wrenching by foreknowledge of the boy’s fate. But Stowe’s particular ideological framing of child death is another matter. Buoyed up by evangelical afflatus, Stowe portrays Eva’s death, like that of Uncle Tom, not as tragedy but as God’s way of doing good. God, says the intrepid Miss Ophelia, when confronted with her cousin’s nascent rebelliousness, has ‘a right to do what he will with his own’ (292). But did all nineteenth-century women writers cast child death in this mould or were there some who, as Sarah Piatt says in her poem ‘Giving Back the Flower’, ‘questioned [God’s] grace?’ (7) Child death was one of the principle defining events of the nineteenth century. According to Jack Larkin, ‘[t]otal childhood mortality (measured as the proportion of children who did not survive to age 21) [...] estimated at 27–30%’ in Northeast rural communities alone, with higher rates elsewhere (n.p.). As such, this essay argues, it gave women writers a unique literary site wherein to pose questions about God’s grace that they might otherwise have lacked the temerity – or the motivation – to ask. In their poems on child death, which run the gamut from evangelical-based orthodoxy to flat-out rebellion, women confront their understanding of God and his governance in terms of the sorrows inflicted upon them

God’s Will, Not Mine

127

and their families, on their society as a whole or, as with the Indians and slaves, on some subset within it. It gave them, that is, the chance to play Job, either reconciling themselves to God’s mysterious ways, as Miss Ophelia instructs her cousin to do or, as with Sarah Piatt (and Ivan Karamazov), refusing finally to accept them. The result is a poetry in which women gave their experience of child death complex aesthetic representation, sentimental, yes, but also much more than ‘sob stories’.

Child-Death Poetry in the Antebellum Period: Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Others No nineteenth-century American woman poet is more closely associated with the Victorian child elegy – or suffered more because of the association – than the antebellum period’s premier woman poet, Lydia Huntley Sigourney. But while scholars like Gordon Haight and Ann Douglas Wood have condemned out-of-hand what they view as the emotional excesses of Sigourney’s elegies, these poems are, as Patricia Crain argues, far better understood as being externally rather than internally oriented (381). Often written on demand, they are acts of public mourning. As such, they stress the compensatory blessings of life everlasting for the dead and, as evangelical consolation must, they urge the living to accept God’s will. At their worst, they are less overly emotional than perfunctory, which, given their public function, should not surprise. From this essay’s perspective, the very perfunctoriness of Sigourney’s child elegies is what gives them their value. Taken together, they set the parameters for the evangelical poem of consolation, and in them, the author’s struggle with the conundrums of this consolation are writ plain. The evangelical elegy’s principal function was to reconcile the bereaved to God’s will. When the deceased was a child, this meant justifying the death of one ‘too young’ to die. Wherever possible, Sigourney does this by arguing that the child is, in fact, better off dead. If the child was irremediably ill over an extended period, as, for example, in ‘Request of a Dying Child’ (Pocahontas, 140–1), this might involve no more than treating death as God’s way of bringing release from pain – and ignoring God’s failure to heal the child instead. But what of a perfectly healthy child suddenly taken ill and dying? Like many poets of the period, Sigourney deals with this latter problem by stressing the evils that the child avoids by dying. Thus in ‘The Transplanted Flower’ by Amanda T. Jones, the mother-speaker, without, it seems, any intended irony on the author’s part, tells how she prayed to God that ‘the blight of sin’ never taint her infant son, and God grants her wish, ‘transplanting’ her flower-child to heaven (209). Similarly, if less dramatically, in ‘The Little Brothers’, Sigourney comforts the parents of William Childs and George Cleveland Brewer, aged seven and five respectively, by observing that they have ‘’scaped the strife, / The snares, the sins, the woes that stain / This pilgrimage of life’ (Man of Uz, n.p.).

128

Representations of Death/Paula Bernat Bennett

Such conventional consolations, however, went only so far. In ‘Brothers’, published in the same volume, the deceased have died ‘in their manly prime’, leaving their now ‘childless parents’ behind to ‘weep their broken trust, / Hope’s fountain failing at its cherish’d springs’, and taking with it any easy solution to the theodicean problem their death raised. In such instances, Sigourney’s speaker admits, the bereaved might well wonder whether God or ‘dark misrule’ governs human life. Having opened the door thus far, however, she quickly closes it again with an ipse dixit placing God’s ways beyond human interrogation: ‘Yet no blind chance this saddening change hath wrought, / [...] /A Heavenly Father’s nevererring thought / Commingles with the discipline He sends’. Ours is not to question why ‘[b]ut faithful bow to each allotted task /And make His will our solace and our creed’. Having no rational grounds on which to counter the possibility that ‘dark misrule’ or ‘blind chance’ rule human life, Sigourney falls back on faith, demanding (blind) submission instead. God’s ‘discipline’ can readily be seen in this, his ‘never-erring thought’ is less perceptible. As a professional mourner, Sigourney was, of course, in no position (had she even wanted to) to challenge God’s will on the bereaved’s behalf. But these elegies also make clear the terrible burden that evangelical consolation placed, unilaterally, upon the bereaved. With God’s blessing, the dead go to Jesus. The living are left to kiss the chastening rod. As Sigourney’s detailed description of her own struggle to accept God’s will in ‘The Sick Child’ (Select Poems, 83–5) makes clear, she knew how difficult such acceptance was. Indeed, she opens one poem, ‘Hebrew Dirge’, with a Jewish epigraph, ‘Mourn for the living, and not for the dead,’ and then goes on to describe herself at a funeral as ‘moved with bitterness [...] / Not for the babe that slept, / But for the mother at its side’. It is for the latter and those like her, the speaker insists, that we should ‘spare those tears / [w]e lavish on the dead’. (Poems [1834], n.p.). In ‘On the Death of a Mother, soon after her Infant Son’, Sigourney lets the mother have the ‘victory’, trumping God by turning his ‘discipline’ into her own demise. Her adored child dead, ‘she who bore him shrank not ‘neath the rod, / Laying her chastened soul low at the feet of God’. She dies, and by her death joins her child ‘[w]here Death’ – and the unbearable suffering of child loss – are ‘no more’. (Poems [1834], n.p.). Poems like ‘Hebrew Dirge’ and ‘On the Death of a Mother’ hint at the limits of evangelical consolation’s power to console; poems on child death among oppressed minorities make these limits clear. This is understandable, since it was one thing to urge acceptance on a middle-class mother coping with child death, another to urge it on an Indian mother who sees her children slaughtered by United States soldiers. As Sigourney’s Indian poems suggest, she knew that evangelical consolation’s efficaciousness was contingent on more than faith alone. In poems like ‘The Lost Lily’ and ‘Last Words of an Indian Chief’ (Pocahontas, 181–2), she presents Indian speakers who want nothing to do with the white man’s heaven, even when, as in ‘Lost Lily’, the speaker herself, though she has lived among Indians most of her life, is white (Western Home, 342–9).

God’s Will, Not Mine

129

It is perhaps more surprising, given the strength of Sigourney’s commitment to evangelical Protestantism, that – at least when writing politically, not inspirationally – she was prepared to problematize evangelical consolation for the working class as well. Indeed, one could argue that Sigourney’s least evangelized portrait of a dying child comes not in an Indian poem but in the very Dickensian, ‘The Sailor’s Sick Child’, a poem with demonstrably political, not consolatory, intentions. In this poem, it is poverty and not an act of God that poisons hope’s ‘cherish’d springs’. The child-speaker knows he will go to heaven when he dies, but what matters to him now is his terror of being left alone while his mother works for ‘food and fire’, at the mercy of ‘stranger-ladies’ who ‘coldly gaze on’ him and ‘urge [her] so to leave [his] side, / And work for them, at home’. ‘How happy are those children dear’, he mournfully intones, ‘Who, on their couch of pain, / Behold a mother always near’, making the obvious but necessary comparison between what it means to die rich and what it means to die poor. The poem ends inconclusively with the child’s last plea that his mother not leave him: ‘But mother, dearest! when I die, / Oh! be alone with me’ (Poetry for Seamen, n.p.). Unrelievedly sentimental though the poem is – some might say, nauseatingly so – the universe it depicts is as close to godless as Sigourney gets. Whether or not it is willed by God, the way this child dies is clearly intended to be unacceptable to readers. ‘The Sailor’s Sick Child’ is, admittedly, a rarity in Sigourney, whose poetry on working-class child death tends to be inspirational not political, with little children dying as model Christians. But, for this very reason, the poem also suggests the considerable strain that evangelism put on writers who sought to confront death outside the ideal model. This same strain can be also seen in the poetry of other middle-class antebellum women poets. In ‘The Pauper Child’s Burial’, for example, Margaret Bailey tries for politically oriented realism also, with a searing portrait of a pauper child’s death. Precisely because she is faithful to the horror she depicts, however, Bailey fails to achieve a stable conclusion. Lying ‘[s]tretched on a rude plank’, the child dies alone. ‘No weeping friends gathered to bear him away’. Indeed, with his mother dead at his birth and his father nowhere in sight, he dies as he lived, in utter desolation. When the speaker tells us in the final line that ‘The good Shepherd’ now ‘folds [him] to his breast’, what, then, should we think? Does this make all well? And if it does, then why care if he lived miserably in the meantime if God makes all right in the end? The two impulses in the poem – one evangelical and idealized, the other reality-oriented and political – cancel each other out (225). Trying for realism and religion simultaneously, Hannah Gould gets into even worse difficulty in ‘The Slave Mother’s Prayer’. In the first six stanzas, Gould, an ardent abolitionist, has the mother, like the speaker in ‘The Transplanted Flower’, pray that her child die before he is ravaged by sin. Only the sinner is not her child but the man who owns him and who will someday wield his ‘tyrant’s rod’ over him. Up to this point, Gould’s poem is internally consistent. Possibly because she feared her mother-speaker might appear impious, however, Gould then adds three

130

Representations of Death/Paula Bernat Bennett

more stanzas wherein the mother plays ‘Uncle Tom’, before the fact and begs divine mercy ‘[f]or him, who here no pity showed’, the slaveholder himself (99, 100). Whatever effect Gould sought by this addition, it renders the mother’s emotional state and her status as tragic (as opposed to evangelical) heroine, incoherent. One cannot imagine Uncle Tom praying that his children die. His faith in God’s mercy, wisdom and justice are simply too strong to permit of such despair. In trying to be realistic and keep faith with the mother’s resistance, and then repudiating it, Gould, like Bailey, undid her poem. The black abolitionist poet, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, avoids this error. As a young writer, Harper, whose career straddles the Civil War, admired Stowe greatly and she wrote a small group of child elegies that fit comfortably within the ideal evangelical model: ‘The Drunkard’s Child’, ‘The Dying Child to Her Blind Father’, and ‘Eva’s Farewell’, a direct tribute to Stowe’s character of that name. In these poems, as their titles suggest, the child heroes, all of whom appear to be white, act as spiritual guides and mentors to the adults in their lives. Like their original, Stowe’s Eva, they are precociously wise and precociously forgiving. Their deaths are beautiful and filled with light, even that of the drunkard’s child, where, given his circumstances – ‘a dark and gloomy chamber’, ‘a coarse and wretched pallet’ – by rights no light should shine (63). In Harper’s two other elegies, however, the children are unambiguously black, and their deaths are every bit as brutal as reality could make them. Indeed, Harper took the events in ‘The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio’ and ‘The Martyr of Alabama’ – the latter published after the war – straight from newspaper accounts. In ‘The Slave Mother’, the mother does not pray that her child dies; she kills her rather than let slave catchers have her. In the ‘Martyr of Alabama’, a group of ‘Christless men with reckless hands’ taunt, torture, and finally kill a young black boy when he refuses to dance for them on the Sabbath (361). These death scenes are much closer to that cited by Ivan Karamazov when he defends his position to his saintly brother, Alyosha – a serf child torn apart by his master’s dogs – than they are to the elevated theatrics around little Eva’s death-bed. One could call this Stowe without the evangelical framework – without, that is, little Eva and Uncle Tom – for the lines are among the angriest that Harper ever penned: Christians! Behold that martyred child! His blood cries from the ground; Before the sleepless eye of God, He shows each gaping wound. For Christless men, with reckless hands, Are sowing round thy path The tempests wild that yet shall break In whirlwinds of God’s wrath. (360, 361)

In a poem such as this or ‘The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio’, the full horror of suffering is not denied, even when the poet’s speaker appeals to God. Nor is the

God’s Will, Not Mine

131

question of justice deferred to the afterlife. If the first set of Harper elegies point backwards toward evangelical solutions to the death of innocents, these other poems point forward toward poetry written during and after the Civil War. As Shira Wolosky has eloquently argued, the Civil War itself presented huge theodicean problems. Although evangelism did not disappear from the stage of American literary culture after the war, indeed, it took on new relevance in novels like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s bestseller, The Gates Ajar, it is to this poetry of realism and hard questions, anticipated in Harper’s work, to which I will now turn.

Emily Dickinson, Sarah Piatt and Post-1860 Child-Death Poetry The suppressed conflict between evangelical and political approaches to child death in antebellum women’s writing helps explain how Harper could end up writing two such very different kinds of child elegies. However, it was for two poets coming of age during the Civil War – Emily Dickinson and Sarah Piatt – to make the theodicean problem underlying this conflict into a central thematic concern. Although Dickinson and Piatt differed radically in their cultural backgrounds, both questioned a God who not only was responsible for bad things happening to good people – a dilemma monotheism made unavoidable – but who also demanded that we accept his will as our own. In her own way, each of these poets refused this gesture, declining in Sigourney’s terms, to lay their ‘chastened soul[s] low’ at God’s feet. Where they diverged was in their handling of child death itself. In Dickinson’s poems, the speaker approaches theodicean questions from a child’s perspective, often situating herself as speaker and as victim at the same time. Piatt, who lost three children under the age of ten (and another three as adults), speaks directly as a rifled mother – an angry one at that. If, as Shira Wolosky argues, Dickinson’s concern with theodicy was greatly intensified by the massive blood-letting of the Civil War, the poet’s sensitivity to suffering was the fertile ground in which this concern flourished both before and after the war itself. Dickinson was a connoisseur of pain, studying its effects in herself and in others with relentless compulsion. In a move meant in all likelihood mockingly, she took a much-favoured evangelical formula and became, ‘as a child again’, asking God why she and others suffered and pondering what his answer might be, and why, even in that ‘fair schoolroom of the sky’, his explanations might not suffice (Poems, 215). For children, who lack control over their environment, predictability and security go hand in hand, and one of the things that troubled Dickinson most about God was the seeming randomness with which his punishments were meted out. A ‘Plan’ (Poems, 747) he might have, but he did not share it, and without it ‘Child-Dickinson’ found theodicean rationalizations of his ways as unacceptable as did Ivan Karamazov. Written during the Civil War, ‘It’s easy to invent a Life’ is among Dickinson’s most explicit statements of this concern. Not only does this poem target death as ‘the Gambol [ / gamble] / Of [God’s] Authority’, it also argues that God neither

132

Representations of Death/Paula Bernat Bennett

hears nor cares when the ‘Perished Patterns murmur’ against their fate (Poems, 747). But this same critique can also be found in poems dealing not with the deaths of soldiers but with those of flowers and birds – standard child-surrogates in nineteenth-century women’s verse, not to mention, frequent occasions for child grief. In ‘Apparently with no surprise’, (Poems, 1668), Dickinson calls frost a ‘blond Assassin’, which kills flowers with ‘accidental power’, enacting God’s will and earning his approval. In ‘His bill is clasped’, she uses the same basic narrative when characterizing cats as the ‘Assassin[s]’ of birds. Indeed, God could be viewed as the ultimate cat in Dickinson’s poetry, playing (gambolling and gambling) with patterns he first invents and then destroys, ‘squandering’ the ‘Miracles’ of their lives, their ‘Tune[s]’, for his own amusement (Poems, 1126). It is significant, although unsurprising, that Dickinson placed her own childhood experience at the heart of her apostasy. In an 1877 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she describes how, attending a funeral at a very young age, she mistook the presiding clergyman’s rhetorical question, ‘“Is the Arm of the Lord shortened that it cannot save?”’ for ‘a doubt of Immortality’ that, she claims, had troubled her ever since (Letters, 503). It is often hard to tell how disingenuous Dickinson was being in her dealings with Higginson. But her doubts about immortality – both its reality and, perhaps even more important, its compensatory value – were real enough and when addressing them, she often seems to recreate this primal scene, using a child-like voice to pose her questions. They were child questions, phrased, as she says, with ‘Childish honesty’ (Poems, 546). ‘I wish ‘twas plainer, Loo, the anguish in this world, I wish one could be sure the suffering had a loving side’, she wrote to Louise Norcross in 1862 (Letters, 263), following the death of an Aunt. In ‘Far from Love, the Heavenly Father’, Dickinson foregrounds this last question. To judge experientially by the way God treats children, never mind flowers, birds, and the rest of us, there was no way to distinguish between him and the Devil: Far from Love the Heavenly Father Leads the Chosen Child, Oftener through Realm of Briar Than the Meadow mild, Oftener by the Claw of Dragon Than the Hand of Friend Guides the Little One predestined To the Native Land – (Poems, 1032)

The etymological root of the word ‘dragon’ is ‘draco’ or ‘great snake’ in Greek, as Dickinson, for whom the lexicon was food and drink, surely knew. But what sort of deity was this, who promised heaven, then made even children go through hell to get there? Could we be sure that the discipline God inflicted would someday

God’s Will, Not Mine

133

show its ‘loving side’, or were we being cheated by a God who asked everything and gave nothing in return? ‘The Charms of the Heaven in the bush are superceded I fear, by the Heaven in the hand’, (Letters, 193), Dickinson wrote to Samuel Bowles in 1858. Even earlier, in 1850, she railed against evangelism’s triumvirate virtues – ‘meekness – and patience – and submission’ – in a letter to her friend, Jane Humphrey. ‘[I]t is so much easier to do wrong than right – so much pleasanter to be evil than good, I don’t wonder that good angels weep – and bad ones sing songs’, she observed, piling reversal on reversal (Letters, 30). If meekness, patience and submission were the principal virtues qualifying one for heaven, then was heaven worth the sacrifice? Dickinson, like Piatt, was not about to value Angelhood over life or confuse a dead child with a good one: They wont frown always – some sweet Day When I forget to teaze – They’ll recollect how cold I looked And how I just said ‘Please’. Then They will hasten to the door To call the little Girl Who cannot thank Them for the Ice That filled the lisping full. (Poems, 923)

If on top of this, there is no heaven, then, as Dickinson writes in ‘I know that He exists’, ‘the jest’ would indeed ‘Have crawled too far!’ (Poems, 365). Life, in the sense of living fully, would have been sacrificed to its simulacrum, death-in-life (i.e., meekness, patience and submission), for no good reason at all. For Dickinson there was, as far as I can tell, only one group who were ‘better off dead’ – those ‘too fragile for winter winds / [whom t]he thoughtful grave enclos[ed]’. In one of her most tender elegies, she wrote that for these – the physically non-viable, the utterly neglected – death might not bring ‘heaven’, but it did bring an end to sentience and thus true peace. Such was her stark answer to poems like ‘The Sailor’s Sick Child’ and ‘The Pauper Child’s Burial’: This covert have all the children, Early aged, and often cold, Sparrows, unnoticed by the Father – Lambs for whom time had not fold. (Poems, 91)

When her beloved nephew, Gilbert, died of typhoid in 1883, beyond a few epigrams clearly meant to comfort surviving family members, she had nothing to say. Possibly, because direct experience with child death only occurred late in Dickinson’s career, her approach to it is largely theoretical rather than experiential.

134

Representations of Death/Paula Bernat Bennett

She used it as a vehicle by means of which to think about theodicy, puzzling over ‘childish’ questions that most adults preferred to put away with other childish things. For Sarah Piatt, the situation was painfully different. Born in 1836 on her grandmother’s plantation outside Lexington, Kentucky, and marrying North in 1861, Piatt, whose career spanned fifty years, wrote a substantial body of poetry on child death, most of it in direct response to her own losses. For Piatt, child death did not lead to spiritual transcendence. Rather it tore families apart, it alienated mothers from their remaining children, it left psychic wounds that did not heal, and it brought Piatt’s speaker to question God himself, flatly posing her will against his. With relatively few exceptions, Piatt’s poems on child death, unlike Dickinson’s, fall within nineteenth-century sentimentality’s discursive parameters, but hers is a sentimentality turned in on itself, devouring itself in rage. Like so many Victorian elegies – indeed, maybe more so – Piatt’s poems luxuriate in pain. But unlike their orthodox counterparts, most reject even the possibility of closure, let alone the kind of disciplinary closure Sigourney’s ‘chastened’ submission to God’s will represents. And underneath their dripping maternal surface, they ask the terrible questions that it was, presumably, only the Devil’s – not a nineteenthcentury domestic woman’s – place to ask: what is real? why is God silent? How do we know God exists? Why are we here? Why do we suffer? The key events in Piatt’s evolution as a poet of child death occurred in a year’s space. In August 1873 she lost a newborn, probably to crib death. According to her husband, the baby, who was in perfect health, simply stopped breathing. Less than a year later, in 1874, she lost her first-born son, Victor, in a freak July 4th accident (Bennett xlv–xlvii). In a series of ten poems beginning with ‘Her Blindness in Grief’, published a scant three months after the first death, and ending with ‘The Little Boy I Dreamed About’, three years later, Piatt set the themes she would work and rework throughout the rest of her career as child elegist. Taken together with two, more generalized, poems on consolation, written at the same time, ‘We Two’ and ‘Comfort – by a Coffin’, this series provides a unique appraisal of the psychological consequences of child death for a woman whose faith was too fragile to bear the weight of evangelical consolation. As the first poem’s title, ‘Her Blindness in Grief’, suggests, Piatt’s child elegies focus on the mother and not, as in Dickinson, on the child. Like many Piatt poems, ‘Her Blindness’ opens in medias res, with the speaker responding to a question posed by an unidentified interlocutor. Concerned, apparently, for the state of the speaker’s soul, this person has tried to assuage her grief by reminding her that her child is now an angel in heaven. The speaker wants none of it. Babies, she says, are of the flesh, and our love for them is of the flesh also. No figment of the spiritual imagination can ever take the place of the infant now gone. There is no comfort anywhere. My baby’s clothes, my baby’s hair, My baby’s grave are all I know.

God’s Will, Not Mine

135

What could have hurt my baby? Why, Why did he come; why did he go? And shall I have him by and by? My cry is but a human cry. Who grieves for angels? Do they die? Oh! precious hands, as still as snows, How your white fingers hold my heart! Yet keep your buried buds of rose, Though earth and Heaven are far apart. (49, 51)

Confronted with irrevocable loss, the speaker concludes her poem not with submission but with the flat bitterness of despair – bitterness expressed in a language so laconic, it moves this very Victorian poem straight into the twentieth century hardly missing a beat. Both sentimentality and faith, the final lines declare, end here ‘beneath that lonesome tree’. Frustration, anger and cold reality take their place: The grief is bitter. Let me be. He lies beneath that lonesome tree. I’ve heard the fierce rain beating there. Night covers it with cold moonshine. Despair can only be despair. God has his will. I have not mine. (51)

Running a tonal gamut from the absolutely mawkish – ‘Oh! but to kiss his little feet, / And say to them, “So sweet, so sweet”’, for example (49) – to the sardonically tight-lipped: ‘God has his will. I have not mine’ – ‘Her Blindness in Grief’ may strike many readers as over the top: an uncontrolled outpouring of feeling by a woman writer whose apparent willingness to engage in self-exposure and self-dramatization rivals that, say, of Sylvia Plath; and, indeed, there are parallels here. Most notably, like Plath’s persona, Piatt’s speaker is also a woman wronged; wronged, moreover, by a (masculine) force whose very power so distances him that he can neither sympathize with her needs nor answer them: The sky a shadow is; how much I long for something I can touch! God is a silence: could I hear Him whisper once, ‘Poor child’, to me! God is a dream, a hope, a fear, A vision – that the seraphs see. ‘Woman, why weepest thou?’ One said, To His own mother, from the dead. If He should come to mock me now, Here in my utter loneliness,

136

Representations of Death/Paula Bernat Bennett

And say to me, ‘Why weepest thou?’ I wonder would I weep the less. (49)

But just as Plath’s last poems – highly crafted as they are – are not simply the ravings of a woman whose emotions are beyond her control, so there is more to Piatt’s speaker than a Victorian sentimentalist gone rancid. Indeed, as E.P. Whipple’s review of Piatt’s fifth volume, That New World (1877), in the Boston Globe, suggests, Piatt’s resistance to orthodox consolation was aimed straight at the heart of evangelical theodicy; and when her husband, J.J. Piatt, tried to defend her, he all but ceded the point. ‘To be sure’, he wrote Bayard Taylor of Whipple’s review, ‘there is little of the mouthing of commonplace religious [forms?] of [worship?] characteristic of New England male & female verse writers – “Thy will be done”, “All is well, etc.”’ (as quoted by Bennett, xlvii). Like Dickinson, Piatt was not about to say ‘All is well’, of a world in which the ‘loving side’ of suffering had so little purchase. Nor was she going to hand her child’s life over to God without a fight. By evangelical standards, insofar as this mother’s mourning resists closure (i.e., acceptance), it fails – dismally; and the interlocutor in ‘Her Blindness in Grief’ is quite right to worry over the state of her soul. By the poem’s own standard, however, which privileges the mother’s determination to embrace the reality of her loss, the blindness of her grief is, in fact, another way of seeing. For such a mother, who refuses to let God off the hook, acceptance amounts to a betrayal, both of the child and of herself; a betrayal that is tantamount to putting a remote angel in her baby’s place, and abandoning the warm, living child to the darkness of its grave ‘beneath that lonesome tree’. This Piatt’s speaker refuses to do. Instead, she distances herself with irony, her conclusion mocking the very formula (‘Thy will be done’) that was the backbone of evangelical consolation. To honour her dead child as he was, she unreservedly embraces the reality of what he now is: dead. In the remaining eleven poems in this elegiac sequence, Piatt goes on to track the consequences of the speaker’s inability to accept either evangelical consolation or her loss. What she describes, sometimes with heartbreaking candour, is not just the self-absorption that the mother’s pain produces but the devastating impact this self-absorption has on her surviving children. ‘Sad Wisdom – Four Years Old’, for example, opens with a four-year-old’s pathetic observation: ‘Well, but some time I will be dead; / Then you will love me, too!’ and concludes with the mother’s vain question, posed to herself, affirming her live child’s suspicions: ‘Tell me, tell me, when will we love / The thing the sun shines on?’ (66). In ‘The Favorite Child’ she bluntly states that the dead child is now her favourite (57). In ‘A Butterfly’s Message’, the speaker, guilt-ridden by what she takes to be her personal failures, strikes a desperate bargain: her dead child restored in exchange for her own conversion to (evangelically defined) goodness: ‘I will be very patient now and sweet’, I whispered to the Angel as he flew,

God’s Will, Not Mine

137

‘And lead – through thorns, it must be – little feet Forever nearer you’. But – what I was he knew! (56)

Needless to say, the mother is unable to live up to her end of the bargain. She still ‘frets’ over ‘small want[s]’ or, put more fairly, she still remains all too human: The passionate words, ‘Give back my child’, the vow To the still Angel which last year I made, And broke, were bitterly remembered now. (56–7)

Only in ‘The Little Boy I Dreamed About’, with its wonderful mix of humour, pathos, and bitterness, does she accept her child’s death, but in a way derisive of evangelical culture: ‘“God’s will” is what the Christians say’ (68). Although J.J. Piatt could be remarkably obtuse where his wife’s poetry was concerned, here he had it right: she had nothing but contempt for evangelism’s spiritual bromides. But the contempt itself, as Whipple recognized, was a symptom of something much deeper: a rejection, very like Dickinson’s, of the cold, insensate being that evangelical theodicy made of God. For only such a God could possess the cruelty to discipline his creations in this monstrous way, and then offer them the hope of Heaven or, as Piatt calls it here and elsewhere, ‘Fairy-land’, as compensation (69; see also ‘Keeping the Faith’, 69–70). As Piatt matured and grew away from these first two deaths, she did add new notes to her treatment of the child elegy. For example, she began to treat child death in broader social terms. As she suggests in ‘The Thought of Astyanax beside Iülus’, based on Aeneas’s meeting with Andromache in the Aeniad (103–4; see also n. 77), child loss was something shared over time and place, linking mothers past and present, poor and well-off, or even, as in ‘The Prince Imperial’, royal (89– 90). It was part of a mother’s lot, part of what defined them as human, and, as so many nineteenth-century women poets recognized, child death was something that united women, across the lines of class, culture and race. Some of Piatt’s most poignant poems on child death, poems such as ‘The Thought of Astyanax’ and ‘Rachel at the Lodge’ (123–4) belong to this group. Ultimately, as ‘The Little Boy I Dreamed About’ foreshadows, Piatt did make a separate peace with her losses. When a third Piatt son, Louis, died in 1884 in a boating accident, she treats his death with a tenderness far more suggestive of pagan resignation than of Christian acceptance. In ‘The Round Tower at Cloyne’, a poem that William B. Yeats called ‘perfect after its kind’ (135, as quoted in n. 102), child death is filled with the same kind of mystery that Dickinson associates with Gilbert’s death in her epigrams. It is a mystery into which the dead child is absorbed as a quester after knowledge and, seemingly, it has nothing to do with Christianity per se, let alone with sin and salvation. Not as angels but as morallyneutral, earth-bound ghosts, Piatt’s dead children remained with her, serving, ironically, as a continuing source of sustenance and love. According to Katherine

138

Representations of Death/Paula Bernat Bennett

Tynan, ‘she spent much of her life in a passionate companionship with [them]’, thus, if in no other way, keeping them with her as they had been, not making them into something they were not: evangelical consolation’s angels (275). Piatt’s child-death poetry marked the end of the nineteenth-century women’s tradition of the child elegy. Like poems on maternal woes, poems on child death fell out of favour after 1910 and those that women had produced were, like the women themselves, forgotten. But this does not detract from the importance of this body of work. Nor does it prove that the broader religious problems this verse engaged were resolved. On the contrary, over the past forty years rising evangelical fervor in the US has made issues around child death – from abortion rights and stem cell research to the legal struggle over Terri Schiavo’s body – more central than ever to thinking about religion’s relationship to domestic and public life, polarizing the nation in the process. Reading these poets may help us to understand why. Their work may also shed light on why child death remains such an agonizing problem, so long after the women I have discussed died, and a new breed of women writers thought itself free at last to write about virtually everything, except what it might mean to be a dead child’s mother.

Works Cited Bailey, Margaret. ‘The Pauper Child’s Burial’. The Female Poets of America. Ed. Rufus W. Griswold (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1849), 225. Baym, Nina. ‘Reinventing Lydia Sigourney’, American Literature 62:3 (1990), 385–404. Bennett, Paula. Introduction, Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), xxiii–lvii. Chadwyck-Healey American Poetry Database (2004), http://dlib.Stanford.edu: 6520/text/ampo.html Crain, Patricia. ‘Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865)’. Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. Ed. Eric L. Haralson (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998). Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R.W. Franklin (3 vols, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955). ——, The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward (3 vols, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958). Dostoevsky, Fydor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990). Fulton, William. ‘Theodicy’. Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. James Hastings (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), Volume XII, 289–91. Gould, Hannah. Poems (Boston, Massachusetts: Hilliard, Gray & Co., 1835).

God’s Will, Not Mine

139

Haight, Gordon S. Mrs Sigourney: The Sweet Singer of Hartford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930). Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. Ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: Feminist Press, 1990). Jones, Amanda T. ‘The Transplanted Flower’, Ladies’ Repository, 14 (May 1854), 209. Larkin, Jack. ‘“No Force Can Death Resist”: Reflections on Child and Infant Mortality in American History’, Old Sturbridge Village Online Research Library, (2 February 2005). Piatt, Sarah. Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, ed. Paula Bernat Bennett (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). Sigourney, Lydia Huntley. Poems, 1834. Chadwyck-Healey American Poetry Database. ——, ‘The Sick Child’, Select Poems. 3rd. edn (Philadelphia: Frederick W. Greenough, 1838), 83–5. ——, Pocahontas (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841), 140–41. ——, ‘The Sailor’s Sick Child’. Poetry for Seamen, n.p. Chadwyck-Healey American Poetry Database (1845). ——, ‘The Lost Lily’. Western Home, and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Parry and McMillan, 1854), 342–9. ——, The Man of Uz and Other Poems, 1862. Chadwyck-Healey American Poetry Database. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Tynan, Katherine. Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1913). Wolosky, Shira. Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Wood, Ann [Douglas]. ‘Mrs Sigourney and the Sensibility of the Inner Space’. NEQ (June 1972), 163–81.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 9

‘The little coffin’ Anthologies, Conventions and Dead Children Jessica F. Roberts

Nineteenth-century America’s significant infant mortality rates created a demand from which a far-reaching and multifaceted industry emerged. That industry tailored its services to meet the specific needs of parents bereaved of their children, and codified middle-class ceremonies of death and dying: coffins designed to mask the horror of death were made specifically for young children; post-mortem daguerreotypes and photographs circulated widely; consolation literature flooded the market.1 Thus far, literary critics have come to know this culture principally by way of the study of American sentimentality, which, due to various critical trends, has left important incarnations of this culture unaddressed. In this chapter, I discuss a body of literature that has, for the most part, fallen outside the purview of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century criticism: anthologies of infant elegies. Between the years 1827 and 1899, anthologies of infant elegies were printed in almost every major publishing city in the United States: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati.2 Small religious presses such as Robert Carter and Co. and Anson D.F. Randolph and Co. as well as popular secular houses like Ticknor and Fields, and Osgood and Co. published titles such as Thoughts on the Death of Little Children (1865), Little Graves (1876) and Tears for Little Ones (1878). Some exceeding as many as three hundred and fifty pages in length, anthologies of this sort were variously framed as records of grief, guides of mourning, and defences of religious orthodoxy. The tables of contents include predictable literary celebrities (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Sigourney, James Russell Lowell, Felicia Hemans), literary celebrities whose inclusion is less predictable (John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson), political luminaries (Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams) and countless forgotten and/or anonymous voices grieving the deaths of infants. Taking account of these anthologies modifies the current critical landscape of the economy of consolation in nineteenth-century America and rehistoricizes the production, circulation and reception of the sentimental infant elegy. Above all, nineteenth-century anthologies of infant elegies indicate that, though characterized as the province of women poets by feminist recovery work of the last thirty years, sentimental elegiac verse was not exclusively, or even predominantly, the domain of women.3 The publication and reception histories of poems that

142

Representations of Death/Jessica F. Roberts

appear in these anthologies reveal not only that both men and women composed and published these elegies but that sentimental elegies written by men and women were aesthetically indistinguishable. Moreover, this indistinguishability was integral to the type of reading that, in the context of the anthology, these poems solicited and on which they relied: namely, sentimental identification, the process by which the reader inhabits the poem’s lyric ‘I’. The beguiling anonymity that characterizes these poems – that is, their apparent dislocation from any particular instance of grief – must be understood in relation to their circulation via anthologies and the editorial trends that shaped them. A publication history of these anthologies challenges the feminization of both the sentimental infant elegy and the conventions associated with it and brings to light the complicated interaction between poetic form, editorial conventions, and print media. The ingrained feminization of the sentimental infant elegy is a product of both the masculinist rhetoric of modernists such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and the understandably exclusionary nature of feminist recovery work (i.e., its recovery of women’s writing). If, in the first half of the twentieth century, nineteenth-century sentimental lyrics, of which the sentimental infant elegy is a subgenre, generally fell out of favour because they did not fit the valued aesthetic propagated by modernist poets and New Critics, in the last quarter of the century they held renewed interest because of the crucial role ‘sentimentality’ has played in the recovery and study of women writers. Eliot, Pound, Robert Frost and others made use of a gendered vocabulary of poetic value judgement that described ‘good’ poetry in masculine terms and ‘bad’ poetry in feminine terms: Pound, for instance, despised the ‘balderdash [that turned poetry into] a sort of embroidery for dilettantes and women’ (qtd. in Lentricchia 78). Poems that fit this description – written by both sexes – were denigrated, excluded from college curricula, and quickly dropped out of print. Fifty years later, the same factor which had been the source of their exclusion – their association with the feminine – gave these poems critical currency within the feminist recovery movement, but only insofar as they were written by women. Having become interesting precisely because of their female authorship, poems written by women reentered academic dialogue, leaving all but the most famous of their male counterparts in obscurity. As a result, the defining conventions of the sentimental lyric generally, and the sentimental infant elegy in particular, have been understood as part of a feminine poetics. The tables of contents of anthologies of infant elegies, however, singlehandedly refute the enduring feminization of the nineteenth-century infant elegy. Elegies penned by men and women appear in roughly equal numbers and subscribe to the same set of aesthetic conventions – excessive emotion, unimaginative imagery, religious platitudes, and, most importantly for my purposes, striking anonymity. When these poems are read in the context of the anthologies in which they circulated, it becomes clear that the anonymity of these poems was produced not by gender but by the collusion of the repetition inherent in the form of the anthology (in other words, the fact that the same type of poem appears time and again) and the paradox of personal pronouns (‘I’ and ‘you’ indicate a specificity that their flexibility belies). The accumulation of ‘I’s’ and ‘you’s’ in these

‘The Little Coffin’

143

anthologies and the type of identification they encourage – i.e., the mapping of one’s child onto the poetic dead child and oneself onto the grieving ‘I’ – divorce the poem’s pronouns from any referent apart from those affixed to the poem in the act of reading, thus rendering the poems anonymous. The publication history of an untitled poem that begins ‘Weeping Mother; what can feeble friendship say’ provides insight into precisely this process of sentimental identification and reveals that the very anonymity feminized by twentiethcentury criticism facilitates this identification. ‘Weeping Mother’ appears in an envelope affixed to the cover of Harriet Gould’s Book, which Mary Kete in her recent study Sentimental Collaborations describes as ‘a keepsake album filled with “verbal remembrances”’ (19). Like contemporary memoirs of grief that integrated poems into the memoir itself, and like professionally printed and distributed anthologies of elegiac verse, Harriet Gould’s Book records the reception of the poems by documenting their movement among readers. In the blank pages of this book, Gould and her companions ‘wrote down forty different poems as “fond remembrances” of themselves’ (19). In addition to these remembrances, Harriet Gould’s Book includes eight poems that ‘were written by or to Harriet Gould and by or to her sister-in-law Abigail [Howe] on the occasions of the loss of their children’ (21). Among them is a poem signed ‘Mother’ that is written in the hand of Abigail Howe: Weeping Mother; what can feeble friendship say To sooth the anguish of this mournful day They, they alone, whose hearts like thine have bled Know how the living sorrow for the dead Each tutored voice that seeks such grief to cheer Strikes cold upon the weeping parent’s ear I’ve felt it all alas too well I know How vain all earthly power to hush thy woe God cheer the childless mother, tis not given For man to ward the blow that falls from heaven. I’ve felt it all as thou art feeling now Like thee with stricken heart and aching brow I’ve sat and watch’d by dying beauty’s bed and burning tears of hopeless, anguish shed I’ve gazed upon the sweet but pallid face And vainly tried some comfort there to trace I’ve listen’d to the short and struggling breaths I’ve seen the cherub’s eye grow dim in death Alas I’ve veiled my head in speechless gloom And laid my little ones to rest in the cold and silent tomb. (qtd. in Kete 79)4

Bookended by the apostrophe ‘Weeping Mother’ and the closing signature ‘Mother’, the poem reflects the shared and specific grief of mothers bereaved of their children. ‘They, they alone, whose hearts like thine have bled’ are presumably

144

Representations of Death/Jessica F. Roberts

the vast number of women who lost children during the nineteenth century. Although in two instances the language of the poem seems to embrace the grief of fathers as well (6, 10), the organizing comparison of the poem – the ‘Mother’s’ grief with that of the ‘weeping mother’ – casts those lines, paradoxically, as ‘gender-neutral’ references to the ‘weeping mother’. The speaking ‘I’s’ exhortation to God – ‘God cheer the childless mother’ (9) – turns momentarily away from the weeping mother of her address and, in doing so, situates her among a community of mothers to whom that title might apply. The plea is general rather than specific, encompassing the speaking ‘I’ as well as the apostrophized ‘thee’. In the end, the only consolation that the maternal speaking ‘I’ offers is an account of her own grief: ‘I’ve felt it all as thou art feeling now’ (11). And yet this poem was not composed by Abigail Howe nor by any other ‘Mother’: Charles Sprague, whose collected poetry and prose were published by Ticknor and Fields in 1851, is the author of the poem inscribed in Gould’s book. Sprague’s ‘God Shield Thee, Childless Mother’ (the title under which the poem was published) appeared in both William Simonds Our Little Ones in Heaven (1858) and Rufus Griswold’s The Cypress Wreath (1844), one of which may have been Howe’s source. As Kete rightly asserts, Sprague does not attempt to ventriloquize a weeping mother (81) as, for instance, James Montgomery does in ‘A Mother’s Lament’. Nothing in his poem masks or reveals his gender, although the traces of his gender that are muted by Howe’s signature take on a different significance in light of his authorship: ‘the weeping parent’ of line six is not simply an alternative way of referring to the weeping mother, but a gesture to weeping fathers as well. The convention of reading masculine pronouns as encompassing both genders ironically serves to expel fathers from the poem in Harriet Gould’s Book. In Howe’s transcription, only her signature asserts a specific gender; the minor substantive changes she makes to the poem – the removal of all punctuation and the tailoring of the poem to her circumstance – do not.5 Howe’s transcription of the poem enacts precisely the type of sentimental identification on which anthologies of infant elegies rely, and which they perpetuate. According to Michael Goldman, ‘identification’ is ordinarily understood as ‘(1) [the] presentation of one’s identity (as in ‘Identify yourself!’); and (2) [the] taking on or sympathizing with the traits or feelings of another person’ (11). Sentimental elegies such as ‘God Shield Thee, Childless Mother’ rely on a strange, almost contradictory blending of Goldman’s identifications. They do not invite readers to identify with an already present subjectivity or even an emerging or inchoate subjectivity from which an identity is born, but rather they bid readers to step inside a subject position that gains an identity precisely in that act. The poems present the space of an identity – a speaking ‘I’, a subject position – whose traits and feelings a reader cannot take on because they do not exist apart from those of the reader. When Howe transcribes Sprague’s poem, she does not identify with him; rather she provides an identity for the space he cleared by writing ‘I’. She supplies feelings for the subject position, instead of feeling with its subject. By taking on the ‘I’ of ‘God Shield Thee, Childless Mother’, she displaces the previous (and contemporaneous) antecedents of ‘I’ and stands in their stead.

‘The Little Coffin’

145

‘Identification’, then, is the giving of identity to something rather than a feeling of likeness with something. What exactly is it about Sprague’s poem that enables this type of identification? What facilitates the reading that Howe’s inscription evidences? First, the openness of the language clears a space for the reader to inhabit. The poem vacillates between the grammatically open language of deixis (pronouns, possessive and demonstrative adjectives: words that gesture to their referents rather than name them) and the more specific, though still fairly vague, details of ‘how the living sorrow for the dead’ (4). I, you, this, that, it, they, thine, take on meaning only in the world born of their utterance – the world of Gould’s book, of Simonds’s collection, of various other imaginable publications and transcriptions. ‘This mournful day’ (2) is, of course, many different mournful days – the day of the death of Harriot Gould’s son, of Abigail Howe’s third child, of the child of the ‘young mother’ Sprague had envisioned or intended (if he did) – just as the ‘weeping mother’ (1) is many weeping mothers. Whether or not Sprague composed this poem with a specific, intended addressee in mind is irrelevant. The circulation of his poem within the economy of consolation evacuates it of any intended referents – if there were any to begin with – thus facilitating the identification that further evacuates it. Howe’s alteration of Sprague’s ninth line, intentional or not, from ‘God cheer thee, childless mother’ to ‘God cheer the childless mother’ illustrates this giving way: ‘thee, childless mother’ (the specific object of address) is always ‘the childless mother’ (any childless mother who receives the poem). Like ‘thee’, ‘the childless mother’ is a deictic, a pronoun of sorts. Howe’s alteration is, in a sense, no alteration at all. If the opening question of the poem is read as merely rhetorical – ‘Weeping mother, what can feeble friendship say?’ (1) – the poem appears to proceed in the face of its own futility. Kete reads this poem as a ‘repudiation of the efficacy of sentimental collaboration’, a denial of the speaker’s ‘ability to console her friend despite their shared experience as mothers’ (79).6 Yet the fact that Howe inscribed the poem affirms its efficacy. Common sense says that Howe would not have transcribed this poem for her sister-in-law had she not found solace in it herself. In the end, she occupied both the ‘I’ and ‘thee’ of the poem. Kete notes a similar type of shifting in the composition of poems and epitaphs: ‘Once testaments were written on the stone or on the paper, the writer also becomes the reader’ (68). While certainly true of many poems and epitaphs, it is also true that, in cases such as Howe’s, the reader also may become the writer or, more precisely, the scribe. Howe did not become the recipient of her own words; she became the speaker of someone else’s. Another example of this process of sentimental identification appears in Theodore Cuyler’s The Empty Crib, a memorial to his son ‘little Georgie’, that Cuyler published first in a New York newspaper and expanded to book form in 1869. According to the opening pages of The Empty Crib, Cuyler conceived of this book both as a gift intended for those who had so kindly expressed grief at his son’s death and as a ‘memorial’ that ‘[might] be a solace and a blessing’ to parents, unknown to him, who had endured a similar loss. Like Harriet Gould’s Book and anthologies of infant elegies, The Empty Crib documents not only the circulation of

146

Representations of Death/Jessica F. Roberts

poems but also the way in which these poems were read. Throughout the memorial, Cuyler integrates some poems into his prose and sets off others in discrete sections. Among the poems is one entitled ‘What Will Jesus Say?’ that throws the process of sentimental identification into stark relief by reversing its standard direction. ‘What Will Jesus Say?’ is a first person narration of the grief suffered at ‘our’ loss written by someone Cuyler identifies as ‘an unknown friend from VA’ (45, emphasis mine). Culled most likely from the newspaper publication of ‘The Empty Crib’, Cuyler’s experience of loss becomes, in this poem, the subject of a first person meditation on the loss ‘we’ suffered. His ‘unknown friend’ then sent the poem to Cuyler himself, who subsequently integrated it into the expanded version of his son’s memorial. Just as Cuyler offers up his own experience for others to inhabit through sentimental identification, this ‘unknown friend in VA’ offers Cuyler a representation – at once general and specific, generic and particular – of his own grief. Cuyler is asked to identify with himself at one remove. The poem itself is only slightly interested in ‘little Georgie’, who is named in the poem’s subtitle (‘Lines suggested by the death of Georgie Cuyler’) and quoted in its epigraph. Likely excerpted from Cuyler’s newspaper account of his son’s death, the epigraph records the last words that Georgie Cuyler purportedly spoke: ‘He looked up to his mother and whispered, “Does Jesus love me? What will He say to me when he first sees me?”’ (46, original emphasis). The unknown friend then translates these whisperings into the first two quatrains of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter in the poem: I know that He loves me, mother, I know that He hears me pray; But when He sees me coming, What will Jesus say? (46)7

The idealization of ‘little Georgie’ begun in ‘The Empty Crib’ intensifies in the poem. Cuyler’s ‘unknown friend’ alters not only the meter and word order of Georgie’s last words but their mood and substance as well. The detail that characterized Cuyler’s short narrative of Georgie’s life and death is evacuated in the poem, leaving an idealized mouthpiece uttering (further) editorialized fragments of Georgie’s speech. By including as his/her epigraph a quotation from Cuyler’s already idealized ‘little Georgie’, the poet not only edits Cuyler’s own representation but calls attention to his/her editorial act. Although it is the poem’s centerpiece, the child’s death is buried by elliptical syntax. It also marks the point at which the first person perspective of the poem emerges: ‘Then the door of heaven opened, / That had been ajar all day, / And our darling alone could answer, / “What will Jesus say?”’ (13–16). Two groups of mourners intersect in the possessive adjective ‘our’: both the mourners of the poem (imagined corollaries to the Cuyler family) and the anonymous ‘we’ made possible by the very representation of a poetic dead child, the series of ‘I’s’ who will ‘identify’ with the poem. By integrating this poem into the expanded memorial of his son’s death, Cuyler concurrently inhabits the ‘we’ that his ‘unknown friend’

‘The Little Coffin’

147

has offered to him in the poem – authorizes it, if you will – and offers that ‘we’ to others. Rhetorically speaking, he experiences his own grief at the death of his son vicariously. ‘What Will Jesus Say?’ enacts both the transformation of a dead child into the figure of a dead child and the re-identifying of (the giving of identity to) that figure by sentimental identification. This is precisely the transformation that anthologies of infant elegies relied on, enabled and perpetuated. As widespread vehicles of transmission, anthologies of infant elegies standardized the fact and form of the sentimental dead child poem – hollowing out the figure of the dead child, emptying it of any individual identity so that it might serve as a conduit of grief, and marketing private sorrow such that it might be taken on by others, thereby training an audience to do so.8 These anthologies were at once testaments of grief and training manuals for the grieving. On the one hand, they responded to an extant market and represented a process of grieving that was already taking place; on the other hand, they modified that process in order to perpetuate the market, thus ensuring the future of their own publications. While these anthologies were ostensibly intended to bring ‘solace and […] blessing’ (Cuyler 10), they were also intended to sell. As economic ventures, these anthologies mediated between the highly specific feelings of loss experienced by bereaved parents, the generic qualities of grief that allowed those parents to find solace in the written grieving of others, and the need to differentiate themselves from the growing number of other anthologies. The editorial conventions that shape and take shape in these anthologies both capitalize on and contribute to the poems’ anonymity. Despite the anthologies’ obvious gesture of sympathy, many editors admit the impossibility of sympathy as a way of negotiating the specificity of loss. Mrs L.B. Hancock, editor of Heart’s Ease: A Mother’s Offering (1899), writes in her preface that ‘we dare not tell you of any earthly pity or speak of others who have lost like you […] But while words of sympathy seem such utter mockery at a time like this, we can, at least, mingle our tears’ (7). Here, Hancock uses the singularity of grief to deny the possibility of sympathy, at the same time that she admits the possibility of mingling ‘our tears’ (7). And yet, the ‘tears’ become ‘ours’ only as a result of the sentimental identification made possible by the representation of ‘others who have lost like you’ (7). Indeed, the one-hundred and seventy-six pages that follow Hancock’s disclaimer offer up a multitude of ‘others who have lost like you’ in the form of various lyric ‘I’s’ with which the grieving mothers are encouraged, by the very form of the anthology, to identify. Rather than encouraging sympathy, then, the various elegies in Hancock’s anthology present spaces of identification – speaking ‘I’s’, subject positions – into which the readers are encouraged to step. The tears are ‘ours’ only insofar as the various subject positions are peopled by countless readers and writers. Even as editors struggled to affirm the biographically specific grief of their readers, the anthologies’ ability to function required that grief be general. Paradoxically, then, though they often arise from specific loss, sentimental elegies were dictated by conventions that insisted on and propagated anonymous forms, the anonymity of which was precisely what allowed them to satisfy the specific needs

148

Representations of Death/Jessica F. Roberts

of various readers. Many editors used themselves as the vehicle through which to negotiate specificity and generality. They offered up their anthologies as records of their own mourning and testaments that they, despite the singularity of their own grief, found solace in the writing of others. These editors characterized their collections as assemblages whose guiding principal was the ad hoc compilation of sources of consolation. The assurance that the editors themselves found solace in these particular writings, which they have (conveniently) collected into a single anthology, then, also served as an advertisement for their particular anthology. For instance, Frank Foxcroft believed that the contents of Elizabeth Howard Foxcroft’s Our Glorified (1888) would have ‘special sacredness’ to its readers if they ‘know the comfort which they brought to the heart of the compiler’ (Foxcroft 3). Hancock describes her Heart’s Ease as a collection of ‘“waifs” […] in which a weeping mother found vent for her own sad emotions’ (Hancock 5–6). Hancock’s use of the third person to refer to herself elliptically captures a defining paradox of these anthologies: the weeping mother is Hancock, but it is also any other mother who engages with this anthology via sentimental identification. Had Hancock been quoting a lyric ‘I’, the ‘I’ of any of the elegies anthologized in Heart’s Ease, she would have been able to use the first person pronoun to articulate ‘her own’ emotions, thereby modelling the type of reading encouraged by her anthology. Because she does not choose a lyric ‘I’, she must refer to herself in the third person in order to maintain the generality of grief that makes her anthology something other than the solipsistic grieving of a single weeping mother. The economic concerns and consolatory aspirations of these anthologies could be construed as at odds with the interests of the individual authors of the poems they present. Indeed, the identity of the author and the integrity of the text of these poems were relatively unimportant to anthologizers and readers alike, or so the splicing of poems and rampant absence of authorial attributions suggest. The possibility of claiming these poems as the articulation of one’s own sorrow – using them to ‘[find] vent for [one’s] own sad emotions’ (Hancock 6) – was aided and abetted by the printing and reprinting of these anthologies and the poems they collect, through which the author’s identity and, consequently, the child’s were effectively erased. As Howe’s transcription of Sprague’s ‘God Shield Thee, Childless Mother’ illustrates, the ‘success’ of the anthologies – that is, their ability to offer up myriad ‘I’s’ into which readers might step – relied on severing the author’s connection to the poem. In the context of the anthology, both the author and child become anonymous – if they were not anonymous already. One of the enduring assumptions – hopes, perhaps – about nineteenth-century sentimental elegies is that, even when published anonymously, they were, in fact, written by parents who had lost a child; that, at one point, there were intended referents for the ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘it all’. The implicit violence of displacing the original grieving ‘I’ by way of sentimental identification (and the tacit confession, in doing so, that ‘my’ grief is, to a certain extent, generic) seems, somehow, less anathema to our sensibilities than the possibility that there was no original referent, that the poems were strictly generic. The striking popularity of Longfellow’s ‘The Reaper and the Flowers’, however, which he composed before the death of his daughter Fanny and which appears in no fewer than seven anthologies, suggests that whether or not the

‘The Little Coffin’

149

poem is rooted in experience was, in large measure, irrelevant to nineteenthcentury readers. Among the seven anthologies in which ‘The Reaper and the Flowers’ appears, there is one entitled Echoes of Infant Voices (1849). Opening with ‘The Reaper and the Flowers’ and closing with ‘Resignation’, a poem Longfellow composed after Fanny’s death, Echoes of Infant Voices is instructive both in its singularity and in its similarities to the many other anthologies published in the nineteenth century. Perhaps its most distinguishing feature – and perhaps the reason for its continued citation – is the presence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Threnody’, the elegy for his son Waldo. The publication of ‘Threnody’ in Echoes of Infant Voices is significant because it evidences the permeable boundaries of what has been called ‘sentimental literature’. Whether or not Emerson authorized this publication of ‘Threnody’ is moot; the poem could and did circulate within the economy of sentiment – the economic and literary production, distribution and consumption of emotion represented by these anthologies. Ceasing to think of sentimentality as a genre (i.e. ‘sentimental literature’) and conceiving of it instead as a kind of reading practice that raises, to use Lauren Berlant’s terms, identification to the level of a hermeneutic (278), allows us to explain more convincingly how writers opposed to the culture of sentiment, writers like Emerson, might appear within it. The question, ‘Is “Threnody” a sentimental poem?’ misunderstands the nature of sentimentality – which is not a genre unto itself but a way of reading. ‘Threnody’ is ‘sentimental’ insofar as the anthology positions it as open for sentimental identification. In the context of Echoes of Infant Voices, ‘the darling who shall not return’ (Echoes, 36) no longer refers to Waldo alone. Just as the ‘sweet but pallid face’ in Sprague’s ‘God Shield Thee, Childless Mother’ represents the dead children of Howe and Gould, among others, so too does Emerson’s ‘truant wise and sweet’ (37) stand for the child of any reader who finds echoes of his/her infant in the poem. As if in order to facilitate this type of reading, the editor of Echoes lists the authors’ names in the table of contents but does not affix those names to the text of their poems. Emerson’s name does not immediately precede or follow ‘Threnody’. The separation of the poem from a specific identity (i.e., the poet’s) facilitates the type of sentimental identification by which readers adopt as their own ‘wondrous child […] the hyacinthine boy’ (36–7). Although the presence of ‘Threnody’ distinguishes Echoes from other anthologies, the fact that almost half of the poems included either had been or would be reprinted in other anthologies evidences both the self-perpetuating nature of the industry and Echoes’s inextricable place inside that industry. Often once mourners themselves, editors drew heavily on the contents of other anthologies when assembling their own. The anthology’s dedication reads as follows: TO THE BEREAVED AND SORROWING PARENT, THIS LITTLE VOLUME IS DEDICATED

150

Representations of Death/Jessica F. Roberts

If it shall serve to soften the shadows of sad hours, by awakening the echoes of pleasant voices that have passed from the earth, or to brighten the faith of the stricken and wounded heart, it will have accomplished its mission, – fulfilled its purpose.

As the titles of the poems in the table of contents indicate – ‘Farewell to the Dead’, ‘Thoughts beside the Corpse of a Beautiful Child’, ‘To a Dying Infant’ – the poems in this anthology do not seek to capture the actual ‘voices’ of infants, living or dead, but rather to awaken multiple forms of echoes, articulated by and resonating through shared expressions of grief. Though authorized by the deaths of children, the poems clearly ‘echo’ the voices of the mourning ‘parent-poets’. The ‘echoes’ of the collection, then, resonate with multiple echoes: the readers hear both themselves and their children speak within the poetic utterances – the multiple ‘echoes’ – of the poems. The form of the poem itself echoes a set of conventions that enables a seemingly endless chain of echoes. Indeed, the ‘success’ of these poems depends on the substitution of a series of echoes for the ‘original’ voices of infants and parents. The echoes are both the cause and effect of the elegies. Far from simply an abstraction deduced from the title of the anthology, the process of transforming infants into infant echoes is a process that the anthology itself enacts; that is, the anthology transforms specific children mourned into the form of a child open for sentimental identification. Two poems entitled ‘Casa Wappy’ and ‘Wee Willie’ follow ‘The Reaper and the Flowers’ and ‘Threnody’ in Echoes. The former is attributed to David Macbeth Moir, the latter to Blackwood’s Magazine. A popular nineteenth-century Scottish poet-physician, Moir published elegies regularly in Blackwood’s Magazine as well as numerous anthologies, thus putatively offering up the grief he felt over the death of his children for public consumption. After Moir’s death, a (sympathetic) reviewer described the first child Moir lost, Charles (a.k.a. ‘Casa Wappy’) as ‘well known to the world, and especially to many a mother’s tender heart, by the touching poetical commemoration of his grieving father’. In addition to the anthologies in which ‘Casa Wappy’ appeared, it also appeared in Moir’s 1851 collection Poetical Sketches along with several other elegies, among them ‘Wee Willie’. According to my research, the editor of Echoes alone included both these poems in a single collection – the elegies of two brothers who died within a month of one another – but in attributing the latter to Blackwood’s Magazine, s/he obscures the relationship between the two. ‘Wee Willie’ actually refers to the death of Moir’s first son, although in poem he is referred to as ‘Charlie’. The presence of both these poems and the inconsistency in their attribution illustrates contradictory trends in the publication of poems in anthologies of infant elegies and the consequences of those trends. On the one hand, the editor of Echoes included a footnote that identified ‘Casa Wappy’ as a child ‘snatched away [from the poet] after a brief illness’ (56), thus confirming the relationship between the poet and the child. The reviewer who described Moir’s son as ‘well known to the world’ confirms that even though this poem was circulating within an economy that would have evacuated the space of the dead child, this poem did, to a certain degree, maintain its specificity.9 Whether or not the poem’s footnote was intended simply to clarify the meaning of the words ‘Casa Wappy’, it effectively foregrounds the

‘The Little Coffin’

151

paternal relationship Moir had with the apostrophized dead child of the poem. Although that relationship is not necessary (and may even be undesirable) in order for the poem to function sentimentally, there are several instances scattered throughout anthologies of this sort, in which similar confirmation regarding the poet’s relationship to the apostrophized dead child appears. And yet, the editor of Echoes attributes another elegy by the same father-poet to its source of publication – Blackwood’s Magazine – rather than its author, thus divorcing it from the specific context of Moir’s life and thereby concealing the relationship between the two poems. Irrespective of its motivations, the effects of this editorial decision are particularly striking because ‘Wee Willie’ was first anthologized and attributed to Moir in Light on Little Graves (1848) a year before Echoes was published. The former publication verifies the fact that specific information regarding the authorship of ‘Wee Willie’ was available, even in the event of its being published anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine. Why did the editor of Echoes choose to attribute the poem to Blackwood’s Magazine rather than Moir? We may never know. But we do know the specific effects of that decision: severed from Moir’s identity, ‘Wee Willie’ becomes an orphan of sorts, to be claimed through sentimental identification. Attributing this poem to Blackwood’s Magazine obscures not only the relationship between Moir and ‘Wee Willie’, but also between ‘Wee Willie’ and ‘Casa Wappy’. Thus, the existence of another echo – an exchange between the ‘voices’ of two brothers – is silenced. ‘Wee Willie’, having been rendered anonymous as a result of an editorial decision, stands next to an elegy to his brother, and the blood relation between the two children is invisible. This invisibility is precisely the point: the more anonymous the poems are the more open they are to sentimental identification. Hancock captures this idea beautifully when she characterizes the poems in her collection as ‘“waifs”, […] in which a weeping mother found vent for her own sad emotions’ (5–6). According to the OED, a ‘waif’ is both ‘a piece of property which is found ownerless’ and ‘an unowned or neglected child’ (3667). The poems are at once unclaimed bits of property to be claimed by readers – and anthologists – and made their own, and ‘unowned or neglected child[ren]’ that stand in the stead of children who have died. To be clear, my intention is not to argue that the editor of Echoes decided to erase Moir’s name and the names of other poets in order to facilitate sentimental identification. This line of argument would have difficulty accounting for the editor’s decision to attribute several other poems, including one of Moir’s, to their authors. Rather I would like to point to a trend in the editing of these anthologies of the striking lack of interest in the author and the consequences of that lack. More or less egregious instances of editorial inconsistency may be found in a number of the other anthologies. Light on Little Graves attributed Sigourney’s ‘Death of an Infant’ to Hemans, long after the confusion surrounding the poem’s authorship had subsided.10 William Simonds published the same poem by Felicia Hemans twice in Our Little Ones in Heaven under two different titles, ‘Dirge for a Child’ and ‘No Bitter Tears for Thee’, and attributed the former to Hemans and the latter to no one. Moir’s ‘Weep Not for Her’ was attributed to Blackwood’s Magazine, to ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’, to no one and (eventually) to Moir himself.

152

Representations of Death/Jessica F. Roberts

Poems were consistently published under various titles, and their authors were recognized willy-nilly – something that makes the study of them challenging, to say the least, and that may be responsible, in part, for the continued feminization of the genre. Re-historicizing the production, circulation and reception of infant elegy reveals that the poems defy one type of identification – the scholarly identification of authors and places of publication – because they have been rendered anonymous by a print culture that primed them for an entirely different type of identification – sentimental identification that fused the reading and written ‘I’s’. Delineating the publishing histories of various poems is illuminating not because it eradicates the anonymity of the poems but because it reveals that together the formal components of the nineteenth-century infant elegy, the transmission of those poems by way of anthologies of infant elegies, and the editorial trends that dictated those collections, render these poems anonymous.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

For studies on nineteenth-century cultures of mourning, see Mary Kete; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: 1982); Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America (Stony Brook: 1980); Karen Sanchez-Eppler, ‘When We Clutch the Hardest: On the Death of a Child and the Replication of an Image’. Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. Ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley: 1999) 64–85. Thus far, I have identified fifteen collections that I place under the umbrella term ‘anthology’. The poems that I refer to in this article are composed exclusively of consolation literature written about children. Thoughts on the Deaths of Little Children contains a long prose section before the poems, but the poems are listed separately in the table of contents and take up the majority of the book’s pages; Our Little Ones in Heaven also contains fragments of prose work. See, for instance, Cheryl Walker, The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900 (Bloomington: 1982); Emily Stipes Watts, The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (Austin: 1977); Joanne Dobson, ‘Reclaiming Sentimental Literature’, American Literature 69 (June 1997) 263–88; Elizabeth Petrino, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820–1885 (Hanover: 1998). I quote the entire text of the poem, lines 1–20, and cite the poem by line number henceforth. For instance, whereas Howe’s transcription closes with the line, ‘And laid my little ones in the cold and silent tomb’, Sprague’s poem concludes, ‘And laid my first-born in the silent tomb’. Kete’s understanding of the lyric as representing and/or engendering a subjectivity is at the root of our differences. Whereas she understands Sprague as ‘speaking for himself as a father and a parent’ (81), I would suggest that the poem does not present any evidence of a self. The circulation of the poems evacuate any remnants of self, if they were there to begin with. For recent asubjective readings of the lyric, see Yopie Prins, Victorian

‘The Little Coffin’

153

Sappho (Princeton: 1998) and Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: a Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: 2005). 7 I quote lines 1–4 from Cuyler’s The Empty Crib and cite the poem by line number henceforth. 8 In a longer version of this essay, I spend more time developing the self-perpetuating nature of this industry: trained by the bereavement literature they read, mourners went on to write memoirs and edit anthologies out of that training, continuing trends that proved economically successful, and terminating those that did not. In doing so, these readers-turned-writers/editor trained yet another generation of mourners who enacted the same cycle yet again. 9 Although the refrain ‘Casa Wappy’ does maintain specificity, the fact that the refrain can easily be cut off from individual stanzas enabled mourners to adopt it easily as their own. See, for instance, Meta Lander, The Broken Bud (New York: 1851). 10 For a description of this confusion see Gordon Haight, Mrs Sigourney: The Sweet Singer of Hartford (New Haven: 1930), 79–82.

Works Cited Berlant, Lauren. ‘The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment’. The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Cuyler, Theodore. The Empty Crib; A Memorial of Little Georgie (New York: Robert Carter, 1869). Foxcroft, Elizabeth Howard (ed.). Our Glorified: Poems and Passages of Consolation, Especially for Those Bereaved by the Loss of Children (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1889). Goldman, Michael. On Drama: Boundaries of Genre, Borders of Self (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. ‘Feeling for the Fireside: Longfellow, Lynch and the Topography of Poetic Power’. Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. Ed. Mary Chapman and Glen Hendler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Hancock, Mrs L.B. (ed.). Heart’s Ease: A Mother’s Offering (Cincinnati: Curtis and Jennings, 1899). Kete, Mary Louise. Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). Lentricchia, Frank. The Modernist Quartet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). M.A.H. (ed.) Echoes of Infant Voices (Boston: W.M. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1849). ‘Moir, David Macbeth’. A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen 12 June 2005 OED (Oxford: Oxford University, 1991).

154

Representations of Death/Jessica F. Roberts

Simonds, William (ed.). Our Little Ones in Heaven (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1858).

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Nels Christensen and Tricia McElroy for their helpful suggestions and keen insights.

PART 3 Cultures of Death

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 10

The Fashion of Mourning Ann Schofield

Mourning is a universal facet of human cultures. From the flaming funeral pyres of the Greek warrior to the immolated widow on the Hindu suttee, it is difficult to imagine a culture either in the past or present that does not commemorate its dead in some culturally prescribed way and make provision for tribes, families and communities to express their grief. Yet, this universal impulse to mark the passage from life to death is accompanied by a tendency to distinguish status, social role and gender through funeral and mourning rituals. Greek warriors merit funeral pyres but not Greek slaves, Indian widows cast themselves onto funeral pyres but not widowers. Mourning customs bridge the gulf between private emotions of grief and social expectations, offering a script for a period of time following a funeral and casting remaining family members in roles appropriate to their closeness to the deceased. Mourning practices provide insight into a culture’s beliefs about what is valued in an individual, and about the landscape facing the individual as he or she crosses the border between life and death. The ancient Egyptians, for example, filled the tombs of their rulers and elites with objects they would need in the afterlife, showing us they thought the afterlife looked very much like the world that they knew. The Christian and European traditions that shaped much of American culture in the nineteenth century promised a rich and rewarding afterlife contingent upon one’s behaviour and accomplishments while living. Textual evidence from eulogies, funeral sermons, tombstone inscriptions and other memorials tells us much about the virtues valued in women and men during the time between the founding of the American Republic and the beginning of World War I.1 Equally significant, though, are the mourning rituals and material aspects of mourning that essentially were cultural articulations that identified the American bourgeoisie, as well as those articulations that set that class apart from others. Who were the American bourgeoisie? A facile yet utterly incorrect answer would be ‘everyone’. Certainly republican ideals claimed to include everyone in their promise of equality, yet even on the eve of the Revolution, American society was a hierarchical structure that included merchant elites and industrialists, artisans and labourers, indentured servants and slaves (Beckert). As the nation emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, white, middle-class women and men played different yet complementary roles in the emerging nation – men in public roles and women doing the emotional and managerial work of the home.

158

Representations of Death/Ann Schofield

What distinguished American political culture then (and now) was the powerful ideological claim of social and economic mobility. Despite clearly demonstrable structural barriers of race and class, American belief in limitless possibilities characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A capacious middle class came to include farmers, artisans, merchants, industrialists, professionals, teachers and more. Both industrial and agricultural workers frequently expressed aspirations to join that class. As Sven Beckert and others have demonstrated, however, the American bourgeoisie was neither as large nor as limitless as ideologically promised. Beckert convincingly shows that by the late 1870s northern and southern elites, merchants and manufacturers and their families considered themselves part of a coalition ‘brought [...] together under the banner of property rights’ (299). They defined themselves by a shared antipathy toward the labouring classes and a taste for the style and consumer goods of the Gilded Age. And, as Beckert points out, this class fulfilled the prescient insight offered by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1832 of: the bourgeois nature of nineteenth-century United States society, including the possibility that the emancipatory and universal promises of such a society could narrow, once the wielders of capital accumulated fortunes, institutions, and positions of power. (332)

It should come as no surprise, then, that this self-conscious class gave rise to a society marked by cultural articulations that brought them together, as well as cultural articulations that set them apart from others, in other words, identity and distinction. While men of this class accumulated capital, women, as Beckert points out, ‘spun the threads that held these families together, both emotionally and economically, constituting what was one of the most important links of midnineteenth-century businesses’ (332).2 Despite emancipatory trends for women in the nineteenth century – growing access to higher education and gradually liberalized property laws – the middle-class woman was, still, largely restricted to home and hearth. Indeed, given her role in reproduction, consumption and the moral authority of the ‘angel in the house’ it is difficult to imagine her outside of her family role.3 Mourning offers a unique opportunity to observe how the bourgeois woman facilitated the links between private and public space. Anthropologist Mamphela Ramphele, although writing about South Africa, aptly characterizes the meaning that differential emblems of mourning have for women and men more generally. Ramphele observes that the widower’s status ‘is the ultimate recognition that a man’s identity in most patriarchal societies is perceived and presented as complete in itself, independent from the women in his life, including his wife’ (100). By the nineteenth century, women in western cultures and in particular the widow assumed the role of principal mourner, acknowledging the cultural work assigned to their role as representative of family respectability and fortunes. What led to this apotheosis of mourning in the sentimental culture of nineteenth-century America? Not surprisingly, seventeenth and eighteenth-century American mourning customs among white colonists came from England. Puritans,

The Fashion of Mourning

159

certain of the existence of an afterlife although notably anxious about their place in it, thought ‘excessive’ sadness was unchristian, and saw the wearing of black mourning garments as being superstitious and ‘heathenish’. As with much else in Puritan culture, these attitudes became diluted, as Massachusetts became a complex mercantile society. When Boston’s wealthiest merchant, Samuel Shrimpton, died in 1698, his funeral looked much like that of his English contemporaries: The tailor Peter Barbour fashioned four black morning suits and ‘westcoats’ for Shrimpton’s brothers-in-law [...] and son [....] [t]he seamstress Anna Peacock sewed a black dress and hood for Madame Shrimpton. John Roulston made a coffin including ‘the frame for the coat of arms and fitting it up’. (Hunter 73)

As was the English custom, all invited to the funeral received a pair of gloves (one minister amassed 3000 pairs in 32 years). Guests attending a funeral wore gloves as well as scarves, mourning ribbons and mourning cloaks, and they frequently received mourning rings at the feast following the funeral. As historian Phyllis Whitman Hunter notes, these ‘elaborate preparations [...] attest to the importance of goods in representing wealth and gentility’ (73). Mourning assumed a political valence during the period of the American Revolution. In 1764, Boston merchants agreed to forgo ‘elaborate and expensive mourning rituals’ (Hunter 160). Ten years later that informal agreement broadened as the Continental Association pledged that ‘on the death of any relative or friend, none of us [...] will go into any further mourning-dress than a black crape or ribbon on the arm or hat, for gentlemen and a black ribbon and necklace for ladies’ (Hunter 160). Signers throughout the colonies also vowed to ‘discontinue the giving of gloves and scarves at funerals’. As Hunter notes, ‘Revolutionary values had inverted the connection between character and display that elaborate funerals betokened’ (160). The death of Washington in 1797 stimulated a market for mourning iconography in the United States and allowed those with republican scruples about ostentation to display their virtue in homage to the Founding Father. As Robin Jaffee Frank points out, ‘[m]any echelons of society, including those who may have hesitated to commission a private watercolor-on-ivory portrait from a leading miniaturist, could afford to display their loyalty to Washington’s memory’ (110). Ironically, this republican impulse also allowed the choice of an ‘art form associated with the English court’ which ‘offered sitters the patina of established wealth [...] their preciousness not only satisfied a superficial desire for valuable goods but also expressed a deeper wish to carry a picture of a loved one’ (Frank 110) The material aspects of mourning – clothing, miniatures and more – joined with a powerful sentimental culture that defined the American bourgeoisie. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a culture of sentimentality, which ran parallel with revolutionary fervour, began to put down roots in American soil. As complex as the roots of sentimentality were, its ideas about death and the afterlife were clear – death was to be welcomed and embraced for it signalled a happy union with a loving God, while at the same time the loss of a loved one continued to be

160

Representations of Death/Ann Schofield

experienced as emotionally devastating. The material manifestations of these twinned beliefs began to coalesce into what became an elaborate, almost fetishistic concern with mourning. In fact, Phillipe Ariès claims that during this period, ‘mourning was unfurled with an uncustomary degree of ostentation’ (qtd. in Stannard, 168). The nineteenth-century cult of death, on both sides of the Atlantic, found expression in literary romanticism, in the garden or rural cemetery movement and in the development of the etiquette and the material culture of mourning. Etiquette manuals, which were something of a growth industry in the rapidly urbanizing United States, mandated the period and apparel for appropriate mourning. Widows bore the heaviest burden: [...] full black mourning for two years – non-reflective black Parramatta and crape for the first year of deepest mourning, followed by nine months of dullish black silk, heavily trimmed with crape, and then three months when crape was discarded. Widows were allowed to change into the colours of half-mourning, such as grey and lavender, black and white, for the final months. (Jallard, 300)

A widow’s bonnet featured a long black veil and her handkerchiefs were trimmed with black. Degrees, shades and the time period of mourning were assigned according to the permutations of familial relations, with specific prescriptions for parents, the child, in-laws, grandparents, and siblings, and for the young, the middle-aged, and the unmarried. Inadequate or inappropriate mourning carried a high social cost. Mrs John Sherwood explained in her helpful guide, Manners and Social Usages, in 1884: If one did not mourn well, that is if one did not display grief in every acceptable mode, this demonstrated a lack of respect for the deceased [...] to go to the opera, or a dinner, 4 or a party, before six months have elapsed, is considered heartless and disrespectful.

The cynical twenty-first-century reader may dismiss this injunction as simple evidence of social anxiety. Historian Karen Halttunen, who has written extensively on nineteenth-century American culture, sees a deeper meaning. She would caution us that Sherwood’s advice and the hundreds of manuals that carried similar warnings provide a useful window onto the ideas and inner life of our cultural ancestors. Halttunen believes that mourning, a ‘genteel performance’ of a particularly ‘deep sensibility’, was a key component of a sentimental culture that marked the American bourgeoisie. After all, Halttunen reminds us, mourning gave Victorian Americans the ‘occasion for two of the deepest “right feelings” in human experience: bereavement, or direct mourning for the dead, and sympathy, or mournful condolence for the bereaved’ (134–5). Proper mourning marked out the Christian: ‘[...] the heathen and the jew [sic] howled in impious anguish over their departed loved ones because they had no hope of resurrection’ (134–5). In addition to distinguishing the middle class and, by implication, the white Christian from the socially less desirable, mourning could also ‘form good character and [...] establish bourgeois respectability’ (134–5).

The Fashion of Mourning

161

These impressive claims – that mourning could identify, indeed could shape moral character – help us to see why correct mourning required more than wearing black dresses and bonnets. The ‘uncustomary degree of ostentation’ that Ariès refers to included accessories – gloves, umbrellas, stockings, fans, walking sticks – as well as casting miniature portraits and making jewellery from the hair of the deceased. It required time, knowledge and, to be done with appropriate style, a substantial income. Even before the middle of the nineteenth century the paradoxical nature of mourning practices seemed clear: its representation of a sincere and deeply felt emotional state on the one hand, and on the other, its function as an index of social class, which set apart those who had the resources to mourn well from those who may have felt deeply but could not afford elaborate mourning. Halttunen’s brilliant analysis of American sentimental culture, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 explains the threat posed by fashion in general: ‘Behind the fashion impulse lay the middle-class American’s desire to set himself or herself apart from the democratic masses by establishing artificial social distinctions’ (64). In other words, the tension between sincerity and display struck at the very heart of republican virtue and identity. Carried to its logical end, such growing class distinctions might mean a return to the shallow aristocratic forms of Old Europe. Halttunen’s reading of funeral sermons, bereavement manuals, and the vast material culture of mourning leads her to conclude that ‘[m]ourning was [...] viewed as a means to form good character and thus to establish bourgeois respectability’ (152). But mourning, since it involved both material display and genteel performance, carried within it the seeds of its own destruction, at least as a reliable indicator of sincere sentiment. By mid-century, Halttunen concludes, ‘the Victorian Cult of mourning was becoming an important ritualistic expression of bourgeois pride and self-confidence [...] the American middle classes learned to embrace the art of social performance as a mark of cultural dominance’ (152). Throughout the nineteenth century, then, mourning rituals expressed the sentimental culture of the American bourgeoisie via a social performance mediated through objects – clothing, jewellery and miniature portraits. Both the task of performance and the display of the objects largely fell to women. Two images of the nineteenth-century widow come to mind; the first is of the forlorn, impoverished woman forced to support herself and her children without any assistance, after the death of her spouse. The second image is that of the lady of fashion, continuing to display her husband’s wealth even after his death. While we might see both of these figures engaged in ‘social performance’, it is the lady of fashion who reinforces most strongly Halttunen’s point about cultural dominance. It is she who had access to the maisons de deuil such as Besson and Son of Philadelphia, and she who frequented urban department stores, all with departments of mourning. The bourgeois woman subscribed to Godey’s Ladies’ Book and so would have been familiar with the journal’s discussion of the dangers that mourning posed to sentimental expression. Godey’s cautioned readers to shun the example of the hypocrite who ‘puts on black for a third cousin, because becoming, and lays it aside at Newport for a fancy ball; or counterfeits it by a mockery of

162

Representations of Death/Ann Schofield

white tarleton, with violet streamers, and marabout feathers tipped with the same shade; or goes glistening in bugles and jet to the gayest entertainments’ (March 1857, 286). Yet, cautious as Godey’s was, Harper’s Bazaar and the Pictorial Review might also number the bourgeois woman as a subscriber, so she would have known the delights of poring over their finely drawn models in all stages of fashionable mourning (see illustrations). Mourning jewellery offers a telling example of the weaving together of fashion, display and sentiment that characterized the cult of mourning. Jewellery was regulated as strictly as all other aspects of mourning. Tradition allowed unpolished jet, a dense black coal, to be fashioned into bracelets, broaches and other forms of jewellery and worn to accompany the deepest period of grief. Later in the mourning season, polished jet-trimmed fashionable mourning costumes, along with pearls and glass beads could be found in rings and pins. Jet was fashioned into tiaras for eveningwear, as was cast iron. The most striking type of mourning jewellery, though, actually came from the body of the deceased. Mourners fashioned the hair of deceased loved ones into bracelets, broaches, watch chains and other jewellery items. As Helen Sheumaker, who has written extensively on various kinds of nineteenth-century hair work, argues, ‘[h]air work was the self commodified’ (4). Of course, once joined, the ‘self’ and commodification present the same challenge to sentimental sincerity outlined by Halttunen. Sheumaker points out that ‘[i]n modern Western cultures hair has often been used as a memento of the dead, the phenomenon of working hair of the dead and positioning it as central to the practice of mourning is clearly a late eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury development’ (225–7). By the nineteenth century, ‘[o]utward displays of sorrow invited the public eye’ (225–7). The sight of hair might bring tears to the eyes of someone with appropriate sentiment and sensibility. The hair of deceased friends and family members also found its way into the exquisitely painted miniature portraits described by Robin Jafee Frank. Frank found that hair could be frequently found ‘chopped up or dissolved to paint mourning miniatures [...] or simply displayed on the reverse of a portrait’ (10). Just as Halttunen and Schumacker find cultural meaning in the varied accoutrements of mourning, Frank points to the value of miniatures both as sentimental objects and as public representations of wealth and status. Eighteenth-century gentlemen and ladies often wore the miniature portrait of a loved one. As men’s clothing became more sombre and less ornamented, women alone wore miniatures and men, if they chose to carry a portrait, sequestered it in a pocket or on a watch chain (sometimes made of braided human hair). Thus, it became ‘the lady’s role to publicly display on her person the family’s wealth and affections embodied in one potent symbol, the miniature’ (Frank 16). Frank explains the emerging confluence between nineteenth-century American middle-class sentimental culture and the mourning miniature: The exaggerated rhetoric of the sentimental had a profound impact on mourning iconography. Mourning is a culturally learned form of language [...] Mourning miniatures express a private grief in a public language that was understood by the mourner’s family, friends, and neighbors. Classical forms, Christian iconography, moral philos-

The Fashion of Mourning

163

ophy, and personal feelings were layered over these incredibly small scenes of idealized simplicity, often painted with dissolved or chopped hair and adorned with tears in the form of seed pearls. The archetypal imagery of mourner, urn, tomb, plinth, and trees would be chosen from sample devices by maker and client and then arranged to fulfill an individual need [...] The common choice of a female mourner with head bent and eyes downcast in selfless devotion also reflects the role of women as the symbolic embodiments of moral virtue, the keepers of the domestic sphere [...] As part of a pedagogical approach enforcing moral values through domestic arts, the motif of a female mourner became a cliche on needlework and watercolors made by girls and women. (123–4)

By mid-century, mourning allowed the middle-class American woman to have it both ways: the moral certitude of virtuous display paired with the fashionable assurance of mirroring European traditions. Perhaps the greatest boost for mourning traditions occurred in 1861, when Queen Victoria and her court went into the deepest mourning following the death of her consort Prince Albert. The Queen remained dressed in black until her own death in 1901. Victoria, an exemplar of domesticity, made an ideal model for the mourning woman. Ironically, during this time of strong royal sanction for mourning, established mourning and funeral traditions met with the strongest criticism in England. The National Funeral and Mourning Reform Association, established in 1875, criticized the ostentation of expensive funerals and, by 1893, Lady Colin Campbell, a prominent etiquette writer, pointed out that good taste had abolished ‘the love of show and parade’ in funerals (qtd. in Jalland 200). Pat Jalland, author of Death in the Victorian Family, shows the ‘overwhelming’ agreement of middle and upper-class families with funeral reformers and points out that the ‘extravagant Victorian funeral, which critics so loved to condemn, was chiefly a feature of the first half of the century’ (201). Despite the ubiquity of the Queen’s mourning, Jalland also sees moderation in mourning clothing. A variety of black fabrics became acceptable for use in mourning dress (to the extent that Courtauld’s, whose fortunes were built on crape, saw profits decline in the 1880s) and, even before the Great War put an end to Victorian modes of mourning, there was a decline in the excesses of mourning traditions. Mourning is a valuable cultural indicator of gender and family roles in the nineteenth century. It can also demonstrate boundaries and fault-lines within culture. Were the sentimentalists who embraced the ‘authentic’ emotions of grief and melancholy the same as the women in jet and black lace at Newport? Were those Americans who shadowed the traditions of Victoria aware of the vigorous critique of mourning excess in Victorian England? Did mourning assume the same political valence during the American Civil War as during the American Revolution? How did mourning function amidst the horrific losses of the Civil War? Not surprisingly, Southern antebellum culture found multiple meanings in mourning traditions. Material evidence from the antebellum South indicates that elite Southern white women in particular, fully participated in the culture of

164

Representations of Death/Ann Schofield

mourning by observing the stages of full, half and light mourning accessorized by black fans and parasols, along with black-bordered stationary. Civil War blockades limited the ‘style and manner’ of mourning, though, during the very time it was most needed. Southern white women ‘made do’ by borrowing clothing or dying what they had. In a well-publicized gesture of feminine solidarity, Mrs Robert E. Lee lent her heavy mourning veil to the mother of a young officer killed in Virginia. Despite the material deprivations of the war, a correspondent for a New York newspaper reported from Richmond soon after the Union occupation, that ‘the women are nearly all dressed in mourning’ and noted also that the cemetery ‘[which] has been enlarged to nearly twice its size – contains sixty thousand new graves’ (qtd. in Loughridge and Campbell 24). How long did mourning traditions persist in the United States following the Civil War? Certainly, there is evidence that the black-garbed widow persisted as a figure for a longer period in the US than in Europe. One reason for this could be the embrace of mourning by the bourgeoisie as a defining ritual of that class. Another is the strikingly different experiences of Europe and America during World War I. As shocking as the reality of modern warfare was for Americans, US losses seemed almost trivial compared to the numbers of British soldiers killed. The British war dead came from all levels of society and heavy civilian costs were experienced on European rather than American soil. Mourning traditions therefore seemed inadequate to the stupendous losses of the Great War. The discourse of mourning throughout most of the nineteenth century circulated around familiar poles of sentimentality and sincerity. Did one’s costume and behaviour represent deeply felt emotion, or was the mourner only carefully following a script? By the end of the century this tension seemed to have been resolved in an unexpected way. Commentators on the propriety of mourning expressed less concern with the link between inner emotional state and outward appearance, and were more interested in the fashion of mourning. Take for example Harper’s Bazaar of 1898, which enunciated the conventional directions for appropriate mourning: ‘Widows wear the deepest mourning that is worn, and their veils are longer and the hem deeper’ (27 August, 728). The commentator then moves into the language of fashion with the comment, ‘[t]he first evening gown that a woman wears when she goes out into society after she has been in mourning is generally of crape. Some most effective dinner gowns have been made of crape heavily trimmed with dull jet’. A sketch of five hourglass-figured women, in various stages of mourning, accompanied the text and filled most of the page (728). In 1907, the Pictorial Review illustrated an essay entitled ‘Smart Mourning’ with three sketches, two of doe-eyed young women with lushly piled light hair wearing crepe and crepe-covered hats with veils and a ‘necklace of mourning jet with pendant’. The writer announces with patriotic pride, ‘[i]n this country, we allow ourselves considerably more latitude in the matter of mourning customs than is permitted in most foreign countries [...]’ This ‘latitude’ consisted of new and lighter materials used in mourning costumes so the mourner avoids being ‘swathed in crepe like a humanized dirge’. Flexible as the author believes rules of mourning for Americans have become, he or she still cautions ‘young and fashionable

The Fashion of Mourning

165

women’ who ‘go a bit too far’ when they ‘appear in coquettishly shaped bonnets which do away with the whole spirit of mourning’. That spirit the writer defines as ‘Formality’. Formality does not preclude fashion, though – little ‘petal confections’ of evening shoes, Cavalieri mesh hosiery, white violets and lilies-of-the-valley trim for ‘very fetching’ hats all receive the approval of ‘Smart Mourning’s’ author. This detailed description of jewellery, fabrics, propriety and ‘petal confections’ jars with the deep grief experienced at the loss of a beloved family member.5 And there, perhaps, is a key reason for the demise of extravagant mourning rituals in the United States. Although formal mourning was on the way out in Europe and England well before the death of Victoria in 1901, its prescriptions continued in the United States into the early twentieth century, as evidenced by women’s magazines, business records and etiquette manuals. It offered bourgeois women the opportunity to display cultural knowledge and accumulated wealth, as well as a refined sensibility. Yet, once the discourse of mourning occurred only in the language of fashion, it lost its emotional meaning and function. In the same decade that the Pictorial Review paired grief and evening shoes, a sociological critique of fashion, indeed of consumption, emerged from the pens of Thorsetin Veblen and Georg Simmel. Veblen excoriated American elites, the ‘leisure class’ in his major work The Theory of the Leisure Class (1925). In particular, he characterized women of this class as little more than mannequins for the display of their husbands’ wealth. Fashionable mourning could maintain this function even after death. What could be further from the tender sentiments that mourning aimed to express than Veblen’s analysis? Five years after the publication of Veblen’s study, Georg Simmel wrote that fashion expresses ‘the antagonistic tendencies of life’ or, as historian Nancy Green glosses it, fashion ‘reflects both uniformity and differentiation, imitation and demarcation, social obedience and individual expression’. So while fashion allows the individual woman to express her own personal taste, the rigid code of mourning offers less possibility for that individuality. Once mourning becomes fashion, though, and only fashion, it is less possible to see its connection to grief. Considerations of cost, the need to match one’s ‘weeds’ to the demands of the season, the role audience approval plays in selection, all underscore the incompatibility of bereavement and fashion.6 More recently, the French cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu has turned his attention to fashion. Bourdieu’s work generally sees ‘the meaning of consumer items [as] highly differentiated in terms of taste, social identity, and cultural capital’ (qtd. in Finkelstein 26). As Bourdieu has demonstrated, the function of fashion is frequently to activate these forces of differentiation. Bourdieu describes fashion’s capacity to satisfy private aspirations as ‘a form of cultural capital’ (qtd. in Finkelstein 30–1). In other words, the knowledge that some clothing is cutting edge, distinctive or striking, sets the fashionable woman apart from the average consumer. Once mourning entered this realm of the fashionable, its meaning had more to do with the individual wearing it than the family member being mourned. In 1900, the noted illustrator Charles Dana Gibson published a satirical pictorial narrative entitled A Widow and her Friends. In a series of twenty-seven sketches, an exquisitely lovely and obviously wealthy ‘Gibson Girl’ finds herself suddenly widowed. In her grief (and wearing her fashionable widow’s weeds) she

166

Representations of Death/Ann Schofield

‘contemplates the cloister’, ‘decides to die in spite of Dr Bottles’ and ‘finds that exercise does not improve her spirits’. She attends a dinner party where men cluster about her and women criticize her for coming out of seclusion ‘so soon’. The centrepiece of the book is labelled ‘Half-mourning’. In it, one half of the figure is coloured dark and the other half light as she walks down a busy city street. Men of all ages look at the widow approvingly while an older woman scowls. In subsequent illustrations the widow leaves town, longing for seclusion and ‘milder climate’, but finds instead a gaggle of suitors while fishing, riding and walking. She becomes a trained nurse and in the final frame, has taken the veil. As a nun, she sits under a tree reading to children.7 Although today valued more for their aesthetic merit than social commentary, Gibson’s beautiful widow perfectly illustrates the tension between sincere grief and fashionable display that marked much of the history of mourning. As grief became more privatized and the American middle class found other means of registering their social status, elaborate mourning became an arcane remnant of a more formal past.

The Fashion of Mourning

167

Fig. 10.1. Reproduced from B. Altman’s Catalogue, Spring and Summer, 1917

168

Representations of Death/Ann Schofield

Fig. 10.2. Reproduced from a Lord and Taylor advertisement, circa 1907

Fig. 10.3. Reproduced from Harper’s Bazaar, circa 1905

The Fashion of Mourning

Fig. 10.4. Reproduced from the Bloomington Catalogue, 1886

Fig. 10.5. Reproduced from Pictorial Review, June 1907

169

170

Representations of Death/Ann Schofield

Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6

7

There are far fewer studies of death and mourning in the United States than in Great Britain. Some standard studies are David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture and Social Change (New York: 1977); James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death (Philadelphia: 1980) and Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven: 1996). Middle-class Northern Europeans also experienced significant changes during the nineteenth century. The usual distinction made between class in the US and Europe is that America lacked an aristocratic tradition. However, just as in the US, the European middle classes were enlarged and redefined by merchants, finance and industrialists. Moreover, women played much the same role in marriage alliances, inheritance and cultural presentation. For an excellent discussion of these issues see the essays in Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Jugen Kocka and Allan Mitchell (Oxford: 1993). Especially interesting is ‘The Example of the English Middle Class’ by Eric Hobsbawn. Historians of US women and social reform, however, have provided ample evidence that an ideology of domesticity that on its surface seemed confining could also legitimate the activities of women in social reform movements like abolition, prison reform, antilynching, temperance, and even female suffrage. Mrs John Sherwood, Manners and Social Usage (New York: 1884), n.p. Pictorial Review (1907). See Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Work, Ready-to-Wear: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham: 1997); Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (London: 1925). Charles Dana Gibson, A Widow and her Friends (London: 1901). These well known sketches were the subject of a series of Royal Doulton plates made in the 1930s. Both the sketches and the plates are now prized by collectors.

Works Cited Beckert, Sven. The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeosie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Finkelstein, Joanne. Fashion: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996) Frank, Robin Jaffee. Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Gibson, Charles Dana. A Widow and her Friends (New York, R.H. Russell, London: J. Lane, 1901). Green, Nancy L. Ready-to-Work, Ready-to-Wear: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

The Fashion of Mourning

171

Hunter, Phyllis Whitman. Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachussetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Jalland, Pat. Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Kocka, Jugen and Allan Mitchell, (eds.). Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Loughridge, Patricia R. and Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr. (eds.) Women in Mourning (Richmond: 1986). Ramphele, Mamphela. ‘Political Widowhood in South Africa: The Embodiment of Ambiguity’. Social Suffering. Ed. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret Lock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Scheumaker, Helen Diana. ‘A Token that Love Entwines: Nineteenth-Century Human Hair Work and the American White Middle Class’. Ph.D diss. (University of Kansas, 1999). Sherwood, Mrs John. Manners and Social Usage (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884 [reprint 1887, 1894, 1907, 1918]). Stannard, David E. The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture and Social Change (New York: 1977)

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 11

‘At a distance from the scene of the atrocity’ Death and Detachment in Poe’s ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

In ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, Edgar Allan Poe famously states that ‘the death […] of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’ (165), yet in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’, the second story in his Dupin trilogy, he reflects on the death of a beautiful woman in a manner as seemingly unpoetical as possible. Throughout his essay, Poe considers the category of ‘Beauty’ as a transcendent ideal, calling its contemplation an ‘elevating’ and ‘pure’ exercise and a ‘pure elevation of the soul’. In the same essay, he associates the category of ‘poetical’ with tearful sadness, claiming that ‘melancholy’ is ‘the most legitimate of poetical tones’ (164). One might then expect the death of a beautiful woman, Poe’s ‘most poetical topic’, to be an opportunity for him to engage in fetishistic aestheticization or sentimental grief. Usually, in his stories and poems, it is.1 In his depiction of the death of the young and beautiful Marie Rogêt, however, Poe approaches and represents her dead body with a distance and disinterest drastically opposed to transcendent and sentimental modes of interpreting death. The centrepiece of the story is a graphic meditation on Rogêt’s mutilated corpse, and in this passage, Poe reduces the beautiful dead woman to so much rotting material and a jumble of dismembered, desexed parts. His approach seems particularly ‘unpoetical’ in that it contradicts the lived reality of Poe’s readership; Marie Rogêt is a barely fictionalized version of Mary Rogers, the glamorous young ‘segar girl’ whose apparent rape and murder in 1840s New York generated an enormous furore among her contemporaries. Poe’s literary redaction of this crime, so different from his other ‘dead women’, is an aloof rejoinder to the anguished depictions of Mary Rogers in the New York popular press. Setting his story in Paris, and attributing actual New York news reports about Rogers to a fictional French daily press, Poe correlates the commercial circulation of Marie Rogêt’s live body in an urban consumer landscape with the circulation of her corpse via sensationalistic journalism and widespread public grief. Poe has Rogêt working in a perfumery rather than the cigar shop where Mary Rogers was

174

Representations of Death/Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

employed, but he retains the fact of her commercial celebrity and emphasizes how such a position commodified her body and sexuality. Her commercial persona, the story suggests, provided an illusion of public ‘closeness’ to Rogers, even though she was in fact no less distanced from the public’s admiring gaze than from Poe’s medico-scientific authorial perspective. Poe’s underlying deprecation of the surge of public sentiment surrounding Mary Rogers’s death uncovers commercial capitalism’s objectification of the female body, but also has the air of reasserting professional male authority over a popular press whose feminized, hysterical bereavement has spun out of control. As a story, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ is itself a capitalization on the public’s frenzied interest in Mary Rogers’s murder, but Poe attempts to distance his project from accounts of Rogers in the mass press by gendering such publications and their audience as histrionically feminine, while emphasizing the rigorous, masculine expertise of his own story’s detective, Dupin. Poe depicts the mass press’s interest in Rogers’s death as transient and flimsy, in contrast to the more durable facts about the case he supposedly uncovers. Bodies, death, femininity and mass culture merge in this story, and by distancing his narrative from such tokens of ephemerality, Poe attempts to detach the ‘product’ of his story from the commercial discourse in which it is so clearly embedded. Poe’s intervention into the hysteria surrounding Mary Rogers’s murder takes a perspective of rational detachment, which is largely responsible for the story’s reputation as an awkward or unwieldy work of fiction.2 From early in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’, Poe erects an architecture of narrative estrangement that prevents the reader from identifying with the characters or from grieving for Rogêt’s awful death. The physical layout of the text, for example, suggests ‘academic’ rather than ‘fictional’ discourse: footnotes, epigraphs, protracted quotations and statistics pervade the work. Although the story initially appeared in Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion, it begins with a lengthy metaphysical German epigraph attributed, in a footnote, to Novalis.3 Poe follows the citation with a translation: ‘There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones’, it begins (199). This opening positions Poe’s story as the ‘ideal’ version of Mary Rogers’s ‘real’ murder, which seems logical since it is fictional, but Poe’s use of ‘ideal’ is curiously mathematical rather than aesthetic. His account of the murder stresses logic, reason and facts, releasing the story from the overwrought emotional turbulence of the original version. Rather than relying on a conventional metaphysical division between a spiritual ideal and a material real, Poe’s sense of ‘ideal’ imagines scientific detachment transcending emotional sentimentalism. The ballast of scholarly signifiers in the story’s introduction – including foreign languages, footnotes and epigraphs – anticipates the narrator’s attempt at scientific objectivity, or disembodiment, throughout the text. Indeed, for a narrative that depends above all on a dead body, its tone is curiously, or correspondingly, dehumanized. Poe deepens the ideal/real split suggested by his epigraph with a cumbersome plot device: an eerie coincidental parallel between the lives and deaths of Marie Rogêt and Mary Rogers; ‘the author has followed, in minute detail, the essential,

‘At a Distance from the Scene of the Atrocity’

175

while merely paralleling the inessential, facts of the real murder of Mary Rogers. Thus all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth: and the investigation of the truth was the object’ (199). Poe takes the emotionally charged narrative of Mary Rogers and relocates it in a foreign country, renames the victim, and attempts to extract all pathos from the bare ‘facts’ of the case.4 The story, Poe tells us, ‘was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded’ (199). From the outset, then, Poe inhabits a posture of scientific detachment or objectivity: he exists only in footnotes as an awkward self-referent (‘the author’) or fictional plural (‘the Editors’), he mediates the murder via a journalistic idiom, and he hypothesizes that the scientific experiment his narrative will enact is capable of yielding a solution to the real mystery of Mary Rogers’s murder. Thus the search for truth ‘justifies’ the author’s foray into this sensational case, and in a retrospectively inserted footnote, Poe claims that events subsequent to his story’s initial publication ‘confirmed, in full, not only the general conclusion [of the story], but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by which that conclusion was attained’ (199). This is a curious assertion, since his story obviously failed to arrive at the ‘truth’ of Mary Rogers’s grisly fate, later revealed in a deathbed confession. As Amy Gilman Srebnick has described, Mary Rogers was not murdered at all, but died in a botched abortion procedure. To disguise this fact, her body was mutilated and disposed of in a manner that suggested she had been a victim of homicide.5 Still, from early in the case, the New York authorities and press had openly considered the possibility that Mary Rogers died not from murderous violence, but from complications resulting from an abortion. Since Poe followed the case so closely, Laura Saltz concludes that he must have been aware of this line of investigation, though he does not touch on it in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’.6 As part of his ratiocination, Dupin addresses and disproves several other competing theories entertained in the popular press about Rogêt’s disappearance – such as the idea that the body in the river did not belong to her at all – but the abortion hypothesis is left unexplored. Abortion was an obscene, unspeakable topic in nineteenth-century popular literature, so Poe’s failure to narrate this possibility is directly linked to his participation in the mass market of mainstream fiction.7 The theory Dupin ultimately constructs concerning Marie Rogêt’s murder fits a more recognizable cultural scenario, which might have been borrowed from popular melodrama: a secret engagement, feminine capriciousness, masculine aggression, and a crime of passion. Poe likewise characterizes Rogêt and her supposed secret lover as prevalent cultural types: she is ‘a gay but not an abject young girl’ (245), and he is a sailor ‘of dark complexion’ (246).8 Thus the ‘solution’ that Poe proposes depends heavily upon the conventional machinery of mass-cultural melodrama. In this way, Poe’s story is both critical of and yet an illustration of the broader cultural project of aestheticizing Mary Rogers’s death. Interpreting the compulsive fixation on death and dead bodies in Poe’s fiction, many critics have found it necessary to contextualize his work in a culture equally

176

Representations of Death/Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

obsessed with death and corpses. Though literary critics disagree about whether Poe’s fiction enacts or disparages nineteenth-century mourning ritual, methods and ideologies of mourning certainly inform his work. Historians and cultural critics have described a ‘cult’ of mourning and death that emerged in the 1830s, when ‘a proliferation of manuals circulated amongst the Victorian middle classes, instructing the bereaved in the minute details of the mourning process’ (Stobert 283). Mourning ritual reflects a broader cultural project in this period of establishing an outward, bodily code to signify inner sympathy and sentiment. As a systematic expression of grief, however, the minutiae of mourning focus not only on the body of the bereaved, but on the body of the corpse. Nineteenth-century mourning offers a means of idealizing, fetishizing or dematerializing the most grossly corporal human condition: the body in death and decay. A widespread impulse to idealize the corpse led, inevitably, to the proliferation of practices meant to turn the dead into art, including post-mortem photography, cemetery statuary, embalming and mummification technologies, and the fashioning of jewellery and other mementoes from relics of the departed. Much of Poe’s writing is about ‘preserving’ corpses as art: his characters’ tendency to keep dead bodies around, or to incorporate them into architecture via walls and floors, can be viewed as a means of memorializing or insisting on the timelessness of human remains. ‘Marie Rogêt’, however, treats the body of the dead woman quite differently. In its first appearance, Rogêt’s corpse has already been subsumed into a teeming underwater biosystem certain to hasten, rather than halt, its dissolution: ‘Three days elapsed, and nothing was heard of her. On the fourth her corpse was found floating in the Seine’ (202). Her body is ‘towed ashore by some fishermen, who had found it floating in the river’ (205). To be literally fished out of the water suggests that in this aqueous environment, the corpse has already degenerated into animal materiality. As Dupin describes in great detail, over five pages, it is also significant that her corpse is found floating. In the midst of constructing a ‘whole philosophy’ (220) on the subject of corpses’ behaviour in water, Dupin asserts: The result of decomposition is the generation of gas, distending the cellular tissues and all the cavities, and giving the puffed appearance which is so horrible. When this distension has so far progressed that the bulk of the corpse is materially increased without a corresponding increase of mass or weight, its specific gravity becomes less than that of the water displaced, and it forthwith makes its appearance at the surface.9 (219)

The passage suggests that Rogêt’s corpse floats because it is literally turning into air. Instead of being turned into art, her body is transitioning to nothing and conjoining with the firmament. Rather than attempting to reverse the course of decomposition, after identifying her body, Rogêt’s family and friends supersede the conventional procedures of death to speed her burial: ‘After the recognition of the corpse, it was not, as usual, taken to the Morgue (this formality being superfluous), but hastily interred not far

‘At a Distance from the Scene of the Atrocity’

177

from the spot at which it was brought ashore’ (207). Public outcry soon necessitates an excavation, but neither Rogêt’s family nor the story’s narrator invests her dead body with the aura or mystification that imbued the nineteenthcentury corpse. Thus, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ appears to critique the aestheticization of the dead body, and particularly the dead feminine body, in mourning ritual. One might read such a gesture as a feminist deconstruction of fetishized feminine corporeality in nineteenth-century culture, which is how Judith Pike reads several other Poe stories involving dead women, but Poe’s disparaging treatment of the popular press in ‘Marie Rogêt’ is also a reaction against a particularly feminized – and devalued – public relationship with a corpse.10 Poe imagines the excesses of mourning ritual as symptomatic of an overly feminized public; the furore surrounding the Rogers murder, in Poe’s story, exemplifies the unwholesome effect feminine audiences have on cultural production.11 Resisting such a ‘feminine’ response to the dead, then, Poe’s story begins like an ‘objective’ scientific report, highlighting in relief how other commentary surrounding Rogers’s murder puts the dead in an idealized, sentimental realm. Following the weighty intellectual paraphernalia of the story’s introduction, however, the narrative also references the deeply embodied feelings associated with melodramatic supernaturalism, the very idiom Poe is seemingly trying to escape: There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvelous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them. Such sentiments – for the half-credences of which I speak never have the full force of thought – are seldom thoroughly stifled unless by reference to the doctrine of chance, or, as it is technically termed, the Calculus of Probabilities. Now this Calculus is, in its essence, purely mathematical; and thus we have the anomaly of the most rigidly exact in science applied to the shadow and spirituality of the most intangible in speculation. (199–200)

The passage makes a nod to the Gothic vernacular of sensation and bodily response, but Poe immediately proposes an opposing narrative paradigm. Setting up a rigid binary division between ‘sentiment’ and ‘thought’, the narrator suggests that sentiment can be explained and accounted for – even ‘stifled’ – via mathematical principle. In keeping with the story’s effort to convey an ‘ideal’ as opposed to a ‘real’ series of events, the mathematical realm is depicted as ‘pure’ and ‘exact’, detached from the uncertainties of shadowy feelings and fleeting emotions. Here, and throughout the story, Poe borrows the authority of numbers and statistics to lend a seemingly disinterested and incontrovertible quality to the story’s conclusions. Mary Poovey describes in A History of the Modern Fact how numbers, in the logic of modernity, ‘have come to seem preinterpretive or even somehow noninterpretive’ (xii), though such a presumption was not always the case. For Poe, writing in the 1840s, the authority of numbers as a means of

178

Representations of Death/Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

accounting for a social or historical event, such as Mary Rogers’s murder, was a relatively new phenomenon. Poovey claims that the use of statistics to generate general knowledge or common fact did not become a naturalized, universally accepted practice until the 1830s and 1840s (316). The rise of statistics and social sciences in the nineteenth century, of course, relates to a broader shift toward understanding modern individuals as calculable, predictable agents. Thus, Dupin’s reliance on mathematics and statistics to investigate Rogêt’s murder identifies him as an innovative modern expert, which helps distinguish him from the popular journalists he so roundly discredits: ‘To me, [the article in L’Etoile] appears conclusive of little beyond the zeal of its indicter [...] it is the object of our newspapers to create a sensation – to make a point – than to further the cause of truth’ (214–5). Dupin’s disinterested reliance on mathematical principle, in contrast, emphasizes his unbiased investment in absolute truth. At one point, he bolsters the authority of a tenuous claim by formulating it in the language of statistics: ‘chances are ten to one, that he who had once eloped with Rogêt would again propose an elopement, rather than that she to whom proposals of elopement had been made by one individual should have them made to her by another’ (231). The certainty with which Dupin assigns a mathematical ratio, to predict Rogêt and her hypothetical lover’s elopement behaviour, is clearly disingenuous, but in the context of the story, Dupin has already been characterized as a mathematical authority. While his statistical analysis here seems obviously speculative, he formulates it in a manner that reads as incontestable: no one can dispute ten-to-one odds. Dupin’s invulnerable expertise, signified by his esoteric use of mathematics, is also apparent in his narrative distance from the reader. Here as in the other stories in the trilogy, Poe employs an anonymous narrator to serve as a filter between reader and detective. An associate of Dupin’s about whom readers know little, the narrator establishes a barrier between the reading public and the story of Rogêt’s death, as though Poe is literally orchestrating a distance in a relationship that had become too intimate. The narrator and Dupin likewise model such detachment in their own outlook. Even the gruesome scenario of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, which precedes ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ in the Dupin trilogy, has left the detective unmoved: ‘upon the winding up of the tragedy involved in the deaths of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, the Chevalier dismissed the affair at once from his attention, and relapsed into his old habits of moody reverie’ (200). The macabre and horrifying deaths of these women are merely ‘a topic whose interest to [Dupin] had long ceased’ (201). When the Parisian official G– visits Dupin, with the hope of consulting him on the Rogêt case, he confronts a similar lack of interest. Emerging from a self-imposed isolation, during which he communicated with the narrator alone, Dupin has not heard of the Rogêt murder, even though it has been all over the press and has produced ‘intense excitement in the minds of the sensitive Parisians’ (202). G– debriefs Dupin and the narrator on the case, but Dupin sleeps through the entire conference. In contrast to the ‘intense excitement’ of the ‘sensitive’ public, his response to the murder is somnolent

‘At a Distance from the Scene of the Atrocity’

179

boredom. Dupin’s inattention goes unnoticed by G– because ‘he wore spectacles during the whole interview’ (204). Here, Poe transforms an accoutrement which would presumably enhance the detective’s gaze, spectacles, into one that hides negligent inattention. As with Foucault’s panopticon, Dupin’s spectacles consolidate the detective’s power of visual surveillance by masking its vacancy. Dupin’s motives for accepting the case are pecuniary. G– makes ‘a direct and certainly liberal proposition’ to the detective, and ‘the proposition he accepted at once’ (204). The narrator insists that this remuneration ‘has no bearing upon the proper subject of my narrative’, but it does characterize Dupin as an expert professional, and presents his interest in the case as financial rather than emotional or sentimental. This is corroborated later in the story, when Dupin decides to confirm the bodily identity of the corpse before moving to the question of who murdered Rogêt: [I]t has been suggested that the corpse discovered is not that of the Marie Rogêt for the conviction of whose assassin, or assassins, the reward is offered, and respecting whom, solely, our agreement has been arranged with the Prefect. We both know this gentleman well. It will not do to trust him too far. If, dating our inquiries from the body found, and then tracing a murderer, we yet discover this body to be that of some other individual than Marie; or if, starting from the living Marie, we find her, yet find her unassassinated – in either case we lose our labour; since it is Monsieur G– with whom we have to deal. For our own purpose, therefore, if not for the purpose of justice, it is indispensable that our first step should be the determination of the identity of the corpse […]. (214)

A murder that is so emotionally significant to the Parisian public is mere paid labour to Dupin. His involvement in the Rue Morgue murders was prompted by a desire for ‘amusement’, rather than indignation at the gruesome deaths of the L’Espanaye women, but his thoroughly financial interest in this case positions him at an even further remove from the emotionalism surrounding Marie Rogêt’s death. As the reference to ‘sensitive Parisians’ suggests, Dupin and the narrator’s perspective on Marie Rogêt’s murder is in wholesale opposition to the public outcry surrounding Mary Rogers’s death. Rogers’s murder was a cause célèbre of the highest order, of enormous consequence to her contemporaries. Public interest in the case drastically exceeded the typical response to murders at this time; David Van Leer even claims that Rogers’s murder made her ‘one of [the] first media celebrities’ (87). Poe recreates this public outcry in his story, referring in a somewhat patronizing tone to the ‘popular excitement’ aroused by Rogêt’s murder (203) and to the extraordinary way in which the case had ‘so agitated the public mind’ (204). He similarly describes the reward set for Rogêt’s murderer in terms that suggest its unwarranted extravagance: ‘The entire reward thus stood at no less than thirty thousand francs, which will be regarded as an extraordinary sum when we consider the humble condition of the girl, and the great frequency, in large cities, of such atrocities as the one described’ (203). The narrator’s attempt to normalize the ‘atrocity’ in this passage, however, suggests his effort to deflate the public panic over the homicide. Dupin makes a similar point later in the narrative,

180

Representations of Death/Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

stating that Rogêt’s murder is not at all exceptional: ‘This is an ordinary, although an atrocious, instance of crime. There is nothing particularly outré about it’ (213). If murders like this are indeed a common occurrence, Poe begs the question of why it is garnering so much attention in the press, trivializing and disparaging the taste and judgement of the reading public. At the same time that Poe depicts public bereavement over Rogers’s death as overwrought, he also implicitly questions its sincerity. While newspaper reports at the time focused on the tragedy that so violent a murder could occur to one so young and lovely, Poe challenges such language by locating public interest in the case in Rogers’s fame: ‘The atrocity of this murder, […] the youth and beauty of the victim, and above all, her previous notoriety, conspired to produce intense excitement’ (202). Here, bereavement and emotional investment become inseparable from prurience. What is more, the story suggests that Rogêt left her post at the perfumery, prior to the murder, ‘to remove herself from the impertinence of curiosity’ (202) – the same curiosity apparently motivating interest in Rogers’s death. The narrator continues, ‘I can call to mind no similar occurrence producing so general and so intense an effect. For several weeks, in the discussion of this one absorbing theme, even the momentous political topics of the day were forgotten’ (202). The reference to ‘several weeks’, in describing an intense fixation, emphasizes the fleetingness and fickleness of public concentration. In a few more weeks, the passage suggests, interest in Rogêt will abate altogether. Still, for the moment, she holds the injudicious public’s eye above more ‘momentous’ political topics. The newspapers, according to Poe’s narrative, are clearly responsible for this sentimental inflation. After the discovery of Rogêt’s corpse, her family and friends’ attempt to ‘hastily inter’ it was meant to ensure that ‘the matter was industriously hushed up as far as possible’ (207). If such efforts endeavoured to suppress a public mourning of Rogêt’s death, the newspapers function to prevent such suppression: ‘several days had elapsed before any public emotion resulted. A weekly paper, however, at length took up the theme; the corpse was disinterred, and a re-examination instituted’ (207). The newspapers literally refuse to ‘bury’ Rogêt, but their inability to correctly assess the facts of the case suggests that their insistence on ‘reexamining’ her body has little to do with the cause of truth. Indeed, part of Dupin’s job in this case, as he conceives of it, is to discredit the press and public’s manifold theories about the murder: ‘the excitement increased hourly […] journalists busied themselves in suggestions’ (207). In disparaging this overly invested reading public, Poe focuses on the questionable respectability of Rogêt’s commercial position in the perfumery. He reminds readers of the impropriety of a young, single woman attending a counter at an urban shop in a business that caters to men. Describing the beginning of Rogêt’s career, the narrator explains that her ‘great beauty attracted the notice of a perfumer, who occupied one of the shops in the basement of the Palais Royal, and whose custom lay chiefly among the desperate adventurers infesting that neighborhood’ (379). Poe makes a number of interesting alterations to Mary Rogers’s story here. In making the establishment a perfumery rather than a cigar shop, he

‘At a Distance from the Scene of the Atrocity’

181

scrupulously emasculates the consumer trade in which Rogêt is engaged. According to Josef Škvorecký, in the 1840s, ‘cigar stores such as Anderson’s [where Rogers was employed] functioned to a degree like cafés in Europe: they were meeting places for sportsmen, writers, and literary critics’ (7). The thickly masculine atmosphere of such an environment is, of course, exacerbated by its metaphorical masculinity; fifty years before Freudian theory, Poe knew that a cigar was not always just a cigar. Instead of an unabashedly masculine cigar shop, then, Poe puts Rogêt in a trade that might attract both sexes, but would most likely attract more female customers than men. This change would presumably enhance the propriety of Rogêt’s position, but curiously, Poe takes pains to preserve her questionable respectability despite the change in venue, describing the patrons as ‘desperate adventurers’ who ‘infest’ urban space. He locates the shop in a basement (unlike Rogers’s real place of employment), as though it inhabits a literal ‘underworld’ with a correspondingly ‘lower’ ethical code. Poe depicts Rogêt’s mother, too, as uncertain about the propriety of such an occupation: ‘Monsieur Le Blanc was not unaware of the advantages to be derived from the attendance of the fair Rogêt in his perfumery; and his liberal proposals were accepted eagerly by the girl, although with somewhat more of hesitation by Madame’ (379). What could be Poe’s interest in feminizing the commercial world that trades in Mary Rogers’s image? If he does not put her in a perfumery to emphasize her public decency, the significance of the change must be that it genders Rogêt’s broader public audience and commerce as feminine, a move that clearly suits Poe’s effort to paint the public mourning of Mary Rogers as emotionally indulgent, histrionic, and undisciplined. Poe cites a newspaper report that indicates Rogêt was ‘a person […] well known to thousands’ (226). If the source of her illustriousness is a perfume shop rather than a cigar shop, then a large percentage of those thousands must be women. The alteration thus genders the public knowledge of and fascination with Mary Rogers, and consequently aligns Poe’s story with a characteristically Modernist rejection of feminized mass culture. In his study of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century representations of mass culture, for example, Andreas Huyssen shows how modernism ‘obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities’ (47). Poe’s story appears to make a much earlier attempt at this Modernist manoeuvre, separating itself as valuable, timeless ‘literature’ from the ever-proliferating loquaciousness of mass print culture. Rather than catering to the masses of women readers eagerly following the Mary Rogers melodrama in the mass press, Poe purports to offer a rigorous, detached, more ‘masculine’ treatment of the subject.12 Viewed in this context, it seems particularly important that the genre Poe helps to inaugurate with the Dupin trilogy, detective fiction, is one that makes its most significant rise in the 1890s – on the coattails of the publishing phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes – which was also the decade that witnessed the rise of literary Modernism. If the detached professionalism of the detective, in the face of gruesome criminality, can be opposed to the overwrought sentimentality with

182

Representations of Death/Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

which the mass press treats the same sort of material, as we see in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’, then detective fiction is actually in aesthetic alignment with Modernism. It is not merely one of the ‘popular’ genres upon whose rejection Modernism relies, but is itself engaged in rejecting the feminized flotsam and jetsam of cultural mass production.13 In rejecting the values of consumer culture, Poe emphasizes their hollowness as well as their feminization and impropriety. He depicts a mass public culture that makes something of nothing – that fetishizes Rogêt’s body into glamorous, intangible, commodified sexuality. In considering the proliferation of barmaids in late-nineteenth-century culture, Peter Bailey describes the emergence of a glamorized, distanced and visual mode of ‘parasexual’ expression in the commercial sphere. Like the barmaids Bailey describes, Rogers ‘the cigar girl’ and Rogêt ‘the perfumery girl’ were hired to attract customers, to be friendly with them, and to associate their employer’s businesses with casual sexual expression. Such expression can remain casual because of its clear demarcation. Rogêt’s bodily location in the shop, for example, was behind ‘her usual counter’ (380). From this demarcated or delimited space, she witnesses how M. Le Blanc’s perfumery ‘became notorious through [her] charms’ (380). Rogêt stands behind an item of commercial furniture that literalizes the imaginary boundary between seller and buyer. The distance created by the counter is what allows for her eroticism: inaccessible, she can perform accessibility. Commercial manifestations of the striptease artist, Rogers and Rogêt are glamorized and sexualized by the imposition of the distance between their bodies and their customers. Their eroticism is thus purely potential – not kinetic – sexual energy.14 Poe presents Rogêt’s dead body in terms that emphasize its raw materiality, in sharp contrast to her fetishized body under consumer capitalism. In the long ‘autopsy’ passage that anchors the story, he systematically deprives the body, as signifying text, of all its power of creating sexual meaning. The narrator presents this section of the story as the edited version of all the ‘data’ on the murder, initially collected by the police or the press and drained of misleading details, informing us that ‘freed from all that was positively disproved, this mass of information stood thus’ (383). Removed from the context of public emotionalism, and from the context of commercial sexual commodification, Rogêt’s body becomes a mere ‘mass of information.’ Accordingly, the passage takes on the distanced, impersonal quality of a medical autopsy: The face was suffused with dark blood, some of which issued from the mouth. No foam was seen, as in the case of the merely drowned. There was no discoloration in the cellular tissue. About the throat were bruises and impressions of fingers. The arms were bent over on the chest, and were rigid. The right hand was clenched; the left partially open. On the left wrist were two circular excoriations, apparently the effect of ropes, or of a rope in more than one volution. A part of the right wrist, also, was much chafed, as well as the back throughout its extent, but more especially at the shoulder blades […] The flesh of the neck was much swollen. There were no cuts apparent, or bruises which appeared the effect of blows. A piece of lace was found tied so tightly around the neck

‘At a Distance from the Scene of the Atrocity’

183

as to be hidden from sight; it was completely buried in the flesh, and was fastened by a knot which lay just under the left ear. This alone would have sufficed to produce death. (206)

The use of the passive voice in this passage lends an air of distanced objectivity; it disguises non-visually-mediated knowledge, as in the construction ‘apparently the effect of ropes’. Similarly, ‘no foam was seen’ and ‘there were no cuts apparent’ circumvent the question of whether visual investigation of the body constitutes its total apprehension. The anonymous gazer in this scene is reduced to one allcomprehending epistemological ‘eye’. Rogêt, too, is absent from the examination; her body is transformed into a jumble of dismembered, disgendered parts: the face, the mouth, the throat, the arms, the chest, the neck, the left ear, and so on. The indefinite cause of her death is perhaps compensated for by the use of definite articles. Just as the passage avoids attributing agency to the examiner or to Rogêt, its use of passive voice likewise masks the agent who performed the fastening of the knot and the bruising of the neck – there is only a synecdochical reference to ‘fingers’ that have left an impression. The passage provides a mechanical, camera-like pan of Rogêt’s dead body, in contrast to newspaper reports that communicate similar information about her corpse. While the narrator’s rhetoric depersonalizes and dehumanizes the murder, the newspapers preserve personhood in the relic of her dead body. For example, L’Etoile – the fictional double for The New York Mercury – describes Rogêt’s body thus: ‘it is folly to suppose that the murder, if murder was committed on her body, could have been consummated soon enough to have enabled her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight’ (208). Rogêt’s corpse is both ‘her body’ and ‘the body’ here, depending on whether she is alive or dead, but ‘her murderers’ are active agents rather than mere synecdochical fingers. Further, in a passage from Le Commerciel, fictional double for the New York Journal of Commerce, Rogêt’s ownership of her body is preserved even after death: ‘Her gown was torn, bound round her, and tied; […] A piece of one of the unfortunate girl’s petticoats, two feet long and one foot wide, was torn out and tied under her chin around the back of her head, probably to prevent screams’ (391). In contrast to the narrator’s description, note the use of ‘her chin’ and ‘her head’, as well as references to ‘the unfortunate girl’, ‘her gown’, and ‘bound round her’. In nineteenth-century mourning ritual, the body parts and belongings of the deceased took on some of their aura or spirit; thus Le Commerciel’s descriptions of what ‘the unfortunate girl’ has left behind are written in the language of mourning, while the narrator’s description of her remains empties them of all association with Rogêt as a person. Rogêt’s body is a text on which Dupin reads the story of a violent death – ‘the peculiar marks on the back and shoulders of the victim tell of the bottom ribs of a boat’ (247, my emphasis) – but in contrast to the newspaper audience, he is not interested in reading on that body the additional story of Rogêt’s life.15 Rogêt’s identity is a mere commodity to Dupin – something whose imaginary ‘value’ can

184

Representations of Death/Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

be exchanged for capital – in the same way that it was a commodity in the Parisian consumer marketplace. Curiously, however, the narrator’s description of Rogêt’s corpse takes on a slightly more personal note when he comes to a camouflaged description of her mutilated genitals: ‘The medical testimony spoke confidently of the virtuous character of the deceased. She had been subjected, it said, to brutal violence’ (206). Here, the medical testimony remains an anonymous ‘it’, but in terms of grammar, it does actively speak. Similarly, Rogêt’s body becomes ‘she’ rather than ‘the’, and the narrator utilizes the rare moral descriptor ‘brutal’. Unwilling throughout the story to sentimentalize Rogêt, Poe can hardly avoid it when he comes to the subject of virginity. Indeed, though the evidence here speaks of a violent rape, possibly by multiple offenders, this conclusion is hidden beneath a sentimentalized language of ‘virtue’ and ‘character’. The unspecified use of ‘brutal violence’ only indirectly hints at the vaginal injuries the narrator must be referencing. The narrator acknowledges that Rogêt is a victim of murder, but only obliquely refers to her rape, and only in conjunction with alleged proof that she was a virgin prior to the rape (which begs the question of how Rogêt’s virginity could have been detected at all, if her body wore evidence of a violent sexual assault).16 In glossing over the rape, the text cordons off sexual violence against women as an inaccessible subject. Indeed, all speculation about female sexuality seems to be taboo in the discourse in which the story participates - only the language of ‘virtue’ and ‘character’ can stand in for mutilated genitals.17 As it turns out in the case of Mary Rogers, evidence that seemed to point toward rape was actually the residue of an abortion. If rape can only be obliquely indicated in the discourse of popular fiction, as the spectre of ‘brutal violence’, abortion cannot be conjured at all. In the midst of a passage that purports to demythologize Rogêt’s glamorous body, and to empty it of the enchanting sexual charisma it has acquired via commodity fetishism, the narrative ironically resorts to a similarly deceptive discourse of female sexuality. As we have seen, Poe’s attempt to erect an emotional and literal distance between readers of the story and the events of Mary Rogers’s death are especially fraught in moments that confront thanotic or erotic details. In such passages, Poe mimics the emerging professional discourses of forensic science and sexology, which take a scientific and ‘objective’ approach to death and sex, in contrast to the sensationalistic approach of ‘new journalism’ or the coded approach of nineteenthcentury mourning and courtship ritual. Poe contrasts Dupin’s openly unfeeling assessment of Rogêt’s dead body with the intangible, but deathly, ethereality of female sexuality in the consumer marketplace. The elusive commercial appeal of Rogêt’s body, far from being revivified under Dupin’s examination, succumbs to the measurement, examination and quantification that follow her death. Dupin’s disinterested response to the murder thus participates in the story’s more general mode of distance toward Rogêt’s dead body, in contrast with what Poe depicts as an illusory intimacy toward her body in the press. While newspaper representations seem to bring readers closer to Mary Rogers, Poe’s story suggests that they are necessarily no less distanced than his account. Amid the anonymity and

‘At a Distance from the Scene of the Atrocity’

185

detachment of modern urban society, readers of mass print culture formulate a surrogate community around sensational, victimized celebrities like Mary Rogers; but Poe depicts this kind of modern community as tainted by the illusory deception that consumer circulation necessitates.

Notes 1

See Bronfen for a more detailed analysis of Poe’s treatment of beauty, death and the feminine in this essay; see Blasco for an analysis of Poe’s ‘dead woman’ philosophy in the context of other short fiction by Poe. 2 Martin Roth, for example, refers to ‘an aesthetic verdict that unanimously decrees the tale to be tedious or obsessively narrow’ (27). 3 A German Romantic poet, Novalis is also famous as a theorist of Romantic irony – another literary mode marked by distancing and defamiliarization. 4 Škvorecký writes that Poe transplants the story out of ‘fear of libel’ (4), but this explanation alone cannot account for Poe’s rigorous effort to defamiliarize the murder by emphasizing the Parisian locale. 5 Laura Saltz writes, ‘that [Rogers’s] body was deliberately mutilated to cover some other crime’ was recognized ‘after the dramatic and widely publicized deathbed “confession” of a certain Mrs Loss (who corresponds to Poe’s innkeeper, Madame Deluc) in November 1842. It was thought almost certain at that time that Mary had died attempting to abort an unwanted pregnancy at Mrs Loss’s inn’ (241). 6 Poe attempts to remedy this oversight in a later addition, where Dupin proposes in an aside that Rogêt may have died in ‘a fatal accident under the roof of Madame Deluc’ (245), but he does not disrupt the main thrust of the story’s theory: that Rogers died at the hands of a hotheaded, violent lover. Poe depicts Rogêt as teasing and fickle, yet innocent, and her lover as passionate and furious. Male brutality and female victimization is apparently less obscene, by the standards of the story’s venue, than the unspeakable fact of Rogers’s abortion. 7 See Saltz for more on the public obscenity of ‘abortion’, as a topic, at this time. Ironically enough, nineteenth-century newspapers did run discreet advertisements for abortifacient medications, and providers of surgical abortions did make veiled allusions to such practices, which were relatively common, in their own advertisements. Poe’s unwillingness to raise the topic marks his participation in a fictional discourse that separated itself from newspapers in part through such scrupulous self-censorship. 8 As if to emphasize the point, Poe relentlessly racializes the hypothetical seaman as a means of designating his criminal alterity. Referring to the sailor as ‘him of the dark complexion’, Dupin remarks: ‘Let me pause to observe that the complexion of this man is dark and swarthy; it was no common swarthiness’ (245). Poe attempts to make this character’s motivation ‘visible’ merely by the darkening of his skin. 9 Unless otherwise indicated, all italics are Poe’s. 10 Pike claims that throughout Poe’s fiction, there is a subtle effort to ‘reinvest the dead body with the corporeality that the cult of mourning attempts to eradicate’ (171). 11 Nonetheless, one could argue that by imagining Rogers’s murder and death in terms of the conventions of sensational melodrama, Poe too is making Rogers into ‘bad art’ – the very condemnation he levels against the feminized popular press.

186

Representations of Death/Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

12 Taken in this context, Dupin’s theory of how mass culture constructs an audience is intriguing: ‘The print which merely falls in with ordinary opinion […] earns for itself no credit with the mob. The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea’ (215). If Poe himself believed this to be true, one might read his rejection of the presumed taste of the reading public, and his correspondingly unorthodox treatment of Mary Rogers, as a particularly insidious means of obtaining public attention. 13 Such a reading might help answer the conundrum Jonathan Elmer poses, that Poe ‘stands simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the much-acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres […] [including] detective fiction’ (2). 14 Walter Benjamin also emphasized Marie’s potential yet unrealized sexual energy in comparing her to Charles Baudelaire’s poetic passante (44–5) 15 Here, my analysis breaks from those feminist critics who have argued that Dupin is ‘virtually a feminist critic’ in this story because he ‘recover[s] the second story – the woman’s story – which has previously gone untold’ (Jordan 5). These critics, focusing on a passage where Dupin recreates Rogêt’s own voice and consciousness, argue that in re-animating Rogêt, Poe conveys her ‘real’ identity and grants her a subjectivity in her own right. Srebnick, like Jordan, claims that in this story, ‘Marie quite literally comes alive […] Poe endows Marie with a voice, as well as agency’ (131). To my mind, however, the passage where Dupin attempts to revivify Rogêt’s voice is most notable for how quickly his attempt is frustrated or baffled by an awkward admission of the impossibility of the enterprise: ‘We may imagine her thinking thus – “I am to meet a certain person for the purpose of elopement, or for certain other purposes known only to myself”’ (233). If Rogêt is ‘thinking thus’, then why should her ‘purposes’ be walled off from her own consciousness? I would tend to agree, then, with the conclusions of feminist critics such as Catherine Creswell or Laura Saltz, who do not see Poe’s reanimation as successful. Saltz argues, for example, ‘Marie has no “real” referent, for the story concerns only an already textualized Mary as she appears in the print world of the newspapers’(258). 16 Dupin himself obliquely references this difficulty, in analyzing the evidence of the surgeon near the end of the story: ‘his published inferences, in regard to the number of the ruffians, have been properly ridiculed as unjust and totally baseless, by all the reputable anatomists of Paris. Not that the matter might not have been as inferred, but that there was no ground for the inference’ (240). In focusing on the doctors rather than Rogêt, however, this passage subordinates the evidence of her injured genitalia to a narrative of professional bickering and competition. What might have been an exposure of how Rogêt’s autopsy assumed a scripted discourse of female sexuality instead positions Poe’s story, again, in the sphere of male professionalism. 17 Naomi Schor provides a deconstructive, psychoanalytic reading of the ‘hitch’ found tied to Rogêt’s body. Her analysis of the story’s treatment of female sexuality is in some ways analogous to mine: ‘[…] the word “rape” never appears in the text, rather we find such ambiguous expressions as, “brutal violence” […] or “appalling outrage” […]. In this tale whose invariant might well be said to be translation, the hitch serves, in the end, not so much as a means of moving the corpse from one place to another, as it does as a displacement of the sexual crime. The hitch designates the locus of violence, while

‘At a Distance from the Scene of the Atrocity’

187

at the same time the use of the word “bandage” attests to a wish to cover up and bind the wound. It is, in a degraded form, the veil that male authors are forever drawing over the female sexual organs, thereby creating mysteries. The real mystery of Marie Roget [sic] lies hidden beneath the multiple circumvolutions of the text’ (218–19).

Works Cited Bailey, Peter. ‘Parasexuality and Glamour: The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype’. Gender and History 2.2 (1990), 148–72. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983). Blasco, Marita Nadal. ‘“The Death of a Beautiful Woman Is, Unquestionably, the Most Poetical Topic in the World”: Poetic and Parodic Treatment of Women in Poe’s Tales’. Gender, I-Deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film. Ed. Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy and José Ángel García Landa (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 151–63. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992). Creswell, Catherine J. ‘Poe’s Philosophy of Aesthetics and Ratiocination: Compositions of Death in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”’. The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory. Ed. Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (Macomb, Illinois: Western Illinois University Press, 1990), 38–54. Elmer, Jonathan. Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1986). Jordan, Cynthia S. ‘Poe’s Re-Vision: The Recovery of the Second Story’. American Literature 59.1 (1987), 1–19. Pike, Judith E. ‘Poe and the Revenge of the Exquisite Corpse’. Studies in American Fiction 26.2 (1998), 171–92. Poe, Edgar Allan. ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’. Selected Tales (London: Penguin, 1994), 199–250. ——, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, Graham’s Magazine (April 1846), 163–7. Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Roth, Martin. ‘Mysteries of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”’. Poe Studies 22:2 (1989), 27–34. Saltz, Laura. ‘(Horrible to Relate!): Recovering the Body of Marie Rogêt’. The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 237–67. Schor, Naomi. ‘Female Paranoia: The Case for Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism’, Yale French Studies 0.62 (1981), 204–19.

188

Representations of Death/Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

Škvorecký, Josef. ‘Poe and the Beautiful Segar Girl’. The Art of Detective Fiction. Ed. Warren Chernaik, Martin Swales, and Robert Vilain (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000), 1–9. Srebnick, Amy Gilman. The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Stobert, Samantha. ‘“Misery is Manifold”: Bereavement in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe’. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11.2 (2000), 282–93. Van Leer, David. ‘Detecting Truth: The World of the Dupin Tales’. New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales. Ed. Kenneth Silverman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 65–91.

Chapter 12

Spectres on the New York Stage The (Pepper’s) Ghost Craze of 1863 Dassia N. Posner

It’s a curious era we live in. A great war raging, and amusements more plentiful and prosperous than ever known in time of peace. ‘Theatrical: City’ Clipper, 31 October

In the fall of 1863, New York saw a rash of ghost plays the likes of which the city had never seen before. The epidemic began with Wallack’s Theatre’s premiere on 6 August 1863 of True to the Last, a play featuring terrifying ‘spectral illusions’, and it spread to other theatres within days. By the end of September the New York Clipper reported, ‘We now have our long ghosts and short ghosts; healthy ghosts and feverish ghosts; ghosts whole or in part; visible and invisible spectres; headless ghosts […] in fact, be it a goblin damned or any other damned ghost, you can get it, provided you have the price in your pocket’ (‘Theatrical: City’ 26 September). Although the craze was short-lived – it only really lasted for about three months – all New York had ghost fever. New Yorkers had good reason that particular fall to seek oblivion in amusements, many of which were of the ‘terrible’ kind. The ghost craze that began in August offered civilians a way to deal with the traumatic events that were taking place in New York and nationwide. Although it was not unusual for daily life and death in mid-nineteenth-century America to exist side by side (theatrical news, for example, was often published alongside obituaries that detailed the deaths of women and young children), by the summer of 1863 death seemed to be everywhere. The Civil War’s death toll was already high, and people were beginning to realize that it was certain to grow even more. In his book The Sacred Remains, Gary Laderman traces the changing attitudes toward death during the war, showing that there came to be an increasing gulf between the glorified spirit and the material body. The bodies of soldiers killed in war or by disease were handled with increasing indifference, depending on the haste with which a burial must be conducted. In the North ‘[...] a new realistic portrait of death, available in photographs, in newspaper stories, and in accounts from many associated with Union medical units, contributed to the ongoing domestication and objectification of the corpse’ (124). New York exhibits of battlefield photographs, beginning with ‘The Dead at Antietam’ in the fall of 1862, mesmerized audiences with images of fallen soldiers in all their gory detail.1

190

Representations of Death/Dassia N. Posner

The memory of lost loved ones, and the physical reality of death, were everywhere. As Walt Whitman wrote in Specimen Days after having served as a war nurse: [...] the dead, the dead, the dead – our dead [...] (there, in secluded spots, their skeletons, bleach’d bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are occasionally found yet) [...] the infinite dead – (the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw). (qtd. in Kaplan, 777)

Aside from the sheer numbers of men who died in the war, and the violent nature of death in battle, what was also particularly traumatic for families was the fact that the body of their loved one might remain unburied, or lie in an unmarked grave, far away. This made the process of grieving especially difficult, and clashed with the Victorian sentimental culture of death and mourning which placed great emphasis on final deathbed scenes and on the ritualized laying out of the dead body. Deprived of the material remains of those killed in battle, northerners imbued the spirits of the dead with an increased symbolic significance, as martyrs for the Union cause and as the ‘saved’ in heaven. Optimism that the Civil War would soon end after the Union’s triumph at the Battle of Gettysburg in July had given way to anger when a law was passed allowing the first conscription in the history of the country. The massive five-day riots that followed ‘stunned a generation of urban Americans well familiar with street violence’ (Bernstein 3). A war that had seemed distant to New Yorkers was now taking place on their streets. To make things worse, there were wild rumours about the number of people who had been killed in the riots. There were also false reports that the bodies of many who had died were being concealed in tenements or were being buried in empty lots around the city. This fear that the dead were hidden all over New York was extremely disturbing, especially in light of the unceremonious burials that were taking place on the battlefields. Additionally, as if the war and riots were not enough, the weather in July and August 1863 was unbearably, dangerously hot. The death toll incurred by the riot was increased tenfold by deaths due to sunstroke (Cook 193–4). The war, the draft, the heat and the ghosts were all foremost in the minds of New Yorkers. The author of the weekly ‘Theatrical Record: City Summary’ section of the Clipper linked these events, just days before Pepper’s ghost made its first appearance at Wallack’s Theatre: ‘[...] we long to get in the draft – not Uncle Sammy’s, but in those cool and refreshing breezes […] The Ghost is being worked up, already, and the “apparition” will soon be shown up at one or more of our theatres’ (‘Theatrical: City’ 8 August).2 The Clipper continued to relate current events in later issues as well: ‘“Why is the present season so much warmer than last summer?” “Because the rioters stopped the draft.” […] The “ghost” sensation continues [...] Ghosts multiply with a rapidity equal to children of Dutch parents;

191

Spectres on the New York Stage

they rise up before us like professional substitutes […]’ (‘Theatrical: City’ 22 August).3 The day after Pepper’s ghost made its first appearance in New York, the Times defined what made the ghost so appealingly appalling: No one believes in ghosts, yet everyone is thrilled at Professor Pepper’s representations thereof [...] [T]he Professor has very skillfully and scientifically given visible consistency to the traditional idea of ghosts, and so unsealed those little springs of darkness and mystery that lie hidden in every healthy imagination […] It can walk and talk like ordinary humanity, but is semi-transpareet [sic] and dissipates itself into air; coming on the scene and leaving it like an exhalation. There is something alarming in all this, and hence the rapt interest that was taken in the several manifestations. (‘Wallack’s Theatre’ 7 August)

These audiences may not have believed in ghosts but they were haunted, nonetheless, by the very real losses of family members and friends. There was a heightened sense of death as something gruesome and immediate that could appear without warning, like the stage apparitions. Although northern audiences may have lacked direct experience of the battlefield, they were rapidly acquiring knowledge of the atrocities of the war. By providing an ‘encounter’ with the dead and with the afterlife, Pepper’s ghosts offered people a way of coming to terms with, and processing, this new knowledge. These spectres retained enough of their alarming characteristics to achieve the desired effect on the audience, yet had a scientific explanation. Thus, audiences could experience the intense emotions they had come to expect in spectacular, special-effects-ridden melodramas as a way of redefining their new awareness of death. Pepper’s Ghost, as the ghost illusion was widely known, was not actually invented by Pepper. In England in 1858, Henry Dircks had demonstrated that a piece of glass, if lit properly, could be ‘both transparent and reflective at the same time’, just as one can simultaneously see one’s reflection in a window and see beyond it (Speaight 49). Dircks hoped to market his discovery to theatres as a new type of stage ghost. A vertical piece of glass could be placed between the audience and the actors and lit in a way that would make it undetectable. A brightly-lit actor would stand in a special alcove underneath the audience, and the actor’s translucent reflection would appear on the glass. Carefully choreographed actors behind the glass could then interact with the ‘apparition’, which would actually be invisible to these actors, but visible to the audience. Dircks was initially unsuccessful at marketing his invention, as his model required the construction of a whole new theatre building to create the requisite area under the audience. In 1862, Dircks brought his idea before J.H. Pepper, director of the Royal Polytechnic Institute. ‘Professor’ Pepper, as he called himself, modified Dircks’s original idea by suggesting that the actor and lights be housed in a trap in the stage, that the sheet of glass be placed at a forty-five-degree angle to the audience, and that the actor to be reflected stand in this trap in a slanted position parallel to the glass. The ghost-actor would have a limited range of motion in this reclining

192

Representations of Death/Dassia N. Posner

position, but there would be no need to construct a whole new theatre. Dircks and Pepper agreed to share the credit, and patented the revised invention in February 1863. Pepper shortly thereafter bought the rights to the conjuror A. Silvester’s enhancement of the device that allowed the actor to have a slightly greater range of motion,4 and began holding regular demonstrations of the invention at the Royal Polytechnic. By this time, the technique had become widely known as ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, much to the indignation of Dircks. Pepper continued to show ‘his’ ghost over the next ten years. In 1890, there was still sufficient interest in it for Pepper to publish his True History of the Ghost. The ghost was first brought to New York by Henry Watkins, who rented Wallack’s Theatre for a short season beginning 6 August 1863. The feature, entitled True to the Last, was unabashedly intended as a vehicle for the display of other-worldly effects. The playbill advertised the pending phantom as THE GREATEST SCIENTIFIC WONDER THE WORLD HAS EVER BEHELD. A MARVELLOUS PHANTOM Produced by Costly Scientific Apparatus’. (‘True to the Last’)

Watkins rightly anticipated that the ghost would find a sympathetic audience but that it would be difficult to monopolize the technique for long; According to the Herald, he ‘pasted brown paper over all the keyholes in the theatre’ in an attempt to preserve the secret (‘Theatrical: Wallack’s’ 6 August), intending to make as much money as he could on the venture. Aside from the fact that Pepper’s was an imported English ghost, and therefore attractive to anglophile nineteenth-century Americans, this new technique, it was hoped, would correct some of the frustrating problems inherent in the portrayal of spectral characters. In anticipation of the ghost’s first appearance, the Times critic predicted: ‘If the effect is what it pretends to be […] the stage has undoubtedly gained a new and thrilling effect. We may expect to have Ghosts for a twelvemonth at least’ (‘Wallack’s Theatre’ 6 August). That this article predicts that ghosts would haunt theatres for a whole year is telling about the nineteenth-century theatrical scene: if something was popular, it was immediately imitated by other theatres for as long as it brought in a profit. At the show’s opening, audiences soon made it clear that they had come for the ghost and cared little for the written drama. The Herald wrote: The mysterious ghost will appear for the first time in this country this evening. Everybody is talking about it, and, of course, everybody will go to see it. The play which introduces the ghost will be called ‘True to the Last’; but nobody cares anything about the play […] The great and only personage of interest is the ghost. (‘Theatrical: Wallack’s’ 6 August)

A Herald article from the following day even provided a plot summary for those ‘who would like to be relieved from listening to the first two acts’ of the play

193

Spectres on the New York Stage

(‘Theatrical. The Ghosts’). Despite some observations that the technique did not operate entirely smoothly on the opening night, the Times proclaimed, ‘we may say, briefly and boldly, that it is the best “Ghost” we have ever had in New-York’ (‘Wallack’s Theatre’ 7 August). True to the Last featured a series of murders committed by Dr Henry Haws, referred to simply as ‘the wicked nephew’. He kills his uncle Hugh Farquier (an ‘old miser’), and the miser’s nurse, Agnes Darke, attempting to pin the blame on a young student, Dulanie. In Act Three, for the first time, the ghosts were revealed. The first one, the ‘King of Terrors’, was a phantom skeleton. Although audiences soon made it clear that they preferred ghosts to be portrayed as lifelike figures rather than as decayed remains, it seems fitting, given the context of the unburied corpses of the war dead, that the first ghost to haunt the New York stage was a skeleton. This illusion was then followed by progressively more terrifying visions, first of the murdered Agnes Darke, and then of the bloody, murdered miser. The Herald gave a detailed description of the event: The wicked nephew […] says he has been visited by spirits, but does not believe in them. Just at this moment a skeleton forms itself out of air and stands by the wicked nephew’s elbow. The wicked nephew and the audience are equally astonished. Then the skeleton flourishes his dart, and the wicked nephew begs for a little longer life. His request is considerately granted, in order not to stop the piece, and a perfect storm of approbation succeeds from all parts of the theatre. This furor of applause stamped the ghost as a great success, and when it had subsided people settled themselves comfortably to see what was coming next. The wicked nephew now recovers from his fright and dares the whole spirit world to come on. He says he is no coward, and laughs – ha, ha. The ghost of Agnes Darke responds to this challenge. The wicked nephew and the audience shiver as this strange, indescribable phantom passes before them. The wicked nephew plucks up courage, makes a rush at the figure, clutches it and finds it mere air. Another tremendous outburst of applause ensues, and the wicked nephew is again encouraged to defy the apparition. (‘Theatrical. The Ghosts’ 7 August)

What is most fascinating about this description is that it presents the villain and the audience as experiencing the same emotions simultaneously. The audience wished to, and often did, experience the shock and terror of the stage character who was interacting with the ghosts. Although the plays that were chosen as vehicles for the new ghost technique did not deal directly with the Civil War, the ghosts in True to the Last helped audiences to process the impact of gory, untimely deaths. The phantoms’ translucence enabled the audience to view the ravaged body and experience an emotional catharsis, while remaining removed from the physical reality of death on the battlefield. These ghosts also reflected, both literally and figuratively, real life experiences by enabling the audience to see and respond to ghosts simultaneously as spirits and as bodies. The nineteenth century saw a resurgence in religions that embraced the idea of an unseen spiritual world. Protestantism allowed for the belief in souls, angels, an invisible Holy Spirit, and demons, even if this religion was unwilling to formally

194

Representations of Death/Dassia N. Posner

admit ghosts. Additionally, not only did a number of new religions come into existence in nineteenth-century America, but many of these emphasized a belief in the unseen (Carroll 8). The late 1840s also saw the rise of spiritualism, especially after the Fox sisters gained renown for their highly theatrical communications with the spirit world. As Amy Lehman points out: ‘For some, the séances and trance speakers were little more than parlour entertainment. But for those who took the phenomena seriously, they heralded a new era of spiritual awakening’ (5). Theatre audiences were unsure what a spirit looked like; one effective and convincing method of presenting Pepper’s ghost was to retain the characteristics that tied the spectre to the world of the living, while altering that reality slightly. In True to the Last, the ghost of Agnes Darke was clearly human in appearance, but simultaneously ghostlike in the sense that she was insubstantial. Additionally, the environment surrounding the ghosts altered when the phantoms materialized: the lights were dimmed, evocative of so-called ‘dark séances’ (Lehman 6) and the ghost then ‘appeared without warning, ushered in by shrieks and groans, pizzicato “sneak music” by the orchestra, and wails from the property man’s wind machine’ (Skinner 245). The Herald adds that ‘a smell of brimstone, faint but distinct’ pervaded the house (‘Theatrical. The Ghosts’ 7 August). A significant difference between séances and these Pepper’s productions, however, was that theatre audiences could now actually see the spirit. Henry Watkins intentionally presented the characters’ apparitions much as they had appeared while still alive. The Herald states that when the final ghost, ‘the ghost of the murdered miser’, appears, his ‘throat [is] bleeding with a ghastly wound’, after which he sits down (‘Theatrical. The Ghosts’ 7 August). The fact that his wound is still bleeding fixes the moment of death for longer contemplation and analysis on the part of the audience, and provides justification for the miser’s spirit remaining in a state of unrest by emphasizing the violent and untimely nature of his demise. Audiences were also fascinated to see what a phantom could do physically. That the miser sat in a chair provided another way of demonstrating that he lacked physical substance, while putting the stage technique through its paces. In séances spirits made their presence felt by interacting with physical objects in the room; objects might move, one might feel an invisible hand, but the only evidence of the spiritual world was its impact on the physical realm (Lehman 6–8). In the case of a stage apparition, it would initially seem that this kind of interaction with physical objects was unnecessary – after all, the audience could actually see the ghost. However, the superimposition of a reflected object on a solid one served to highlight the tension between the concrete and the ephemeral by affirming that the spiritual realm was always present, but unseen. These ghosts could be, and usually were, interacted with as though they were real bodies in order to emphasize their lack of substance. Photographs from True to the Last make no attempt to represent the ghosts as transparent, but in one, the ‘wicked nephew’ achieves the same effect by thrusting his sword through the apparently unperturbed spectral figure of Agnes Darke (Fig. 12.1).5

195

Spectres on the New York Stage

Fig. 12.1. Mrs W.R. Floyd as the ghost of Agnes Darke and Mr H.F. Daly as Dr Henry Haws in True to the Last. Unmounted carte-de-visite, 85 x 53 mm. Laurence Senelick Collection of Theatrical Imagery In the action of the play, the ‘wicked nephew’ interacts with the ghosts primarily by stabbing them, shooting them, grasping them, or otherwise trying to bring about their demise: He draws a sword and stabs the phantom; but it is invulnerable. He seizes a pistol and fires it at the ghost of Agnes Darke; but the apparition will not ‘down at his bidding.’ Then the wicked nephew and the curtain fall at the same time, and the audience again applaud and cheer in the most enthusiastic manner. (‘Theatrical. The Ghosts’, 7 August)

Shortly after the opening of True to the Last, the Herald criticized the production for not going far enough in this direction: ‘Mr Daly, who assists the ghosts, ought to act with more spirit and cut the phantoms through and through, instead of stabbing behind them’ (‘Theatrical: Wallack’s’ 10 August). Less than two weeks into the run, the Clipper reported that audiences had grown impatient at having to wait so long to catch the first glimpse of ‘the chief attraction’ (‘Theatrical: City’ 22 August). A week later, Watkins remedied this by adding more ghost to the finale:

196

Representations of Death/Dassia N. Posner

‘A slice has been taken off of the dramatic at Wallack’s, while a little more ghost has been tacked on, which goes to show that the “shadow” is preferred to the “substance”’ (‘Theatrical: City’ Clipper, 29 August). An undated playbill from the third week of the run describes the revised finale as follows: VISION OF THE DEAD! THE TROUBLED SPIRIT AT PEACE!... GRAND APOTHEOSIS OF AGNES DARKE AND HUGH FARQUIER! (‘True to the Last’)

The purpose of including these additional scenes was more than just to provide the audience with further terrible thrills. Following the war, there was an increased interest in the spiritual afterlife and more detailed immediate depictions of heaven.6 Ghastly spectres were what audiences wanted, but these same audiences also wanted resolution – in the spectral realm if they could not achieve it in the physical one. After nearly seven weeks of packed houses and speculators selling tickets at jacked-up prices (‘Theatrical: City’ Clipper, 5 September), the Times, by then sick of the ghost show at Wallack’s, announced: ‘“The Ghost” will be kicked out of Wallack’s on Wednesday next [...]’ (‘Amusements’ 14 September). Wallack’s regular season did not advertise any ghost shows but within days of the first performance of True to the Last, other theatres had ghost shows, having most likely pirated the technique from Wallack’s (‘Theatrical: City’ Clipper, 26 September). Fox’s Old Bowery had a ghost by 17 August; the New Bowery introduced a phantom three days earlier, the showman P.T. Barnum supposedly had ‘the only genuine ghost in the country’ by early September; the Brooklyn Academy of Music had a ghost by 24 August. The papers advertised ghost lectures, ghost burlesques, ghost swindles, ghost speculators and ghost light salesmen. Several critics entertained hopes that higher quality staging techniques would result in better productions of works with literary value. The ghost was optimistically predicted to be a solution to staging Shakespeare. The Herald predicted: ‘The ghost in “Hamlet” and Banquo’s ghost and the witches in “Macbeth” will no longer be laughing stocks, but will be represented with all the sublime […] of the supernatural’ (‘Theatrical: The Ghost’ 4 August). Although several theatres hoped to insert Pepper’s ghost into Shakespeare plays, the New Bowery Theatre was the only one that did. They had the first Pepper’s Macbeth and Tempest to the delight of critics who had high aspirations for ‘his Ghostship’, as several critics began to call the phantom stage technique.7 In Macbeth, the ghost made several cameo appearances, including manifestations as the spirits of the witches and the ghost of Banquo. (‘Macbeth’). The Clipper complained, however, about the portrayal of Banquo’s ghost. The first time Banquo appeared, he used Pepper’s illusion; the second time, however, he ‘stalked’ on stage ‘as bold “as any other man”’ (‘Theatrical: City’ 29 August). The limitations of the technology made it im-

197

Spectres on the New York Stage

possible for a Pepper’s ghost to have a convincing speaking part. Despite the hopes for Shakespeare, audiences proved to be interested in ghosts for the thrill of the experience, rather than for any supposed high cultural benefit, despite the frequent but ineffectual protests of the theatre critic from the New York Times. The New Bowery Theatre ended their Shakespeare experiments after these two productions, and redoubled their efforts to create spectral effects featuring murders, strange spells, the devil and séances. These latter ghosts brought the theatre several months of success. In many ways ‘his Ghostship’ was the ideal actor. He could be, and was, viewed as a single, concrete identity, but had multiple manifestations. In fact, the key to keeping Pepper’s ghosts alive as long as possible was to vary the ghost effects and to include them as only part of an evening of entertainment. George L. Fox’s Old Bowery Theatre, already famous for its pantomimes, had even more success with ghost dramas than the New Bowery. The Old Bowery’s first spectral drama of the season, The Ghost of Altenberg, lived up to its promise of being ‘Replete with Powerful Spectral Effects;’ its seven tableaux featured an illusion, a shadow, a spectre, a skeleton, a phantom, a ghost and a vision (‘Ghost of Altenberg’). This piece, the second on the bill, was preceded by another called How to Avoid Drafting, a comic take on the conscription. The Clipper attributed the success at both Bowery Theatres to the fact that ‘about every variety of shadow [is] exhibited’ (‘Theatrical: City’ 17 October). Less typical of the ghost trend, but significant in relation to the broader cultural context, were minstrel versions of Pepper’s ghost. The first spectre to appear after Wallack’s was at Wood’s Minstrel Palace, on 10 August, four days after the first ghost hit Manhattan.8 Although it was suspected that this was a ghost burlesque, the Clipper critic, who had a marked fondness for minstrelsy, encouraged audiences to attend, emphasizing that this was a Pepper’s ghost, despite initial technical difficulties: ‘There is no burlesque about the spectres, for they appear “like shadows in the air” and Charley Fox is made a ghost in spite of himself. The spectral scene is heightened by the singing of several popular Negro airs’ (‘Theatrical: City’ 22 August). By mid-September Wood’s had conflated their ghost show with one of their longest running and most popular skits, ‘Happy Uncle Tom’, to create ‘The Ghost of Happy Uncle Tom’, a skit that enjoyed a run of about a month and a half. ‘Happy Uncle Tom’ bore virtually no resemblance to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; rather it was an anti-abolitionist skit first performed by Frank Brower in 1853 as ‘a sketch of Ethiopian eccentricities’ featuring the performer’s ‘Uncle Tom Jig’.9 As Alexander Saxton elucidates: Within a few months after the appearance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, minstrels had coopted the title and main characters, while reversing the message [...] Indeed, all that was needed to render a serious theme ludicrous in blackface minstrelsy was to permit its dehumanizing form to overbalance the content. (80)

198

Representations of Death/Dassia N. Posner

The content of Brower’s ‘Happy Uncle Tom’ frequently changed, but a version published in 1863 featured a contented plantation slave, Tom, who is hard of hearing and cares only about banjos and dancing. Uncle Tom mishears the banjo player in ways that are intended to emphasize Tom’s lack of intelligence and worldly knowledge in a comical way. The scene concludes with Brower’s usual jig (Brower 7). ‘The Ghost of Happy Uncle Tom’ was probably based on the same principle as Brower’s solo acts, but with additional characters, including a second ghost played by Charley Fox. The playbill boasts: THE GHOST of HAPPY UNCLE TOM fills every beholder with wonder and delight. The greatest novelty yet introduced in Spectral Illusions. THE DANCING GHOST Will appear in connection with WOOD’S MINSTRELS (‘The Ghost of Happy Uncle Tom’)

Brower’s spectral dance would have been somewhat restricted by the stage machinery, probably to increased comic effect. The skit emphasized blackface ghosts, but the Clipper adds that there were white ghosts as well, which was probably intended to accentuate racial difference, even beyond the grave: ‘[L]et us recommend a visit to Wood’s Minstrels. There, the ghost of Uncle Tom appears, fresh from the land of spectres, and black spirits and white’ (‘Theatrical: City’ 19 September). This contrasted sharply with Stowe’s representation of a heaven in which racial difference was erased, eradicating her novel’s original message on yet another level. As a ghost, not only was Uncle Tom deprived of his original social message by being turned into a dancing buffoon, but he was made to appear and disappear at will, and to vanish entirely. It is significant that a dancing Tom ghost, the only Pepper’s Uncle Tom advertised during this craze, could be utilized for amusement such a short time after the draft riots. A great deal of anger had been unleashed against black Americans; the homes of blacks were invaded and destroyed, and a sizeable percentage of the roughly one hundred killed in the riots were African Americans. In his study on minstrelsy, Robert Toll states: On stage, minstrelsy repeatedly acted out images which illustrated that there was no need to fight a war over slavery, no need to accept Negroes as equals in the North, and no need to feel guilty for contradictions between slavery and the American Creed. (97)

‘The Ghost of Happy Uncle Tom’ took this a step further by addressing a desire on the part of audiences to have the ‘Negro question’ disappear entirely, especially in the wake of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of that year. The volley of ghost plays slowed down after about three months. There was only so much variety theatre managers could devise before audiences accepted ghosts as a matter of course. The Clipper even joked, ‘You can no longer “skeer” children by threatening them with the Ghost – they like it; you can’t give ‘em too

199

Spectres on the New York Stage

much of it; you can’t choke them off with the Ghost any more than you can with cheese cakes’ (‘Theatrical: City’ 19 September). More importantly, however, there were problems inherent in the design of the machinery that theatres, in the interests of making money quickly, never addressed. For stage machinery that was apparently so simple, the set-up was difficult to perfect. Significant time was required to erect the device between acts, something that audiences were accustomed to, but not entirely happy with. One had to mask the edges of the glass, get the angle of the glass right, and acquire a light source that was bright enough to produce a clear reflection, but could also be made to fade up and down. Besides the technical difficulties, the ghost had other limitations. Choreographing the actor onstage to interact with the ghost was challenging because the actor could not see the ghost. Giving the ghost enough mobility to look natural was difficult, and making the ghost talk in a serious drama was impossible, since the voice would come from the trap and break the illusion. Additionally, not only had the Scientific American published a how-to article on the subject in August (‘Correct Explanation’, Fig.12.2), but the secret of Pepper’s ghost was also disseminated via word-of-mouth.

Fig. 12.2. A simplified illustration of the Pepper’s ghost mechanism. Reproduced from ‘Correct Explanation of the Ghost’ (Scientific American, 29 August 1863), 132 If the ghosts were presented well, audiences didn’t mind being aware of the technique used to produce them, but theatres were more concerned with making money quickly than they were with perfection, and over-advertised to draw

200

Representations of Death/Dassia N. Posner

audiences away from competing ghosts. Barnum, whose ghost did not haunt the stage until mid-September, advertised in the Times that his ghost would be: produced with the most PERFECT SUCCESS, the spectre standing out clear and distinct, WALKING ABOUT THE STAGE, visible to every eye, and from every part of the house’ (‘Amusements’ 15 September)

His first few productions were riddled with technical difficulties and did not live up to his promises. Although the Times was laudatory,10 the Clipper was damning: ‘The ghost business […] which [Barnum] has introduced, is a poor attempt. Why the men in the boxes who wear spectacles can plainly see the three pieces of plate glass on the stage that are used as refractors’ (‘Theatrical: City’ 26 September). This disappointed audiences already somewhat sated on ghosts.

Fig. 12.3. A modification of Pepper’s technique. The original caption reads: ‘AN X-RAY ILLUSION UPON THE STAGE CONVERSION OF A LIVING MAN INTO A SKELETON’. Reproduced from ‘The Cabaret Du Neant’ (Scientific American, 7 March 1896), 152 So what happened to his ‘Ghostship’? Did he vanish ‘like the baseless fabric of a dream’ as the Clipper had predicted two weeks into the craze? (‘Theatrical: City’

201

Spectres on the New York Stage

22 August). Senelick observes that Pepper’s ghost was eventually replaced with the back-lit scrim (72). Although this was true for the majority of theatres, Pepper’s ghost did put in sporadic appearances in a variety of settings for the rest of the century. There were two US patents involving Pepper techniques in the 1880’s (Johnson). Albert Hopkins’s book Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversion, Including Trick Photography, published in 1897, contains a number of articles relating to this technique as well. The ‘Cabaret du Neant’ of 1896, which featured an imported ghost, this time from Paris, but based on the same principle, was a haunted ‘tavern’ where patrons could be frightened by multifarious phantoms. In one of the most popular exhibits, spectators could watch one of their companions be turned into a skeleton before their eyes (‘Cabaret’, Fig. 12.3). It is this last example that best illustrates the fate of the ghost. Pepper’s ghost was best suited to fairgrounds and magic shows – places where the setup could be permanent, the shows short, and the spectre foregrounded. Audiences in New York constantly sought a variety of new, sensational entertainments. As an exciting innovation in stage machinery, Pepper’s ghost would have been popular in the nineteenth century, regardless of the particular cultural moment of its production. Later in the century, for example, audiences had an even greater interest in live, onstage horse races. Because of its timing, however, Pepper’s ghost addressed more than just a need for novelty. How it was used was more significant than the fact that the craze was so popular – or so short-lived. The theatrical ghost offered a fright as well as a form of therapy. Audiences could deal with ‘latent superstition’ in a concrete, yet removed way (‘Wallack’s Theatre’ Times, 7 August). In a review of a Brooklyn show, the Times described the emotional response the audience both wanted and provided: ‘The “Ghost” was all the fancy of the audience had painted it, and exacted the usual tribute of shiverings, tears and screams from the gaping throngs’ (‘Amusements. Brooklyn’). Audiences experienced an emotional thrill from what appeared to be the stuff of nightmares, as a way of looking changing definitions of death and mourning directly in the face.

Notes 1

2

3 4

For a detailed discussion of changing attitudes toward death during the Civil War, see Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Deathn (1799–1883) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 89–154. Although the paper was published on Saturdays, the ‘Theatrical Record’ is always dated the previous Monday. The Clipper critic was somewhat unusual in his juxtaposition of widely contrasting themes; his weekly summaries address a wide range of issues, often with humour, in a way that shows the relation between these seemingly unrelated occurrences. If drafted, provided one had the money, one could hire a substitute. Senelick and Speaight state that Mr Silvester added a mirror in the trap so that the actor could stand upright and be reflected in the mirror, and so that his image would be cast

202

Representations of Death/Dassia N. Posner

from there to the onstage glass. See Laurence Senelick, ‘Pepper’s Ghost Faces the Camera’, History of Photography (January–March 1983) and George Speaight, ‘Professor Pepper’s Ghost’, Revue d’Histoire du Theatre, 1 (1963). A. Silvester (Johnson does not provide Silvester’s full name) and numerous others patented changes to the Pepper’s Ghost technique in an attempt to make the ghost vivid, more other-worldly, or even to change its colour. See Raoul Fenton Johnson, ‘United States and British Patents for Scenic and Lighting Devices for the Theatre from 1861–1915’, Ph.D diss., (University of Illinois, 1966), 35–40. 5 For more information on photographs of Pepper’s ghost, see Senelick. 6 See Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, Religion and the American Civil War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 7 For more information on The Tempest see ‘The Tempest’, Playbill. New Bowery Theatre. 15 September 1863. Harvard Theatre Collection. 8 Odell claims that the show opened on 12 August, and that Bryant’s Minstrels had a ghost show beginning on the 10th. See George C.D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (15 vols; New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–1949), vol. 7. I am basing my dates on advertisements by the theatres themselves. 9 The following are examples of titles that show how the story was altered to eliminate the book’s original message: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Hearts and Homes’, ‘Life Among the Happy’, ‘Aunt Dinah’s Cabin’, and an Irish version, ‘Uncle Pat’s Cabin’. See Harry Birdoff, The World’s Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: S.F. Vanni, 1947), 139–41, and Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 10 The Times reviewer generally gave Barnum favourable reviews. See ‘Barnum’s Museum’, New York Times (16 September 1863).

Works Cited ‘Amusements’, Advertisement, New York Times (15 September 1863), 7. ‘Amusements’, New York Times (14 September 1863), 4. ‘Amusements. Brooklyn Academy of Music’, New York Times (24 August 1863), 4. ‘Barnum’s Museum’, New York Times (16 September 1863), 4. Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society in the Age of the Civil War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Birdoff, Harry. The World’s Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: S.F. Vanni, 1947). Brower, Frank. Frank Brower’s Black Diamond Songster and Ebony Jester (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1863). ‘The Cabaret Du Neant’, Scientific American (7 March 1896), 152–3. Carroll, Bret E. Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997).

203

Spectres on the New York Stage

Cook, Adrian. The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1974). ‘Correct Explanation of the Ghost’, Scientific American (29 August 1863), 132. ‘The Ghost of Altenberg, or, the Mystic Harp’, Playbill. Old Bowery Theatre. The Programme: Journal of the Drama, Music, Literature, Art (Harvard Theatre Collection, 28 August 1863). ‘The Ghost of Happy Uncle Tom’, Playbill. Wood’s Minstrels. The Programme: Journal of the Drama, Music, Literature, Art (Harvard Theatre Collection, 23 September 1863). Hopkins, Albert A. ‘The “Cabaret Du Neant”’. Trans. Henry Ridgely Evans. Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversion, Including Trick Photography (New York: Munn & Co. Publishers; Scientific American Office, 1897), 55–60. Johnson, Raoul Fenton. ‘United States and British Patents for Scenic and Lighting Devices for the Theatre from 1861–1915’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Illinois, 1966). Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799– 1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Lehman, Amy. ‘The Theatrical Possibilities of Mesmeric Performance’. Seminar paper. Annual conference of the American Society for Theatre Research (Philadelphia, 2002). ‘Macbeth’, Playbill. New Bowery Theatre (Harvard Theatre Collection, 22 August 1863). Miller, Randall M., Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson. Religion and the American Civil War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Odell, George C.D. Annals of the New York Stage (15 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–1949). Pepper, John Henry. A True History of the Ghost and All About Metempsychosis (London and New York: Cassell & Co., 1890). Saxton, Alexander. ‘Blackface Minstrelsy’. Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy. Ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch and Brooks McNamara (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). Senelick, Laurence. ‘Pepper’s Ghost Faces the Camera’. History of Photography (January–March 1983), 69–72. Skinner, Maud, and Otis Skinner. One Man in His Time: The Adventures of H. Watkins, Strolling Player 1845–1863. From His Journal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938). Speaight, George. ‘Professor Pepper’s Ghost’. Revue d’ Histoire du Théâtre, 1 (1963), 48–56. ‘The Tempest’, Playbill. New Bowery Theatre (Harvard Theatre Collection, 15 September 1863). ‘Theatrical Record: City Summary’. New York Clipper (8 August 1863), 131. ‘Theatrical Record: City Summary’. New York Clipper (22 August 1863), 147.

204

Representations of Death/Dassia N. Posner

‘Theatrical Record: City Summary’. New York Clipper (29 August 1863), 155. ‘Theatrical Record: City Summary’. New York Clipper (5 September 1863), 163. ‘Theatrical Record: City Summary’. New York Clipper (19 September 1863), 180. ‘Theatrical Record: City Summary’. New York Clipper (26 September 1863), 187. ‘Theatrical Record: City Summary’. New York Clipper (17 October 1863), 211. ‘Theatrical Record: City Summary’. New York Clipper (31 October 1863), 229. ‘Theatrical: The Ghost’. New York Herald (4 August 1863), 5. ‘Theatrical: Wallack’s’. New York Herald (6 August 1863), 5. ‘Theatrical: The Ghosts at Wallack’s’. New York Herald (7 August 1863), 5. ‘Theatrical: Wallack’s’. New York Herald (10 August 1863), 4. Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). ‘True to the Last’, Playbill. Wallack’s Theatre (Harvard Theatre Collection, 6 August 1863). ‘True to the Last’, Playbill. Wallack’s Theatre (Harvard Theatre Collection, [undated] 1863). ‘Wallack’s Theatre’. New York Times (6 August 1863), 4. ‘Wallack’s Theatre’. New York Times (7 August 1863), 5. Whitman, Walt. ‘The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up’. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982).

Chapter 13

Medusa’s Blinding Art Mesmerism and Female Artistic Agency in Louisa May Alcott’s ‘A Pair of Eyes; or, Modern Magic’ Ann Heilmann

‘I was disappointed – the great actress had not given me what I wanted, and my picture must still remain unfinished for want of a pair of eyes’. This is the opening sentence of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘A Pair of Eyes; or; Modern Magic’, published anonymously in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1863 and reprinted in Madeleine Stern’s 1988 edition of Alcott thrillers, A Double Life. In ‘A Pair of Eyes’ Alcott draws on the contemporary vogue for mesmerism to explore the artistic and sexual struggle for mastery that takes place between a painter couple. Disenchanted with the Shakespearean actress whose performance fails to provide inspiration for his painting, the narrator, Max Erdmann, scouts her fashionable audience for a suitable model and becomes enthralled with Agatha Eure, a young heiress with the reputation of a Diana and a mysteriously vacant gaze: the very embodiment of the somnambulist Lady Macbeth that Erdmann is in the process of creating on canvas. Agatha agrees to sit for him, but the Muse soon turns into Medusa as Erdmann finds himself afflicted with uncanny fainting spells and an irresistible desire for the performative skills of his model when he attempts to paint. After their marriage he realizes that he has fallen victim to Agatha’s hypnotic powers: it was she who contrived their first meeting in order to retrieve her artistic inspiration, enticing him into marriage, and she who now endeavours to utilize his eyes as her own waning eyesight disables her from pursuing her art. Unable to acquiesce in his wife’s desire for creative and sexual agency because it challenges his hegemonic position as husband and artist, Erdmann struggles free from her magnetism, only to find that his negation of his wife’s gift permanently impairs his own artistic faculties. With the loss of her eyesight (her creative vision) Agatha dies, leaving a disabled son and grief-stricken husband behind, the joint emblem of male creativity blinded by its rejection of femininity and the potential of artistic partnership. I argue that in this neglected metafictional story, Alcott invoked mesmerism as a symbol of the potential of female creativity in order to interrogate masculinist attitudes to the woman artist and to plead for an aesthetic that accommodated both male mythology and feminine ‘magic’.

206

Representations of Death/Ann Heilmann

In representing mesmeric powers as the particular province of the female, Alcott inverted the gender dynamics of mesmeric and spiritualist relationships (male mesmerist and female medium) as discussed in Kelly Richardson’s chapter on William Dean Howells’s The Undiscovered Country. The configurations of Alcott’s story draw on and further subvert the gendered spaces of spiritualism, a movement which invested authority in traditionally feminine qualities (spirituality, the inner life, devotion) and challenged the dominant hierarchy of sex/gender traits by turning passive mediumship into a mark of metaphysical agency, and women’s psychical power into evidence of their superiority. Not surprisingly for a social reform movement engaged in a ‘rebellion against authority’ (Braude 3), spiritualism held strong appeal for feminists and women’s rights activists on both sides of the Atlantic. (see Basham; Braude, especially 117–41; Burfield; Oppenheim; and Owen). With its emphasis on equal human rights, its espousal of abolitionism, and its indictment of the inequities of marriage, it became, as Ann Braude has noted, ‘a major – if not the major – vehicle for the spread of woman’s rights ideas in mid-century America’ (57, emphasis in original; see also 6–7, 117–18). Alcott’s spiritualist ending – a male narrator haunted by his dead wife – is thus emblematic of the force of the female spirit which haunted contemporary America. By deploying mesmerism as a metaphor for female agency and depicting the power struggle between mesmerist and mesmerized subject as a reflection of sexual and marital relations, Alcott was able to inject feminist undertones into her story, even as she banked on the marketability of the supernatural. Her text also dramatized the contemporary crisis of category, for the instability of mesmerism and spiritualism as discourses precariously poised between the scientific and supernatural1 is mirrored in the story’s destabilization of art as the product not of individual, autonomous, ‘virile’ genius but of psychic exchange and mediumship. The creative process is thus firmly feminized, and the textual pun on the elusive yet masterful ‘eye’ (‘I’) that shapes its outcome enacts a powerful affirmation of the voice and identity of the woman artist. Pinpointed already in the title, the story’s central metaphor – a pair of ‘eyes’ – operates as a structural and conceptual device, signalling the multiple levels on which Alcott sought to engage her readers. In harnessing the popular appeal of Gothic and sensation fiction to the contemporary cultural and scientific interest in the psychological ramifications of the mesmerist gaze, she was able to explore the gender configurations in the construction of aesthetic discourses, raising unsettling questions about the nature of artistic identity in its interaction with the eye / I of the aestheticized subject. By aligning the artist’s quest for immortality with the marital pursuit of mastery and depicting the ensuing battle of wills as one from which women could emerge only as beautiful corpses, she articulated a stark critique of the position of women in marriage, subtly veiling her feminist concerns by ventriloquizing them through the voice of the male protagonist bound on delivering himself from domestic enslavement. Alcott’s text is also significant in that it offers an intriguing counterpoint to Elisabeth Bronfen’s later conceptualization of the death of a beautiful woman as representing a paradigmatic moment of inspiration

Medusa’s Blinding Art

207

for male art (Bronfen 71). For Alcott’s male artist, Erdmann, accomplishes his masterpiece during Agatha’s lifetime, under her mesmerist dictation, in a state of suspended consciousness resembling death, and Agatha’s demise leads, not to heightened artistic output, but instead to his recognition of her artistic superiority, an insight which effectively terminates his creative impetus. In this essay I explore Agatha’s haunting and subversive mortality through a detailed analysis of Alcott’s use of mesmerism as a signifier of the female artist’s aesthetically and culturally ‘different’ vision. If, as Christopher A. Fahy notes, vision (eyesight) connotes artistic ability in the story, it also points to the competing visions (insights) of male and female artists. Having lost his vision as a painter, Erdmann vainly endeavours to draw inspiration from the spectacular performance of female abjection on the stage and in social institutions (we learn that in his plight Erdmann has visited madhouses and hospitals, all to no avail). Ironically, while his one ambition is to possess himself of an appropriately ‘haunted’ pair of eyes, regardless of the attendant body or the individual woman that might be attached to it, he himself becomes haunted and possessed by Agatha Eure’s disembodied gaze. Initially figured through the power of her eyes only, Agatha is assigned a spiritual rather than bodily space of signification in the ‘disturbing influence’ which begins to discomfit the painter when he finds himself subject to an invisible observer’s ‘searching look’: ‘the thought that I was watched annoyed me like a silent insult’ (Alcott 34). Aware of a shift in power relations, he infers that ‘some stronger nature was covertly exerting its power upon my own’ and, overcome by a ‘curious feeling of impotent resistance […] longed to rebel’ (35). This visual consumption by what he presumes to be another man has a pointedly emasculating effect on his body politic, engendering the gestures of the Victorian middle-class hysteric: ‘every nerve seemed jangled out of tune, my temples beat, my breath came short, and the air seemed feverishly close […] I […] fanned myself like a petulant woman’ (35). It is only in response to his friend Louis Yorke’s metonymic reduction of female spectators into ‘upturned lorgnettes’ (35) that Erdmann is able to reconstitute himself as a patriarchal subject and, consequently, a master of the gaze: ‘Bah! I just wish I could inspire some of those starers with gratitude enough to set them walking in their sleep for my benefit’ (35). His reassertion of his masculine authority, premised as it is on the objectification / abjectification of femininity, enables him to locate the unknown observer, identify her as a woman and subject her, in her turn, to careful inspection: This figure I scrutinized with the eye of an artist which took in every accessory of outline, ornament and hue. Framed in darkest hair, rose a face delicately cut, but cold and colorless as that of any statue in the vestibule without. The lips were slightly parted with the long slow breaths that came and went, the forehead was femininely broad and low, the brows straight and black, and underneath them the mysterious eyes fixed on vacancy, full of that weird regard so hard to counterfeit, so impossible to describe; for though absent, it

208

Representations of Death/Ann Heilmann

was not expressionless, and through its steadfast shine a troubled meaning wandered, as if soul and body could not be utterly divorced by any effort of the will. She seemed unconscious of the scene about her, for the fixture of her glance never changed, and nothing about her stirred but the jewel on her bosom, whose changeful glitter seemed to vary as it rose and fell. Emboldened by this apparent absorption, I prolonged my scrutiny and scanned this countenance as I had never done a woman’s face before. During this examination I had forgotten myself in her, feeling only a strong desire to draw nearer and dive deeper into those two dark wells that seemed so tranquil yet so fathomless, and in the act of trying to fix shape, color and expression in my memory, I lost them all; for a storm of applause broke the attentive hush as the curtain fell, and like one startled from sleep a flash of intelligence lit up the eyes, then a white hand was passed across them, and long downcast lashes hid them from my sight. (37)

Erdmann’s ocular encounter with Agatha replays the unstable and shifting subject / object positions between spectator and spectacle, artist and muse, agent and recipient of the gaze, which marked the opening pages of the text. The woman who, at first sight, appears to have all the passive attributes of the ideal objet d’art, in reality not only rivals but surpasses the male artist in her visionary force, excelling in ‘all manner of things few women […] care to know’, including firsthand knowledge of the occult (43). In its antithetical structure, the passage hints at the perilous consequences that must follow from mythologizing women, dramatizing Erdmann’s entrapment in a maze of self-induced fantasies choreographed and confounded by a woman who subverts the objectifying power of the gaze by mimicking her submission, in order to appropriate and wield authority. When Erdmann boasts of having won ‘haughty Agatha to my will in fifteen minutes’ (41), Yorke disabuses him by revealing her prior interest in him, excited when she caught sight of him striding along unselfconsciously: ‘so Miss Eure had a fine opportunity to feast her eyes upon you, “though you are not pretty, by the way”’ (42), the closing shot echoing Erdmann’s patronizing remark about her plainness (42). Erdmann’s misrecognition of Agatha as the living embodiment of his inner vision and willing instrument of his superior will is further problematized through the disjuncture that the text suggests exists between Agatha’s essence and her selfperformance, for the expression of her eyes, ‘so hard to counterfeit’, could be a sign of duplicity as much as of authenticity. The markers of uncertainty qualifying Erdmann’s observations (‘as if’, ‘seemed’) cast additional doubt on the validity of his perception, underscoring the analogies between the dramatic props of the stage and the mimetic properties of Agatha’s face. Just as the rise and fall of the curtain serves to shape and curtail the spectator’s vision, so Agatha’s eyelashes orchestrate Erdmann’s impressions of her veiled personality. The more he seeks to stabilize and fixate her with his gaze, the more he becomes entranced by her impenetrable eyes bending him to her will, while depriving him of insight into his condition; for ‘scarce conscious’ of the actual dynamics, Erdmann believes himself to be ‘the controlling power’ in their encounter (38). This early passage prefigures a later scene when, chafing under the authority of his wife, he deserts her company only to be impelled, by an unaccountable sense of urgency, to return to her side, and to

Medusa’s Blinding Art

209

discover her sitting ‘erect and motionless as an inanimate figure of intense thought; her eyes […] fixed, face colorless, with an expression of iron determination, as if every energy of mind and body were wrought up to the achievement of a single purpose’ (59): that of making him captive to her will. The glittering jewel so emblematic of her name (agate), and which suffuses Erdmann with the desire to submerge himself in her gaze, operates, like the bracelet in a subsequent scene, as a token of Agatha’s magnetic powers. To the contemporary reader well versed in the literature of mesmerism, Erdmann’s drained energy, drowsiness and mental fatigue on being released from Agatha’s influence would have been self-evident. By the time Alcott wrote the story, the association of mesmerism with the peculiar psychic sensibilities and creative faculties of the artist was well established. The theory of animal magnetism, introduced to prerevolutionary France by the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer, gained cultural currency in the America of the nineteenth century, leaving its imprint on the work of many British and American writers, including Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Basham 85; Stern 18). Alcott was personally acquainted with Hawthorne and Emerson (Saxton). To female intellectuals like Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller (the latter another personal acquaintance of Alcott’s) the occult encapsulated the ‘different voice’ (Gilligan) and visionary spirit of the female and specifically feminist artist (Basham 84).2 Inverting the male myth of the femme fatale (Erdmann’s Lady Macbeth) by reconceptualizing women’s spiritual insights and occult energies as qualities catalytic to, and enriching, the creative abilities of both genders, Alcott suggested that male art might be revitalized by an infusion of femininity. Meanwhile the female artist would find herself delivered from the disabling (in Agatha’s case, blinding) impact of the cultural binaries which pitted the woman against the artist, reproductive against creative faculties. Thus Erdmann’s failing imagination, its manifest sterility evidenced in his need to seek out external stimuli produced by women’s performative agency, undergoes a momentous creative resurgence under the influence of Agatha’s magic spells. (Alcott’s own experience, in early 1863, of female-directed mesmerism as an antidote to debilitating illness would have predisposed her to highlight the healing potential of magnetism).3 On first visiting Agatha’s home, Erdmann’s entry into feminine artistic space is eased by her studio being furnished with the exquisite skill of ‘some one who understood all the requisites for such a place’ (Alcott 44), the play of sounds and the visual effects of light and shadow being offset by colour, greenery and exotic vistas, all creating an emblem of the artist’s mind (‘house’) at the moment of inspiration: The house was very still, for the turmoil of the city was subdued to a murmur, like the far-off music of the sea; a soft gloom filled the room, divided by one strong ray that fell athwart my picture, gifting it with warmth and light. Through a half-open door I saw the green vista of a conservatory, full of fine blendings of color, and wafts of many odors

210

Representations of Death/Ann Heilmann

blown to me by the west wind rustling through orange trees and slender palms; while the only sound that broke the silence was the voice of a flame-colored foreign bird, singing a plaintive little strain like a sorrowful lament. (44–5)

Transfigured by the sensual reverie induced by this scene, Erdmann begins to accede to a fluid state of imaginative sensibility that will make him susceptible to Agatha’s feminine vision. In order to complete the process which would place him in the mental frame required to embrace and be energized by the feminine, Agatha sets in motion a dramatic performance whose purpose it is to make him recognize the barrenness of the masculine imagination. To breathe more life into his vision of Lady Macbeth, she animates his picture, stepping, as it were, from the canvas to confront him with the ‘living likeness of the figure I had painted’ (45). Delighted with being presented with a mirror image of his mental picture, Erdmann is eager to proceed with his work, only to discover that he ‘found [his] interest in the picture grow less and less intent, and with every glance at [his] model found that it was more and more difficult to look away’ (45). The male artist’s attempt to construct mythical femininity from within a masculine economy of desire founders in the encounter with the woman artist invested with the mental power to superimpose a feminine body economy on his vision, enabling him to ‘drift away into a sea of blissful response’, his trance punctuated only by a ‘fragmentary dream that came and went’ (46), signalling the rhythmic periodicity of feminine desire. His impression that he ‘seemed to be looking down at [him]self, as if soul and body had parted company and [he] was gifted with a double life’ (46) points to the mental convergence of identities, reflecting Erdmann’s point of entry to a new, feminized vision. As Agatha later explains, she ‘took the liberty of treating [him] like a woman’ (49). Once again, a ‘glittering object’ of female jewellery (now a bracelet) serves to lull his will, and, as in mesmerist experiments of the time, magnetic passes bring about a trance-like state. Agatha’s choice of wrist (indicative of skilful hands) and temples (one of the seats of artistic taste)4 as the sites most suitable for magnetic stimulation reflect the contemporary phreno-mesmeric belief that, by exciting specific phrenological sites, correlating faculties lying dormant in the mesmerized subject could be activated (Barrow 84–5). Indeed, on awaking from his trance Erdmann finds that he is able to paint ‘as [he] had never done before. Every sense seemed unwontedly acute, and hand and eye [wrists and temples] obeyed [him] with a docility they seldom showed’ (Alcott 49). The ease with which he sets to work suggests that he is not merely inspired, but is actually guided by Agatha’s inner vision. Contemporary readers widely read in mesmerist literature and familiar with the concepts of ‘traction’ and mimicry would have inferred that, just as in deep trance the mesmerized subject was in tune with, and able to reproduce, the mesmerist’s sensations and movements (Winter 41),5 so Erdmann internalizes, copies and bodies forth Agatha’s artistic conception. As Chauncy Hare Townshend observed in his popular and broadly disseminated study Facts in Mesmerism (1840), this process of coordination was analogous to the workings of the human body, thus supporting the notion that mesmerist and

Medusa’s Blinding Art

211

mesmerized subject constituted ‘the complement of one full being […] The one designs, the other executes: the one sets in motion a machine […] the other is the machine itself’ (52). Applied to Alcott’s story this suggests that the creative agency for the masterpiece which Erdmann produces, and which makes his artistic reputation, resides primarily with Agatha. As in his dream, the body and soul of the reconfigured, doubly-gendered artist are split, with Agatha representing the soul, while Erdmann (literally, ‘man of the earth’, ‘earth-bound man’) operates on the level of the body, acting as he does as the medium of her imagination, the tool which lends material shape to her inner vision. As the text implies, this would offer the ideal basis for an artistic partnership in which, in ironic subversion of Victorian separate-spheres ideology, the woman is ascribed the leading (spiritual, cerebral, conceptual) part. For different reasons, they are both unable to operate in isolation, Erdmann because he lacks the vision while being abundantly supplied with the ambition of the true artist (‘the pursuit of fame’, not art for art’s sake, was ‘the object for which [he] lived’; Alcott 34), Agatha because the overexertion of her faculties has resulted in failing eyesight, her near-blindness a potent metaphor for the consuming intensity of her inner vision. The constructive collaboration to which Agatha so keenly aspires – ‘I have learned to desire for others what I can never hope for myself’ (Alcott 50) – is circumvented by Erdmann’s resurfacing masculine drive for a separate identity, the aggressive imposition of body boundaries revealing his deep-seated fear of emotional proximity. Once his masterpiece is completed and his success in the art world assured, not least because of the material benefits of his pecuniary marriage to Agatha, his close association with femininity, in particular his feminine trance, appear to him as a mark of shameful ‘weakness’ (49). Intent on healing his impaired sense of masculinity, he replaces Agatha’s company with the public world of celebrated male artists. Ironically, however, his flight from femininity proves to be his artistic downfall, for in obliterating Agatha (his feminine alter ego) he also erases his creative vision. Though he shuts himself away in his studio, there is no mention of any further project on which he might be engaged, and he is eventually faced with the stark insight that he has lost ‘both brain and hand of power to conceive and skill to execute’ (60). In full cognizance of the fact that if Agatha ‘could have joined me in my work we might have been happy’ (54), he excludes her from his imaginative life, severing their artistic union by relegating her to the marginal spaces of domesticated, intellectually and spiritually constrained, patriarchally defined femininity: ‘Here are novels, new songs, an instrument, embroidery and a dog […] what more can a contented woman ask’ (55). Agatha responds to her reduction to the disempowered and superfluous Angel in the House by assuming the role of another patriarchal stereotype, the Witch. Provoked by Erdmann’s indifference, she takes him up on his challenge to try and break his emotional resistance if she can, and resumes her mesmerist spells. Yet, while previously her occult powers served primarily creative purposes, they are now disengaged from her artistic persona, not

212

Representations of Death/Ann Heilmann

least because she has been stripped of her identity as an artist. No longer a unifying, productive and regenerative force, mesmerism, in the hands of the dispossessed and subjected, becomes a dangerous weapon whose destructive force leaves nobody unharmed. For when Erdmann discovers the reason for the nervous attacks which keep him housebound, he abandons Agatha and their unborn child and, after studying mesmerism, launches a telepathic battle for supremacy. Though on the face of it he is successful in forcing her to concede defeat, his concluding remarks reveal that her will has ultimately prevailed, albeit only in death: ‘Day and night I listen to the voice that whispers to me through the silence of these years, day and night I answer with a yearning cry from the depths of a contrite spirit […] humbly saying: “You have conquered, I am here!”’ (71). Only through her erasure as a woman, only in death and through death can the female artist lend permanence to her voice, only as a spectre can she achieve visionary mastery. The spectacle of destruction caused by mesmerism, which in Alcott’s story operates as a metaphor for misguided energy, specularizes and sensationalizes contemporary nineteenthcentury feminist arguments about the grave repercussions on the collective bodies of the family and the ‘race’, of depriving women of agency and constructive means of creative self-development. ‘A Pair of Eyes’, then, suggests that life is a minefield for the artist if she happens to be a woman. As a single woman who is in the privileged position of a wealthy orphan, Agatha is free from direct parental and paternal injunctions and able to dedicate herself to intellectual pursuits, albeit only within the constraints imposed by patriarchal taxonomies. Thus she remains subject to the social norms circumscribing and regulating women’s lives: she cannot visit the theatre on her own, nor can she realize her desire for Erdmann’s company without resorting to subterfuge. Her identity as an artist proves detrimental to her physical and mental health, with her hysterical trances, failing eyesight and postnatal blindness reflecting the beliefs of the Victorian medical establishment concerning the perilous consequences of too much mental exertion on the female constitution. Women risked losing ‘health, strength, blood, and nerve, by a regiment that ignore[d] the periodical tides and reproductive apparatus of their organization’, the American physician Edward H. Clarke warned coeducationalists in 1873, ten years after the publication of Alcott’s story (Clarke I, 430). However, as the text implies, Agatha’s disease is not the result of her deviance, but rather a response to the imposition of patriarchal parameters in her marriage. Her dreamlike states are indicative of inspirational sequences in the mental life of the artist, not of the tantrums of the hysteric. Hysteria becomes a refuge and mode of self-expression only for the woman bound and silenced. As Erdmann’s wife, Agatha is denied any space to exist as an individual, let alone artist, and her pregnancy imposes further constraints on her freedom of movement. Forced into the straightjacket of femininity, Agatha rebels by simultaneously enacting the parts of the hysteric and the sorceress, feminine roles whose subversive energy, as Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément have argued, ‘unties familiar bonds, introduces disorder into the well-regulated unfolding of everyday life, [and] gives rise to magic in ostensible

Medusa’s Blinding Art

213

reason’, but which ultimately always lead to the destruction of the insurgent subject, with ‘nothing […] registered of her but mythical traces’ (Cixous and Clément 5): the spectral voice which haunts Erdmann long after Agatha has died. This story, then, is as much about the missed potential of artistic partnership as about the dangers of disregarding women’s right to independent agency and full participation in private and public life. A man who can conceive of women only in fragmented terms ends up with an infantile ‘companion’ (his son) whose ‘dumb, blind and imbecile’ condition (Alcott 69) serves as an ironic reminder of his objectifying desire. As the stark conclusion to the story suggests, a society which operates on the principle of Erdmann’s libidinal / artistic prerogatives, prohibiting half of its population from making constructive use of their faculties, risks all but physical and spiritual collapse. In Alcott’s story the death of the beautiful woman, while signalling ‘the moment of self-reflexivity’, does not, as Bronfen would have it, serve ‘as the motive for the creation of an art work and as its object of representation’ (71). Erdmann’s consuming desire for his own dissolution as the precondition for a reunion with Agatha precludes the impetus for creative production other than through artistic self-negation; significantly, the single work of art resulting from Agatha’s death is an account of his consummate failure, as both an artist and a husband. To conclude, then, the theme of mesmerism operates on two metaphorical levels in Alcott’s ‘A Pair of Eyes’, signifying both the ‘magic’ potential of liberated, female-directed, feminine art and the cataclysmic potential of women’s misdirected and frustrated energies prevented from being channelled into productive outlets by patriarchal injunctions. Erdmann’s flight from domesticity and struggle for autonomy point to a veiled feminist discourse on the dispossession of women in marriage. In the context of the American Civil War and Alcott’s abolitionist politics (Saxton),6 his plea to ‘Give [him] more liberty’ (Alcott 56) also raises pertinent questions about contemporary race relations. Mesmerism, Alison Winter argues, was ‘catalytic particularly to disputes about intellectual authority […] [and] the relative status of the […] genders’, acting as a ‘resource for drawing new geographies of authority’ in the nineteenth century (346). Ironicizing male aestheticization of female mortality by highlighting its ultimately self-destructive impact, Louisa May Alcott reinvigorated the association of mesmerism with the creative faculties of the artist in order to redraw the boundaries of female agency in American society.

Notes 1

In mid-century America modern technological discoveries like the telegraph enjoyed no more scientific credibility than did spiritualism or mesmerism: thus Samuel F.B. Morse’s venture of setting up an experimental telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore in 1842 was initially greeted with much scepticism, as the mysterious

214

2

3 4 5 6

Representations of Death/Ann Heilmann

workings of the telegraph inspired the Congressmen with little more confidence or comprehension than the magnetic processes of mesmerism (Braude 4–5). For a detailed account of the influence of occultism on Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Barrett Browning see Winter 218–30, 233–41. For Fuller see Saxton. For the invigorating role of spiritualism in nineteenth-century American feminist discourses see Braude. Saxton 258. According to the turn-of-the-century phrenologist R.D. Stocker, a ‘low forehead, well rounded at the temples’ denoted ‘artistic taste’ (35). This concept was developed by the marquis de Puysegur (Winter 41). The story must have been written in 1861 or before, as Alcott noted down her earnings from ‘A Pair of Eyes’ in a journal entry from 1861. See Myerson and Shealy 106.

Works Cited Alcott, Louisa May. ‘A Pair of Eyes; or, Modern Magic’. A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. (London: Macmillan, 1988), 33–71. Barrow, Logie. Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians 1850– 1910 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). Basham, Diana. The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (London: Virago, 1992). Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in NineteenthCentury America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). Burfield, Diana. ‘Theosophy and Feminism: Some Explorations in NineteenthCentury Biography’. Women’s Religious Experience. Ed. Pat Holden (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 27–56. Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). Clarke, Edward H. Sex in Education; or A Fair Chance for Girls. (Boston, 1873). Extract repr. in Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debates in Documents. Ed. Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen (2 vols, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), I: 427–31. Fahy, Christopher A. ‘Dark Mirrorings: The Influence of Fuller on Alcott’s “Pair of Eyes”’. ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 45:2 (1999), 131–59. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, 1982 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Myerson, Joel and Daniel Shealy. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1989). Oppenheim, Janet. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Medusa’s Blinding Art

215

Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women and Spiritualism in Late Victorian Britain (London: Virago, 1989). Saxton, Martha. Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography, 1977 (New York: Noonday Press, 1995). Stern, Madeleine B. ‘Introduction’. A Double Life (London: Macmillan, 1988), 3– 29. Stocker, R.D. The Human Face as Expressive of Character & Disposition (London: H.J. Glaisher, 1900). Townshend, Chauncy Hare. Facts in Mesmerism (London, 1840). Extract repr. in Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890. Ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 51–3. Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 14

‘To surprise immortality’ Spiritualism and Shakerism in William Dean Howells’s The Undiscovered Country Kelly Richardson

That’s the nature of worlds, big and little. You can’t be at home near them; you have to be in them to be comfortable. Edward Ford, The Undiscovered Country, 322 We must beware how we make the supernatural a commonplace. Shaker Elder Joseph, The Undiscovered Country, 193

In his 1899 lecture ‘Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading: An Impersonal Explanation’, ‘Dean of American Letters’ William Dean Howells articulated what had long been a governing artistic principle of his literary work: ‘The truth may be indecent, but it cannot be vicious, it can never corrupt or deprave [...] I make truth the prime test of a novel’ (267). Given that Howells strove for ‘truth’ and that, as his friend Henry James noted, he ‘adore[d] the real, the natural, the colloquial, the moderate, the optimistic, the domestic, and the democratic’ (46),1 it may seem surprising to see him explore the less tangible theme of spirituality via the rather unconventional topics of spiritualism and Shakerism. However, his complex yet underrated early novel The Undiscovered Country (1880)2 tells the story of Dr Boynton, an educated man who is obsessed with spiritualism and who has trained his reluctant daughter, Egeria, to be a medium.3 The narrative begins in Boston, where the two have come after leaving their home in Maine because of family disagreements over Boynton’s obsession. The environment is not a healthy one, and a failed séance and a family friend persuade Boynton to return to Maine to continue his work in a noncommercial environment. On their way home, however, they take the wrong train, and wander lost on village roads before arriving at a Shaker community in Vardley, Massachusetts. There, the pair react in contrasting ways to the utopian enterprise: Egeria recovers from the feverish state she experienced from walking on the cold roads, but she loses her spiritual powers as she grows physically stronger. Boynton is in sympathy with the nonprofit focus of the group, but eventually clashes with them because they now privilege ‘the angelic life’ rather than their founding spiritualist ethos. Seeking to convince the Shakers that they should spend more time on spiritualist investigations, Boynton

218

Representations of Death/Kelly Richardson

attempts a demonstration of Egeria’s skills as a medium. During the test, which is ultimately unsuccessful, Edward Ford, a newspaper writer who had argued with Boynton in Boston about séances, coincidentally arrives at the Shaker community. Blaming Ford’s presence for Egeria’s failure, Boynton attacks him and then collapses. Boynton’s poor health subsequently confines him indoors, a situation that helps him to reflect on his obsession with spiritualism. During this time, Ford remains, befriending Boynton and falling in love with Egeria. When Boynton dies, Ford and Egeria eventually marry, finding happiness ‘in the full sunshine of our common day’ (419). Criticism of the novel has concentrated on a number of key ideas: the connections between Howells, Hawthorne and James on the topic of spiritualism;4 the rapid changes in postbellum society, in terms of both scientific thought and the growth of cities;5 the focus on Boynton as a key representative of spiritualism; the links to Howells’s religious experiences, including Swedenborgianism; the importance of focusing on the material world, which seems to be the novel’s final message. Here, I build on these conversations to explore first of all the contrasting effects of spiritualist interpretations of death on Boynton and on the Shakers. I shall argue that although Howells treats all these characters sympathetically, he also suggests that their beliefs are, in their different ways, problematic because they allow them to justify their own isolation from mainstream society. Second, I discuss how Howells uses Egeria in order to articulate a compelling critique of spiritualism. In the course of the novel, Egeria is gradually transformed from a passive medium to an advisor6 advocating the material world and the role of community in achieving a state of spiritual and material balance. Overall, The Undiscovered Country explores the dangers of making ‘the supernatural a commonplace’, and the problems with believing that ‘to surprise immortality’ is a worthier goal than finding connection in the material world.

‘The Comfort of an Assured Reality’: Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century Culture In The Undiscovered Country, a number of characters investigate spiritualism as a means of exploring representations of death in alternative ways from the traditional Christian paradigm that governed nineteenth-century thinking. Their interest in spiritualism parallels the cultural response to it. Despite its unorthodox views, spiritualism was a major cultural movement of the nineteenth century, gaining support not only for the comfort it promised but also because it intersected with scientific interests and social reform movements.7 Beginning in 1848 in New York, with the claim by sisters Kate and Margaret Fox that they could communicate with the dead, as evidenced by rapping sounds in their home, spiritualism quickly grew in popularity. This was in spite of the fact that, as R. Laurence Moore explains, it was ‘a diffuse movement with no official philosophy other than the claim that spirit communication was a scientific fact’ (41). Some common themes, however,

‘To Surprise Immortality’

219 8

do exist, as Moore and Ann Braude show in their excellent studies. Moore observes that spiritualists often show evidence of ‘a rejection of supernaturalism, a firm belief in the inviolability of natural law, a reliance on external facts rather than on an inward state of mind, and a faith in the progressive development of knowledge’ (19). Similarly, Braude attributes the appeal of spiritualism to ‘the desire for empirical evidence of the immortality of the soul; the rejection of Calvinism or evangelicalism in favor of a more liberal theology; and the desire to overcome bereavement through communication with departed loved ones’ (33–4). Aligning Howells’s narrative with these general characteristics will illustrate his own understanding of the movement, and will show how the inclusion of these elements contributes to the creation of sympathetic character treatments, demonstrating, as Howard Kerr terms it, Howells’s ‘critical compassion’ (21). First, we see that Boynton’s belief in the ability to communicate with the dead obviously provides a comforting thought as it transforms the experience of mourning. No longer reliant on otherworldly religious explanations or on having their mourning experiences concentrated on static artefacts such as locks of hair or pictures,9 spiritualists could now see death as a dynamic state, as the dead could now ‘speak’. As Braude notes ‘[w]hile others hoped and prayed over the fate of their loved ones after death, spiritualists could rest assured by concrete statements from beyond the grave’ (52). The rationally minded Boynton, for example, explains several times that it was only after his wife’s death that he became interested in spiritualism. He explains that at ‘her passing I was aware of something, as of an incorporeal presence, a disembodied life, and in that moment I believed! I accepted the heritage which she had bequeathed me with her breath, and I dedicated the child to the study of truth under the new light I had received’ (179). This description of the event underscores its traumatic nature, because of what Boynton only hints at through his silences. For example, readers see no attempt to contact her, no image of her, no description of her gravesite, no mention of a cherished memory – we do not even learn her name. All of these omissions as well as the pain on Boynton’s face when he first mentions her (15) suggest that conceptualizing death as something that can be studied has provided him with a way to channel his grief. Boynton also illustrates how this ‘scientific’ approach intersected with rationalist thinking. To avoid the term ‘supernatural’ and to focus on the scientific study of spiritual subjects may seem odd for modern readers. Spiritualism, however, suggested that death could not only be examined but also quantified, accessed and mastered, allowing the boundaries between the earthly and the spiritual worlds to be negotiated through scientific rather than theological means. Boynton, for example, repeatedly insists upon an empirical approach to death. Prior to the séance in the opening chapter, he warns Ford, who has come looking for evidence of fraud, and Ford’s friend Phillips, who attends for the novelty value, to be cautious: ‘I make it a rule, myself, measurably to distrust all manifestations occurring in the presence of more than three persons besides the medium’ (12). He also later tells Ford, ‘I prefer to base my convictions solely upon facts’ (50).

220

Representations of Death/Kelly Richardson

Boynton’s analytical abilities, as he himself points out, do not extend to questioning why spiritualism is confined to such a shabby neighbourhood, or why people lose interest so quickly, after attending a séance. His analysis extends only far enough to confirm his own perceptions about his objective stance rather than to balance it with external evidence. Moreover, Boynton’s personal experience of turning away from Calvinism and its view of the afterlife as a place of punishment mirrored the experiences of other spiritualists. Instead of Calvinism’s bleak view of death, followers often drew on Swedenborgian thought, which asserted that the afterlife is actually composed of several spheres: According to the spirits, man passed at death into a region of hierarchical spheres, his condition ‘superior’ to its earthly state but his character and essential identity unchanged. Beginning in the lowest sphere, he ‘developed’ or ‘progressed’ upward on a spiral path toward a distant (usually seventh) sphere. There was neither redemption nor punishment in the spheres; ‘undeveloped’ spirits simply took longer to ascend. (Kerr 10)10

Historically, this idea has provoked considerable hostility from critics because of the threat that it poses to some of the foundational tenets of Christianity. As Braude explains, ‘with no threat of judgment or punishment, humanity needed no redemption and therefore no atonement. Christ himself became logically unnecessary, as did the Gospels that announced his resurrection’ (37). Concerns existed about the lack of morality that could result from such a view as well as ‘low-minded spirits’ (Moore 18), fraud and ethical issues about problematic spiritual advice. William Ferris summarized these fears in an article in the Ladies’ Repository (May 1856), in which he claimed that ‘Spiritualism is the great Dead Sea of this age’ (298). Despite these views, Boynton is completely converted to spiritualism, and he commits all areas of his life to studying immortality, including his daughter Egeria. There are several moments in the text when various characters – including even the Shakers – remark that Boynton views Egeria more as a medium than as a daughter. This manipulation of a daughter by a father or father figure can also be seen in Hawthorne and James, and it is also consistent with contemporary practices, as the role of medium tended to be regarded as being particularly appropriate for women.11 Given contemporary views about women’s passivity, it is hardly surprising that they were assumed to be more easily able to be ‘filled’ by external powers than men. Ferris, for instance, reports that he heard a doctor say that to be a medium ‘requires a person of light complexion, one in a negative, passive condition, of a nervous temperament, with cold hands, of a mild, impressible, and gentle disposition. Hence girls and females make the best mediums’ (‘Review’ 92). Initially, Egeria fits this description perfectly, and although she expresses doubt about her abilities and does not enjoy the spectacle of séances because they weaken her, Boynton does not allow her to cease working. He tells her: ‘I respect, I revere,

‘To Surprise Immortality’

221

your power; but it is out of regard for that power that I must combat your weaker mood’ (73). While his control of Egeria is oppressive, the sincerity of Boynton’s belief suggests that Howells did not intend his readers to view him as an entirely villainous character.12 Later on in the novel, Boynton recognizes the harshness of his earlier treatment of Egeria, admitting that ‘I seized upon a simple, loving nature, good and sweet in its earthliness, and sacred in it, and alienated it from all its possible happiness to the uses of my ambition. I have played the vampire!’ (318–19). Ian F.A. Bell makes a similar observation of Verena Tarrant’s father Selah in his study of Henry James’s The Bostonians,13 although Boynton, unlike Selah, is a believer rather than an opportunist. Boynton imposes his will upon his daughter because he truly believes in her spiritual ability. It is his excessive preoccupation with death that proves to be the villain, rather than Boynton himself. Four key spiritualist scenes appear in the novel; appropriately for Howells, he concentrates less on the spectacle and more on the impact that these events have on the real lives of the witnesses. As Delmar Gross Cooke states, ‘Howells’ enthusiasm was enlisted rather by the psychological problems involved; his interest lay in the effects induced in the minds of investigators of supernormal phenomena, not so much in the phenomena themselves’ (184). Howells begins by contrasting the authenticity of Boynton’s belief with the theatrical environment of a boardinghouse in a commercial district where mediums thrive. Phillips, for example, quips: ‘What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy street! I don’t think I was ever in a street before where quite so many professional ladies, with English surnames, preferred Madam to Mrs on their door-plates’ (2). In this environment, we observe Egeria for the first time, and her presence is accompanied by the first supposed evidence of the dead in the form of the rappings of the spirit of an Italian painter named Giorgione, who responds to talk of colours (9). This short scene serves to illustrate the spiritualist belief that certain individuals are more prone to encounter psychic phenomena and that these encounters can be controlled by the environment. Egeria, for example, is wearing white because, as Boynton explains, the spirits seem to be more responsive to that colour (8). Finally, the scene shows that spirits can interact with the material world, as the conversation about art compels a reaction from the ‘spirit’, who raps even more loudly when Phillips playfully warns Egeria to be cautious because ‘there are so few genuine Giorgiones’ (10). Howells never directly explains how the tappings occur, but we later learn that Mrs Le Roy, the landlady, is not above ‘helping’ the spirits for her paying clients. The contrast between Boynton’s delight and Egeria’s lack of enthusiasm begins the double-edged commentary that will characterize Howells’s treatment of spiritualism throughout the novel. We then move to the second spiritualist event, a séance that incorporates an element of spectacle and audience participation. When Egeria enters, her physical appearance suggests her passive state: ‘Her face was white, and her eyes had the still, sightless look of those who walk in their sleep’ (22). ‘Evil’ spirits first appear, something that Boynton says is common, and Boynton instructs Egeria to push

222

Representations of Death/Kelly Richardson

through, and ‘the innumerable host [...] disperses them’ (23). Next, hands materialize from a box on the table: one looks like a child’s, while another belongs to a black male named Jim.14 A fan appears, a music-box plays and floats, ‘Jim’ slaps people on the shoulders, and ‘messages’ from loved ones are given (23–31). Participants are comforted as well as entertained, until someone grips Egeria’s hand so hard that it crushes her ring into the skin, causing it to bleed. Hearing her cry out, a spectral blue hand appears to turn on the light (32). Later, it is revealed that the apparently ghostly hand actually belongs to Ford, who was attempting to reveal the trickery of the performance. Dr Boynton does not yet know of Ford’s interference, and he believes that a significant breakthrough in spiritual studies has been made. Basking in the light of this revelation, he overlooks Egeria, who has fainted, and it is up to Ford to pick up the unconscious woman (34). In doing so, he initiates the transfer of masculine power from father to future husband.15 The implications of this séance are extensive. Phillips proves the Doctor’s statement about waning interest, when he admits that while he connected with the experience – even noting that he felt that he was ‘then an element of the supernatural’ (80) – he does not feel compelled to return. Boynton, however, has thought of little else, and when Ford returns to their boarding-house, the doctor tells him that the rappings have continued, providing further support for his belief in the ‘principle of solicitationism’ (52). When Ford reveals his involvement, Boynton furiously accuses him of ‘sacrilege’: You derided the hope of immortality itself, – the evidences through which thousands cling to the belief in God [...] I was leading them on to the evolution of a great truth, to the comfort of an assured immortality. But you, – were you aiming at anything higher than the gratification of the wretched vanity that delights in finding all endeavor as low and hopeless as its own? Oh, I know your position, young man! I know the attitude of those shallow sciences which trace man backward to the brute, and forward to the clod [...] Did you think you were doing a fine thing, that day, when you lay in wait to dash our hopes, – to prove to us by the success of your trick that we were as the beasts that perish? (56–7)16

The anger as well as the energy of this speech captures not only Boynton’s own personal experiences with scientific scepticism but also taps into the underlying fear of what he loses if spiritualism proves false, namely the chance for reunion with his wife. Ford later refuses to attend a demonstration of Egeria’s powers, and this refusal, coupled with Boynton’s discovery of Mrs Le Roy’s fraud, convinces him to return home where he plans to establish a nonprofit community to explore the afterlife. At the train station, however, Boynton is so distracted by a conversation he overhears between two Shakers, that they board the incorrect train, leaving father and daughter stranded in the village outside of Vardley. Inhospitable villagers, fearful that Egeria is a runaway from a local reform school or that the pair are ‘tramps’, do not help them, and they are forced to take shelter overnight in a local school house and then the next morning at the Elm Tavern, where they experience

‘To Surprise Immortality’

223

the third example of ‘inexplicable’ activity. This event is witnessed by Boynton and the tavern owner (at this point Egeria, suffering from fever and exhaustion, has collapsed). Howells describes how ‘the sky darkened; there was a noise like the straining of the branches of the elms beside the house; but there was no wind, and the boughs were motionless’ (156). The sound increases and is then accompanied by other sights: ‘the marble top of the centre-table lifted three times’, ‘a picture swung out from the wall’, ‘the brush from the table was flung across the room’, ‘a flash of red light filled the world, and a rending burst of thunder made the house shake’ (156–7). Afterward, Howells, in a move reminiscent of Hawthorne, draws attention to the fact that these events are being described by Boynton, not the narrator. The tavern owner denies these details later, claiming that Boynton was drunk (243). Without Egeria to explain it, the situation remains ambiguous, leaving the reader to decide whether or not Boynton has been a reliable narrator. For Boynton, however, it is another example of the progress he is making in spiritualism. A fourth example breaks away from the tight chronology of the first three events as it does not occur until several chapters later, when Ford attends a spiritualist meeting at Walden Pond. Despite this location being famous for spiritual inspiration, Howells chooses instead to foreground the worldly, mundane details such as the ‘scraps of newspapers’ that appear on the grounds (254) as well as the presence of men who smoke ‘with their hats on’, lovers sitting together, and ‘ladies in artificial teeth and long linen dusters’ (255). The service follows a typical structure, which includes a trance speaker, who ends his statements with the refrain of ‘Come, then, come to Spirit-Land’. The narrator describes how a speaker then declaimed against the injustice of the world towards spiritualism and boasted of the importance of its Unfoldments. He sketched its rise and progress, and found an analogy between the ‘first lisping of the tinny rap at Rochester’ and the advent of Christ, whom he described as the ‘infant Reformer in the man-ger’ [sic], and again as our ‘humble elder brother’. (255-6)

The radical nature of these ideas is undercut by the speaker’s lack of energy, and the scene is more interesting for its inclusion of the reactions of so many middleclass and rural Americans rather than for any spiritual revelation.17 All spiritualists, however, are not represented as being charlatans or curiosity seekers. The Shaker community is not simply used as a device for staging an isolated spiritualist episode, but rather is included in order to illustrate the effects of a group using spiritualism to create a more comprehensive program of ‘angelic life’ on earth. Howells had visited a Shaker establishment in 1875, five years before the novel’s publication, and had, according to Kermit Vanderbilt, written of his interest to his friend Charles Dudley Warner. Howells stated in a letter: ‘They present great temptations to the fictionist, and as Mrs Howells has charged me not to think of writing a story with them in it, I don’t see how I can help it’ (qtd. in Vanderbilt, 12). Howells denies that his Shakers are based on an actual

224

Representations of Death/Kelly Richardson

community, explaining in a footnote that ‘his Shakers are imaginary in everything but their truth, charity, and purity of life, and that scarcely less lovable quaintness to which no realism could do perfect justice’ (161). Still, his representation resonates with actual examples of this group. Howells accurately portrays spiritualism as being an important part of the foundations of their belief system, which embraced an egalitarian social vision, characterized by the observance of celibacy, communal living and the repudiation of marriage.18 Howells shows also how Shakers believed in visions, as evidenced by Elder Joseph’s account of how he, when he was young, first saw the community in a vision (192), although, significantly, Joseph warns against making ‘the supernatural a commonplace’ (193). The point of the Shaker community is not to focus on death, but to live a spiritually based existence on earth. As one of the elders explains to Boynton, spiritualism is a ‘means’ to Shakerism: ‘You don’t seem to realize that our very existence is a witness to the truth of an open relation between the spiritual and the material worlds’ (221). Boynton, however, disagrees; believing spiritualism should be the ‘ends’ of Shakerism. In other words, Boynton believes that the Shakers should use their lives to study death, while the Shakers assert that their spiritualist beliefs should lead them to create a certain way of life (222). In examining this scene and its central argument, William McMurray explains why it is so difficult for Boynton to accept the Shakers’ position: ‘Their notion that the angelic life of earth is proof of the spiritual world is repugnant to Boynton. The life of the spirit, he argues, is free of earth. Earth drags the spirit down’ (30). As noted earlier, Boynton eventually experiences a physical collapse after he attempts to attack Ford, and we learn that he suffers from ‘an obscure affection of the heart’ (278). It is clear that Boynton is unwell, and he spends time recuperating indoors. This confinement actually is a positive event for Boynton as he reflects on his beliefs, and he concludes that spiritualism is a form of materialism that: asserts and affirms, and appeals for proof to purely physical phenomena. All other systems of belief, all other revelations of the unseen world, have supplied a rule of life, have been given for our use here. But this offers nothing but the barren fact that we live again. If it has had any effect upon morals, it has been to corrupt them. I cannot see how it is better in its effect upon this world than sheer atheism. (366–7)

Boynton turns again to conventional religion in an inquisitive rather than evangelical way, saying that he would like to speak with a clergyman. That conversation, however, does not occur as Boynton dies soon after this epiphany. Howells deliberately focuses on Boynton’s search right up to the end of the text. He includes no description of the funeral, no deathbed scene between father and daughter (Boynton had seemed to be doing so well that Egeria had gone into town on the day of his death), no reassuring final words, no closure. Readers do not even know that they are viewing Boynton for the last time in the scene in which he comments to Ford about Hamlet’s famous line ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns’. Noting that people often leave out bourn, he

‘To Surprise Immortality’

225

concludes that the omission makes no difference: ‘The undiscovered country – what a weight of doom is in the words – and hope!’ (373). By suspending closure of Boynton’s spiritual journey, Howells ends the character’s life on a poignant note that encourages readers’ sympathy rather than their judgement.

‘Eternity in This World’: The Defeat of Death through Earthly Community Egeria’s character is often read as being a legacy of Hawthorne, ‘a translation of Priscilla into realism’ (Long 555), or she is taken to be merely an object whose purpose is to be possessed not only by spirits but also by Boynton and then Ford. Yet in the course of the novel, Egeria is transformed from a passive medium into a powerful voice of critique, both of spiritualism and Shakerism. At the beginning of the text, Egeria does not have much opportunity to express her own views, and we initially see her in a passive rather than active role. Because she so wants to please her father, she often suppresses her feelings, or finds herself defeated by his commitment to his own position. Yet she has a better understanding of their situation than her father, as she perceives that the displacement from their home is problematic and is aware that her power may not be real. She tells him: ‘I see, or seem to see, whatever you tell me’ (68) and ‘Perhaps I’m not a medium, but only a dreamer, and dream what you tell me’ (68). This is not to say, however, that her voice is fully developed at first. For example, following this early scene, when Boynton leaves, we see not only the cumulative effect of her frustration but also her inexperience in gauging her own voice when expressing herself; what she thinks sounds ‘as if she shrieked out’ was actually ‘a little scream in response to a knock at the door’ (75). Howells also shows her difficulty in composing her own original thoughts. For instance, when she writes a thank you letter to Ford for refusing the demonstration in Boston, Howells describes how she starts the letter twice, hesitant and unsure about her actions (104). Egeria’s turning point comes at the Shaker community, where her time in nature heals her health and spirit. Her vitality increases so much that the narrator observes that ‘an artist or a poet of those who dream backward from fable might have figured her in his fancy as the Young Ceres: she looked so sweet and pure an essence of the harvest landscape, so earthly fair and good’ (213). With this new strength, Egeria begins to disagree more directly with her father about spiritualism, proclaiming ‘we have a right to our life here [...] Let the other world keep to itself!’ (195). In a key scene, father and daughter talk in a Shaker graveyard, where we see that the Shakers do not record the names of the dead on the tombstones. Egeria asserts that while she admires the Shakers, she disagrees with their attempts to ‘try all the time to make the other world of this world!’ (201). Egeria’s comments are crucial in terms of capturing Howells’s own concerns. As James Mathews comments, ‘Egeria Boynton is Howells’s simple and direct refutation of the selfdenying “angelic” life’ (214). Howells depicts the Shakers as sincere in their devotion to their work; however, as with Boynton, their sincerity is problematic

226

Representations of Death/Kelly Richardson

because it has led them to a separatist stance that clearly defines their spiritual community in opposition to the earthly world. As Kenneth Lynn states, ‘Instead of addressing themselves to the problems posed by modern life, they had merely retreated from them’ (250). Long also observes that ‘Howells insinuates the idea of the ‘unnaturalness’ of the Shakers’ life, which necessitates celibacy and renunciation of the world’ (558). Because Egeria is developing her voice, it is only appropriate that she and Ford come together not through a séance, but through everyday conversation that shows they are surprisingly well suited to one another. Both believe in the importance of freedom, and Ford listens to Egeria’s assertion that believing in visions limits freedom (302). They also agree on their preference for the material rather than the spiritual realm. Egeria tells Ford: ‘I should like a house of my own. And I should like a world of my own’ (306). Not only do their conversations give Egeria support for her beliefs, but they also help her develop her confidence as a reader of this world. These conversations also help Ford, whom we learn came to Boston from a small village. Working as a newspaper man, he tells Egeria that he covers ‘what they call social topics, – perhaps because I never go into society’ (320). In contrast to Egeria’s forced isolation, Ford chooses to remain separate from others because of the sense of freedom that it gives him, especially in relation to the expectations of others (250–1). Spiritualism for him is a fraud that needs to be exposed, yet he is unable to substitute it with a vision that nurtures his connections to other people. He also does not connect with Shakerism, even though he strongly admires the Shaker community (402–3). Instead, Ford seeks an ‘earthly’ group, just as his future wife does. It is not via his intellect, but through his reconciliation with Boynton and his interactions with Egeria that Ford comes to appreciate the importance of genuine connection with others. Howells confirms these lessons about secular connection and community in the promise that their marriage will be a happy one. Because of his inventions – notably the Ford Fire Kindler – Ford is able to retire from the newspaper to concentrate on his scientific work. Egeria delights in society, entertaining frequently and attending the local Episcopal Church. To this end, Howells upholds middle-class values rather than the separatist leanings of the Shakers or spiritualists. As Long notes, ‘Reflecting his different attitudes, and the different mode of his realism, Howells’s pastoral works toward a reconciliation to community, and finds sanity and health in normality and the democratic average’ (570). Not all critics agree with this assessment. Lynn argues that the couple ‘become[s] unconscionably dull’, suggesting ‘the novelist’s reservations about the whole quality of middle-class marriage in America’ (250). Indeed, Howells uses Phillips to express a similar viewpoint: As bricabrac [...] Ford was perpetually attractive; but as part of the world’s ordinary furniture he can’t interest me. When he married the Pythoness, I was afraid there was too much bricabrac; but really, so far as I can hear, they have neutralized each other into

‘To Surprise Immortality’

227

the vulgarest commonplace. Do you use the Ford Fire Kindler? He doesn’t put his name to it, and that isn’t exactly the discovery that is making his fortune. He has come to that, – making money. And imagine a Pythoness with a prayer-book, who goes to the Episcopal church, and hopes to get her husband to go, too! No, I don’t find my Bohemia in their suburb. (417)

This commentary would be much more damning if Phillips himself were portrayed as a social model;19 however, his speech suggests that his interest in clever and interesting objects may be a symptom of his own alienation. Phillips plays the role of observer in his desire to collect literal and figurative bricabrac for its ingenious or unusual qualities, which he can then describe at dinner parties for the amusement of his listeners. While it may be enjoyable and convenient for him, however, this confinement to the role of observer and entertainer leaves him isolated and deprived of more meaningful connections with other people. The appropriateness of focusing on the material world and choosing community is also underscored in two ways by the novel’s final paragraph. Howells’ narrator returns to the site of Boynton’s grave, long covered by grass, to note, ‘If Boynton has found the undiscovered country, he has sent no message back to them, and they do not question his silence. They wait, and we must all wait’ (419). Boynton’s silence clearly discourages spiritualist investigations. What is not as clear is that these final lines echo an earlier speech of Egeria’s when she argues with her father about whether their spiritualist work could put her in contact with her dead mother: ‘I should not know her; and she would not know me for the little baby she left! [...] Besides, I can wait to go to her. And she can wait, too’ (219). Egeria does not argue for the denial of death; as a representative of the tangible, material world, she understands the importance of death in the order of nature, as well as the fact that no attempt ‘to defeat death’ will eliminate the reality of it. Rather, Egeria’s message reminds readers that to obsess about mortality prevents individuals from seeing that – as McMurray suggests (27) – ‘the undiscovered country’ actually refers to the present, everyday, and material world, ‘a world’, as Ford describes, ‘of possibilities and recoveries’ (362).

Notes 1

2 3 4

More than one critic has stereotyped Howells for this kind of statement. See Henry Nash Smith for a discussion of Howells’s class sensibilities and his attempts to achieve ‘a synthesis of the ideal and the real’ (45). Religion and spirituality were actually extremely important to Howells. See George Arms, Graham Belcher Blackstock, Kermit Vanderbilt 14–23, and Kenneth Lynn 14–65. Suggestions for possible models for Boynton include his own father (Lynn 246), Robert Dale Owen (Kerr 121–54), and Bronson Alcott (Brooks 122). For connections between Hawthorne, Howells and James, as well as the idea that Egeria is an object that other characters are seeking to possess, see Robert E. Long and Richard Brodhead.

228 5 6

7

8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19

Representations of Death/Kelly Richardson

See Vanderbilt 11–48 for a discussion of The Undiscovered Country as a pastoral. Egeria was the nymph who advised King Numa; as Bulfinch records, ‘she taught him those lessons of wisdom and of law which he embodied in the institutions of his rising nation’ (213). Its connection with abolitionism and the woman’s rights movement also helped to galvanize its work. For example, it is important to remember that 1848 was also the year of the Seneca Falls Woman’s Convention, and spiritualism and women’s rights advocates found common ground. Women could assume roles of leadership and have legitimate opportunities to speak publicly, as exemplified by public figures such as Victoria Woodhull, who used her leverage as a spiritualist to open a newspaper and a stock brokerage firm with her sister Tennessee Claflin (another spiritualist), and even ran for President as a representative of the Free Love party in 1872. Death, in a sense, became a source of power. See Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America and Barbara Goldsmith’s Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and The Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. In addition to Braude and Moore, see Brett Carroll, Russell and Clare Goldfarb and Ernest Isaacs. See Mary Louise Kete’s Sentimental Collaborations for a study of such artefacts. See Carroll 62–5 and Braude 40 for additional discussions of ‘sphere’ theories. Moore notes that ‘one census of spirit mediums carried out in 1859 showed a fairly even balance between the sexes – 121 women as against 110 men’; despite these numbers, he states that the stereotyping of female mediums continued (105). Brodhead sees their relationship as one that recovers quickly, suggesting to him that Boynton’s influence is not oppressive (30). Kerr also observes that while ‘Howells criticized as morbid and irrelevant the spiritualistic demand for physical proof of immortality’, he also ‘vindicated the motives and character of a single quixotic spiritualist through the changing attitude of an unbeliever whose scepticism was humanized in the process’ (126). See Bell 212, n.2. Also, Long connects Selah Tarrant and Boynton as examples of a ‘paternal vampire’ (561). That spirits retain their racial complexion is evidence of the spiritualist belief that people retain their physical characteristics when they die. See Vanderbilt 24–40 for his compelling argument about an incest theme in the novel. Howells’s attitudes toward evolution are explored in Jane Marston’s article. See Rita Gollin, ‘The Place of Walden in The Undiscovered Country’, The Thoreau Society Bulletin 137 (1976), 7–8. Howells recorded some experiences with Shakers for the Atlantic. In one scene he observes the married sisters of one of the Shakeresses with her baby. Watching the mother, he wonders: ‘If she were right and they wrong, how much of heaven they had lost in renouncing the supreme good of earth!’ (710). Also, see Jones for an analysis of Howells’s evolving attitudes toward the Shakers. The description from ‘The Shaker Village’ easily characterizes Phillips, and, to some extent, Ford: ‘The impulse of the age is towards a scientific, a sensuous, an aesthetic life. Men no longer remain on the lonely farms, or in the little towns where they were born, brooding upon the ways of God to man; if they think of God, it is too often to despair of knowing him; while the age calls upon them to learn this, that, and the other, to get gain and live at ease, to buy pianos and pictures, and take books out of the circulating library. The new condition is always vulgar, and amidst the modern ferment

‘To Surprise Immortality’

229

we may look back upon the cold stagnation and call it repose’ (707). Lynn sees Phillips and Ford as part of a group of ‘characters through whom Howells would seek to define the feelings of alienation and demoralization to which so many American artists and intellectuals were subject in the Gilded Age’ (227). He also claims that Howells saw himself in Ford and Phillips (245).

Works Cited Arms, George. ‘Some Varieties of Howells’ Religious Experience’. The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture. Ed. Sam Girgus (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 76–87. Bell, Ian F.A. ‘Language, Setting, and Self in The Bostonians’. Modern Language Quarterly 49.3 (1988), 211–38. Blackstock, Graham Belcher. ‘Howells’s Opinions on the Religious Conflicts of His Age as Exhibited in Magazine Articles’. Howells: A Century of Criticism. Ed. Kenneth E. Eble (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1962), 203– 18. Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in NineteenthCentury America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). Brodhead, Richard. ‘Hawthorne among the Realists: The Case of Howells’. American Realism: New Essays. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 25–41. Brooks, Van Wyck. Howells: His Life and World (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1959). Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch’s Mythology: The Age of Fable, 1855 (New York: Mentor, 1962). Carroll, Brett. Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Cooke, Delmar Gross. William Dean Howells: A Critical Study (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1922). Ferris, William. ‘A Review of Modern Spiritualism, Part II’. The Ladies’ Repository 16.2 (February 1856), 88–92. ——, ‘The Theology of Modern Spiritualism, Part I’. The Ladies’ Repository 16.5 (May 1856), 297–300. Goldfarb, Russell, and Clare Goldfarb. Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century Letters (Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978). Goldsmith, Barbara. Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and The Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998). Gollin, Rita. ‘The Place of Walden in The Undiscovered Country’. The Thoreau Society Bulletin 137 (1976), 7–8. Howells, William Dean. ‘Novel-Writing and Novel Reading: An Impersonal Explanation’. The Norton Anthology of American Literature (vol 2, 3rd edn, New York: Norton, 1989), 266–82. ——, A Shaker Village’. The Atlantic Monthly 37.224 (June 1876), 699–710.

230

Representations of Death/Kelly Richardson

——, The Undiscovered Country (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880). Isaacs, Ernest. ‘The Fox Sisters and American Spiritualism’. The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives. Ed. Howard Kerr and Charles L. Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 79–110. James, Henry, ‘William Dean Howells’. Howells: A Century of Criticism. Ed. Kenneth E. Eble (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1962), 41–50. Jones, Joel. ‘A Shaker Village Revisited: The Fading of the Familial Ideal in the World of William Dean Howells’. Old Northwest: A Journal of Regional Life and Letters 8.2 (1982), 85–100. Kerr, Howard. Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). Kete, Mary Louise. Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Long, Robert E.‘Transformations: The Blithedale Romance to Howells and James’. American Literature 47.4 (1976), 552–71. Lynn, Kenneth S. William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). Marston, Jane. ‘Evolution and Howellsian Realism in The Undiscovered Country’. American Literary Realism 14.2 (1981), 231–41. Mathews, James. ‘Howells and the Shakers’. The Personalist 54 (1963), 212–19. McMurray, William. The Literary Realism of William Dean Howells (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967). Moore, R. Laurence. In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Smith, Henry Nash. ‘Fiction and the American Ideology: The Genesis of Howells’ Early Realism’. The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture. Ed. Sam Girgus (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 43–57. Vanderbilt, Kermit. The Achievement of William Dean Howells: A Reinterpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

Index

abortion 138, 175, 184, 185n.6, 185n.7 Africa 63–4, 98 afterlife 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 98, 131, 157, 159, 191, 196, 220, 222; see also heaven Alcott, Louisa May 10–11, 205–15 Anderson, Benedict 45–6, 47–8, 56n.1, 56n.3 apparitional lesbian 113–14 Ariès, Philippe 3–4, 11n.2, 160, 161 assassination 46, 70 of John F. Kennedy 57n.9 of Abraham Lincoln 7, 43, 45, 50–54 autopsy 182, 186n.16 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 8–9, 109–24, 209, 214n.2 Baudrillard, Jean 84 Beecher, Henry Ward 45, 52 Botta, Anne C. Lynch 109, 111–13, 120, 121, 121n.6 Bourdieu, Pierre 65, 165 Bronfen, Elizabeth 6, 12n.3, 77, 86, 110, 121n.8, 185n.1, 207, 213 Brown, William Wells 7, 29, 30–31, 32–4, 37 Bruce, Philip 89, 91 Butler, Judith 32, 40n.5 Calvinism 219, 220 Castle, Terry 113; see also apparitional lesbian

Castronovo, Russ 4–5, 61–2, 64, 74n.2 cemetery 1, 176 at Arlington 56n.3 at Gettysburg 46–7, 56n.3 at Richmond 164 rural cemetery movement 23, 160 Chesnutt, Charles W. 65, 66 The House Behind the Cedars 66–7 The Marrow of Tradition 7–8, 62, 66–7, 90, 93, 94, 96–7 99–100, 101n.3 Child, Lydia Maria 33, 38, 41n.9 Civil War and Abraham Lincoln 44, 46–51 and African Americans 7 and attitudes toward death 4, 5, 10, 11, 64, 189–91, 193, 201n.1 and mourning 163–4 and religion 48, 131 and technology 62 consolation 53–4, 144–5, 148 evangelical consolation 127–9, 134, 136, 138 literature of 3, 6, 141, 152n.2; see also elegy; sentimentality corpse 6, 30, 56n.3, 63, 67, 69, 70, 90, 96, 99, 150, 173, 176, 177, 179, 180, 183, 184, 187n.17, 189, 193, 206 of Abraham Lincoln 53, 57n.12 Crafts, Hannah 30

232

Representations of Death

Cuyler, Theodore L. 54–5, 145–7, 153n.7 Davis, Rebecca Harding 8, 77–88 de Man, Paul 49 Dickinson, Emily 9, 12n.3, 109, 111, 116–20, 121, 121n.11, 121n.12, 121n.13, 131–4, 136, 137 Douglass, Frederick 7, 29, 32, 34, 40, 40n.4, 40n.7 The Heroic Slave 36–8 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 29–30, 34, 36, 39 ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ 33, 34–5 Du Bois, W.E.B 8, 65, 66, 67, 89, 92–3, 100, 101n.12, 102n.21 The Souls of Black Folk 89–90, 93–4, 95, 96, 97–9, 100, 102n.18, 102n.24, 102n.27 Durkheim, Emile 85, 86, 87n.8 elegy 5, 9, 110–18, 121n.3, 121n.7 child elegy 127, 137–8, 141–2, 149, 151–2; see also consolation Emerson, Ralph Waldo 9, 23, 43–4, 141, 149, 209 Eng, David and David Kazanjian Loss: the Politics of Mourning 31–2, 40n.5 executions 46, 89 forensic science 10, 184 Foucault, Michel 77, 82, 83 Fox sisters 23, 194, 218; see also spiritualism Freud, Sigmund 25, 86, 87n.9, 181 funerals 38–9, 57n.12, 69, 90, 92, 96, 99, 100, 101n.7, 128, 132, 157, 159, 161,163, 224 Ghost Dances 21, 22, 26n.9, 26n.10

ghosts 1, 2, 3, 6, 10, 15, 18–22, 24–5, 61–2, 67, 69, 114, 120, 137, 189–204, 213, 222; see also apparitional lesbian ‘Gibson Girl’ 165–6 grief see mourning Halttunen, Karen 57n.8, 102n.23, 152n.1, 160–61, 162 Harper, Frances 9, 130–31 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 6, 12n.3, 209, 218, 220, 223, 225, 228n.4 Heaven 25, 110, 115, 117, 127, 128, 129, 132–3, 134, 135, 137, 143, 144, 146, 151, 190, 196, 198, 228n.18; see also afterlife Hendler, Glenn 29, 102n.19, 152n.1 Hoffman, Frederick L. 89, 91, 92, 101n.6, 101n.9 Holland, Sharon Patricia 4, 102n.29 Holloway, Karla 3, 102n.29 Hopkins, Pauline 31 Howells, William Dean 11, 206, 217–30 Jacobs, Harriet 7, 29, 30, 38–40, 41n.9 James, Henry 11, 77, 87n.4, 217, 218, 220, 221, 228n.4 Kete, Mary Louise 5, 143, 144, 145, 152n.1, 152n.6, 228n.9 Kushner, Howard 80, 81, 83, 86 Laderman, Gary 4, 170n.1, 189, 201n.1 Lincoln, Abraham 7, 43–60; see also assassination; Civil War; corpse; sentimentality Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 9, 112, 141, 148, 149,

Index

233

Poe, Edgar Allan and women poets lynching 89, 90, 98, 100, 101n.1, 114; ‘Ligeia’ 6, 12n.3 170n.3 ‘The Mystery of Marie Rog_t’ Manifest Destiny 25 10, 173–88 Marx, Karl 61–2, 64, 70 ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ mediums 11, 23, 114, 115, 120, 206, 6, 12n.3, 173 211 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, Puritans/Puritanism 24, 158, 159 225, 228n.11; see also spiritualism; mesmerism racial melancholia 7, 31, 32, 40 melancholia 7, 29, 30, 31, 32, 40n.5, Reconstruction 8, 63, 65, 71, 93, 99 55, 56, 44, 57, 80, 85, 86, 173; see also racial Sapphistry 113–14, 120 melancholia Sappho see Sapphistry melancholy see melancholia Schenck, Celeste M. 110–11, 118, memorial discourse see mourning 121n.3 mesmerism 10–11, 205–9, 211–13, séances 23, 194, 217, 218, 219, 220, 214n.1 221, 222, 226; see also missionaries 16 spiritualism mortality rates; of African Seattle, Chief 6–7, 13–28 Americans 90, 91–3 sentimentality of children 9, 126, 141 and abolitionist writing 95, 97 mourning 5, 6, 7, 11, 15, 16, 19, 25, and African-American writing 8, 29–42, 62, 89, 90, 95–7, 99, 29, 33, 40n.6, 42, 65 100, 103n.30, 125, 127, 132, and child death 126, 127,129, 134–6, 180, 181, 201, 219 134, 135, 136, 141–54; see and nationalism 43–60 also consolation literature; and sentimental discourse 3, 5, 6, and Abraham Lincoln 44, 45, 90, 97, 125, 127, 141–54, 173 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, Mourning Dove 15, 19 57n.6 mourning rituals 3, 6, 7, 10, 16, 20, and nationalism 44, 45, 47, 49, 30, 157–71, 176, 177, 180, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57n.10 181, 183, 184, 190 and poetic tradition 111, 112, and sentimentality 10, 158, 159, 114, 119, 120, 121n.4 160, 161, 162,163, 164, 190 and trauma 61, 64, 73; see also murder 10, 30, 36, 38, 67, 69–71, 78, mourning; mourning rituals; 83, 89, 173–86 sympathy Sigourney, Lydia 9, 127–9, 131, 134, Oliver, Kelly 29, 36–7, 39 141, 151, 153n.10 Smith, Henry 15–25 phantom, see ghosts spectrality see ghosts Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart 11, 131 Spiritualism 10, 11, 23, 26n.12, 114, photography 10, 62, 69, 141, 176, 120, 194, 206, 214n.1, 189–90, 194, 201, 202n.5 214n.2, 217–30; see also Piatt, Sarah 9, 126, 127, 131, 133, séances 134–8

234

Representations of Death

Stowe, Harriet Beecher 5, 6, 9, 12n.3, 68, 125, 126, 130, 197, 198 suicide 8, 29, 30, 32, 45, 77–88, 97 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 218, 220 sympathy 1, 8, 51, 53, 54, 79, 80, 82, 112, 113, 120, 147, 160, 176, 225 and African Americans 32, 33, 34, 39, 70, 90, 93, 94–7, 102n.19 moral theories of 94–5 Tompkins, Jane 5, 6, 82, 125–6 trance speaking 23, 120, 194, 223; see also spiritualism Twain, Mark 65 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 5, 7–8, 62, 67–73 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 67, 69

‘Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven’ 25 ‘The Curious Dream’ 1–2, 3 Tom Sawyer Abroad 63–4 uncanny, the 24, 25 Uncle Tom’s Cabin see Harriet Beecher Stowe Victoria, Queen 163, 165 Volo_inov, V.N. 78–9 Wells, Ida B. 89, 101n.1 Whitman, Sarah Helen 109, 111, 114–16, 120, 121 Whitman, Walt 43–4, 45–6, 190 Williams, Raymond 82–3 Winnemucca, Sarah Hopkins 24 Wood’s Minstrels 197–8 Zitkala-Sa 24