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In Memory of Cassie: Child Death and Religious Vision in American Women's Novels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Ann-Janine Morey
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Extract

This article investigates the contribution of several twentieth-century women writers to the legacy of women's writing about child death and scriptural consolation. The suffering and death of children constitutes the most intractable of religious problems, and recent studies of parental grieving support women's literary treatment of child death. Thus, just as child death creates a unique religious space, it may also demand its own literary category and aesthetic. By considering the unique dimensions of parental grieving, and by looking at how Perri Klass, Toni Morrison, and Harriette Arnow handle this subject, it is possible to gain fresh literary perspective on the fiction of nineteenth-century American women, many of whom also addressed the problem of child death and scriptural consolation. Women writers create children who are more than literary or symbolic commodities, and, in so doing, these writers challenge us to reevaluate scriptural and social perspectives on child death.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 6 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Religion and Twentieth-Century American Novels , Winter 1996 , pp. 87 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1996

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References

Notes

1. See Morey, Ann-Janine, Religion and Sexuality in American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. For solid resources on this question, see the following: Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Baym, Nina, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-70, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Harris, Susan K., 19th-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Kelley, Mary, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Samuels, Shirley, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

3. Samuels, , Culture of Sentiment, 5.Google Scholar

4. Kauffman, Linda, Discourses ofDesire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 316.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., 238, among others, notes this. The death of Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the death of Beth March in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women are ready examples in this regard.

6. Dye, Nancy Schrom and Smith, Daniel Blake, “Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920,” Journal of American History 73 (September 1986): 330.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed For a more detailed range of statistics on nineteenth-century child death, see Preston, Samuel H. and Haines, Michael R., Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. For example: Burns, Stanley B., Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America (Altadena, Calif.: Twelvetrees Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Pollock, Linda, A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children Over Three Centuries (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987)Google Scholar; and Simonds, Wendy and Rothman, Barbara Katz, Centuries of Solace: Expressions of Maternal Grief in Popular Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).Google Scholar Interestingly enough, Simonds and Rothman point out that the sentimental prose and poetry of the nineteenth Century provided an important outlet for grieving mothers that is no longer available to twentieth-century parents. In fact, the “distinguishing characteristic of the contemporary literature [about grieving for children] is that it is… now necessary to explain, to justify, to legitimate the grief of a mother whose baby has died, in a way that was not necessary in the nineteenth Century” (22).

8. Klass, Dennis, Parental Grief: Solace and Resolution (New York: Springer Publishing, 1988)Google Scholar; Knapp, Ronald J., Beyond Endurance: When a Child Dies (New York: Schocken Books, 1986)Google Scholar; and Mabe, P. Alex and Dawes, Michael, “When a Child Dies: The Impact of Being a Christian,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 19 (Winter 1991): 334-43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Knapp, , Beyond Endurance, 68.Google Scholar

10. Gullette, Margaret, “Perilous Parenting: The Deaths of Children and the Construction of Aging in Contemporary American Fiction,” Michigan Quarterly Review 31 (Winter 1992): 58.Google Scholar

11. Simonds, and Rothman, , Centuries of Solace, 256-57.Google Scholar

12. Dye, and Smith, , “Mother Love and Infant Death,” 346.Google Scholar

13. Klass, Perri, Other Women's Children (New York: Random House, 1990).Google Scholar Page references for quotations are from this edition and will appear within the text immediately after the cited passage. Portions of the following discussion appear in another context in Morey, Ann-Janine, “The Literary Physician,” in In Good Company: Essays in Honor of Robert Detweiler, ed. Jasper, David and Ledbetter, Mark (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994).Google Scholar

14. Morrison, Toni, Beloved (New York: NAL, 1987).Google Scholar Page references for quotations are from this edition and will appear within the text immediately after the cited passage.

15. For discussions of this angle on Beloved, see Corti, Lillian, “Medea and Beloved: Seif Definition and Abortive Nurturing in Literary Treatments of the Infanticidal Mother,” in Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment, ed. Furst, Lilian R. and Graham, Peter W. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 61–77 Google Scholar; and Mathieson, Barbara Offutt, “Memory and Mother Love in Morrison's Beloved ,” American Imago 47 (Spring 1990): 1–21.Google Scholar

16. Carolyn A. Mitchell discusses other biblical revisions in Beloved in “ ‘I Love to Teil the Story’: Biblical Revisions in Beloved,” Religion and Literature 23 (Autumn 1991): 27-41.

17. Arnow, Harriette, The Dollmaker (New York: Macmillan, 1954; repr., New York: Avon, 1972).Google Scholar Page references for quotations are from the 1972 reprint and will appear within the text immediately after the cited passage.

Perhaps one sign of recovery for the novel is that it was produced as a made-for-TV movie, starring Jane Fonda, which aired in 1984. For a discussion of the translation from novel to movie, see Pannill, Linda, “The Remaking of The Dollmaker ,” The Kentucky Review 6 (Winter 1986): 24–34.Google Scholar

18. For further commentary on biblical usage in The Dollmaker, see Malpezzi, Frances M., “Silence and Captivity in Babylon: Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker ,” Southern Studies 20 (Spring 1981): 84–90 Google Scholar; Mooney, Steve, “Agrarian Tragedy: Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker ,” Appalachian Journal 19 (Fall 1991): 34–42 Google Scholar; and Walsh, Kathleen, “Free Will and Determinism in Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker ,” South Atlantic Review 49 (November 1984): 91–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Walsh does an impressive and satisfying reading of the Judas material in The Dollmaker.

19. Glenda Hobbs was the first to note the correspondence between Callie Lou and Gertie's Christ. See her article, “A Portrait of the Artist as Mother: Harriette Arnow and The Dollmaker,” Georgia Review 33 (1979): 851-66.

20. Knapp, , Beyond Endurance, 40, 70, 68.Google Scholar

21. Anselment, Raymond, “ ‘The Teares of Nature’: Seventeenth-Century Parental Bereavement,” Modern Philology 91 (August 1993): 51.Google Scholar The most extensive revisionist work on the loving relationship between parents and children in bygone centuries is Pollack, A Lasting Relationship.

22. Gullette, “Perilous Parenting,” 58.

23. Simonds, and Rothman, , Centuries of Solace, 34 Google Scholar, note that “our examination of this early consolation literature convinces us that the intensity of women's grief has not varied because of the technological innovations, health improvements, political, familial or economic changes of the past two centuries.”

24. Gordon, Mary, Good Boys and Dead Girls and Other Essays (New York: Penguin, 1991), 219.Google Scholar For a more charitable view of Jonson's expression of grief, see Anselment, “ ‘The Teares of Nature.’ ”

25. The biblical citations are as follows: Job 1:18-19; Exodus 12:29; 2 Samuel 12:15-18; Matthew 2:16-17.

26. Updike, John, Rabbit, Run (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1960)Google Scholar; Kennedy, William, Ironweed (New York: Viking, 1983)Google Scholar; Heller, Joseph, Something Happened (New York: Knopf, 1974).Google Scholar

27. Kent, George, The Politics of Children's Survival (New York: Praeger, 1991), 110-12.Google Scholar

28. Johnston, Donald H., “Children: Crisis Without a Voice,” Christianity and Crisis 52 (May 25, 1992): 171.Google Scholar

29. Quoted in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, April 13, 1994, 3A. The report is entitled Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Younger Children. Other sources are equally blunt regarding the cause of infant death in the U.S.:“ Abuse was the leading cause of death of infants” from 1983 to 1988 in Cook County, Illinois, according to Hall, John R. and others, “Traumatic Death in Urban Children, Revisited,” American Journal of Diseases of Children 147 (January 1993): 105.Google ScholarPubMed “Recent analyses show that homicide is the leading type of injury death affecting US infants,” according to Christoffel, Katherine K.,“Violent Death and Injury in US Children and Adolescents,” American Journal of Diseases of Children 144 (June 1990): 699.Google ScholarPubMed

30. Christoffel, , “Violent Death,” 697.Google Scholar This homicide takes the form of child abuse in the case of infants and young children, and gunshots and other assaults by peers in adolescents.

31. Hubbard, Greg H., “Helping Parents Grieve,” Leadership (Winter 1992): 86.Google Scholar On the variable role of religion in grieving, see Gilbert, Kathleen R., “Religion as a Resource for Bereaved Parents,” Journal of Religion and Health 31 (Spring 1992): 19–30 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Cook, Judith A. and Wimberley, Dale W., “If I Should Die Before I Wake: Religious Commitment and Adjustment to the Death of a Child,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 22 (September 1983): 222-37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mabe and Dawes, “When a Child Dies.”

32. Anselment, “ Teares of Nature,’ ” 51; and Klass, , Parental Grief, 41–42.Google Scholar

33. I am convinced that differences in men's writing and women's writing are mostly a matter of content, not style. Women and men occupy different cultural locations and naturally bring different perspectives to the same kind of experience. If there is a difference between how male and female authors handle the subject of children and child death, perhaps it derives from the gender-driven parameters of public and private life that still pertain to American life. Perhaps what real-life fathers feel about their children and what male authors have written are two different things.

34. See my “American Myth and Biblical Interpretation in the Fiction of Stowe, Harriet Beecher and Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55 (Winter 1987): 741-63Google Scholar, for an analysis of how two nineteenth-century women quoted the Bible.

35. For example, Trible, Phyllis, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Exum, J. Cheryl, Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993).Google Scholar

36. Gordon, , Good Boys and Dead Girls, 218.Google Scholar Most scholars and interpreters mention the horror of the proposed act as prefatory to a larger point about the meaning of faith or how the drama Signals that the emerging monotheism is repudiating child sacrifice.