Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century Pamela K. Gilbert (bio) Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century, by Laurence Lerner; pp. xiii + 252. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997, $29.95. The topic of child deaths in the nineteenth century is one which could hardly fail to interest any serious scholar of the period. The importance of the theme in literature is obvious; its historical importance is scarcely less evident. Recent works on the construction of the child, on death, and on religion from literary and historical scholars have made it possible to bring to bear many new insights and theoretical frameworks upon the subject. In short, there could not be a more auspicious moment for a rigorous and engaged study. Unfortunately, Angels and Absences is not it. Lerner is concerned with nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers’ differing responses to nineteenth-century representations of child death, and especially with those [End Page 307] representations described as “sentimental.” Lerner initially engages his reader with descriptions of “Real Deaths” (Chapter One) and real mourners’ written responses to them. He wisely lets the authors speak for themselves, interspersing just enough of his own well-written prose to lead us through our confrontation with their stories. The chapter is moving, and succeeds in its aim—to remind readers of the historical reality and emotional immediacy of loss. Chapter Two deals with poems as “Strategies of Consolation,” including readings of Felicia Hemans, Coleridge, the Shelleys, Wordsworth, and others. Lerner is interested in the use of Christian values in consolatory poems: the claim that the child is better off dead in heaven, and that claim’s contradictory relationship to grief. Here the readings of individual poems, and the contrast between the poetry and arguably less formal expressions of grief such as letters are quite interesting. Chapter Three, dealing primarily with Charles Dickens, is lively and readable; although it offers few new insights, it combines existing material thoughtfully. The following chapter gives a quick survey of other famous novelistic child deaths of the period, and a brief comparison with twentieth-century representations. The final chapter, “Sentimentality: For and Against,” presents the long-deferred argument of the book (largely from pages 192 to 212) about aesthetic value and the canon. Lerner interrogates the term “sentimentality,” (which he conflates with melodrama, without engaging scholarship on melodrama), and addresses three feminist works on sentimentality (Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins, and Marlon Ross), taking to task those who try to claim high aesthetic quality in didactic or sentimental art. He contends that “ideological factors do influence aesthetic judgments, and it is important to see how this happens, but that doesn’t mean that art should be seen as nothing more than a disguise for ideology” (194). Lerner states that the “mere simplicity of the sentimental” (212) does fall short aesthetically. He argues that aesthetic judgments are necessary, and, he implies, dependent on real timeless values (or at least New Critical values of complexity and craftsmanship), though to what extent is unclear. However, he grants, it is also possible to discuss the past “without passing value judgment; that is what historians do” (199), and to discuss works of art from an “ideological” perspective independent of the concern with artistic quality. Most troubling is the lack of a sustained attempt to deal with the relevant scholarship. (In fact, Lerner cites very little recent scholarship throughout the book). Having taken on as significant topics Christian strategies of grief and consolation and the significance of gender in writing strategies, Lerner evinces little familiarity with even the most basic scholarship on these topics, let alone on the historical and theoretical work on children and childhood. Lerner provides no commentary on the growing material on Victorian religion and death or on Victorian religious diversity (Michael Wheeler, for example, is not cited). Although he purports to be analyzing Victorian understandings of gendered grief, his own largely unstated approach to gender appears to be so naively essentialist that it is sometimes difficult to know when he is referring to Victorian beliefs and when he is explaining his own argument. He dismisses in a paragraph the distinction between gender and sex, since “if ‘femininity...