Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors by Harold K. Bush

Abstract

Religion & Literature 126 charged as various factions used it to wrestle over the boundaries of their own rights and privileges in relation to some of the most contentious religious , political, social, and economic controversies of the day, including those dear to Coleridge’s heart. But in a contextual survey of this kind, some organizing typology is necessary to clarify things, and this does not undermine the thesis of the book in any way. Jennifer G. Jesse Truman State University Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and NineteenthCentury American Authors Harold K. Bush University of Alabama Press, 2016. 237 pp. $49.95 hardcover. In his Continuing Bonds with the Dead, renowned scholar of American literature and of the religious problem of theodicy in general, Harold K. Bush, presents the profound influence of the death of a child on nineteenthcentury American literature. Widely admired for his work on Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain, Bush offers a gripping, detailed historical and deeply spiritual set of contexts for writers whose works were in part inspired by bereavement of a child, a sense of a continued connection to that child, and a duty to live and work in his or her honor. This effect on a select group of important writers contributes to the national narrative of death but also salvation, during and following the Civil War. Some of the doctors who practiced after the War believed in the new Freudian wisdom of the day that the child should be grieved for only so much, then cut off, for the sake of the health of the parent. At the same time, the funeral industry expanded greatly and contributed to what Bush, following Jessica Mitford, calls a new “American way of death” (4). Bush covers some of the very large shifts in American religious belief, from seeing the Christian funeral as a worship service to the more complex system of “death of dying” he describes among budding undertakers (4). Bush sees nineteenth-century changes in the words and doctrine on death as “modern,” but in post-War grieving such an adjustment was natural. Yet for those unwilling to cut off the dead, many avenues of maintaining meaningful bonds continued. In contradiction to the “scientific” approach to death, many people found themselves grieving based on a sense of continuing bonds with the child. BOOK REVIEWS 127 This appeared in numerous cultural forms, such as renewed individual or familial commitment to doing good to honor the dead child. Harriett Beecher Stowe was completely devastated by the 1847 loss of her baby Charley, who died of cholera from Cincinnati’s polluted drinking water. In 1857, she also lost her son Henry Stowe, who drowned while a student at Dartmouth. Bush traces how Uncle Tom’s Cabin was her response and means of honoring Charley; as he notes, the novel begins with Eliza and her baby’s escape and ends with the dual deaths of Little Eva and Uncle Tom. Their importance to her was never better phrased than in Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address: “We should highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, a resolve that permeates the Christian faith: ‘Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord’ (1 Cor. 15:58).” After an excellent introduction encompassing nineteenth-century ideas and works of art that debate maintaining versus cutting ties with the dead, Bush’s chapters examine with grace and clarity the effects on the writings of important bereaved writers including Stowe, Lincoln, W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Bush describes, with excellent research, the unexpected fruit of these individual writers emerging from the losses: “somehow the survivors generate some of the most meaningful accomplishments of their lives” (3). Bush’s subsequent chapters speak to the pain and also to the impulse to do social good that could at times overcome Lincoln’s despair in 1862 upon his son Willie’s death at age 11 from typhoid fever. This loss made the ever-melancholic Lincoln a ravaged man, but one who pulled himself together to lead...