‘The most precious of all gifts’: Sentimentality, Consumption, and the Gift of Death in Warner, Phelps, and Twain

Abstract

Drawing on one of Jacques Derrida's key philosophical concepts, the gift of death, this chapter explores how death as a gift was articulated and thematized in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American fiction. While Derrida in his Donner la mort (1992) mainly focuses on sacrifice and ‘dying for the other’, the chapter examines the notion of death as a divine, asymmetrical gift, with particular reference to The Wide, Wide World (1850) by Susan Warner, The Gates Ajar (1868) by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Mark Twain's late fiction. All the three authors relate death to the ideology of the pure, gratuitous gift, on the one hand, and to their growing anxieties about the emergent consumer society, on the other. Whether Calvinistic gift of grace (Warner) or the ‘gate’ to domesticated afterlife (Phelps), the end of Christian's life in Warner's and Phelps’ sentimental religious novels is seen as the emanation of God's goodness. Twain instead withdraws the gift of death from the Christian orthodoxy. Reflecting his ambivalent religiosity and iconoclasm, death no longer promises anything and is considered a pure, ‘valueless’ gift precisely because it cannot be ‘traded’.