Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (9 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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W.V. laughed incredulously: "Father, you said it was true!"
If we look at the texture of the writing, we can easily date this, with its mixture of whimsy and domestic affection, of historical feeling and fin-de-siècle charm, that links it to William Morris and Kipling and Andrew Lang; but on the one point of truth-status it can be seen as a curious anticipation of something much more modern. The narrative glides from the true to the
 
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fictitious in a way that subverts the distinction between them, while using W.V. to reassert it. Yet what she asserts is the validity of the distinction rather than its importance: she needs to know if the narratives are true, but her enjoyment does not altogether depend on that.
Along with the gliding between truth and fiction there is a gliding between the living and the dead. The title story begins with a familiar device, the assertion that what follows is taken from "a series of letters which I received a year or two ago." The writer of the letters (like the writer of the book) "was twice married, and just before the death of his first wife their only child, a girl, died at the age of six weeks." In his idolatry of her, he declares, he "clean forgot the savage irony of existence" (Christian belief seems here to be a fiction tenable only during happiness). He has therefore "petrified [him]self against disaster'' by deciding that he will never again be taken unawares:
Sometimes even when I am putting the latch-key into the lock, I stop and hear an inward voice whispering "Baby is dead," and I reply, "Then she is dead." The rest I suppress, ignore, refuse to feel or think. It is not pleasant schooling; but I think it is wise.
But as the anecdotes of the new daughter unfold, it becomes clear that it is not by suppressing feeling that he has "petrified" himself: he is "growing imbecile under the influence of the Pinaforifera." He reports that the girl has got a new plaything, "an invisible 'iccle gaal' (little girl) whom she wheels about in her toy perambulator, puts carefully to bed, and generally makes much of," and whom she treats with intense literalism: "She won't sit on my right knee at all until I have pretended to transfer the playmate to the other."
W.V. falls ill and dies, and the last "letter" describes his final conversation with her:
Can you believe this?
I
cannot; and yet I saw it. A little while before she died I heard her speaking in an almost inaudible whisper. I knelt down and leaned over her. She looked curiously at me, and said faintly: "Pappa, I not let her fall." "Who, dearie?" "Yourn iccle baby. I gotten her in here." She moved her wasted little hand as if to lift a fold in the bedclothes. Close beside her lay that other little one, with its white worn face and its poor arms crossed in that old-womanish fashion in front of her. Its large suffering eyes looked for a
 
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moment into mine, and then my head seemed filled with mist and my ears buzzed.
I saw, that
. It was not hallucination. It was
there
.
Just think what it means, if that actually happened. Think what must have been going on in the past,
and I never knew
. I remember, now, she never called it "mamma's baby"; it was always "yourn." Think of the future now that they are bothwhat? Gone?
The mingling of truth and fiction in this narrative is far more complex than the sentimental charm of the writing would suggest. There is, first, the old device of attributing the story to "a friend," whose situation turns out to be exactly that of the author. Then there is the identity and truth-status of that unseen playmate: is this a ghost story, in which the spirit of the dead child appears first to the living half-sister and then, finally, once, to the father? or did the young daughter make it up and then talk her father into a hallucination at the end? or did she invent a being who then turns out to be real? Or did the father make it all upin self-deception, or deliberately, as fiction?
And there is another complication.
The Invisible Playmate
was published in 1894; W.V. died in 1901. When the story was written she was still alive, and the death in which it culminates is an anticipation of later fact. The writer's claim that he has "petrified himself against disaster" is wildly and ironically untrue: he has imagined a disaster that had not yet occurred but later did. In thought, at least, he killed his second daughter.
Next to this winsome narrative, I now place a sophisticated piece of theory. Paul Ricoeur's distinction between the semiotic and the semantic is useful here. When a text is analyzed as a self-contained unit, as it is by structuralism, its elements are understood only in relation to one another, that is, as "a system of signs defined by their differences alone": this is the semiotic. Semantic analysis regards the text not as closed in on itself, but as "opening out onto other things," and semantic understanding is "to understand oneself in front of the text." Though Ricoeur respects semiotic analysis as a way of moving us from surface semantics to depth semantics, he does not believe that texts are self-contained, for that would be to reduce analysis to a "sterile game." The world we inhabit, for Ricoeur, is not locked up in a prison house of language.
10
In the texts of Catherine Tait and Elizabeth Prentiss, we find two emotions, faith and grief. Now what will the response be of the skeptical reader

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