Copyright by Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell 2008
The Dissertation Committee for Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:
“Words survive”: Death and Dying in Women’s Letters
Committee:
Carol Hanbery MacKay, Supervisor
Samuel Baker, Co-Supervisor
Ann Cvetkovich
Coleman Hutchison
Pascale R. Bos “Words survive”: Death and Dying in Women’s Letters
by
Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell, B. A.; M. A.
Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin December 2008
Dedication
To my parents, Dale and Debbie. And to my husband, Tim.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my committee members for their enthusiastic support of my project. Carol MacKay, Sam Baker, and Ann Cvetkovich provided invaluable feedback and encouragement from the very beginning of my dissertation. Even though they had not worked with me before, Cole Hutchison and Pascale Bos generously agreed to work with me, read through drafts, and attend the defense. I especially appreciate my committee’s encouragement and support while I finished this project from a distance. To my parents, I owe my love of words and my work ethic. My husband, Tim, would not let me quit writing and kept me laughing. Their love and support have been unwavering.
v “Words survive”: Death and Dying in Women’s Letters
Publication No.______
Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2008
Supervisors: Carol Hanbery MacKay and Samuel Baker
During the nineteenth century, the publication of letter collections, often titled “Life and Letters,” became very popular and let the public in on the private lives of public figures. Women from literary families all wrote letters with an awareness of the possibility of the world reading them. Even as letters were viewed as ostensibly private forms of communication, they were serving an intimate public as a vehicle for public feelings long before publication. Exploring the epistolary remains of three nineteenth- century women writers from literary families, I focus, in particular, on how these writers confronted illness, grief, and death, all things that kept them isolated from others and made correspondence necessary. Sara Coleridge wrote about the deaths of those closest to her in order to learn from and plan her own death. While Alice James concentrated almost entirely on her own demise, Charlotte Brontë did not write about her death, even preferring that others at least hold off speculating on it while she was still living. Instead Bronte focused on her sisters’ vi deaths, knowing that their deaths would shape how her life got written. Indeed, the family narrative would never lose its association with death. Throughout the study, Virginia Woolf acts as a mediating figure who both engaged in these epistolary practices of bereavement and read and wrote about letter collections from the past. The significance of these letters is how they reflect attitudes towards death and dying in the nineteenth century, particularly in how narratives get worked into an epistolarity of death in which the narrating of grief itself provides a means to manage the challenges of bereavement. The work of death and the writing of it are creative acts that build toward leaving a written corpus more permanent, or at least more durable, than the body and less vulnerable than life.
vii Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Literary Remains: An Epistolarity of Death...... 1 Histories of Letters ...... 6 Death and Letters ...... 16 Women and Letters ...... 22 Durable Epistographies...... 29 Literary Remains ...... 48
Chapter 2 "Tabernacle of the flesh": Sara Coleridge's Epistolary Death Work ... 55 "a plain figure of mere prose" ...... 61 Valuable Testimonies ...... 74 "making the vestibule of my letters a doleful sickroom"...... 86 "memory is almost a religion"...... 96
Chapter 3 "Labour is the only radical cure for rooted sorrow": Writing and Rewriting Grief in Charlotte Bronte's Letters ...... 103 "Home is not the home it used to be" ...... 108 "If I live…" ...... 122 "the memory of one loss is the anticipation of another"...... 130 "I am better now"...... 142
Chapter 4 Alice James's "Ghost Microbes": Collaborative Death Writing in James's Diary and Letters...... 154 Her "mortal career"...... 158 "the practical problem of life"...... 168 "so here goes, my first Journal!" ...... 179 "seizing the right moment of eclipse" ...... 188
Chapter 5 "[T]o tell the truth about the dead": The Life and Death of Letters....203 Sara Coleridge: The Caretaker and the Undertaker...... 211 Charlotte Brontë: Encountering Objects...... 220
viii Alice James: Imagining and Writing Death ...... 228 The Death of Letters ...... 234
Bibliography ...... 242
Vita ...... 250
ix Chapter 1: Literary Remains: An Epistolarity of Death
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string And let them drop down on my knee tonight. The opening lines of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 28 capture the paradoxical power of letters, objects that while “dead paper, mute and white” can suddenly “seem alive and quivering.” At first the source of animation seems to come from the speaker’s “tremulous hands,” but by the end of the poem there is no question that the letters themselves have their own peculiar force. Once the papers are loosed from the string and the physical narrative of their courtship falls onto the speaker’s knee, the letters are no longer mute, and as bodies of text, they stand in for the absent body of the speaker’s lover. Because the speaker is the addressee in this collected correspondence between lovers, she is also a reader who shares with the sonnet’s audience the intimate contents of both the letters and her heart. The lines that follow describe each letter and how the speaker responds to each one of them. In the first letter, her correspondent expresses a desire to see her, emphasizing the condition of absence, which necessitates writing a letter in the first place: This said—he wished to have me in his sight Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring To come and touch my hand. . . a simple thing, Yes I wept for it—… (5-8)
1 The letter sets the terms for future physical contact; at the same time, the writer has touched the paper and left his mark on it, in a sense offering a preview and a promise of real physical contact. The next letter, she lifts up, and remarks, “this . . . the paper's light. . .” (8). Yet the weight of the letter belies the message, “Dear, I love thee” (9); she describes her reaction to it then (and quite possibly now): “I sank and quailed / As if God's future thundered on my past” (9-10). She describes the following letter, which reads, “I am thine…its ink has paled / With lying at my heart that beat too fast” (11-12). The faded ink does not indicate a diminished love; rather, the acts of reading and rereading, of pressing the letters to her chest during a prolonged absence, have worn the ink. Significantly, the action in relation to the addressee-speaker’s body moves from hand to chest or heart. Up until the last two lines, the speaker quotes the letters and lets them speak; then the speaker withholds the contents of the last letter: “And this . . . 0 Love, thy words have ill availed/If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!” (13-14) We do not really know just what it is that she cannot repeat. The words have been written; they have a physical presence, but she hesitates in speaking them. It seems that the letters and the messages within all foretold on paper what would happen to her. They served as promises or warnings of physical meetings and declarations of love. While the letters can bring the speaker closer to her lover, they also serve to remind her that he is absent. Whether the message contained in the last letter offers the promise of reunion or marriage or, in the case of Barrett herself, escape and elopement, we do not know. If we look to her biography, we are reminded of how letters must have been a lifeline for Barrett and Robert Browning. The image of the speaker in Barrett’s poem holding on to these letters as she would the body of her lover would have resonated with nineteenth-century readers. Her
2 contemporary readers were themselves authors and recipients of letters, and therefore participated in the same practices and rituals of letter-writing that shaped the “lives and letters” genre of epistolary biography, one of the main literary vehicles by which they came to know public and private figures. This genre substituted narratives formed from real letters for the fictions of the epistolary novels whose production had diminished by the late eighteenth century. While gesturing toward this genre, the Barrett sonnet continues the association between letters and love that had characterized epistolary novels. Moreover, beyond narrating a courtship through letters, the Barrett poem illustrates how letters get preserved, how their uses operate beyond a first reading, and how the meanings of letters can change with each re-reading. Here, where the lives of letters are concerned, the main events have less to do, figuratively or literally, with love than with death. In Barrett's sonnet, the letters, though they start out “dead” and mute, are resurrected in the rereading of them. Just so, in the lives and letters genre, this reanimating characteristic of letters becomes even more powerful when the writer dies. This process of preservation and the cherishing of the letters as a keepsake made possible the lives and letters genre in the first place. Instead of reading the letters of fictional characters, the reading public clamored after “real” letters written by “real” people. Interest in the lives, and especially the deaths, of the well-known, and the creation of a
commemorative culture, grew out of a culture of mourning that participated in the growing cult of the celebrity, especially the literary celebrity, in which the deaths of the well known were judged against a standard of the good death. These narratives of celebrity deaths relied on letters to fuel the reading public’s curiosity. Published collections containing such letters held particular importance for women, and, together with letters themselves, allowed women participation in the nineteenth-century culture of
3 mourning even as that culture isolated them from attending many of the public rites and rituals of death. Life writing, and letters in particular, permitted women involvement in an emerging commemorative culture that made bereavement at once a social experience and one of solitude. This dissertation offers three case studies in how women’s epistolary writing mediated an emergent culture of death in the nineteenth century. For Sara Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, and Alice James, writing letters on bereavement, sickness, and death facilitated their inclusion in a literary culture that isolated them because they were women. In studying these women’s letters, I outline and develop an epistolarity of death that draws from nineteenth-century cultural and textual history, from the feminist project of making women’s writings more visible through genres of life writing, and from trauma theory as it offers a poststructuralist account of grief. Instead of viewing letters as little more than source material for literary biographers, I hope readers will be better able to see the importance of letters (and communication technology in general) in the writing of death and bereavement, and will grasp the creative potential of letters to stand on their own for writers who participate in both the general publics of literary culture and the intimate publics constituted by circles of family and friends. More than any other genre, I argue, letter-writing galvanized the writing of grief for women in the nineteenth century. In addition to my three main case studies, I take up in this dissertation, and especially in this introduction, the case of Virginia Woolf. Woolf, a reader and writer of letters herself, was also a literary critic concerned with the place of letters in the culture of death that belonged to her parents’ generation and with how, during her own life, personal communication changed as attitudes toward death, dying, and memorial shifted. Woolf was one of the earliest critical readers of letter collections, particularly women’s letter collections. She spent a great deal of time reading women’s and men’s lives and
4 letters collections and reviewing them, an endeavor that informed her sense that people had become increasingly interested in other people’s lives. However, as much as Woolf read other people’s letters and even wrote letters herself, she at times also imagined the death of letters. Woolf’s writings on nineteenth-century personal letters and on the fate of letter-writing illustrate, and engage with, a problem of reading that beset Modernist readers haunted by their Victorian parents and affected by the traumas of war and the challenges of new technologies of communication. Considering Woolf thus helps us see why and how this dissertation takes up communications theory and trauma theory, as well as the cultural history of death, nineteenth-century literature, and women’s writing. In this introduction, as I survey how my dissertation situates itself with regard to these scholarly projects, I look to Woolf as a mediating figure: as both an exemplary object for my analysis and as a subject who analyzed previous letter-writers in ways upon which I will draw. In part by looking back through the lens that Woolf provides, this chapter begins with some historical and critical remarks that aim to establish the importance of correspondence and published letter collections for nineteenth-century readers, and the relationship of this popular form of life writing to emerging ideas of literary celebrity. Here I give a first approximation of my argument that the significance afforded letters in the nineteenth century is directly related to period attitudes towards death and dying,
particularly as life narratives get worked into an epistolarity of death in which the narrating of grief provides a means to manage the challenges of bereavement as well as to authorize death narratives. The second part of the introduction analyzes this epistolarity of death by describing the specific qualities that characterize death letters. Thus while the first part of the introduction focuses on the publication of letter collections and their importance in a culture of mourning, the second part concentrates on the initial purpose
5 of such letters as they circulated among an intimate public of family and friends. I then conclude, again through a consideration of Woolf, albeit this time from our vantage point, with an account of how technological advances now participate in our contemporary culture of memorial.
HISTORIES OF LETTERS
Later in her life Woolf forecasted the death of letter-writing, but in 1932, almost ten years before her death in 1941, she maintained hopes for its survival, despite believing that letters would eventually become so personal that no one would dare to keep them. In “A Letter to a Young Poet” (1932), Woolf asks her reader, the “Young Poet” of the title, if he had met an older man, referred to as an “elderly necrophilist,” who claimed “that the art of letter writing is dead.” “‘Nobody,’ her necrophilist declares while “examining an envelope through his eye-glasses, ‘has the time even to cross their t’s. We rush, he went on, spreading his toast with marmalade, to the telephone. We commit our half-formed thoughts in ungrammatical phrases to the post card’” (“A Letter,” The Death 208). But Woolf found a freedom in this rushing to the post. Woolf, the modernist, counters the elderly necrophilist, a Victorian, by arguing that for her, as “the child of the penny post,” “the art of letter writing has only just come into existence” (“A Letter” 209). She reasons that before 1840, when the penny post made sending letters more affordable, a letter had to be worth its cost, especially when the receiver had to pay by the sheet to read its contents. Moreover, because of the labor and money invested in such a document, a letter “was read aloud; it was tied up with green silk; after a certain number of years it was published for the infinite declaration of posterity” (“A Letter” 209). In this sentence, Virginia Woolf neatly encapsulates the telos of the letter that was withering in her day. She follows the letter from its painstaking composition, to its reception by its initial reader, to its circulation among multiple readers, as it is brought into an intimate public of 6 family and friends, to its status as a memento that might be brought back into circulation once the writer and perhaps other correspondents have died, as part of a compiled and edited collection to be shared with the world and brought into an existence beyond its original body. For Woolf, however, the letter could have a different life than this; for her, as for recent critics of epistolary writing, the letter is “a cultural institution of multiple histories” (Gilroy and Verhoeven 4). Woolf believed that history was killing the letter, but I think that letters were always already about death. I offer one of these histories, specifically a history of the letter’s importance to nineteenth-century literary women in the writing of death. Such a history resonates with recent theories of the letter, as recognized for instance by Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven when they describe the letter “mapping the route of subjectivity for Jacques Lacan and encompassing all genres, indeed functioning as the paradigm of textuality for Jacques Derrida” (7). What makes the letter so conducive to writings on grief is what Jacques Lacan referred to in his essay on “The Purloined Letter” as the letter’s “property of nullibiety,” or of being nowhere.1 Jacques Derrida also referred to the survivor as being “unlocatable.”2 In applying Jacques Derrida’s The Work of Mourning, specifically the idea of “the gift,” to one of Wordsworth’s elegies on his brother and the commonplace book of the deceased inherited by the poet, Mary Jacobus takes as her subject “the strange afterlife of mourning” or “a non-normative mourning that continues to honor the dead by talking to them” (393). My argument that women’s letters on death and dying during this time extend this conversation between the living and the dead applies this “strange afterlife of mourning” to not only talking to the dead but also to
1 Lacan recognizes that the relationship between letter as material thing and location cannot be described by any French word. He argues that Baudelaire’s description of the place of the letter as “bizarre” or “odd” is the best way to describe it. 2 In The Work of Mourning, the essay on Sarah Kofman in particular, Derrida writes that “the place of the survivor is unlocatable”; even if one found it, “it would remain untenable, unbearable, I would almost say deadly” (170). 7 listening to them by reading their letters. Derrida’s argument, that the work of mourning is interminable and that neither assimilation nor outright rejection of the dead by the living works as a faithful mourning, speaks of the desire of the survivor to find some way to integrate memories of the dead while still recognizing their otherness. Neither complete assimilation nor rejection work to provide for memorial or remembrance. Mourners in the nineteenth-century recognized this, that mourning continued as long as the survivor lived. My work draws from recent scholarship on nineteenth-century bereavement behavior that recognizes how grief became an individualized experience that lasted beyond the designated mourning period. Esther Schor, in her study Bearing the Dead (1994), documents the movement from the Enlightenment “culture of mourning” to the Victorian “cult of mourning” (9). During the Enlightenment, sympathy for the dead was a moral gesture that operated on a principle of exchange; in fact, the very basis of social sympathy depended on sympathy for the dead. In this system of sympathy as morality, the mourner and society alike shared the burden of bereavement. However, by the nineteenth century, this system gave way to “the patronizing of the individual mourner” (Schor 9). Dana Luciano, in her study Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), interprets this isolation of the bereaved differently. Instead of viewing grief as something that society desired to contain, as it is viewed in
Schor’s model, Luciano claims that by the nineteenth century, grief was no longer considered “a sign of disobedience to the divine will”; rather, it was celebrated, as mourners concentrated less on their own demise and more on the death of the other. While Schor’s analysis of grief is helpful in documenting this shift from communal to individual experiences of bereavement and exchanges of sympathy, Luciano goes further by showing how the emphasis on the individual mourner during the nineteenth century
8 did not give the deadline for the experience of grief that had been given in the past. Rather, grief was expected to extend beyond the designated mourning period. Instead of being an exceptional experience, grief became “ordinary.” Woolf, who interpreted her father’s grief at her mother’s death as typical of the Victorian cult of mourning, nevertheless viewed that mourning for her mother as pathological, even deadly. In this light, it is more understandable why Woolf distrusted the elderly Victorian necrophilist who predicted the death of letter writing. Her father’s generation also represented this attachment to letters, the careful preservation or equally careful destruction of them. Like the speaker in the Barrett sonnet, Woolf’s Victorian father, Leslie Stephen, have held on to letters as an aid to memory. When Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, died, her father’s period of mourning held the family hostage. As Woolf grew older, Woolf recognized that her mother’s death had been symptomatic of what she believed was really killing women during that time—the deadly specter of the Angel in the House. And, Stephen’s insistence that his grief be indulged at the expense of his children—his stepdaughter Stella would die trying to live up to the legacy of care- giving that Julia Stephen bequeathed—left its own legacy of pain far greater than the trauma of Woolf losing her mother. While Leslie Stephen’s grief was certainly damaging to Woolf and her siblings, its ruthlessness had less to do with bereavement customs of the time and more to do with what Woolf herself described as Stephen’s “histrionic”
temperament.3 For the mourner in the nineteenth century grief was hardly viewed as abnormal or pathological; it was just interpreted that way by the generations that followed. In fact, grief was fairly commonplace, acknowledged as a daily reality. I argue that because of
3 In “A Sketch of the Past”, Woolf describes her father as “exacting, greedy, unabashed in his demand for praise” from women and his grief was reflective of his tendency toward “histrionics” (145). Woolf concludes near the end of her life, “I found him brutal” (146).
9 the very ordinariness of grief, it became the subject of intense examination in personal letters, a quintessentially ordinary genre, and a genre of the ordinary. Luciano’s argument emphasizes “the melancholy and abundant pleasures promised in reading, writing, and speaking grief in nineteenth-century print culture,” the practice of which “can be seen to trace an archaeology of the subject’s interiority which highlights the buried question at the heart of consolation literature: the always-uncertain relation of ‘love’ to time” (67). I extend Luciano’s argument, one that focuses on nineteenth-century America, to Victorian England, by claiming that this articulation of grief in letters functioned as consolation literature for women, both as these letters on death appeared in the intimate circulation of family and friends and in the wider circulation of a reading public hungry for information on the lives, and especially the deaths, of others. Luciano argues that bereavement in the nineteenth century was experienced as “a slow time of deep feeling” that took the mourner out of time and encouraged the rhythms of grief, ones incongruent with the new adherence to linear timekeeping. Because the letter is always suspended in and even marked by the time that it was written, it became the ideal vehicle for the expression of grief for the bereaved and the dying. These mourners left behind letters that documented their bereavement experiences, and these letters have been instrumental in offering a new history of mourning in current scholarship. In looking at these letters on death from the nineteenth century, it becomes apparent that the majority of them do not depict scenes of the “beautiful death” as outlined by Philippe Ariès. In fact, these letters reflect a highly diverse range of deathbed experiences that perhaps draw upon cultural expectations of death but hardly rely on them. Pat Jalland’s critique of Ariès in Death and the Victorian Family (1996) finds his classic work of scholarship too limiting, writing that Ariès’s definition of the “beautiful death,” in which the deathbed scene was romanticized, was
10 “stereotypical” and drew mainly from the story of the Brontë family. Jalland supports another candidate for preeminent model of death for the nineteenth century, that of the Good Death, one that recommended that the dying be prepared for death and have finished earthly and spiritual business as well as manage to die at home with family and friends present. Ideally, this would all take place while the dying remained conscious and fully cognizant to the end. Of course, those who actually wrote about death recognized a diversity of deathbed experiences and did the best they could to try to meet those rarely met expectations. I build on the importance of this concept of the Good Death, finding it portrayed in letters as something desirable but never fully attainable. While Ariès and even Schor argue that a more individualized experience of mourning emerges in the period, Jalland, as she outlines the Good Death, recognizes the deathbed as a social scene. I suggest that bereavement took place socially through letters, which could accommodate the strange location of not only the dying but also of the mourner-survivor. While mourners remained isolated, even quarantined by their grief, they were able to experience grief socially through articulating it. The deathbed witness, often a caretaker, narrated the deathbed in order to not only leave behind something durable but also to include those excluded from the sickroom, a place that admitted very few. For both those attending the deathbed and those absent from it, letters kept the memory of the dying’s last days in circulation. For the dying, these letters worked toward self-memorial.
I further argue that letters on grief for the bereaved also have such a purpose of self- memorial since, as Derrida argues, all writing about death is a reflection on one’s own death. Recent theories on trauma and loss argue for the productive value of mourning, one that I extend to memorial. David Eng and David Kazanjian’s collection Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003) argues for the new comprehension of melancholia they find in recent scholarship: “a better understanding of melancholic attachments to loss,” they
11 write, “might depathologize those attachments, making visible not only their social bases but also their creative, unpredictable, political aspects” (4). I argue that the women in this study, and the Victorians in general, were productive in how they managed grief. Woolf, in reading these women’s letters, fails to recognize that their epistolary management of grief was far from passive, that in letters they not only created their own memorials to the dead but also engaged in acts of self-memorial. Woolf felt ambivalent about the productive value of trauma and about how memory facilitated grief, and her melancholic writings on her past and her losses illustrate a refusal of type of mourning that “abandons lost objects by laying their histories to rest” (Eng and Kazanjian 4). In contrast to the destructive force of her father’s grief, Woolf wanted to make her grief productive. Current scholarship on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” helps us see how, like Woolf, Freud struggled to reconcile early twentieth-century notions of bereavement with the practices put into place in the nineteenth century. It was during Woolf’s lifetime that Freud posited mourning as a kind of hyper-remembering, but this work of remembering as a bereavement practice began long before Freud’s theorization of it. Even as current critical works such as Eng’s and Kazanjian’s reinterpret Freud’s mourning and melancholia, Freud himself was constantly rethinking his theories on bereavement. In her study of how Freud’s theories changed throughout his career, Tammy Clewell argues that Freud eventually caught up to nineteenth-century strategies for coping with loss, strategies that recognize mourning as never-ending and melancholia, the act of hyper-remembering, as essential to the process of mourning itself. Eng and Kazanjian differentiate mourning from melancholia in that “melancholia’s continued and open relation to the past finally allows us to gain new perspectives on and new understandings of lost objects” (4). I argue that letters on grief in the nineteenth century illustrate the “creative, unpredictable, political aspects” of personal loss. Instead of
12 abandoning the lost object and finding a substitution as a resolution of grief, the letter itself becomes a vehicle for that grief, one that the bereaved uses to make grief more manageable while still maintaining the connection to the dead through the writing of one’s sorrows. Tony Walter’s work on bereavement and the writing of mourning as “durable biography” recognizes both the productive value of grief and the importance of creating something durable out of what grief can produce. After all, such a production of durability is the purpose of memorialization: but instead of looking at memorial on a grand scale that includes monuments and statues, Walter recognizes the great potential for the bereaved in telling stories of the dead that place the dead in the continuing narrative of the mourner’s life. Women often wrote such narratives, in great measure because they were the most excluded from the public ceremonies and rituals of death, while their access to the deathbed gave them stories to tell. These women found letters to be the most accommodating spaces for durable biography; they were written in the isolation imposed by grief but then circulated among readers beyond the ones addressed. For Woolf, mourning and the writing of it became something political in the public sphere of war and remembrance, but the writing of mourning always had been political for the women writing these letters on grief. I thus find that Woolf’s reinvention of mourning actually ratified a practice put into place by her Victorian forebears—the very women with whose
writings she found the most to criticize, and sometimes even dismiss. The preponderance of scholarship on women’s letters since Woolf likewise neglects the nineteenth century. While some essay collections work to remedy this, the focus remains on letters written
before the nineteenth century and on the epistolary novel.4 Works like Gender and
4 See Linda S. Kauffman’s Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and the Epistolary Form (1986), Janet Gurkin Altman’s Epistolarity: Approaches to the Form (1982), Mary Favret,’s Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (1993), Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook’s Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth Century Republic of Letters (1996.) 13 Politics in the Age of Letter Writing (2004), by Caroline Brand, and the essays collected by Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven in Epistolary Histories (2000) resist looking at letters as simply or mainly feminine and private; Gilroy and Verhoeven challenge the characterization that letter-writing is a uniquely “feminine art form” (3). While I acknowledge that characterizing letter-writing as a “feminine art” is problematic, I maintain that letters were a particularly significant aesthetic domain for women exactly because they allowed women access to zones of discourse beyond the feminine or feminized zones of the “agreeable letter” or the “love letter.” Letters on death and dying, the focus of my study, represent just one such further zone. In her essay on “Aurora Leigh,” Woolf recognized the importance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning beyond her writings on love and the great epistolary romance of her life, and she regretted the attention paid to the love story of the Brownings, as told through letters and biographies, rather than to her art. However, Barrett’s letters, like the sonnet that opens this chapter, are about more than love; in fact, the isolation imposed by both her invalidism and her father necessitated the writing of letters in the first place, letters that became not only vehicles for her poems but also acts of resistance. Likewise, letters on dying were an active form of resistance for female mourners in general, allowing them to break the quarantine imposed by scheduled bereavement and make mourning a social practice all its own.
Beyond providing women with a way to memorialize, letter collections opened up publication for more women writers and made women’s writing more visible. If Woolf viewed Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her husband as “two of the most conspicuous figures in that bright and animated company of authors who, thanks, to our modern habit of writing memoirs and printing letters and sitting to be photographed, live in the flesh not merely as of old in the word” (“Aurora Leigh” in The Second Common Reader 202),
14 this was no doubt in part because the letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning increased the readership for all of her writings. And rather than view these letters as distracting readers from the art of Barrett’s poetry, I see them as part of her life’s work as a writer. The idea of literary celebrity in the nineteenth century created larger reading publics for letter collections outside the more intimate ones of friends and family. Viewing these collections of lives and deaths as a sort of epistolary autobiography, these consumer- readers read letters as a means both to satisfy public curiosity surrounding the famous as well as to be included in a more intimate readership. Moreover, letters in the nineteenth century provided not only evidence of the lives lived by literary celebrities but also how those lives ended. Because of their connections to death and literary remains, letters reveal the anxieties surrounding how death gets written, a work that, in the end, is impossible to author. How these women wrote about death and dying in their letters demonstrates their awareness that they would be judged by their deaths. Sara Coleridge wrote about the deaths of those closest to her in order to learn from and plan her own death., and Alice James concentrated almost entirely on her own demise. Charlotte Brontë did not write about her own death, even preferring that others at least hold off speculating about it while she was still living. Nevertheless, Brontë instead focused on her sisters’ deaths, knowing that their deaths would shape how her own life would be written. Indeed, the family narrative would never lose its association with death. Finally, Woolf’s own life narrative remains dominated by mental illness and death often at the expense of recognizing her ability to produce a diverse range of high quality writing. In writing of death in general and of their own deaths in particular, Sara Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, Alice James, and even Woolf try to meet the demands of competing publics. Addressing a more intimate public through letters, the bereaved—
15 often isolated, even quarantined from society, writes and rewrites these narratives of grief in order to write her way back into the world where the balance between living and dying is a tandem act of survival. it is with this struggle in mind that I argue that the work of death and the writing of it are creative acts that build toward leaving a written corpus which is more permanent, or at least more durable, than the body and less vulnerable than life.
DEATH AND LETTERS
Three phenomena in the first half of the nineteenth century converged to make epistolary explorations of death a significant practice: advances in print technology, which allowed letter collections from a wide variety of writers to become more available; the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840, which increased access to the postal system by making it more affordable; and a new interest in the lives, and especially the deaths, of others, particularly the well-known. In the nineteenth century, with advances in mass publication and transportation and the affordability of the postal system, the amount of information on public figures and its increasing accessibility made the myth of celebrity and the celebrity death a matter of public fascination. Then as now, celebrities are often “owned” by the public, and it would seem that whatever works are left over belong to that public as well. To extend Samantha Matthews’ argument that writers (or celebrities)
such as Tennyson in a death-aware culture shaped their deaths for public consumption, I argue that autothanatographical letters work not only as evidence of the life and death of the subject but also co-author that assessment. The writing outlives the writer so that it can shape how one is written about posthumously. The death of Princess Charlotte in 1817 made her the object of national grief. Esther Schor identifies 200 extant documents published in the aftermath of Charlotte’s death that memorialize the Princess and her stillborn son. Pamphlets, sermons, elegies, 16 and various other types of memorial writings were produced in response to her death. Schor argues that these writings reveal a “conflation of public and private grief” by which the public would lay claim to the private lives of its monarchs” (199). By the time Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria made the image of her grief iconic and had monuments to her mourning built throughout London. The same would be true for well- known literary figures with Alfred Tennyson receiving a public funeral at Westminster by the end of the century. Print technology further publicized the private lives and deaths of these public figures. In 1803 the invention of a paper-making machine made paper less expensive and more widely available. Eight years later in 1811, the steam-powered cylindrical printing press increased the production of newspapers when the London Times and other newspapers bought one in 1814, and this invention brought about the standardization of book publication in the next decade. In 1840, postage stamps were brought out to accommodate the wider use of the postal system after a decade of postal reform. Just as advances in the printing press increased literacy rates, the Penny Post encouraged not only literacy but also a wider participation in the culture of letter-
writing.5 Along with the increased use of the postal system during the nineteenth century, the publication of letter collections, often titled “Life and Letters,” became very popular and let the public in on the private lives of public figures. Richard Altick writes that nineteenth-century English biography “was a rich but unstable compound of history, journalism, eulogy, inspiration, and materials suitable for the study of the mind” (181) and that the “life and letters” genre was “the most typical and, critically speaking, most vulnerable form of literary biography” (182). Readers consumed literary letters avidly in
5 In the year before the introduction of the Penny Post, 76 million letters were sent. The next year people sent 168 million letters, and ten years later in 1850, 347 million letters were sent through the Penny Post. 17 the nineteenth century, and letter collections claimed a mass readership well into the twentieth. Virginia Woolf commented on the Victorian and early Modernist obsession with reading other people’s lives: “Interest in ourselves and in other people’s selves is a late development of the human mind. Not until the eighteenth century in England did that curiosity express itself in writing the lives of private people. Only in the nineteenth century was biography fully grown and hugely prolific” (187). I argue that the same curiosity about other people’s lives extended to reading letter collections. This proliferation of other people’s letters to satisfy this curiosity and the controversy often created by “lives and letters” made the friends and families of the well known reluctant to part with their letters. In her essay “The Art of Biography” (1939), Woolf tracks what lead to the radical changes in writing biographies in the twentieth century. One of those changes she locates in the willingness of widows and other family members to relinquish their letters. For the Victorian biographer, “[t]he widow and friends were hard taskmasters” who wanted to “Cover up. Omit” (“The Art of Biography,” The Death 188). However towards the end of the century, “widows became broad minded, the public keener-sighted” (188). This new freedom of the biographer to move away from the “wax figures” of Victorian lives was demonstrated, she argues, by Froude’s Carlyle and later by her good friend Lytton Strachey’s examination of Victorian lives. However, I would argue twentieth-century biographies such as Strachey’s did not
particularly resemble the Lives and Letters genre of the previous century. In them, the biographer’s voice became more prominent than that of the subject, whose voice dominated nineteenth-century biography with heavily excerpted letters. For example, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë depended on including entire letters. Eventually, as Gaskell relies more and more on Brontë’s letters to speak for her, Gaskell becomes more of an editor, guiding and directing the reader by providing context and
18 connecting narrative from one letter to the next. Gaskell valued these letters as evidence that she hoped would recover her subject’s reputation. Not only were the letters of the person whose life was under examination put to use, but other correspondents were essential in providing not only epistolary evidence of a life well lived but also of a life that ended well. Letters written after someone’s death often provided a postmortem of its events for those who could not be there, and these letters on death worked hard to show that the deceased had a good death, a significant concept for Victorian families and readers. As previously mentioned, Pat Jalland advances this concept in her study of Victorian death, while challenging the model of the “beautiful death” as first described by Philippe Ariès, “whereby Romanticism transformed death from the fearful to the beautiful, to be almost eagerly awaited as Victorians glorified the act of dying and the deathbed scene” (Jalland 8). Ariès writes of the Brontës that “The desire for death expressed by these doomed young invalids is not a literary affectation but a deep wound; not a personal wound but the accident of an age and culture” and that for them “Death is
therefore a joy” (437).6 Jalland, by contrast, draws on Evangelical didactic writing to excavate a more social and responsible version of the Good Death, one that had the following requirements: [It] should take place at home, with the dying person making explicit farewells to each family member. There should be time, and physical and mental capacity, for the completion of temporal and spiritual business, whether the latter signified final Communion or informal family devotions. The dying person should be
6 Interestingly, Ariès omits from this narrative Branwell Brontë, who perhaps had the strongest wish for death through his self-destructive behavior. 19 conscious and lucid until the end, resigned to God’s will, able to beg forgiveness for past sins and to prove his or her worthiness for salvation. (Jalland 26) While didactic Evangelical writings on the Good Death recommend this scene, Jalland finds that privately written and unpublished deathbed accounts did not always meet this model. A Good Death “required a rare combination of good luck, convenient illness, and pious character, and was achieved more often in Evangelical tracts than in family life” (Jalland 38). John Wolffe’s work about memorial sermons on the famous in nineteenth- century Britain goes even further to show just how much later critics emphasized the good and beautiful death, perhaps more than the Victorians themselves, who likely recognized the model for the impossible ideal it set. Sermons focused more on the subjects’ entire lives and less on the process of dying, acknowledging the diversity of deathbed experiences (Wolffe 287). The sermons encouraged the family in “facing the loss of one of its members … to redefine and reassert its identity through the rituals of
grieving” (Wolffe 290).7 In both Wolffe and Jalland, the place of the family is emphasized, and though the ideal model was a goal rarely met, it did play a role in how people wanted to die and in how these deaths were written. Nineteenth-century letters on death, sometimes referred to as “last letters” when written by the dying, provided the bereaved a record of the deceased’s final days. Letters written about the deathbed by witnesses or caregivers provided evidence to the absent bereaved that the deceased died well. For those whose deaths meant something beyond the family and friends who knew them, telling one’s story became even more important. For writers in the nineteenth century, a postmortem examination of their lives by the press and the reading public was inevitable. By the end of the century, well-known
7 In looking at the memorial sermons on Princess Charlotte (1817), the Duke of Wellington (1852), Prince Albert (1861) and Queen Victoria (1901), Wolffe finds the following themes: accountability, sympathy, and inclusiveness (290). 20 writers and public figures knew they had an influence over how they would be viewed after death. In her work on Alfred Tennyson, Samantha Matthews looks at how the poet staged his death. Tennyson, who died in 1892, was well aware that his death would be a public event and that all traces, or remains, would stand in for his body. When a writer like Tennyson dies, “cultural significance shifts from the poet as human being to his memory as embodied by printed texts and other remains” (Matthews 248). Matthews describes the social process of celebrity death in which the secret of “an individual poet’s genius remained a focus of powerful empirical curiosity, a mystery to be solved by gathering and analyzing evidence” (248). She further locates the pieces of this puzzle of genius, “the phase of biographical and critical assessment following death” in not only the poet’s works but also in the body wherein “the posthumous history of the corpse— and its representation—is integral to the poet’s biography” (248). Charlotte Brontë had to answer to her sisters’ reputations by letting the public in on their deaths. In her “Biographical Notice,” she lets the world know that they died well, that their “good deaths” stand in for their characters. Brontë hoped to recover her sisters’ reputations, which had been bruised by critics dismissing their works as coarse and vulgar. Earlier in the century, another poet, John Keats, was also assessed by how he died. Sara Coleridge had her own words to say about it. While she admired Keats’s poetry, she could not abide by the way he died: “The spectacle of Keats’ last days is truly a miserable one”; “How sadly he wanted fortitude. He was manly in some respects; but in others he was but five feet high after all,” and, “Again, I must say it is a miserable spectacle.” Sara Coleridge read and interpreted the poet’s death in The Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848, edited by Richard Monkton Milnes), where excerpts from his close friend Joseph Severn detail the final days.
21 Letters provided evidence of a good death in a culture that increasingly used its media and print technology to memorialize. To satisfy the public demand for one’s literary remains, a writer’s collected letters often come out after that writer has died. The initial editors, compilers, and archivists (usually family, friends, or colleagues) view selected letter collections as a sort of memorial to the writer, often referring to them as “literary remains.” The arranged letters, as a body of work, stand in for the writer himself or herself, aiming to give readers a glimpse into the intimate details of a writer’s life and times and an opportunity to “hear” the writer’s “real” voice. Not surprisingly, editorial work focuses on creating an image of the author that best fits the reading public’s conception of him or her, or tries to repair it. The longer a letter sits collecting dust, the more obscure the references and contexts in which it was written become. In letter collections, editors have to orient readers to the relationships, events, and histories of letter writers’ lives. Introductions and explanatory notes attempt to close the distance between writer and audience, and this intimacy between reader and writer is often accomplished through memorialization. Letters move from the intimate public of family and friends to the larger reading public of letter collections through such memorializing writing, which transforms the grief of intimate relations into one shared by all who read it.
WOMEN AND LETTERS
Historically letters have been viewed as a genre uniquely suited to women, since they remove the body from the scene of discourse while allowing women participation in semi-public exchange. Hence it is that Gilory and Verhoeven react against “the dominant critical tradition [that] equates letters and love, women’s writing and the writing of the heart” (3). Still, Gilroy and Verhoeven, as well as Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, recognize that both the female voice and the letter were put into circulation together at the 22 “historical moment between manuscript and print, private correspondence and published text” (Cook 2). Studies on women’s letter collections from the eighteenth century focus on the writers’ attention to domestic details and their use of a “private voice appropriate to women whose roles were increasingly circumscribed within the confines of bourgeois ideology” (Gilroy and Verhoeven 2). The assumption of “a private voice” may have been expected by middle class women writing letters in the eighteenth century and beyond, but I argue that such a conception of a uniform private voice really did not exist. Indeed, letters, I maintain, allowed women to try on different voices and challenge their own ideas of what could and could not be expressed in conversation. Women often created voices for each correspondent depending on the definition of their relationship and the expectations they shared. During the nineteenth century, literary letters allowed women to be public figures even as letters operated as familiar (or private) letters. The posthumous publication of letters took women outside of the more intimate reading publics of family, friends, and literary circles into a larger reading public. This shift in a woman’s public image required that the information in a collection be managed, giving editors (oftentimes family and close friends) the power to shape a woman’s epistolary history to conform to the public’s expectations of the writer and appropriate female behavior as well as its conception of “private” life in relation to the personal letter. Material supplementing the letters in
collections attempts to promote the fiction of the private female voice in personal letters when, in fact, that voice had a reading public, however small, before its “public” debut in a collection. Furthermore, letter collections opened up publication for more women writers. An early example, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, was first published in 1763, and Montagu’s Letters and Works kept her in circulation in 1837. Dorothy Obsorne’s letters were discovered and published in the late nineteenth century.
23 A quick look at Cheryl Cline’s Women’s Diaries, Journals, and Letters: An Annotated Bibliography (1989) reveals the great amount of life writing produced by women in the nineteenth century. In the early part of the 1800s, women’s letter collections came mostly from royalty, the aristocracy, or bluestockings. However, by the end of the century, women’s letters and, especially, women’s travel letters, appeared widely with some women even having their letters printed privately and some families issuing privately printed collections of letters as memorials to the deceased. As more letter collections were published, members of literary families became increasingly aware of the importance of letters. The majority of women’s letter collections published in the nineteenth century came from women either participating in or connected to literary culture. I focus on these more canonical figures because of their awareness that their letters, due to their literary celebrity or family connection to it, were likely to be published. They knew their words, especially their words on death and dying, would survive their bodies. Throughout the nineteenth century, the assembly, publication, and reading of women’s letter collections participated in the posthumous assessment of literary lives both of the writer herself and of all those connected to her. Jane Austen’s and Charlotte Brontë’s letters were widely published after their deaths in order to satisfy public curiosity into the writers’ lives; in fact, the hunt for Brontë’s letters illustrates the
lengths to which literary scavengers would go to claim the remains.8 Sara Coleridge
8 Margaret Smith gives a complete history of Charlotte Brontë’s letters in volume one of the most recent Oxford edition of her letters. For Austen and Brontë, the letters that remained were (and continue to be) valuable commodities for biographers, autograph hunters, and anyone involved in the Austen or Brontë myth-making or scholarly industries. While Austen’s and Brontë’s letters show readers how these writers lived, what they read, and how they approached the business of publishing, they also hold value as commodities. In the most recently published collection of Charlotte Brontë's letters, editor Margaret Smith argues that the most valuable of Charlotte's letters to collectors was written on August 24, 1847 and accompanied her manuscript of Jane Eyre (1847). That letter continues to be circulated in sale rooms, fetching higher and higher prices, and collectors persist in looking for missing or unknown letters from Brontë and Austen.
24 participated in both preserving family letters and writing them, eventually promoting the publication of her own letters. Letter collections could be extremely controversial. Near the end of the century, Jane Carlyle’s published letters created great controversy when the collection revealed that her relationship with her husband was less than ideal. Even letters that were not published shortly after the writer’s death were preserved for later use. Alice James, connected to an important American family, arranged to have her diary posthumously, though privately, published, but her letters were not published until 1980 when feminist scholars began to consider her a serious literary figure. In fact, Alice James’s brother Henry recognized how far people would go to get their hands on a well- known figure’s literary remains in his novella The Aspern Papers, which is about how a scholar attempts to manipulate a long-dead Romantic poet’s now dying mistress and her spinster niece into giving up the poet’s letters. The niece, after almost being seduced by the scholar, burns the letters when she realizes his intentions are less than sincere. As illustrated by James’s story, letters were never viewed as safe even though letter-writing was often characterized as an activity suitable for women. Personal writing like letters and journals sits on the margins of literary production. As marginal as these materials may have been (and still are) considered, they were also viewed as potentially dangerous not only for the information that might be made public but also for the emotions these materials could elicit. While Hallam and Hockey acknowledge the usefulness of memorial objects in aiding memory and managing grief, they also recognize how these objects have historically been viewed as dangerous and even pathologized, “trivialized as merely ‘sentimental’” and “coded as disparate fragments residing in a ‘female’ domain of excessive emotion and irrational, possessive impulses” (19). While the publication of a letter not only permitted access to the home lives of the writers but also the deathbeds, the sentiments expressed in letters on grief might also be
25 viewed as part of this female domain of excessive emotion and grief. The danger of this textual body comes from the possibility of its being read by those not intended to read it, and that is exactly what the publication of these letters allowed. Because of this threatening quality of letters, many have been lost to flames. Alitck observes that because of the widespread publication of letters in nineteenth- century Britain, burning letters became a common practice for families and friends of writers and public figures: “the odor of burning letters permeates the literary history of the nineteenth century” (162). Jane Welsh Carlyle burned many of her letters to spite her husband, while the Coleridge family learned to destroy their family letters after some unflattering ones by Samuel Taylor Coleridge were published by his acquaintances. Charlotte Brontë’s husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, once asked his wife to write her friend Ellen Nussey to request that she burn all her letters, that they were as “dangerous as Lucifer matches” (3:295, [20 Oct. 1854]). Ellen promised to destroy them but did not follow through. 9 For years after Brontë’s death, she fought with Nicholls to get them published. One of the most infamous nineteenth-century instances of epistolary immolation comes from Cassandra Austen’s handling of her sister Jane Austen’s letters. Virginia Woolf begins her essay on Jane Austen with a discussion of Cassandra burning the writer’s letters: It is probable that if Miss Cassandra Austen had had her way we should have had nothing of Jane Austen’s except her novels. To her elder sister alone did she write freely; to her alone she confided her hopes and, if rumour is true, the one great disappointment of her life; but when Miss Cassandra Austen grew old, and the
9 The exchange among Brontë, Nicholls, and Nussey took place in the fall of 1854. Brontë wrote to Ellen that Nicholls believed women “most rash in letter writing”; they “do not look to contingencies—a letter may fall into any hand” (3: 296). Nicholls required that Ellen “promise on a separate slip of paper, in a legible hand” (3: 297). In the letter, Brontë mocks Nicholl’s concern, writing later, “All this seems mighty amusing” (7 Nov. 1854), that “I never thought of attaching importance to them, or considering their fate.” 26 growth of her sister’s fame made her suspect that a time might come when strangers would pry and scholars speculate, she burnt, at great cost to herself, every letter that could gratify their curiosity, and spared only what she judged too trivial to be of interest. (“Austen,” Common Reader 137) History has not been kind to Cassandra, with many opting to forget, unlike Woolf, that the destruction of her sister’s letters must have been costly, not to mention painful. Cassandra once wrote to their niece Fanny after Jane’s death: “I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed,--She was the sun of my life, the glider of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is if I had lost a part of myself” (20 July 1870; 344 in Le Faye). Whether Cassandra wanted to protect her family or felt the letters to be of too personal a nature to be published, her practice of sorting and burning speaks to her knowledge of the place of her sister’s letters in literary history. In destroying a great many of the letters, Cassandra Austen shaped how others would read her sister’s life. She committed, in her own way, the ultimate act of commemoration. Each and every one of the writers considered in this study wrote letters that will never be recovered because friends, family, and sometimes even the writers themselves destroyed the letters before they could be harassed out of them. Those left behind, such as Cassandra Austen, had to decide whether to send letters back to the family or next of kin, to keep them, or to destroy them. As in the Barrett poem that opened the chapter, letters are often preserved, tied in a neat bundle with ribbon or placed in a chest, almost in a ritualistic manner. Just as there were customs in place to handle the physical remains of the dead, the letters or literary remains of the dead have their own sets of traditions, practices, and rituals wherein letters become tokens or mementos. In fact the definition of undertaker not only refers to the person who deals with the business of death (OED Def.
27 5B) but also one who prepares a literary work (OED Def. 6 c). Women often functioned as not only caretakers but literary undertakers as well. They became active commemorators through not only the writing of letters but also through the preservation and even destruction of them. Women often manage how death takes place. They attend
the sickroom, and they are often in charge of literary remains. Hallam and Hockey cite visual works of the eighteenth and nineteenth century that illustrate “[t]he proximity of women to death and the weight they would bear in terms of the work of mourning and remembrance” (69). These works often place women, marked by mourning in their veils and dark clothes, on top of the grave where they mirror the body below. Historically, women often bore the responsibility for the dead, for the rituals of grief that attended death and dying, just as they considered letters their domain, their point of access to the arena of public discourse that had been denied to them. Sara Coleridge, Charlotte Bronte, and Alice James are all exemplars of turning the experiences of grief into creative acts that allowed them to test the limits of appropriate bereavement behavior. The letters they left, I argue, not only provided evidence of a life well lived and a brave death, they stood on their own as a genre uniquely suited to the writing of death. However, even as letters neutralized women’s bodies enough to allow them greater freedoms to express themselves, the physicality of the letter never severed its ties to the body. Letters demonstrate how death gets written, read, and interpreted as what is left of the body, as a sort of corpse, for post-mortem examination. As objects left behind by the dead, letters play an important role in commemoration. Not only are they physical remnants of the deceased that seem to actually speak, and that do actually bear the marks of the deceased’s hand, they also act as evidence for how the dead lived and for how they wanted to die. But, what did it mean to the letter writers for them to write about death?
28 The next section begins to answer this question by outlining an epistolarity of death that captures the unique ability of letters to communicate dying, death, and bereavement.
DURABLE EPISTOGRAPHIES Letters provided the bereaved with greater freedom to express their grief and to challenge traditional notions of appropriate bereavement behavior. One did not have to perform the role of the resigned mourner who had given her loved one to God; rather, the letter allowed one to be angry, frustrated, and inconsolable. While much of these behaviors could not be acted out in public, they could occur within the intimate public of a letter. Still, such expression mostly occurred while one wrote in solitude. Bereavement, then, became more of an isolated activity with letters providing a facilitating space for grief when other spaces had been curtailed. As discussed in the previous section, the letter held added significance for women. Introducing her mother’s collection, Edith
Coleridge wrote that Sara Coleridge’s letters “reveal to the world that which was spoken either in the innermost circle of home affection, or in the outer (but still guarded) circle of social and friendly intercourse” (ML x-xi). While letters allowed women to enter this
“guarded circle” of society, they also gave women a way out of solitary mourning
Writing about one’s grief at one’s own or another’s death, be it past, present, or future, became a creative and empowering act for these women as they engaged in acts of self- creation and re-creation. This section outlines the particular characteristics of letters that make them the ideal vehicles for such writing of death.
First, it is necessary to review why people write about death in the first place.
Death studies theorist Tony Walter finds that grief works through “the construction of a durable biography that enables the living to integrate the memory of the dead into their 29 ongoing lives; the process by which this is achieved is principally through conversations with others who knew the deceased”; “bereavement is part of the process of
(auto)biography, and the biographical imperative—the need to make sense of self and others in a continuing narrative—is the motor that drives bereavement behavior” (7). The idea that this narrative is continuous problematizes the concept that grief has an ending.
We view mourning as a disease because such a label provides the possibility of a “cure” even where there can be no full recovery since the deceased can never be recovered.
Ultimately, we do not bury our grief along with our dead. Walter’s work on durable biography provides a language for how we write about grief.10 He focuses on modern grief and suggests “durable biography” as a way to replace traditional practices of grief management as influenced by Freudian ideas on mourning. Instead of rejecting the lost object and finding a replacement, Walter maintains that writing provides a durable object that honors the memory of the bereaved and the place of the deceased in that memory; instead of outright substitution, “durable biography” works at redefining the relationship between the self and the deceased.
If self and family have to be redefined as part of a successful performance of bereavement, then that redefinition requires (even now) that the bereaved make sense of life without the deceased in it, and this redefinition often takes place through writing about grief. Part of the difficulty for the bereaved involved changing ideas of sympathy and consolation throughout the nineteenth century in which sympathy for the dead became less a social practice and more an individual experience. The mourner’s solitary
10 Most criticism of Walter’s durable biography as an alternative method in Freudian grief work comes from therapists who suggest that his model would work well as a supplement rather than a replacement of 30 state “quarantine[d] the mourner for examination as though such an interpretative
practice would itself promote the ‘cure’ for a condition that is declared, more or less
explicitly pathological” with isolation as “defense against the contagion of suffering”
(Schor 3). Schor argues that in continuing to quarantine the mourner, psychological
theories of mourning fail to recognize that bereavement is scarcely a solitary experience; instead, she prefers a cultural approach that “interprets mourning as a discourse among
the living” (3). While I acknowledge that writing about grief through letters makes
mourning a social experience, the expression of grief usually occurs in solitude. In
Arranging Grief, Dana Luciano outlines the reasons for this isolation. As mentioned earlier, Luciano argues that grief occurs at a slower tempo that falls outside of linear time-keeping, something that became even more widely followed with the importance of railroad and train schedules and even the mail post itself. She also argues that the nineteenth century’s shift in emphasis from a community’s grief to that of the individual had to do with an increased capacity for love. In a sense, time slowed down to allow for this “cherishing of grief” which really amounted to a “cherishing of love” (6-7).11 As
George Eliot reminded her readers in several sympathy letters, “For love is never without its shadow of anxiety. We have this treasure in earthen vessels” (493, 13 Dec. 1877).12
The word “durable” significantly suggests something that lasts, a material piece of writing that can outlive the fragile earthen vessel of its creator. While Tony Walter
traditional models of bereavement therapy. 11 Luciano continues, “The ‘natural’ consequence of the newly exalted human capacity for interpersonal attachment, grief recalled, through the pain of loss, the timeless truths that supported and stabilized the historical development of a humanity founded in fellow feeling” (6-7). 12 Eliot often expresses the sentiment to those who are bereaved or when she herself was in mourning: “We pay a heavy price in anxiety for the blessedness of loving” (397, 16 Dec. 1871). 31 suggests that twenty-first-century grief be managed through the construction of a durable
biography, I maintain that the nineteenth-century culture of mourning allowed and even
encouraged a type of “durable epistography.” While I agree that writing a durable
biography can make grief more manageable, I suggest that bereavement requires the
writing and re-writing of multiple durable biographies, that there is never a consistent
picture of the deceased or of the bereavement experience. In Creative Negativity: Four
Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest, Carol Hanbery MacKay defines creative negativity as “a complex of rhetorical and performative techniques by which certain women of the period construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct themselves” (3). Creative negativity allowed the female questor to continuously “create and decreate the self” (3).
By a similar process of creation and decreation, I argue that the female mourner and memorialist had to continuously write and rewrite bereavement. MacKay locates the greatest achievement of the female quest “in its insight into death—that it does not have to be a rupture,” that “even death can constitute a rounding out, a sense of completion that concurrently exists as connection and continuity” (94). Death writing in letters allowed the writer-mourner to reflect upon one’s grief and memories of the deceased at that moment thereby resisting a uniform depiction of bereavement. Grief hardly follows a steady course; one’s memory of another’s death is often informed by the mourner’s moment-by-moment relationship to grief. Just as Jalland describes a diversity of deathbed experiences, a single mourner’s grief and memories of death have their own diversity.
Then as now, one did not experience the feelings associated with bereavement consistently or even predictably. The variable nature of grief requires that the bereaved
32 continuously write and rewrite her position of bereavement. Letters participated in that push to memorialize even before the letters appeared in print with some letters doing the work of memorial from the deathbed.
This dissertation provides a vocabulary for an epistolarity of death that explains why letters became important texts for communicating the bereavement experience.
Typically, in autobiography, a life is shaped and interpreted by the subject in retrospect, and in biography, a life is shaped and interpreted by another. Letter collections usually contain elements of both autobiography and biography. Letters can be characterized as autobiographical texts, but unlike narrative autobiography, they are scattered over space and time and feature only one side of the correspondence. The letters I study take on a specific designation: they are all about death, dying, and bereavement. Coined by Nancy
K. Miller in 1994, “autothanatography” describes, in short, the act of writing one’s death.
Susanna Egan identifies three tropes in the writing of autothanatography:13 (1) it involves more than one subject, (2) those subjects engage in a continuous dialogue that occurs almost entirely in the present, (3) the subject expresses grief in material forms whereby space substitutes time. Egan’s approach to autothanatography is helpful in looking at death writing and, more generally, works of art that represent the process of dying.
Letters, because they are scattered over space and time and because their audience shifts from an intimate public to a larger commercial or academic one, require their own
13 Susanna Egan’s essay on authanatography appears online as part of the Pain and Suffering Interdisciplinary Research Network. Her brief essay was part of an online workshop of papers written between 2000 and 2001. Egan’s article is helpful because it provides a way of looking at autothanatography as the reverse of autobiography as well as familiar tropes in this type of writing. Rather than an extended narrative with multiple events, “it covers a brief period of time and single main experience.” And, instead of a single subject, it includes other people in addition to the dying, “often in a dialogue of shared 33 framework. Toward the end of constructing such a framework, I propose looking at
letters through their spatial/temporal, testimonial, material, and collaborative qualities.
Letters in Time and Space
The temporal quality of letters reflects the tense of dying and bereavement, one that disrupts time and space by occurring in a continuous present tense. With letters there is the here and now of the writer and the here and now of the reader; ideally, the time between writing and reading is brief, as the content of letters usually covers time- sensitive material. The primary reader would appear to be the addressee; however, the first reader is in fact the writer. If autothanatography occurs in a continuous present
(which Egan recognizes as the tense of dying), then in a diary or letter one can provide a snapshot of one’s life while one is dying.14 Derrida calls approaching one’s death through
writing “as a sort of autobiographical acceleration” (WM 52).15 The act of writing passes
time in its own way, in “graphological time” or “the time or tense… the implicit tempo of
all writing” (WM, 158) which “is the signature of the writer’s posthumousness” (Jacobus
408). A letter, like a photo, can capture a moment, and unlike the diary, which is often
read posthumously, it must be read as soon as possible. The intimate audience of letters
experience, sometimes for the completion of the task” (Egan). For Egan’s purposes, she looks at visual arts, film, and quilting. 14 Another critic, Kathryn Carter, identifies a temporal element in autothanatography, arguing that it “shares something with the finite, temporally aware genre of diary writing. Diary writing more than other kinds of autobiography draws attention to issues of time; it enforces an engagement with temporal perspectives” (56). Carter does not consider letters, which also require dates and locations. 15 See Derrida in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” so titled because “his deaths, that is, those of his relatives, those deaths that must have inhabited him, situating places and solemn moments, orienting tombs in his inner space (ending—and probably even beginning—with his mother’s death). His deaths, those he lived in the plural, those he must have linked together, trying in vain to ‘dialectize’ them before the ‘total’ and ‘undialectical’ death; those deaths that always form in our lives a terrifying and endless series” (52). Through Barthes, Derrida illustrates that death moves in a continuous narrative.
34 on death often mourns the death before it happens in what has been labeled “anticipatory
grief.” Anticipatory grief, though a term used to describe contemporary bereavement behavior, has a long history with the idea of preparedness for death a requirement in the
nineteenth-century model of the good death. Sara Coleridge writes of her preparedness
before the death of her husband that though she had not given up hope, she was not
deluded by it either: “this faint hope, which perhaps, however, is stronger than I imagine,
does not render me unprepared for what all around me expect” (ML 189, Dec. 1842).
Even after death, the bereaved used letters to “articulate and interpret experience”; I
would add to Egan’s argument that not only are these experiences articulated and
interpreted, but they also must undergo constant rearticulation and reinterpretation; in
other words, the experience gets written and rewritten to reflect fluctuating states of grief.
Just as one adjusts to the fact of dying, of losing one’s hold on life little by little, those
who will be left behind are making the same types of adjustments, necessitating that
writings on grief exist in an extended present tense.
The main problem in writing about the dead is the issue of time. Where does one
place the dead in time, and how do we incorporate the dead in our lives while still
recognizing their otherness as the dead? For nineteenth-century mourners, this separation
was problematic. Michael Wheeler locates the “unspeakableness” of the dead, especially
for the Victorians, as a “problem of interpretation”: “is the dying person alive or dead?”
(34). This difficulty originates in “[t]he double consciousness of faith, which holds the
this-worldly and the other-worldly in tension, finds in death and the future life a subject
which is at once fitting and unaccommodating” (27). For the survivor in the Victorian
35 family, mourning became not only an act but also a state. Luciano argues that the
“emergence of grief in the nineteenth century [was] a means not simply of tempering but also of temporalizing the body and its feelings” (27). She connects the time and space of mourning in the nineteenth century by looking at the “sacralized spaces” created for grief that did not go away, that lingered long past the designated mourning period. Most importantly, Luciano recognizes “the contradictory temporal pull of the mournful moment, which slowed or suspended ordinary time in its yearning after sensual continuities” (29). Complicating this bodily response to grief, argues Luciano, was time, which during this century was being figured as “linear, ordered, progressive, and teleogical” (2). In order to indulge in “the luxury of grief,” “the time of grief,” in contrast to more mechanized and linear time-keeping, was constructed as “the slow time of deep feeling,” a state “experienced (and thus embraced) as personal, human, intimate” (2).
Therefore, taking the individual out of society and away from the rhythms of everyday life could allow for the more scared rituals of grieving. Even as those who mourned desired a physical reminder of the deceased, they were also marked with and weighed down by their status as mourners: mourning dress, mourning stationery, and all the accessories of death separated them from society. And, as evidenced by Queen Victoria, the bereaved could “indulge” in this marked appearance of grief for as long as they wanted.
Taking the mourner out of time also complicates the location of the mourner.
Where the survivor places herself is complicated by the fact that she is also always dying.
Derrida writes that “the place of the survivor is unlocatable”; even if one found it, “it
36 would remain untenable, unbearable, I would almost say deadly” (170). Such a place
could not be maintained because there will always be loss; no one can remain a survivor forever. The survivor, in a way, has to reconcile herself to a world without the deceased in it as well a world that once had the deceased and create that world anew. Letters, material items, all the residue of the dead complicate this act of re-creation. Similarly, when we read a letter, it puts us in two places at once. We are in the past at the time of the writing, and we are in the present. Anxiety in correspondence has to do with expectations of response and non-response in which the time between composition and reading compounds the distance created by geography: “letters have specific forms of deixis” or “ways of referring to the writer and the intended reader and to space and time”
(Barton and Hall 6). Spatial distance necessitates the writing of a letter, and a gap in time consequently separates the writing from the reading (6). A letter is written because of an absence: “Of course, for every ‘presence’ a letter creates, an absence hovers nearby.
Every letter delivered, ‘understood,’ and responded to initially included the possibility of nondelivery, misunderstanding, and lack of response” (Bower 170). For the mourner, the last part, “lack of response,” becomes the most significant. As Jacobus reminds us, “This
‘no-response’ (sans-réponse), Derrida writes, is how Levinas himself had defined death”
(WM, 203). Jacobus argues that “to keep on addressing the one who does not respond is also a means of keeping alive Autrui (Otherness), perpetuating the secret interior exchange that links the speaker to the dead and keeps him alive within oneself” (397).
This process applies, I think, to how the dead get written in letters. Letters function across time and, I would argue, death. Donna Landry, in her essay on the letters of Lady Mary
37 Wortley Montagu, defines the letter as a defining form for the travel writing genre since the letter, as a spatial object, is itself a “traveler”: “An epistle documents what has happened to the writer since the last epistle. And so the letter writer is always traveling, explicitly through time, and either explicitly or implicitly across space. The eyewitness account as authenticating gesture belongs equally to the genres of letter writing and travel writing” (51). Letters bridge this absence and allow a writer to travel from one world, the here and now, to the world of the recipient, the there and later. But the location of the writer, like the location of the survivor, is still unlocatable since letters usually contain temporary material, content that can easily change from the moment it is written to the moment it is received. This is the condition of mourning and of dying, the world where the dead have not yet become “other” and the world that has kept moving despite the
“end” of one’s world.
Writing from New Zealand, Charlotte Brontë’s friend Mary Taylor once described her own “queer feeling of living as I do in 2 places at once” (2: 88-89, June to 24 July 1848). For Mary, those two places included the world of England and the other “all that I actually see & hear & speak to,” where “separation is as complete between the things in a picture & the things in the room” (2: 88). Mary Taylor’s words could just as easily be used to describe the position of one recently bereaved. Like the picture in a room, a letter captures a moment, and it depicts specific moments in the course of bereavement, which hardly consists of consistent or predictable behaviors. And the very materiality of the letter itself is directly tied to absence in that most material things are “a means to recall persons, relationships and events that are no longer immediately present” (Hallam and Hockey 25). Hallam and Hockey identify memories “as mediators that
38 connect accessible with what threaten to become inaccessible domains,” where death is defined as “loss, departure or journey—displacements that create distance, either spatial or temporal” (25). As memories stand in as mediators, so too do letters, which are also “containers” of memory. Letters as Testimony As a container of memory, the letter could also testify to the good or bad death of the deceased. Actual epistolary testimonies reveal a diverse range of deathbed experiences and bereavement behaviors that rarely conformed to depictions of the “good death.” Like Ariès, Jalland takes as her source material a wide range of letters, and in them, she discovers that families and friends did not idealize death.16 While recognizing the importance of Ariès’s work in establishing a history of death and dying, Jalland takes issue with his sources for suggesting this idealized model, “largely based on the Brontë family which was decimated by tuberculosis” (8).17 The majority of letters on death and dying, including those written by Charlotte Brontë herself, illustrate a wide range of deathbed experiences. Brontë’s letters on her siblings’ deaths do not testify to the beautiful deaths in Aries’s study and fail to support the myth of the Brontë family that romanticizes illness as part of creative genius. However, what readers found in Brontëan deathbed scenes was informed by Gaskell and even Charlotte Brontë herself. In the “Biographical Notice” introducing her sisters’ collected works, Brontë describes their deaths as the ultimate measure of their characters and even uses the way they died to atone for their “rough” writing. For example, she writes of Anne’s death, “[I]t was by leaning on those Christian doctrines
16 In his section “The Letters of American Settlers,” Ariès recognizes the importance of letters providing a “record of death” (447). He identifies the written record as setting a new trend that replaced oral accounts of death and dying due to the separation of families during western expansion which necessitated letter writing across long distances. 17 Ariès writes, “You will recall that the life of the Brontë, like the life of the La Ferronays, was a series of deaths, of losing battles with tuberculosis” (433). 39 which she firmly believed, that she found support through her most painful journey. I witnessed their efficacy in her latest hour and greatest trial, and must bear my testimony to the calm triumph with which they brought her through” (“Biographical” 57). This “testimony” conforms to all the requirements of the good death. Brontë’s letters, however, told another story, one hardly depicting a beautiful, or even consistent deathbed narrative. Her letters immediately after Anne’s death may describe this “calm triumph,” but she later wrote, “[T]here are moments when I know not whither to turn or what to do, so sharp, so dark and distressing are these remembrances, so afflicted I am that beings so loved should have to pass out of Time and Eternity—by a track so rough and painful” (2: 373). Charlotte wrote these words in order to console a friend upon the death of her mother; however, she did so by telling her friend that no real consolation existed for the living even if another’s earthly suffering was ended. The testimonial quality of letters, writings ideal for circulating deathbed accounts, is not only about death but also about giving another person, the correspondent, a glimpse into experience of mourning. Brontë, by example, can show her friend through her own experience that consolation is not always possible. Testimonials to the good life and death of the deceased were a familiar feature in personal letters and were even more widely distributed in newspapers and periodicals throughout the nineteenth century. In a letter response written to Thomas Clifford Allbutt
on 20 February 1879, shortly after her husband George Henry Lewes’ death, George Eliot requests in writing, not a eulogistic, but a plain statement of your observation and experience in relation to the effect of my husband’s work, to be printed in quotation, but not (unless you wished it) with your name, simply as testimony of an experienced physician whose judgment is not simply that of a professional
40 man, but of a scientific experimenter. I want, if I can, to write a ‘characteristik’ of my loved one—no memoir, but a brief sketch of his mental and moral qualities, and his way of looking at the work he tried to do. (505) Struck by the kindness of his sympathy letter, which praised her husband’s scientific mind and held him up as an inspiration to students of science, Eliot desired some testimony of this aspect of her husband’s character to be distributed to a wider readership. Note that Eliot has a difficult time defining the piece of writing; she desired no eulogy but a plain statement, no memoir but a brief sketch. Too bloated or formal a writing about her husband would be distasteful; she wanted, instead, a humble “characteristik” of the man she loved. Ultimately, Eliot’s request reflects her need to have what she read in a sympathy letter to be distributed among a wider reading public while still maintaining the letter’s intimate tone. This letter forms part of the postmortem assessment of Lewes’ life. Even though this letter is not about the death of Lewes but about a specific part of his life as a teacher and a scientist, the writer can act as witness who can testify to this aspect of the deceased’s legacy. Leaving a description of how Lewes inspired students gives Eliot a material reminder of the person she lost. The Materiality of Letters
Indeed, the key to all this postmortem assessment is a writer’s literary remains. For literary remains to be read, print technology in the nineteenth century made available a more durable memorial through publishing literary remains and making them available to a larger audience than originally intended.18 When a letter outlives its initial purpose of communication, it can be considered a commemorative or relic object. In the Barrett sonnet, it is a fetish. Ultimately letters create a physical presence where there once was an
18 Hallam and Hockey also acknowledge the diversity of materials through which to study death are all products of different, historically emergent technologies including writing, print and photography, which provide diverse means of recording, storing and retrieving experiences of death. 41 absence, and we make mourning readable by giving it a physical manifestation through letters. Writing about grief in letters allows the bereaved to displace what has been lost and then internalize it. While painful, writing about the deceased allows the writer to keep the deceased “present,” when objects bridging the awful disparity of past and present, of here and there, find common ground. Our physical connection to objects, the fact that they can come into contact with the body, makes an object’s attachment to one once living possible. The survival of these objects allows mourners to internalize their losses and to preserve memories, which become material when mourners write letters or engage in other acts of memorial making. Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey find that the language of memory often works through metaphors of storage; we possess memories and we lose them. Institutions and collectors preserve all the material originals while at least the words are preserved in print. The archive and the publication of a collection of letters work to extend the survival of an object. Because paper is not durable and because letters break down and fall apart from reading and rereading, folding and refolding, they are protected in reading rooms and handled carefully. The material look of a letter is preserved as a digital image or published in facsimile form. For example, Jane Austen’s Manuscript Letters in Facsimile (1990), edited by Jo Modert, preserves the look of Austen’s letters. A letter, when published, extends its “capacity to endure time and to operate across time by encoding aspects of the past or future in the present moment” (Hallam and Hockey 48); in so doing, a letter can be retrieved by a wide range of readers without their seeing the actual material object. The survival of the object depends not only on the preservation of the original but also on technology’s ability to reproduce that object and thereby enable others to witness its continued survival.
42 While the dead can be read in the letters they have written, writing for the bereaved has its own function. By placing one’s grief into a material object, like the letter, which is enclosed by an envelope the way a casket encloses a body, a mourner no longer bears the sole responsibility for carrying around the dead. Once grief is given an object status, the burden becomes more manageable without mourners feeling like they have abandoned or forgotten the dead. Hallam and Hockey connect textual preservation
to memory and grief and see a diversity of materials and audiences for these objects.19 Throughout the nineteenth century, the circulation of deathbed testimonies worked to preserve lives in texts (Hallam and Hockey 162). Just as letters are inscribed, so are many other death texts such as plaques and statues, obituaries and wills. One significant, albeit obvious, memorial inscription is on a grave marker, which usually bears the deceased name, birth and death dates, as well as labels indicating their relationships to others—for example, “Loving Mother” or “Devoted Son.” Giving the deceased a relationship to those here on earth is important for the bereaved; it solidifies a relationship that can no longer exist and can endure through memorial even after all connections are gone. I argue that much of this work to preserve memories through objects of memorialization is driven by the desire to create something durable when people cannot “endure.” We create something concrete not only to shift the burden of mourning but also to keep mourning in a way that does not interfere with the work of life. In recounting deathbed scenes, the writer is allowed to “lose” all over again, and while the writer is alive in the world with other people, the losses never stop. Anyone who writes about loss, who “works at the work of mourning,” realizes that “mourning is interminable. Inconsolable. Irreconciliable” (Derrida 143). Derrida argues that people work at
19As Hallam and Hockey write, “the life of the inscribed word might overlap with, but may also extend beyond the physical body; materialized words become potent as markers that preserve identity after death; the materials and spaces of writing are as diverse in form as they are in function, articulating gestures of intimacy as well as public statements” (157-8). 43 mourning right up until their own deaths, that mourning is both an “object” and “resource”; “ the theme of work thus becoming their very force, and their term, a principle” (Derrida 143). By writing grief onto a material object, the responsibility of the living to the dead becomes less burdensome. Hallam and Hockey argue that “materialized memorial writing” requires many genres and forms in its “pursuit of elusive permanence” (168). Yet, they concede, “[W]riting or the construction of a text that outlives the dying, was recognized as a precarious process in that all aspects of the material world were open to decay” (168). Whatever the material—they mention stone, thread, and fabric—these mementos “come to be valued in terms of their varying degrees of durability” (Hallam and Hockey 168), possibly long after the creators of the memorial text have passed. The test is in time. All of the writers in this study were concerned with getting their grief down on paper, but they were also anxious about the materials they left behind. Hallam and Hockey acknowledge the function of materiality to confront the fluctuating power of grief and that even in the case of memorial objects, nothing is guaranteed to be permanent or even successful in promoting memory. These objects run the risk of being perceived as trivial; in the case of letters, references to events and persons long past make the deceased even more obscure and difficult to memorialize. Hallam and Hockey mention the fluctuating power of words within memories associated with death; so, too, do memories fluctuate – they, like the feelings associated with bereavement, were rarely consistent or predictable. In order to shape the image of one’s posthumous existence, the dying person had to author those memories and become a collaborator in the writing of her death. Letters and Collaboration
For obvious practical reasons, authoring one’s own death requires a coauthor. Even the preservation or destruction of literary remains after the writer’s death shows
44 how collaborative death writing is. Tony Walter’s work on “durable biography” suggests that this way of managing grief is not only social but also collaborative. Catharine Exley builds on Walter’s work, describing “[w]hat remains after death” as not “an empty page upon which survivors write the deceased’s ‘last chapters’”; the dying, she argues, are “instrumental in shaping their own after-death identities, and therefore should be regarded as ‘co-authors’ in the process of writing their last chapters” (249). I extend Exley’s argument by showing how in letters on death and dying, correspondents work to shape their after-death identities by instructing those will be left behind in how to write those final chapters. While autothanatography is a “single-subject” text, one that focuses on death and dying, that does not mean that dying always occurs in isolation. Death writing necessitates an audience; in fact, the writer depends on the writing to survive her and be read. I further argue that this writing is necessarily collaborative, particularly when it occurs through letters. While one can write about illness leading up to death or even just the fact of having to eventually confront it, there is the knowledge that others will have to manage the postmortem details and conclude the narrative of death when one cannot. Alice James wrote from England to her family in America, and she died in England where she could shape and control her own deathbed experience without interference from her family. When James died, her companion, Katharine Loring, who had been writing Alice’s letters through dictation, wrote James’s family and even filled in the final entry in Alice’s diary. In cases of terminal illness like James, the dying person herself is a co-author in that she can influence how grief gets written by how she manages the process of dying. For example, Mrs. Wordsworth wrote to Sara Coleridge of her brother Hartley’s death. Hartley died in such a way that he co-authored that narrative with Mrs. Wordsworth in order to comfort his bereaved sister. Mrs. Wordsworth’s letter provided
45 proof that Hartley died well, and this letter was distributed to friends and family along with other remembrances. While it is ultimately impossible to narrate one’s own death, a writer can account for the events leading up it and even imagine the moment of death. Even for the mourner or sickroom spectator, writing about the decline of another is ultimately a work about his or her own demise. In The Work of Mourning, Jacques Derrida writes: “One cannot hold a discourse on the work of mourning without taking part in it, without announcing or partaking in [se faire part de] death, and first of all in one’s own death. …All work in general works at mourning. In and of itself” (143). Writing about another’s death means writing about one’s own death, with “each death” signifying the end of the world, and even then, “the first death gets repeated…. the whole world is lost, and yet with each we are called to reckon our losses” (Derrida 15). Each death tells us what it means for us to survive, the worst part being that once we lose a person, “we can no longer lose them; they who were once so distant become all too close, too close because now only within us” (Derrida 27). The only way to manage one’s losses is to internalize them, but in order for both self and memory to take on the burden of surviving, the bereaved have to find something external, something material to represent that loss. In the cases of the three women in this study, each in some way participated in acts of self-memorial through their letters. Sara Coleridge edited her father’s works and wrote essays and introductions for her father’s posthumously published collections. Charlotte Brontë wrote the “Biographical Notice” for her sisters in a work that included a heavily edited collection of her sisters’ poems, and it is likely that she destroyed some of Emily and Anne’s letters and poems as well. Furthermore, Alice James left the publication of her journal in the care of her companion Katherine Loring, who rarely left James’s bedside during her long invalidism and final illness. Sara Coleridge and Alice
46 James have always been considered minor literary figures, and Charlotte Brontë was not always considered a major one. I give great attention to the particularly “minor” figures who played major roles in these women’s lives. A discussion of the collaborative quality of all of my subjects’ epistolary death writings cannot exclude the women who finished their stories or made sure those stories as well as the evidence were preserved. Sara Coleridge’s daughter Edith Coleridge ensured that her mother’s epistolary memoir and letters were published. She wrote the introduction to the edition of her mother’s letters and was the inspiration for her mother writing an epistolary memoir near the end of her life in the first place. Charlotte Brontë’s letters were put to use immediately after her death in her friend Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Many of her friends contributed remembrances and letters to Gaskell’s narrative. Even her dead friend Mary Taylor, who destroyed her friend’s letters, contributed to her Brontë’s image if only by adding to the mystery surrounding her life. Although all three women’s letters contribute to understanding the lives and works that came out of three major literary circles, a significant amount of time passed before any of their letters were published as collections. The publication of Charlotte Brontë’s letters were tied up in an ugly battle between her husband and her friend Ellen Nussey over a broken promise to burn the writer’s letters. The brother who inherited both
Sara Coleridge’s literary responsibilities as well as her papers neglected his sister’s work and concentrated entirely on their father. Alice James’s diary was privately printed until the 1930s and her letters were not published until 1980. James’s letters, diary, and biography all appeared around the same time with all three texts demonstrating the importance for feminists in recovering works from unknown writers who would have been unknown if not for these even lesser known collaborators. Without the work of their
47 literary caretakers, Alice James and Sara Coleridge would have likely remained even more obscure and the mythology surrounding the Brontë family would stand unchallenged.
LITERARY REMAINS
Coleridge, Brontë, and James all exemplify how writers can of turn their experiences of grief into creative acts that allow them some authorial control over their after-death identities. Even as Virginia Woolf wrote critically of the Victorian women writers of her mother’s generation, she shared the same desire to write her life and death, whether through letters or through the free-form, highly self-conscious memoirs she struggled to complete throughout her life. The middle three chapters of this dissertation focus on Coleridge, Brontë, and James, respectively. Through these three case studies, I examine how women’s letters on death were creative acts that not only served as ways to manage bereavement but also had some influence in the shaping of their posthumous reputations. My final chapter takes up Woolf’s readings of each of these author’s letters in order to demonstrate how her Modernist interpretation of them reflects anxieties related to changes in bereavement and death brought about by war and advances in communication technology. In “’Tabernacle of the flesh’: Sara Coleridge's Epistolary Death Work,” I argue
that the letters in her published collection show how Sara Coleridge used correspondence to document the deaths of those around her as well as to provide a place to plan her own death. Edited by her daughter, Edith Coleridge, The Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge is a work of grief and memory that complicates the image of Coleridge presented in the collection by how Edith frames the letters. Sara Coleridge used letters as a performative space to “rehearse” her death. She gave deathbed testimonies (and critiques) of those around her and related those narratives to how she wanted to die. Her 48 epistolary memoir, written while she was dying to her daughter Edith, helps shape her posthumous image just as she had tried to author the lives and deaths of those around her, a didactic exercise that would help her die. Charlotte Brontë, on the other hand, did not write so much about her death as she did about living among the dead. Brontë’s letters allow her to survive her bereavement and make sense of a world without those closest to her. The letters, I argue in "’Labour is the only radical cure for rooted sorrow’": Writing and Rewriting Grief in Charlotte Bronte's Letters,” offer her a better place to memorialize her siblings than the “Biographical Notice,” which she authored as a preface to her sisters’ literary remains and something she considered a failure. Charlotte Brontë, as a notoriously morbid figure, fought hard for her survival. Unlike Sara Coleridge and Alice James, she focused more on finding a life for herself beyond the deaths of her siblings instead of finding the death that would make the greatest impression. Despite this difference, Brontë’s letters are important in how they document the never-ending writing and rewriting of grief. In her letters, she struggles to make sense of herself, her home, and her writing life without her sisters in it. Her determination to survive her grief despite her isolation comes out in her letters as a sort of distress call for the living to respond and keep her connected to life. While Brontë and Coleridge published during their lifetimes, Alice James did not. She did, however, leave behind a diary that was privately published after her death. Ruth
Bernard Yeazell, editor of the appropriately titled The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981), shows how James made dying her profession. In “Alice Jame's ‘Ghost Microbes’: Collaborative Death Writing in James's Diary and Letters,” I show how James knowingly writes her letters and journal in a way that testifies to the “success” of her death. However, because she was an American and from a later generation near the end of the Victorian period, her writing of death differs radically from that of Coleridge and Brontë,
49 and at times James’s writings offer a wry critique of the Victorian ideal of the good death. The story of Alice James’s letters and diary, “her letter to the world,” further illustrates the truly collaborative quality of writings on death. Her companion Katharine Loring’s dictations and management of Alice’s care and posthumous writings take on a mediumistic quality that attests to Alice’s desire to live beyond her body. Although American, Alice James is included in my study because her family was a truly transatlantic one that split its time between Europe and the states. In fact, Alice James spent the last ten years of her life England where she wanted to die away from her family. That does not mean that James’s writings on death were not shaped by her nationality. The Civil War forced Americans to confront and adapt their own Victorian notions on death to the violence of the battlefield. The effects of war on James’s epistolary writings on death connect her to Woolf, who also experienced the great losses that come with war. My epilogue, ‘[T]o tell the truth about the dead’: The Life and Death of Letters”, examines the role of nostalgia in Virginia Woolf’s nonfiction works regarding letter writing in relation to new technology. Woolf’s history of reading letter collections as documented in her own letters and journals as well as in her essays and reviews of letter collections in the Common Readers and The Death of the Moth and Other Essays reveals her anxieties that the most private thoughts of writers would become the sole content of their letters and letter collections. Woolf’s forecasts for the future death of letter-writing reflect her growing uneasiness with a public dialogue on death and dying during a lifetime that included great personal losses as well as two world wars. Woolf’s fears for the fate of letters tie directly to her own anxieties about memorial and about how the lives of others will be written with technology creating an even greater amount of source material for biographers. Woolf wondered about technology’s impact on biography and life writing. She recognized her own age as an age “when a thousand cameras are
50 pointed, by newspapers, letters, and diaries, at every character from every angle, [the biographer] must prepare to admit contradictory versions of the same face. Biography will enlarge its scope by hanging up looking glasses at odd corners” (“The Art of Biography” 195). Similarly, emerging technologies such as the telegraph and the telephone would enlarge the scope of letters. Beyond acting as a mediator, as she does for me at the beginning of this chapter, between contemporary critical scholarship on letters and the nineteenth-century practice of epistolarity, Woolf mediates for me between the writing of death and dying in the past and its representation by way of new technologies of communication. In looking at how Woolf confronted new media in her own lifetime, we also need to examine how we use technology and communication to create new forms of memorialization, while we wonder what to do with obsolete ones. In “The Humane Art” (1940), Woolf describes this course of events where old technologies of communication are replaced by new ones: “News and gossip, the sticks and straws out of which the old letter writer made his nest, have been snatched away. The wireless and the telephone have intervened. The letter writer has nothing now to build with except what is most private; and how monotonous after a page or two the intensity of the very private becomes!” (“The Humane Art,” The Death 60) Woolf worries that “[i]nstead of letters posterity will have confessions, diaries, notebooks, like M. Gide’s—hybrid books in which the writer talks in the dark to himself about himself for a generation yet to be born” (“The Humane Art” 61). This awareness of talking to “a generation yet to be born” was happening long before Woolf imagined it. However, biography, I maintain, started becoming such a hybrid form in the nineteenth century, with the life and letters genre itself allowing contradictions in the subjects it aimed to memorialize.
51 Even as she cites letter collections as one of her favorite genres in which to read, Woolf forecasts the death of publically-minded letters, while suggesting that the personal letter could adapt. Woolf’s argument for a new mode of letter writing through new technologies includes her prediction that this new art will be an ephemeral one. Like today’s corporate e-mails, letters will have to be destroyed: “It only cost three halfpence to send. Therefore you could afford to be intimate, irreticient, indiscreet in the extreme” (“A Letter,” The Death 209). In “Letter to a Young Poet,” Woolf claims that the letter she received from the young poet of the title is a “true letter-- one that can neither be read aloud now, nor printed in time to come;” therefore, it “will have to be burnt” (209). Woolf offers Walpole and Madame de Sévigné as compensation to posterity since “[t]he great age of letter-writing, which is, of course, the present, will leave no letter behind it” (209). Of course, letters were kept and letter collections of writers were published long after Woolf’s death. But Woolf’s writings on letters reveal how anxious she was about how people would communicate in the future, a practice she viewed as directly connected to how people were remembered and memorialized. Even as Woolf expressed anxieties about these new technologies, she wondered if technology would provide a better way to remember. She wondered if extraordinarily powerful memories, if “things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence?” (67) Woolf’s desire to locate
memory in a place outside of her mind indicates how desperately she wanted her memories to outlive her. She imagines a radio-like technology that would allow one to recall memories and the past: …will it not be possible in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it—the past—as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall
52 fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start. (“Sketch” 67) Just as Freud’s idea of mourning as a kind of “hyperrembering” worked to keep the dead in one’s life by keeping memories of the dead on constant recall, Woolf describes, mostly in terms of convenience, the benefits of being able to recall memories through a cable connected to a past scene whose existence is fueled by the intensity of its emotions. Another benefit to this device would be choosing to remember, or choosing the moment to plug the cord into the wall in order to remember. Maybe not in the way Woolf imagined, our own technological age has produced devices that can record our memories for us. Images of the past can be pulled up on a screen without relying on objects, such as letters, photographs, videotapes or DVDs, things subject to decay or vulnerable to destruction. The residue of the past has become seemingly invulnerable. Even with all these advances, we still stand outside ourselves as spectators and these images are static while our memories are ever-changing. Like many readers, Woolf perhaps read letters and biographies as a way to plug into the past, to learn how those kept alive by posterity lived and died both in their own words and the words of others. The fact that Coleridge, Brontë, and James all wrote about death and mourning in letters hardly makes them unique, and many unknown women whose life and death writings were never published wrote about the same topics and probably with comparable eloquence and a great deal less self-awareness. In looking at my subjects’ epistolary writings on death, I hope I have developed an approach for considering how letters and other life writings can facilitate an understanding of bereavement and death. We can learn from these writings and see a resemblance in
53 twenty-first century writings on dying and bereavement. Now more than ever, one can document one’s own death and send it as a letter to the world. Just as the nineteenth century saw an explosion in the publication of literary remains in the form of Life and Letters, we live in an age of the memoir. Personal weblogs, e-mails, and websites all make it possible to share with a large number of people one’s life and death, joy and sorrow. These writing all share qualities of personal correspondence. They operate on a system of exchange between readers and writers in order to keep the dialogue of memory alive. In opening up virtual spaces for autothanatography, writing on death has become even more collaborative. Just as everyone can be a contributor, everyone can be a mourner as well. Complete strangers can leave condolences to fallen soldiers on message boards. A family’s grief can belong to anyone who reads about it. Though letter-writing, as Virginia Woolf predicted, has all but died, we have found new ways to write about death and dying in the spaces opened up by virtual communication. Hence it is that in my concluding epilogue I return to Woolf’s wireless of memory and weigh how it manifests itself in our own era’s “wireless of memorial.”
54 Chapter 2: “Tabernacle of the flesh”: Sara Coleridge’s Epistolary Death Work
When Sara Coleridge, the daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and undertaker of his literary remains, died in 1852, Henry Reed, best known for editing Wordsworth and promoting his works in America, wrote a eulogy proposing immediate biographical treatment of her. “It is to be hoped," Reed declares in this eulogy, "that, in due season, a suitable biographical tribute will be rendered to the memory of this eminent lady; and we venture to add the hope that it will be the work of that sole surviving brother who found fit fraternal duty in the delicate task of telling … the story of the life of Hartley
Coleridge” (2).1 With Coleridge's letters published, Reed argues, “her genius and learning, and the strength and gentleness of her nature, will be seen in very pleasing form” and even goes so far to make the large claim, “It is no exaggeration to say that the literature of familiar letter-writing has produced nothing which can compare with them”
(15).2 Even though the letters are “highly intellectual and even learned compositions,” “they are genuine letters withal—genuine specimens of what a woman excels in” (15). For Reed, a letter collection would let readers know Coleridge as a gentle intellect. However, that “sole-surviving brother,” Derwent, did not write Coleridge’s biography or publish a collection of her letters. Shortly before she died in 1852, Sara Coleridge attempted to tell her own story, in an epistolary autobiography addressed to her
1 “The Daughter of Coleridge” first appeared in The Literary World on August 21, 1852. Henry Reed died in 1854. Sara Coleridge biographer Earl Leslie Griggs writes dramatically of Reed’s death, “Reed never had the privilege of meeting Sara Coleridge but in 1854, he visited England. He perished, as someone reported, ‘in the Arctic on his return from a pilgrimage to the graves of Sara Coleridge and William Wordsworth” (186). 2 "Coleridge" in this chapter refers to Sara Coleridge; persons referred to by their first names are for the most part members of the Coleridge family, thereby distinguished from each other and from Coleridge herself. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is referred to at times by his familiar monogram "STC." 55 daughter Edith, but that autobiography ends after a brief description of childhood—in mid sentence, with only a string of dots trailing a thought she could not complete. After Reed’s eulogy “The Daughter of Coleridge,” over twenty years passed before a biographical treatment appeared in print: Edith completed the job that her mother had started and that Reed had urged by publishing The Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge (1873). In her preface to The Memoir and Letters, Edith compares portraiture to letter- writing. She opens with some lines from her mother’s epic poem Phantasmion: “Poor is the portrait that one look portrays / It mocks the face on which we loved to gaze” (ML ix). She follows her mother’s lines by comparing the purposes of pictorial art to the portrait-making qualities of letter-writing: “And if this be true of such external resemblances as pictorial art is employed to produce, it is equally true of that unconscious self-portraiture, that revelation of the inner mind, which is contained, in a greater or less degree, in any collection of published letters” (ML ix). The quality that sets letter-writing apart from painting, for Edith, is “unconscious self-portraiture,” a “revelation of the inner mind.” As Edith recognizes her mother’s purpose in letters—to reveal an inner life—she does not dwell on the point of her mother’s words: that a portrait reveals only “one look,” one moment in time. It might seem that Edith’s goal in publishing her mother’s letters was to create a portrait without inconsistencies or contradictions, one unchanging and unnatural in its pose. Still, if a letter is a reflection of internal life, then a collection of letters would naturally reveal inconsistencies in character and contradictions in thought. And in fact, Edith’s Memoir and Letters included writings that reflected multiple portraits of inner life, which is how Coleridge believed letters should be written in the first place. Sara Coleridge held that letter writers should not merely communicate news, but present on paper reflections of their minds. It is for friendship and not “for the sake of
56 communicating news, that letter-writing is to be advocated” (30 Aug. 1838; ML 158-9). Coleridge recognized the function of letters in providing a presence where one is absent. In one letter, she wonders why people use letters to communicate news only, “Why do these people waste time in visiting their friends of an evening, or calling on them of a morning? Why do they not pickle and preserve, stitch and house-keep all day long, since those and such-like are the only earthly things needful?” (ML 159). Coleridge questions why women talk only about their domestic duties instead of about what is going on in their minds. The true purpose of correspondence for those “who have any seriousness of character” is “to put the better part of their mind upon paper; and letter-writing is one of the many calls which life affords to put our minds in order, the salutary effect of which is obvious” (ML 159). One type of letter that Coleridge excelled in writing, the sympathy letter, has its own salutary function by providing a means to communicate with the bereaved without violating the space that mourning requires. A letter, whether received or sent, met a desire for both company and isolation during bereavement. Coleridge found comfort in how letters could comment on the deceased’s character or death simply by filling in where there was an absence left by the dead. Her mourning letters illustrate her need to facilitate such a ministry of presence by communicating on subjects other than “earthly things,” subjects that could put her mind in order when her world was disordered by death. These letters, more than any of the others, illustrate in turn how Coleridge wanted to be written of, since they reveal an inner life removed from pickling, preserving, and stitching. The letters where Coleridge recounts the deaths of family and friends constitute less individual, partial portraits of Coleridge’s inner life than a composite portrait of how she herself wanted to be understood after her own demise. As discussed in Chapter 1, grief theorist Tony Walter offers a concept of durable biography as a genre in which a writer tells a story about death in order to better
57 understand herself and others in reference to a world that no longer has the deceased in it. In her letters written shortly after her husband’s death, Coleridge gestures towards this need to resort to biography in order to understand her world: “It is to feel, not merely that he is taken away from me, but that, as appears, though it is but appearance, he is not— that the sun rises in the morning, and he does not see it” (13 Feb. 1843; ML 193). Coleridge would refer to her husband and his death periodically in her letters in an effort to comprehend the deaths of those around her, and also her own loss. Coleridge’s durable biography thus comes in the form of letters, specifically of the ones in which she recounts deathbed scenes, expresses grief, or remembers the dead. More broadly, as death created work for Coleridge, death became her life’s work, dedicated as she was to managing her father’s literary remains after her husband’s death as well as to taking responsibility for her brother Hartley’s work after he died. Edith recognized this side of her mother, and in including so many letters on death in her collection, she offers Coleridge's• literary death mask, composed of how she writes about death and how she wants to die. This collection includes the letters that testify to the good deaths of the deceased• as well as to the desire for the good death in the living. While many contemporary readers would find Coleridge’s focus on the deaths of friends and family disturbing and morbid, Coleridge’s correspondents would likely read them as a culturally accepted form of bereavement behavior. As outlined in the introduction, the importance of conversation in placing the dead in everyday life extends to the significance of letters as source material for communicating these biographies. Women, most often, are keepers of memory, and their efforts to maintain memory through letters and conversation, commonplace books, and other writings are commemorative acts where the bereaved integrate the dead into their lives through articulating those memories (7). As long as stories are told about the deceased, the
58 memory of that person survives. For Coleridge, the most important stories focused on the act of dying, not on the life before a terminal illness or sudden death. The Coleridge family had added motivation to construct these biographies of the dead: they needed to recover Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reputation, a task aided by a perspective that foregrounded not his scandalous youth but his relatively dignified last years. Continuing that project of constructing a family history through death writing, both STC's daughter and granddaughter author their own durable biographies in The Memoir and Letters. Edith writes a memorial to her mother through her introduction, the testimonies of others, and her arrangement of her mother’s letters. She kept her mother’s memory alive by making her letters, and therefore her mother, available to an audience beyond the small circle of friends and family who originally received them. For both Edith and Coleridge, the dead played a vital role in how they wrote their lives. Tony Walter writes that the deceased can function “as a role model, as giving guidance in specific situations, as clarifying values of the survivor, and as a valued part of the survivor’s biography” (11). In this way, the relationship between the dead and the living resembles that of a parent and child. Edith created a biography for her mother that lived beyond her. Although it contains neither letters to Edith from her mother nor any information about herself, the Memoir and Letters ultimately becomes Edith's own biography as well, however absent she is from it. And in this her strategy resembles the method her mother had used to edit and arrange Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Sara Coleridge chose the dead as her role models. Her letters document the deaths of those around her, her struggle to understand a world without those closest to her in it, and her preparations for death. In including these letters on death in the collection, Edith constructs a deathbed text for her mother.
59 In her letters and journals, Coleridge expresses both a readiness to die and join friends and family and a reluctance to serve those who remain. The more people she lost the greater her preparations for death. Her public preparations concerned both her father’s “literary remains” and her condolence letters. Meanwhile, many of the ideas included in these documents were drafted in private journals where she lists, one by one, deaths in the Coleridge-Wordsworth-Southey Circle. Ultimately, Coleridge attempts to place and accommodate her grief in her mourning writings by rewriting and re-representing the deaths of those close to her. Through writing about her own illness and death in letters, Coleridge ultimately shaped how others would read and testify to her death. Likewise, in The Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge Edith may appeal to her readers to see her mother through lenses offered by different types of life writing, but she presents the work as a whole as a memorial, a product of grief. The first part of this chapter gives a brief publication history of the Memoir and Letters as a way to set up the image Edith portrays in the book and how it clashes with popular images of Sara as Romantic muse. We can better understand how Edith shaped her mother’s collection, I then argue, if we look to how her mother handled her father’s literary remains. I also stress how Sara Coleridge’s letters on illness and death contribute to the many portraits that Edith presents in the letters: portraits of others, of Sara, and of herself. I argue that Edith uses letters as a covert form of biography that complicates the image of Coleridge that appears in the preface, the heavily edited epistolary autobiography, and the letters of testimony from others that attempt to finish Coleridge’s autobiographical fragment. The middle two sections of this chapter concentrate entirely on Coleridge’s letters on the deaths of others and on her own death. Coleridge prized the ability of letters to provide testimony of the good death. When she herself is dying, Coleridge’s letters on illness and death reflect what she learned from her study of others’
60 deathbeds and how grief prepares her for death. These epistolary writings on death allowed Coleridge a social death in which she could act as a collaborator in how her death is written through how she writes about others and her own fantasies of death. After analyzing these writings, the chapter concludes with a discussion of how Edith Coleridge, her mother’s biographer, caretaker, and undertaker, attempted to tell her mother’s story, especially the story of her death, in prose that did not appear in the Memoir and Letters but that did survive elsewhere.
“A PLAIN FIGURE OF MERE PROSE”
In the Memoir and Letters, Edith attempts to tell her mother’s story through numerous genres: she writes a brief introduction, includes her mother’s autobiographical fragment, and assembles testimonies written by Coleridge’s friends to fill in where the
autobiography leaves off.3 After a little over a hundred pages of both autobiographical and biographical material, the letters begin. In a sense, Coleridge gets the opportunity to tell her story, but as is typical of letter collections, “[a] book composed of epistolary abstracts can never be a wholly satisfactory one, because its contents are not only relative and fragmentary, but unauthorized and unrevised” (ML x). Instead of “a life in letters,” Edith Coleridge begins the letters in 1833 after Coleridge’s marriage to Henry Nelson Coleridge and after the birth of their son, Herbert. However, Coleridge’s literary career had begun long before that. She was more than her father’s editor. By her early twenties she had two published translations: Martin Dobrizhoffer's An Account of the Abiphones (1822) and The right joyous and pleasant history of the facts, tests, and prowesses of the Chevalier Bayard (1825). Among her literary works, she produced the children’s volume of poetry, Pretty Lessons in Verse for Small Children (1834) and the fairy tale,
3 Unless otherwise indicated, the letters come from The Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge (1873), which I reference as ML. 61 Phantasmion (1837). And in the 1830s, she and her husband published Coleridge’s Table Talk and Literary Remains. She devoted the 1840s up until her death in 1852 to editing her father’s work, a task she had to undertake alone after her husband died in 1843. She also dedicated the last ten years of her life to correspondence, political and religious
epistolary essays, poetry, and journaling.4 In Edith’s efforts to memorialize her mother and to create a consistent image of her, she uses multiple forms of life writing. She publishes an edited version of her mother’s autobiographical fragment, an epistolary memoir addressed to her near the end of Coleridge’s life, and supplementary testimonies from men who knew her mother. Edith wants to give her readers the image of Coleridge as a woman of intelligence and education, more than as simply a muse for Romantic poets and painters with all the attractive and feminine qualities such a role implies. This was necessary because what nineteenth-century readers knew of Coleridge’s life before marriage came from William Wordsworth’s “The Triad,” a poem written in 1828, which features three children of Romanticism presented in such a light: Sara Coleridge, Edith Southey, and Dora Wordsworth. Contributing to the ethereal image Wordsworth created, William Collins
painted Coleridge as the representation of Wordsworth’s own “Highland Girl” (1818).5 However, Edith must have been aware that the Sara Coleridge in the letters was not the Sara Coleridge readers knew. By including excerpts from Wordsworth’s “The Triad” and
4 Most biographical information comes from the most recent biography of Sara Coleridge written by Bradford Mudge, Sara Coleridge: A Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays (1989). Mudge finds fault with the earlier biographical treatments by Virginia Woolf and Earl Leslie Griggs that “employ a system of valuation…the presupposes the necessity of public performance, of ‘great works’ produced by artistic or intellectual ‘genius’. That system cannot accommodate the fragmentary and miscellaneous remains of Sara Coleridge without immediately pronouncing them a failure” (6). I discuss more fully Woolf’s literary valuations of Coleridge in the final chapter. 5 Dennis Low describes how Coleridge “became known as the ‘Flower of the Lakes,’ the ‘Sylph of Ullswater’ and the ‘Beauty of Buttermere’” (105). He discusses her image as a Highland Beauty and poetic muse in relation to her struggle to understand the relationship between beauty and intellect; Coleridge wrote of this relationship in her essay “On the Disadvantages Resulting from the Possession of Beauty.” 62 letters from acquaintances, Edith outlines her strategy to depict her mother as both feminine and intellectual: In order to combine the scattered notices of the letters, and put readers at once in possession of the main facts; and still more, in order to provide some partial substitute for that chapter of her youth which would otherwise remain a blank, it has seemed desirable to preface the correspondence by a slight biographical sketch. In doing this, I shall gratefully avail myself of the valuable reminiscences most kindly imparted to me by friends, both of earlier and later date, as well as of an interesting memoir of my mother which appeared shortly after her death in an American journal. (ML 50) Edith uses the memories of Sir Henry Taylor, William Collins, Henry Reed, and Aubrey De Vere to construct the image of a feminine intellectual who matches the figure in “The Triad,” but this strategy cannot compete with the powerful image created by her letters. Ultimately, Coleridge’s letters, documents of multiple and revisionary “unconscious self- portraiture,” clash with the fixed image Wordsworth creates. This clash of images reflects Coleridge’s lifelong struggle to reconcile her intellect, especially as it ordered her mind and internal life, with the expectations her beauty created in others. In her death letters, Coleridge found fault with her "Highland girl" image. In a letter to Henry Reed, she offers a reluctant, negative assessment of Wordsworth’s
depiction of her: “I do confess that I have never been able to rank ‘The Triad’ among Mr. Wordsworth’s immortal works of genius. It is just what he came into the poetical world to condemn, and both by practice and theory to supplant. It is, to my mind, artificial and
unreal” (19 May 1851, ML 494).6 Yet readers and reviewers of Edith’s collection took
6 Reed faults Coleridge for not reading “The Triad” correctly. He described the poem as “exquisite poetic painting—the imaginative portraiture of the finest feminine beauty, wherein are visible, deep meditativeness and tenderness of feeling” (Reed 5). The portrait Wordsworth created of Sara Coleridge would not fit with the Sara Coleridge “packaged” in the 1873 letter collection. 63 Wordsworth’s image a little too literally and could not acknowledge that the Highland girl grew up. They thought Coleridge should be the ethereal girl in Wordsworth’s poem, and they were disappointed by how intellectual she appeared in her letters. Critics of the Memoir and Letters found it to be too one-sided of a portrait. They wanted more of the wife and mother and less of the editor and intellectual. The review of the Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge in The Nation in 1873 illustrates the tradition of viewing Coleridge as a creature of the imagination. The review claims that the letters strangled all the poetry out of Wordsworth’s Sara: “It were an infelicity that might well awaken a sentimental regret should so lovely a poetic image as this be changed into a plain figure of mere prose” (425). The critic concludes, “The chief impression left by the letters is that Sara Coleridge’s existence was far too intellectualized” (426). Indeed, while the letters do provide personal details from Coleridge’s life, because she does not make the details of day-to-day life the main focus of her letters and because her style is sometimes more expository than epistolary, the
collection is not a typical one. 7 Many of the letters in the collection do read more as essays than as personal correspondence, but perhaps that was the joy Coleridge discovered in letters. The reviewer from The Nation found her letters to demonstrate “an absence of feeling” (426), but he ignores ones in which Coleridge reflects on the deaths and illnesses of those around her and considers her own fragile body. The reviewer fails to recognize that one type of letter appears with great regularity in the collection: the sympathy letter. In this case, the sympathy letter designates those letters written in response to both illness and death. In fact a large number of the letters focus on death, memorial making, death preparation, and sickness and invalidism. The portrait created by
7 Mudge writes that even with Edith’s shaping of readers’ expectations, the letters reveal that correspondence was a lifeline for Sara, a “forum for her ideas, an outlet for her energies….Within the safe place of correspondence, Sara found she was free to indulge secret desires and to exercise her mind as well as her pen” (59). But even as she found this security, her brothers found her letters tiresome. 64 these letters does not reproduce the Highland girl; rather, these letters on death compose a death mask by arranging Coleridge’s epistolary reflections on death. It is quite possible that Edith edited her mother’s letters to prolong her memory of her and to leave something that would remain when Edith died. Coleridge’s letters were published twenty years after her death, a significant amount of time considering how she began memorializing and preparing others’ literary remains immediately after their deaths. While Edith “reproduces” the letters, she cannot “reproduce” her mother as she was. Significantly, Edith characterizes the image of her mother in these letters as “a reproduction.” Indeed, the memoir and the letters are all reproductions. The letters are transcribed, excerpted, and edited; they do not appear in their original form or as facsimiles. What happens to Coleridge’s letters is what happens to all letters that are published: they are recontextualized. The ability to recontextualize letters operates through a technology of memory. Morris Eaves calls reproduction “a mode of memory” and connects reproduction to print technology in which technology can or cannot remember. Technology is useful in preserving the past through artifacts, but it goes beyond simple preservation in the desire to “improve that historical artifact through present technologies” (Ezell and O’Keefe 5). Hallam and Hockey, in their work on the material culture of grief, consider print as scientific memory and devices like the printing press, the photograph, and other types of technology as “sciences of memory” (18). These sciences of memory gave the bereaved a material object that could contain memory when the burden of it became too much. Little is known about how Edith went about collecting her mother’s letters, historical artifacts made widely available through present technologies. She most likely
65 wrote to those with whom Coleridge corresponded frequently and requested letters.8 Gathering letters could not have been easy for Edith. Many letters were destroyed. After all, the Coleridge family learned early on to burn any potentially damaging ones. Edith’s memoir is typical of the nineteenth-century drive to protect one’s privacy and one’s family from humiliation. Carl Grantz conjectures that Edith’s reticence could very well be a family practice; Coleridge (and Edith) knew that the letters of any Coleridge were subject to collection: hence the “prudence and propriety” (2). In A Passionate Sisterhood, Kathleen Jones describes the Coleridge family practice of burning letters, which began with Coleridge’s parents, when Sarah Fricker Coleridge burned her husband’s letters: “Sarah’s fear of exposure extended to a mass burning of family letters—anything that might allude to their marital difficulties and Coleridge’s ‘weaknesses’” (161). However, “[i]t was a futile attempt to protect his reputation,” and it only damaged Sarah Fricker Coleridge’s reputation “since she burned material that would have helped to give a more balanced account of their relationship” (Jones 161). Jones concludes, “She made sure that only Coleridge’s side of the story was told” (161). Many of Edith’s reservations as an editor come from invading her mother’s privacy and the privacy of those in her mother’s circle: To arrest the passing utterances of the hour, and reveal to the world that which was spoken either in the innermost circle of home affection, or in the outer (but
still guarded) circle of social and friendly intercourse, seems almost like a
8 In his bibliographic dissertation of the Sara Coleridge collection at the University of Texas, Carl L. Grantz finds that the collection at the University of Texas “includes a sizable number of autograph transcripts which were used by Edith Coleridge in the compiling of her Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge” (v). These are in her daughter’s hand. Recipients who did not want to part with the originals transcribed many of the letters. The letter itself is an easily reproduced object. In the nineteenth century, many people copied out letters and shared them with others. Sara Coleridge sent copies of letters from others, and she often transcribed parts of letters into her commonplace books. 66 betrayal of confidence, and is a step which can not be taken by survivors without some feelings of hesitation and reluctance. (ML xi) The audience replaces the original reader of the letters and therefore becomes the key to their interpretation and bearers of Coleridge’s memory. Edith establishes a relationship with readers and appeals directly to them: the act of creating Coleridge’s portrait continues with readership and interpretation. It is a collaboration between audience and editor. Collaboration is key to any letter collection, and it often begins with a partnership between the living editor and the dead letter writer. As discussed earlier in relation to durable biography, the dead often operate as role models who guide the living through narratives of grief and memory. For Edith, the editor and daughter, Sara Coleridge, also an editor and daughter, was a role model for how to approach the task of collecting and editing. We can understand Edith’s arrangement of her mother into a literary bluestocking if we first consider how Sara Coleridge approached her father’s life and remains. Coleridge, Alan Vardy argues, uses her father’s literary remains to shape her father’s reputation and make him consistent. We can also apply this to Edith’s shaping of her mother into a gentle and feminine Bluestocking in her preface and supplement to her mother’s autobiography. This process of “shaping” the subject of memorial into someone consistent is easier to do after someone has died. In studying her father’s literary remains,
Coleridge strives to discover “intellectual coherence over the entire range of his writing” (Vardy 207). This strategy, he concludes, “must be understood as one of the driving goals in constructing literary remains” (Vardy 223). Indeed, Edith used her mother as a model for how to arrange her literary remains. Her need to make Coleridge into a literary bluestocking who kept her ideas isolated to her correspondence clashes with Coleridge’s actual daily work outside of the inner work of correspondence, namely editing,
67 negotiating with publishers, and seeing visitors. Where this contradiction is the greatest lies in Edith’s struggle to reconcile the two images of Sara Coleridge as mother and Sara Coleridge as editor and epistolary intellectual. Instead, she allows the letters to offer another side to her mother, no matter how contradictory or death-obsessed. In fact, the letters represent Coleridge as deeply committed to anything she did whether it was dying, arranging and introducing her father’s works, designing her children’s education, or engaging in religious debates. All of the letters in the collection do present Coleridge’s existence as intellectualized, as the Nation critic complains, but maybe Edith did not see that as a bad thing or as contrary to Coleridge’s philosophy of letters as acts of friendship. For Coleridge, the art of letter writing as an act of friendship and authorship involved authoring one’s death through writing and rewriting the death narratives of those closest to her. In preserving death in letters, Coleridge develops her own epistolarity of death. Her letters give memories of death material form, memories that stand, arrested in times of mourning, as testimonies to the good death. In many of her sympathy letters, Coleridge consoles others through honoring her correspondents’ memories of the dead by making those memories part of her own life story. In a letter written to Mrs. Jones around the death of Joanna Baillie, Coleridge tells her friend, “You were privileged, dear friend, to have the sight of the dear face after death, and to see that ‘friendly look,’ so consolatory to survivors, and so precious a
treasure for memory” (24 Feb. 1850; ML 422). For Coleridge, memories of death are collected treasures. A death look is a “friendly look” and “consolatory to survivors” (ML 422). Memories of death, including the last look of the body, are written down on paper; they are collected, taking on a materiality that can survive memory. When Dora Wordsworth was dying, Coleridge wrote to Miss Morris that Dora endures her last illness with “heavenly composure, sweetness, and piety of her frame of mind” (31 May 1847;
68 ML 312). Coleridge determines to write to “Mrs. Wordsworth in reply to a detail of her beloved child’s sayings and doings in this her season of death-expectancy and final weakness” (ML 312). Coleridge considered this a duty and felt honored to offer this kind of memorial and comfort to her friend’s mother: “It is quite a privilege to be admitted to dwell on such a dying bed as hers” (ML 313). Coleridge collects her memories of Dora as a tribute to her friend and her family and contributes to the ritual of mourning through providing a material reminder of her friend to those who knew her. In using the dead woman’s “saying and doings,” Coleridge collaborates with Dora in writing her deathbed testimony. Coleridge used this strategy herself after her father died, when she wrote many of her friends to tell them that her father had died well. Coleridge appeals to her reader’s sense of fairness when justifying the unrestrained praise she gives her father in the space of a letter: I will not apologize to you for this filial strain; I write unreservedly to you, knowing that you are alive to my father’s merits as a philosopher and a poet, and believing that you will be pleased to find that he who was misunderstood and misrepresented by many, and grossly calumniated by some, was and is held in high honor as to moral as well as intellectual qualities by good and intelligent persons. (Oct. 1834; ML 101)
In writing this, Coleridge includes her correspondent, Mrs. Plummer, in this circle of good and intelligent persons. It is a way of assuring herself that her reader will take her letter as intended. She assures her friend that her next letter “shall be of a more lightsome and general nature, but this is dedicated to my dear father’s memory; and I could say much more on that subject if I had more strength and more paper, and were not afraid of wearying even you, who are a reader and lover of his works” (ML 102). This letter, in
69 itself, stands as a memorial and reflects the often self-conscious and anxious act of writing something so intimate as grief. In comparing Coleridge’s writing of death to Edith’s construction of her in the preface and introduction, one can see how the daughter learned editorial and narrative strategies from the mother. In collecting these moments of loss, the story of Coleridge’s life becomes one shaped by death, a story whose ending would recover her losses by reuniting her with the people of her youth. But, while living, Coleridge wrote letters that kept the dead alive through deathbed testimonials. Knowing that letters were shared beyond those addressed, Coleridge wrote these letters to provide evidence of a good death. The death of her husband marked the beginning of her life as her father’s sole editor and literary executor, but her father’s death on July 5, 1834, is the first death one encounters in the letters section of the memoir, and she uses the story of his death to begin reforming the story of his life. In all of the letters about his death, Coleridge works hard to convince her reader that he died well: “When he knew that his time was come, he said that he hoped by the manner of his death to testify the sincerity of his faith” (Oct. 1834; ML 98-99). In this letter to Mrs. Plummer, Coleridge continues with a postmortem of her father’s life and death, even going so far as to describe his autopsy: His body was opened, according to his own earnest request—the causes of death were sufficiently manifest in that state of the vital parts; but that internal pain
from which he suffered more or less during his whole life was not to be explained, or only by that which medical men call nervous sympathy. (ML 99) Like a letter, his body is opened and the contents are read. And, like the letter, the body cannot reveal all. Her father requested an autopsy in a letter to William Sotheby on November 9, 1828. He includes among his requests: “Be so good as to give a cut just there, right across the umbilical region—there lurks the fellow that for so many years
70 tormented me on my first waking!” (769). Samuel Taylor Coleridge wanted the assurance of professional opinion that he was not a hypochondriac, that there was an organic reason that, “in the mind of a competent Judge what I have performed will excite more surprize than what I have omitted to do, or failed in doing” (770). Of course, his poetic career was not the only thing on his mind; he knew he had to answer “[his] only offences against others, viz. Sins of Omission” (770) with an organic cause. His daughter was included in that group of the sinned against, whether he knew it or not. Clearly, STC was hard at work in constructing a posthumous reputation of his own. He had already approved of his literary undertaker, his daughter’s husband Henry Nelson Coleridge, and Coleridge herself worked equally as hard on recovering and reestablishing her father’s reputation even after her husband died. Shortly before her father died, the third edition of his Poetical Works was published, and Coleridge could not deny that the timing of both his death and reviews of the publication were right for a reassessment of his work and reputation.9 One of the new poems included was “Epitaph,” written on November 9, 1833: Stop, Christian, passer-by: Stop, child of God, And read, with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seem’d he— O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.— That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death: Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame— He ask’d, and hoped through Christ. Do thou the same. (152)
9 See Chapter Three of Mudge for Coleirdge’s reaction to her father’s death and her renewed sense of intellectual energy created by the interest in the poet after his death. 71 This deathbed poem gives the last word on the poet’s life as well as his final request to be judged by others with mercy and forgiveness as Christ (or the medical examiner) would judge his offenses a symptom of organic illness and not of character. The poem’s emphasis on Coleridge’s fragile physical state, his experience of “death in life,” reflects his own desires for how he thought of his posthumous reputation and his own ambition to be resurrected through his literary remains. What cannot be revealed about her father through his scattered literary remains and the autopsy of his physical remains, Coleridge herself had to uncover. She constructed a biography about her father for her correspondents that puts him in a positive light. One would never know from her letters that her father did not really know her; Coleridge does too good of a job writing herself into her father’s death to the point that she could not be separated from his life. Immediately after he died, she began writing his deathbed narrative in a letter to her brother Hartley written on August 5,
1834.10 Even though she did not attend to her father during his final days, she used the accounts given by her husband, the Green family with whom he was staying, the physicians Mr. Gillman and Mr. Taylor, and the autopsy report. The letter shows Hartley that their father died a good death. He turned away visitors during his final days in order to “be as little disturbed as possible” in order to prepare himself for his final change: “The agitation of nerves at the sight of those dear to him disturbed his meditations on his Redeemer to whose bosom he was hastening…he wished to evince in the manner of his death the depth & sincerity of his faith in Christ” (991). In the same letter, she notes that the autopsy revealed no bodily condition “which could be ascribed to laudanum,” that “uneasiness” and physical complaints he suffered from his entire life were due to “some
10 Edith Coleridge did not include this letter in her mother’s collection. I refer to the appendix of Earl Leslie Griggs’ Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2000). 72 sympathetic nervous affection” (992).11 The letters that followed worked hard to tell correspondents that her father died well. Moreover, like any good biographer, Coleridge refers to a primary source, the letter “testimonies” of others, to attest to her father’s character throughout this correspondence. She realized that the lack of intimacy in her relationship with her father did not allow her to write an accurate description of him, but those “who had him daily, hourly, in their sight” could (Oct. 1834; ML 101). She concludes her letter to Mrs. Plummer, a letter that largely consists of his praises, with a summation of the evidence pointing to a good life and death: “There was every thing in the circumstances of his death to soothe our grief, and valuable testimonies (such as I have mentioned, with many, many others) from valued persons have mingled their sweetness in the cup” (ML 101). Coleridge established a relationship with her father, but only after he died. She arranged his works, wrote introductions, and documented his good death.12 Coleridge would repeat the practice of writing the deaths of others for the rest of her life. Alan Vardy characterizes Sara Coleridge’s editing of her father into a consistent image as “an act of political and historical forgetting in which she silences the impassioned voice that characterized her father’s political efforts” (208). In the end, Coleridge continued the work her father had begun when he ordered his autopsy, and she continued the practice of writing and testifying the deaths of others. The next two sections concentrate entirely on the letters, where Edith lets her mother’s story really be told. How Coleridge writes her
11 In fact, the autopsy concluded that Coleridge needed narcotics in order to manage a lifelong condition. Dr. Gillman, a doctor and family friend who attended his deathbed wrote years later in 1895, “The record, however suffices to prove that this intellectual giant must have suffered more than the world was aware of, and it can be understood that his ‘indolence’ as well as his opium habit had a physical basis” (Griggs 993). 12 Coleridge was not at her father’s deathbed nor did she attend his funeral. However, Henry was at both and related what he saw to his wife (Mudge 72). Coleridge did compose a couple of works of deathbed poetry: “Epitaph,” written on November 9, 1833, was published posthumously in 1834. 73 father’s death presages how she writes the subsequent deaths of those close to her and ultimately of herself.
VALUABLE TESTIMONIES
In a letter to her friend Miss Fenwick, Coleridge describes Dora Wordsworth’s death as instructional, her last hours “a living document,” better illustrative of Christian death than “arguments and sermons on immortality” (1 July 1849; ML 314). For Coleridge, death texts such as the one that originated from Dora’s deathbed were not only instructive but consolatory. In order for this “living document” of death to survive the deathbed text of Dora’s body, Coleridge and others, including Dora’s husband, circulated letters that provided evidence to Dora’s good death. Survivors’ immediate memories of the deceased privileged narratives of the dying body over the healthy one because of the great cultural importance of the good death. For Coleridge, the most important requirement of the good death was preparedness. She found being prepared to die most consoling to survivors since mourners constructed memories of death that would provide the most comfort. At least in the time immediately following death, mourners could engage in what Luciano calls “the slow time of deep feeling,” or the slowing of time to allow the bereaved the full experience of mourning. I add that this time further facilitated the writing of narratives that accommodated fluctuating states of grief as well as competing emotions and memories. Coleridge’s deathbed testimonials are examples of the nineteenth-century way of writing the good death. Although Coleridge did not see her father die or attend his funeral, Coleridge used the story of her father’s death to comfort her friend Aubrey De Vere years later. Even so, memory in this case was certainly not a reliable source for accuracy; rather, the narrative Coleridge presents was edited to console her friend. Jenny Hallam and Elizabeth Hockey explain the management of grief through the need to create a coherent 74 picture of the deceased.13 Coleridge acknowledged the fragmentary nature of trying to put together another’s life. The “scattered diversity” of memories, I argue, can come from synthesizing other’s memories of a similar situation. For example, Coleridge’s memory of her father’s death can be integrated with her friend De Vere’s memory of his father’s death: “Those you spoke of to me remind me of my own father’s. He, too, was calm and clear to the last, till he fell into a coma that so often precedes death, and neither afraid nor grieved to depart” (31 Aug. 1846; ML 284). Even if that narrative was not the one she experienced firsthand, it did exist in her imagination. Coleridge advises De Vere to look to his father’s fine death for comfort as other memories may be inadequate: “These are remembrances on which the mind may repose as on a bed of balm—more lasting in their fragrance than any balm that ever grew in Arabia, for they will yield fresh odors from time to time as long as they are pressed upon” (ML 284). She argues, that “[a]s those dying hours of our dearest ones can never be far out of mind, it is a blessing, indeed, when they have more of the rest of heaven in them than the sting of the grave” (ML 284). Her advice to De Vere to privilege his memories of the deathbed over those of the life lived may seem backwards; however, in Coleridge’s experience, the deathbed may have been the most consoling memory of her father that she could collect even if she was merely an imaginary witness. This section focuses on Sara Coleridge’s role as caretaker and undertaker in her letters on the death of her husband, mother, and brother, Hartley.
For her husband, those roles were both put into practice during his long illness and preserved on the page, but her mother’s unexpected death forced her to write her fantasy of what it would have meant to be her mother’s caretaker. Like their father, Hartley died
13 According to their study on memory and the material culture of death, remembrance of the deceased follows a system aimed at making grief manageable, to take “the shattered, displaced and troubled memory” and “attempt to synthesize, a temporally scattered diversity” (108). 75 away from his family forcing Coleridge to rely on the testimonials of others to attest to her brother’s good death. Sara Coleridge acted as the key witness and principle caregiver during her husband’s long illness and death. Coleridge found a place to document these last hours in her journals and letters. Coleridge’s mourning journals provide an immediate place to put these memories before they appeared in her letters.14 If Coleridge considered letter- writing to be an activity geared toward organizing one’s mind and memories, then journaling must have been a drafting exercise for her letters. The book begins as a graphic account of Henry’s last hours: his request to see his daughter Edith one last time, attacks of phlegm, doses of medicine. He died on January 26: “This day at 10 minutes to one oclock my most beloved and honored husband breathed his last—James and Southey beside his bed. So ends the great charm of this world to me. He has made all things bright to me for 20 years—perhaps too bright. It is time to look at the brightness that can never fade.” She concludes, “So ends my record. A way of life in heaven begins. May I live so as to join him above.” Her mourning journals and letters provided a space for her deathbed rehearsals—her own as well as others. For her, bereavement, illness, and death required discipline, preparation, and practice, and after her husband died, her “way of life in heaven” included this study of death. If Dora Wordsworth offered her body as a “living
14 I bring in the mourning journal, part of the Coleridge collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, when necessary, but I do not focus on it. I use it as material that supplements the letters. Writing death was a practice for her both publically and privately with some passages from her mourning journal appearing later in her letters. The contents of both her letters and journals are very similar with some entries acting as a drafting space for letters and other entries consisting of copied-out letters, often of other deathbed witnesses’ stories. Studied on its own, the two-volume mourning journal seems incoherent and fragmentary – lists of deaths and illnesses, copied out letters, hymns, poems, and scattered reflections on grief, illness, and death fill its pages. However, when read with her letters, one can see patterns in how Sara Coleridge managed grief. The opening entries frantically record her husband’s illness and last hours, but after his death, she began recording the passings of those who followed him. 76 document” of the good death, then Sara Coleridge made sure that once that document expired its story would at least be preserved on paper. In many letters, Coleridge offers sympathy to friends and family who have lost someone, and she refers to the deceased’s preparedness to die as the main point of comfort when the living find it difficult to be as prepared for loss. A month before he died, Coleridge prepared for the death of her husband while also writing to a friend of her own unlikely hope that he would pull through, a hope that she says “will seem chimerical” and “which perhaps, however is stronger than I imagine, does not render me unprepared for what all around me expect” (Dec. 1842; ML 189). For Coleridge, death preparation for the living included not only preparing for one’s own death, but also for the deaths of others. Coleridge consoles one friend who lost her brother by reminding her that there is not much to grieve since he was ready: “in this case there really and truly is much to soothe and console your feelings, and there is no difficulty in finding a topic of comfort on the subject” (16 Jan. 1838; ML 155). Preparedness for death, then, benefits both the dying and the bereaved as Coleridge has “such a happy conviction that he was prepared to exchange this world for a more blessed state of existence” (ML 155). Coleridge says of her friend, the living, “you have a heart sufficiently disciplined by thought and previous trial, and that heavenly aid of which thought and trial are but instruments, to take true pleasure in contemplation of his ‘great gain’” (ML 155). Again,
“to die is to gain” and what will comfort Mrs. Stanger is her “mind disciplined by thought” and the trials of her life—both of which are referred to by Coleridge as “heavenly aid.” Coleridge collected these death testimonials as objects of study that would help her discipline and prepare herself for death. Coleridge knew that her husband would not recover, but she could not control her unlikely and surprisingly persistent feelings of hope. However, she realized she had some
77 power over being prepared for her husband’s death, and because she wanted this deathbed preparation for herself, she longed to die in the same way as her husband. After all, for Coleridge, the worst way to die would be quickly and unexpectedly: It is very awful to think in how many ways the opportunity of a death-bed preparation may be denied us; it may be prevented not only by sudden death, but also by loss of mental power, only to terminate in dissolution. We may trust, however, that for our friends ‘to die is gain,’ whatever may be the immediate or intermediate state of those who thus leave us. (28 Nov. 1837; ML 154) A good death required the triumph of mental and spiritual power over physical pain and weakness. To die well, the dying person had to know he or she was dying first of all, and second, try to stay conscious long enough to say goodbye to family, attend to spiritual business, and ask for forgiveness. In addition to reassuring mourners that the deceased was ready to die, dying well ultimately comforted friends and family by preparing them for their own deaths. However, Coleridge acknowledged that all of the requirements of the good death were rarely met, that sometimes it was enough to acknowledge “the gain” in death. Ultimately, these requirements seemed to do more for the living than for the dying. In her mourning journal, Coleridge begins her way of life in the beyond, what Virginia Woolf called Coleridge’s “heaven haunting,” with a telling account of her husband’s funeral: “The metal coffin was put into another black one and moved in the afternoon of this day into the dining room….it occupied nearly the same place as our dining table. …How often at the head of that little dinner table have I seen him radiant with smiles and glowing cheeks—and full of wit and glee!” On February 2, she writes in her journal about the comfort she received from the funeral, “The sight of the hearse with its black plumes—the tolling of the bell as we entered the churchyard—all the …honours
78 of death gratified me. I seemed literally to hunger and thirst for such out word remembrances.” Coleridge places the body, and her remembrances, in the dining room and the cemetery as well as in her journal. The journal provides a place to mourn her husband before she can appropriately do so in letters; it is a transitional space for Henry’s body to be remembered both by his “smile and glowing cheeks” and the coffin, hearse, and churchyard that contain his remains. Coleridge finds a comfort in these objects, these “outward remembrances,” but she also realizes the dangers in relying on them. As mentioned in the introduction, these object were often considered dangerous and “coded as disparate fragments residing in the ‘female’ domain of excessive emotion and irrational possessive impulses” (Hallam and Hockey 19). Coleridge certainly considered these objects dangerous, and she had put them away in case she began to neglect her children and all other areas of her life. Coleridge, above all, characterizes this tendency as an indulgence.15 Her husband’s daily objects conjured up his image; within them, she could see his body, or his “portrait.” After Henry Nelson Coleridge died, Sara Coleridge removed from her surroundings objects reminding her of her husband and her marriage when she realized the potential of these objects to create enough grief to distress her children. In order to “cultivate happiness,” Coleridge “put away all the special reminiscences of my past happy wedded life which lay in my daily path” (Oct. 1847; ML 329). Significantly, Coleridge relates this practice in a letter and reiterates that her actions were not intended to “diminish the remembrance of the departed—that remains as vivid as ever, without a hue faded or a line erased” (329). Putting away these things “prevented me from continually beholding the image of the departed in the midst of my daily work, when I could not afford to stand still and gaze upon it, and forget the present in the past”
15 The need to undervalue the importance of objects in social processes comes from the tendency to characterize the relationships between people and objects as “vicarious, fetishistic or wrong; that primary concerns should be with direct social relations and ‘real’ people” (Hallam and Hockey 20). 79 (329). Coleridge already confronted her husband in her daily work because she shared the working of editing her father with him. The letter itself comes to be the memorial—the real testimony of her devotion as Henry’s wife. Instead of letting his objects become relics, she puts them away, creates her own memorial through letter-writing and journaling, and even sends those letters away so they can be shared with others, making the burden of mourning less demanding. Memories, for Coleridge, are characterized as a type of disturbance by the ways in which “the physicality of deaths [and] their associated material residues can lead to acknowledged rupture and unwelcome intrusion from the perspective of the bereaved” (Hallam and Hockey 103). For Coleridge, this type of residue “lay in my daily path” (ML 329) forcing her to remove that shock of memory from her daily existence. When Coleridge could share her grief and when letter-writing was appropriate, she could give memories a place to go besides the intermediate space of her journal. Through writing and copying out letters, other people can share these memories and relate them to others; in this way, the mourner is not the sole keeper of the person’s memory. Even at the deathbeds that Coleridge did not attend, she enclosed copied out letters that gave an
account.16 These epistolary testimonials were passed around between family and friends. By putting an account of death in her own handwriting, it was if Coleridge had attended the deathbed herself. Even if the writing and consumption of deathbed testimonies had the power to console for an immediate family member, they became painful reminders of absence if the one expecting to author such testimonies could not attend the deathbed. Prolonged illness was a desirable way to die because it allowed enough time for family members to say goodbye. Coleridge recognized the advantage of prolonged illness when her husband
16 They are not included in the Memoir and Letters. 80 was ill, and after his death, she imagined taking care of her mother. When her sister-in- law Fanny died, Coleridge wrote her friend Mrs. Plummer that anticipation and preparedness are quite separate from the event of death when it happens: “but there is a gulf between the real, actual things and these kinds of conjectural anticipations, the depth of which we find when it is all over” (ML 188). Only in retrospect can the bereaved really know the difference between the imagined and the actual experience of loss. Coleridge learned a hard lesson about this gulf between the anticipation of death and its reality when her mother unexpectedly died. No amount of testimony from others could comfort Coleridge as she mourned the opportunity of “nursing her through a long last illness” more than the actual loss of life (26 Sept. 1845; ML 240). She looked forward to telling this story and resented the nurse who cared for her mother. In addition to writing a secondhand deathbed testimony as related through her mother’s nurse, Coleridge provides her correspondent, Justice Coleridge, with a sort of fantasy of how it should have been: I know not how it was, I could never help looking forward to [nursing her] with a sort of satisfaction. I day-dreamed about it—according to the usual frame of mind—and cut it all out in fancy all in my own way. She was to waste away gradually, without much suffering, and to become more and more placid in spirit and filled with the anticipation of heavenly things. (ML 240)
Coleridge expected her mother’s death to be a model for her own; she would tend to her mother carefully and watch closely. “Now I seem as if a long-cherished prospect had been snatched away from me” (ML 240). She found comfort only in the fact that at least her husband provided her with the opportunity to witness another’s death: “I thank God I was not thus suddenly separated from Henry” (240). The story of Henry’s death is Coleridge’s story since she witnessed it and could provide the most complete testimony
81 of it. She believed her mother’s death was hers to witness, learn from, and write. When her estranged brother Hartley died two years later, Coleridge confronted the same feelings of disappointment. However, the difference between her mother’s and brother’s deaths had to do with the silence between her and Hartley before his death. Her close relationship to her mother made “[t]he death silence awful” (240). Because of her close relationship to her mother, she believed her mother’s death was hers to write. Instead, her mother’s nurse wrote it. The dead, for Coleridge, became a part of her own biography; they served as models for how she wanted and did not want to die. When Coleridge’s brother Hartley died, she wrote to a friend about the work one must do to prepare for death. She argues, “If thinking about death and the grave could make me spiritual and detached from the weakness of this earthly sphere, I should be so; for I am perpetually dwelling on death and that other imaginable state. But, alas! More is required than the sense of our precarious state here, to fit us for a better and a higher” (Jan. 1849; ML 372). From Hartley’s death, Coleridge concludes in a letter to Justice Coleridge that death makes one better prepared, “I am sure, dear John, this most unexpected death of my dear brother is a spiritual benefit to me” (ML 372). Rejecting earthly things would not make one better equipped to die; in fact, one must deal with people, business, and what is left behind by others (i.e. literary remains) in order to die well. Coleridge and her brother did not resolve their differences before his death, and from this, perhaps, she learned that the dying were not entirely responsible for resolving earthly business before one’s death; the survivor had responsibilities of her own as well. After the death of her brother, Coleridge writes of the usefulness of letters in testifying to her brother’s character and good death, but finds less comfort than she expected: “if tributes of love and admiration from those who knew him well, and tears
82 shed for his unlooked-for death, could remove or neutralize sorrow, my cup would have lost its bitterness” (17 Jan. 1849; ML 370). She was extremely angry about her brother’s death. The two were separated for so long that she regretted the way he died without her; however, she reasons that “the sight of me, after so long a separation, would have agitated him, I know, and been too injurious. I thought to go with Nurse had the illness continued” (ML 370). Ever the planner, Coleridge found it difficult to deal with the reality of this death because it did not align with the fantasy of old-age reunion and death she had fixed in her mind. Not only physical distance but also emotional distance separated the two and kept Coleridge from sharing a deathbed scene. A more prolonged illness would have made it possible for her to visit because the dying would have had time to resolve himself to the fact of his mortality. However, as time went on, Coleridge began to find the letters more and more consoling. In a letter to Miss Morris, Coleridge longs to show “the letters which give account of his state in illness, his dying hours, and then of the funeral. Nothing could be more gentle, loving, pious, and humble—more deeply penitent for sin. Long and severe was his parting struggle—severe both to body and mind; but at last he went off very gradually” (17 Jan. 1849; ML 370). Coleridge’s references to her wayward brother’s struggles include not only his final illness but also his entire life’s condition. In another letter) to Reverend Coleridge, Coleridge encloses Hartley’s last letters with her expectations for her correspondent’s response: “I think you will be glad to see the letters I inclose. They will tell you more of my dear Hartley’s last days than you could otherwise hear” ((Jan. 1849; ML 371). A letter written a month later to Mrs. Plummer shows that testimonies of her brother’s character are extraordinarily positive despite his many weaknesses. Coleridge resented the fact that his weaknesses (alcoholism and shiftlessness) kept him away from her. Letters testifying to her brother’s character were
83 really all she had left: “If testimonies of warm and strong attachment, the liveliest admiration and deep regard—in spite of his sad infirmity, which did himself such wrong—to my dear brother’s memory could console for his loss, I should be abundantly consoled, for I think I never knew any man so wept for out of his circle” (20 Feb. 1849; ML 374). Coleridge felt excluded from this circle especially since she could not make a testimony of her brother’s life. She describes the “letters of his friends and admirers” as “most affecting and beautiful”; significantly, family is not included in that. In her letters, Coleridge emphasizes her brother Hartley as a broken link to her past: “the whole of my early life is so connected with him, he was in my girlhood so deep a source of pride and pleasure, and at the same time such keen anguish and searching anxiety, that his departure brings my own before me more vividly and with more of reality than any other death has done” (Jan. 1849; ML 372). Besides reminding her of her own mortality, his death makes their separation and the disparity between the child of
promise he was and the adult of disappointment he became even more painful.17 Coleridge obsessed over the fact that those who knew her as a child were gone. She felt that the “three who loved me best in this wide world, to whom I was most dear, most important” could no longer comfort her, that “even from earthly feeling,” “that other world were more my home than this” (Sept. 1848; ML 354). Again, as in the sudden and unexpected death of her mother, Coleridge expresses shock that she survived him: “It seems as if he were snatched away from me all on the sudden, and all the thoughts and visions of so many, many years are swept away all at once” (ML 355). Coleridge planned often for a reunion and fantasized her future with a brother that would be spent talking about the past. Coleridge and her brother lived far apart and this seems to be much of
17 These feelings of sadness and disappointment are similar to those experienced by Charlotte Brontë when her brother Branwell Brontë, a promising painter and poet in his youth, died from the effects of alcoholism. 84 what drives her regret: “I never thought of surviving him. I always thought he would live to old age, and that, perhaps, in our latest years we might cherish each other; meantime, that I might see much of him in some long visit to the North, when I might make my children known to him” (ML 355). Coleridge wanted her children to know him and, therefore, a part of her past self, a self that died with him. The most surprising thing of all for Coleridge throughout her life was her ability to survive, and to console herself for surviving her brother, she wrote to everyone about his death. Hartley’s biography gets told through letters in the multiple voices of those who knew him. He may have disappointed the family in life, but he redeemed himself in death. Coleridge and her surviving brother Derwent agreed to work together to edit a collection of Hartley’s poetry. Coleridge found great comfort in editing because it was an activity in which she could shape her brother’s life and works and therefore his posthumous reputation as she did for her father. Just as Coleridge’s epistolary work in writing multiple narratives of Hartley’s deathbed attested to his good, and therefore redemptive, death, her publication of the collection of poetry would provide evidence that he lived a productive life. Both the letters and the collection would live beyond both the body of the writer and the editors. More than her father, husband, or mother, Coleridge seemed to dwell on the death of her brother Hartley: “Nothing has ever shaken my hold upon earth” (372). Coleridge made her father’s deathbed a work of imagination. But her
imagination failed her when she missed the death of her mother causing her to hunger for narratives that would let her be a part of it. Moreover, she found the deathbed testimonials of Hartley’s death comforting since she could not be there to witness it. When she could not be the original author of these memoires, she could at least possess them through letters. And, if she could not be with the dead, then she would at least practice it though illness.
85 “MAKING THE VESTIBULE OF MY LETTER A DOLEFUL SICK-ROOM”18
After the deaths of her husband, mother, and brother, Coleridge felt ready to leave. This is when Coleridge became Virginia Woolf’s “heaven haunter,” whose tenuous relationship with the passage of time pitched her into a struggle with herself. Woolf situates Coleridge in time: “Past, present, future dappled her with a strange light. She was mixed in herself, still divided, as in the wood behind the house, between two loyalties, to the father who told her fairy stories in bed; and to the mother—Frettikins she called her— to whom she clung in the flesh” (“Sara,” The Death 117). Coleridge similarly considered herself divided between the worlds of the living and the dead. This division was greatest when she was confined to the sickroom for either illness or bereavement; there she was free to write these fantasies of death and reunion. Coleridge found letters to be the ideal place to express her grief. After all, she believed that letter-writing was a way to order one’s mind. For example, after her husband died, Coleridge wrote about how the deaths of those closest to her “is absorbed in the gulf of all our deepest and most earnest reflections” (ML 428). These reflections are made up of “thoughts about life and existence here and hereafter, which are more earnest, more real, and permanent and solid and enduring, than any particular thoughts and sorrows and troubles which our course here brings with it, or which contains them all virtually” (ML 428). Coleridge finds comfort in a future reunion with her husband, a thought she describes as “permanent and solid and enduring” (428). She imagines the same type of comfort for Mrs. Wordsworth. When Wordsworth died, she wrote not only of the comfort of reunion but also of how a time of mourning brings a renewal of all loss: “The event renews to me all my great irremediable losses. Henry, my mother, Fanny, Hartley, my Uncle and Aunt Southey, my father—in some respects so great a loss, yet in
18 To Miss Erksine, 23 July 1836, Memoir and Letters, page 257. 86 another way less felt than the rest, and more with me still” (1850; ML 435). On paper, Coleridge reunites the family she created as an adult, the family who raised her, and all the members of her biological family. Through mourning, Sara Coleridge, the bewildered survivor, can bring all of her losses together in the space of the letter, something that can make the story of her losses “permanent and solid and enduring.” But nowhere did this reunion occur with the greatest intensity and frequency than when Coleridge was ill. By the time Wordsworth died, Sara Coleridge knew she was dying. Illness allowed Coleridge to practice death, and in the sickroom Coleridge could engage in the imaginative work of constructing deathbed fantasies and reunions in the hereafter. Katharine Meiners argues that Coleridge’s Victorian ideas on grief conflicted with her desire for a Romantic rendering of illness, something she inherited from her father, and like her father, failed her. In her study on Sara Coleridge and the language of cancer, Meiners observes how Coleridge’s thoughts on illness made her “a true student of Romanticism” (48). But however much Romanticism “promises [sic] a harmonious relationship between the body and the environment,” it fails to provide any true consolation (49). Meiners finds that Coleridge challenges the Romantic ideal by working to show “that the relationships between mind and body, health and disease, invalid and the environment, are rarely simple” (49). Coleridge instead viewed them as polarities “with ironies and fluctuations that work themselves out variously in the life of each individual” (Meiners 49). I further suggest that the Coleridges, and for that matter the Victorians in general, held that the same complex calculus expressed the relationship between life and death. Hence illness could well be used as a way to conceive of death, and this section focuses on letters that use illness in this way. Meanwhile, where the last section concentrated on how Coleridge wrote about the deaths of others, this one narrows
87 in on her own demise, for as if anticipating the isolation enforced by mourning, the isolation imposed by illness encouraged a serious contemplation of death. Even before she found a lump in her breast in 1849, Coleridge seemed to accept the possibility that she could die from illness. In a letter written to Reverend Henry Moore in December of 1842, Coleridge comments on her husband’s illness and his reactions to his sister Fanny’s death. She remarks that Fanny’s death has not made him “worsened in body,” reasoning “Invalids often bear these shocks better than persons in health” (Dec. 1842; ML 188). And Coleridge had plenty of practice being an invalid. The letters from Edith Coleridge’s collection begin in 1833 after Coleridge’s marriage, the births of Edith and her brother, and immediately after Coleridge’s first major breakdown (which was most likely postpartum depression) and the beginning of her invalidism. At this point in time, the sickroom made it possible for Coleridge to write.19 Sara
Coleridge’s best-known letter was written to her mother during one of these illnesses.20 Edith thought it was a significant letter as well. It is the only one in the collection that receives a paragraph-length gloss. Edith characterizes the letter, written on October 24, 1836, as one that “breathes the very spirit of Christian resignation” (ML 128). In the letter, Coleridge entreats her mother to “pray for cheerfulness and fortitude” and to look to her future in heaven by abandoning what is holding her here on earth. She describes her own illness as a visitation and asks her mother to “be not grieved” because her spiritual preparedness means much more than her bodily strength: “When you go to heaven before me, if you leave your poor daughter with a more serious, chastened heart
19 Mudge gives reason for Edith starting her mother’s biography in 1833. At this time, Coleridge’s poor health allowed her plenty of time “always on the Sofa” to write letters. The great majority of letters written after 1833 is abstract and intellectual. All letters before this time were mostly personal letters about friends and family (59). 20 On her way home from visiting relatives, Coleridge stopped with her children at an inn in Illchester. She sent her children back to the relatives and wrote her husband that she could not travel any farther. She stayed at the inn for over a month. After returning home, it took her five months to recover. However, during her recovery, she wrote many letters and her fairy tale, Phantasmion (1837). 88 (though still a weak and sin-inclined one), you leave her in far better case than if her frame were as free from uneasy weakness as the best in the land” (ML 128-9). The letter seems to mark a changing point in Coleridge’s life, when her main duty was no longer raising her children but preparing herself for heaven: I thought my business here was to teach my darling boy; to be respected, admired, beloved; my head said otherwise, but my heart felt thus. Now I feel, more feelingly, that my business here is to make my soul fit for eternity, and my earthly tasks are but the means by which that blessed work of my salvation is to be effected. (ML 129) For Coleridge, a weak body strengthened the soul, and frequent illness better prepared one for death. Coleridge seemed to take a peculiar pride in her illness—it fit her for eternity. Because Coleridge had to continually confront her mortality through bodily illness, that state became a comfort because it brought her closer to the ones she had lost and helped her to understand the dying. With each illness, Coleridge felt closer to death and wrote about a need to prepare for it. Illness made Coleridge “more serious for the future—not more sad—more cheerful, but more earnestly thoughtful of the true end of life, and desirous to make ready for departure” (7 Jan. 1849; ML 369). In his eulogy, Henry Reed praises Coleridge for never letting sickness interfere with her filial or editorial duties: “No sickroom selfishness narrowed her large and generous sympathies” (16). However, Coleridge did admit to sickness invading her letters and interrupting her correspondence, and it certainly isolated her from the activities of her family and necessitated the writing of letters in the first place. That said, illness was one of Coleridge’s main excuses for delayed correspondence.21 After describing the illness that prolonged her response to a letter,
21 During one illness, Coleridge was restricted to writing to her mother, sister, and husband only. 89 Coleridge has to apologize for “making the vestibule of [her] letter a doleful sick-room, in which the most interesting and refreshing objects that present themselves are bottles from the apothecary’s shop full of tonics, sedatives, liniments, gargles, and so forth” (23 July 1846, ML 257). That list would also include opium. Like her father, Coleridge had
become dependent on laudanum for relief of pain and nervousness.22 Being ill allowed Coleridge to write because no depended on her in the sickroom, but her addiction to opium likely kept her quarantined there as well. Instead of receiving visitors, Coleridge considered letters as visitations to friends when she had to be isolated, when the demands of her body trumped any social or familial obligations. The letter, for Coleridge, reflects the room or place from which one writes. Many of her letters do operate as a catalog of ailments. As well as a sickroom, the letter acts as a substitute for the body, where illness can be read. Her body tells the story of her life, in which the ravages of pregnancy and grief can be read on her body: “I can spin along yet, though my face is so pale and small, and tells such a tale of sleepless nights, a weakly wifehood and a nervous widowhood” (19 May 1849; ML 384). In one of her last letters she writes Aubrey De Vere about how she reads her body as a sign of her impending death: “There is a torpor ever hanging over me, like a cloud overspreading the sky, only rent here and there by some special force; and my eyes have a heavy, deathly look. I am decidedly worse since I saw you” (27 Oct.
1851; ML 526-7). Coleridge writes and rewrites the deathbed scenes of others in order to create a fantasy of death for herself. She attempts to write her own death even as she realizes the impossibility of telling that part of her story. Ultimately, Coleridge could not
22 In her collection of children’s poetry, Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children (1834), Sara included what would become one of her best-known and most anthologized poems, “The Poppies.” One stanza describes the soothing effects of opium, “When poor Mama long restless lies,/She drinks the poppy’s juice;/That liquor soon can close her eyes,/And slumber soft produce:” (lines 17-20) . She later regretted including this poem in her collection. 90 separate the stories of others’ deaths from the story of her life. She describes her body instead, and it acts as her deathbed text. However, the text of her body and its ability to tell her story is limited by its vulnerability. At the same time, Coleridge recognizes that language fails to convey completely the depth of her grief or her physical pain. A letter ultimately could not accommodate either, and the problem of articulating pain becomes a problem of genre and the material limitations of the letter’s space: “But I must consider the limits of this letter, and the observations which it ought to contain” (1839; ML 173). She could not write or be heard by those she lost because she herself was not dead. As a consolation she imagines in the letter that the dead have a language of their own. Coleridge describes how angels do not need the space of a letter to communicate; they have no idea of suffering, and therefore, have no need to communicate what language often fails to convey: That reminds me of another advantage enjoyed by Cherubim and Seraphim. I am sure they do not write letters with pen, ink, or paper, nor put them into the post, nor stop to consider whether they are worth postage, nor look about for franks and private conveyances. They have a quintessence of our earthly enjoyments and privileges; the husk for them drops off, and all is pure spirit and intelligence. (ML 173) All the material remembrances and the tools used to create letters—“pen, ink, or paper”—service the living. The very human activity of sending a letter involves the worry that the contents are worth the postage. Angels do not have this worry. Their communication is not mediated by the post office. Instead, it occurs without material and would be instantaneous, like Woolf’s wireless of memory. The angels, according to Coleridge, do not need to leave a part of themselves behind. The living concern themselves with what remains while angels lose their husks,
91 or bodies, and become “spirit and intelligence.” Even in talking about the difficulties of letter writing and grief, Coleridge reinforces her frustrations with both the inadequacies of language and of her body to fully communicate what it is she wants to say about grief: “All this nonsense is excusable in me, because I am poorly, out of humor with those activities in which I cannot share, and quite cross and splenetic because I am not as free from fleshly ills and earthly fetters as an angel in heaven” (ML 173). Even years before her final illness, Coleridge had already begun to separate herself from the living, but for the rest of her life and up to her death her presence on earth frustrated her. Her body may have provided a text of her life, like Dora Wordsworth’s bodily text of death, and illness may have brought her closer to death, but it still limited her in that she could not communicate with the angels, who had little need of bodies or of language. They did not need to make sense of emotions like grief. While Coleridge accepted the fact of grief during her life, she often undermined the emotions associated with bereavement as “mere human feelings” (13 Feb. 1834; ML 193). In a letter to Reverend Moore shortly after her husband’s death, she begs him to “Forgive so much about my own feelings” (ML 194). Instead she determines to find “comfort…in thinking that the anguish I have gone through, which will be merged, I humbly trust, before I go hence, in that peace which the world can not give, is probably the heaviest part of my earthly portion, or that is must have seasoned me to bear well what remains behind” (ML 193). She aspires to have a “higher and better and enduring mind” that “has no concern with these sensations” even though “they will arise and have a certain force” (ML 193). These feelings take on an almost sinister form: “While we remain in the tabernacle of the flesh, they are the miserable, cloggy vapors that from time to time keep steaming up from the floor and the walls, and obscure the prospect of the clear empyrean which may be seen from the windows” (ML 193). Like the seraphim who
92 are pure spirit and intelligence, feelings are hardly material; however, the cloggy vapours, or her pain, have enough substance to clog. They have a materiality for which the dead have little use. Her feelings, “only the sensations of natural man and woman” (ML 194), obscure her view of heaven. All that remained for Coleridge to do was “contemplate [her] own removal, not with mere calmness, but with a cheerfulness which no other thought bestows” (ML 194). Even as grief made letter-writing necessary, it also made it more difficult, especially when the news of one’s own illness made the writer the subject of anticipated grief. As long as Coleridge grieved, however, she could use the sickroom as a place to practice death and imagine her reunion with all her great losses. When Coleridge knew she was dying, she found it more difficult to write about her own illness and death. One of the earliest mentions we have of Coleridge’s final illness is in a letter to Aubrey De Vere (6 Aug. 1850). In the letter, she first responds to De Vere’s gift of In Memoriam, parts of which she had heard him recite days earlier. For someone dying and reading a text about mourning, Coleridge seems oddly detached. Her discussion of Tennyson is mostly a critical one. She found in Tennyson’s work a “great intensity of feeling,” a type of poetry “that cannot be perceived at first, especially from recitation” (ML 454). Coleridge makes an important distinction between hearing through recitation and reading. An “impassioned recitation” can heighten “poetry of feeling,” but she argues, “to do justice to it, we must adopt the usual attitude of study, and dwell with our eyes upon the page” (ML 454). Like reading a letter, Coleridge relies on the romantic notion of true understanding in solitude. She reasons that her understanding comes from knowing her own mind, “a creature of habit” that “moves but in the accustomed track” (ML 454). The entire letter documents different stages of her reading experience. She writes later in the evening that she marked certain passages up to page 48, and the next day, she finds herself affected by section XXX. However, she is put off by obscure
93 passages—“obscurity mars pathos”—as well as the too clear ones that “strike [her] as too quaint” (455). But, she not only found Tennyson’s work quaint; she also found it violent, writing later to Mr. Quillinan, Dora Wordsworth’s husband, that the violence of his poetry kept it from being forceful, equal to creating a “want of truth, which is at the bottom of all affectation, an endeavor to be something more and higher and better than the aspirant really and properly is. The heaven of poetry is not to be taken by these
means” (15 Aug. 1850, ML 457).23 Overall, I argue, what Sara Coleridge found lacking in Tennyson’s elegy was consolation. After her discussion of In Memoriam to De Vere, Coleridge has to close her letter. In fact, great physical pain kept her from continuing. If Coleridge found Tennyson’s writing too obscure, part of that obscurity could have come with the great difficulty of describing the pain of bereavement.24 Coleridge’s own physical pain, unlike that of bereavement, gives her something solid to describe: This fierce pain clings to me. Oh! How well can I imagine all the frightful shapes with which the infernal realms have been peopled, the demons with their prongs and pitchforks, may have been mere brain images—the shaping forth, by way of diversion and relief, in order to send it from self, of these sharp pangs, and shattering, piercing nerve tortures! (ML 456) Even though the images are horrible, they are a form of relief; they are something that she can give shape to since pain is something that is so difficult to describe or express.25 Coleridge found pain personified in Dante’s demons, “personifications of Neuralgia and Tic-douloureux, or at least the latter, if they sat for their pictures, would come out just
23 Significantly, both letters contain discussions of Romantic poetry almost immediately following her analysis of In Memoriam, praising The Prelude to De Vere and finding the familiar fault of obscurity in Shelley’s “Adonais.” 24 In the next chapter I discuss how in Charlotte Bronte’s reading of the poem, Tennyson’s work was too orderly to describe the chaos of grief. She preferred violent means of consolation, not gentle sympathies. 25Alice James once wrote that “there was a comfort in good, solid pain.” 94 like them” (ML 456). In another letter to Reverend Coleridge, she admits that her trial “is not light, all circumstance considered” (ML 465), but that from the “many marks of warm sympathy and active kindness from friends,” she can find that “some good has grown out of the evil” (ML 465). Such “warm sympathy and active kindness” would follow after her death. In planning her own death, she could try to control part of the story. Part of these final arrangements includes her plans for her body and her reunion with her family beyond her epistolary imaginings. In one of her last letters to Aubrey De Vere (1 Oct. 1851), Coleridge writes of her own death and burial fantasy in which she would have everyone exactly where she wanted them. With everyone gone, Coleridge writes herself back into her circle, into the grave denied her. She relates her thoughts on the grave with her illness and impending death, “When we are withdrawn from society and the bustle of life, in some measure, and our thoughts are from any cause fixed on the grave, how does the early life rise up into glow and prominence, and, as it were, call one back into itself!” (ML 519) Her desire to be reunited with the dead helps explain her motivation near the end of her life to write about her childhood in her epistolary autobiography, something she had to do alone. When she sat down to write her autobiography, Coleridge sent her addressee, her daughter Edith, away to visit friends. She may have been writing to her daughter as a way to speak to her when she was no longer alive, but she was also reconnecting with her past in anticipation of being reunited with it. In letters, her mind haunts and “hovers about that
old well-known churchyard” (ML 518-19).26 She describes her burial fantasy, “I long to take away mamma’s remains from the place where they are now deposited, and when my own time comes, to repose beside her, as to what now seems myself, in that grassy burial-
26 In Coleridge Fille, Earl Leslie Griggs writes that Coleridge “took a mournful pleasure in visiting the Highgate churchyard” (142). 95 ground, with the Southey’s reposing close by” (ML 519). Coleridge could restore her earliest family to one another by placing their remains together: “My husband and I hope to meet in heaven. But there is a different feeling in regard to earlier ties: Hartley and Mr. Wordsworth I would have …within an easy distance of Keswick, as it used to be in old times” (ML 519). She could make sure that she was near her mother and her relations the Southeys, and that Hartley was near the Wordsworths. Her regard for earlier connections to friends and family made them a priority over her husband—whose remains could stay where they were and with whom the certainty of reunion remained vaguely hopeful, but far from necessary. For Coleridge, the way her circle was buried represented her past, her childhood, and in preparing to join that circle, she envisioned earlier ties were restored. Despite having already made arrangements for burial with her immediate family in the Coleridge family vault, she held on to her fantasies of death and reunion.
“MEMORY IS ALMOST A RELIGION”
Coleridge in this way made arrangements for her own burial, and yet after her death on May 3, 1852, her fantasy to be buried in the grass with her mother close to the Southeys remained just that, a fantasy. In contrast, her practical, realized death work began well before her death, not long after her husband’s, and followed a different route. After Henry Coleridge died in January of 1845, she made arrangements to have her
husband’s tomb, which was close to her father’s in Highgate churchyard, expanded. The vault, located at the site of an old school chapel, soon included her father who was placed in a new coffin and reinterred. She once wrote, “It is a great pleasure and comfort to me to be busy about these sepulchral affairs” (qtd. in Griggs, Coleridge Fille, 142). She made plans for her mother and herself to be placed there after their deaths, and her son was buried there in 1861. Edith was a visitor.
96 Edith outlived her mother by almost sixty years, and her brother by a half century. She saw the construction of another chapel in 1866 on top of the family vault. Even though there was an opening to the vault on the side of the burial ground, Edith’s family vault had become a crypt and its condition quickly deteriorated. When the remains of the Coleridge family were removed, given new coffins, and reinterred in a new brick tomb beneath the knave of St. Michael’s Church in Highgate in 1961, Edith was not included. I do not know where she is buried now. Even in her writings about her family, she appears on the outside as a spectator about whom little is known. The closest we have to her own life story is what she writes about her family. Not surprisingly, Edith likewise appears oddly absent from the published biographical material and letter testimonials about the Coleridges. In the prefatory material before the letters, Edith often expresses her own sense of inadequacy in telling her mother’s story or portraying her accurately. While she describes letters as unconscious self-portraiture, Edith does not trust portraiture, so she offers a pastiche of impressions of her mother that bookend the letters. The pages following Coleridge’s incomplete memoir in The Memoir and Letters attempt not only “to combine the scattered notices of the letters, and put readers at once in possession of the main facts” but also to provide some partial substitute for that chapter of her youth which would otherwise remain a blank by way of a “slight biographical sketch” (ML 50). As described earlier, that sketch includes the letters and testimonies of those who knew her—all men of authority. Sir Henry Taylor attests to Coleridge’s early literary success with translations. Writings from Henry Reed and Aubrey De Vere provide further testimony of her character. Unfortunately, Edith did not share her own memories or thoughts in The Memoir and Letters to add to the testimonies of her mother. After quoting from letters and writing the details of her mother’s life, she claims, “any addition from me would
97 indeed be superfluous” (67). However, Edith did write something about her mother, a revealing, unpublished memoir of her own that revealed how her mother lived through many losses and how she died conflicted between her duties to the living and her desire to join the dying. The memoir, part of the Coleridge collection at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, is entitled “[Memoir of Sara (Coleridge) Coleridge]”. The document is undated, but it shares enough similarities with the biographical section in the memoir that it represents another version of Edith’s story of her mother. Edith includes quotes from the epistolary testimonies that appear in the published version and prefaces them with this statement, which does appear in the published version: “the following correspondence will give some idea; through there were others (perhaps no less valued of which from accidental circumstances) an epistolary record can be presented to the public” (17). This version of the Memoir is more personal with Edith referring to Coleridge as “my mother” instead of by name or by “she.” While the published version contains little about Sara Coleridge’s death besides a short when, where, and how, the unpublished introduction goes into great personal detail, even quoting heavily from the journal Coleridge kept while she was dying. This version reflects the truly collaborative quality of death writing in which both the writer and caretaker become coauthors in narratives of death.27 Hardly a “superfluous” addition, Edith’s unpublished memoir of her mother begins with the recognition that while loss structured the narrative of her mother’s life, it did not represent it:
27 I cannot find why this version was not published, but it probably had to do with the fact of Edith being too obscure for audiences twenty years after her mother’s death. Just as Coleridge did not get to write about her mother’s death in letters, Edith’s version of the deathbed is thwarted. However, at least Edith created one, and it has survived. 98 In so slight a narrative as this, the record of successive losses is [bound] to give a mournful character to the story, which did not in reality belong to the life which it endeavors to represent. Suffering indeed there was, both bodily and mentally, in so small proportions; yet the darkness was never unmingled by rays of hope and comfort, nor did my mother ever lose her grateful sense of the blessings which fell to her lot. (16) Instead of a life defined by grief, Coleridge’s life was like many others, a cyclical exchange between hope and disappointment, gain and loss. Coleridge recognized that hope, though a duty, was not the problem; duty never was for her. Rather, consolation was difficult to master. In an epistolary essay written to a friend entitled,
“Nervousness,”28 Coleridge arrives at the cause of her invalidism: “It is not material for comfort but the capacity for comfort that is wanting. And how often we are told that cheerfulness and hopefulness are a duty” (203). This letter allowed Coleridge to describe and make sense of her condition, one that often separated her from her friends but allowed her to work. The essay makes the brave conclusion that “pain hurts less the second time around” (216). Coleridge found hope and comfort to be a struggle, and Edith recognized her mother’s willingness to work at both. Even when Coleridge became ill, her family and friends held out for hope but “had gradually been prepared to face the worst, by the painful process of successive disappointments” ([Memoir]). After years of being told by doctors that the growing and increasingly painful tumor in her breast was benign, Coleridge and the doctors concluded the tumor was malignant but it was too late to operate. Just as Coleridge maintained hope
28 “Nervousness,” an essay included in a letter to Emily Trevenen from January 1835, is a dialogue between two interior personas, The Good Genius and The Invalid. While the Good Genius advises avoiding doctors and “taking instructions chiefly from our own best selves” (201), the Invalid struggles to understand how illness affects body and mind. The Invalid repeats three times throughout the essay a variation on this theme: “It is the capacity for comfort that is wanting” (216). 99 during her husband’s long illness even when she knew he would not recover, Edith recognized the contradictions in her mother’s dying actions. She could interact with her friends with the complete faith and hope that she would recover, yet she acknowledged she could die and “would not postpone the duty of ‘putting her house in order,’ outwardly as well as inwardly” (28). The published version of the preface had Edith praising her mother for the “moral motive” “that set her to work” “to dedicate the whole of her intellectual existence to the great object of carrying out a husband’s wishes—of doing justice to a father’s name” (ML 62). 29 Edith’s reference in the unpublished version to “putting her house in order” included putting her father’s house in order as well as her own. Edith does not praise her mother for sacrificing “her natural preference for retirement” for the male-sanctioned activity of editing her father’s works; rather, she recognizes how painful it must have been for Sara to continue the work of memorial. Perhaps learning from the task of putting together her mother’s letters, Edith came to understand the difficult work of mourning that defined her mother’s undertaking of her father’s remains: Most people, even in the midst of health and happiness, shrink somewhat from the painful associations called upon by such old memories and would rather put them aside unopened than rouse themselves and decide upon their preservation or destruction. That my mother did not yield to this feeling, but continued her
labours, an often affecting occupation, until it was completed, was among many instances of the inward strength and composure which she ever retained in spite of much nervous affliction. (29)
29 Again, Edith underestimates Coleridge’s agency in choosing to take up this work. In fact, she was challenged by it and quite possibly received some pleasure from it. Besides that, with her early editorial experience and extensive learning, she was better equipped than her husband to be her father’s caretaker. 100 Edith characterizes this choice of preservation or destruction of “old memories” and “painful associations” as a difficult one. Edith recognizes that true consolation was impossible for her mother because she chose to preserve and destroy, to engage with her father’s remains in public literary culture and to write and rewrite memories of death in personal letters. Because her work centered on undertaking, through both her editorial efforts and her epistolary deathbed testimonials, Coleridge’s mourning kept her working as long as she could count herself a survivor. What the public does not read beyond the letters written before her marriage are excerpts from her journals, which Edith includes in the unpublished memoir. Edith realized that near the end of her mother’s life, her mother began communicating with the dead by addressing them through her journal. This entry, included in the unpublished memoir, functions as a sort of letter to those she hoped to join: My father, unseeing, speculative, imaginative father, where now is your spirit? Hartley, more beloved, though lesser object of admiring wonder, where is thy dear spirit? My mother, ever most near and dear, guardian of my weakly childhood and tender, mournful girlhood, where are thou? My honored Uncle Southey, Wordsworth, admired and affectionately regarded, Dora and Edward Quillinan, am I going to you? Henry, my dearest friend admiring husband, whom I could please ten times more, I fancy than ever before, could we both meet again
in health and strength shall I behold thee again? (34) In publishing her mother’s letters, Edith worked to reunite the dead in a collection where readers, the living, would be eavesdropping. She also gave her mother’s words a permanent place in this reunion. It was a work in which Edith could memorialize her mother and reunite her with the past and present. For Edith herself, the memoir must have brought together a family long after her brother’s death. In another unpublished family
101 memoir, Edith wrote about her solitary position as survivor but she concludes, “These things are too far off now for any sadness.”30 Thus it was that Coleridge’s daughter Edith looked to the past and recovered her losses. Like her mother, she engaged in the same acts of preservation and destruction in putting together her mother’s letters so that future generations would know her mother. Edith ends her introduction to the Memoir and Letters with a letter written by Aubrey De Vere to herself that begins, “I rejoice to hear…that a portion of your mother’s letters will be published soon” (ML 64). He goes on to describe “her high literary powers,” her “great and various” talents, and the “certain gentleness and modesty which belong to real genius” (65-66). Even with these letters, however, “how little will be known of her”; “Something they will guess of her mind, but it is only a more fortunate few who can know her yet higher gifts—those that belong to the heart and moral being. If they have a loss which is theirs only, they too have remembrances which none can share with them” (66). De Vere wisely reminds readers that no collection of letters can reveal everything about a person, that with time, even those who knew the deceased take their memories with them when they die. As Coleridge’s remaining child and biographer, Edith could only acknowledge herself as one of the living who “lived with her in habits of daily intimacy, and depended on her wholly for guidance, affection, and support. To such a one memory is almost a religion” (67). Even though Edith’s memoir of her mother was never published, she put her memorial to paper, preserved it, and saw to it that someone would keep it after her death.
30 “Some recollections of Henry Nelson Coleridge and his family, by his daughter”; AmsS/draft [13pp]; AmsS [15pp] April 2, 1910.
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Chapter 3: “Labour is the only radical cure for rooted sorrow”: Writing and Rewriting Grief in Charlotte Brontë’s Letters
In a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell dated 27 August 1850, Charlotte Brontë wrote about reading Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Writing from Haworth, where she lived with her father as the sole surviving child of Patrick and Maria Brontë, Charlotte had spent the past year in mourning for all three of her remaining siblings who had survived
childhood, Branwell, Emily, and Anne.1 In that year, Tennyson’s memorial to his friend, Arthur Hallam, was published on June 1, just days after the first anniversary of Anne’s death on May 28, 1849. Charlotte Brontë was not able to finish reading Tennyson’s
elegy. To Gaskell, she admits to closing the book at “about half-way” (2:457).2 Charlotte Brontë found In Memoriam to be three things: “It is beautiful; it is mournful; it is monotonous” (2:457). The feelings, she argues in the letter, “bear, in their utterance, the stamp of truth, yet if Arthur Hallam had been somewhat nearer Alfred Tennyson—his brother instead of his friend—I should have distrusted this rhymed and measured and printed document of grief” (2:457). For Brontë, this “printed document of grief” was too tidy a thing to accommodate such messy emotions. Perhaps thinking of her own losses, she wondered to Gaskell, “What change the lapse of years may work—I do not know—but it seems to me that bitter sorrow, while recent, does not flow out in verse”
(2:457).3 The loss of a blood relative, a sibling, was for Brontë something that could not
1 Branwell died on September 24, 1848. Emily died on December 19, 1848. Anne, who was ill throughout the spring, died in May of 1849. 2 Throughout the chapter, I use Margaret Smith’s three-volume edition of Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her system of identification. All dates come from her edition; all dates in brackets were identified through envelopes or postmarks. 3 In her biography of Charlotte Brontë, A Passionate Life, Lyndall Gordon also mentions Charlotte Brontë’s reading of In Memoriam. She writes that Brontë differs from Tennyson in that she would not have been stuck “in helpless melancholy;” instead, “she preferred a mind like George Sand’s which ‘disastrous experience teaches without weakening or too much disheartening’ so that the longer you live, the better you 103 be articulated easily. She had lost three siblings within the course of one year (1848-49), and a year later, on 27 August 1850, that sorrow was too bitter, too fresh to put into words for public consumption. For the time being, or at least for another month, Brontë would keep her grief private.4 Only a couple of days after writing her critique of Tennyson, Brontë’s publisher informed her that he would be reprinting Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. It was suggested that Brontë write the preface and edit her sisters’ poems and “literary remains.” Brontë would have to create her own document of grief for the public. Not surprisingly, then, the “Notice” goes to great lengths to shape public opinion of her sisters, to redirect criticism of their works and lives, and to rehabilitate their reputations from coarse and unrefined women writers into writers defined by the circumstances of their isolated upbringing. In fact, Charlotte Brontë’s memoir of her sisters and her questionable editorial decisions have been a prickly issue for critics, with some even claiming that “her sisters would have been infuriated by Brontë’s unwarranted interference in their work; it
was on par with her many attempts to organize them during their lives” (Barker 657).5 Granted, Charlotte Brontë did rearrange and rewrite her sisters’ poems and she was both dismissive of their works as well as willing to manipulate their personas; however, I argue that Brontë’s depiction of her sisters and pained dismissal of their works had as much to do with grief as the desire to reshape their reputations.6 Writing the
grow’” (Gordon 224-5). My chapter will focus on how Charlotte worked her way out of “helpless melancholy” through her letters. 4 Tennyson took seventeen years to write In Memoriam after Hallam’s death in 1833. It was published by Edward Moxon in June of 1850 anonymously, and Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate on November 19 after Wordsworth’s death in April of that year. Although everyone knew that Tennyson wrote the elegy, he never published a version with his name on the title page during his lifetime. 5 Nicola Thompson and Barbara Lloyd-Evens are also critical of Charlotte’s editorial work. Conversely, Susan R. Bauman argues that while Charlotte does change lines of her sisters poetry, she at least brings to the public poems that otherwise would have been lost or ignored. 6 Bauman argues that Brontë’s goal in writing the Notice was to “shame” critics (23) and that “Charlotte confronts the dual challenges of her sisters’ gender and notoriety by creating a compelling portrait of two women who were exemplary in life and death” (24). Because Brontë “did not like the depiction of her 104 “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell” forced Brontë to confront the limits of the printed page to contain a subject only previously written about in letters. While she struggled to complete literary projects, Brontë had to confront not only her grief but also her status as someone truly solitary yet increasingly known. After the publication of Shirley in October of 1849, she could no longer hide the woman behind the pen name “Currer Bell,” and by the spring of 1851 not only was her identity revealed, news of the deaths of her siblings, Emily and Anne, had also become known. Brontë’s narrative of loss was made public, and she would eventually have to answer that public. But in that time between Anne’s death and becoming known, Brontë could write about her life and the deaths around her in letters to both her friend Ellen and the outside, literary world in London of which she was fast becoming a member Correspondence had always been a lifeline for Charlotte Brontë. From her earliest days in school at Roe Head, Brontë valued her correspondence with friends, particularly her correspondence with Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. Her letters later became an important tool for writing about desire. Her surviving correspondence with Monsieur Heger marks an important exercise in how Brontë would later write about passion in her
fiction.7 The letters, more than any other written document, provided a place for Brontë to articulate her grief. Most importantly, correspondence allowed Brontë, during her bereavement, the liberty to comfortably situate herself between the worlds of the living and the dead as well as the known and the obscure. Maria Frawley argues that after her siblings’ deaths Brontë was “[p]ositioned between the dead and the dying…emotionally
sisters as “coarse, uncultured men,” she appealed to the public’s expectations for women in characterizing her sisters’ lives and deaths. 7 In her biography of Charlotte Brontë, A Passionate Life, Lyndall Gordon describes how Brontë’s creative life began not just in childhood writings with her siblings but also in letters. Gordon views Charlotte Brontë’s correspondence with Heger as an act of creation, not one of desperation where she could try out her voice on an “imagined audience.” I disagree that it was just a dramatic exercise; however, I do think distance made it easier for her to articulate her passion. 105 immobilized in a house oddly marked by the presence of what is absent, her family”(175). This chapter explores how Charlotte Brontë articulated grief in her letters. The letters became a place where she could enact a cure for her “great sorrow” through a determination to work. The previous chapter on Sara Coleridge illustrates how letters created a space for Coleridge to practice and write her own death. Charlotte Brontë did not use her letters to this end. Instead, Brontë tried to write her way out of death. The letters, I argue, allow her to survive bereavement and make sense of a world without those closest to her. The letters became a space to manage both her solitude and grief enough to allow her to write, to give her grief a public face in the novels of Shirley and Villette, where, especially in the latter, mourning is anything but “a rhymed and measured and printed document of grief” (2: 457). While this chapter does not address in full the depictions of grief in Shirley and Villette, it does consider letters as proving grounds for
the treatment of grief in her fiction.8 I focus, in particular, on the letters written after the deaths of her siblings, from the summer of 1849 to the writing of her sisters’ “Biographical Notice” in the fall of 1850. This writing can be identified as autothanatography because it provides a model of the Brontë family narrative of death for Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë’s first biographer, as well as for future writers. Many writers and readers tend to dwell on Brontë’s morbidity. Robert Keefe, in his dramatically titled Charlotte Brontë’s World of Death (1979), argues that Brontë centered her life on death, “its pall a filter through which she saw all of existence” (3). He even claims that Brontë “willed her own death as effectually as if she had consciously thought it out”; “the death fit the life as if it had been arranged by a fine
8 Kate E. Brown’s “Catastrophe and the City: Charlotte Brontë as Urban Novelist” sees Villette as illustrative of “the experience of catastrophe and the impediments to mourning” in which “the apprehension of grief” and the experience of loss occur “as an affliction of time for which the city is a spatial correlate” (351). 106 artist” (42).9 Keefe, even as he acknowledges Brontë’s work as inspired by grief, fails to consider letters and art as a common response to grief—specifically, the need to make sense of one’s life and loss through narrative. Even as Brontë tried to write her way out of death during her great bereavement, writing about her grief kept her connected to the dead as she tried to distinguish herself from them. While Sara Coleridge and Alice James use their letters to write about their impending deaths, Brontë does not and even avoids the subject when her correspondents bring it up. Narratives created from bereavement, because they try to make sense of a world bereft of what made the world familiar, are necessarily repetitive and reflect grief at a specific point in time. This chapter charts the course of Brontë’s grief through letters. First, I consider how Brontë used letters to confront the solitude of bereavement immediately after Anne’s death. In the second and third sections, I argue that Brontë’s letters on death outline a strategy for bereavement that depends on correspondence where she can separate her personal and professional life and where she can manage grief as a series of departures and returns. Ultimately, letters constitute part of her strategy to use work as cure for deep grief. I conclude that while Brontë fails in producing a published memorial to her sisters, she succeeds in doing so though her letters. In looking at Brontë’s correspondence after the deaths of her siblings and during her recovery from their loss, we can see how letters enabled Brontë to write about her
bereavements and how she came to measure her management of grief by her ability to articulate it. Ultimately, Brontë’s mourning correspondence, though about the deaths of others, becomes part of a narrative of death that would eventually include her. In the end, all writing about the deaths of others is a meditation on one’s own demise.
9 While Keefe acknowledges that many people lost family members to illness during this time, he argues that her “drive” to create art from her bereavement made her unique. 107 “HOME IS NOT THE HOME IT USED TO BE”10
After Anne Brontë died at Scarborough on May 28, 1849, Brontë did not return immediately to Haworth. Instead, she and her friend Ellen continued on to Filey and Easton, just south of Scarborough, in Northern Yorkshire. While traveling, she wrote
William Smith Williams11 of her hopes to “bear up against the weight of the solitary life to come”; “I cannot help dreading the first experience of it—the first aspect of the empty rooms which once were tenanted by those dearest to my heart” (13 June 1849; 2: 221). Earlier in Brontë’s life, when Branwell, Emily, and Anne were still alive and inhabiting the rooms of the parsonage and after she returned to Haworth from Brussels in early 1844, she had the same feelings of displacement a year later, when she felt that “[t]here was a time when Haworth was a very pleasant place to me,” “but it is not so now—I feel as if we were all buried here” (24 March [1845]; 1: 385). Like many young people who leave home and return only to find that they no longer fit there, Brontë had outgrown Haworth parsonage. Five years later, Brontë would find these words as painful as they were true, but for a couple of weeks at least Brontë could delay that return and “wander a week or two on the east coast and only stop at lonely quiet places” (4 June 1849; 2: 216). Brontë’s cycle of grief would eventually depend on escapes from Haworth followed by tortured returns.
Brontë did not return to Haworth until June 21, three weeks after Anne’s death. While she had her friend Ellen to comfort her, Brontë still needed to express her grief to someone else. Besides Ellen, Brontë confided in her publisher’s reader William Smith Williams, who, though an odd choice of confidant, was, she reasoned, “kind enough to
10 Letter to Ellen Nussey, 4 July [1849], Vol. 2, 228. 11 Smith Williams worked as a reader for Brontë ’s publisher Smith, Elder, and he became a regular correspondent of Brontë’s after responding to The Professor in July 1847. Smith, Elder rejected the manuscript for The Professor, but the response from Smith Williams encouraged Brontë to write and submit a three-volume work, Jane Eyre. He recommended Jane Eyre for publication. 108 take a certain interest in my afflictions”: “I feel it a sort of duty to tell you how I am able to sustain them” (13 June 1849; 2: 220). William Smith Williams (1800-1875) had been in the publishing business since the age of seventeen. Well-regarded by numerous nineteenth-century writers, he appears as a footnote in Keats’s biography as the one who “felt the ‘last kind pressure’ of the poet’s hand as Keats began his last journey in September 1820” (qtd. in Smith, “Biographical Notes,” 97). He became a reader at Smith, Elder in 1845 after working as a bookkeeper and reviewer for the Spectator and Athenaeum. While she found some comfort in her friend Ellen, to Williams she could directly appeal for a way out of her grief: Labour must be the cure, not sympathy—Labour is the only radical cure for rooted Sorrow—The society of a calm, serenely cheerful companion—such as Ellen—soothes pain like a soft opiate—but I find it does not probe or heal the wound—sharper more severe means are necessary to make a remedy. Total change might do much—where that cannot be obtained work is the best substitute. (25 June 1849; 2: 224) If Brontë found labor to be “the cure,” Williams was the ideal confidant for recovery. Williams had the double function of being both a friend and a colleague. Brontë realized that grief was a violent emotion and required a “sharper more severe means” that Ellen could not provide. While correspondence with Ellen could dull “pain like a soft opiate,”
Williams wrote “in the strain best tending to consolation” (2: 220). The difference between Ellen and Williams as correspondents can be described in the distinction between consolation and sympathy. Consolation involves “[t]he action of consoling, cheering, or comforting; the state of being consoled; alleviation of sorrow or mental
distress” (def. 1)12 whereas sympathy does not imply an action but a relationship in
12 Definitions come from the online edition of the OED. 109 which a “conformity of feelings, inclinations, or temperament… makes persons agreeable to each other” (def. 3a). Sympathy is a “quality or state of being thus affected by the suffering or sorrow of another; a feeling of compassion or commiseration” (def. 3c). Williams certainly felt sympathetic towards Brontë’s pain, he had enough distance to be able to respond objectively to it, while Ellen had a relationship with Brontë’s grief as a longtime family friend. As Smith, Elder’s reader, he was directly connected to her “work” cure. Years later she would find that work, while helpful, was no cure-all; in fact, she realized that there was no cure for deep grief. However, for the moment, writing letters to Williams allowed her to articulate her grief as Charlotte Brontë while still operating as Currer Bell, the author.13 At the same time, Brontë could communicate honestly about her anguish in a way that might be unattractive or disturbing to Ellen. Besides that, Ellen attended Anne’s deathbed; she had her own memories to process. Brontë wrote Williams a brief letter on May 30, two days after Anne’s death, to tell him “that Death was come, and come so gently” (2: 214). The letters written to Williams in the weeks between Anne’s death and Brontë’s return home contain numerous attempts at narratives of loss. The very articulation and rearticulation of loss aided her in her grief by helping her make sense of the events of the past year. On June 4, 1849, Brontë gave her first account of Anne’s death: “she died without severe struggle—resigned—trusting in God—thankful for release from a suffering life—deeply assured that a better existence lay before her” (2: 216). She concludes, “I let Anne go to God and felt He had a right to her” (2: 216). Brontë did not have such an easy time with her memories of Emily’s final days; however, Anne’s death and Brontë’s acceptance of it reminded Brontë of Emily’s death, which she
13 Lyndall Gordon characterizes the 1848-1849 season of illness and death in the Brontë household for Charlotte and connects it to her identity of herself as dutiful daughter and sister and emerging author: “With Anne’s progressing consumption, not helped by Papa’s dread of sickrooms, Charlotte wondered if she could ever be Currer Bell again” (186). 110 could not accept: “I could hardly let Emily go—I wanted to hold her back then—and I want her back hourly now” (2: 216). She compares Anne, who “from her childhood seemed preparing for an early death,” to Emily, whose “spirit seemed strong enough to bear her to fullness of years” (2: 216). Wanting to “save papa the anguish of the return and a third funeral,” Brontë buried Anne’s ashes in Scarborough where “they rest apart from the others” (2: 216). Like Anne buried away from the family, Brontë stood outside of this narrative of loss as the survivor, and Brontë’s guilt as a survivor complicated her struggle to place herself at home among the dead: “Papa has now me only—the weakest—the puniest—least promising of his six children—Consumption has taken the whole five” (2: 216). She wondered at her survival, why “younger and far better than I are snatched from [life] with projects unfulfilled” (2: 216). Brontë’s project would be to find ways to manage and articulate her grief, to help her understand “Why life is so blank, brief and bitter” (2: 216). Despite her despair, Brontë assures her correspondent, “No one need be anxious about me…. Friends and acquaintances seem to think this the worst time of suffering—they are sorely mistaken—Anne reposes now—what have the long desolate hours of her patient pain and fast decay been?” (2: 216). Her only consolations, it seemed, were the fact of Anne’s good death and the act of retelling it to a consoling reader. Even though it takes place through the medium of letters, Brontë’s bereavement is
a social one that functions on an exchange of sympathy or, even better, consolation for her narrative of grief. In this way, her letters on death are collaborative because they depend on a response. Kate E. Brown summarizes Brontë’s correspondence in the time between Branwell’s death in September 1848 until Anne’s death in May 1849 as depicting “the awful rhythms of emergency: the alertness to signs of incipient disaster that never constitutes preparedness; the frantic efforts to frame one’s mind, as if
111 catastrophe might be forestalled by anticipating it; the sudden, estranging stillness of death” (351). Brontë had to work herself out of the habit of these emotions; it was hard for her to do so at Haworth, an environment filled with the residue of death. In order to make sense of her domestic catastrophe, she had to write and rewrite her narrative of loss in order to understand her role as a survivor. The letter provided a place for her to re- experience grief while she had to learn again what it meant to be at home. Brontë gives her most complete early narrative of loss in her letter to Williams on 13 June 1849. She relates more details of Anne’s death and mentions how the doctor, “a stranger,” “wondered at her fixed tranquility of spirit,” remarking that “in all his experience he had seen no such death-bed” (2: 220). Even with another witness to back her claims of Anne’s “good” death, Brontë finds “it but half consoles to remember this calm——there is a piercing pain in it” (2: 220). Whereas, days earlier, Brontë could easily let Anne go to God, it was now not so simple; she wondered whether Anne’s death was really less sad than “Emily turning her dying eyes reluctantly from the pleasant sun” (2: 220). Again, she repeats that “life seems bitter, brief—blank”; “[t]here must be a heaven or we must despair” (2: 220). Even more comforting than the promise of heaven for Brontë is that “these two have left in their memories a noble legacy” (2: 220). She could turn to the past and her memories to replace what is absent: “Were I quite solitary in the world—bereft even of Papa—there is something in the past I can love intensely
and honour deeply” (2: 220) She had confidence that this memory “is something which cannot change—which cannot decay—which immortality guarantees from corruption” (2: 220). These memories and her grief were deeply personal and entirely hers; even if she had no one, her memories would be the only things she could not lose. Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey in their study of death and material culture describe the management of grief and the need to create a coherent picture of the deceased. Here, the
112 memory is certainly not a reliable source for accuracy; rather, remembrance of the deceased “is the process through which the shattered, displaced and troubled memory is apprehended and subjected to attempts at management” (Hallam and Hockey 108). Even if these memories, “which immortality guarantees from corruption,” cannot “decay,” they can be re-remembered and rewritten and rejected in favor of other remains. Brontë writes and rewrites the narrative of Anne’s death in order to make it fit into a more comprehensible family death narrative. In addition to recounting her most immediate losses in this letter, Brontë gives a brief, yet complete, account of her family’s narrative of loss in which she begins to place grief and loss in temporal terms. In the following quote, Brontë seems to be marking time in terms of loss in which the past self, one who felt she would not survive such great loss, meets the present self who could and did survive: A year ago—had a prophet warned how I should stand in June 1849—how stripped and bereaved—had he foretold the autumn—the winter, the spring of sickness and suffering to be gone through—I should have thought—this can never be endured. It is over. Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams—gone as Maria and Elizabeth were twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm—and closed their glazed eyes—I have seen them buried one by one. (2: 220)
In addition to expressing her grief, Brontë constructs a brief account of her losses, and she begins with her oldest siblings, Maria and Elizabeth, who died when Brontë was a small child. By June, 13, 1849, this letter was Brontë’s most “public” document of her many losses. Though brief, she begins the work of constructing an epistography of grief. Brontë’s correspondence, her narrative of grief, functions as autothanatography because sooner or later she, too, will figure into that narrative of loss. In the opening pages of The
113 Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell creates a panoramic description of the village of Keighly that eventually zooms into tight focus on the memorial marker in Haworth church. Gaskell lists the names and remarks, …when the first memorials were written down, the survivors, in their fond affection, thought little of the margin and verge they were leaving for those who were still living. But as one dead member of the household follows another fast to the grave, the lines are pressed together, and the letters become small and cramped. (58-9) Brontë’s words to Ellen, “I feel as if we were all buried here” (1: 385), after her return from Brussels four years earlier, anticipate the iconic image of the Haworth graveyard, a location that would later be essential to telling the family story.14 When Brontë returned home from her vacation to the sea, she felt a more severe disconnection from her home. She wanted to walk through the doors by herself, without Ellen, because, as she explained to Williams, “it would be better to face the desolation at once—later or sooner the sharp pang must be experienced” (25 June 1849; 2: 224). She described the experience of coming to a home without her sisters in a letter to Ellen written on June 23, two days after returning: I shut the door—I tried to be glad that I was come home—I have always been glad before—except once—even then I was cheered but this time joy was not to be the sensation. I felt that the house was all silent—the rooms were all empty—I remembered where the three were laid—in what narrow dark dwellings—never were they to reappear on earth. (2: 222)
14 As early at 1855, people were getting the details of the story incorrect. According to Matthew Arnold’s poem “Haworth Churchyard,” the bodies of the Brontë siblings were in grass-covered graves of the churchyard when actually the churchyard was so crowded that many of the markers cover the ground horizontally. The Brontës were not buried in the churchyard but in the family vault, and Anne was buried in Scarborough. 114 Her home was no longer hers; it belonged to the dead. If Haworth once held the promise of her home and a family to whom she could return, it now no longer had the ability to “cheer” or bring joy. The words “silent” and “empty” characterize the space of the home, which, for Brontë, recalls memories of her siblings’ graves, those “narrow dark dwellings.” Similarly, the home is this “narrow dark dwelling,” a record of memory where the dead outnumber the living, where she, the living, does not fit. Brontë gave herself an even narrower time frame to grieve: “So the sense of desolation and bitterness took possession of me—the agony that was to be undergone—and was not to be avoided came on—I underwent it & passed a dreary evening and night and a mournful morrow— to-day I am better (2: 222). Brontë wonders to Ellen how her life will be now that all her siblings are dead, seeing her own life as something separate from herself: “I do not know how life will pass” (2:222). Brontë’s grief kept memories of her siblings alive, and she used letters to contain her narrative of death, thus giving her grief a material manifestation. As mentioned in the introduction, this narrative, defined by Tony Walter as “durable biography,” allows the bereaved to make memories of the dead a part of their lives through talking with others about the dead. For the Victorians, this conversation included letters. The loss of those closest to Brontë is ultimately the story of her own death, but as long as she lived, she would have to resist burying herself with the dead. Brontë used her almost weekly correspondence with Williams in the summer of 1849 to help her recognize the dead while attempting to integrate their memories without their becoming a burden. To mourn successfully, or “faithfully,” to use Jacques Derrida’s term, she would have to recognize the otherness of the dead while still interiorizing them. In mentioning her sisters Maria and Elizabeth, she forces herself to remember an old grief as a way to deal with new ones. In terms of durable biography, bereavement requires that all deaths fit into a
115 continuous narrative. Linell Secomb, in her essay, “Autothanatography,”15 talks about the role of the survivor. The survivor carries the death within her, dwells with or lives, that death: The survivor does not simply elude death, but having been confronted with its alterity (perhaps the most strange, foreign and unknowable) is now responsible to death. The survivor carries death within, like a promise to the future—a memoire or memento—a promise and a warning of the death to come. (42) Unlike Sara Coleridge, who gives blow-by-blow deathbed accounts, it was enough for Brontë to deal with the sheer magnitude of her losses, to bury her dead together if only in text. While Brontë carried this responsibility to the dead, she still wanted to separate herself from it. No matter what she did, she came to be connected to those deaths. Brontë struggled to write about their deaths because the memory was still too painful for words, especially while she remained at Haworth, where memories of the dying coexisted with the details of life. As these memories possessed Brontë, she came to embody the promise of death. Instead of the sisters discussing their latest projects, she could hear only her own thoughts, ones recalling their final days, “remembering their sufferings and what they said and did and how they looked in mortal affliction” (23 June 1849; 2: 222). While during the days, “[s]olitude may be cheered,” the evenings, when she and her siblings “used to assemble in the dining-room,” told a different story (2: 222). Brontë is forced to sit these nights alone, “necessarily I am silent” (2: 222). Gaskell later used this image of the sisters pacing “the room backwards and forwards, up and down” while discussing their works in her biography to vivid advantage (166).16 Even as Brontë thought of work
15 Secomb’s essay uses the works of philosophers Maurice Blanchot and Sarah Kofman and of the novelist Kim Scott to illustrate the genre of autothanatography in which survival is not achieved as a separation from death but an internalization of it. 16 Gaskell emphasizes Brontë’s loneliness in doing this “walk alone from old accustomed habit, round and round the desolate room, thinking sadly upon ‘days that were no more’” (166). 116 as a cure for her grief, that work did not remove her from her sisters. With her sisters, work was collaborative; therefore, she had to find a new way to work in addition to all the things she had to relearn. The first task confronting Brontë that summer was redefining her sense of home and how she lived in it. On June 25, 1849, she wrote to Williams for the first time since her return to Haworth and provided an assessment of her environment: “I call it home still—much as London would be called London if an earthquake should shake its streets to ruins” (2: 223-4). Like any survivor after a disaster, Brontë confronted the long task of rebuilding. She recognizes her bitter tone, “let me not be ungrateful: Haworth is still a home for me, and not quite a ruined or desolate home either” (2: 224). Still, she could not escape memories of their deaths: I dream of them—and I cannot recall them as they were in health—still they appear to me in sickness and suffering—Still my nights were worse after the first shock of Branwell’s death—they were terrible then—and the impressions experienced on waking were at that time such as we do not put into language. Worse seemed at hand than was yet endured—in truth worse awaited us. (2: 224) Brontë could not internalize the dead because that act required that she integrate her memories of illness and death with her memories of the dead as they lived when healthy. Her grief, beginning with Branwell, was “such we do not put into language.” Brontë clearly felt uncomfortable with the force of her anguish. The letter itself provided a space for Brontë to find the language to articulate her grief in her letters to Williams.17 Brontë’s workings out of grief through the language of her letters reach their clearest articulation
17 Lyndall Gordon emphasizes the importance of letters for Brontë in finding her voice. Gordon focuses in particular on Brontë’s letters to Heger as “not quite a real correspondence … reflect[ing] the correspondent”; rather, “it was more an invented correspondence, close to an imaginative act” (118). Brontë could try out her voice and her working ideas on love and passion on “an imagined audience” (Gordon 137). While I agree that she does find great freedom in correspondence to stretch her voice, she did write to Heger, a man she greatly desired. 117 in Villette (1853), where like passion, grief can be a violent emotion. Throughout the summer, her letters remained angry, and in them, she unashamedly admits to anger, especially at night, when “something in my heart revolts against the burden of solitude— the sense of loss and want grows almost too much for me. I am not good or amiable in such moments—I am rebellious” (2: 224). Brontë surrendered to all the emotions of grief no matter how negative. She realized that, unfeminine though it may have been, she had to endure these feelings: “All this bitterness must be tasted—perhaps the palate will grow used to the draught in time and find its flavour less acrid—this pain must be undergone— its poignancy—I trust—will be blunted one day” (2: 224). Most remarkably, Charlotte Brontë discovered that the more she grieved, the better she understood how grief worked. Correspondence with Williams also provided Brontë with “subjects which compel me, in order to give a coherent answer, to quit for a moment my habitual train of thought” (2: 226). His letters about his daughters brought her back into the world of the living, into a world of health, “the world where other people live—where I lived once. Theirs are cheerful images—as you present them: I have no wish to shut them out” (3 July 1849; 2: 226). On July 3, 1849, Brontë wrote to Williams of the changing function of their correspondence after her siblings’ deaths: In those days your letters often served as a text for comment—a theme for talk: now—I read them—return them to their covers and put them away. Johnson—I
think—makes mournful mention somewhere of the pleasure that accrues…when we are ‘solitary, and cannot impart it.’ Thoughts—under such circumstances— cannot grow to words, impulses fail to ripen to actions. (2: 227) Again, Brontë characterizes her grief as difficult to articulate. Just as she did not trust the “measured” depiction of grief in Tennyson’s poetry, she finds grief paralyzing because she mourns those with whom she would have shared such language. Still, Brontë can act
118 even if, as she writes, “impulses fail to ripen to action”; she is thankful that she has the “courage to adopt a career” (2: 227). Without action, without a career, she wonders how she would survive: “I should have no world at all”; she would be “the raven, weary of surveying the deluge and without an ark to return to” (2: 227). Almost a month after Anne’s death, Brontë could find “something like a hope and motive sustains me still” (2: 227). She wrote Ellen the day after on July 4, “I get on as well as I can. Home is not the home is used to be; that you may well conceive—but so far—I get on” (2: 228). For Brontë, the ability “to get on” was enough. By mid July, Brontë could assess her life without her sisters. Her correspondence illustrates the process of “getting on” by charting the transition from anticipating what her life will be like to writing about what her life is. To Ellen, she does not want to talk about herself; rather, “I like better to go out of myself and talk of something more cheerful” (2: 230). On 14 July 1849, Brontë wrote to Ellen of her cycle of grief, that each day is a struggle: My life is what I expected it to be—sometimes when I wake in the morning—and know that Solitude, Remembrance and Longing are to be almost my sole companions all day through—that at night I shall go to bed with them, that they will long keep me sleepless—that next morning I shall wake to them again. (2: 230)
Solitude, Remembrance, and Longing become part of Brontë’s routine of grief; they replace her sisters. Solitude reminds Brontë of what is absent while remembrance can at least fill that absence by internalizing the dead. Longing is an extension of both solitude and memory. She desires what once existed in the past—the company of her sisters. Finding companions in abstractions resembles Brontë’s narrative strategy in Jane Eyre when Jane consults with Memory and Reason. Likewise, Lucy Snowe in Villette
119 communicates with Imagination and Reason. Similar to Jane and Lucy, Brontë lived in silence and considered her thoughts, her only daily source of “real time” communication, as her sole companions. Brontë determined to hold on to hope almost as if the writing of it firmed her resolve: “But crushed I am not—yet: nor robbed of elasticity nor of hope nor quite of endeavor—Still I have some strength to fight the battle of life. I am aware and can acknowledge I have many comforts—many mercies—still I can get on” (2: 230). The repetition of the phrase “get on “ as “still I can get on” emphasizes her determination to do so. As much as she tried to put on a brave face Brontë acknowledged the difficult reality of her life and the magnitude of her loss: “But I do hope and pray—that never may you or any one I love, be placed as I am. To sit in a lonely room—the clock ticking loud through a still house—and to have open before the mind’s eye the record of the last year with its shocks, sufferings losses—is a trial” (2: 230-31). Brontë views her loss in terms of “time” with the ticking clock reminding her of what happened within the past year; it also reminds her that time moves on while she remains in the past. As mentioned in the introduction, Dana Luciano finds that grief for nineteenth century moved at its own tempo, one slower that linear time. While Brontë acknowledges the force of mourning on time, she does not find it comforting. In her study of Villette, Kate E. Brown argues that the novel “represents an affliction of time” and “insists on both the necessity to mourn
and the opportunity of doing so in the absence of a responsive social world” (352).; however, I argue that Brontë does find a responsive social world through letters, albeit one that often disappoints her. But like Brontë’s letters, Villette “depicts the aspect of mourning that clings to a loss by refusing substitution—the resistance to mourning within mourning—and it describes the clinging to be both grotesque and necessary in a world without adequate substitutes for loved ones” (Brown 352). She resists consolation
120 through substitution for her losses and instead documents her mourning in letters. Brontë’s letters illustrate the more productive and creative potential of negative emotion. For Brontë, finding a substitute for her siblings would mean to lose them permanently. Grief allowed a continued connection to the dead by dwelling on that loss in her letters. However, she realized that grief could be unhealthy when functioning at the expense of living. Part of grief, as Brontë learned, is learning to balance the two. Perhaps realizing that Brontë needed company, Williams suggested that she entertain a visit from one of his daughters; however, Brontë declined, arguing that such a visit “would not suit…the young person whom I might request to come and bury herself in the hills of Haworth” (26 July 1849; 2: 232). Her excuse to Williams reveals her acceptance of what Haworth had become: a tomb. She argues that it would not do for a young woman “to take a church and stony churchyard for her prospect—the dead silence of a village parsonage—in which the tick of the clock is heard all day long—for her atmosphere—and a grave, silent spinster for her companion. I would not like to see youth thus immured” (2: 232). The word “immured” is significant; it suggests being walled in, imprisoned, entombed. Brontë found herself buried not only by grief but walled in by time and its interminable passage. Not wanting to bury another person with her, she finds that “[m]y work is my best companion—hereafter I look for no great earthly comfort except what congenial occupation can give” (2: 232). Brontë allowed herself to grow
accustomed to solitude—something she found necessary for work anyway. But, her solitude, her grief, was something she could not share. For the time being, there could be no substitute besides what her work could provide. In determining to live through her loss, Brontë, as shown in the next section, uses letters as tools for writing her way out of grief. But in order for her “work cure” to be successful, Brontë has to separate her
121 professional identity as Currer Bell from her identity as Charlotte Brontë, the bereaved sister.
“IF I LIVE…”18
With the idea of work as her consolation, Brontë finished Shirley on August 29, 1849. She sent a satirical essay to Williams answering her critics titled “Word to the
Quarterly” to act as the preface for Shirley.19 Earlier in the month on August 16, she wrote to Williams, responding specifically to James Lorimer’s damning review of Jane Eyre in The North British Review that compared the work to Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: “The critic did not know that those writers had passed from Time and from Life” (2: 235). She despairs that she has “read no review since either of my sisters died which I could have wished them to read—none even which did not render the thought of their departure more tolerable to me” (2: 235). While critics were not aware of Brontë’s recent history or the deaths of Emily and Anne (still known at that time as Ellis and Acton), she felt it “cruel” “[t]o hear myself praised beyond them”; “to hear qualities ascribed to them so strangely the reverse of their real characteristics was scarce supportable—It is sad even now—but they are so remote from Earth—so safe from its turmoils—I can bear it better now” (2: 235-6). The only comfort was that her sisters could not read them. The satirical preface, while directed entirely towards The Quarterly
and its review of Jane Eyre, was clearly written with other negative reviews in mind. It was no surprise, then, that Williams, in order to soften the blow of the preface’s rejection, suggested that Brontë write explicitly about the deaths of her sisters. She answered him two days later with a refusal to change her preface into one that would appeal to public sympathy: “I can shed no tears before the public, nor utter any groan in
18 Letter to William Smith Williams, [?31 August 1849], Vol. 2, 246 19 The preface is in response to a review of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair by Elizabeth Rigby in the December 1848 Quarterly Review. 122 the public ear. The deep, real tragedy of our domestic experience is yet terribly fresh in my mind and memory. It is not a time to be talked about to the indifferent; it is not a topic for allusion to in print” ([?31 Aug. 1849]; 2: 245). Brown argues that Brontë’s refusal illustrates a hopeless kind of mourning that by not producing tears, or “legible signs,” can provide “neither comprehension of loss nor alleviation of grief” and therefore no “closure”: “the arrest of expression and the hopelessness of consolation thus implied surely reflect on grief itself which is perhaps necessarily experienced as incommunicable and interminable” (353). “Closure” is a modern, therapeutic term that can hardly be applied to a conception of grief in the mid-nineteenth century before Freud; however, its application does have some relevance in that it illustrates the changing functions of sympathy and consolation. Early Freudian ideas about melancholy and grief focus on the bereaved “moving on” with their lives by completely separating themselves from the dead without internalizing them and finding a substitute. In this case, complete closure, if “consolation” or sympathy does its work to allow someone to move on, destroys the dead, while grief keeps the dead with the living. If “mourning—at least in a first moment—consists in interiorizing the other and recognizing that if we are to give the dead anything it can now be only in us, the living” (Brault and Naas 9), then Brontë found a way to interiorize the dead by seeing herself as other from Currer Bell. Her separation of professional and personal selves allows her to both mourn as Charlotte
Brontë and work as Currer Bell. This section focuses on how this separation, which played itself out in letters, facilitated Brontë’s expression of grief while also allowing her to continue work on her novel Shirley. Letters, I argue, functioned not only as a space for her to act out these two identities but also as a place to preserve memories of the dead. In the preface, Charlotte Brontë, the sister-mourner, distances herself from her professional identity as much as possible. Instead, Currer Bell appears in the preface as a
123 character writing “a private and confidential letter to a friend”—it is a literary exercise, not a personal one in expressing and making sense of grief. She assures Williams that writing as Charlotte Brontë would be a mistake: “Believe me, my dear sir, ‘C. Brontë ’ must not here appear; what she feels or has felt is not the question—it is ‘Currer Bell’ who was insulted—he must reply” (2: 246). In order for her to work—to write and respond to her work as a professional—Brontë had to separate the mourning self from the writing self. Currer Bell did not grieve. Besides that, Brontë did not want judgment of her books swayed by her gender; nor did she want public sympathy to determine her readers’ judgments either. To support her argument that she should not write a biographical preface, Brontë comments on the practice of making private grief public. She finds it a “deplorable error in an author to assume the tragic tone in addressing the public about his own wrongs or griefs” (2: 246). She expresses a cynical view of the public and its interest in literary figures and celebrities: “What does the public care about him as an individual? His wrongs are its sport; his griefs would be a bore. What we deeply feel is our own—we must keep it to ourselves” (2: 246). Brontë parallels the separation between Currer Bell and herself to her sisters’ identities: “Ellis and Acton Bell were, for me, Emily and Anne; my sisters—to me intimately near, tenderly dear—to the public they were nothing— beings speculated upon, misunderstood, misrepresented” (2: 246). While Brontë rejects,
for the moment, writing a preface that would include the story of her family and its grief, she does not entirely rule out the possibility of doing so in the future: “If I live, the hour may come when the spirit will move me to speak of them, but it is not come yet—“ (2: 246). The phrase “if I live” is a significant one. Winifred Gérin argues that even though Shirley might have been a better book “if Brontë had had the courage to put it aside completely and wait for the healing power of time” before writing, doing so “would be
124 tantamount to suicide; her will to live was almost dependent on the ability to work” (390). Part of this will to live, I argue, depended on her ability to separate Charlotte Brontë from Currer Bell. At least in her letters to Williams, both of those identities could be acknowledged and she could work out the terms of their mutual survival. Brontë’s “if I live” attitude had much to do with how she saw herself as a survivor and its contrast to how others saw her as fragile, a physical reminder of impending death. After all, a person’s status as a survivor is only finite. The chapter of Shirley, titled “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” has been recognized as the chapter Brontë resumed writing after Anne’s death. Caroline’s illness illustrates the potentially damaging effects of grief, of which Caroline claims, “is, and always has been, my worst ailment” (432). Lyndall Gordon writes that Brontë resumed writing Shirley shortly after Anne’s death, even before her return to Haworth, in order to “recount the wasting illness of Caroline and the dire effects of self-suppression” (193). Caroline’s mother, however, offers another perspective, one that attests to surviving and allowing grief to run its course: “the human heart can suffer. It can hold more tears than the ocean holds waters. We never know how deep—how wide it is, till misery begins to unbind her clouds, and fill it with rushing blackness” (Shirley 436). One line in the chapter, “The future sometimes seems to sob a low warning of the events it is bringing us” (Shirley 421), holds special significance in formulating how Brontë would eventually approach life. Almost in anticipation of the sadness to come and written most likely before Anne’s death and during her siblings’ illnesses, Brontë refers to grief earlier in the novel in Chapter 11, “Fieldhead”: People never die of love or grief alone; though some die of inherent maladies, which the tortures of those passions prematurely force into destructive action. The sound by nature undergo these tortures, and are racked, shaken, shattered: their
125 beauty and bloom perish, but life remains untouched. They are brought to a certain point of dilapidation; they are reduced to pallor, debility, and emaciation. People think, as they see them gliding languidly about, that they will soon withdraw to sickbeds, perish there, and cease from among the healthy and happy. This does not happen; they live on. (191) Brontë had a clear understanding that love and grief were closely tied; she wrote vividly about both subjects in her letters. Grief can make one ill, but grief, by itself, does not necessarily kill. Brontë viewed the experience of grief as inseparable from the body; she describes the movement of the bereaved as “gliding languidly about.” Languid suggests a quality brought on by a physical condition: “Faint, weak; inert from fatigue or weakness; wanting in vigour or vitality” (def. 1). Brontë used the word “languid” in a letter to Ellen Nussey written in February of 1850, months after publishing Shirley: “Now and then the silence of the house—the solitude of the room has pressed on me with a weight I found it difficult to bear—and Recollection has not failed to be as alert, poignant, obtrusive as other feelings were languid” (2: 346). For Brontë, then, languidness can refer to the physical condition of grief as well as the weakening of feelings unrelated to grief that are crushed underneath its burden. If the bereaved appeared “languid” to others, then Brontë would have to confront others viewing her the same way, especially when her identity became known along with the story of her family. As reflected through her creation
Caroline Helstone, Charlotte Brontë learned how to fight against being paralyzed by grief. Throughout the month of September, Brontë dealt directly with the issue of her identity and the conflicting roles of Currer Bell and Charlotte Brontë. If Brontë was not ready to speak of her grief publicly, neither was she ready to be known. In the middle of September, she wrote Williams, “I cannot sacrifice my incognito” ([?c.15 Sept. 1849]; 2:
126 254). Williams wanted to protect Brontë from being known, but her sisters’ publisher, T.
C. Newby, to whom Anne possibly revealed their names,20 had likely been spreading rumors of their real identities. Brontë admits that Newby “does know my real name. I wish he did not—but that cannot be helped—Meantime, though I earnestly wish to preserve my incognito, I live under no slavish fear of discovery—I am ashamed of nothing I have written—not a line” (19 Sept. 1849; 2: 256). With the knowledge of her identity soon to be made public, Brontë resolved both not to apologize for her own writing as well as to use labor, or writing, to combat her grief. Brontë could own the part of herself that was a writer; at that point, even as she tried to separate Currer Bell and Charlotte Brontë, it was really all she had left of the identity that she shared with her sisters. In a letter to Williams on 21 September 1849, she ties her resolution to write directly to the loss of her sisters: “The two human beings who understood me and whom I understood are gone: I have some that love me yet and whom I love without expecting or having a right to expect that they shall perfectly understand me: I am satisfied, but I must have my own way in the matter of writing” (21 Sept. 1849; 2: 260). Brontë prepared to alienate those who loved her with her writing; she did not expect complete understanding. In losing her sisters, Brontë found that her grief made her stronger, more willing to hold onto her writing: “The loss of what we possess nearest and dearest to us
in this world, produces an effect upon the character: we search out what we have yet left that can support, and when found, we cling to it with a hold of new-strung tenacity” (2:
20 In July of 1848, Anne and Charlotte had to visit London to show Charlotte’s publisher, Smith, Elder, that Acton, Ellis, and Currer Bell were all separate people. Newby, Anne and Emily’s publisher, misrepresented the authorship of Jane Eyre as Acton’s and The Tenant as Currer’s. Charlotte and Anne traveled to London to prove their separate identities to George Smith when Smith wondered why he was not publishing The Tenant after Newby tried to sell it under Currer’s name. 127 260). Influenced perhaps by her friend Mary Taylor,21 Brontë argues that it is not only necessary but also moral to take comfort in one’s gifts as well as profit from them; it would be immoral to waste them. Brontë could see that “[t]he faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking three months ago, its active exercise kept my head above water since—its results cheer me now—for I feel they have enabled me to give pleasure to others—I am thankful to God who gave me the faculty—and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift and to profit by its possession” (2: 261). As distressful as it may have been, this conflict seemed to have strengthened her identity enough to enable her to write her way out of death. Recovery, then, became an imaginative act of self- creation. By the first of November, she wrote Williams of her “fear that I no longer walk invisible” (1849; 2: 272). She needed that strength after some negative reviews of Shirley, but she attempted to put them in perspective, reasoning, “Were my Sisters now alive they and I would laugh over this notice—but they sleep” (2: 272). Without them, she writes, “I fear I really am not so firm as I used to be—nor so patient: whenever any shock comes, I feel that almost all supports have been withdrawn” (2: 272). Brontë, as survivor, decided to live a life of action; and if she could not have the support of her sisters, then she would try to find new sources of strength. Brontë did chose a life of action by “choosing” to both start a correspondence with Gaskell and to visit London and
stay with the Smiths.22 Brontë began corresponding with Elizabeth Gaskell on 17
21 In Mary Taylor’s Miss Miles (1890), the plot, set in 1830s Yorkshire during times of economic turmoil in the wool industry, focuses on how the female characters handle adversity with the most moral characters finding redemption and success through work and financial independence. Taylor often encouraged her friend to enjoy her success as well as to demand fair pay for it. Brontë and Mary likely corresponded on this subject, but Mary destroyed her letters. It took Mary Taylor her whole life to write this book, but she also published travel writings and early feminist essays. 22 On 19 November, Brontë struggled to accept an invitation from George Smith to visit his family in London because some friends who knew her as Charlotte Brontë would have to be introduced to Currer Bell, and she feared that her friends “would not understand the author” (289). But, she determined to spend some time with the Smiths and some with her friends. 128 November 1849. In her first letter, she asks her new correspondent to “not pity Currer Bell too much; there are thousands who suffer more than she” (2: 288). In order to describe her bereavement, she steps outside of herself and continues using the third- person: “dark days she has known; the worst, perhaps, were days of bereavement, but though CB is the survivor of most that were dear to her, she has one near relative still left, and therefore cannot be said to be quite along” (2: 288). This letter demonstrates Brontë’s ability to separate her personal and professional selves as well as her determination to be seen outside of her bereavement. Significantly, Brontë writes Williams two days later of her reaction to seeing her sisters’ pen names mentioned in the papers; her decision to travel to London is likewise emotionally painful. Unlike the letter to Gaskell, this one is not as light or as determined to put on a cheerful face. Seeing her sisters’ names is poignant: “Why does the pulse of pain beat in every pleasure—Ellis and Acton Bell are referred to—and where are they?”(19 Nov. 189; 2: 291). Brontë uses words to step outside of her grief, if only for a moment, to speak about it in culturally appropriate terms: “I will not repine. Faith whispers they are not in those graves to which imagination turns—the feeling, thinking, the inspired natures are beyond Earth—in a region more glorious. I believe them blessed. I think—I will think my loss has been their gain” (2: 291). For Brontë, imagination worked both ways; it could lift her out of her suffering and allow her to write, but it could also keep her tied to the dead and memories of illness. Clearly, Brontë continued to work on this idea of heavenly “gain” in the wake of earthly loss, but unlike Sara Coleridge, she did not find it so convincing. Moreover, it seems, she was beginning to tire of her grief. She asks her reader, Williams, “Does it weary you that I refer to them? If so—forgive me” (2: 291). Brontë found herself not only caught between the identities of Currer Bell
129 and Charlotte Brontë but also in a conflict with how her imagination facilitated her obligations to both the world of the living and the world of dead. As a survivor, she had a responsibility to the living texts of the dead writers, Ellis and Acton, and to the living memories of her dead sisters, Emily and Anne. In writing to both Gaskell and Williams before she left Haworth on November 29, she attempted to prepare herself for her looming trip to London where she would be both Charlotte Brontë and Currer Bell. Perhaps her letter to Ellen on November 22 sums up her struggle best: “what I am, it is useless to say—those whom it concerns feel and find it out. To all others I wish only to be an obscure, steady-going private character” (2: 293-94). When she came back from London, she would find that her grief operated as a series of departures and returns. The following section argues that Bronte’s letters throughout 1850 illustrate her growing understanding of how grief works. She came to realize that while she could write hew way out of death and mourning, many of her correspondents would keep in her that family narrative of loss.
“THE MEMORY OF ONE LOSS IS THE ANTICIPATION OF ANOTHER”23
Brontë returned to Haworth on December 15 from her travels in London, which filled her with anticipation for a fruitful correspondence with her new friends and acquaintances. She wrote Williams a couple of days after her return home:
…after the first sensations consequent on returning to a place more dumb and vacant than it once was—I am beginning to feel settled. I think the contrast with London does not make Haworth more desolate; on the contrary I have gleaned ideas, images, pleasant feelings—such as may cheer many a long winter evening. (19 Dec. 1849; 2: 312)
23 Letter to Ellen Nussey, 16 Aug. 1850; Vol. 2, 444. 130 The following month was a busy one of correspondence with people she met in London. However, the correspondence slowed, and she once again had to confront the desolation she thought she had filled with all the “ideas, images, pleasant feelings” from her London visit. While Brontë enjoyed her trip to London, she found the return to Haworth not any easier than her homecoming after Anne’s death. Brontë began to see that her grief
operated on a cycle of departures and returns.24 A change of scene did Brontë much good, but in coming home she had to confront a desolation as fresh as the one experienced after her return home from Scarborough. Brontë found the courage to travel outside of the home; she did enjoy the escape from her solitude, but all these trips were clouded by the solitary condition that awaited her. For much of the spring of 1850, Brontë wrote to Ellen about her continued feelings of solitude. She becomes “bitterly enraged” with her dependence on letters from London which she blames on the danger of “the mind to be quite alone” ([?16 Feb. 1850; 2: 347). Brontë’s cycle of grief involved her relationship with correspondence. The letter is a traveler; it comes like a visitor. The writer does not physically appear; rather, the writer visits from another time, the past, and from another place, one removed from the scene of the addressee (in this case, Haworth). Like “paying a visit,” a letter operates on a series of exchanges as well as on a sequence of departures, arrivals, and returns. Brontë comes to rely on her correspondence to take her out of her grief: “I cannot help feeling
something of the excitement of expectation when the post-hour comes and when day after day it brings nothing—I get low. This stupid, disgraceful, unmeaning state of things” (2: 347). Gaskell felt uncomfortable enough with Brontë’s dependence on letters to claim in
24 Tennyson recognizes this cycle of grief in the opening stanzas of “In Memoriam.” In an early critical essay, “The Structure of In Memoriam” (1910), A. C. Bradley shows how Tennyson arranged his poem through the passage of time, marked by three Christmas sections, that documents the lessening severity of grief. However, unlike Tennyson, these repetitions of homecomings did not lessen the grief for Charlotte Brontë. 131 The Life of Charlotte Brontë that Brontë did not let her expectations for letters interfere with her duty: Her life at Haworth was so unvaried that the postman’s call was the event of her day. Yet she dreaded the great temptation of centring all her thoughts upon this one time, and losing her interest in the smaller hopes and employments of the remaining hours. Thus she conscientiously denied herself the pleasure of writing letters too frequently, because the answers (when she received them) took the flavour out of the rest of her life; or the disappointment, when the replies did not arrive, lessened her energy for her home duties. (395) Gaskell, as she de-emphasizes the importance of letters, fails to recognize the extent to which grief was tied to Brontë’s letter writing beyond providing a respite from solitude. Drew Lamonica argues that writing Villette gave Brontë “artistic control over her memories of death” (184).25 Furthermore, Lamonica discusses Brontë’s dependence on letters in relation to Lucy’s own dependence: “Both Lucy and Brontë seek to resist a dependence on their correspondence, yet, at the same time, they hunger for the sense of connection that the letters provide, easing the solitude of the mind” (201). The letters come to represent grief and loss, and because they are objects, they can be “manipulated” and “managed” (Lamonica 201-2). Brontë’s Lucy Snowe consistently articulates an uneasy relationship with letters. Lucy keeps her letters from Graham, but once Madame Beck and Monsieur Paul violate her privacy and read them, she knows she must dispose of her letters. Lucy wants to give
25 In “We Are Three Sisters”: Self and Family in the Writings of the Brontës (2003), Drew Lamonica explores how Charlotte Brontë conceived of herself as a writer and as a sister through family relationships; once her siblings died, she lost that sense of self. In Villette, “the personification of abstractions and the use of metaphors (shipwreck) do not act as merely repressive, side-stepping narrative techniques; rather they become the memories themselves. Both Lucy and Charlotte gain control of their grief by artistically controlling its representation.” Lamonica provides a useful way to view letter writing for both Charlotte and Lucy, but she neglects the materiality of the letter itself, especially in a novel full of objects. 132 them the finest burial possible, and in burying them, she feels “a dreary something – not pleasure – but a sad, lonely satisfaction” (Chap. 26, 295). She wants to bury something that acts as both “a treasure” and “a grief.” She describes this act of internment as a familiar, almost comforting ritual: “This done, I rested, leaning against the tree; lingering, like any other mourner, beside a newly-sodded grave” (Chap. 26, 296). While burying desires and letters can afford some comfort and control of grief, an excavation of letters that memorialize a loss can also comfort the reader. Brontë’s earliest loss was her mother, and fortunately, Patrick Brontë preserved Maria Brontë’s letters and papers for their daughter to read. Brontë describes reading her mother’s writings in a letter to Ellen: “Papa put into my hands a little packet of letters and papers, —telling me that they were mamma’s, and that I might read them. I did read them, in a frame of mind I cannot
describe” (2: 347). 26 She even considers her mother’s writing in relation to her assessment of her own poetic genius: “it was strange now to peruse, for the first time, the records of a mind whence my own sprang; and most strange, and at once sad and sweet,
to find that mind of a truly fine, pure, and elevated order” (2: 347).27 The main function of the letter—communication—depends on its ability to provide a material presence where one must be physically absent. The handwritten letter, as an extension of the writer’s hand, represents the body. Through reading her mother’s letters, she can find the source of her own talents. The words on the page are created from her mother’s hand just as she, Charlotte Brontë, came from her mother’s body.
26 Smith dates this letter 16 February 1850 based on Ellen Nussey’s annotations. 27 I’m not sure why Patrick Brontë withheld the letters for so long, but some biographers have their own theories for why he shared them. Juliet Barker suggests that a vicious case of writer’s block, silence from her publishers, and her increased dependence on and disappointment with her correspondence provoked Mr. Brontë to share the letters in an attempt to comfort his daughter and help her out of her depression. Barker points out that he had just read Shirley and “recognized in Caroline’s longing for her mother something of the depth of loss Brontë had sustained” (The Brontës 631). I find this explanation convincing and her father’s actions as evidence of his sensitivity to her position as a bereaved only child. 133 Beyond the ability of letters to memorialize, this mixture of both pleasure and sadness has to do with expectations of response and non-response in which the time between composition and reading compounds the distance created by geography. As described in the first chapter, “letters have specific forms of deixis” or “ways of referring to the writer and the intended reader and to space and time” (Barton and Hall 6). Spatial distance necessitates the writing of a letter, and a gap in time consequently separates the writing from the reading. Clearly, this disparity of time and space between reader and writer is even greater when the writer is dead, thus complicating expectations of response and non-response. In responding to this reading experience, Brontë concludes to Ellen, “I wished She had lived and that I had known her” (2: 347). Even though Maria Brontë died before Brontë ever really knew her, reading her letters constitutes an exchange with the dead. Writing about Derrida’s use of Levinas’s “no-response” to define death and the act of mourning through addressing the dead, Mary Jacobus argues that in communicating with those who can no longer respond, mourners are “perpetuating the secret interior exchange that links the speaker to the dead and keeps him alive within oneself” (397). In reading her letters and getting to know her mother as a thinking person, Brontë can include her mother in a continuing narrative of death in which the death of one contributes to understanding the deaths of others before and after. Similar to Sara Coleridge, Brontë uses her developing understanding of death and what it means to mourn in condolence letters. One sympathy letter, written on March 31, 1850, to her friend Amelia Ringrose, attests to the testimonial qualities of letters to document death as well as the mourning experience. Brontë’s words of consolation to her friend Amelia, who had just lost her mother, address dying and death in a straightforward, even raw, manner: “It is indeed difficult under such circumstances for near relatives to realize the actual parting of soul from body. The longer we have watched
134 the gradual attenuation of the thread of life, the more its final severance seems to take us by surprise” (2: 372). Early in her bereavement, shortly after Anne’s death, Brontë characterized Ellen as best suited to giving sympathy when she did not need sympathy but consolation, something achieved through “sharper and more severe means” (25 June 1849; 2: 224). Even as Brontë sought consolation, she used her experience as a survivor in order to console. She intends to honor all of Amelia’s details in her response: “Experience has taught me to enter fully into all you say respecting your poor Mamma’s last illness and death” (2: 372). This circumstance occurs when bereavement and sympathy operate on exchange, when experiences can be shared even though they differ from person to person. And, from her own experience, Brontë knows how to console Amelia by complimenting the accuracy of Amelia’s testimony as a deathbed witness: “And then, too, most truly do you describe the oblivion of faults which succeeds to Death. No sooner are the eyes grown dim, no sooner is the pulse stilled than we forget what anxiety, what anguish, what shame the frailties and vices of that poor unconscious
mould of clay once caused us” (2: 372). 28 Brontë further warns Amelia that “yearning love and bitter pity are the only sentiments the heart admits, but with these for a time--, it is sorely oppressed” (2: 372). Grief continues long past death, and Brontë’s own narrative of grief, as written to Amelia, aims perhaps to normalize Amelia’s experience, to provide an example of how mourning really works beyond the cultural expectation of the mourner’s placid acceptance of death. Although we cannot read what Amelia wrote to Brontë about her mother’s death or the circumstances leading to it, it is likely that Brontë wrote in such an honest strain due to Amelia’s own candor. Brontë warns her friend that solitude and inaction make the
28 Margaret Smith identifies references to Amelia’s mother’s illness in previous letters; these references imply that Amelia’s mother shared the same affliction as Branwell, namely addiction. 135 process of mourning, though necessary and hard, almost impossible: “We should never shrink with cowardice from the contemplation of Death, but after a near view, an actual contact with that King of terrors it is not good to be left unoccupied and solitary to brood over his awful lineaments” (2: 372). Brontë then describes what solitude can bring: Often when I am alone, I try with all my might to look beyond the grave, to follow my dear Sisters and my poor brother to that better world where—I trust— they are all now happy, but still, dear Amelia, I cannot help recalling all the details of the weeks of sickness, or the mortal conflict, of the last difficult agony: there are moments when I know not whither to turn or what to do, so sharp, so dark and distressing are these remembrances, so afflicted I am that beings so loved should have had to pass out of Time into Eternity—by a track so rough and painful. (2: 373) A balance has to be struck between confronting death head on and engaging in a serious contemplation of it alone and sharing in the rituals of grief with the community where sympathy is exchanged. While much mourning was (and is) a solitary activity, talking to others about this grief becomes a necessary part of durable biography, or making sense of oneself in a world without the deceased. Not surprisingly, Brontë admits to feeling guilty for writing that even the promise of a Christian afterlife where she can be reunited with her family offers her very little comfort. As a result, she asks Amelia not to say anything about it to the very proper and submissive Ellen Nussey who would be shocked by such an admission. Not only would hearing secondhand that Brontë continued to struggle with her grief (and faith) distress Ellen, it also would be implying that Ellen failed in her role to comfort Brontë. As a clergyman’s daughter, Charlotte Brontë would have been familiar with religious ceremonies and rituals related to death and mourning. In his study of famous
136 memorial sermons,29 John Wolffe concludes that, contrary to the often-cited Victorian celebration of the beautiful death, most sermons focused on the individual life as a whole and not on the deathbed. As far as the deathbed, “[t]he sermons rather suggest a recognition that modes of dying were inevitably diverse and there was no particular normative or ideal model” (287). Woolfe implicates “the lingering and emotional tubercular demises of the Brontë sisters and their fictional creations” in informing
Philippe Ariès’s emphasis on the beautiful death (287).30 From Brontë’s own letters, we can see that she did not find their deaths all that beautiful. Even Anne’s death, considered peaceful in comparison to those of Branwell and Emily, provided only initial consolation. Just as Wolffe acknowledges the accepted diversity of deathbed experiences, I argue for a diversity of accepted mourning experiences. This diversity depends on the genre of the letter and how the writer can shape herself and the depiction of her bereavement into what the reader expects. While Brontë writes and rewrites this narrative of loss in her letters, she finds that some audiences are more appropriate than others for different types of grief. For a time, she can write William Smith Williams because he is at a remove from the family, and he can best facilitate her own prescription for grief, namely work. As a man, Brontë’s alter ego Currer Bell can write to him freely under the assumed double identity. She can have it both ways with Williams even though he knew the truth. Similarly, Amelia, as one
29 Wolffe focuses on the memorial sermons on the deaths of Princess Charlotte (1817), the Duke of Wellington (1852), the Prince Consort (1861) and Queen Victoria (1901) 30 Pat Jalland’s reading of Ariès does a good job of explaining why his history, though helpful in a very general way, is too simplistic: “Ariès presented a stereotypical view of death in nineteenth-century Britain as ‘the beautiful death,’ whereby Romanticism transformed death from the fearful to the beautiful, to be almost eagerly awaited as Victorians glorified the act of dying and the deathbed scene. His sources for Victorian Britain were limited and eccentric, largely based on the writings of the Brontë family, which was decimated by tuberculosis…Rather, if death in the nineteenth-century Britain is to be characterized in terms of a single model or an ideal, then it should be the Evangelical ‘good death’ and not Ariès ‘beautiful death.’ Death itself and the process of dying were rarely greeted with joy or conceptualized as subjects of beauty, except in romantic fiction or didactic literature…the ‘good’ Christian death had the most importance as a model for most Christians” (Jalland 8). 137 experiencing “fresh” grief, is the ideal reader for recounting the rawness of one’s grief even after time has passed. Even though Brontë felt guilty for admitting to the difficulty of her grief and her inability to resolve the competing memories of life and death, she concedes to her fellow mourner, “[I]t is a relief to write it down, but it would be great pain to talk it over” (31 March 1850; 2: 373). While face-to-face company can take Brontë out of her grief, she still cannot articulate it. Yet she continues to write about her sisters and how her life goes on without them; she keeps reworking this narrative and finds that this work must be done before anything else can be written. Her most vivid and poetic articulation of grief comes in a letter to Williams in May of 1850. Haworth and its environs are a potent symbol of grief for Brontë, and it would be for later biographers, especially as a place of death. Brontë continued to work on a definition of home and what it meant to be at Haworth, at home among the dead. She once described her grief as “rooted sorrow,” which implied a connection to home or “rootedness.” Brontë’s grief has “roots” that cannot be removed; to remove it from the soil would kill it. Therefore, Brontë places her sisters in the landscape where they are still separate but part of the land she calls home. She writes to Williams on 22 May 1850 that she is “free to walk on the moors—but when I go out there alone—everything reminds me of the times when others were with me and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening” (2: 403). The landscape reminds her of Emily the most:
“there is not a knoll of heather, nor a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me of her” (2: 403). While Emily is in the land, she finds Anne in what she loved most, “[t]he distant prospects… in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon” (2: 403). With Emily and Anne in the earth and sky, Brontë stands somewhere in between Emily in the earth and Anne in the sea and sky, where she can hear them “[i]n the hill-country silence;” there “their poetry comes by
138 lines and stanzas into ‘my’ mind” (2: 403). Brontë could write eloquently about her grief, about the poetry of her sisters in the landscape, poetry that “once I loved it – now I dare not read it.” It makes her want to “taste one drought of oblivion and forget much that, while mind remains, I never shall forget” (2: 403). Brontë knew how her grief operated, that eventually “[m]any people seem to recall their departed relatives with a sort of melancholy complacency” (2: 403). But, she argues, “these have not watched them through lingering sickness nor
morning” (2: 403).31 These memories become so vivid, that there is almost a substance, a body, to them. While Brontë accepts the fact that her memories are rooted in the very ground on which she walks and the air she breathes, she had to leave Haworth again. For the rest of the summer, Brontë embarked on a series of trips to take her away
from home, away from the moors, and away from her grief.32 Instead of the memories of her sisters becoming a comfort, the sources of her melancholy reached beyond the home and into the landscape. She visited the home of her publisher, George Smith, and his
mother in London.33 The letter she wrote to Ellen on July 18 after returning from her travels to London and Edinburgh in the late spring and early summer touches on two
related subjects: letter-writing34 and confronting death, her own in particular. She
31 Smith identified the marked out words
Haworth, which was her immediate challenge and the most present demand of her continued grief. Brontë had to confront getting settled again at home, where “the solitude seems heavy as yet” (2: 427). From London, “It is a great change,” she reasons, “but in looking forward—I try to hope for the best” (2: 427).
though friendly and intimate in its own way, had its own specific function: helping her through grief. Grief did not have a place in her correspondence with George Smith. 140 Brontë’s words did little good, and in subsequent letters, she tried to reassure Ellen of her health and reiterate her wish that they not talk about her death (7 Aug. 1850; 2: 438). But the subject persisted. She could not seem to comfort Ellen or “chase the shadow of anxiety” (2: 437) and gave “an earnest request that [she] broach the subject…no more” (2: 438). Brontë had grown tired of others’ perceptions of her as vulnerable and weak, susceptible to the same death that took her sisters. Brontë wanted a life of wellness, free from the impending tragedy everyone anticipated for her: It is the undisguised and most harassing anxiety of others that has fixed in my mind thoughts and expectations which must canker wherever they take root— against which every effort either of Religion or philosophy must at times totally fail—and subjugation to which is a cruel and terrible fate—the fate indeed of him whose life was passed under a sword suspended by a horse-hair. (2: 438). “Canker,” a word once synonymous with cancer, is significant here. She considers others’ thoughts and expectations that she must die and soon as a cancer, as an affliction that not only had identifiable physical manifestations but also one that killed her mother. Worse than an early death was living under the anxiety that others had for her that she would die prematurely, that her early demise would complete the tragic Brontë narrative. She did not want to pass her life “under a sword suspended by a horse-hair” (2: 438). She resolved to “determinably resist the kindly meant, but too irksome expression of an apprehension for the realization or defeat of which I have no possible power to be responsible” (2: 438). As much as Brontë could watch out for her health and attempt to set her father’s and friends’ minds at ease, she could, in the end, do nothing about death. After facing the deaths of those closest to her and experiencing and re- experiencing the sting of grief, Brontë came to her own understanding of loss. By the fall of 1850 Brontë had to leave Haworth again and endure another desolate return that would
141 reawaken old feelings, ones that, though painful, kept her siblings’ memories alive within her. She knew the fall would make old grief fresh again. Brontë wrote to Ellen on August 6 of her reluctance to leave her father even though he had recently recovered from an illness. She resisted giving in to dark thoughts, “It is not right to anticipate evil, and to be always looking forward with an apprehensive spirit—but I think grief is a two-edged sword—it cuts both ways—the memory of one loss is the anticipation of another” (16 Aug. 1850; 2: 444). For Brontë, grief had become a part of her life. It was a habit, like her dependence on letters, which she found difficult to break but a tool necessary for understanding her life. The association of Brontë with death began long before she died with her friend Elizabeth Gaskell memorializing her as soon as they became acquaintances. The final section of this chapter concludes that Brontë’s own failed efforts to memorialize her sisters to a reading public beyond her letters follows the same strategies of memorial that Gaskell would later use to memorialize her friend in The Life of Charlotte Brontë. While Gaskell had faith in this type of memorial, Charlotte Brontë did not and wrote a memorial that disappointed her because it was dictated by public expectations of how women’s lives were written.
“I AM BETTER NOW”35
A week before Charlotte Brontë shared her assessment of In Memoriam with
Elizabeth Gaskell, Brontë met Gaskell for the first time around August 20 at The Briery
in Windermere.36 On August 25, 1850, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her friend Catherine Winkworth to tell her all about Charlotte Brontë in a letter mixed with first-person testimony and gossip courtesy of Lady Kay-Shuttleworth; Gaskell even admits, “All this
35 To Ellen; 18 Dec. 1850, 2:535 36 During the visit, Gaskell and Brontë arranged to meet Tennyson and his wife who were on their honeymoon, but a rainstorm forced them to turn around. See Mrs. Gaskell to Catherine Winkworth [25 August 1850] in Smith, Vol. 2, 446-450. 142 Lady K S told me” (2: 448). She writes her own early narrative of the Brontë family history: Just in the success of Jane Eyre, her sisters died of ‘rapid’ consumption— unattended by any doctor, why I don’t know. But she says she will have none and that her death will be quite lonely; having no friend or relation in the world to nurse her, & her father dreading a sick room above all places. There seems little doubt she herself is already tainted with consumption. (2: 449) The whole letter gives a condensed and highly inaccurate version of Charlotte Brontë’s life that relies on gossip and exaggeration. Only days earlier, Brontë had told Ellen that she wanted to hear no talk about her own demise. It is impossible to know how much Brontë told her new friend about her history of loss or how she believed she would eventually fill her place in that narrative. What is significant is that Gaskell began writing about Charlotte Brontë’s death immediately after meeting her. Deidre D’Albertis ties Gaskell’s gossipy tone directly to her efforts to memorialize Brontë before she had even died. D’Albertis argues that Gaskell’s gossip, or “[t]he dark side of her method,” drove “her conviction that knowledge is social and that writing should refer outward to an interpretative community” (9). Likewise, sympathy is social and operates within an interpretative community, and a changing idea of sympathy into an individual practice, I argue, would include what D’Albertis finds to be the most sinister part of Gaskell’s method: a voyeuristic “sense of vicarious pleasure in the suffering of others, the displacement of pain onto the figure of Brontë, and a ‘morbid’ fascination with the morbidity of her subject” (9). Gaskell, in whom Brontë had found a devoted friend, could not begin to understand Brontë’s position. She once wrote Gaskell, “If it should ever befall you to live a very lonely life (which I believe it never will, for you are too genial
143 two women’s lives and Brontë’s recognition of it. Seeing Brontë as a victim to duty, Gaskell could not conceive of her friend as someone who chose duty because she wanted
to care for her ailing father because it would not fit into her narrative.37 Having Brontë’s private narrative of death exposed to an “interpretative community” would pull into focus what Gabrielle Helms identifies as the main question surrounding Brontë’s biography: “can a woman live the life of an artist?” Helms argues that in forming her narrative around this question, Gaskell “does not strive to show the blending of the two selves of author ‘Currer Bell’ and woman ‘Charlotte Brontë ’; rather, she reinforces the disparity between the responsibility and duty of the household role versus the fulfillment and selfishness of the writer’s role” (352). This is why Gaskell talks so much about Brontë to others. Gaskell proposes gossip as “the antidote to Brontë’s isolation and the confessional style of writing that grew out of her morbid self- regard. Related to this concern with communal interpretation was the biographer’s self- conscious mission as memorialist” (D’Albertis 10). Gaskell’s interpretation of Brontë’s life was self-motivated, to show the biographer in contrast to the conflicted Charlotte Brontë who could not reconcile duty and art. Brontë was similarly self-motivated in writing her preface of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. In a sense, she wanted to separate her work from her sisters, but she also wanted to distinguish herself beyond their tragic deaths, thus separating herself from, or, at least for the time being, “dodging the knife hanging from a horsehair.” For an entire year, Brontë wrote privately about her grief to her friends in letters, but that fall, she would have to write publicly about her sisters’ deaths. In early
37 Part of this inability to understand Brontë’s life had to do with Gaskell’s refusal to see Patrick Brontë beyond his eccentricities. It was much easier for her to construct him as someone cold to his children’s needs 144 September, Williams asked Brontë to write a biographical notice of her sisters.38 While the biographical notice has been criticized for Brontë’s apologetic tone and criticism of her sisters, it seems as if Brontë, unable to apologize for her own words, tried to apologize for her sisters. Naturally, she sent drafts to Williams throughout the fall. Brontë wondered how to label such a piece of writing, further evidence that she did not know how to write it or what it should contain: When you have read it, you can better judge whether the word “Notice” or “Memoir” is the most appropriate. I think—the former. Memoir seems to me to express a more circumstantial and different sort of account. My aim is to give a just idea of their identity, not to write any narrative of their simple, uneventful lives. … I could not write it in the conventional form—that I found impossible. (20 Sept. 1850; 2: 473-4) Just as Brontë could not understand how Tennyson’s grief could flow out in verse, she could not fit her sisters’ identities, much less their lives, into a preface either. She “found the task at first exquisitely painful & depressing—but regarding it in the light of a sacred duty—I went on—and now can bear it better—It is work however that I cannot do in the evening—for if I did, I should have no sleep at night” ([?3 Oct. 1850]; 2: 481-2). The writing of the preface gave Brontë the opportunity to construct a durable biography, but just as she did not trust in easy articulation of grief in Tennyson’s efforts to memorialize his friend, she did not feel up to the task. Writing the preface cost her much energy and even her health, and by the end of October she was in a dark place, longing to travel again but dreading the inevitable return home. Even though “very decent indeed in bodily health,” she was “both angry and
38 Lyndall Gordon characterizes the Notice as “a blueprint for Mrs. Gaskell: it separates Emily and Anne from their works, assuring the public that they were ladies of the utmost refinement” (225). 145 surprised … for not being in better spirits—for not growing accustomed or at least resigned to the solitude and isolation of my lot” (23 Oct. 1850; 2: 487). She reasons, “[M]y late occupation left a result for some days and indeed still, very painful. The reading over of papers, the renewal of remembrances brought back the pang of
bereavement and occasional depression of spirits well nigh intolerable” (2: 487).39 Brontë tells Ellen about her grief because “it is absolutely necessary to me to have some relief— You will forgive me—and not trouble yourself….it is quite a mental ailment—and I believe and hope is better now—I think so because I can speak about it which I never can when grief is at its worst” (2: 487). By this point, Brontë knew her grief well enough to be able to gauge it by its expressibility. If extreme grief prohibited Brontë from writing, if there was a line where grief could cripple instead of enable expression, then Brontë must not have been all that happy with the Preface. She thanked Williams for “the care and kindness with which you have assisted me throughout in correcting these ‘Remains’” and wondered, “Whether—when they are published—they will appear to others as they do to me” ([?c.19 Nov. 1850]; 2: 513). She concludes: “I cannot tell—I hope not—and indeed I suppose what to me is bitter pain will only be soft pathos to the gentle reader” (2: 513). To Brontë, the document stands as a narrative of her grief at that moment. Brontë knew that grief is changeable, that the story of loss in one’s life never ends, but that what would be published would remain for the public as a lasting truth when it really was not.
She tried to remain true to her first claim in “The Biographical Notice”40: “I am
advised to distinctly state how the case really stands” (51).41 For the first time, she had to
39 Hallam and Hockey claim that when memories surface, “whether in the form of a person’s writing or other material fragments of a life, [there] are traces of the past that demand reflection. Such a profusion of material forms can open up a ‘vista’ of the past, making it momentarily available for scrutiny in the present” (105). 40 See Susan R. Bauman’s “Her Sisters’ Keeper: Charlotte Brontë ’s Defence of Emily and Anne” for an in-depth analysis of the Biographical Notice.
146 reveal publicly not only her sisters’ identities but also the facts of their deaths. The Notice aims to clear up the “little mystery, which formerly yielded some harmless pleasure”; that mystery “had lost its interest: circumstances are changed” (51). Susan Matthews, in her analysis of Tennyson’s death “performance” and memorial and posthumous reputation, argues that “[a]t the moment of death, cultural significance shifts from the poet as human being to his memory as embodied by printed texts and other remains. The enigma of an individual poet’s genius remained a focus of powerful empirical curiosity, a mystery to be solved by gathering and analyzing evidence” (248). Matthew’s argument is helpful in looking at how “poetic genius” is identified through a kind of postmortem analysis. Part of Brontë’s “Notice” focuses on the two sisters’ poetic styles, since the volume not only introduced the novels but directed the public to their poetry which Brontë edited. Part of the mystery of poetic genius, Matthews shows, involves speculation on how the poet died in which “the poet’s body and appearance might themselves be invoked as evidence, offering clues to the poet’s special character” (248). Even though, “irrelevant to the oral and textual transmission of immortal poetry,” the body “acquired posthumous prestige: it constituted a direct physical link to genius. … the posthumous history of the corpse—and its representation—is integral to the poet’s biography” (Matthews 248). Since the memories of Emily and Anne’s death remained painful throughout the rest of her life, Brontë did not want those memories to be a diverting mystery or an object of public amusement. Instead she offered a reading of their works by way of informing the public how her sisters’ lives and literary remains should be read. Immediately, Brontë sets up the context of their writing lives, characterizing it as a solitary one. Susan Bauman argues that Brontë’s goal in writing the Notice was to “shame” critics (23) and that “Brontë confronts the dual challenges of her sisters’ gender and notoriety by creating a compelling portrait of two women who were exemplary in life
147 and death” (24). Because Brontë did not like the depiction of her sisters as ‘coarse, uncultured men,’ she appealed to the public’s expectations for women in characterizing her sisters’ lives and deaths. The “Biographical Notice” becomes less about the sisters and more about their work and then, finally, about their deaths. Brontë has the most difficult time giving language to the latter, writing, “The details of her illness are deep- brained in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power” (56), and “To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a pain no words can render” (56). Brontë refuses to satisfy public curiosity for deathbed details: “What more shall I say about them? I cannot and need not say much more” (57). Brontë was aware that this was a public death notice that would be read as a means to satisfy the same needs of those who started visiting Haworth out of curiosity. If Brontë had trouble both identifying this piece of writing and composing it, critics have had an even harder time trying to pin down Brontë’s motives and intentions. Bauman provides a helpful way for looking at the Notice by emphasizing how Brontë “distorts evidence for narrative effect so that her sisters’ bad reputations, based on writing fiction, are recuperated through the fiction of biography” (23).42 In looking at Gaskell’s writing of Charlotte Brontë, Gabrielle Helms observes that autobiographical and biographical writings are ultimately fictive: “Biography therefore can best be regarded as a hybrid form that searches for a possible, plausible, but necessarily fictive, version of life experience” (343). Brontë’s awareness of her situation, her ideas about solitude and isolation, becomes the organizing principle for constructing a biography of her sisters. Her own isolation writes the story of her sisters. While having to revisit her sisters’ works and write about them, Brontë also has to confront a fact about herself, one that she learns
42 The Notice conforms to a type of writing that Bauman identifies as a “deferential preface” which relies on a display of false modesty, and to this end, Brontë uses flower imagery to “remind the reader that the poems are frail, precious legacy of her absent sisters” (29). 148 though her grief: “I feel to my deep sorrow—to my humiliation—that it is not in my power to bear the canker of constant solitude” (2: 513).43 Her mind “turns entirely to the Past—to Memory, and Memory is both sad and relentless. This will never do—and will produce no good—I tell you this that you may check false anticipations” (2: 513). This struggle, she realizes, must be overcome on her own. Even in solitude, which she could not stand, she has to admit that others “cannot help me”; friends, like Williams, she writes, “must not trouble yourself in any shape to sympathize with me. ‘It is my cup’—I must drink it as others drinks theirs” (2: 513-14). Gaskell reflects on this period in The Life: “If I say again what I have said already before, it is only to impress and re-impress upon my readers the dreary monotony of her life at this time. The dark, bleak season of the year brought back the long evenings, which tried her severely” (434). Brontë clearly had to break the monotony of her grief. The edition of her sisters’ works with Brontë’s preface came out December 7; a week later she stayed with Harriet Martineau at her home in the Lake District near Ambleside where she met Matthew Arnold. From there, she visited Ellen at Birstall and stayed with her the rest of the year. While at Martineau’s, Brontë wrote Ellen of her ability to “write to you now for I am away from home and relieved, temporarily at least, by change of air and scene from the heavy burden of depression which I confess has for nearly 3 months been sinking me into the earth” (18 Dec. 1850; 2: 535). She describes the autumn days and nights as “cruel—but now—having once told you this—I need say no more on the subject. My loathing of solitude grew extreme; my recollection of my Sisters intolerably poignant; I am better now” (2: 535). As soon as Brontë articulated her grief and put it in perspective, she admitted to Ellen that it was time to write something else. For one, she was able to resume correspondence with other friends.
43 Again, note the use of the word “canker.” 149 It would be almost two years before Villette was published in November of 1852. In Villette, Brontë offers a highly complex picture of grief. Between the writing of her sisters’ “Biographical Notice” and Villette’s publication, Charlotte Brontë spent time traveling to London and visiting friends. Progress on Villettte was slowed by a bad cold, depression, and finally mercury poisoning in late 1851. After a slow recovery, she resumed work on Villette. Once Brontë found a pattern in her grief and understood its variability, she could manage it through her ability to articulate it. In The Life, Gaskell recognized the pattern of Brontë’s autumns in which “the usual effects of her solitary life, and of the unhealthy situation of Haworth Parsonage, began to appear in the form of sick headaches, and miserable, starting, wakeful nights” (459-60). It is odd that Gaskell claims that Brontë “does not dwell on this in her letters” but instead finds “an absence of all cheerfulness of tone, and an occasional sentence forced out of her, which imply far more than words could say” (459-60). In fact, Brontë wrote very clearly to Mrs. Gaskell on 6 November 1851 her feelings on her life during the fall, which “[f]or a month or six weeks about the Equinox (autumnal and vernal) is a period of the year which, I have noticed, strangely tries me” (6 Nov. 1851; 2: 710). Aware of her symptoms, Brontë knows that the strain is both mental and physical, and she identifies its source: “That weary time has—I think and trust—got over for this year. It was the anniversary of my poor brother’s death and of my Sisters’ failing health. I need say no more” (2: 710). In her ability to write about her grief and identify its manifestations, Brontë is doing the work of recovery, work that will ultimately prepare her to write. In fact, Brontë seemed tired of her own low feelings as she writes to Ellen: “Some painful mental worry I have gone through this Autumn but there is no use in dwelling on all that—At present I seem to have some respite. I feel more disinclined than ever for letter-writing” (2: 711).44 She admits at the
44 [?6 or 7 November 1851]; annotation by Ellen. 150 end of a letter to Ellen written days later: “Life is a struggle” (2: 712). After all, losing those closest to us and grieving their absence are necessary parts of life. She had spent much of the spring ill, and recovered slowly. With the struggle of two autumns past and with the gift of new friends and experiences and renewed health, Charlotte Brontë felt able to do something for the dead on her own terms and, most importantly, alone. Brontë returned to Anne’s grave around the third anniversary of her sister’s death. She explains to Ellen Nussey in a letter written on 6 June 1852 what she had to do and her reasons for going “utterly alone”: Do not be angry. The step is right. I considered it and resolved on it with due deliberation. Change of air was necessary; there were reasons why I should not go to the South and why I should come here. On Friday I went to Scarbro’, visited the church-yard and stone—it must be refaced and re-lettered—there are 5 errors. I gave the necessary directions—that duty then is done—long has it lain heavy on my mind—and that was a pilgrimage I felt I could only make alone. (6 June 1852; 3:51) At this point, Brontë could revise her sister’s grave and could honor “that duty.” Brontë’s emphasis on “that” indicates her continued obligation to the dead; the responsibility of the living to memorialize the dead that never really ends. As Brontë wrote in the “Biographical Notice,” she recognized the differences between intimate and public discourses of death: “I may sum up all by saying, that for strangers they were nothing, for superficial observers less than nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationships, they were genuinely good and truly great” (“Biographical” 57). She concludes, “This notice has been written, because I felt it a sacred duty to wipe the dust off their gravestones, and leave their dear names free from soil” (“Biographical” 58). Brontë’s notice is written entirely to this purpose. It does not
151 satisfy her own grief but the public’s imagined sense of loss.45 Unlike the difficulties she had writing the preface for her sisters, Brontë knew what she had to do to set things right with Anne’s marker. Aware that tourists would visit this grave and the family memorial at Haworth, Brontë could at least correct the errors on a grave marker. Perhaps she knew that Anne’s grave would be read and that the grave marker, like a letter, would be considered source material for her family’s story. Even as Gaskell attempts to write Brontë’s life within the confines of a family tragedy, she separates Brontë from the family. In the opening pages of The Life, Gaskell describes the memorial tablets in the church at Haworth. The names of Maria Brontë and her children appear on the first tablet, but “[a]fter Anne’s death, there is room for no other” (Gaskell 59). She finally describes Brontë’s place on the tablet: “But one more of that generation of six motherless children—was yet to follow, before the survivor, the childless and widowed father, found his rest. On another tablet, below the first, the following record has been added to that mournful list” (Gaskell 59). Gaskell then lists Brontë’s name and memorial information as it appeared on the tablet. Brontë understood her personal responsibilities to the dead, and they did not involve the public. Her husband Arthur Bell Nicholls and her friends Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey became the bearers of this burden once Brontë died. Nicholls not only quarreled with Ellen over her failed promise to burn Brontë’s letters—those things “more dangerous than Lucifer matches”—he also had the memorial tablets Gaskell describes destroyed and buried in the churchyard. Souvenir hunters and literary tourists descended on Haworth all wanting a piece of the tragedy. Brontë’s “Biographical Notice” did very little to quell public curiosity; the mystery, it seems, had deepened. But no one would get
45 It would be interesting to apply this to celebrity culture where all losses and joys are perceived as public property. 152 Mary Taylor’s letters. We have no way of knowing what Brontë wrote to Taylor beyond a couple of surviving letters, but because of Taylor’s letters, there is a speculative narrative on the life of Charlotte Brontë the public will never know, perhaps another depiction of bereavement that will remain a mystery. Taylor’s own grief comes out in a letter to Gaskell, which Gaskell excerpts and includes in the next to last paragraph of The Life. Taylor wrote the letter reluctantly, for the last time (that we know of), about her friend. In it we can find reasons for her destruction of the letters. She simply wanted Brontë’s grief to remain her own: I have written [the letter] with the strong desire to obtain appreciation for her. Yet what does it matter? She herself appealed to the world’s judgment for her use of some of the best faculties she had,—not the best,—but still the only ones she could turn to strangers’ benefit. They heartily, greedily enjoyed the fruits of her labours, and then found out she was much to be blamed for possessing such faculties. Why ask for judgment of her from such a world? (526)
153 Alice James’s “Ghost Microbes”: Collaborative Death Writing in James’s Diary and Letters
In the early days of January of 1886, Alice James wrote to her brother, the psychologist William James, in Boston. In the letter, she confessed to her brother, who had requested hair samples from family members to test the validity of a famous Boston medium, that he had been duped: I played you a base trick about the hair. It was a lock, not of my hair, but that of a friend of Miss Ward’s who died four years ago. I thought it a much better test of whether the medium were simply a mind-reader or not, if she is something more I should greatly dislike to have secrets of my organism laid bare to a wondering public. I hope you will forgive my frivolous treatment of so serious a science.
(111)1 To add insult to injury, James was undermining what would become a serious object of study for William that year when he published a paper on mediums, particularly the one
in question, Leonore Evelina (Simonds) Piper.2 James’s protective measures against fraud and exposure guarded her from looking foolish and from having someone else dictate the terms of her past, present, and future through prognostication. As a perpetual invalid, she considered her body a mystery for the medical professionals who had already tried to
1 In this chapter, I refer to Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s edition of Alice James’s letters in The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981/1998). For letters not included in this collection, I use Linda Anderson’s Her Write, His Name: Alice James, Her Life in Letters (1996) and reference it as “Her Write” parenthetically. The bulk of the letters in Yeazell come from Alice’s later life and focuses on her death while Anderson’s collection aims for comprehensiveness by publishing two-thirds of the extant letters. References to the diary, if not indicated in the text, will be identified with a “D.” All references to the diary come from Leon Edel’s 1964 edition reprint from 1999 with an introduction by Linda Smith, titled The Diary of Alice James. A more recent scholarly edition of Alice James’s diary is not available. 2 The article appeared in volume one of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (1886), a publication for the society he helped establish. At first, William James did not believe that Piper was credible, but after one visit, he sent dozens of his friends to her and began his research. I have not been able to find anything on this specific lock of hair. 154 decipher the “secrets of her organism.” James was not concerned so much about the threat to her privacy by a wondering public; rather, it was the “something more” the medium might be doing in addition to practicing “mind reading.” Ultimately, the “reading” of part of her body, her hair, would be something Alice could not influence, and she had trouble enough with doctors and professionals trying to diagnose her problem, which at that moment had no real organic cause. Instead of providing her own hair, James gave her brother a lock from a nameless woman who could no longer defend herself, for whom exposure to “a wondering public” would not matter. Most importantly, the hair she provided came from a woman “in a state of horrible disease for a year before she died—tumours I believe” (113). She merely sent the hair, returned to her invalid chair, and wondered “what the woman will say about the hair” (113). Alice James wrote her brother from across the ocean, at a distance where she felt safe both to play such a joke as well as construct her own future death without the influence of a medium. In the meantime, she lived the life of an invalid and waited for death. In the end, the woman who played a prank on the medium Mrs. Piper found out the joke was on her, that she would share the same fate as the lock of hair’s owner. She wrote years later, near the end of her life, in her diary: It is taken for granted apparently that I shall be spiritualized into a ‘district messenger,’ for here comes another message for Father and Mother; imagine my
dragging them, of whom I can only think as a sublimation of their qualities, into gossip about the little more or less faith of Tom, Dick or Harry. I do pray to Heaven that the dreadful Mrs. Piper won’t be let loose upon my defenseless soul. I suppose the thing ‘medium’ has done more to degrade spiritual conception than the grossest forms of materialism or idolatry: was there ever anything transmitted but the pettiest, meanest, coarsest facts and details: anything rising above the
155 squalid intestines of human affairs? And oh, the curious spongy minds that sop it all up and lose all sense of taste and humour! (28 Feb. 1892; 231) For years, James had considered herself a dead woman talking to the living, but denied access to the dead. In a way, she played the role of expectant medium in an intimate circle of family and friends who anticipated her death at any moment. Recognized as a “district messenger” to the dead, she dreaded being called into the service of mediums like Mrs. Piper who, like the other physical manifestations of afterlife in materialism and idolatry, would use her name and death in the transmission of “the pettiest, meanest, coarsest facts and details” (231). To counter any posthumous misinterpretations of her physical remains—should anyone steal a scrap of her hair to a medium or use her spirit as a sort of spiritual letter carrier, James figured a way out of being spiritualized as a messenger, something that she dismissed as mere ventriloquism. She wrote her own death in both her letters and diary. The latter she arranged to have posthumously published so that she might be able to speak for herself. However, this writing was not a solitary act and proved to have its own mediumistic qualities. More than any of the writings in this study, Alice James’s autothanatographic letters and writings are the most collaborative. Charlotte Brontë’s bereavement letters are written from a solitary place where she finds herself among the memories of the dead, and Sara Coleridge’s letters focus on her preparations for death, something she considered a lifelong activity. Alice James thought of herself as already dead, thus enabling her to self-memorialize. All letter-writing is, in a way, collaborative, but what makes James’s correspondence so unusual is the involvement of another writer on the page. James’s friend and companion Katherine Loring managed all of the details of her life and death when both became too much for her to handle. Letters linked her to her life and family back in America, but even near the end of her life, these letters to
156 friends and family were dictated to Katharine Loring. If a letter carries the traces of the body through the handwriting, then James, by using another woman’s hand just as she used another woman’s hair, managed to remove her body altogether. This removal was especially significant in a family that was never comfortable with its sole female child. Moving away from family to London allowed James to shape her death from afar as well as mourn from afar. Another type of doubling occurs in the journal, which, though not a letter, functions as a sort of correspondence. One condition of death writing involves the displacement of the body onto another physical object; James merely found another body. She turned Katherine into a medium to transmit her messages, one similar to the infamous Mrs. Piper’s later methods of invoking the dead through “automatic writing” wherein the medium writes out through dictation the thoughts of the dead. In considering Katharine Loring as medium, I will argue that the bodies of writing through which James could operate, her letters and the diary, allowed her to take her body completely out of the family discourse, to write as one of the living dead. Near the end of her life, pain made the use of Katharine’s body, her hands in particular, necessary for both the activities of writing and the alleviation of pain through hypnosis. This chapter argues that letters from abroad allowed Alice James to shape how others would read and know of her death and invalidism and that the diary itself operates as a form of correspondence that communicated this narrative of death posthumously. In
addition to justifying the inclusion of her diary in her correspondence, it is first necessary to establish how James, in a family aware of its own historical importance, constructed
herself as an invalid, as the one in the family whose career it was to die.3 In the middle
3 Biographies have been written about all of the James siblings, and more biographies continue to be written about them. Besides the numerous biographies on the more well-known Henry and William, Jane Maher’s tellingly titled Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James (1986) features the two younger brothers. A most recent family biography, Paul Fisher’s A Family of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (2008), joins the two previous ones The James Family (1947) by F. O. Mattiessen and The Jameses (1991) by R. W. B. Lewis. Fisher’s A Family of Wits 157 sections of the chapter, I focus in particular on how James writes the deaths of others in letters and how this informs how she wants to write about her own death. Like Sara Coleridge and Charlotte Brontë, James both wrote deathbed scenes and responded to those she read in correspondence. However, unlike Coleridge and Brontë, James writes in great detail about the question of suicide, both in how it related to her decision to endure despite great physical and emotional pain and in how others chose to end their own lives. I argue that James rejected ending her own life in favor of dying slowly because it allowed her to not only dictate the terms of her bodily and literary remains but also to collaborate with her caregivers in how her death got written and how she would be remembered. I conclude by exploring Alice James’s deathbed preparations and her careful arrangements to leave literary remains of her own: her diary, which documents her life’s work of dying. Her writings on inheritance and material remains, I contend, ultimately determine her reasons for wanting to leave her diary behind, a type of writing beyond letters, objects over whose fate she could not control. This final section shows that James intended for the writing of her death and the act of dying itself to be truly collaborative undertakings, ones she shared with Katharine Loring. In the end, she strategized a death for herself and the writing of it through using Loring as a medium, or her own “district messenger.”
HER “MORTAL CAREER”
The fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me as I faced a ceaseless possible horror, since that hideous summer of ’78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me
joins the most recent biographies of William and Henry written in the last two years: William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007) by Robert D. Richardson and Sheldon M. Novick’s two-volume biography, The Young Master (2007) and The Mature Master (2007). Alice James’s biography was written by Jean Strouse was published in 1980. It is to be hoped that another biography on Alice’s life will follow these recently published biographical treatments. 158 and I knew neither hope nor peace; that now it’s only the shriveling of an empty pea pod that has to be completed. (Diary 2 Feb. 1892, 230) Alice James wrote this entry shortly before her death, but it is illustrative of how she viewed her body for most of her life, or at least since “that hideous summer of ’78.” Since she thought of herself as already dead, she made it her life’s work to die well, to have, in Sara Coleridge’s words, “everything in readiness.” In letters and diary entries spanning 1886 to 1889, Alice James uses the word “career” at least three times synonymously with her life as an invalid. In early 1886, in the same letter she confessed her practical joke, she wrote her brother William a summation of her life, or her career, so far: My ill-health has been inconvenient & not aesthetically beautifull, but early in youth I discovered that there were certain ends to be attained in life, which were as independent of illness or of health, as they were of poverty or riches, so that by turning my attention exclusively to them, even my torpid career has not been without its triumphs to my own consciousness & therefore not to be pitied for.
(Jan 3-7 [1886?]; 112).4 She adds sardonically, “This is meant not as biographical but simply to cheer you up” (112). Even before her cancer diagnosis, James worked to convince William that her life was not a failure, that these “certain ends” held the mystery of her own accomplishment: maintaining her ability to be an invalid while inconveniencing as few people as possible. The use of the adjective “torpid” to describe her career denotes being “benumbed; deprived or devoid of the power of motion or feeling; in which activity, animation, or development is suspended; dormant” (def. 1). Part of her career would be constructing
4 Kristen Boudreau’s “’A Barnum Monstrosity”: Alice James and the Spectacle of Sympathy” shows William and Alice’s correspondence illustrate their contrary views of sympathy. 159 her autobiography. In this particular letter, she withheld the biographical from her brother, intending for the last word on her life to appear after her death. Her “torpid career,” or her deprived or dormant career, only needed awakening; in other words, for James, life would begin after what she considered the true awakening: death. This section provides a biographical overview of how James distinguished herself as the invalid of the family as well as a brief publication history of her diary. In doing so, I also establish the importance of looking at both her letters and her diary together to show how her writings fit into the cultural history of death that I am studying. Alice James was born on August 7, 1848, the youngest sibling, a postscript in an important American family with four boys. Two would later distinguish themselves as the psychologist William James and the novelist Henry James. The other two, Wilky and Robertson, are merely part of the family history and are themselves footnotes in Civil War history. Alice James distinguished herself posthumously through the publication of her diary. The diary is now the most well known of her works, sometimes regarded as her only work. Her diary, first published in 1934 under the title Alice James: Her Brothers—
Her Journal,5 was written during the last three years of her life. As an invalid who sought treatment for both mysterious physical and mental ailments, she wrote a diary often described by critics as a means to accommodate her pathology. Critics view the diary as an ideal form for the invalid because it is a confessional, “I” driven, free-form narrative
5 In his introduction to the 1964 edition of the Diary, Leon Edel gives a publication history. Henry was the most afraid of the diary. Loring did not act against Henry’s wishes; instead, she gave the diary to Robertson’s daughter, Mary James Vaux. “Thus the diary finally reached book form in 1934 not as Alice’s ‘letter to the world,’ but as part of a volume devoted also to Wilky and Robertson” (Edel xxx).The editor of the volume, Anna Robeson Burr wrote the 82-page introduction which focuses entirely on the brothers. Burr edited out the French and the cut out articles from English papers from James’s diary; therefore, the reader misses out on her interest in politics. 160 that resembles the talking cure.6 Even if the diary does not depend on an audience to be written, the talking cure does rely on a listener just as a letter depends on a reader. Both diaries and letters are often considered genres on the margins of literary
activity, but this is how James saw herself in relation to her life’s work of dying.7 Despite the marginal status of letters (or perhaps because of that marginality), Joanne Jacobson argues that Alice James found power in letters because of their ambiguity: “neither public nor wholly private; both obligation and prerogative” letters gave her “strategies for exploiting the ambiguity, by aggressively putting the autonomous voice which she claimed for herself in her letters against the narrative of dependence to which she seemed fated by gender” (367). Even as the letters gave her a place for “this narrative of marginalization,” she could use the form to resist being marginalized. It also allowed her to authorize her experience of the sickroom and deathbed. In both her diary and her letters, Alice James struggles to find a language that is “adequate to the suffering—and joy—of the female body” (Anderson xxi). Moreover, this space allowed her to live and die at a distance from those who would try to dictate her life (and her death). While the diary is the most widely read of her works, the letters themselves should be read in how they reveal how James wanted her life and death read while she was still living. Letters ensured that she would get a response as she was experiencing illness and be able to correct any misconceptions while she was alive. As autothanatographical writing, letters
6 In fact, in her exploration of how Alice James uses the diary to enact and inscribe hysteria, Mary Capello calls attention to Woolf’s characterization of illness as “the great confessional.” 7 For Linda Anderson, “[l]etters are vehicles of manipulation which do not necessarily tell the ‘truth’ and must be read in context. They also to a degree escape the isolation of authorship since a letter always addresses but also contain the other as both destination and desire” (James, His Write xxv). Anderson likewise identifies how “the ambiguity of letter writing makes it an attractive activity for Alice: she was good at the informality and assumed the spontaneity that letter writing requires…However a letter also offers a natural defense against spontaneity and against the other’s invasiveness and Alice’s writing about her illness in her letters suggests this same ambivalence (xxv). 161 made possible the dialogic interplay between experience and interpretation, allowing James, the dying, to exist in a constant present. Because her letters depict these struggles of body and mind in a family aware of its own historical significance, few survive. While numerous letters of Sara Coleridge and
Charlotte Brontë’s were destroyed, at least very many are extant.8 James’s brothers destroyed quite a few, especially, Henry; and while she lived close to William and his wife until 1884, she only wrote him frequently until after the year she moved to England. None from Henry or Katharine Loring are known to exist. Her letters as a young woman—specifically those written before her first breakdown, at least the ones that survive, are breezily energetic and unselfconscious. The letters take a slow turn as friends started to get married and as she sought out medical treatment more and more. Moreover, her illnesses are rarely mentioned in any detail, save indicating the locations of treatment that separated her from family and therefore made correspondence necessary. As the only girl, she was already seen as separate from her brothers. William teased and even flirted with her mercilessly, and her family often denied her any sort of excitement. Jean Strouse describes James’s adolescence and young adulthood as the time she “stopped” short of accepting “the tasks and pleasures of adult femininity” (82). Determined to avoid any excitement, she made her health her only occupation. After her breakdown in 1868, her parents sent her to New York. Then, throughout the 1870s, she had frequent breakdowns and visits from doctors. By the end of the decade, Katharine Loring had begun taking care of her. James had not always been inactive; she had a couple of good years in the 1870s full of travel, movement, and even riding and driving horses. After the breakdown of 1878, however, she determined to settle into being an invalid, a career interrupted by her parents’ illnesses and then
8 See Leon Edel’s Henry James: The Untried Years. 162 resumed for good after their deaths. After her parents died and she moved to England, James had time for her own invalidism and death. Once in England, she moved
frequently seeking the ideal climate for her temperamental condition.9 After one move from Hampton to Mayfair, she describes in a letter the toll of this move: “my little world has had many convulsions—digestive, mental & sentimental” (4 Oct. [1887]; 137). Her subsequent isolation in London, where she anticipates being “densely dull and lonely,” makes little difference: “of course, but the sands of my little hour-glass will run out as swiftly here as anywhere” (137). But, there was a difference. Without her parents and with an ocean separating her and William, she could die how she wanted. Before she could die, James had to confront the nature of her illnesses, something no doctor or specialist seemed to agree upon. To Aunt Kate, she related the cycle of illness she experienced in which a physical improvement in health would increase her nervousness. With characteristic dry wit and humor, she wrote on Nov 21-24, [1885]: Whether I am much better or not, I don’t know, I am gradually getting stronger & am able to do a great deal more, but as always happens as my physical strength increases my nervous distress & susceptibility grows with it, so that from an inside view it is somewhat of an exchange of evils. To have a tornado going on within one, whilst one is chained to a sofa, is no joke, I can assure you. (109-10) James’s cyclic “exchange of evils” was an added dimension to her hysteria and one that has puzzled family, medical professionals, and anyone who has ever studied her. To her brother William, she argues that the price for good physical health is dear—“half of your body helpless while the other half is the battle-ground of an army of fiends” (11 Dec. 1887; Her Write, 179). She concludes, “There is some comfort in good solid pain” (179).
9 Frequent moves had become a way of life for James who spent much of her childhood in Europe as part she had visited Europe with Henry and her Aunt Kate, but her mother soon made it clear afterward that James was not allowed to go abroad until her parents died. 163 Pain would come to define Alice’s world and work, and the persistence of pain, whether mental or physical, necessitated a caregiver whose body would support James’s vision of her death. Even if she considered herself dead in 1878, fourteen years before her death, she didn’t want to write like one dead. Yeazell writes of her style that “comic detachment” enabled her to be “comically distant from her own suffering and pain” (30). For example, in another letter to both William and Mrs. Alice she quotes a physician, clearly delighted with the absurd obviousness of his prognosis: “He also remarked, ‘You won’t die, but you will live, suffering to the end.’ The last gentleman of the trade I saw, was going to make me perfectly well in four months!” (16 June 1887; 136-7). In her letters, and later her journal, James narrates her experience of pain and turns Victorian conventions of the Good Death to her comic advantage. James scholars have addressed how Alice James confronted illness through her diary. Mary Capello argues that James’s personal diary works in the same way as her illness in how it deals with the outside world “like an extra appendage that cannot be incorporated by Alice, that cannot make her whole” (142). Elizabeth Duquette counters Capello’s characterization of the diary as “an appendage,” arguing that critics are too tempted to depict James’s life and works through the scope of failure, “as a martyr to patriarchal hegemony” (717). Duquette reasons that this focus on her life as failure, “perpetuates her status as an ‘appendage,’” and undermines what James actually achieves literarily in the Diary (717).10 This tendency to highlight the failures of women writers to achieve in a patriarchal publishing culture at the expense of what they do accomplish in
10 In how James characterizes herself as picturesque, she uses the diary as a way to distinguish herself as a James, argues Duquette. Instead, the diary, “works to divorce the picturesque from its use in nineteenth- century sentimental literature, sympathetic identification, and landscape description; the picturesque evolves, through her deft manipulation, into a tool that exposes the particularities of life, as well as the assumptions that generally shroud them (720). 164 such a repressive culture is not isolated to Alice James.11 Characterizing the diary as an appendage just further illustrates the marginal status of the diary as a literary genre. Even the younger brothers made attempts to write poetry and produce art. Perhaps James rejected participating in the same genres as her brothers’ works and attempted to carve out her own literary identity through diaries and letters.12 The use of the term appendage is significant here because it designates something attached to the body but not necessarily a part of it, possibly inanimate. It also demonstrates its connection to the body and James’s view of herself as a familial appendage. The fact remains that James’s writings are confined to these two marginal genres of diaries and letters. Most scholarship on Alice James tends to focus on the diary while the letters provide biographical information and supplement the reading of the diary; however, I argue that the diary and letters complement each other and should be considered together because of their similarities in form and content. Her diary was not one that followed the rules of traditional diary writing. It was hardly private, with much of it dictated to Katharine Loring whose hand appears in many of James’s letters as well. Mary Capello identifies the importance of the diary for the isolated James as a “self-made companion through which she imagines the world as companion, palpable and elusive as her caretakers, Katharine Loring and Nurse Bradford” (142). However, I would argue that James uses Katharine as a collaborator in the composition of her death. Recognizing that dying would be a social process, she used Katharine as not only an appendage who lent her hand to her diary when James could no longer use her body but also as the
11 Coleridge biographer Bradford Mudge makes the same argument in his treatment of Sara Coleridge’s life. He argues that too often Sara Coleridge has been dismissed for what she did not do instead of recognizing her for her great achievements in literary criticism, children’s literature, and letters. 12 However, it must be acknowledged that Henry James did participate in genres of life writing, the personal essay and memoir in particular, Moreover, he was also known as a letter-writer. Unlike his sister, he did not have to engage in any of his writings covertly. Before her diary was privately printed, only Katharine and James’s nurse knew about her diary. 165 “medium” that allowed James to speak posthumously. An appendage requires a body for an attachment whereas the absence of a body requires the services of a medium. Alice James clearly viewed the diary as, in Leon Edel’s terms borrowing from Emily Dickinson, “her letter to the world,” one she sent posthumously as the last word on her life transmitted through the reliable body of Katharine. Two years after James’s death, Katharine Loring had four copies of the diary made and sent a copy to both Henry and William James. While both William and Henry admired the diary, they were clearly uncomfortable with its contents. Henry does, however, grant the diary “a new claim for the family renown” for how “heroic” it is in its “individuality, its independence—its face- to-face with the universe for and by herself—and the beauty and eloquence…let alone the rich irony and humor” (28 August 1894; Henry James 215). Henry writes this review in response to William’s similar appraisal. For Henry, the diary functions as a material reminder that can be possessed, “it brings back to me all sorts of things I am glad to keep” (215). He clarifies just what these things are: “things that happened, hours, occasions, conversations,” “[brought] …back with a strange, living richness” (215). The diary reminds Henry of his sister’s letters in “her style, her power to write” (215). Despite “the life, the power, the temper, the humor and beauty and expressiveness of the Diary,” Henry finds his sister’s “thoughts partly ‘discounted’ to [him] in advance” by Alice’s conversation of which, unlike William, Henry was able to enjoy the “extraordinary force of her mind and character, her whole way of taking life—and death—in very much the manner in which the book does” (215). In sum, he had heard it all before. More than anything, it seems, the diary reminded Henry of “the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality” that “would have made the equal, the reciprocal, life of a ‘well’ person…impossible to her—so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the
166 only solution for her of the practical problem of life—as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc” (220). With the diary, William and Henry could perhaps justify preventing the diary’s publication in William’s case and destroying it in Henry’s. Henry’s story “The Aspern Papers” characterizes a scholar hunting down a poet’s love letters as a grave robber who waits for an old woman to die in order to “pounce on her possessions and ransack her drawers” (15). A diary is more private while letters are shared, are meant for more than just the eyes of the writer. Like many families aware of their own importance, the Jameses concerned themselves with memorial and family mythology. Jean Strouse writes that while “[m]ost families generate myths about themselves…few place the kind of premium the Jameses did on simultaneously reinforcing the myths and presenting private perceptions of truth for public consumption” (xi-xii). Because the Jameses placed “communication as the ultimate value in human experience,” there was a “painful awareness of all one could not share” (xii). Strouse emphasizes the interaction of letters and diaries as important texts that depict “the background drama of Alice’s nerves” (116). I further argue that this mixed narrative covering illness both as it was occurring through letters and in retrospect through the diary is one that includes information too private to share yet too known within the intimate public of the family to ignore. For the James family, letters were valuable commodities.13 Unfortunately many of Alice James’s letters were destroyed perhaps because of the family recognition of the power of personal correspondence. What Henry described as his sister’s “practical problem of life” first appeared in James’s letters where she could work out the problem of her life and how to end it.
13 And, during a significant European trip in 1872, “Bob wrote that Alice was ‘turning out the genius of the house,’ and William observed that she ‘must be tired ere now of the epithet of Mme. de Sevigne’” (Strouse 145). 167 “THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM OF LIFE”14
The beginning of James’s mortal career dated from her adolescence, which
coincided with the Civil War.15 This section addresses James’s problem of life and how she chose a lifetime of invalidism over suicide. An analysis of her choice to make a career of dying must first include a consideration of the Civil War and how it influenced her decision to confine herself to the sickroom in order to control the narrative of death that followed. This narrative control would not have been possible had she committed suicide. The Civil War forced Americans to adapt their notions of the Good Death, ones similar to and even influenced by the British Victorian way of death, to the horrors of battlefield death. Soldiers could not expect to die at home surrounded by friends and family and with the benefit of preparation brought on by prolonged illness so essential to dying well. Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) argues that during the war “[l]oss became commonplace” and “death’s threat, its proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared of the war’s experiences” (xiii). In fact, she acknowledges the importance of letters from the
battlefield in documenting the last hours of soldiers who had to die away from home.16 “[S]udden death, [which] represented a profound threat to fundamental assumptions about the correct way to die” (18), was what soldiers and their families found most traumatic about war deaths. Suicide in the years following the Civil War would not only remind families and friends of the traumas of sudden death during the war, it would also
14 Letter from Henry to William James, 28 August 1894, about Alice’s diary. Henry believed that Alice’s illness was the only remedy for “the practical problem of life,” that “her will and personality…would have made life almost impossible to her” (215). 15 Strouse rightly characterizes what she calls the “drama of Alice’s nerves” as a “background drama” since during this time, both brothers Wilkie and Robertson were fighting in the war and soon after they both suffered financial problems. 16 Gilpin writes of the letters documenting the deaths of others written to families by soldiers, “These letters sought to make absent loved ones virtual witnesses to the dying moments they had been denied, to link home and battlefront, and to mend the fissures war had introduced into the fabric of the Good Death” (15). 168 constitute an act of violence reminiscent of what war can inflict on the body. I argue that Alice James rejected suicide because it made the Good Death impossible and because she found the impact of violent death on one’s family too traumatic a legacy to leave. After the Civil War, several friends and acquaintances of the James family chose suicide, and these suicides became the subject of many of James’s letters and diary entries. One issue the family discussed fairly openly in letters addressed the problem of Alice: how she was, how she would live, and if she would, in fact, end it all herself. They seemed early on to accept what her brother Henry called her “practical problem of life.” She describes her life from adolescence, her breakdown in 1868, and early adulthood in a diary entry dated 21 February 1890, which is also one of the most heavily quoted and studied passages from the diary: Owing to muscular circumstances my youth was not the most ardent, but I had to peg away pretty hard between 12 and 24, ‘killing myself,’ as some one calls it— absorbing into the bone that the better part is to clothe oneself in neutral tints, walk by still waters, and possess one’s soul in silence. How I recall the low grey Newport sky in that winter of 62-3 as I used to wander about over the cliffs, my young soul crystallizing within me of what Life meant for me, one simple, single and before which all mystery vanished. …How profoundly grateful I am for the temperament which saves from the wretched fate of those poor creatures who
never find their bearings, but are tossed like dryed leaves hither, thither and yon at the mercy of every event which o’ertakes them. Who feel no shame at being vanquished, or at crying out at the common lot of pain and sorrow, who never dimly suspect that the only thing which survives is the resistance we bring to life and not the strain life brings to us. (95-6)
169 It is the only account we have of her illness at this time. No writings from the period of her first major breakdown survive. Why Alice James resisted killing herself even years after “pegging away” at suicide is a good question to ask, especially when there were so many people she knew choosing that option. For James, this “pegging away” to kill oneself was work; choosing neither to end her life nor suffer under its strain, she labored to “resist” life. Just as Charlotte Brontë found labor as the cure for rooted sorrow and Sara Coleridge gained comfort through her literary undertakings and death preparation, Alice James made invalidism and death her profession. Ruth Bernard Yeazell makes this the central claim of her introduction (and her title) in The Death and Letters of Alice James. Not long after she arrived in England, James wrote to William again of their brother Henry, “I am afraid that he will find me attached to his coattails for the rest of my mortal career” (23 Dec. 1884; 105-06). Kristen Boudreau highlights the ambiguity of James’s labeling of her “mortal career” that, “like her ‘mortal pen,’ seems to be the career of a living being, her phrase contains the more original sense of the ‘deathly’ career, a career intent upon its own demise” (53). However, this construction of herself as invalid was, until she moved to London, under the control of her family.17 The ambiguity of Alice James’s position—not just as a spinster invalid but as one both living and dying—finds it most adequate expression in letters where the speaker’s position is also ambivalent by being neither here nor there, then nor now. James enjoys a position of ambiguity because it is unlocatable; it allows her to be out of the way, to inconvenience as few people as
17 Esther F. Lanigan in her article “Negative Mentorship and the Case of Alice James,” sees Alice as her mother’s special project with Alice’s role “to be sick, to improve, and to relapse”; “little evidence exists that Mary desired Alice to do more than ‘improve’” (Lanigan 77). Alice could not journey back to Europe until both her parents died. This was the deal. It seems that she was stunted creatively until her parents died. Ultimately, “Alice James by force of circumstance and habit, came to see no alternative identity for herself” (Lanigan 82).
170 possible with her nerves. Her “certain ends to be attained in life” gestured towards death, but suicide was never the answer for her. From the very beginning, James used letters to debate and work out the problem of how she would die. This discourse on life and death—the choice of whether or not and how to endure—began years previously when James, possibly in the “hideous” summer of 1868, asked her father if it was okay to end one’s life. In 1878, Henry Sr. wrote her brother Robertson, also suffering but from depression and alcoholism, during one of her most severe attacks: One day a long time ago…[she] asked me whether I thought that suicide, to which at times she felt very strongly tempted, was a sin. I told her that I thought it was not a sin except where it was wanton, as when a person from a mere love of pleasurable excitement indulged in drink or opium to the utter degradation of his faculties and often to the ruin of the human form in him; but that it was absurd to think it sinful when one was driven to it in order to escape bitter suffering, from spiritual influx, as in her case, or from some loathsome form of disease, as in others. (qtd. in Yeazell 17-18) As an illustration of the two groups identified by Henry Sr., Robertson suffered from “the utter degradation” brought on by drink and Alice represented those wanting to escape “bitter suffering.” Her father even goes so far as to provide a diagnosis for his daughter:
“spiritual influx.” Henry Sr. gave her his “full permission to end her life whenever she pleased,” and “hoped that if ever she felt like doing that sort of justice to her circumstances, she would do it in a perfectly gentle way in order not to distress her friends” (qtd. in Yeazell 17-18). Henry granted his daughter the freedom to die and in doing so, quelled her desire to follow through on her temptation to end her own life. James’s motivation to kill herself was “with a view to break bonds, or assert her
171 freedom” (qtd. Yeazell 17). Yeazell describes Henry Sr’s strategy as one typical of the James family in which the “very tenderness of the family atmosphere produced a sort of impotence in the children, made resistance and definition difficult” (22). In this atmosphere, she would hardly be able to die on her own terms. Even if Alice James desired to die away from her family, she viewed her death as a reflection on those around her; after all, they would have to deal with the aftermath. In the diary entry on Edmund Gurney’s suicide, James does find fault with his actions in a critique that closely follows the advice her father gave her about how to kill herself: “It’s bad that it is so untidy, there is no denying that, for one bespatters one’s friends morally as well as physically, taking them so much more into one’s secret than they want to be taken” (5 Aug. 1889, Diary 52). The “secret” here means not only taking one’s friends and family into association with suicide, something superstitious and secretive; it also means “marking” one by acquaintance. Alice James did not commit suicide for the very fact that it would have been “untidy”; as much as she made Victorian conventions of the deathbed comical, she still held on to the literary technique of lingering death as a means to control the narrative of one’s demise. Like those who died violently during the Civil War, suicides did not have any narrative control over the story of one’s death. For most of Alice James’s life, she contemplated the end of her blissful career more than she actually took action to terminate it. The violence of suicide was too much for her to contemplate. She had learned that lesson a couple of years earlier when her friend Ellen Gurney committed suicide after her sister, Clover Adams, poisoned herself. Ellen Gurney’s violent suicide was the talk of Cambridge, and the main subject of Alice James’s letters throughout December of 1887. She even foresaw Ellen’s death after the suicide of her sister Clover Adams by poison on December 6, 1885. In letters written about Ellen’s fragile psychological state, James differed, in the most typical way, from
172 William on the value of Ellen’s life and on matters of sympathy and consolation, life and death. Even before Ellen’s suicide, James wrote to William wondering how her brother could “be so cruel as to wish her to live,” adding “nothing would rejoice me more than to hear that she was gone” (24 Aug. 1887, 133). When Ellen Gurney finally committed suicide by throwing herself under a train, James expressed her conflicted feelings to Mrs. Alice James at the great violence of what she considered a justified suicide. In a letter to her sister in law, she feels “triumphant” that Ellen’s “bruised wings are folded, no more desperate flapping to prolong that weary flight” (3 Dec. 1887, 146). Still, she admits, “[O]ne cannot murmur at the manner of her end, but with our imbecile, physical clinging to what we know to be dust & ashes the thought of that poor wandering body violated by that hideous iron monster has given a ghastly wrench to my feeble frame” (147). Significantly, James characterizes Gurney’s suicide as a violation of the body. The great physical trauma of Gurney’s suicide must have reminded those who had lived through the Civil War of the sudden violent deaths of war where bodies were violated by bayonets, bullets, and shrapnel. James’s obsession with how one dies and the state of the body illustrates a common view of death in America at that time even as she writes from England. Considering the background of the Civil War and the widespread violence done to the body (even Wilkie James’s injuries were so severe that he could not be moved from the entrance hallway in the family home and had to sleep there), violent death not only made the “beautiful death” impossible, its trauma also resonated with the traumas of war.18 For
18 In using an American writer, I aim to show, through the lens of someone who lived during the traumas of the Civil War, just how pervasive the idea of the Good Death was in the British and American cultures of death. Another writer who also lived through war and wrote a good many letters during it was Emily Dickinson. Dickinson produced most of her poems during the period of the Civil War, and her focus on death reflects the time during which she wrote. How she writes about death in her correspondence, most of which was destroyed by her sister Lavinia Dickinson after Emily’s death in 1886, should be studied. Alice James did read Dickinson’s poems near the end of her life. She mentions reading Emily Dickinson and 173 James, the reality of Gurney’s mutilated body reminds her of her “feeble one.” Writing to William days later, she feels, “knocked up, crushed, and broken” by how Ellen died “which haunts one like a nightmare” (11 Dec. 1887; Her Write 177). That such an end should have come to her of all people in the world with her exquisite personal refinement is too hideous. It brings home to me cruelly what paralytics we all are, so remote from our nearest and dearest that we are helpless to save them from such a desecration of their personal sanctity even as that. It is ghastly!” (177) While James felt that Ellen could no longer live, she could not abide by the way she died. Just as she felt powerless to save her friend, she could not kill herself either. In both senses, she felt like a paralytic; after all her “torpid career” relied on not acting, on being remote. In the end, such physical inaction did not matter; no one can prevent death. She felt vanity kept her from the final act of ending her life; it was too untidy, a “desecration of …personal sanctity” (177) that “bespatters one’s friends morally as well as physically” (5 Aug. 1889, Diary 52). She learned this lesson from her parents early on. Her father died in a way consistent with his life; whereas, death for Ellen Gurney was incongruous with how she lived by being an unaesthetic death for an aesthetic life. Even after her parents’ deaths, James determined not to kill herself in order to control the narrative of her death as much as possible.
While James at times dismissed conventions of the Good Death in her letters, she wanted to make sure that her parents had one, and while her parents were sick, she met the demands of caregiver with an energy that had up until that point been absent. Her own caregiver, Katharine Loring, provided a good role model. Katharine Loring (1849- 1943) impressed James from the start. Katharine first appears in James’s correspondence
derides the English for “missing quality,” writing of her poems, “the robust evades them equally with the subtle” (6 Jan. 1892, 227). 174 in 1875 in a letter to her friend Annie Ashburner. James met Katharine through their volunteer work for the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, a correspondence course
for women on intellectual topics.19 Their friendship developed, and Katharine began taking over care of James in 1879. James once wrote of Katharine as “the most wonderful being” with “all the mere brute superiority which distinguishes man from woman combined with all the distinctively feminine virtues. There is nothing she cannot do from hewing wood and drawing water to driving run-away horses and educating all the women in North America” (9 Aug. 1879; 87). The two traveled to England in May 1881 and returned in September of that year. Mary James became sick soon after their return, and Katharine provided support for James in her new caregiver role. Backed by Katharine, Alice embraced her new occupation as caregiver. The illness and death of Mary James on January 30, 1882, so transformed Alice James that her Aunt Kate referred to her as “a daily, hour miracle” with “those poor nerves having apparently found their long needed stimulus in the tremendous sense of responsibility which has fallen upon her” (qtd. in Yeazell 25). Aunt Kate says of her sister, “how must she rejoice that to the dear child to whom she gave material existence, she has by her death given spiritual life” (25). James acknowledged her new sense of life to her friend Francis Morse and how the seven months since her mother’s death “brought such changes in so many ways & to me so many new responsibilities that I feel at times that I may not be equal to them” (11 Sept. 1882; 91). She was surprised that she could get through with “the invaluable thought that one has only to live one day at a time & that all
19 James taught history and Katharine oversaw. Some of Katharine Loring’s letters are located in the Schlesinger library at Radcliffe College. Ruth Barnard Yeazell quotes a letter from Katharine to Fanny Morse after Alice’s death to show the significance of the day they met: “that festivity is dated the greatest happiness of my life,” and “It is an anniversary which we always kept unknown to any” (74). Loring wrote Morse to thank her for making the introduction. Critics and biographers characterize their relationship as a Boston Marriage. Strouse writes that Katharine replaced Henry James, Sr. as Alice’s principle caregiver, who replaced “passive convalesence” with calling Alice “out of herself” (191). 175 the vague terrors of the future vanish as the future at every moment becomes the present” (91). With this new responsibility to her father and less fear of the future, she also realized her responsibility to the dead along with a new appreciation for her mother: “in losing her I am only nearer to her than I ever was before; it is such a happy thought that her dear, tired body is at rest & that the blessed memory of her beautifull spirit will never grow dim” (91). James’s realization that one’s relationship to the dead could continue no doubt changed her view of her own mortality. James’s commitment to her mother’s memory cannot be considered separately from how she viewed her own death. The way she writes about her mother reveals someone who wants to know how to materialize memory with what is left after someone dies. In a diary entry years later on 20 September 1891, James concludes, “how little all assurances of one’s own immortality seem to concern one, now, and how little to have gained from the experience of life, if one’s thoughts are lingering still upon personal fulfillments and not rooted in the knowledge that the great Immortalities, Love, Goodness and Truth include all others; and one need pray for no lesser survivals!” (220-1). At the heart of her realization is that dying, remembrance, and enduring are inherently social; they cannot occur in isolation. Still, as much as she engages in acts of commemoration and self-commemoration, she seems uncomfortable with evoking the dead: References to those whom we shall meet again make me shiver, as such an
invasion of their sanctity, gone so far beyond, for ever since the night that Mother died, and the depth of filial tenderness was revealed to me, all personal claim upon her vanished, and she has dwelt in my mind a beautiful illumined memory, the essence of divine maternity from which I was to learn great things, give all, but ask nothing. (221)
176 James seems to contradict herself here by wanting to be remembered by the living while considering references to the dead as “an invasion of their sanctity” (221). However, her real issue with evoking the dead near the end of her life lay in how people measured the success of life through “personal fulfillment” and not in the “great Immortalities.” Like many people who idealize the dead soon after they have died, Alice James idealized her mother as this “essence of divine maternity” who embodied self-sacrifice. The lesson she learned from her mother’s death, “give all, but ask nothing,” enabled her to become her father’s caretaker. After Mary James’s death, James had to take over care of her father who required constant attention. The “miraculous” Alice bought some land and had a house built for her and her father on Manchester-by-the-Sea where Katharine was staying nearby. Just as James learned from the “divine maternity” of her late mother, her father’s death instructed her in how to die. In a letter written shortly after his death, James finds that “[a] happier or more beautifull death it would be impossible to imagine & what is so precious to his children, is its perfect consistency with all that he has thought & said & lived so that by the manner of his death his life’s work was consummated actually showing to us that life not death had come to him” (7 Jan. 1883; 93). Her father’s death was beautiful because it reflected how he lived and thought, and he died in such a way that others would construct a narrative of his death in the manner he desired. James idealizes her father immediately upon his death just as she did her mother. In her mind, she could use her father’s death to idealize his life or at least use the death as a reflection of the life that she wanted to memorialize. In another letter, she articulates perhaps the most difficult lesson of all: “I never till lately understood how hard it must be to have no father or mother to help one out of the wood in which we are all floundering” (n.d., Her Write 113). With the death of her parents, James could no longer consider herself a child.
177 Her youth was gone, and her generation took its turn to die. She still needed someone to take care of her, and even though she managed her father’s care while he was dying, Katharine remained always nearby. In Henry Sr.’s final days, Katharine never left her side. From her parents’ deaths, James learned, as a deathbed witness, how she wanted to die (or not to die) and that just as she did not hold any real possession of her own life, she did not possess any one else’s life either. With her parents’ deaths she ceased being a deathbed spectator in order to prepare for her own. Above all, James sought a death that she could control; if she could not commit suicide then she would passively accept whatever mortal condition would befall her, and with her parents’ deaths, she gained control of her life. However, she found it “a struggle this fitting oneself to the middle volume of life from the pages of which all the ripe and mellow are vanishing so fast leaving our own crude generation to fill their places” (28 Dec. 1887; 181). For James, “the ripe and mellow,” or the older generations, were leaving so quickly the younger generation could not fill their places before they were mature or ripe enough to leave the young with an example of how to live and die. She wonders, “Can Time ever round our angles and deepen our tone so that some day we shall impose upon the innocents behind us and seem to them low-toned and harmonious?” (181). She finds comfort in how “humanly experience seems to renew itself and revolve perpetually in the same narrow
circle of emotions” (181). James realized that grief and acts of mourning did not follow the linear course of time. Dana Luciano finds that “the altered flow of time experienced by the mourner could be … understood as a version of sacred time, the regenerative mode that transcended ordinary time in a ritual revisiting of origins” (7), where “the largely cyclical time of private life made space, as we have seen, for the reproduction of that which was understood to be always already given about the human” (36). James could
178 not take herself out of time, but she longed for an intimate space to grieve and die. For her to die without reminding people of her bodily presence, she removed her body to England. If she considered herself “already dead,” then her body did not need to be present; it was merely an inconvenience, an afterthought. Eventually, even her letters, necessary for maintaining connections to her family, would bear no trace of her body once Katharine took over her correspondence and her diary entries. Still, James determined to leave something behind. Her next move in her deathly career would work toward that end.
“SO HERE GOES, MY FIRST JOURNAL!”20
If Alice James learned from her parents how to die, then her Aunt Kate taught both her and Katharine Loring how not to handle the remains of the dead. After the elder
Henry James’s death, Mary James’s sister Catherine Walsh,21 otherwise known as Aunt Kate, took it upon herself to handle the literary remains of her late sister and brother-in- law and destroyed a great many family papers. Katharine Loring wrote to William’s eldest son Harry James years later in 1920: “your Aunt Alice was very ill, and while she was still in bed, Mrs. Walsh burned up great numbers of letters that your Grandfather had in a chest of drawers. I happened to see her doing it (just as she finished) & remonstrated, but she said they were family papers & she thought it better that ‘the children’ should not see them” (qtd. in Strouse 209). Katharine takes issue with both the destructive act and the use of the word “children” to describe the adult James siblings. She disapproved of Catherine Walsh appointing herself caretaker of the family’s literary remains. As an
20 The opening lines of Alice James’s first diary entry, 31 May 1889 (25). 21 Catherine Walsh lived with the James family for many years. Alice James’s mother used her sister, Aunt Kate, as a kind of surrogate to her children. Aunt Kate likely found Katharine Loring somewhat threatening as she considered herself Alice’s companion, but clearly, Aunt Kate and Alice did not have the smoothest relationship as evidenced by the letters on objects of inheritance. Loring was the one person who could both “save” Alice and help her die. 179 accidental witness, Katharine could judge Catherine Walsh’s rash “adult” act as well as inform future generations of it. Katharine considered herself a caregiver at the time; little did she know she would be her companion’s literary executor and undertaker as well. This section focuses on James’s interest in the material remains of the dead, and how her concern with the objects left behind fueled her desires both to start her own journal as well as to take great care controlling the arrangements surrounding her own demise. In a family obsessed with its own mythology, Alice James concerned herself with the objects of inheritance. In 1888, she clashed with her aunt over her “cool proposal for disposing of Grandmother’s portrait.” She determines that “so long as Death eludes my grasp I remain as much alive as possible and have not the slightest desire or intention to dispossess myself of the few ancestral possessions owned by our race” (199). For James, ownership was a right of the living and a family practice. In fact, she was already making arrangements for her pictures and clocks to go to Henry and then William’s children. Part of this obsession with ancestral objects had to do with James’s concern that she would leave nothing of herself behind after she died. The letter to Aunt Kate regarding the portrait contains a phrase that must have pained Aunt Kate, the elderly spinster widow: “It is very strange to live altogether with people who ‘can’t imagine that I ever walked’ and who take me as having always been an ancient, grey-haired spinster” (200). Even though Aunt Kate had married at age forty, her marriage ended after only
two years in separation with her much older husband dying ten years later.22 Still, Aunt Kate and Alice shared similar positions in the family, ones financially dependent on allowances and inheritances and socially dependent on familial patience and the power of guilt.
22 Jean Strouse posits that Captain Charles H. Marshall was put off by the devotion Aunt Kate showed to her sister’s family, devotion that should have been reserved for her own husband. Aunt Kate’s place in the family was as an outsider but one who imposed herself on the family. 180 While James was in England, Aunt Kate began to decline. Despite knowing that her aunt was receiving care from her family, she felt “grief and regret” for “lying with folded hands fostering her own aches and pains” (165). Part of that regret was both lessened and strengthened by distance. When Catherine Walsh died on March 5, 1889, James was able to “witness” or read the death through letters from the family which made her and her circle of Henry and Katharine “feel as if we knew all the outward details; as for the rest of our ignorance, at 3000 miles distance, is no greater than yours close at hand, we were no more remote from her at the last moment than those by her bedside” (March 22, 1889; 169). James seemed to recognize that despite death being social, there was a great divide between the deathbed witness and the dying. She observes that “[d]eath at a distance” or reading about it through letters or hearing testimonies, “is much more shocking & seems to emphasize the almost brutal aloofness in wh. we are from those to whom we owe the most, owing to the conditions of life & the unmodifiable nature of individual temperaments” (22 March 1889; 169). The letter, itself necessitated by absence, reminds James of the distance from her aunt’s deathbed at the same time that it survives as a durable narrative, one that she, Henry, and Katharine can revisit and relive. And, Aunt Kate’s death renews old grief, namely the deathbeds of her parents, which she not only attended but also presided over as chief caregiver. If her parents provided her with models for how to die, then Aunt Kate’s death
served to remind her how she did not want her life to end. James wrote to William her own evaluation of “Poor Aunt Kate’s life”: “[It] must seem to our point of view such a failure, a person so apparently meant for independence & a ‘position’ to have been so unable to have worked her way to them & instead to have voluntarily relegated herself to the contrary” (22 March 1889; 170). Instead of being independent or even succeeding at her marriage, Aunt Kate’s life “had but one motif, the intense longing to absorb herself in
181 a few individuals” (170). But even absorbing herself into her sister’s family was a disappointment. Still, Aunt Kate’s failure involves James’s own sense of failure: “My failing her, after Mother & Father’s death, must have seemed to her a great & ungrateful betrayal; my inability to explain myself & hers to understand, in any way, the situation made it all the sadder & more ugly” (170). If James was meant as a companion for Aunt
Kate, she escaped this responsibility by moving to England.23 In her sickroom, there was space for only one invalid, and at least from the sickroom, she could attempt to communicate with her difficult aunt through letters. However, even James knew her letters were not enough companion for her Aunt Kate and that even in England, she had to “share” Katharine Loring with her father and sister Louisa. James’s grief and regret were short-lived. Aunt Kate left her nothing but a shawl. As one who found in earthly possessions and family heirlooms a sort of comfort, even a consolation prize, for being alive, James felt this insult keenly. After all, she inherited Aunt Kate’s position as the single dependent female. To William, she wrote, “I can hardly conceive of myself under any conditions, as so abject as to grasp at a life-interest in a shawl!” (7 April 1889; 175). She jokes to her brother that “you your heirs & assigns should give me the shawl, renouncing their rights of reversion in it, & making me its absolute possessor” (175). Upon her death, she jokingly resolves, I may, or I may not, leave it to you in my will, but if I should, it will be entirely a
voluntary action on my part & in that way you must look upon it & accept it with any ravages wh. moth & rust may have brought about. I might make a condition of doing so, that you shd. drape yr. manly person in it at my funeral—or better still, wrap it about you to protect you from the breezes on the wharf when you
23 Esther F. Lanigan argues that because Alice’s mother refused to allow Alice to return to Europe after her first trip there, Alice’s creativity was stunted until both her parents died. 182 perform that unaesthetic duty, wh. may some day be yrs., of passing my skin and bones thro’ the Custom House. (175) Jokes aside, James did not trust William with her remains, her possessions, or her writings. A misunderstanding between brother and sister on the storage of her things
made her wary.24 Around this time, James began writing her diary and in doing so realized that the dead could live beyond their bodies through things. Her fears of being treated as if she never existed must have been somewhat assuaged by this activity whose very end meant leaving something permanent behind. After her father’s death, she took great comfort from the volume of literary remains published by William, titled The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James (1884). She wrote William’s wife about the experience of reading her father’s book: “I have just been consoling myself this morning with some pages of Father’s book. It makes him so actually present! Wm. can have no haunting thought of having inadequately fulfilled his filial function!” (8 Dec. 1886; 128). Just as James had taken care of her father throughout his illness, William arranged Henry Sr’s fragmented works. He left something material through which his father could endure. James knew she could not rely on her letters to endure because she did not have control over their fate. Two significant events occurred after Aunt Kate’s death. Not only did James begin her diary, she also discovered and read a few of her parents’ surviving letters.
James started her diary not long after Aunt Kate’s death and while she was at
24 When James moved to England, she left many of her things in storage. She wrote William in spring of 1887 to tell him that he and his family could use some of the home items there. However, William took everything out of storage and arranged for storage elsewhere. She merely wanted things to be of use, but she wanted to keep the remainder where she had arranged. She felt insulted that he found the storage facilities too expensive for her use and found an alternate facility. In a letter written on Nov. 4, 1888, she argues that she chose an expensive place because she found the objects too precious to store just anywhere. 183 Leamington, where neither Katharine nor Henry were attending her. For the first time in a
while, she was entirely alone.25 Her opening entry, dated May 31, 1889, reads, I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one- syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations. I shall at least have it all my own way and it may bring relief as an outlet to that geyser of emotions, sensations, speculations and reflections which ferments perpetually within my poor old carcass for its sins; so here goes, my first Journal! (25) James conceded that her body could no longer bear the burden of her emotional life and that writing would give her relief and consolation. She had kept commonplace books before. In 1886, when she left home, she began a commonplace book and started copying death-themed quotations in what her biographer Jean Strouse identifies as a form of ventriloquism. With James, there always seemed to be a layer of protection in her writings, whether through using others’ words to express her thoughts and feelings or using a genre that was deemed nonliterary. Joanne Jacobson relates diaries and letters through their shared “protected status of audience” which “makes both forms ambiguously belletristic, reducing the ‘anxiety of authorship’ which has made the task of
writing literature loom for many women as an abrogation of male authority” (372). This must have especially been the case in a family of talented writers. Even the relatively obscure brothers Wilkie and Bob were known to be good letter writers in the family, especially during the Civil War. For James both letters and diaries allowed her “a
25 Katharine was in America taking care of her father and sister. Leamington was a town that ran on the business of invalids. 184 precious, hoarded means of repossessing compromised autonomy”; however, “the letters remained obligated to much of the world from which the diary could claim refuge”
(Jacobson 372).26 The diary must have allowed James to express all that she held back in her letters, writings that often read as frank and sarcastic treatments of not only her illness but also of her sickroom visitors. But the diary was hardly a private genre for James. Besides the fact that she dictated much of it to Katharine and her nurse, she wanted the diary published after her death. She desired to preserve the story of her own life and struggle from her perspective; in her concern for earthly things, she wanted to leave this one behind. Even the request that the Diary be typewritten counters any desires for privacy. Making a handwritten text typewritten “plac[es] bodies at a further remove from the scene of printed writing” (Menke 11). Not only would her body be absent, Katharine’s would be removed well. Yeazell points out Katharine’s own ambivalence about James’s wishes: “‘though she never said so,’ Katharine Loring reported, ‘I understood that she would like to have it published’” (6).27 But, I argue that this was less an ambivalence about the privacy of her sickbed and more of an acknowledgement that dying is social and writing about death is a collaborative act, like correspondence. This desire to endure materially and to explain herself was probably instilled in her even more after she found old letters from her parents in a desk, what she called “ghost microbes imported in my Davenport” (29 Jan. 1890, 78). She read for two days
26 James’s resistance in her letters played itself out in how she determined to contradict how others wanted to write her. James’s reliance on letters, then, had to do with her inability “to create a viable alternative to the community which sent her such conflicting messages about herself, James’s letters enabled her to face that community and to face the narrative of silence into which it threatened to writ her, armed with words” (Jacobson 372). Linda Anderson, editor of another collection of Alice James’s letters, also links Diary and correspondence. Anderson argues that since the diary was a “private, intermediate space, it could be said to be a rehearsal for the authorship she never publically claimed, though may have privately coveted” (xxiv). 27 Yeazell calls Katharine’s dictation “stenographic activity” and argues that such an activity is characteristic of Alice James’s ambivalence towards privacy. 185 the letters that Aunt Kate did not find, claiming that time as “the most intense, exquisite and profoundly interesting experiences I ever had” (78). The letters had such a profound effect upon her that it strengthened her will to preserve family objects of inheritance, particularly written ones. In a letter to her sister-in-law, Alice Howe Gibben James, she wrote a couple of days later, “Bend all your energies to instill in [your children] the most conservative habits with regard to family letters, their own, as well as the rest, they will have priceless value in time” (5 Feb. 1890; 189). Similar to the way Sara Coleridge used her Mourning Journal as a drafting space for her letters, the content of the letter to her sister-in-law parallels the content of the diary entry, which also describes the two-day reading as “the strangest and most vivid experience” (189). In the diary, she writes that the letters were “made of the daily events of their pure simple lives, with souls unruffled by the ways of men, like special creatures, spiritualized and remote from coarser clay” (78-79). By writing down this experience, attempting to “give it form,” “its vague intensity will take limits to itself, and the ‘divine anguish’ of the myriad memories stirred grow less” (78). “[T]aking limits of itself” would imply that the spiritualized forms of her parents and her memories of them as well as her grief would all be made material through the written word. What could be overwhelming became manageable in its material manifestation. As she reads these letters, she responds to her parents by writing her reaction to the letters as if in dialogue. But, in the letter to Mrs. Alice, she describes how she had to leave the experience of reading “from pathologic causes & I do not dare return yet, but they are perpetually soliciting me” (188), characterizing the pull of the voices in the letters as hazardous to her health. Indeed, revisiting the past could result in disappointment, and it did for James less than a week after writing Mrs. Alice when, “In a rash moment, panting to rise out of the trivial and draw a breath of life, I read one of
186 Father’s letters to a [word blotted] friend” (13 Feb. 1890, Diary 84). Instead of it bringing her father to life, the letter “fell perfectly flat—Ah, what a wilted moment was that! I felt as if I had committed a desecration” (84). Despite that experience, she considered the letters “living things sucking me back into the succulent past out of this anomalous death in life—an existence as juicy as that of a dried cod-fish. They both exist so in their letters!” (5 Feb. 1890; 188-189). For James, all the juiciness and succulence of life were in the past. Strouse writes of James’s frequent use of the word “succulent” as describing “the human juices exuding from the human comedy at the slightest pressure” (299). However, I think it also refers to the very tangible “ghost microbes,” the residue of the dead and how James conceived of the dead as even more alive than herself. In quoting from one of her mother’s letters in her diary, she writes that the letters have a power of “giving instantly, that wh. the wisdom of the sages is inadequate for, body to her ghost” (189). The letters, no matter how trivial or obscure, stand in as a memorial to who her parents really were in their day-to-day lives. Most importantly for James, the experience of reading her parents’ letters brings them back into her life without interfering with it. In rereading the letters and writing about them, she wanted to make what once was lost familiar again through repeated exposure. Until reunion, she determined to get to know her parents again: “But as I read it seemed as if I had opened up a post-script of the past and that I had had, in order to find them truly, really to lose them” (Diary 79). She learned of the possibility of really knowing the dead after they have died. James’s struggle to exist (or to avoid sharing the fate of her Aunt Kate) found its solution in her diary, in leaving behind “ghost microbes.”28 In a diary entry, she writes of the pleasure she receives from Mr. Howell’s letter responding to one she had sent him: “mine had
28 “The depiction of her own reading experience—two days on the old davenport poring over the letters— suggests the unspoken anticipation that future generations might similarly discover Alice James herself, the fully formed subject of her own writing, now formalized in the pages of the diary” (Hoffman 415-416). 187 made father and mother seem living to him. No greater happiness can come than finding that they survive, or can be revived, in a few memories” (13 June 1889, 33). James engaged in her brand of memorial making, one that circulated in an intimate circle of family and friends. Here memories were made from letters—the ones she encountered in her desk and the ones she wrote to others while still living. James found a way to endure through her diary, an object that a relative like Aunt Kate could not destroy because its preservation could be trusted to an undertaker, one like Katharine Loring.
“SEIZING THE RIGHT MOMENT OF ECLIPSE”29
But, at the moment, Alice James had to confront living her “anomalous death in life” while plotting her existence on the page (5 Feb. 1890; 188-189). In early 1890, James determined to make real preparations for her death. One diary entry from February details her plans for cremation and the writing of her will. The will joins her other remains, her letters and her diary, as collaborative texts for which she employed Katharine’s body. In all of these texts, James and Katharine make arrangements for death, treating it as the great ceremony of their lives. I argue in this section that James’s collaborative death writing with Katharine functions as a sort of correspondence with the living to which she dictates the terms of her death. James had been “discouraged about cremation,” fearing it would be “very fussy and very expensive” (88). She followed her father’s teaching that death need not inconvenience others. After tasking Katharine to write a letter of inquiry, she learned that cremation was “ as simple and inexpensive as possible.” Moreover, James did not want her ashes to be placed among the living but reunited with the dead where she felt she belonged: “Me ashes are to be put in an urn, and sent home, not as a parlour ornament for William’s new house, but to be buried beside Father and Mother in the cemetery at Cam[bridge], --so that we shall not be myths as
29 1 Feb. 1892; Diary 229. 188 Henry suggests we night otherwise become” (88).30 In her diary, she imagines Katharine carrying her body across the ocean and finds it “a great waste” that she “didn’t die whilst K. was here; she could have carried home the urn in her top berth and as she lay convulsed with seasickness it would have greatly assuaged her grief to have such a palpable assurance that that portion of the hitherto so susceptible to the dread thing was reduced to ashes” (Diary 88-90). Not only does James depend on Katharine to attend her deathbed, but she also relies on Katharine’s physical pain through seasickness to deaden the emotional pain of grief. Furthermore, in constructing a narrative of her bodily “homecoming” in joining the graves in Cambridge, she adds another element to Katharine’s journey: the diary, in her friend’s possession and perhaps sitting alongside the ashes. If Alice James thought of herself as “dead” since “the hideous summer of ‘78” as she wrote of her “shriveling empty pea pod” of a body shortly before her death, then she must have considered her whole body an appendage and therefore in need of another body to act as a more capable appendage for her (2 Feb. 1892; Diary, 230). Not only did Katharine figure in James’s plans for her bodily remains, she also oversaw the rewriting of the will. Recounting the episode in her diary acts as a sort of codicil to the will that explains the alterations to her will along with the dispensation of her body. One of the witnesses to the will remarked to Katharine that she could not look at James’s face because “she felt as if she ‘ought to keep her eye fixed upon Miss James’s hand!’” (17 Feb. 1890; Diary 90). The witness’s fixation on James’s body and on the hand that signs the will seems to suggest that her hand was the most animated and powerful part of her
30 Henry James later described his family plot in the Cambridge Cemetery as “that unspeakable group of graves” (Complete Notebooks 240). “Everything was there, everything came; the recognition, stillness, the strangeness, the pity and the sanctity and the terror, the breath-catching passion and the divine relief of tears. William’s inspired transcript, on the exquisite little Florentine urn of Alice’s ashes…” (240). 189 body, that the action of the hand belied the death in life. This diary entry was written in September of 1890 in James’s own hand. At some point, however, James could no longer write for herself, and Katharine took over. A collaborative authorship, after all, would solve the main problem of writing one’s death. For the last two years of her life, James frequently pointed out with great humor that she would not be around to witness her own death: it will probably be in my sleep so that I shall not be one of the audience, dreadful fraud! a creature who has been denied all dramatic episodes might be allowed, I think, to assist at her extinction. I know I shall slump at the 11th hour, and it would complete it all so to watch the rags and tatters of one’s Vanity in its insolent struggle with the Absolute, as the curtain rails down on this jocose humbuggery
called Life! (12 Sept. 1890; Diary 135)31 In November of 1890, a month before she gave her pen over to Katharine, she wrote of the monotony of her sickbed as broken only by “the varying degree of discomfort.” She still held onto making her death of as little inconvenience as possible, even worrying that the timing of her death would conflict with the London opening of one of Henry’s plays: “I am working away as hard as I can to get dead as soon as possible, so as to release Katharine; but this play of Harry’s makes a sad complication, as I don’t want to immerse him in a deathbed scene on his ‘first night,’ too much of an aesthetic incongruity!” (26 Nov. 1890; 193). Beyond Henry’s play, James was aware of how the cycle of her illnesses controlled Katharine’s life and even characterizes her “work” “to get dead” as
31 James often wrote about being caught by death unprepared. In a letter to Sara Sedgwick Darwin, she jokes about living in fear of being “suddenly taken ill unto my death” and in the absence of her brother Henry, having her “little ecclesiastical nurse” introduce the curate from upstairs to the deathbed. She asks her reader to “[i]magine opening your eyes and seeing the bat-like object standing there!” She adds with great comic effect, “I am sure it would curdle my soul in its transit & at any rate entirely spoil my post mortem expression of countenance. It is terrible to be such an unprotected being as I am” (138). 190 something that would liberate her companion. James knew her and Katharine’s real predicament: “The trouble seems to be there isn’t anything to die of” (193). On 31 May 1891, that problem was solved and James realized her aspirations: “Ever since I have been ill, I have longed and longed for some palpable disease, no matter how conventionally dreadful a label it might have, but I was always driven back to stagger alone under the monstrous mass of subjective sensations” (Diary 206-07). Her “mass of subjective sensations” is replaced by a tumor diagnosed by Sir Andrew Clark who says to her, “nothing can be done … but to alleviate pain, that it is only a question of time.” He delivers his prognosis of no recovery along “with a delicate embroidery” of all of her physical ailments (207). She seems proud of this litany of illness, one that “ought to satisfy the most inflated pathological vanity,” while acknowledging its possible distastefulness: “It is decidedly indecent to catalogue oneself in this way, but I have put it down in a scientific spirit, to show that though I have no productive worth, I have certain value as an indestructible quantity” (207). While she may have had nothing to show for her life in bed, she now had scientific proof that all ailments prior to the tumor had failed to kill her. The catalogue provided a sort of biography for her body. With a diagnosis, she could now imagine the end of her story. James writes of the unique perspective she had gained throughout her long wait for something to die from on 1 June 1891, “Having it to look forward to for a while seems to double the value of the event, for one becomes suddenly picturesque to oneself, and one’s wavering little individuality stands out with a cameo effect and one has the tenderest indulgence for all the abortive little stretchings out which crowd in upon the memory” (Diary 207). But, “looking forward” to death would have to be further prolonged; there would be another
191 “stretching out.” Five days after her diagnosis, she wrote, “As canker32 I’ the rose, so lurketh disappointment in the tumour!” finding that she could not “throw myself back upon a tumour with perfect moral security” (5 June 1890; Diary 208). Instead, “the wretched thing is simply absolutely a tumour; commonplace and well intentioned as curtailing life” (208). Despite James looking, in Katharine’s words, “‘prepared’ for a week,” it could be months (208). Katharine continued to be held captive by her companion’s illness. With such prolonged pain, James doubted she could maintain looking so prepared for that long or that pain would lessen enough to return her to her pen. Chalking it all up to the cruel humor of Destiny, James marveled at her “indestructible quality” and her capacity to endure pain. She knew that her “elaborate exit” had been arranged for her by her biology and that Destiny was just part of the body with which she was at war. Along with pain, James had to meet the challenge of communicating her prognosis to others through letters. Letters provided a way for her to shape the image of her deathbed for people who could not be spectators. She spent the next couple of days after realizing that death would not immediately come working out in her Diary how to tell people and how to manage the misapprehensions she anticipated from others who would not “understand the enormous relief of Sir A. C.’s uncompromising verdict, lifting us out of the formless vague and setting us within the very heart of the sustaining concrete” (207).33 For James, it was important that people understand her approach to death and her relief in knowing that something organic, the “sustaining concrete” of a
32 Like Alice, Charlotte Brontë also used the word “canker,” but in Brontë’s sense, it was the cancerous quality of grief. 33 In Scene Six of Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed: A Play in Eight Scenes (1993), Alice gives a monologue in which she compares her tumor to stone, “So much stone; this stony lump in my breast. Broken stones, which means broken writing. The letters are all capitals” (50). Sontag’s play imagines Alice on her deathbed. She has conversations with her father, Henry, a burglar, and in some of the more peculiar scenes, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Fuller, Myrtha from Giselle, and Kundry from Parsifal. 192 tumor, would kill her. The way James writes in her diary implies that there is an audience for her private writings on death. Why else, then, would it be so important to her, in a family of writers and attention getters, that she construct a deathbed narrative for readers to encounter after her death? Even as James could step outside of herself as an observer and watch the deathbed, she remained separate from the other members of the audience. She realized she would not be part of the audience after her death; instead, “The grief is all for K. and H. who will see it all, whilst I shall only feel it, but they are taking it, of course, like archangels, and care for me with infinite tenderness and patience. Poor dear William with his exaggerated sympathy for suffering isn’t to know anything about it until it is all over” (207-08). While Katharine was always there and Henry readily available, William was back in America; he was part of the audience from whom she anticipated the greatest misapprehension. Alice James separated herself from her brother William. Not only did she reject his version of sympathy, she also quarantined herself from him by moving and considering herself as already dead and beyond his help and expertise. When she told William she was dying, he responded with a very sympathetic letter. James responded in kind, “I could have wanted nothing else, and should have felt, notwithstanding my ‘unsentimentality’ very much wounded & incomprise, had you walked round & not up to my demise” (30 July 1891; 194). She wrote William that dying seems to be “the most
supremely interesting moment in life, the only one if fact, when living seems life” (194). She is grateful “to have these few months so full of interest & instruction in the knowledge of my approaching death” (194). Dying, “as simple in one’s own person as any fact of nature, the fall of a leaf or the blooming of a rose,” gives James a “delicious consciousness, ever present, of wide spaces close at hand, & whisperings of release in the
193 air” (194). She refuses to let William characterize her death, “my commonplace little journey,” as tragic: You must also remember that a woman, by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man, a few emotions & she is satisfied: so when I am gone, pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else had neurotic science been born; notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience I have always had a significance for myself, & every chance to stumble along my straight & narrow little path, & to worship at the feet of my Deity, & what more
can a human soul ask for. (195)34 James knew that accepting sympathy would be equal to accepting another’s depiction of her pain. Sympathy, then, interfered with how she wanted to write her own death. Boudreau identifies her strategy of attacking sympathy by showing it to be “worthless at best, at worst a fictionalization of sentimental desires exploited for the spectator’s pleasure” (62).35 Wanting to counteract William’s imagination that his sister is tragically wasting away in England, James writes, “This year has been one of the happiest I have ever known, surrounded by such affection & devotion, but I won’t enter into details, as I see the blush mantle the elderly cheek of my scribe, already” (196). James had long taken
34 Her letter continues: “But you must believe that you greatly exaggerate the tragic element in my commonplace little journey; & so far from ever having thought that ‘my frustrations were more flagrant than the rule”, I have always rejoiced that my temperament had set for my task the attainment of the simplest rudimentary ideal, which I could carry about in my pocket & work away upon equally in shower as in sunshine, in complete security from the grotesque obstructions supposed to be life, which have indeed, only strengthened the sinews to whatever imperfect accomplishment I may have attained“ (194; 30 July 1891). 35 Kristen Boudreau argues that instead of claiming the position of the invalid as “impotent but sensitive,” James manipulates the position of the invalid to project a position of “potency based on its ability to resist sentimental relations between subjects” (53-54). Boudreau focuses on “the sympathetic visitor” and I would say that includes the “sympathetic correspondent.” In a way James occupies a position of advantage in her correspondence; she can shape how others see read death. In her letters, ”Alice denies sympathy in order to preserve her own subjectivity (not let the spectator’s gaze turn her into an object of sympathy)” (54).Woolf on sympathy: “Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.” Duquette also brings up sympathy: William believes that sympathy is a quality essential to all human beings while James finds his attempts at sympathy “oppressive and coercive” (720). 194 to calling Katharine her “scribe.” In a way, James defied her family and conventions of the Good Death by dying away from home and creating her own home with Katharine. James found in Katharine what William could not provide: a strong physical presence as well as a witness removed from sympathy. In another letter to her friend Frances Rollins, James tells the news of her cancer. Despite her efforts to pen such news herself, she had to surrender her “own goose quill” with hopes that her correspondent could “hear through the hand of Katharine the quavering chirp of Alice” (5 Aug. 1891, 197). Similar to William James’s psychic Mrs. Piper who used “automatic writing” to transcribe the messages of the dead, Katharine acted as a kind of medium through which James could communicate to the living. She acknowledged that the writing of her death would have to be social, that she would not be there to witness it and would need her companion to write it for her, to lend her body to one whose body no longer functioned. Anne Golomb Hoffman argues, Alice positions herself as witness to writing that has taken shape out of the pulpy substance—the body—of her experience. The articulation into writing redeems that pulpy mass, as the diary moves outside of the body, but it does so only on condition of preserving intimate connection to the felt materiality of that body. Writing to the very end, Alice becomes the reader of the text—“the outline and the tracery”—that is her body. (416)
I further add that the presence of pain makes James’s body too present. With so much physical pain, James could not find space for her final emotional and intellectual struggles. The diary does not act as a substitute for the body; rather, it is where she can avoid her body altogether and where others do not have to adjust to the inconveniences of her body. Most importantly, she believed her story would be better understood through this text.
195 Though the diary offered her a way to avoid her body, it could not exclude the narrative of pain brought on by her cancer. The story of her illness included the work of dying and the management of pain, the telling and management of which required Katharine. If James could not control her pain, she could not tell her story. In a particularly odd entry, James recounts how others view her pain. When Katharine tells a woman that James is in pain, the lady responds: “It is caused by London in mourning.” Katharine counters, “‘but she hasn’t been out of bed for months—and hasn’t seen London in mourning, and her spirits are perfectly cheerful.’ ‘That doesn’t make any matter, it tells upon her body and produces pain.’ Some one suggested that the proper name is, ‘Mind Disease’” (1 Feb. 1892; Diary 229). Again, in this instance, Katharine is acting as messenger and rejects another’s theory of pain with her characteristic common sense. The woman does bring up an important point about how grief can be written on the body, how bereavement cannot be separated from physical health. James ties pain and the expectation of pain to death and its similar rhythms of expectation and how pain can interfere with the Good Death. The management of pain through morphine not only diminishes the awareness of the dying it also makes communication, which James relied on for Katharine’s dictations, impossible. With morphine, a “treacherous fiend,” “while murdering pain, destroys sleep and opens the door to all hideous nervous distresses” (4 Dec. 1891; Diary 222). James admits that with morphine, “K. and I touched the bottom more nearly than ever before” (222). Fortunately, James, unlike Sara Coleridge with opium, did not become dependent on morphine. She found alternate means to coping with pain. If William’s sympathy was useless in his sister’s eyes, he could at least help in offering remedies against pain; his expertise when it came to pain management could not be denied. Still, pain is never an easy thing to describe much less make others understand.
196 When James wrote to William of her pain, she expected a scientific response. Katharine, at the suggestion of William, employed Charles Lloyd Tuckey, a hypnotist, and it was successful. James informed her brother that with hypnotism she experienced “a calming of my nerves & a quiescent passive state during which I fall asleep, without the sensations of terror which have accompanied that process for so many years” (2 Dec. 1891; 199). She could dictate her message to Katharine, who began using her hand not only to write but also to release James from her pain through hypnotism. Still, James held on to the experience of pain as an essential part of her work of dying. However, even though pain was essential, it needed to be managed enough to enable James to dictate her diary entries and letters to Katharine. Unlike morphine, hypnotism gave James the power to at least articulate to Katharine what she was thinking and feeling while she was dying. She realized that while “pains are too much a part of my substance to have any modification before the spirit and flesh fall asunder” (2 Dec. 1891; 200), hypnotism opened up something for her “in the way of a nerve pacifier & one of the most intense intellectual experiences of my life” (200). With hypnotism, she found the remedy for something that had troubled her entire life: relieving bodily pain without bringing on nervousness. James found a solution in hypnotism, but the irony of this revelation was not lost on her after a lifetime of pain: “And now, this vast field of therapeutic possibilities is opened up to me, just at the moment when I have passed far beyond the workings of their beneficent laws, save most superficially” (4 Dec. 1891; Diary 222-23). James wonders “[t]hat the golden solution of the complex riddle” of her pain “should be a mechanical process of inconceivable simplicity” and “only another of the myriad beautiful illustrations that the highest Divine order is brought about the humblest means” (223). Ultimately, divine order, the alleviation of great pain, occurs through the mechanism of another human’s body.
197 Along with being removed from her body, James also realized that she would be taken out of time, and maybe she discovered something about her “death in life,” that in really, truly dying, she became more aware of life. Part of the work of getting dead required that James realize all that she no longer had to do. In a diary entry for later in that month, 24 June 1891, James speaks to the process of dying, especially when it comes to time and the diminishing function of some things and activities for the dying. While she finds herself frequently “saying, ‘I must ask K. about that,’ or ‘I must find out about this,’ with the idea that some day I may need the knowledge,” she is “suddenly…stopped not by the thought that the ‘some days’ are over for me; a thought natural and simple, and of a most desirable complexion” (216). She tries to put this “gentle dropping of natural things, than the taking up of spiritual ones” into perspective; “as it comes nearer, it will doubtless seem positive” (216). This natural dropping off makes James feel more concentrated, more compact and manageable like she has something to work towards and a place for her energy. In confronting the death of her body, she wondered what the dying could learn when information is no longer important or of long-term use: This long slow dying is no doubt instructive, but it is disappointingly free from excitements: ‘naturalness’ being carried to its supreme expression. One sloughs off the activities one by one, and never knows that they’re gone, until one suddenly finds that the months that have slipped away and the sofa will never
more be laid upon, the morning paper read, or the loss of the new book regretted; one revolves with equal content within the narrowing circle until the vanishing point is reached, I suppose” (2 Feb 1892; 229-30). Life would go on even after its ending, and James had found a way to be remembered and exist in time when she was no longer in it. The great lesson and last work of the dying would be the information left behind.
198 With these lessons in mind, Alice James only had to think about when she would die. James had always been concerned with the timing of her life. She once told her brother William not to mourn the fact that she had been born too late to benefit from his work on hysteria and mental illness. She reckoned, “The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of eclipse” (1 Feb. 1892; Diary 229). She puts her own ambitions for her death in relation to her brothers’ successes as a psychologist and a novelist: “not a bad show for one family! especially if I get myself dead, the hardest job of all!” (16 June 1891; 211) In leaving behind a narrative account of her death, James resists the conventional Victorian deathbed narrative by authoring her own death instead of letting the living pass on the
story.36 However it is impossible to write one’s death without the help of others. What James could do was turn her death into the ultimate ritual and ceremony of her life, ones that she shares with Katharine Loring: “Having been denied baptism by my parents, marriage by obtuse and imperceptive man, it seems too bad not to assist myself at this first and last ceremony” (24 June 1891; Diary 216). In defining the situation as ceremonial, she adopts cheerful language associated with birth and marriage. Unlike the ceremonies attending birth and the ceremonies that “define” a woman’s life, death, for James, held creative potential. Photography, a new art form and way to capture the ceremonies of life, was used in times of birth, marriage, and especially death. While there are no known pictures of Alice James’s death mask, she did have pictures made before
36 “Alice James presents herself in her diary as a creative individual, redefining an aesthetic concept by which her greatest work of self-realization, her dying, might be appropriately measured as Jamesian” (Duquette 722). Alice expresses an awareness throughout the journal of how she is defying expectations of the sickbed – she turns this narrative on its head and disappoints others. I think that these expectations, after all, are designed to comfort spectators (much like sympathy). Duquette emphasizes Alice’s awareness of herself as a stock Victorian character from a stock Victorian scene: the invalid in the sickroom. Duquette summarizes Laura Wexler’s argument: “Sentimentalism teaches readers and viewers that individuals should fit comfortably into well-established sentimental categories, and those who do not are made imaginatively to conform; put differently, sentimental representation relies on a mode of looking that is more precisely looking away” (728). 199 she died and while she knew she was terminally ill. However, she did not orchestrate the photo session; rather, Katharine led her, “like sheep to the shambles…to the camera!” (3 Sept. 1891; Diary 218). She describes the spectators beyond the photographer’s eye: “Owing to some curious cerebral condition, Annie Richards was heard to say, ‘Alice has fine features’: K. seized the ‘psychologic moment’ of titillated vanity and brought the one eyed monster to bear upon me; such can be a woman’s inhumanity to woman” (218). Katharine’s management of James’s death and the undertaking of her literary remains takes on an almost possessive quality, and it is difficult to tell from the above passage if the “one eyed monster” is directed toward Annie Richard’s attentions or the fact that Katharine envied James her fine features. Whatever the case, she finds the situation comical. Significantly, months later James wrote about how to characterize herself in terms of posing. She finds it impossible, “with Death so close at hand, to take anything which concerns one’s ephemeral personality, with seriousness” (4 Dec. 1891; Diary 222). If she did take such things seriously, she reasons, I might pose to myself before the footlights of my last obscure little scene, as a delectably pathetic figure, for I have come to the knowledge within the last week or so that I was simply born a few years too soon; as however this discovery in no way dims to my imagination the glorious possibilities of my immortal being, I shall keep the occasion cheerful by contemplating simply the truly human and
topsy-turvy aspect of the situation. (222) Alice James rejects the idealized deathbed scene, refusing to play the pathetic figure. Instead, she opts to use her imagination, “to keep the situation cheerful” (222) and even finds beauty in her deathly image. In the photo, James lies propped up by a pillow. While she keeps her head up, she tilts it and her eyes slightly to the right. Her mouth is slightly parted, and she wears a look of intense concentration on her face.
200 This episode with the photographer reveals not only that death can be beautiful but also that there is beauty in her caretaker’s actions. While she initially appeared annoyed by the whole photography ordeal, she wrote days later (7 September 1891; Diary 219): “Mes beaux restes have returned from the photographer in refulgent beauty! So very much flattered that my heart now overflows with mansuetude for that admirable Katharine, so wise of counsel, so firm of purpose, so gentle in action!” James did not “assist herself” at the final ceremony. Katharine Loring shared it with her just as she shared her healthy body. After all, James’s story of her death would have been nothing without Katharine. James wrote on New Year’s Day 1892: As the ugliest things go to the making of the fairest, is it not wonderful that this unholy granite substance in my breast should be the soil propitious for the perfect flowering of Katharine’s unexampled genius for friendship and devotion. The story of her watchfulness, patience and untiring resource cannot be told by my feeble pen, but all the pain and discomfort seem a slender price to pay for all the happiness and peace with which she feels my days. (1 Jan. 1892; Diary 225) Perhaps the most interesting story, one Alice James knew would never be told, was of Katharine’s devotion. While James came from an important American family, Katharine Loring sat even further on the margins. The story of the caretaker would be even more neglected than the life and death story of the solitary girl in the James family. Even as
James writes those words of praise for Katharine, she undercuts them with outlining her companion’s “most serious defect”: “she is most unbecoming to the race of man, and when he takes the shape of the British Doctor, the spectacle of impotent paralysis that he presents is truly pitiful. Baldwin did keep his shape and colour, but even the great Sir Andrew Clark faded visibly to the eyes” (225). However, James turns the critique on those who cannot see Loring’s beauty the way she can, asking, “When will men pass
201 from the illusion of the intellectual, limited to sapless reason, and bow to the intelligent, juicy with the succulent science of life?” (225) Alice James located Katharine’s beauty in her body’s ability to withstand the demands of caregiving. She wondered in amazement how “[n]otwithstanding the wear and tear of Time and the burden of three invalids upon her soul and body she seems as large a joke as ever, an embodiment of the stretchable, a purely transatlantic and modern possibility” (16 Nov. 1889; Diary 56). James’s last transatlantic was a cable sent by Henry James that reached William, “Tenderest love to all farewell am going soon” (5 March 1892; 201). James admired Katharine for her great powers of adaptability, an ability she never possessed. Unlike Katharine, James realized her “soul will never stretch itself to allowing that it is anything else than a cruel and unnatural fate for a woman to live alone, to have no one to care and ‘do for’ daily is not only a sorrow, but a sterilizing process” (57). The “large joke” of Katharine’s stretchable body carried Alice James’s last message. Her modern possibility became a promise that those in the next century would know Alice James and appreciate her. Katharine Loring did make this trip across the ocean, and as Alice imagined, she carried her ashes and her journal. For Alice James, Katharine bridged life and death, obscurity and posterity. She was a real transatlantic and modern possibility whose life stretched to almost a century when in 1943, she died at age 94, strong until the end of her days and ensuring before her death her companion’s words would “give body to her ghost.”
202
Chapter 5: “[T]o tell the truth about the dead”: The Life and Death of Letters
Virginia Woolf once described herself as “born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world” (“Sketch,” Moments 65). The publication of Woolf’s life writings in the 1970s renewed interest in the writer’s life and works. The editors of her letters, originally published in England as The Flight of the Mind (six volumes, 1975-1982), referred to the existence of such a large number of letters as “an accident of survival,” attesting not to the percentage of letters that were kept but to the amount written by Woolf, “a compulsive letter writer” (Letters
xiii).1 Clearly, a great many more letters were written than survived. Scholars have studied her letters both for what they reveal about Woolf biographically and for how they document her writing process. Though Woolf wrote letters compulsively, she was conflicted about their place in her writing life. James Gindin observes that Woolf “occasionally complained that one long letter or another had ‘drained’ some of the material she might have used in the diary; at other times, she lamented that she had told too many of her amusing or revealing incidents to friends or visitors” (85). Gindin further claims that the letters and diaries are “indistinguishable” in how they demonstrate Woolf’s tireless commitment to exactness of phrase and her style as a writer. But letters and diaries are never indistinguishable. While they share similarities as texts marked by time, they differ in audience, and a letter
1 According to the editorial note of the first volume, 3,800 letters are known to survive. Her entire collection comprises 6 volumes. To offer some perspective, the following are a few of the multivolume letter collections from the nineteenth century. The most recent collection of Charlotte Brontë’s letters, edited by Margaret Smith, fills three volumes while George Eliot’s collection, edited by Gordon Haight, fills nine. The letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, edited by Charles Richard Sanders, numbers at ten volumes. 203 requires a response. I argue that this tension for Woolf between the genres of letter- writing and diary-writing demonstrates competing pulls of different types of writing in
how they fashioned Woolf both on paper and in person.2 As mentioned in the introduction, Woolf frequently reviewed letter collections, not just from the nineteenth century, but from as early as they were published, admiring and critiquing the letter collections of Horace Walpole, Madame de Sévigné, Dorothy Osbourne, and Henry James to name a few. Her reviews of letter collections and her thoughts on letter-writing itself reveal her anxieties about the fate of letters both for literary figures and as “the humane art which owes its origin to the love of friends” (“Humane,” The Death 58). Woolf was especially aware of the place of correspondence in a writer’s life. If Woolf was born into not only a letter-writing family but also, like Alice James, a family aware of its own importance, then what did it mean for her to write letters? In a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, she wonders if people like Lytton Strachey and Hugh Walpole wrote letters with an awareness that they would be published. She considers herself “vain as a cockatoo” but not so vain that she would write letters towards that end (6 Sept. [1932]; 5:98]. In writing a letter, she finds that “the whole point is to rush ahead; and anything may come out of the spout of the teapot” (5:98). If she believed that her correspondent would “put [her] letter in a box,” she promises to quit writing her altogether (5:98). Woolf clearly thought of letters as conversations on paper, but that did not diminish the
fact that she chose her words carefully. At this point in her life, she believed that writing letters for posterity was for the very young, when “one believed in immortality” (5:98). It was not always clear for Woolf whether or not her letters held any importance beyond the
2 Woolf was just as compulsive in her journal keeping as she was in her letter-writing. She kept reading notebooks, and her published diaries comprise five volumes. 204 two separate moments of composition and reception. She was clearly ambivalent about their place in her life and work. Ultimately this conflict has its source in Woolf’s ideas about biography, especially about how a life gets written and how language is often inadequate in capturing the essence of a person. Woolf spent her entire life trying to get her life down on paper. Much of this writing includes her narratives of grief: the losses of her mother, her father, and siblings in her teens and early adulthood and her many friends during her middle age and the end of her life. Beyond family and friends, she confronted the traumas of two world wars. Woolf acknowledged the creative and political potential of loss in her writings, and her writings on grief in her letters and essays, I argue, are defiant acts that keep grief alive and tie her personal histories to literary and political ones. However, critics have not always viewed Woolf’s mourning as productive. Tammy Clewell shows how the publication of Woolf’s life writings in the seventies provoked many critics into reading Woolf’s work as “a narrative form of mourning,” “defining Woolf’s life and writing as an unfortunate display of pathological grief” (197). Clewell and more recent
critics argue for “Woolf’s positive reinvention of mourning” (198).3 Susan Bennett Smith identifies the point of defiance for Woolf, that she acted out against medicine’s mission to “cure” grief. The rest cure prescribed for pathological grief, Smith argues, resembled a sort of “imitation death.” She situates this prescription for bereavement historically in the 1920s when medicine pushed out the mourning ritual, making grief “virtually unmentionable” (313). Smith further extends this practice of silencing grief by treating its
3 Clewell identifies the work of Thomas Caramagno, Susan Bennett Smith, and John Mepham. Clewell, in particular, works out Woolf’s “positive reinvention of mourning” as it relates to the traumas of World War. I. Clewell has also worked on new understandings of Freud’s writings on grief in relation to the war. The elegiac quality of Woolf’s writing, especially in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, has been studied by numerous scholars: Christina Froula, Kathleen Wall, Lisa Low, and Jane Marcus. The following oft-quoted diary entry from Woolf attests to how connected to mourning her writing is: “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel’. A new --- by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” (Diary 3:34) 205 symptoms “without acknowledging the source of pain” (313). As mentioned in the introduction, David Eng and David Kazanjian’s collection Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003) proposes a new way of approaching mourning and melancholia. Through a better understanding of melancholia, attachments to the lost object or person are no longer pathologized. With this approach, melancholia and attachment would be recognized as social phenomena with “creative, unpredictable, political aspects” (4). The work on Woolf that argues for the productive value of her grief follows more recent approaches to mourning and melancholia. How Woolf writes about her past and her losses demonstrates her defiance against a prescribed type of mourning that “abandons lost objects by laying their histories to rest” (Eng and Kazanjian 4). Eng and Kazanjian differentiate mourning from melancholia in that “melancholia’s continued and open relation to the past finally allows us to gain new perspectives on and new understandings of lost objects” (4). Clewell’s rereading of Freud’s theories on mourning and melancholia through his war writings reveals how Freud himself recognized that melancholia was essential to successful mourning. She counteracts the notion that early twentieth-century
Western culture ushered in a new era that denied death and dismissed bereavement.4 Woolf’s own readings of Freud after the beginning of the second world war disturbed her; she realized through her encounters with Freud that her grief was no longer just her own—it belonged to the community. This chapter continues the work of the first chapter in using Woolf as a mediating figure who both wrote letters and analyzed them as a critic. I conclude with Woolf’s readings of the three subjects of my study as well as her predictions for letter-writing and memorial in order to demonstrate how letters function beyond providing tools for the
4 See Clewell’s “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psycholanalysis of Loss” in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52 (2004): 43-67. 206 biographer. Letters in the nineteenth century supplied women with the opportunity to make their bereavement part of a larger social discourse on death when their grief often kept them isolated from society. Through Woolf, I argue that while nineteenth-century writings on grief maintained a comfortable place in letters, new genres had to be opened up for death writing in the twentieth century. Death writing did not go away any more than letter-writing did; these writings on death had to be adapted to new technologies of communication. What Woolf failed to recognize was that though she predicted the death of letters through new media, the epistolary qualities of these new forms of personal address would remain. In fact, even as Woolf moved from traditional forms of life- writing to developing her own stream-of-consciousness style adapted from her novels, she continued to converse with the dead throughout her writing life. Woolf’s several attempts at writing her life illustrate her own reservations about how biography was written. She struggled throughout her life not only with writing and reading the lives of others but also with writing her own. Woolf’s writings on loss were published posthumously yet shared earlier with friends and family during her lifetime. Her earliest memorial writing, “The Reminiscences” (1907), actually takes the form of an epistolary autobiography, a familiar nineteenth-century genre. But her final memorial written near the end of her life, “A Sketch of the Past” (1939-40), rewrites the same losses documented in the “Reminiscences.” Significantly, this later writing is addressed to no one. It loses its epistolary qualities yet relies on the immediacy of the diary form to write grief as it is experienced and remembered. In “Reminiscences,” the epistolary biography addressed to her sister Vanessa’s unborn child, Woolf expresses her discomfort with the genre of writing down a life, especially the life story of her entire family and her mother in particular:
207 Written words of a person who is dead or still alive tend most unfortunately to drape themselves in smooth folds annulling all evidence of life. You will not find in what I say, or gain in those sincere but conventional phrases in the life of your grandfather, or in the noble lamentations with which he fills the pages of his autobiography, any semblance of a woman whom you can love. It has often occurred to me to regret that no one ever wrote down her sayings and vivid ways of speech since she had the gift of turning words in a manner peculiar to her, rubbing her hands swiftly, or raising them in gesticulation as she spoke. (“Reminiscences,” Moments 36) For Woolf, the problem with the epistolary autobiography as a genre, one I examined earlier with Sara Coleridge, was the fact that she was using her father’s conventions of writing a life. In fact, Leslie Stephen had started his own Mausoleum Book, an epistolary memoir/memorial, after his wife’s death in 1895. Woolf rewrites this early history of her life in “A Sketch of the Past.” These “sketches” started out as a respite from writing her biography of Roger Fry. She abandoned the formal voice and structure of the epistolary biography for something that would accommodate what she identified as the difficulties of memoir: a wealth of memories and the knowledge of all “the number of different ways in which memoirs can be written” (“Sketch,” Moments 64). As a result, she discards the forms used by writers to construct their lives. Instead, she examines memoir writing as a
reader while recounting her own past. However, even over thirty years after her first attempts at writing a life, she maintained that memoirs fail because “it is so difficult to describe any human being” (65). Instead of trying to capture one’s identity, she focuses on the events that comprise identity. Woolf calls such an event a “moment of being,” which she defines as “a token of some real thing behind appearances,” or a shock of being which she “make[s] real by
208 putting it into words” (72). The phrase “moments of being” situates time in how Woolf
memorializes the past by writing it into the present.5 “A Sketch of the Past” appears on first reading as scattered reflections in the form of diary entries. Woolf clearly did not write down her memories in one sitting; rather, she let the different times that she wrote these reflections shape her writing. She demonstrates, through this style, the way that grief and remembrance are seldom consistent, that their rendering differs from one moment to the next. She expresses this awareness in one passage that she dates “May 2”: I write the date, because I think that I have discovered a possible form for these notes. That is, to make them include the present—at least enough of the present to serve as platform to stand upon. It would be interesting to make the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast. And further, this past is much affected by the present moment. (“Sketch” 75) Woolf recognizes that the writing of the past “stands” on the present and that representations of past selves and of the dead depend on the present moment. Such awareness allows her to be forgiving of her memory. Woolf feels that the past is most present when she is “living most fully in the present,” “when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river” that enabled one to see into its depths: “For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else” (“Sketch,” Moments 98).
Woolf’s referencing of the past to a present self resembles the hyper-remembering that Freud identifies as part of the work of mourning. For Woolf, this immersion into the past, however, did not end with the rejection of the lost object that Freud predicted for mourners when the act of remembering could not compare with the reality that the person
5 Jeanne Schulkind chooses the phrase “moments of being” as the title for her edited collection of Woolf’s life writings. The essays in Moments of Being (1985) include “Reminiscences,” “A Sketch of the Past,” and selections from “The Memoir Club.” 209 is gone. As outlined in his “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915), when imagination fails to live up to this reality, the mourner must abandon the lost object and claim a substitute in order to resolve grief. Woolf’s “moments of being” relied on never resolving grief, on rejecting substitution, and on keeping the past alive within oneself and on paper. What Woolf hoped to accomplish in these writings was to learn from grief and loss. In “Reminiscences,” she observes, “the effect of death upon those that live is always strange, and often terrible in the havoc it makes with innocent lives” (Moments 32). That earlier work did not make sense of such havoc. Part of Woolf’s early traumas of loss and sexual abuse led, I argue, to her championing these obscure genres of life-writing, such as diaries and letters. Woolf wrote about her grief privately in letters and diaries, but she also wrote publically about illness. In her writings on illness, she wondered why illness was not one of the celebrated subjects of literature, why “[t]hose great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected” (“On Being Ill”10). Above all, Woolf recognized the isolation brought about by illness, times when she wrote letters the most: “Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable” (“On Being” 14). A letter seems to accommodate illness and grief, to allow one this isolation while still keeping the writer connected to the outside world and most importantly, to control the flow of sympathy or at least keep it contained in letters. This final chapter considers Woolf’s writings on memory and grief as well as her encounters with Sara Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, and Alice James. Woolf’s writings on Sara Coleridge reveal her anxieties about duty and literary inheritance. Her rejection of Sara Coleridge reflects her own dismissal and destruction of the Angel in the House. Woolf wrote three essays on Charlotte Brontë, and in them she considers the roles of relic
210 objects in memorializing the writer as well as the place of grief in Brontë’s writing and legacy. While she never wrote about Alice James, Woolf did read her diary. Both Woolf and James imagined death in their writings, especially toward the end of their lives. Their writings on death reflect the influence of war on how they similarly predicted the end of life to be an abrupt and violent one. I conclude with Woolf’s predictions for the art of letter-writing and argue that while she recognized the decline of personal correspondence, she opened up other forms of life-writing to narratives of loss. In profiling how Woolf interprets the “moments of being” for Coleridge, Brontë, and James, I hope to show how the lives, letters, and diaries of these women contributed to Woolf’s understanding of loss and inheritance, self-memorial and public commemoration, and death and trauma. Though these women belonged to her parents’ century, Woolf realized that even if some forms of writing like letters are sacrificed to new technologies, at least “words survive”
(“Craftmanship,” The Death 201).6
SARA COLERIDGE: THE CARETAKER AND THE UNDERTAKER
When Virginia Woolf met Henry James in 1907, she wrote to her friend Violet Dickinson of the encounter to great comic effect by imitating James’s stammering speech. The following passage not only shows off her great gift of characterization but also reveals her own awareness of how she fit into the family business of letters:
Henry James fixed me with his staring blank eye—it is like a childs marble—and said ‘My dear Virginia, they tell me—they tell me—they tell me—that you—as indeed being your fathers daughter nay your grandfathers grandchild—the descendant I may say of a century—of quill pens and ink—ink—ink pots, yes,
6 The whole quote reads, “Let us simplify and assert that since the only test of truth is length of life, and since words survive the chops and changes of time longer than any other substance, therefore they are the truest. Buildings fall; even the earth perishes. What was yesterday a cornfield is today a bungalow. But words, if properly used, seem able to live forever” (201). 211 yes, yes, they tell me—ahm m m—that you, that you, that you write in short. ([25 August 1907] 1: 306) Woolf continues by confiding to Dickinson, “Never did any woman hate ‘writing’ as much as I do. But when I am old and famous I shall discourse like Henry James” (306). This passage also highlights the writer’s certainty, even at age twenty-five, that she would be well known and that her letters would matter. However, as a descendent of quill pens and inkpots, Woolf knew that she would have to stake out her own literary territory before someone decided it for her. Virginia Woolf and Sara Coleridge were both born into literary families and to temperamental and needy fathers, and both Woolf and Coleridge had to manage their father’s remains for a time after their deaths. All that Woolf learned about Sara Coleridge she learned from Edith Coleridge’s Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge (1873). Even though both women confronted loss and established their careers in literary circles dominated by men, Sara Coleridge made Woolf uneasy. Woolf once described Coleridge as her father’s masterpiece, likening her to his poem “Christabel,” both works remarkable but “unfinished” (“Sara” 75) like so many of the fragments in her father’s life that Coleridge would try to assemble later. This section considers the work of literary inheritance and the place of memory in commemoration. I argue that while Woolf’s reading of Coleridge as a disappointment is a faulty one, it does reveal how uncomfortable Woolf was with what she viewed as Coleridge’s sacrifice of her own ambitions to rescue a failed father. After all, Woolf knew she could have shared a similar fate. While Coleridge devoted the rest of her life to putting her father’s works back into print and critical circulation, Woolf spent very few years on her father Leslie Stephen’s literary legacy after his death. However, while Samuel Taylor Coleridge was mostly
212 absent from his daughter’s life, Leslie Stephen at least lived in the same house. When Julia Stephen died, he expected the same tireless care from his daughter that his wife had given. Moreover, he insisted that no one’s grief was stronger than his. While Leslie Stephen was dying, he clearly thought of his daughter as his literary caretaker and dictated to Woolf the final parts of his Mausoleum Book. Stephen annotated his papers near the end of his life with handling instructions; one folder in particular was marked, “Perhaps some worth preserving—Ginia may do some research work!” (qtd. in Lee 57). After her brother Thoby died, Woolf took over the job of reading Stephen’s letters for Fred Maitland’s Life and Letters (1906). While Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee recognizes that the work must have been cathartic, she also emphasizes Woolf’s resentment. But her work as undertaker began even earlier when her mother Julia Stephen died in 1895 when Woolf was thirteen years old. Julia gave specific instructions about her papers: “All Mr. Lowell’s letters in dispatch box to Virginia. She is never to have them published” (qtd. in Lee 47). Woolf learned early on the significance of personal correspondence after someone’s death and all the rituals and rules attached to preserving, publishing, or destroying letters. After all, her lifelong interest in other people’s lives and letters was a family business, as evidenced by her father’s involvement in the founding of the Dictionary of National Biography, which he took over from Charlotte Brontë’s publisher George Smith.
Sara Coleridge knew those same rules governing the lives and letters of the well known. However, while here are definite similarities between Sara Coleridge and Virginia Woolf, Woolf, after she read The Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge and wrote her essay on Sara Coleridge in 1940, tried to distance herself from Coleridge. She dismissed the Victorian mother and literary caretaker and daughter of the Romantic poet
213 as a failure both in her literary career and her life.7 Woolf called Sara Coleridge a “heaven haunter,” obsessed with the past and memorial-making even as she shared that same obsession. Just as Sara Coleridge reminisced about the importance of Gretna Green and the country as the early scenes of her childhood, Woolf’s memories of the family vacation home on the sea at St. Ives could not be divorced from her memories both of her mother and herself as a child. Perhaps what Woolf found most unappealing about Coleridge was the resemblance of her tireless literary undertaking to her mother’s tireless caretaking. In addition to a needy and dependent husband, Julia Stephen’s commitment to others during illness and death as well as the births and care of her many children likely wore her out. Lively and intelligent herself, Julia Stephen simply did not have the time or the reserve energy to be a writer or an artist though she did, like Coleridge, write
children’s stories.8 Woolf likened Sara Coleridge’s work of memorial and editorial labor to domestic labor, calling Coleridge “the housekeeper in that littered palace” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s remains (“Sara,” The Death 114). Woolf at least saw her younger self in this image. She once wrote that had her father lived much longer, she could not have: His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; inconceivable. I used to think of him & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. (I believe this to be true—that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; & writing of them was a necessary act…. ) (Diary 3: 58)
7 Sara Coleridge biographer Bradford Mudge writes of Woolf’s misconception of Coleridge: “To assume with Woolf that Sara’s fragmentary and miscellaneous writings signify only the tragedy weak will and wasted talent is to deny the meaning of a life caught between private need and public expectation…. Moreover, it is to ignore the complex processes of production and reception that constitute the making of literary value both then and now” (9). 8 Julia Stephens children’s stories can be found in Julia Duckworth Stephen: Stories for Children, Essays for Adults (1987), edited by Diane F. Gillespie and Elizabeth Steele. 214 Woolf did not have to arrange her father’s works for the rest of her life. Leslie Stephen left a fairly orderly set of literary remains behind. While Woolf did have to read and go through his letters, she did not have to edit and publish them. She merely filled the role of consenting family member in letting the biographer, Fred Maitland, do his job. Woolf had plenty of memories of her father; for good or bad, she did know him. Sara Coleridge did not and spent her life trying to build this relationship out of her father’s literary remains. But Coleridge never entirely abandoned her own writings, and she did leave behind letters, poems, and an autobiography. Like Woolf’s life writings, the latter focuses on recovering memories from childhood. Both women had vivid memories of their childhoods and remembered the presence of literary and historical figures, but they were often frustrated by the failings of memory and language to reconstruct a person on the page. Woolf’s memories of “old men sitting round the tea table talking—father’s friends, Henry James, Symonds…” (“A Sketch,” Moments 83) resembles Coleridge’s memory of Thomas De Quincey, William Wordsworth, and her father pacing the room in conversation (ML 45). If Woolf regretted that her mother’s “sayings and vivid ways of speech,” her “gift of turning words in a manner peculiar to her, rubbing her hands swiftly, or raising them in gesticulation as she spoke (“Reminiscences” 36) were never recorded, Coleridge similarly regretted not being able to remember her father’s words at all. In helping her husband put together Table
Talk (1835), a book of remembrances on her father that included his conversation, Coleridge was surprised by her inability to contribute much to the memorial, writing to her friend, “Two or three short memorables I remember recording; and I often wonder now how I could have been so negligent a listener” (ML 106, nd [1835]). What Virginia Woolf recognized about Samuel Taylor Coleridge that his relatives either could not have
215 known or have wanted to admit so soon after his death was how impossible it would have been to remember his conversation in the first place: The truth about Coleridge the talker seems to have been that he rapt some listeners to the seventh heaven; bored others to extinction; and made one foolish girl giggle irrepressibly. In the same way his eyes were brown to some, grey to others, and again a very bright blue. But there is one point upon which all who listened are agreed; not one of them could remember a single word he said. (“The Man,” The Death 109) Not even his daughter remembered what little conversation they shared in their little time together. In arranging his works, Sara Coleridge did not use her memories; she relied on his written words and her remarkable editorial and critical skills instead. Coleridge realized that she could not depend on her memories, that what little she could recall of her father’s speech would be an imperfect recitation. Woolf does remark on one moment when Coleridge did speak in front of his daughter after her marriage. Helpless to stop the marriage of his “masterpiece” to his nephew Henry, “[a]ll he could do was to cast his magic spell. He talked. For the first time since she was a woman, Sara heard him talk. She could not remember a word of it afterwards. And she was penitent” (“Sara,” The Death 114). Part of Coleridge’s guilt about not remembering her father’s conversation involved her early memories of visiting
her father at the Wordsworth’s home, where her father “was anxious that [she] should learn to love him and the Wordsworths and their children, and not cling so exclusively to [her] mother” (ML 44). In her epistolary memoir, she recalls her father’s displeasure when she showed affection to her mother and not him. He accused Sara, a child, of being cold in contrast to the Wordsworth children:
216 The young Wordsworths came in and caressed him. I sat benumbed; for truly nothing does so freeze the affection as the breath of jealousy. The sense that you have done very wrong, or at least given great offense, you know not how or why—that you are dunned for some payment of love or feeling which you know not how to produce or to demonstrate on a sudden—chills the heart, and fills it with perplexity and bitterness. (ML 44-45) It was little wonder, then, that Coleridge did not remember her father’s words. He barely spoke to her. When her father gave her a book for her wedding present, he wrote instructions that she receive it when he died; he intended for the book to provide evidence of “her unusual attainments” in languages while also attesting to her “piety, simplicity and unaffected meekness—in short, with a mind, character and demeanor so perfectly feminine” (qtd. in Mudge 51). Even before he died, Coleridge’s father continued to view his daughter as his “unfinished masterpiece.” More than a gift, the inscription in the book provides evidence not only of his daughter’s character but also of his continued efforts to make her his poetic masterpiece by controlling her image. This “unfinished” quality of both Sara Coleridge and her father disturbed Woolf the most. Woolf identifies one common difficulty in the lives of Sara Coleridge and her father that might have contributed to the lack of completion she found so endemic to their lives: the problem of interruption. In her essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Man at
the Gate” (1940), Woolf locates the truth about Coleridge in his letters, “where the body of the actor was suppressed” and where “we have the best record of the siren’s song” (The Man,” The Death 110). She concludes that letter-writing “was in its way a substitute for opium” (“The Man,” The Death 108). Woolf recognizes the special power of letters as tools that not only record but also remove the distraction of the body away from the speaker. In reality, the letters were the only real conversation that Sara possessed of her
217 father, and even then, the letters were addressed to others, rarely to her.9 In letters, Samuel Taylor Coleridge could project an image of productivity, “that he had actually written the folios, the quartos, the octavos that he had planned” (“The Man,” The Death 108). He found in letters relief from “those perpetually pulsating ideas which, like Surinam toads, as he said were always giving birth to little toads that ‘grow quickly and draw off attention from the mother toad’” (“The Man” 108). Most importantly, between his ideas and his thoughts of poems never written, he found solace in letters, writings where “thoughts need not be brought to a conclusion” (“The Man” 108). Incompletion of thought and work always had to do with the fact that “[s]omebody was always interrupting” allowing him to “throw down his pen and indulge in what was, after all, better than writing” (“The Man” 108). Woolf parallels the appeal of letters in allowing interruption to the distraction of his opium addiction. In her essay on Sara Coleridge, Woolf also compares writing to opium, but for Sara, it was her tireless commitment to editing her father’s works: “She worked on. In her desolation it was her solace, her opium perhaps” (“Sara,” The Death 115-16). Woolf finds Coleridge’s motivation to work on her father’s remains not in her need to satisfy her own talents and ambitions but in the dullness of her life, describing her as “eating supper twice, she was so bored” (“Sara” 116). Woolf further dismisses what she viewed as the marginal literary work of editing and criticism by unfairly comparing Coleridge to her father: “Like her father she had a
Surinam toad in her head, breeding other toads. But his were jeweled; hers were plain” (“Sara” 116). Woolf’s own rejection of a life of literary “housekeeping” informed her rejection of Sara Coleridge’s work, a body of work that I argue should be appreciated for its display of great editorial and critical talent.
9 Father and daughter were separated for much of her life. Mudge notes that Samuel Taylor Coleridge often let years go by before even writing his daughter. 218 What started off as a promising literary career for Sara Coleridge ended, in Woolf’s opinion, with her father’s death. The opposite was true for Woolf. She recognized that her own father had to die in order for her to have a literary career. As mentioned in the essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Woolf found letters to be a genre that accommodated interruption. Moreover, Woolf cited Coleridge’s epistolary memoir written to her daughter, her only formal autobiographical writing beyond her diaries, as evidence for this interrupted life. The memoir leaves off at childhood with only a series of dots following her final words: “On reviewing my earlier childhood, I find the predominant reflection…” (ML 50). Woolf writes of the ending, “but still…dots intervene” (“Sara” 111), indicating that such incompletion and interruption were typical of Coleridge’s life. While Coleridge wrote her epistolary autobiography near the end of her life, Woolf wrote her own epistolary autobiography in early adulthood with the “Reminiscences.” Lee calls the writing “an awkward hybrid” that “makes a fierce critique of patriarchal behaviour, but it inherits, and imitates, a nineteenth-century patriarchal
tradition of the autobiography written as a letter to one’s children” (18).10 What Woolf fails to do in this writing she achieves later in “A Sketch of the Past,” something I argue Coleridge achieved in her epistolary memoir where she explained the truth of her strange childhood through moments of realization, or what Woolf calls in her “Sketch” “a moment of being.” The whole point of this type of remembrance, especially revisiting the time of one’s childhood, is to highlight the development of identity through loss: “these moments of being of mine were scaffolding in the background; were the invisible and
10 Lee compares it to the Mausoleum books left by her father and grandfather, but without all the egotism. Still, the stilted language, “the formal language and structure” are “meant for suppressing sentiment” (18). 219 silent part of my life as a child” (“Sketch” 73). In writing the Memoir to her daughter Edith, Sara Coleridge attempted to leave no silence for her daughter to fill.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE: ENCOUNTERING OBJECTS
When she was forty-one years old, Virginia Woolf posed for the May 1924 issue of British Vogue wearing her mother’s puffy-sleeved dress. Staged and shot by photographers Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor as an allusion to Julia Margaret Camaeron’s photo of Julia Stephen, the photo depicts what Jane Garrity describes as a “modernist who is haunted by her Victorian past” (202). Garrity finds that “[t]he manipulated image of Woolf—her frilly collared dark dress, introspective mood, and the downcast direction of her abstracted gaze—duplicates almost verbatim the iconic image of her mother, a duplication that invokes the virginal beauty of the angel in the house” (202). She observes that the dress calls up the mother while the accompanying caption, “the most brilliant and enterprising of the writers of the younger generation…a daughter of the late Sir Leslie Stephen” (202), connects her to her father and places her in a literary family. Woolf herself was aware of this tension between the two generations, the Victorian and Edwardian, that “confronted each other in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate” (“Sketch 147). Woolf writes of her Victorian father, “We were not his children; we were his grandchildren. There should have been a generation between us to cushion the contact” (“Sketch” 147). It was little wonder, then, that Julia Stephen’s dress did not fit Woolf’s slight frame; it practically swallowed her up. Both Woolf and Charlotte Brontë recognized the downside to mourning while realizing its necessity. Most importantly, they did not romanticize it. When Julia Stephen died, the effect of Leslie Stephen’s grief was poisonous to his family in his insistence that that his grief was greater than anyone else’s. Woolf found that grief, or at least her father’s version of it, had been much too idealized and exercised at the expense of those 220 around him: “That is one of the aspects of death that is left out when people talk—as father talked—of the message or teaching of sorrow. They never mention its unbecoming side; its legacy of bitterness, bad temper; ill adjustment; and what is to me the worst of all—boredom” (“Sketch” 143). Charlotte Brontë found the same thing to be true of grief. While having to revisit her sisters’ works and write about them, Brontë also had to confront a fact about herself, one that she learns through her bereavement: “I feel to my deep sorrow—to my humiliation—that it is not in my power to bear the canker of constant solitude” (2: 513). It was monotonous to her, once writing of grief as a “habitual train of thought” (3 July 1849; 2:226). In charting her changing relation to Brontë’s works and legacy, I look at Woolf’s nonfiction writings on Brontë for how they uncover Woolf’s ideas on grief and objects of commemoration. Ultimately, Woolf comes to realize that what really lives beyond the dead are not their objects but their words. Objects and words for both writers, I argue, maintained connections to the dead. What kept Charlotte Brontë’s grief fairly constant for such a long period after her siblings’ deaths had to do with the fact that she never left the parsonage, that the physical reminders of her sisters and brother were ever-present. For the bereaved, these objects take on painful meanings, but for those interested in the lives of the dead, objects are something else entirely. In her essay “Mrs. Gaskell” (1910), Woolf writes about the appeal of objects once belonging to the dead:
Curiosity about the houses, the coats, and the pens of Shelley, Peacock, Charlotte Brontë, and George Meredith seems lawful. One imagines that these people did everything in a way of their own; and in such cases a trifle will start the imagination when the whole body of their published writings fails to thrill. (The Essays, I: 341)
221 Woolf includes these objects of the dead as part of these writers’ literary remains because of their power to work the imagination. Unlike Brontë, Woolf did leave her family’s home; therefore, she had to rely on her imagination to remember her dead. In fact, “[e]ach family death precipitated the loss of a home” (Lee 228). She relocated after each parent’s death and after her brother Thoby died. Brontë moved from her birth home in Thornton when she was five years old to Haworth where she lost her mother and all of her siblings, wrote her books, lived with her father and husband, and then died. For Woolf who had lost and lived in numerous homes, interest in homes of famous writers stimulated the imagination when the writer’s words failed to do so. However, as Woolf realized later, houses can crumble with age or be destroyed by fire or bombs; words survive these disasters. All of the women in this study found solace in the words of the dead; they discovered new life in old letters, particularly in their parents’ letters. Woolf recounts coming across in her mother’s desk in St. Ives “all the letters received that morning freshly laid in it, to be answered perhaps when she got to London” (“Reminiscences” 38). Patrick Brontë, worried about his depressed daughter, gave her Maria Brontë’s papers. Charlotte found it “strange, and at once sad and sweet, to find that mind of a truly fine, pure, and elevated order” (2: 347). Alice James discovered her parents’ letters in an old desk, and the letters reanimated the dead or at least put her in their company. Sara
Coleridge managed her father’s papers, so she knew about his letters but concentrated more on his essays and poems. Virginia Woolf’s encounters with Charlotte Brontë and her objects, what Alice James once called “ghost microbes,” illustrate the potential ambiguities involved in handling the objects of the dead. Woolf’s fascination with objects extends to her curiosity about Charlotte Brontë’s life as illustrated by her visit to Haworth
222 cottage in 1904 when she was a young woman and by the three essays she wrote about Brontë in the years that followed. Woolf wrote about her visit to Haworth in an article, “Haworth, November, 1904.” She found the museum to be “rather a pallid and inanimate collection of objects,” but she was conflicted over their survival, arguing that though “[a]n effort ought to be made to keep things out of these mausoleums,” such a “choice often lies between them and destruction” (The Essays 1:7). Someone has to be responsible for the upkeep of such objects, and she reckons, “that we must be grateful for the care which has preserved much that is, under any circumstances, of deep interest” (1:7). What drives Woolf’s grudging respect for these objects is one display case in particular: But the most touching case—so touching that one hardly feels reverent in one’s gaze—is that which contains the little personal relics, the dresses and shoes of the dead woman. The natural fate of such things is to die before the body that wore them, and because there, trifling and transient though they are, have survived, Charlotte Brontë the woman comes to life, and one forgets the chiefly memorable fact that she was a great writer. Her shoes and her thin muslin dress have outlived her. (The Essays 1:7) Though this was written years before Woolf appeared in her mother’s dress and before she worked out her feelings about her mother’s death in To the Lighthouse (1927), she connects with Brontë on another level, as a human being who died. Even then, the act of viewing a dead woman’s dress must have stimulated memories of her mother. In fact, her mother’s dress would be an essential element in recounting her first memory in “A Sketch of the Past”: “This was of red and purple flowers on a black ground—my mother’s dress; and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap” (“Sketch” 64). Both Charlotte Brontë’s dresses and Woolf’s memory of her mother
223 and her pose in one of her mother’s dresses demonstrate the fact that a material thing, though insignificant, can outlast a human life. However, as Woolf got older, she became a little less comfortable with these objects, especially those who collected them. To Lady Cecil, she wrote about how they “used to review books together, 100 years ago, for that long faced old lantern jawed man, who kept Charlotte Brontë’s socks in a glass case in his drawing room” (18 August 1932;
5:96).11 She remarked to her friend, “I can’t follow the Brontë enthusiasts” ([25 July 1932]; 5:80). Meanwhile, the Brontë enthusiasts were busy scavenging for letters. Once they possessed these precious textual objects, the new owners assumed control over both their use and content. Brontë’s willingness to write frankly about her frustrations, loneliness, and desires made her letters downright transgressive, and with these dangerous texts, writers and editors have become the most uncomfortable and subsequently committed great editorial abuses.12 Biographers have used and misused her letters, and the very letters themselves have become objects of exchange, or high-priced relics of the Brontë myth, long after her death. Even before the publication of her letters, Brontë wrote to Ellen that her husband feared “the passing of letters into hands and under eyes for which they never were written” ([20 Oct. 1854]; 3:295). In fact, her husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls remarked that her letters were “as dangerous as Lucifer matches” (3:295). In the introduction of A Life in Letters, Juliet Barker claims that Brontë’s letters, “dashed off in the heat of the moment,” were not intended for publication (xviii). But, it is impossible to know whether or not Brontë wanted her letters published posthumously.
11 She is talking about Reginald Smith, the son-in-law of Charlotte Brontë’s editor and at one time really close friend George Smith. Reginald Smith took over Smith, Elder after the elder Smith died. 12 In the introduction of volume one of the Charlotte Brontë collection, Margaret Smith gives a detailed history of the letters. The letters passed through many hands. Ellen Nussey fought with Arthur Bell Nicholls for many years to get the letters published. T. J. Wise took advantage of Nussey’s age and her desperation by offering to buy the letters and promising to preserve them only to start selling them off one by one. Smith writes that the confusion created by Wise’s handling of the letters is just now being sorted out. 224 In The Brontë Myth (2001), Lucasta Miller acknowledges Brontë’s desire for fame from early on and with the help of the young writer’s own words: “Yet Charlotte’s early ambition was not merely to write but ‘to be for ever known’” (1).13 Brontë was hardly naïve about the value of her letters. Woolf was conflicted about what to do with her own letters. She wrote to her sister Vanessa not long after writing her “Reminiscences,” “if I were a vain woman, vain of my letters that is, I would never let this go: I wish you would consider what I say about burning letters. I admit that it flatters me to think they are kept; but it also hampers me in the least literary of my intercourse” (30 Aug. 1908; 1:366). Ten years later she instructed Vanessa, “You ought to burn my letters always” (8 July 1918; 2:258). Twenty years after that she wrote her friend, “Lets leave the letters till we’re both dead. Thats my plan. I dont keep or destroy but collect miscellaneous bundles of odds and ends, and let posterity, if there is one, burn or not. Lets forget all about death and all about Posterity” (17 Sept. [1938]; 6:272). Woolf’s uneasiness about writing for posterity in letters had to do with the fact that Woolf considered letters acts of friendship, not products meant for posterity for later generations to compile and consume (even though she was one of those consumers). But it is likely that Woolf’s discomfort with letters stemmed from the fact that once a writer sends a letter it is no longer hers; she gives up control of its fate and has to trust in the addressee’s discretion. Once writer and addressee die, it is then the responsibility of the living to determine the fate of letters. For someone participating in literary culture, this responsibility for letters and other literary remains extends beyond the family to the amorphous reading public.
13 Miller even uses the phrase, “To be for ever known,” as the title for her first chapter. The phrase comes from an early letter Brontë wrote to Robert Southey on 29 December 1836. 225 Woolf’s essay on Charlotte Brontë in 1916 remarks on the responsibility of later generations to keep Brontë in circulation, since “her posthumous reputation has not been prolonged by any circle of friends whose memories so often keep alive for a new generation the most vivid and most perishable characteristics of a dead man” (The Esssays 2:26). For Woolf, what makes Brontë so remarkable in her posthumous life is how she lives beyond the objects and the people who filled her life. Memories of Brontë’s “most vivid and perishable characteristics” as a person may have died with those who knew her, but her words did not. We do not need the objects in the museum when her words speak for themselves, nor do we, as Woolf argues, “need to know her story, or to have climbed the steep hill and gazed upon the stone house among the graves to feel her tremendous honesty and courage, and to know that she loved liberty and independence and the splendor of wild country, and men and women who are above all things passionate and true-minded” (2:31). Years after her visit to Haworth, Woolf claims that Brontë’s words should be enough to live for her. She compares reading Brontë to reading Hamlet, a work that if one wrote about reading it every year, it “would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography” (2:17). She contends that Brontë’s novels must be placed “within the same class of living and changing creations, which, so far as we can guess, will serve a generation yet unborn with a glass in which to measure its varying stature” (2:17). Just as one’s reading of great literature would change along with life experience, so would the writing of one’s life, especially grief. Charlotte Brontë did the same in letters; she had to write and rewrite grief in order to for her to produce the works that she gave to the public. Woolf recognizes the function of grief in Brontë, but at the same time, she does not reduce her talent to relying on sorrow alone in order to write. As we have seen, Charlotte Brontë’s writings on grief were hard labors for her; she found in work the only cure for sorrow. That does not mean that she relied on sadness
226 in order to create, that her abilities as a writer were grown from loss alone. Woolf seems to understand about Brontë that her writing did not depend on her sadness but that her ability to function through her grief depended on her ability to write. Woolf observes, “It is not surprising to hear that she did not enjoy writing her books, and yet that writing was the only occupation that could lift her up when the burden of sorrow and shame which life laid on her weighted her to the ground” (2:29). Woolf calls her books “a superb gesture of defiance, bidding her torturers depart and leave her queen of a splendid island of imagination. Like some hard-pressed captain, she summoned her powers together and proudly annihilated the enemy” (2:29). A year later, Woolf connected the power of Charlotte Brontë’s defiant grief to the overwhelming sense of national grief after the traumas of war and epidemic. In an essay written in response to Charlotte Brontë: A Centenary Memorial by the Brontë Society (1917), she quotes Bishop Welldon, “‘If,’ he says, ‘Charlotte Brontë owed much to her own life, most of all did she owe to its sadness,’” and she responds to him: For the moment, this gives us pause; we grudge deeply any tribute to the value of sadness. The moral east wind and the anger bred of sadness are still too fresh in our minds. But then, after all, that intensity of passion which we honour most perhaps in Charlotte Brontë was only ground out by conflict; make her happy, make her amiable, make her fluent to society, and the writer we know has ceased
to exist. (The Essays 2:193-94). Woolf can link a mythologized (yet mostly true) story of loss through the Brontë family to national loss and trauma. If Brontë could create something from sadness, so should a nation and a world of mourners. The only way for such a large number of mourners to do that would be to maintain the grief of war and to keep evaluating individual sorrow as long as one survives. Even though Woolf is reluctant to acknowledge the productive
227 value of sadness, she recognized in Brontë’s determination to make her work an antidote to grief, that there was work to be done out of the loss that war inflicts. She would refer to Charlotte Brontë’s life and works throughout her life, especially in times of personal and national crisis. Of course, Woolf would bring Brontë up again in A Room of One’s Own and periodically thereafter. Woolf never abandoned Brontë throughout her life even though she did consider her in A Room to be so “at war with her lot” “[h]ow could she help but die young, cramped, and thwarted?” (69). Near the end of her life, Woolf perhaps came to understand that complex of emotions, writing in her diary on Friday, 16 August 1940, on a night bombing raid during the Battle of Britain, “My books only gave me pain, Ch. Brontë said. Today I agree. Very heavy dull & damp. This must at once be cured. The all clear. 5 to 7” (311).
ALICE JAMES: IMAGINING AND WRITING DEATH
While Alice James was never one of the subjects of Woolf’s essays, she does appear very briefly in Woolf’s diary on a reading list dated October 1934: “Library books: Powys Wells Lady Brooke. Prose. Dobree. Alice James” (4:248). What Virginia Woolf and Alice James had in common, beyond coming from literary families, had to do with how they confronted a life of mental illness and imagined death near the end of their
lives. Woolf wrote about her realization that death was not beautiful in “The Death of the Moth,” which was posthumously published in a collection of the same name in 1942. It is a very short essay that records her observations as she watches from her desk as a moth
dies very slowly.14 At first, Woolf is an observer, but she takes action to aid the moth
14 Catharine Gallagher’s essay, “Formalism and Time,” considers the temporal elements of form and the novel. In so doing, she takes the image of the moth as the symbol of “literary form’s escape from the monotonous weave of history” throughout the critical history of formalism from Shelley’s Defense of Poetry to Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.” Gallagher locates Woolf’s epiphany in the “noiseless 228 only to realize the futility of her interference: “But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again” (5). As Catharine Gallagher asks, “[W]hat could seem more transitory than the moth itself, which is not only an agent of decay but also a common figure for self-immolation and ephemerality, for the shortness of life and its vitality?” (237). Both “The Death of the Moth” and the letters and The Diary of Alice James depict the process of dying. Alice James’s death was documented in her diary with even her caregiver Katharine Loring providing some of the narrative and insuring the document’s survival. Throughout out much of their lives and especially towards the end, Woolf and James imagined what it was like to die, and their imaginations rendered death in ways that were simultaneously violent, awkward, and tender. Personal writings like diaries and letters allowed these women to give their fantasies of death some substance beyond their imaginations. The main problem for both women in writing death and illness had to do with the inherent difficulties in giving language to pain and loss. In her essay “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,” Karen DeMeester claims, “Modernist literature is a literature of trauma” (649). For both the Modernist writer and the war veteran, the story of trauma, DeMeester argues, cannot be told in traditional narratives. In fact the problem for the war survivor Septimus is that he finds telling his story of
survival impossible. He cannot make others understand his trauma because language is inadequate. While communication of trauma is essential for the survivor to heal, it is never without difficulties. As mentioned earlier, Virginia Woolf found language inadequate in writing a life with all of its traumas and losses. However, Alice James found her own language through her diary to write about pain and the struggle between
apocalypse of the imagination” through the emptying out of the moth’s formalism as “the minimalist symbol of life” to “a hollow space through which nothingness makes its appearance” (249). 229 her mind and her body. In fact, she considered herself as already dead, attempting to separate herself from her body in order to give an account of it: The fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me as I faced a ceaseless possible horror, since that hideous summer of ’78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace; that now it’s only the shriveling of an empty pea pod that has to be completed. (Diary 229-30; 2 Feb. 1892) As discussed in the previous chapter, the fact that she removes her hand from the page and dictates to Katharine puts her words at a further remove from her body and her experience of pain, which could have been read in her handwriting. In “On Being Ill” (1926), Woolf uses to same image of the pea pod to describe the process of separating mind and body, divorcing “the creature within” “from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant” (10). Woolf documents the drama of illness as an “unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe” (10). With death, “the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record (“On Being” 10). However, I argue, that in the writing of such experiences as death and illness one does provide a record however imperfect, and both James and Woolf worked toward leaving behind durable evidence of their “daily dramas” of bodily struggle. Alice James’s diary gives a record of her changing relation to death. All of the writers in this study wrote about death and their preparedness for it, but James does so in a way that is disturbingly raw and somehow humorous. In one diary entry, James relates an episode that she wrote “test[ed] the sincerity of my mortuary inclinations” (229). She describes her reaction when her hypnotist, Dr. Charles Lloyd Tuckey, assured her she
230 could live a little while longer: “I was terribly shocked and when he saw the havoc that he wrought, he reassuringly said: ‘but you’ll be comfortable, too,’ at which I exclaimed: ‘Oh I don’t care about that, but boo-hoo, it’s so inconvenient!’ and the poor man burst into a roar of laughter” (2 Feb. 1892; Diary 229). James felt grateful for the episode, one that enabled her to realize that wanting to die and the physical act of dying were quite different: “I have always thought that I wanted to die, but felt quite uncertain as to what my muscular demonstrations might be at the moment of transition, for I occasionally have a quiver as of an expected dentistical wrench when I fancy the actual moment” (Diary 229-30). James often referred to pain and death in terms of dentistry. Pain serves to remind James that she is still, in fact, in her body, that she has not been taken out of it. In one diary entry, from 15 September 1890, she compares having a tooth out to the moment of death, the “mortuary moment” as she was fond of calling it: “I had a tooth out the other day, curious and interesting like a little lifetime—first, the long drawn drag, then the twist of the hand and the crack of doom!” (137). She had written her brother William shortly before her death, “As far as pain goes the result is nil, save on four occasions the violent resuscitation of a dormant toothache, a wretched dying nerve which demands an agony of its own, impatient of waiting for, or too vain to lose itself in the grand mortuary moment so near at hand” (2 Dec. 1891; 199). The body’s ability to fight and to demand attention through its pain put James at odds with her desire to die.
This battle between the body and the mind and how both women wrote about the violence of death are both related to the greater traumas of national tragedy. War clearly had a role in how both writers thought and wrote about death. Oddly enough, there are no references to the Civil War in any of Alice James’s surviving letters. However, as discussed in the previous chapter, the war did leave a mark on her family. Her two youngest brothers fought for the Union and came back with physical and emotional
231 injuries that lasted throughout their lives. Woolf wrote frequently about war in her novels and journalism. Tammy Clewell argues that Woolf’s writings on World War I do not attempt “to heal wartime wounds, but to keep them open” (198). Woolf kept these wounds exposed throughout her life, and this pain became too much when she started contemplating suicide again shortly after the beginning of World War II and the Battle of Britain. Though Alice James did not explicitly write about war, she often wrote about the suicides of her friends and the violence of the act. James could not do violence to her body, so she waited for something organic to destroy it and allow her to escape its “empty pea pod.” Still, James never considered death without its potential for violence. Both James and Woolf did not think that death would be beautiful or easy. They used their imaginations to author their own deaths and did not shy away from what they imagined was a violent end to life no matter how one died. In the fall of 1940, death was on Virginia Woolf’s mind often. She wrote in September, “This is quite possible, in any condition. I sometimes think about violent death” (September 1940; Diary 5:30). Again, on October 2, 1940, she asks, “Why try again to make the familiar catalogue, from which something escapes. Should I think of death?” (Diary 5:326). In her diary, she recalls the “great heavy plunge of a bomb under the window” from the night before. She and Leonard watched as the plane was “dropping this fruit” with “[t]rinkets of stars sprinkled and glittering” (5:326). When all was “quiet,” she said to Leonard, “I don’t want to die yet” (5:326). She concludes, “The chances are against it” (5:326) Because Woolf lost a home in the bombings and saw the bombs drop throughout the battle, she could not help but imagine what it was like to die. Significantly, in the same entry, she mentions her “nice gallop with Coleridge—Sara,” a
232 woman who disciplined herself to die,15 but she returns to the present to resume her imaginings of death: Oh, I try to imagine how one’s killed by a bomb. I’ve got it fairly vivid—the sensation: but cant see anything but suffocating nonentity following after. I shall think—oh I wanted another 10 years—not this--& shant for once be able to describe it. It—I mean death: no, the scrunching & scrambling, the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye & brain: the process of putting out the light,--painful? Yes. Terrifying. I suppose so—Then a swoon; a drum: two or three gulps attempting consciousness--& then, dot dot dot.” (5:327) Like the woman she was researching and writing about, she imagined the end of life in a series of dots. What she left Leonard by way of a suicide note was not a series of dots. In fact, Woolf wrote two suicide notes, one on March 18 and another on March 28, the day she disappeared, and she left envelopes addressed to both Leonard and her sister
Vanessa.16 To her own companion, Leonard, Woolf wrote in her suicide note, “You see I cant write this even, which shows I am right” (6:486-7). She had stopped writing her autobiography and worked on a couple stories earlier that winter until she found she could produce no more.17 Woolf’s fear that she would not bounce back from her depression and recover her ability to write signaled the end of her life. On the back of the note, she left one final request, “Will you destroy all my papers” (6:487). After her death, Leonard Woolf received over 200 sympathy letters and answered almost every one of
15 It is significant that in a diary entry written a month earlier Woolf is distressed over the competing pulls of writing about the past and the present: “I daresay if I write fiction & Col[eridge] & not that infernal bomb article for USA, I shall swim into quiet water” (16 Aug. 1940, 5: 314). 16 Hermione Lee describes the events leading up to Woolf’s suicide and the aftermath in Chapter 40, titled “Anon.” 17 Lee emphasizes that Woolf’s final stories were all ones that dealt with violent death, memory, and family issues (736-8). 233 them (Lee 751). And like Alice James’s Katharine Loring, Woolf’s husband Leonard was committed to publishing his wife’s works after her death.
THE DEATH OF LETTERS
On September 2, 1840, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, “No raid. Slept over Sara Coleridge” (5:315). Near the end of her life, as she was reading Sara Coleridge, she began thinking about the past, about the First World War and the one she was confronting literarily in her backyard, and about the end of her life. If Woolf located her beginnings in a literate letter-writing family, then it is no surprise that she wanted to separate herself from her Victorian and Edwardian upbringing. However, she felt nostalgic, not for the past itself but for the place of writing in one’s life, and she felt a need to memorialize letter-writing as a memory-keeping record that preserved the past. But even as she memorialized letters, she began to consider new strategies for writing a life. Woolf started “A Sketch of the Past” in 1939. It is, by far, the most revealing look into her life. She struggled with her memories of her early life and realized that language could not adequately break through the murkiness of the past. She examined how her memory worked: “my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen” (67). Woolf wondered if our most intense memories could have some existence beyond the imagination and live beyond ourselves. In the last pages of my introductory chapter, I briefly discussed what I call Woolf’s “wireless of memorial.” I take up where I left off in that chapter to discuss how Woolf’s prognostications for a new technology of memory have become partly true in our own age of new media. It is worth repeating Woolf’s passage on the technology that she imagines would give new life to memories, perhaps extending those memories beyond the imagination that created it:
234 …will it not be possible in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it—the past—as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start. (“Sketch” 67) But like Alice James’s readings of her parents’ letters, would that uniform experience of memory dull the embellished memories of the imagination and result in disappointment over time? Or, would it, like reading the novels of Charlotte Brontë, seem to change in its reception with each passing year as wisdom and experience influence interpretation? Woolf seems to be suggesting a wireless of memorial, or a device that would preserve memories without committing them to paper or other media, objects that, while less vulnerable than the body, are still subject to decay. However, this new record of memory would make the most private of recollections open to everyone with access to the new technology Woolf proposes. In Telegraphic Realism (2008), Richard Menke argues that advances in communication technology, specifically wireless telegraphy, raised issues of “privacy, publicity, and ownership” (223). In applying Menke’s analysis of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century technology to Woolf’s wireless of memory, one can see just how public Woolf’s memories would become to others. Would Woolf’s wireless of memory access only one’s own memory, or would memories, like the messages sent through a wireless telegraph, be available to “be picked up by anyone with a receiver tuned to some roughly compatible frequency?” (Menke 223). The immediacy of communication brought about by the wireless and the telephone through “real-time transmission could
235 make texts seem material and embodied by comparison” in contrast to the previous century’s “technologies of storage [which] could make print textuality seem abstract and disembodied” (Menke 11). As discussed in the introduction, memories also operate through metaphors of storage (Hallam and Hockey). In replacing letters with wireless messages like the telegraph and later the telephone, the capacity for storing memories is lost. In fact, through technology, these memories lose the embodiment granted through the earlier technology of writing, one that leaves a trace of the body through the handwriting. Furthermore, through this removal of the body’s trace, technology changed the way that people were memorialized by eliminating the body from the home altogether. Advances in medical technology had moved death out of the home, and the professionalization of the funeral industry likewise transferred the responsibility of the dead from the family to the funeral director. When Lytton Strachey died in 1932, Woolf was disappointed in the lack of memorials for her friend. He was cremated without ceremony and did not benefit from the commemorative culture of their parents’ generation. Strachey did not have “solemn funeral oratios or respectful, hagiographical three-volume ‘Lives and Letters’”: he and others of their generation would find “their immortality would be in their books, their letters, their portraits and their photographs, the stories of their friends, their posthumous reputations” (Lee 618). Lee writes that
Woolf compensated for the lack of ritual in Strachey’s memorial with her diaries and letters which were “filled up with dialogue and sharp character sketches, as though she were holding her feelings at bay and also writing down the kinds of narratives he would have liked to hear” (618). Through preserving these narratives in her personal writings, she fulfilled her “longing to speak to him” (618). Like Sara Coleridge, Woolf used her diaries to speak to the dead. She missed her conversations with Strachey, and his death
236 spurred her on to create a memorial in the only way she knew how. Woolf did not envision Lytton Strachey’s letters ever being published. She read his letters as true
specimens of the modern art of letter-writing,18 and after his death, she consoled herself by writing down her memories of her friend. Woolf reworked her ideas of memorial into her nonfiction writings to voice her grief when she could not find venues for it anywhere else. She wrote biographical sketches, obituaries, and condolence letters. She used her diaries to discourse with the dead and to recreate and reconstruct memorials appropriate to the changing face of her grief. Tammy Clewell observes that “Woolf’s art shows us why we need to perpetually remake our grief and perpetually remake our memorializing art. Woolf teaches us, finally, that only by refusing consolation and sustaining grief can we accept the responsibility for the difficult task of performing private and public memory” (219). Woolf did this in every thing she wrote. She knew that her notebooks, her letters, and her unpublished manuscripts would give Leonard Woolf the undertaking of a lifetime. When she ended her life in 1941, she left a suicide note that expresses great regret for the years that Leonard had to act as her caregiver. Beyond her suicide note, she left him with the tools for memorial when she died. If Woolf showed through her writing the need to continue both remaking how we memorialize and how we articulate our grief, then I think it is important to ask if we have allowed new technologies of communication to help us to that end in the twenty-first century. Even if we no longer write physical letters to our friends and family with the same frequency of Woolf’s generation, we do write and employ forms of mediated communication to keep in touch with the people in our lives. After all, putting our
18 It seems fitting that the first selected correspondence of the two writers should occur together. His letters appeared earlier in 1956 as part of a selection of letters between himself and Woolf printed by Hogarth Press and edited by Leonard Woolf and James Strachey. Indeed, his letters were not published as a collection until 2005, edited by Paul Levy. 237 handwriting as a trace of our bodies to paper, an organic material, might outlive the body, but it won’t live forever. Just as technology has changed how we communicate, virtual spaces have opened up new forms of memorial, ones that are inorganic and resistant to decay. Websites provide a space where memorials can be updated continuously and revised and where mourners can contribute memories and offer condolences on message boards. The dying can write about illness and death in real time, and the bereaved can write and rewrite their grief as it fluctuates. The characteristics of death letters, which I outlined in the introduction, are very similar for these new types of communication. They are time and date marked and are collaborative in that they depend on exchange, and they provide testimony to the lives and deaths of the deceased. But they are not entirely material. If the creation of memorial depends on a material item to stand in for the absent loved one or to at least provide a physical object to carry the burden of grief, then what can a virtual forum for bereavement do? Message boards, blogs, and e-mails provide countless opportunities for the real- time communication of grief. We can access state funerals, revisit national traumas, and witness vigils online. Hospitals offer blogs to patients so that they can provide family and friends with updates. This is especially useful for terminally ill patients and their families and caregivers. One hosting site in particular, CaringBridge.com, “helps keep loved ones informed during difficult times” (“Our Services”). Those who visit the site for information offer “[i]n return…patient and caregiver support through guestbook messages” (“Our Service”). Sites like this one clearly demonstrate that “critical illness, treatment, and recovery” are social, that they involve more than just the immediate family and caregivers and medical team. In the exchange of information and messages between caregivers and those friends and family members who cannot visit the hospital, these forms of communication can help prepare those involved for loss or can provide a way to
238 share in the celebration of recovery just as letters on these same life events once did. If hospitals once quarantined patients and their immediate family away from the rest of the world, thus making illness and dying a more alienated experience, then these websites provide access to the social discourses on dying and illness similar to the letters written on the same topics in the nineteenth century. But these sites are no longer useful when a life ends. Bereavement requires its own type of virtual community. Actual memorial websites mimic the rituals of mourning. Visitors to these sites can leave virtual flowers and light virtual candles as well as offer condolences. In cases of national tragedy, epidemic, and war, websites created both by foundations as well as individuals who want to honor the dead attempt to manage losses whose numbers are overwhelming and sometimes seem senseless. One website, through the Global Health
Council, invites visitors to light a candle for those affected by HIV/AIDS.19 The “9/11 Living Memorial” is an online archive of memorials written and recorded by families as
well those who experienced it first hand.20 Countless websites are devoted to soldiers, both individually and by war and theatre. America’s most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have generated many online memorials where people can leave tributes. But, the creation of memorial in all of these instances is not without conflict since it is difficult to monitor and restrict content. Opening up these forms of memorial to everyone can result in eulogies that become more about the writer than the one being mourned or even worse, result in unprovoked attacks when the death is associated with a controversial cause such as war. Still, the community-building potential for mourners online often outweighs the risk of negative response, especially as families and friends are increasingly separated by geography but brought together virtually.
19 http://www.candlelightmemorial.org/ 20 http://www.911livingmemorial.org/ 239 Just as letters allowed women to make their bereavement a social experience, these online memorials are similarly social. However, they also highlight the solitude and isolation of grief. Just because virtual mourners can be assembled in one place does not mean that the mourner is not alone—in fact, the mourner is even more physically removed. However, these communications do more to alleviate the loneliness of grief even if a physical presence is missing. While the women in this study contemplated death on paper in order to leave something of themselves behind that could survive their bodies, virtual correspondence now can survive as a storehouse of memorial where preservation and storage can be managed with little effort. Virginia Woolf’s wireless of memorial, “where strong emotion must leave its trace,” answered her need to revisit her past. She imagined that through such a device she could attach herself or reconnect to the objects produced by emotions, thus allowing her to relive her life. Even with our new technologies of communication, this is impossible because our own memories are ever changing. We still watch scenes from the past and view photographs of ourselves as outsiders. If we return to the Barrett poem that opened the first chapter, we see how letters are powerful traces of the body that penned them, but even in revisiting the letters, the reader is not able to repeat the experience of first reading them. The practices of commemoration and death writing in letters for Sara Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, Alice James, and Virginia Woolf resemble our own virtual customs and rituals for recognizing the dead and thinking about our own deaths. In looking at how these women wrote about death in personal correspondence from the nineteenth century, I hope I have provided a way to understand more contemporary forms of self-memorial that employ practices similar to those of correspondence. How we write about death now through these new forms of media deserves more in-depth study. While the body might not leave a mark in virtual forms of memorial and communication, something else of the
240 body is left behind through photographs, videos, and recordings. It is not quite the wireless of memory that Woolf imagined, but it is the closest we have.
241
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249 Vita
Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell attended Lockney High School, Lockney, Texas. In 1996, she started The University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. She attended The University of Texas at Arlington from 1999 to 2000. She received the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English and Psychology from The University of Texas at Arlington in December, 2000. In 2001, she entered the Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin. She received the degree of Master of Arts in English in 2003.
Permanent address: 1802 Jefferson, Plainview, Texas 79072 This dissertation was typed by the author.
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