not one, to mitigate his sufferings, do nothing but pray in my anguish that he ... W.E.B. Du Bois, the twentieth century
ALH Online Review, Series XI 1 Harold K. Bush, Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016), 237 pp. Reviewed by Jeffrey Berman, University at Albany, State University of New York Authors seldom acknowledge that they began a book on “life’s worst day,” but this is how Harold K. Bush opens Continuing Bonds with the Dead, a thoughtful study of the role of parental grief in five iconic nineteenth-century US authors. Life’s worst day for Bush came in June 1999. He doesn’t elaborate on its details until the Epilogue, but we suspect a powerful personal motive compelled him to write his scholarly book. Few will dispute Bush’s thesis, expressed disarmingly on the opening page in the form of an impersonal generalization: “They say that losing a child is life’s greatest tragedy.” It takes only a few seconds to pen the ten words, but it may take a lifetime to absorb their dark meaning. Infant mortality was higher in the nineteenth century than it is now, but the death of a child was usually unexpected, an event that seems to go against nature. Bush invokes clinical theory to suggest that a child’s death may become “the crucial event” for the rest of the parents’ lives. “Sometimes,” he muses, “out of the rubble of lost lives, something redemptive emerges” (1). Until recently, most therapists agreed with Freud that psychological health required mourners to sever all ties with the death. In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud maintained that mourning “impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live.” Those who could not break attachment bonds with the dead were likely, in Freud’s view, to fall ill, succumbing to self-reproaches that he felt were reproaches against a lost loved one. Freudian theory dominated clinical thinking throughout the century, until a strikingly different view of bereavement emerged in 1996 with the publication of Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, edited by Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman. Its contributors argued that mourners maintain attachment ties with the dead while forming new bonds with the living. What better way to keep the dead alive than by writing about them? Reading nineteenth-century US literature through the lens of contemporary clinical theory, Bush shows how a child’s death irrevocably influenced the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Some of the authors, such as Stowe, lost multiple children. Other scholars have commented in passing on how the death of a son or daughter affected these authors’ lives and writings, but Bush is the first to map each author’s journey following the loss of a child. All five used their parental grief to memorialize the dead and deepen our © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
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2 ALH Online Review, Series XI understanding of mortality and grieving. The strengths of Continuing Bonds with the Dead lie in Bush’s deep familiarity with each author’s writings, his sensitivity to their struggles, his knowledge of both grief theory and trauma theory, and his personal grasp of loss and recovery. Imbued with deep religious conviction, Bush brings his profound understanding of the Bible into the discussion, showing how the death of a child challenged these authors’ faith. “At last it is over,” Stowe wrote in a harrowing letter following the death of her infant son Charley from cholera in 1849. “He has been my pride and joy. . . . I have just seen him in his death agony, looked on his imploring face when I could not help nor soothe nor do one thing, not one, to mitigate his sufferings, do nothing but pray in my anguish that he might die soon.” The words are haunting, Bush reminds us, “a mother praying that her infant son might die, to alleviate the horrible suffering of the disease” (44). Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a major consequence of this loss. Nor was this her only experience with parental grief. She wrote The Minister’s Wooing (1859) two years after her oldest son Henry, a Dartmouth college student, drowned. Both novels demonstrate not only Stowe’s continuing bonds with the dead but also her belief that the death of a son “shall not be in vain,” to which Bush adds, “and, in retrospect, and due mainly to her own brave perseverance, it wasn’t” (69). Abraham and Mary Lincoln also knew the heartbreak of parental loss: two of their four sons died young. Mary was convulsed with grief when her son Edward died in February 1850 at the age of four, probably of tuberculosis, and from whose loss some scholars believe she never psychologically recovered. William Lincoln, “Willie,” died in 1862 in the White House of a fever at the age of 11, three years before his father’s assassination. Lincoln suffered for much of his adult life from “melancholy,” but counterintuitively, he put his grief to good use. The Gettysburg Address, delivered in November 1863, a year after Willie’s death, is “saturated with grief and the invocation of the unending bonds with the dead” (76). Willie’s death triggered a spiritual awakening that led to a generative outcome for both Lincoln and the nation. Noting that the Lincoln Memorial is the greatest monument built in honor of a single American, Bush avers that Lincoln’s greatest achievements as a statesman are linked to Willie’s death. America’s “dean” of letters and the third editor of The Atlantic, William Dean Howells suffered the loss of his daughter Winifred, a talented poet who struggled with mental illness and died in 1889 at the age of 21. Comforting the bereft Howells, Henry James wrote, “When a man loses a loved child everything that is most tender in him must be infinitely lacerated” (qtd. on 101). Howells’s mystical bond with his daughter may not have been supernatural, Bush admits, but it had moral and ethical dimensions. Howells is a key transitional figure in critiquing the “death of dying” trends characterizing
ALH Online Review, Series XI 3 twentieth-century secularism. Howells’s religious faith comforted him after his daughter’s death, but his friend Mark Twain angrily rejected Christianity after his beloved daughter Olivia Susan Clemens, “Susy,” died in August 1896 at the age of 14 from meningitis. “It is an odious world, a horrible world,” he wrote to his wife in the same month; “it is Hell; the true one, not the lying invention of the superstitious” (qtd. on 129). Twain’s extensive comments on Susy include “some of the most emotional and distressing passages ever written by one of America’s great authors” (140). Twain derived comfort from others in the same situation, but unlike Stowe, Lincoln, and Howells, he came to believe that rejecting the “superstitions of the past and facing the scientific realities of the modern world were moral necessities” (149). Without diminishing Twain’s grief or despair, Bush suggests that the writer experienced what clinicians call posttraumatic growth—in Nietzsche’s words, the idea that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Twain’s “philanthropic side, energized in constructive ways by the ‘fires of grief,’ has been overlooked in favor of the ‘misanthropy’ of these same years” (162). Bush closes his book with a chapter on the great African American author and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, the twentieth century’s most outspoken crusader against the lynching culture. Acknowledging that his discussion of Du Bois is “perhaps the most debatable chapter of the book,” Bush nevertheless draws a parallel between Du Bois’s effort to forge a continuing bond with his son Burghardt, who died in 1899 of diphtheria before he reached his second birthday, and the reformer’s attempt to end lynching, which he came to associate with his son’s tragic death. Fusing personal trauma with cultural trauma, Du Bois transformed his son into a “powerful symbol of hope and incarnation” (181). Only at the close does Bush explain the personal reason for writing Continuing Bonds with the Dead: to honor the memory of his only child, Daniel, who died when he was six. Daniel’s death, Bush remarks wryly, allowed the father membership into a club he never wanted to join. He concedes that some readers may object to the fact that he has brought his own life story into a scholarly book, but he also observes, by way of self-justification, that all writers do this, overtly or not, including the five authors studied here. I’m sympathetic to Bush’s thesis of continuing bonds, for after my first wife Barbara died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 57, I too experienced his “descent into depression and near madness” (193). A spouse’s death is generally the most life-changing event that one is likely to experience, especially when one has been married for 35 years, as Barbara and I were. Life without one’s partner and soul mate seems unimaginable. Like Bush, I threw myself into my work, writing several books on love and loss and death education, teaching courses on these subjects, and giving talks at professional conferences. Like
4 ALH Online Review, Series XI Bush, I have long admired William Faulkner’s observation in Requiem for a Nun, which is quoted in Continuing Bonds with the Dead: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” though the truth of this observation is not fully apparent until after a devastating loss. Again like Bush, I did everything possible to forge a bond with a lost loved one, reading the same clinical books that he read and putting into practice what I learned. Bush’s unwavering Christian faith sustained him during the darkest time of his life. By contrast, as a Jewish agnostic, I did not have a religious lifeline after Barbara’s death. My only criticism of Bush is his intention to “reenchant theodicy,” which he defines as a defense of God in the face of radical evil, “with the full mystery of iniquity that our fallen condition on a broken planet necessitates” (34-35). I wish Bush had acknowledged that secular humanists can also forge continuing bonds with the dead, though they may need to search for a nonreligious support system. Still, I recommend Bush’s heartfelt study, a book that succeeds in mysteriously joining the dead and the living via continuing bonds.
