Deathbed scenes in fiction
One of the most successful novels of the 18th century, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, was widely admired for its two highly emotive death-bed scenes. In the book’s very first volume, the jesting parson Yorick (something of an alter ego for Sterne) breathes his last while squeezing the hand of his weeping friend Eugenius. It is something different, however, from the deathbeds of Victorian fiction. While emotional, it is also comic: Yorick dies quoting wittily from Don Quixote, and his passing is marked by an entirely black page – an audacious visual joke. The novel’s second deathbed – much anthologised in the years that followed – was more sentimental. Le Fever, a fellow soldier befriended by Tristram’s benevolent uncle Toby, dies with his young son clutching him and Sterne’s syntax imitates his fluttering pulse and the fluttering feelings of his sensitive readers.
Broadside: The Dying Christian
‘The Dying Christian’, a broadside setting an example of a true Christian death, 1840.View images from this item (1)
A test of fine feelingsFor both readers and characters, then, the fictional deathbed was a kind of test of the finer feelings. One Victorian variation on the theme was the death of a child (amply justified by mortality statistics, but rarely represented in fiction before the mid-19th century). Some of the most calculatedly painful deathbeds in Dickens are those of children: Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son, Jo the crossing sweeper in Bleak House and, most notoriously, Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. To modern sensibilities these have often seemed mawkish, and certainly Dickens was highly manipulative in squeezing the pathos out of them. But we should also realise that, in an age of high infant mortality, they seemed to dignify what many Victorian readers had known and suffered.
Those who die young in Dickens are allowed to give us a hint of immortality. As his life ebbs, Paul Dombey sees his dead mother as if alive again, greeting him. Jo, the impoverished crossing sweeper in Bleak House, dies saying the Our Father. And when ‘Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell’ has died in The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens’s illustrator provides an image showing her being taken into Heaven by angels (ch. 71). In Dickens, the deathbed is for the pure of heart, as the novelist turns his gaze on the witnesses. (The vicious or the malign never die in their beds – in Oliver Twist Sikes accidentally hangs himself while pursued by a vengeful mob; in Nicholas Nickleby, Ralph Nickleby deliberately hangs himself in bitter despair.) Other great Victorian novelists took the young person’s death as the test and proof of feeling. In Jane Eyre the heroine’s schoolgirl friendship with Helen Burns is made indelibly affecting by the latter’s death. Helen dies in Jane’s arms, more confident in her religious faith than the narrator can ever be, an example to her in the sufferings that lie ahead.
Great Expectations illustrated by John McLenan
In Great Expectations Dickens offers a complicated death bed scene for convict and Pip’s benefactor Magwitch, 1861.View images from this item (16)
Releasing unexpressed emotionsThe deathbed scene became irresistible to novelists as a means of releasing the unexpressed emotions of their characters. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has many impassioned moments, but none more so than the final parting between Cathy and Heathcliff when the latter sees that ‘there was no prospect of ultimate recovery there – she was fated, sure to die’. Medically it is not clear why she is near death, while on the brink of giving birth to her first child. Brontë makes her proximity to death a matter of fate: ‘If I’ve done wrong, I’m dying for it. It is enough!’ (ch. 15). The watching servant Nelly, our narrator, records with a kind of horror the certainty of these two thwarted lovers that death is the only possible consequence of their passion.
The unsentimental deathbedIt is tempting to believe that Victorian readers had come to expect a deathbed scene, offered as a test of the reader’s sensitivity, in any serious novel. Even such a determinedly unsentimental novelist as Elizabeth Gaskell usually includes such a scene as a climactic episode in each one of her novels. Yet deathbed scenes do not have to be sentimental or tragic. In Middlemarch George Eliot has the rich miser Peter Featherstone lie on his deathbed for weeks, while his relatives gather in the hope of benefiting from his will. We see how Featherstone gets his last pleasure from playing upon (and thwarting) the hopes of these vultures, all of them pretending to care for him but only caring for his money. In Eliot’s hands, the deathbed scene has been turned into satire.
At the end of the century it is transformed in a different way. One of Thomas Hardy’s last and greatest novels take us to the deathbed of its protagonist, but with a refusal of sentiment that is unsettling still, and must have perturbed his first readers. At the conclusion of Jude the Obscure, Jude, worn out by disillusion and despair, lies dying, supposedly tended by his wife Arabella. In the end, however, she is too tempted by the sounds of merriment in the streets of Christminster and abandons him (probably to find a man to replace him in her bed). Helplessly he begs for water, but there is no one to comfort him. Bitterly repeating to himself some lines from the Book of Job, he dies. The tearful set pieces of earlier Victorian fiction seem a distant memory.
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