Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors by Harold K. Bush (review)

Harold K. Bush's latest book is scholarship tenderly and elegantly written in a minor key. Bush explores the effect of parental grief on five American authors and their writings—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, W.D. Howells, Mark Twain, and W. E. B. Dubois—each of whom experienced the death of a beloved child.

Bush frames his study with a discussion of American movements in grief management over the past hundred and fifty years, arguing that "the burdens of grief triggered transformation, rejection, and (sometimes) a sense of redemption" and led all five writers to a "direct involvement in the struggles for African Americans to attain civil rights." Bush also explores the redemptive power psychologist Erik Erikson has called 'generativity'"; i.e., the desire to "have some positive impact upon the world" in the face of loss.

Following the death of her two-year-old son, Stowe hoped that "this crushing of my own heart might enable me to work out some great good to others." Her "great good" led to Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Minister's Wooing (1859) also found its genesis following the death of Stowe's oldest son. A similar generative experience in the face of loss came to Lincoln following the death of his eleven-year-old son: "Great sobs choked his utterance. He buried his head in his hands, and his tall frame was convulsed with emotion." As casualties from the Civil War mounted, Lincoln relived his own loss again and again. Bush analyzes Lincoln's "Meditation on the Divine Will" (1862) as a precursor to his Second Inaugural Address.

The exploration pivots on Howells and Twain. Bush notes that throughout Howells' life, he maintained a comforting sense of continuing bonds with his beloved daughter Winifred while Twain rejected a reunion with his cherished Susy. Bush suggests that Winny "haunts the pages of A Hazard of New Fortunes" and that Howells' poetry collection Stops of Various Quills ex-presses not only his loss but also his "serious quest for faith and consolation." For Twain, Bush suggests that "Susy's demise becomes an overwhelming instance of the problem of evil in human life" that led directly to his 1897 poem "In Memoriam" and "Broken Idols" (1898) as well as the "systemless system" of his Autobiography. "Twain's theory of autobiography," Bush posits, "is deeply tied to his growing sense that life may simply be a random system without center, without purpose, possibly without meaning." Bush suggests that Howells and Twain created generativity not only in their literature but also in their political commentary against America's imperialistic excesses, examining "Editha" and "The War Prayer" in relation to grief and loss.

Finally, in 1899 W. E. B. DuBois' two-year-old son died in tandem with the horrific public lynching of Sam Hose, a young black man accused of rape and murder in Georgia. Biographer Edward Blum argues that this convergence of events inspired Du Bois "to associate the black victim with the biblical Christ" and to "convert the lynched African American from an object of disdain into a paragon of virtue." Bush analyzes Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk as a generative response to the death of his son.

Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief in the Nineteenth Century is powerful. The death of a child bears down on parents as it disturbs the expected order of life. Bush's assemblage of evidence and thoughtful insights are rich in compassion and honesty. This, we learn in his acknowledgements and epilogue, is because he intimately knows such loss: his own son died at age six. Bush's scholarship is enriched by his experience. Ultimately, the book is a generative response to grief and a celebration of the author's love for his son.