American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman

4. Elegy's Child: Waldo Emerson and the Price of Generation

   Elegy’s Child: Waldo Emerson and the Price of Generation Have you ever lost a child? —   Because the practice of elegy is fundamentally devoted to the enshrinement of compensatory memory, and thus to a complaint or grievance against the present, elegists frequently seek to project a future that would transcend elegiac salvos of resentment—a future, in other words, that would amount to more than a grievance against the conditions of its arrival. Versions of such a future in antebellum elegy include both Christian and naturalistic visions of posthumous personal reunion, the anticipation of transformed social relations among the living, and exhortations to trust in the principle of change for its own sake. All three of these classes of compensatory projection were for the generations rising in the decades after the War of  rightly perceived to be under assault, for example, by the vast disuniting of families and communities grown too large for intrafamilial stability and intergenerational continuity; by the widening gap between rich and poor; by the antagonisms of sectionalism and sectarianism; by heightened individualism, the competitive pursuit of wealth, and the rise of wage exploitation; by Indian removal; by the disfranchisement of free blacks; by slavery’s nineteenth-century rejuvenation and consequent territorial expansion; by the financial crises  ELEGY’S CHILD of  and ; and by conservative fears of the unstoppable democratization of an evangelically aroused electorate. Capitalist transformation, as Charles Sellers suggests, helped ensure that futurity itself would be a source of increasingly cold comfort: Radically new imperatives confronted people when they were lured or pushed from modest subsistence into open-ended market production. By the s rapidly spreading channels of trade were replacing an unpressured security of rude comfort with an insecurity goaded by hope of opulence and fear of failure. Within a generation in every new area the market invaded , competition undermined neighborly cooperation and family equality. Ancestral ways and parental example no longer worked. Increasingly individuals had to chart their own chancy courses. It comes as no surprise that under such circumstances the figure of the child—its sentimentalization as what Serge Leclaire calls “the royal figure of our wishes, memories, hopes, and dreams”—would accumulate cultural significance not only as a vehicle for nostalgia but also as a prop for heavily burdened aspirations of a collective as well as individual nature. That is, the cultish adoration of the child served not merely to oppose symbolically the loss of traditional ways but also increasingly to take the place of adult symbols of the prospect for social stability and civic continuity. And their deaths were mourned accordingly. As Philippe Ariès observes of nineteenth-century American attitudes toward the death of the young, “[t]hese long-neglected little creatures were treated like famous personages.” But if, as Ariès also observes, “[i]n middle-class circles in the nineteenth century, the death of the child has become the least tolerable of all deaths,” it is not only, as he implies, because mourning the loss of a child ceremonially bolsters the threatened family ties for which the dead child is also the symbol, but, equally importantly and far more troublesomely, because the death of children has become freshly and appallingly desirable. Population growth—fueled by human fecundity, lower infant death rates, and massive immigration—had been dramatically exacerbating social decay and alienation since the late eighteenth century. “As the market assailed traditional ways,” Sellers explains, “shrinking farms were spawning more people than they could feed.” Children grew burdensome to parents, and parents—especially fathers—provoked chil- ELEGY’S CHILD  dren’s resentment of “a paternal authority that seemed less reasonable as it became less functional.” The consequences were momentous: The uprooted, insular household found children no longer an asset but an impediment to survival. Their labor on shrunken farms no longer earned their keep; they challenged a paternal authority that could no longer provide them with farms or livelihood; and they required a more rigorous socialization for market competition. Under these pressures Americans inaugurated history’s most dramatic and sustained repression of human fertility. As white birth rates plummeted, new restraints on sexuality exacted heavy psychological costs. Mourning, as it were, for too much life, antebellum Americans sought to evade erotic melancholy by projecting their sense of loss onto the children whose superabundance had caused it. Child elegies proliferated from mothers and fathers as children once had. The infanticidal unconscious enforced and energized a...