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

Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors. By Harold K. Bush. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8173-1902-1. Pp. 237. $49.95. Harold Bush takes his title from an emerging concept in psychological research in which clinical practitioners report that sufferers of traumatic grief who find a way to continue their relationship (or ‘‘bonds’’) with the deceased are often psychologically healthier than those who have tried to ‘‘get over’’ a loss or ‘‘move beyond’’ it. The phrase is fitting as the book is as much a psychological study as a literary one. In fact, Bush deftly weaves psychological, sociological, theological, and literary research into an elegantly written whole. Bush’s work, broadly speaking, fits into the tradition of biographical and new historical criticism of 19th-century American literature exemplified by David Reynolds, but Bush’s work attends to theological concerns with the deftness and care of one who speaks from the inside, that is, one who has garnered insights from living out theological practices. Bush divides his work into five main chapters, each focusing on a particular author and how he or she reacted to the death of a child, and how the child’s death affected the author’s work and theology as well as how the author’s reaction illustrates the shift in attitudes towards bonds with the dead and the connection between those attitudes and contemporary attitudes. The first chapter is on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Given Stowe’s strong Christian faith it is perhaps not surprising that her reaction to the death of her son is most aligned with Christian orthodoxy. However, Stowe’s attitude was not merely an acceptance of the beliefs she grew up with. It represents a hard-fought struggle against the harsh Calvinism of her father. Stowe’s struggle with this brand of Calvinist theology led her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin (and The Minister’s Wooing) as a theodicy. Uncle Tom’s Cabin particularly allowed mothers’ struggling with the deaths of sons and daughters whether through sickness, accident, or war, to see suffering and death as potentially redemptive. This attitude is strikingly parallel to modern psychological conclusions about the healthiness of generativity (turning a bad situation into something good) and continuing bonds with the dead. Similarly, in the next chapter on Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln’s loss of his son Willie allowed him to understand and feel the grief of those who had lost sons in the battles of the Civil War. His desire to believe that his son lived on and his continual feeling of his presence in both dreams and waking moments changed his theology, shifting it closer to a belief in a more personal God who is providential, and at the same time, inscrutable. It also led to a desire to seek generativity, hoping and believing that his son, as well as the soldiers in the war, had not died in vain—that something good might come out of it, specifically the preserving of the union, the freeing of the slaves, and the chastening of an American Christianity that had too often equated America with the chosen people of God. William Dean Howells serves as a transition figure regarding attitudes toward the dead in America. Howells struggled, in an era moving from sentimentality to hard-bitten realism, to maintain a belief in a future hope, the supernatural afterlife, 178 Christianity & Literature 66(1) or in the continuing bonds of the dead. That he did finally achieve such a hope, hard-won and perhaps always somewhat skeptical, is revealed in the writings of his final days, in essays and letters. The pattern established with Stowe and Lincoln is perhaps less clear here. Did he, like them, hope to bring a kind of redemption out of his daughter Winny’s death? Did he try to work, as Stowe and Lincoln explicitly did, so that her life would not have been in vain? The evidence suggests that he tried to use his writings to work through his spiritual doubts rather than using them as a way of ‘‘redeeming’’ Winny’s death. That he believed in a consolation...