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In Memoriam Beth March
Mar. 6th, 2022 07:46 amI can only begin by wailing: BETH!!!!!!!
I always spend the second half of this book weeping over Beth’s chapters. In a way the story of her trip to the seaside with Jo is more painful than her actual death: here you have Jo swearing to fight Beth’s illness, as if she can clap on a knight’s helm and a sword and do battle with it, and Beth already knows that it’s hopeless. The tide’s going out, and won’t come back.
And then the death chapter - the way the whole family rallies around her, doing everything in their power to make her last months bright. Poor Beth gets weaker and weaker, and Jo stays ceaselessly by her side to nurse her, and then Beth dies “on the bosom where she had drawn her first breath…” Oh, it’s all so sad.
On a more hifalutin literary level, I’ve been thinking about the fact that tear-jerking was considered legitimate emotional mode in nineteenth century novels. It was a sign of high breeding and emotional sensibility to cry over a sad book. Hence Dickens’ LENGTHY spinning out of Little Nell’s demise (Beth’s is comparatively swift!), hence all the deathbeds in Elizabeth Gaskell’s books, hence the political strategy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is designed to punch you in the heart with tragic scenes of families ripped apart by slavery until you scream “Slavery must be abolished!” (Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, famously cried so hard over Uncle Tom’s Cabin that he had to leave a railway carriage.)
In the twentieth century, when it became socially unacceptable to cry your eyes out over anything (and certainly over a book), this sort of thing came to be viewed as emotionally manipulative and even dishonest. If tears are unacceptable there must be something wrong with books designed to provoke them.
It seems to me that writing off tears as a literary reaction also makes it impossible to write honestly about whole swathes of the human experience. How do you write an honest account of a character going into a slow decline at a brutally young age without making the reader cry?
I always spend the second half of this book weeping over Beth’s chapters. In a way the story of her trip to the seaside with Jo is more painful than her actual death: here you have Jo swearing to fight Beth’s illness, as if she can clap on a knight’s helm and a sword and do battle with it, and Beth already knows that it’s hopeless. The tide’s going out, and won’t come back.
And then the death chapter - the way the whole family rallies around her, doing everything in their power to make her last months bright. Poor Beth gets weaker and weaker, and Jo stays ceaselessly by her side to nurse her, and then Beth dies “on the bosom where she had drawn her first breath…” Oh, it’s all so sad.
On a more hifalutin literary level, I’ve been thinking about the fact that tear-jerking was considered legitimate emotional mode in nineteenth century novels. It was a sign of high breeding and emotional sensibility to cry over a sad book. Hence Dickens’ LENGTHY spinning out of Little Nell’s demise (Beth’s is comparatively swift!), hence all the deathbeds in Elizabeth Gaskell’s books, hence the political strategy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is designed to punch you in the heart with tragic scenes of families ripped apart by slavery until you scream “Slavery must be abolished!” (Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, famously cried so hard over Uncle Tom’s Cabin that he had to leave a railway carriage.)
In the twentieth century, when it became socially unacceptable to cry your eyes out over anything (and certainly over a book), this sort of thing came to be viewed as emotionally manipulative and even dishonest. If tears are unacceptable there must be something wrong with books designed to provoke them.
It seems to me that writing off tears as a literary reaction also makes it impossible to write honestly about whole swathes of the human experience. How do you write an honest account of a character going into a slow decline at a brutally young age without making the reader cry?
