She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, What We Mourn: Child Death and the Politics of Grief in Nineteenth-Century Britain, and shared the following:
From page 99:Learn more about What We Mourn at the the University of Virginia Press website.The political context of the Indian Rebellion shaped how Britons grieved child death, and grief, in turn, ultimately served to strengthen British imperialism. Without access to communal British mourning rituals, including the witnessing of a child’s death and salvation, the preparation of the body, the funeral and burial service, and the marking of the grave for future visitation, survivors initially struggled to articulate and perform their grief. They pointed to their inability to mourn for children who died during war as a means to highlight the incongruity between an idealized childhood in safe, “British” domestic spaces and extreme wartime violence. These accounts suggested, in fact, that children should never have been present in such circumstances. The initial reports from Lucknow marked a “cultural trauma,” and like many mid-Victorian literary and historical representations of “the Mutiny,” they contained what Christopher Herbert identifies as a “sometimes dizzying rhetorical instability” and “incurable self-contradiction” about such fundamental questions as the excessiveness of British force, the law, race, and religion—contradictions ultimately overshadowed by repeated cries for vengeance and rising imperialist propaganda following the 1865 Jamaican Rebellion and late Victorian colonization of Africa. The swift reclamation of British grieving rituals beginning with the distribution of mourning attire as survivors made their way from Lucknow to Calcutta and the retelling of child wartime casualties as beautiful deaths surely allowed many survivors to express their sorrow more openly, providing them with comfort and solace. However, such nationalistic expressions of grief also left much unspoken and unremembered: the anguish of violent child death, the struggle for resources divided unequally among the besieged population, the awareness that Indian as well as British children were dying and that Britons were dependent on Indians for survival, and the utter loss of oneself that can come with grief for another (Bartrum’s sense that she was “stripped of all,” “empty & desolate”). . . The forms of national mourning and memory that eventually dominated public accounts reaffirmed the ties that bound all Britons along with the distinct subject positions that had been eroded during the conflict: military men and domestic women, British colonizers and Indian subjects, nurturing adults and innocent, protected children.Page 99 is the conclusion to my third chapter, “‘Suppressed Grief’: Mourning the Death of British Children and the Memory of the 1857 Indian Rebellion.” The Page 99 Test works remarkably well as a reflection of my book’s argument and method. The chapter details British accounts of child death from shell fire, disease, and starvation at Lucknow, where civilians and troops remained under siege for several months during the colonial uprising against the British East India Company. Page 99 speaks to the underlying idea of the book that grieving enables us to rethink our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to others. Here, in the chapter conclusion, I summarize how British adults struggled to mourn the often violent deaths of children during the siege, and how, for some, the defamiliarization of mourning patterns corresponded with a questioning of self and nation. Ultimately, however, after the siege ended and Britain reclaimed violent military control of India, these unsettling deaths of children tended to be forgotten or rewritten as “beautiful deaths” and replaced with imperialist testimonies of British power.
While this chapter focuses on forms of forgotten or “suppressed” grief during the Indian Rebellion, the book’s other chapters take this argument in reverse to explore how a broad group of nineteenth-century reformers politicized their grief over child death. In response to child deaths that they increasingly understood as “premature” rather than divinely ordained, they expressed their grief in public to demand from the state a future with new political rights: freedom, citizenship, and suffrage, as well as the rights to leisure, housing, and medical care.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
