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In Memory of Cassie: Child Death and Religious Vision in American Women's Novels
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Extract
This article investigates the contribution of several twentieth-century women writers to the legacy of women's writing about child death and scriptural consolation. The suffering and death of children constitutes the most intractable of religious problems, and recent studies of parental grieving support women's literary treatment of child death. Thus, just as child death creates a unique religious space, it may also demand its own literary category and aesthetic. By considering the unique dimensions of parental grieving, and by looking at how Perri Klass, Toni Morrison, and Harriette Arnow handle this subject, it is possible to gain fresh literary perspective on the fiction of nineteenth-century American women, many of whom also addressed the problem of child death and scriptural consolation. Women writers create children who are more than literary or symbolic commodities, and, in so doing, these writers challenge us to reevaluate scriptural and social perspectives on child death.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Religion and American Culture , Volume 6 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Religion and Twentieth-Century American Novels , Winter 1996 , pp. 87 - 104
- Copyright
- Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1996
References
Notes
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33. I am convinced that differences in men's writing and women's writing are mostly a matter of content, not style. Women and men occupy different cultural locations and naturally bring different perspectives to the same kind of experience. If there is a difference between how male and female authors handle the subject of children and child death, perhaps it derives from the gender-driven parameters of public and private life that still pertain to American life. Perhaps what real-life fathers feel about their children and what male authors have written are two different things.
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