Narrative Mourning: Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel by Kathleen M. Oliver (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Narrative Mourning: Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel by Kathleen M. Oliver Mark Fulk Kathleen M. Oliver, Narrative Mourning: Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel ( Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 207; 7 b/w illus. $34.95 paper, $120.00 cloth. Studies such as Thomas W. Laqueur's The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015) and Phillipe Ariès's The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years (1981) have provoked cultural reappraisals of our changing relation to death and dying in the West. Kathleen M. Oliver's book picks up the challenge of these studies, particularly relating them to the changing theories and practice of death in the eighteenth century as read through major and minor novels of the period. Oliver's analysis centers on close readings of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753); Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Familiar Letters between the Principal Character in David Simple (1747), and Volume the Last (1753); Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771); and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Building her study around the changing cultural dynamics concerning death between 1748 and 1794, Oliver argues that the eighteenth century evinces "a world of epistemological uncertainty," as ideas of an embodied soul transform into the view of a "consciousness that transcends time and place and body" (161). Oliver's study uses the notion of relics and relicts as the centerpiece to her understanding of the changing dynamics around death in these novels. The word "relic" evokes the medieval relic, which was a physical piece from a saint that was expected to carry holy power, including the power of healing, and became an important emblem of a system of religious power. Oliver uses the term "relict" to denote physical remnants of the dead more generally; in practice, the distinction between relict and relic is often elided. In her study of the eighteenth century, the relic/relict moves from a remnant that carries with it power from the decedent to a thing that merely invokes the memory of the person who is gone. Oliver traces the change she sees from relic/relicts as objects that continue to embody the dead [End Page 149] to objects merely of remembrance in the novel to John Locke's arguments in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) that the soul is not necessarily connected to the body and can exist apart from it. Locke's formulations take time to displace older ideas of the soul suffusing the body and its remnants, becoming instead represented by the ever-present ghosts of the gothic novel. Clarissa represents the earliest manifestation of the idea of the relic/relict, being a text that references a time when these had some power and prescience that could shape the lives of the living. While they may not possess ghostly powers like saints' relics, Clarissa's bequeathed rings (some with her hair and some without) become an equivalence to her moral judgment as well as a way of promising her continuing presence in her beloveds' lives after her death. Oliver traces the history of hair rings and shows their shifting meaning in the time of Richardson's writing, demonstrating that they did indeed exist somewhere between relics/relicts as understood in the Middle Ages and relics/relicts as mere symbols for remembrance. Oliver's strongest, most insightful readings concern the David Simple novels as well as Mysteries of Udolpho. Although the novel was written chronologically later, Oliver's analysis of Udolpho is placed earlier in her study as one of two framing texts, the other being Clarissa. Her study highlights two aspects of the changing notion of the material culture surrounding death: portraits and miniatures on the one hand, and waxen transi on the other. Oliver offers a sophisticated history of the use of the miniature, especially as a gift that then becomes a remnant of the dead themselves. The placement of the miniature close to the heart of the one who...