Dr. Metablog

On Aggasiz

Louis Agassiz was, Darwin aside, the nineteenth century's most acclaimed naturalist.  He was the first to speculate about the ice ages and the first to suggest that mastodons and other giant quadrapeds had become extinct as a consequence of the deep freeze in Europe and America.  Agassiz was much celebrated in his lifetime, and at his death, Harvard, where he taught, shut down for a day for his majestic funeral.  James Russell Lowell contributed an eleven-page elegy to the Atlantic. "Seldom, if ever, has the death of a man of science been so deeply felt," reported The Nation.

These details are drawn from Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's (2009) an oddly-titled but informative and accessible history of Darwinism in gilded-age America.

Here's a striking and crowded sentence about Aggasiz, also drawn from Werth's book."The son of a strong-willed assistant pastor to the Protestant congregation of a lakeside village in French-speaking Switzerland who married well, he was his parents' fifth child but the first to survive infancy." 

Agassiz was a therefore a "replacement child" with a vengeance. He "replaced" four lost siblings (but whether male or female Werth does not say).  Imagine his parents' pain; imagine how young Louis must have been cherished and protected but also, possibly, afflicted with the 'guilt of the survivor.'  Or how he must have unconsciously competed with his deceased and therefore perfect brothers and sisters.  And then try to imagine both his mother's suffering and also how his aspiring and apparently devout father might have responded to such an appalling succession of family tragedies. 

Agassiz wa.s America's foremost opponent of evolution.  He rejected natural selection because, he claimed, "Darwinism" led inevitably to "atheism" -- which hasn't turned out to be the case, although I personally can't imagine why not.  Agassiz took his own idiosyncratic route and proselytized for the curious and retrograde doctrine of "polygenism" -- the idea that the various races of man were separately -- and hierarchically -- created.  Agassiz imagined eight different kinds of humans, ranked according to their "cranial capacity" -- Caucasian, Arctic, Mongol, American Indian, Negro, Hottentot, Malay, and Australian (thereby running afoul of both "monogenists" like Darwin and bible-worshippers who acknowledged only one creation -- that of Adam and Eve). For Agassiz, each species was "a thought of God."  An odd path for usually observant scientist.  Agassiz was the favorite intellectual of slaveholders and their apologists. 

Agassiz was also a virulent and odious racist. Here's what he wrote to his mother when he stopped at a hotel in which he was served by black waiters.  "It is impossible to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on their heads, their bent knees and elongated hands, their large curved fingernails, and above all the livid colors of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance, and when they advanced that hideous hand toward my plate to serve me, I wished that I could leave in order to eat my bread apart rather than dine with such service.  What unhappiness for the white race to have tied its existence so closely with that of the Negroes. God protect us."  And so on, and more, and worse.  I can't remember reading a paragraph that more turned the stomach or that more cried out for psychological analysis.       

I cannot help wondering whether there might not be a connection between Agassiz's status as a replacement child and his embrace of polygenism.  It is possible that he unconsciously thought that he was a special and superior person because he, of all his siblings, was chosen for survival?  And that in the same way, white people were chosen and superior among all the "races" of humankind.  His deeply-held resistance to evidence that persuaded almost all of his fellow naturalists is inexplicable -- unless he clung to the doctrine of special creation for reasons that were fundamentally irrational.  Put it this way:  Agassiz's unusual situation required him to believe that he, and people with whom he could identify, were marked for distinction -- and that all others were inferior.  One of five among the siblings, one of eight among the races.  How else could he free himself of the guilt that he lived and thrived while his apparently less deserving siblings had perished?

Broad-brush cheap pop psychologizing, to be sure -- but let's reserve judgment until we find some time to get ourself to the library and learn a little about this brilliant, disgusting man. 

What We Read in the Fifties: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, although published in 1927, was still widely read in the 1950s both by the  general public and by students in classrooms all over America.  It's a fine novel but it's unfortunate that Thornton Wilder's philosophical premise is so naive and lame. In 1714 a rope bridge over a gorge in Peru breaks and five people perish.  Brother Juniper investigates the lives of the fallen, assuming that the good lord wouldn't have allowed them to die without a reason.  Eventually, the well-meaning priest learns that the five victims were no worse and no better than any other quintet of ordinary mortals. His conclusion is displeasing to officialdom and both he and his compilation of facts are burnt by the Inquisition.

By the oddest of odd coincidences, I had recently read an essay on the rope bridges of the Incas, in which I learned that, though brilliantly designed, these bridges required annual renewal.  My reading of The Bridge of San Luis Rey was therefore colored by questions not of theology but of engineering.  Why didn't they repair the damn bridge?  Why did they think that a fiber bridge wouldn't rot?  Why doesn't Brother Juniper investigate the bridge maintenance department?  The conclusions to which the novel seems to come -- that a) sometimes good people die for no good reason, b) that god is either indifferent or not there at all, and c) the Spanish inquisition was unpleasant -- don't seem particularly challenging.  Is it possible that the novel's theses were daring in the 50s classroom?   They seem mighty tame today.

Though the frame of The Bridge of San Luis Rey is bland, the accounts of the five people who die are sharp and colorful and imaginative and rather beautifully written.  There are moments, in fact,  when Wilder's storytelling seemed almost post-modern.   Here's part of a paragraph about the twins Manuel and Estaban.  To me, it sounds like an extract from The Hundred Years of Solitude.

Because they had no family, because they were twins, and because they were brought up by women, they were silent.  There was in them a curious shame in regard to their resemblance.  They had to live in a world where it was the subect of continual comment and joking.  It was never funny to them and they suffered the eternal pleasantries with stolid patience. From the years when they first learned to speak they invented a secret language for themselves, one that was scarcely dependent on Spanish for its vocabulary, or even for its syntax.  They resorted to it only where they were alone, or at great intervals in moments of stress whispered it in the presence of others.  The Archbishop of Lima was someting of a philologist;  he dabbled in dialects;  he had even evolved quite a brilliant table for the vowel and consonant changes from Latin into Spanish and from Spanish into Indian-Spanish.  He was storing up notebooks of quaint lore against an amusing old age he planned to offer himself back on his estates outside Segovia.  So when he heard one day about the secret language of the twin brothers, he trimmed some quills and sent for them.  The boys stood humiliated upon the rich carpets of his study while he tried to extract from them their bread and tree and I see and I saw. They did not know why the experience was so horrible to them.  They bled.... 

I think if this extract were presented to ten literate readers, nine of them would immediately guess "Marquez."  Of course, its Marquezness would be even more obvious if Manuel and Estaban would fly up to the ceiling or be transformed into a thousand glorious butterflies.  I don't know whether Marquez ever read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised to discover that he had done so.       

Incidentally, Manuel dies and his twin Estaban wrestles with "the guilt of the survivor."  Is it relevant that Thornton Wilder's own twin died at birth?  And does it follow that Wilder, despite the fact that he came from a large and accomplished family, might well be thought of as still another variety of replacement child? 

A Recurring, Violent Nightmare

I wish I had pleasant dreams but I only have nightmares.  Here's one of them.  Beginning with early adolescence and continuing to this day, I've had a recurring dream in which I've murdered someone--I don't know whom.  The victim is always an unidentifiable male, and his death is always violent.  Ordinarily, I beat him to pulp with a shovel.  I have problems disposing of the gory body, but usually I bury it next to the neglected garage that lay behind the house on East 9 Street in Flatbush where I lived my first seventeen years.  It's an anguishing dream not because I've killed someone, but because I've failed to conceal the body properly and because I'm going to be arrested and punished.  It's amoral  -- I don't feel guilty that I'm a murderer -- just embarrassed because I'm incompetent.  It's a very realistic nightmare.  A couple of times it's been so vivid to me that even after I was wide-awake, it took me ten or fifteen seconds to realize that I was not being hunted by the police and that I could proceed normally with my life.

I don't know why I should be so oppressed with this fantasy.  In the daylight hours, I'm your run-of-the-mill peaceful person.

Imagine my surprise when I read (and studied the illustrations of) J. M. DeMatteis's 100% autobiographical "graphic novel" Brooklyn Dreams (Paradox, 2003) and discovered that my nightmare is not entirely my own.  DeMatteis suffers from exactly the same recurring dream.  "I remember the body -- buried out behind my apartment building... or maybe stuffed in a trash can across the street....  Some poor, innocent schmuck I've either hacked up with a machete... or machine-gunned with Cagney-like ferocity... or maybe just kicked down a flight of stairs."  DeMatteis labors under the guilt that's provoked by this dream, and, like me, he can't explain it except to speculate that his life is a nightmare from which he's trying to awake.  But here's what's so fascinating to me:  DeMatteis is a product of the exact same Brooklyn neighborhood as I (see map).  He grew up at the corner of Ocean and Foster, and he hung out at Newkirk Plaza, a commercial island that would nowadays be called a shopping center, where I endured painful haircuts, carried the dry cleaning back and forth, and entered and exited the BMT subway.  Was there something about Flatbush, or, more particularly, something about "the Plaza" that made us killers in our dreams.  Yes, I rather think there was.

Is it significant that DeMatteis is an kind of replacement child?  He is the survivor of a pair of fraternal twins.  His potential sibling was spontaneously aborted -- although DeMatties speculates, that, prescient about life's forthcoming difficulties, he might have "jumped."  DeMatties' mother was about to be "scraped" when the doctor had second thoughts.  In Brooklyn Dreams, DeMatteis describes his mother's and father's hysterical, debilitating and inconsistent protectiveness -- traits often discovered in parents who haven't properly grieved their loss.

Is it possible that the person whom DeMatteis thinks he murdered is, on some level, the unborn twin?   

And so we have still another variation of the replacement child syndrome. 

Another Variation on the "Replacement Child" Theme

In Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son (1848), which I've just re-read, Dombey's treasured son Paul dies when his big sister, Florence, is about six years old.  Dombey has never liked his daughter Florence (he seems to blame her for being a girl) and likes her less after he loses Paul.  Dombey could transfer his affection from his dead son to a possible "replacement," his living daughter.  But he shuns that very legitimate psychological option.  On the contrary, Florence is neglected, ignored, exiled, and eventually even struck by her hard-hearted father.  In real life, it's inevitable that Florence would become alienated, bitter, and distorted.  In Dickens' fairy-tale world her love for her father endures and she remains cheerful and optimistic.  Although she experiences a truly horrible childhood, she suffers no permanent psychological deficit.  Eventually, she reconciles with her father, forgives him (sic!) and produces two children (named Paul and Florence, of course).  Dombey, now chastened, grandfathers these true replacement children.   

It's a big, good novel, and Dickens makes us laugh and cry but sometimes against our will and always in defiance of our knowledge of real --as opposed to idealized--children.  Dickens' optimism and his faith in the power of forgiveness are wonderful but utterly otherworldly.  Replacements, even quasi-replacements such as Florence, rarely fare so well.      

Was Edward Gibbon a Replacement Child?

     By strict definition, a replacement child is one who is conceived because an older sibling has died. According to the theory, such a child is at psychological risk, especially if the dead child has not been adequately mourned.

     Because he was an oldest son, Edward Gibbon, the greatest of all modern historians and the most brilliant prose stylist in the English language, would not seem to qualify as a replacement  -- except that in his own curious manner of thinking, Gibbon “replaced” children who were born subsequent to him.

     Gibbon preened himself on his status in the family. “From my birth,” he said in his famous Memoir, “I have enjoyed the rights of primogeniture.”   But primogeniture was not so much a chronological fact as it was a pinnacle to be defended. As he conceived it, Gibbon triumphed over would-be competitors to his supremacy.  “I was succeeded by five brothers and one sister, all of whom were snatched away in their infancy.”  Toward his dead siblings, and toward the parents who endured the heart-breaking death of six of their seven children, Gibbon was unnaturally cold and mercenary.  “I shall not pretend to lament” the loss of those who would “oppress my inheritance.”  Gibbon lacked empathy in part because he felt, with some justice, that his younger siblings were favored over him by his father.  How could this be? 

     The Memoir supplies an explanation. In an age of high infant mortality, Gibbon was a very sickly child. His life was at risk and other children seemed healthier. As Gibbon himself puts it, “so feeble was my constitution, so precarious my life, that, in the baptism of each of my brothers my father’s prudence successively repeated my Christian name of Edward, that, in case of the departure of the eldest son, this patronymic appellation might be still perpetuated in the family.”  This is odd indeed.  In five separate instances, according to the future historian, a male child saw the light, and each time the child was named Edward. In one case after another, the outcome was the same. The infant who might have “oppressed his inheritance” succumbed and the heroic oldest son beat back the challenge. The first Edward therefore “replaced,” so to speak, a series of subsequent Edwards who might have superseded him.  It's not hard to imagine that a sickly child, pursued by a series of infants each christened with his very own name, would feel threatened and might rejoice rather than mourn at their funerals.

     Although Gibbon attributes the pattern of naming to his father’s “prudence,” it is obvious that the phrase "my father's prudence” is an irony that masks a true fury.  Was it prudence or was it his father's hope that the sickly child would be succeeded by an healthy one?   Hostility also shines through Gibbon's jealous account of his mother: "to preserve and to rear so frail a being [as himself], the most tender assiduity was scarcely sufficient; and my mother’s attention was somewhat diverted by her frequent pregnancies, by an exclusive passion for her husband, and by the dissipation of the world, in which his taste and authority obliged her to mingle.”  The irony of this beautiful Augustan sentence conceals infantine rage:  to translate into more forthright English, Gibbon objects that his mother conceived other children, claims that she should have preferred him to her husband, and asserts that she should have withdrawn from society to nurse him.

     To what degree Gibbon’s suppressed and ironic but still obvious anger toward his parents contributed to his peculiar temperament is difficult to say, but it is a fact that the bulk of his career was spent not only in tracing the decline and fall of Rome, the father of all European civilizations, but also in displacing an established patriarchal religion from its position of supremacy. The irony that he directed against his parents in his Memoir is the exact weapon he learned to deploy against Roman failures and against triumphant Christianity.

     In addition, there's an untidy psychological wrinkle. Gibbon’s claim that the male children who succeeded him were all named Edward is a crucial part of his indictment of his parents.  But it's an assertion that is not true and is not substantiated by parish records.  There was no endless series of Edwards.  Apparently, one succeeding child was so named but the rest enjoyed various different appellations. The most scrupulous of historians either invented or misremembered the dreadful slight that so wounded him.  What psychological mechanism caused Gibbon to yearn to be even more of a replacement child than in fact he was? 

The Replacement Child: Juliet

In the narrowest definition, a "replacement child" is a being who is intentionally conceived because an older sibling has recently died.  Such substitutes must endure the lifetime burden of competing with a lost and often idealized child.  Because it is almost impossible for them to please their parents, they easily become confused and frustrated, or worse.  Here's a dry summary from a learned journal:  "When bereaved parents give birth to a child or children subsequent to a perinatal death, their constructions of the family necessarily change. The subsequent child is thought to be at risk of psychopathology (the replacement child syndrome) if parents have not sufficiently grieved their losses."  "At risk of psychopathology" is a hesitant, euphemistic formulation. 

The term "replacement child" has also been defined more broadly: it may, for example, refer to any child in a family that has lost one or more of its offspring (rather than solely to one conceived as a direct consequence of a death).  In an even larger sense of the term, there are all kinds of 'symbolic' replacements: one psychologist has gone so far as to suggest that any Jewish child born after the European holocaust should be so considered.  This idea seems extreme.

In pre-industrial societies, replacement children received no particular notice because infant deaths were so very commonplace. While there must be many replacement children in traditional literature, the earliest who comes to mind is Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which was written in 1595 . 

Juliet's biological mother is aloof and distant, but she has a second and more loving parent -- her nurse -- who does much of the actual work of mothering.  The nurse has lost her own daughter, Susan, and has become wet-nurse to Juliet.  "Susan and she -- God rest all Christian souls --/  Were of an age.  Well, Susan is with God;/  She was too good for me."  Clearly, Shakespeare suggests, Susan has been idealized.  Juliet is the nurse's replacement child, a fact that goes far to explain the profound bond between surrogate mother and surrogate daughter.  It is uncharacteristic of Shakespeare to discuss the infancy of his heroines, nor can I think of another pre-modern work that devotes so much space to wet-nursing or to the trauma of weaning.  Although he depicts in detail the relationship between Juliet and her nurse,  Shakespeare does not seem to anticipate or foreshadow the interest that later centuries would take in the replacement child syndrome.  Instead, he focuses on Juliet's sexual alacrity.  The nurse tells a pertinent story (and leave us with the impression that she has told it many times before):  when Juliet had just learned to walk, she fell and "broke her brow"-- cut her forehead, as we would say.  "And then my husband --God be with his soul,/ He was a merry man--took up the child,/ 'Yea,' quoth he, 'dost thou fall upon thy face?/ Thou wilt fall backward when thou has more wit,/ Wilt thou not, Jule?'  And by my holidame,/ The pretty wretch left crying and said 'ay.'"  "Falling backward" is bawdy talk for a woman's posture in sexual intercourse.  Retelling her husband's tale, the Nurse dramatizes her expectation that when Juliet comes of age, or "has more wit," she will be eager to fall backward. To this proposition Juliet -- "the pretty wretch"-- says "Ay.'  Juliet's personal psychology, Shakespeare seems to hint, formed itself to gratify the suggestions of her surrogate mother.  The vigorous sexuality that might be appropriate for the nurse's natural daughter Susan, who would have been a servant girl, has been transferred to the bourgeois Juliet, who, if she had followed the example of her birth mother, would have been properly restrained, repressed, and diffident.  In effect, the nurse contrives to live her own desires through her replacement child;  the result is Juliet's impetuosity and death.

William Shakespeare was born in 1564, but an older sister Joan was baptized in 1558 and another, Margaret, in 1562.  Both died in infancy.  The future playwright was therefore doubly a replacement child.  There's an additional complexity in the family drama because the infants he replaced were female.   How this oddity affected his own psychological development is open to speculation.  Perhaps because he was the oldest son in a family that had lost two daughters, he was especially cherished.  Or perhaps a boy who replaced girls developed the empathy to create complex female characters in an English drama that, until Juliet, had limited itself strictly to unidimensional stereotypes.