It is an unenviable end, doing a vast amount of research on a particular subject and discovering your insights have already been made by others. I recently set about studying the historical trope of “the dying girl,” imagining I would write my thesis, to conclude my second master’s degree, on the topic. Unfortunately, while it was clear from primary sources that the dying girl had much to tell us about past American thought, the more scholarship I read the more it grew equally clear that the subject had been thoroughly covered. That is the way of things. Your work has to offer something new, but you cannot know if you have something new until you’ve read everything that everyone else has already written on the matter, a mammoth task, or at least read enough to come across your ideas. I also find it unnatural to try to find something new under the pressure of the clock (ringing at the end of the semester). Historical discoveries and meaningful insights cannot be rushed or forced — they may take months, years, or decades to find, and I’d rather come across them organically.
But it seemed a shame to not do something with this work, so I thought I would take some of my notes and craft a short piece.
In the nineteenth century, the archetype of “the dying girl” or “the dying woman” pervaded art and literature throughout the West, from the United States to Britain to Australia. A young female on her deathbed was the subject of a deluge of poems, short stories, novels, plays, songs, paintings, photographs, and sculptures. However manifested, the dying girl did a great deal of cultural work — as cultural theorist John Storey writes, works of art “always present a particular image of the world” and “win people to particular ways of seeing” it (Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction). The dying girl broadcast ideas on sexuality, religion, and perhaps even industrialization, the latter representing one of my few (somewhat) original insights or theories on this matter.
The archetype arose from various causes. While historians and English scholars have marked the nineteenth century as a high point of the archetype, it was hardly new, having appeared in preceding centuries. It was perhaps an outgrowth from imagery of the virgin Mary’s death. Compare Henry Peach Robinson’s photograph Fading Away (1858) with Death of the Virgin by Rembrandt (1639), Bruegel (1564), or Christus (1460). Jessica Straley, associate professor of English at the University of Utah, writes, “Scholars explain Victorian attitudes toward death as the result of the timely confluence of three traditions: the Gothic fixation on the mysterious and the melancholic, the Romantic veneration of nostalgia and decay, and the Evangelical view of death as a lesson for the living.” Thus, alongside an explosion of dying girls in art, “the nineteenth century uniquely transformed death into an elaborate performance: the century saw the invention of the modern cemetery, the elaboration of the funeral into an extravagant and expensive visual spectacle, and the codification of mourning attire and etiquette.”
There is likely a connection between the dying girl and tuberculosis, which killed large numbers of people in the nineteenth century. Scholars such as English professor Katherine Byrne of the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland (Tuberculosis and the Victorian Imagination, 2011) and Ashleigh Black, doctoral student of visual culture at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland (“Even in Death She Is Beautiful: Confronting Tuberculosis in Art, Literature, and Medicine,” 2022) have considered this. Tuberculosis, or consumption, was a “wasting disease” that British Victorians saw as enhancing feminine beauty, offering “pale, waxen features and a thin figure.” Red cheeks and glittering eyes were other key traits. Thus, real-world deaths, and ideas of beauty, bled into art. In depictions, dying girls were always young, fragile, and pretty. Symptoms of TB include cough, exhaustion, fever, weight loss, aches, and headaches, some of which are referenced in the American poems and short stories I examined (though what the dying girl is dying of is never worth directly mentioning, in the same way her name is usually unimportant).
A typical example of such a primary source (and it cannot be emphasized enough how uniform these writings are, right down to their identical titles, which limits mineable meanings) is Mrs. John K. Laskey’s “The Dying Girl” from Godey’s Magazine in 1843. The dying girl is “lovely,” “gentle,” and “youthful,” with “light curls on her brow.” Laskey depicts a struggle between the natural desire to live and the will of God, his invitation to paradise. With a warm and beautiful summertime, and a garden she “worshipped,” reminding her of the “thousand lovely things of earth,” the dying girl feels the “deep yearning of the soul for life,” longing to “delay” the end. She cries out:
To die, alas, to die!
To say farewell to all my heart holds dear;
To pass from earth while yet the summer sky
Resounds with gladsome voices, sweet and clear, —
Oh! would I might yet longer tarry here!
The dying girl eventually comes to her senses (“Father in heaven, my reason half departs!”), overcomes her fears, and accepts God’s will.
Yes, yes! I will submit! —
Forgive the spirit that has dared rebel!
And, holy Father, if THOU thinkest fit,
Take me from earth, for THOU dost all things well! —
With THEE, henceforth, I would for ever dwell!
Here you see the three key elements of the dying girl’s beauty, her noble Christian example, and her love of nature. These appear throughout my sources, whether written by men or women (typically white and middle or upper class). Of course, scholars have seen sexual connotations in the dying girl’s beauty and weakness. The archetype has been described as “a male fantasy of women’s bodily surrender.”
Magda Romanska, theatre scholar at Emerson College, explores the connection between the dying girl and sexuality in “NecrOphelia: Death, Femininity, and the Making of Modern Aesthetics” (2005). The nineteenth century, she writes, “was a period of morbid aesthetics and a peculiar and apparently inexplicable fascination with deadly eroticism.” Indeed, the “poetic and artistic imagination of the time began conceiving of the erotic as invariably ‘touched by death’ and of death as invariably touched by the erotic.” European artists, for example French sculptor Auguste Clésinger (“Woman Bitten by a Serpent”), offered in their work naked or semi-naked dying women, whose limp, sprawled forms could be read as post-orgasmic as easily as post-mortal. The dead or withering female body was inherently pornographic. The male gaze, Romanska argues, had a particular impact on artistic depictions of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, who became a central necrophilistic subject: “dead, yet sexually appealing.”
Of course, the nineteenth-century writer could not get away with descriptions of the nude body or various stages of undress and hope to be published; the painter and sculptor had more freedom in this regard. The furthest one could go would be where preacher and historian Timothy Horton Ball went in his 1893 Annie B., The Dying Girl: the girl is “very fair,” a “maid” (virgin) of “faultless form” and “native grace,” her cheeks and lips a “rosy hue,” her eyes “tender,” “bright,” and “blue.” This is alongside a beautiful voice and loving nature. Her lips and skin of course grow pale from illness. Not exactly erotica, but certainly pleasing to the male gaze. Elsewhere vulnerable girls are “sad and languid, weak and faint.”
And the dying girl is indeed at times explicitly a maiden, a sexual prize. (Though not always: see Deborah Deacon, “Seduced and Dying: The Sympathetic Trope of the Fallen Woman in Early and Mid-Victorian Britain.”) Professor of English Susan K. Martin of La Trobe University (Australia) explores this in her 1995 article “Good Girls Die; Bad Girls Don’t: The Uses of the Dying Virgin in Nineteenth-century Fiction.” After pointing out that nineteenth-century Western narratives confined young middle-class women to very few roles (“she can marry; she can fall; she can die”), Martin turns to the dying virgin, finding in her an “unthreatening ideal.” By ideal, Martin means that the dying girl is successfully trapped in a “closed system of virginity.” The only way to preserve her sexual purity is to kill her. The dying girl is unthreatening because her agency and power — sexual, social, economic, political, and so on — are curtailed through illness and eventual termination. In much Australian literature, Martin observes, including works by women, female characters who are transgressive, who push against class or gender boundaries, are both punished and cured of “over-active and over-assertive” traits by illness and death — they are made powerless and passive.
However, various interpretations, and myriad authorial anxieties, are possible: the “death of young women on the brink of sexual maturity” could also be read as escape “from repressive models of nineteenth-century female maturity, the sexual economy and gender boundaries which burden the adult female.” Martin also notes that dying girls issue commands and instructions to men that can hardly be refused (they also provide religious teachings to men, for instance in Ball’s piece). Narratively, the deathbed is a place of power: with the tale about to end and the dying girl showered with love and adulation, anything can be asked for. Further, in some instances, as with Beth and Jo in Alcott’s Little Women, the interpretation that a dying (ideal, domesticated) young woman enables the more radical path of another young woman is possible. Other scholars have noted that Poe’s dying women tend to return from the grave. Dying girl stories can thus be seen as sites of negotiation or feminist subversion, not solely as weapons of male supremacy and the gender order.
However, it must be said that the short nature of the works that appear in American magazines and newspapers do not allow for substantial narrative (and, again, there exists little variance). There is no before or after, no time for the girl to be transgressive, for other characters to walk a life path, etc. The girl is introduced on her deathbed and described physically, she comforts a loved one, reminisces about her childhood in nature, accepts God’s will and delights in seeing heaven, and dies. It is a steady drip of specific ideas into the cultural body. While we certainly see commands that cannot be refused, they tend to service the religious indoctrination. In Daniel Cooledge’s 1833 The Dying Jewess, the girl begs her father to find Christ as she has; she passes away and he does just that.
Beyond the alluring femme fragile and sexually untouched object, beyond the exemplar of the good Christian death (which was a staple of children’s literature in the nineteenth century and prior centuries, featuring more than just dying girls), only the adulation of nature appears to have received little commentary.
Samuel D. Patterson’s “The Prayer of the Dying Girl” was published in Godey’s Magazine in late 1848. The titular character remembers fondly her childhood home, and pleads to be taken there to die. She recalls the green valleys, streams, mountains, and plains she would explore, the “happy days that there I spent when health and strength were mine,” when she “never knew a pang of sorrow or of pain.” The Mourner’s Chaplet: An Offering of Sympathy for Bereaved Friends from 1844, edited by John Keese, contains three works entitled “The Dying Girl,” seemingly by different authors. In the first poem, the girl lifts up the natural world left behind: “Speak of me, when the summer day is bright / With glorious sunbeams, and the golden light / Streams through the lattice of my own green bower / Let me be there, in that rejoicing hour.” Heaven is likewise described as an everlasting spring, with flowers and streams and peaceful skies. The second poem speaks of exploring the ocean shore and picking flowers in childhood. In the third work, the dying girl admires the “golden sun” that warms her “lovely” “native land,” remembering herself as a “careless merry child” who “twined me garlands of sweet wild flowers — no hot-house denizens.” This is an explicit rejection of an urban structure. She regards each “rock and tree as old remembered friends,” and lauds the sparkling river and soft grass. Finally, consider abolitionist and suffragist Mattie Griffith Browne’s “The Dying Girl,” prominently positioned as the first poem in her 1853 collection. This dying girl laments she will not be buried at their family home but rather in “this cold, strange land.” No further explanation is given.
Straley argues that the Victorians linked death and childhood (death is returning home and becoming a child again, returning to a state of innocence), an idea existing alongside a connection between death and the erotic (see Romanska), and between death and woman (both seen as Other, outside the norm, in male-centric societies). But the dying girl’s rejection of her current place and the craving to return to nature could reflect attitudes toward the increasing urbanization and industrialization of nineteenth-century America — in other words, these are works of the Romantic movement (think Thoreau, Emerson, Bryant). Cities grew rapidly in the early 1800s and they were not always pleasant, nor was industrial labor. Philadelphia, Boston, and New York saw large influxes of rural migrants — these are the cities with the magazines and newspapers that received and published most of the dying girl stories I surveyed. While the idea that these works contain expressions of yearning for old ways of life is interesting, it is a bit interpretive for my tastes (like some elements of the sexual analysis) and could not carry a lengthy thesis.
Similarly, my suggestion that the dying girl archetype began to die out with the transition from Americans dying in the home to dying in the hospital in the late nineteenth century (the good Christian death was supposed to happen in the home, the hospital is a less sentimental setting, you may be less likely to be surrounded by family at the end, etc.) would be difficult to prove and quick to discuss.
It is time, then, to find a new topic.
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