Commonplace 130 George & The Death Drive aka The Death Wish.
There's a lot of death in George's writing. People die from sickness, neglect, from suicide by drowning, from old age, in accidents and by murder - sometimes, it feels like George doesn't want anyone to get out alive. There is enough of it in his work to conclude he had a bit of a Freudian Death Drive going on. This is not surprising in one so given over to control-freakery; by its very randomness, death always throws a spanner in the works of the control freak, and drives them neurotic. Feeling un-powerful in his real life, George could manage all things on his own terms in his creations, including when to terminate them. Much as he did with wives.
It would be wrong to think an abundance of Death Drive makes us all court death and disaster, or that it makes us all reckless and feckless. Some of us react this way to its influence; others are made fearful and cautious and live life avoiding exposure to any form of danger or threat. It was identified by Sigmund Freud in 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' (1920). Freud puts forward the notion that there are two influences that dominate our psychology - the Life Drive and the Death Drive. These exert a powerful hold over human psychology, and, by extension, all our endeavours. Drives are adaptive behaviours, and not instinctual states. It is to be remembered that the Ego protects our inner selves from threats, sometimes by anticipating them, sometimes in 'real time' by dealing with them, and then retrospectively by mopping up situations we find troublesome. Freud studied the way children role play imagined threatening situations - such as fear of storybook giants coming to life - in order to develop coping strategies for future use. In 'The Uses of Enchantment' (1976), Bruno Bettleheim makes a similar point about why fairy stories, myths, legends and sagas are so important to us all in allowing us to imagine horrors and challenges we would feel inadequate to in real life, and to equip us with intellectual skills to overcome our foes, even when these are internal and not external in nature. No doubt the worldwide cultural obsession with Superheroines and Superheroes, Wizards and Vampires, also speaks to our need to confront and conquer the real world threats that frighten us.
George is sometimes presented as suffering from bouts of depression that might have led him to consider suicide. I doubt this very much. There used to be a (possibly over-simplified) way of quickly diagnosing what type of depression someone suffered from - it was said that neurotic/reactive depressives blame outside forces for their predicament; psychotic/endogenous depressives blame themselves. As George frequently blamed others for his lot in life - such as it was his mother's fault he went off the rails at Owens College in Manchester because she sent him to live in digs there (as if she made him and it wasn't his choice!), to publishers not wanting to pay top dollar for his novels; likewise, his health, his lack of social mobility, his place of domicile, his lack of recognition, his inability to find people of a similar bent to talk to - everyone but George was to blame for it. And, though it is possible behind closed doors (away from biographers' eyes) it was different, the only time he was ever linked to suicide was probably nothing of the sort at all, but was the actions of a writer working out the dynamics of a special act of self-destruction. Would he have really been so callous as to actually attempt to cut his throat in front of a child?
A preoccupation with death in the 1890s is not the same as one evidenced in the twenty-first century. In the 1880s, there were few cures for major diseases and life-threatening conditions, and without the support of antibiotics to cure even simple infections, any sign of illness must have raised concern that something might deteriorate into a more sinister problem. And, in the case of a predisposition to a condition - such as congenital weakness of the heart - any defect would cast a dark shadow over living a normal life. The business of being ill was nothing like what we experience now - when we in the UK still have an NHS to care for us free at point of delivery (which is not the same as free health care please note - those with an income pay for everyone's health care in their taxes) we should stop and appreciate what it must have been like to be ill with no-one to care for us. George must have missed Marianne aka Nell's ministrations when his ailments were playing up, and no doubt made a replacement wife an attractive prospect when he found himself single again.
We are much more squeamish about death these days and it is kept out of our sight. In George's day it was common for corpses to remain in the room where they died, with the body laid out on show for several fays prior to burial. People were brought to view the body and often, a posed photograph of the corpse with living relatives was taken as a memento. We find this sort of thing ghoulish, but in a time when photographs were expensive and not an everyday item for most people, a lasting image of a deceased loved one was a special celebration to mark a life.
The impact of his father's death and funeral was profound, particularly for the boys, but George's father does not come across as a particularly diligent parent - he spent too long out of the home, for a start, and access to his physical presence was limited. He worked in his shop then did his Wakefield civic duty by participating in the town's political life - the family seems to have come third in his list of priorities. He left the child-rearing to Mrs Gissing, but George did not have much respect for either of his parents as he felt intellectually superior to them. And then there was that dratted need to identify with those who were his social superiors, which must have made him look down on their parochial ambitions. If ever there was a lad who thought he had been abandoned on the doorstep like a character in a fairy tale, it was George. His reactions of extreme grief at his father's graveside were as much to do with mourning his lack of prospects as it was mourning his lack of a father.
There is a modern term that mixes what we covered of 'slum tourism' in Commonplace 128 (George & Slumming) with a similar fixation on death, known as Dark Tourism. Let's face it, anything these days with the word 'dark' in it is going to be bad - this is the rise of interest in holidays visiting places where very bad things happened. And we are not talking small-scale day trips to see where Jack the Ripper is alleged to have supped a shandy, but sites where atrocities were carried out. Not necessarily formal museums, such as Auschwitz click, or WW1 battlefields; we are talking Srebinitza, torture chambers, mass killing sites and disaster areas such as New Orleans' most flood-damaged places click. Some like a week's camping in St Ives or Babbacombe click; others prefer looking at piles of skulls and cattle prods. Hmm.
It cannot be imagined what impact the diagnosis of syphilis would have on anyone back in the days when there was no cure. By the time George contracted it, there were milder strains that did not always destroy the appearance of sufferer before killing them. Tertiary syphilis could lay dormant for a decade or more, and so the percentage to die entirely from syphilis was limited (in 1868 click) to less than 1 per week in a population in London of 3 million. It was the fear of what syphilis could do that galvanized the popular imagination - and its association with illicit sex that classified it as shameful. One advantage to modern thinking on epidemiology is that there are no shameful diseases - anyone can catch anything, if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time - unless they are immune.
In all his writings on death and the dead, one of the most affecting is his description of Emma Vine visiting the corpse of Richard Mutimer, the man she loved and who had betrayed her for another woman:
She was alone again with the dead. It cost her great efforts of mind to convince herself that Mutimer really had breathed his last; it seemed to her but a moment since she heard him speak, heard him laugh; was not a trace of the laugh even discernible on his countenance? How was it possible for life to vanish in this way? She constantly touched him, spoke to him. It was incredible that he should not be able to hear her.
Her love for him was immeasurable. Bitterness she had long since overcome, and she had thought that love, too, was gone with it. She had deceived herself. Her heart, incredible as it may seem, had even known a kind of hope - how else could she have borne the life which fate laid upon her? - the hope that is one with love, that asks nothing of the reason, nor yields to reason's contumely. He had been smitten dead at the moment she loved him dearest.
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| The Power of Death by William Holbrook Beard 1890 |
It would be wrong to think an abundance of Death Drive makes us all court death and disaster, or that it makes us all reckless and feckless. Some of us react this way to its influence; others are made fearful and cautious and live life avoiding exposure to any form of danger or threat. It was identified by Sigmund Freud in 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' (1920). Freud puts forward the notion that there are two influences that dominate our psychology - the Life Drive and the Death Drive. These exert a powerful hold over human psychology, and, by extension, all our endeavours. Drives are adaptive behaviours, and not instinctual states. It is to be remembered that the Ego protects our inner selves from threats, sometimes by anticipating them, sometimes in 'real time' by dealing with them, and then retrospectively by mopping up situations we find troublesome. Freud studied the way children role play imagined threatening situations - such as fear of storybook giants coming to life - in order to develop coping strategies for future use. In 'The Uses of Enchantment' (1976), Bruno Bettleheim makes a similar point about why fairy stories, myths, legends and sagas are so important to us all in allowing us to imagine horrors and challenges we would feel inadequate to in real life, and to equip us with intellectual skills to overcome our foes, even when these are internal and not external in nature. No doubt the worldwide cultural obsession with Superheroines and Superheroes, Wizards and Vampires, also speaks to our need to confront and conquer the real world threats that frighten us.
 |
| From The Triptych Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation by Hans Memling 1485 |
A preoccupation with death in the 1890s is not the same as one evidenced in the twenty-first century. In the 1880s, there were few cures for major diseases and life-threatening conditions, and without the support of antibiotics to cure even simple infections, any sign of illness must have raised concern that something might deteriorate into a more sinister problem. And, in the case of a predisposition to a condition - such as congenital weakness of the heart - any defect would cast a dark shadow over living a normal life. The business of being ill was nothing like what we experience now - when we in the UK still have an NHS to care for us free at point of delivery (which is not the same as free health care please note - those with an income pay for everyone's health care in their taxes) we should stop and appreciate what it must have been like to be ill with no-one to care for us. George must have missed Marianne aka Nell's ministrations when his ailments were playing up, and no doubt made a replacement wife an attractive prospect when he found himself single again.
The impact of his father's death and funeral was profound, particularly for the boys, but George's father does not come across as a particularly diligent parent - he spent too long out of the home, for a start, and access to his physical presence was limited. He worked in his shop then did his Wakefield civic duty by participating in the town's political life - the family seems to have come third in his list of priorities. He left the child-rearing to Mrs Gissing, but George did not have much respect for either of his parents as he felt intellectually superior to them. And then there was that dratted need to identify with those who were his social superiors, which must have made him look down on their parochial ambitions. If ever there was a lad who thought he had been abandoned on the doorstep like a character in a fairy tale, it was George. His reactions of extreme grief at his father's graveside were as much to do with mourning his lack of prospects as it was mourning his lack of a father.
There is a modern term that mixes what we covered of 'slum tourism' in Commonplace 128 (George & Slumming) with a similar fixation on death, known as Dark Tourism. Let's face it, anything these days with the word 'dark' in it is going to be bad - this is the rise of interest in holidays visiting places where very bad things happened. And we are not talking small-scale day trips to see where Jack the Ripper is alleged to have supped a shandy, but sites where atrocities were carried out. Not necessarily formal museums, such as Auschwitz click, or WW1 battlefields; we are talking Srebinitza, torture chambers, mass killing sites and disaster areas such as New Orleans' most flood-damaged places click. Some like a week's camping in St Ives or Babbacombe click; others prefer looking at piles of skulls and cattle prods. Hmm.
 |
| Death and Life by Gustav Klimt 1910 |
In all his writings on death and the dead, one of the most affecting is his description of Emma Vine visiting the corpse of Richard Mutimer, the man she loved and who had betrayed her for another woman:
She was alone again with the dead. It cost her great efforts of mind to convince herself that Mutimer really had breathed his last; it seemed to her but a moment since she heard him speak, heard him laugh; was not a trace of the laugh even discernible on his countenance? How was it possible for life to vanish in this way? She constantly touched him, spoke to him. It was incredible that he should not be able to hear her.
Her love for him was immeasurable. Bitterness she had long since overcome, and she had thought that love, too, was gone with it. She had deceived herself. Her heart, incredible as it may seem, had even known a kind of hope - how else could she have borne the life which fate laid upon her? - the hope that is one with love, that asks nothing of the reason, nor yields to reason's contumely. He had been smitten dead at the moment she loved him dearest.
 |
| Tristan and Isolde Death by Rogelio de Egusquiza 1901 click for a bit of Furtwangler und Flagstad. |
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