ABSTRACT

Child death was one of the principle defining events of the nineteenth century. The suppressed conflict between evangelical and political approaches to child death in antebellum women's writing helps explain how Harper could end up writing two such very different kinds of child elegies. The evangelical elegy's principal function was to reconcile the bereaved to God's will. In Emily Dickinson's poems, the speaker approaches theodicean questions from a child's perspective, often situating herself as speaker and as victim at the same time. The 'theodicean' assumes the validity of the theistic conception of God as powerful, wise, and good, and on this basis seeks to defend the divine administration. Sarah Piatt's child-death poetry marked the end of the nineteenth-century women's tradition of the child elegy. Like poems on maternal woes, poems on child death fell out of favour after 1910 and those that women had produced were, like the women themselves, forgotten.