Love, Death, and Narration from Beyond the Grave: Howe's The Hermaphrodite and Spofford's "The Amber Gods"

The Hermaphrodite wrestles, in various ways, with the idea of a physical versus spiritual love or connection. Laurence, whose body is fraught with tension, cannot know physical love and must maintain romantic relationships on a spiritual/emotional level. In fact, a spiritual connection between lovers is both romanticized and valorized in the novel, making it seem like the ideal sort of love. Again and again, characters are engaged in love that transcends all physicality, beyond death, existing only on the spiritual plane. Quite fittingly, then, the novel ends with the death of Laurence, whose inability to love in physical form has always been written on his body. But the final passage of the novel doesn’t reflect any of the idealized, spiritual, or transcendent love. In fact, it’s rather morbid: “I heard the sound of many footsteps ascending the stairs, and silently entering the room. My brain was now excited to a vivid consciousness of the horror of my fate, and I longed earnestly for the power of averting it by giving some token of life. At this moment, I heard another step, of how well known, and then the falling of one upon his knees beside me. Silence, dead silence from all—of that he could have spoken, that I might but hear his voice once more” (Howe 198). The present and active consciousness of Laurence’s narration is, perhaps, the most disturbing element of this scene. He is not narrating from beyond the grave but rather from inside it. The present tense—“my brain was now excited to a vivid consciousness to the horror of my fate”—gives the distinct impression that Laurence narrates from a point of consciousness, “vivid” consciousness to be exact. We, of course, have to wonder what “the horror” of his fate might entail. It could simply be death, but I’m not sure one “averts” death by giving “some token of life;” averting death is as simple as being alive. One might, however, want to give a sign of life if their spirit were trapped in an apparently deceased body and wanted to avoid being buried or burned alive.

It’s hard (pretty impossible, actually) to know what happens next in the novel, if anything. And we can’t really know if this “ending” is really the end, since Howe’s novel was recovered as an unfinished work in disjoined pieces. Laurence could, potentially, escape from his mortal body and transcend the earthly plane to await (or meet) his lovers. Or he could be trapped in his hybrid body forever, meaning that no matter how long Ronald (I can only assume it’s Ronald’s familiar footsteps he hears) waits, they will never reunite with God. It seems, from the textual evidence available, that Laurence is trapped in his body for eternity. At the very least, Laurence’s death provides a shocking alternative to the other moments of death and dying in the novel.

I plan to do more with this alternative ending, but first I’d like to look at the end of another novel ending in death, potentially narrated from beyond the grave. Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “The Amber Gods” is, throughout the story, rather grim and eerie and ends with the death of the narrator, Yone: “So I passed out of the room, down the staircase. The servants below did not see me, but the hounds crouched and whined. I paused before the great ebony clock; again the fountain broke and it chimed the halfhour; it was half past one; another quarter, and the next time its ponderous silver hammers woke the house, it would be two. Half past one? Why, then, did not the hands move? Why cling fixed on a point five minutes before the first quarter struck? To and fro, soundless and purposeless, swung the long pendulum. And, ah! What was this thing I had become? I had done with time. Not for me the hands moved on their recurrent circle any more. I must have died at ten minutes past one” (Spofford 83). Unlike Laurence, Yone does not remain in her lifeless body but moves about the house, readily acknowledging her death. The servants did not see her, but the hounds sensed her presence, marking her deceased soul as tangible. And time stops; Yone simply acknowledges that the hands on the clock no longer move for her. She plainly says, “I must have died as ten minutes past one.” In “The Amber Gods,” death is simply life without progression. The text never indicates that death would bring transcendence or eternal love, though Yone does wish that she could stop time to isolate particular moments of love and adoration.

We’ve been discussing all semester the morbid process of becoming a “true” woman; a true woman requires avoidance of all pleasures of the flesh, a pious nature, and angelic, selfless behavior. We see this trend in The Lamplighter especially Emily becomes more perfect as she nears death. And Mrs. Sullivan has more influence beyond the grave than she did while rooted in her mortality. But Spofford’s “The Amber Gods” (1860) and Howe’s The Hermaphrodite (1846) seem to revise these ideas, offering an alternative ending. We know from Toni Morrison that “the subject of the dream is the dreamer,” and so I have to wonder what’s at stake as the authors work through, in impossible postmortem narration, different options for living and dying. Spofford’s Yone exists in the world of the flesh and refuses to minister to the sick, tend house, or demurely receive suitors. Her character is both earthly and sensual, and though she doesn’t live past the end of the novel, she most certainly lives during it. She doesn’t ascend to a higher plane after death but remains in the same world, only now she’s unable to act or affect change. Howe’s Laurence, on the other hand, forgoes most worldly pleasures (sex, food, etc.) in favor of fulfillment from a higher power. But Laurence’s fate does not mirror other characters’ eternal reunions. He remains trapped in his body. Both authors seem to argue that postponing earthly pleasures, detaining romantic love until the possibility of an eternal bond, isn’t as desirable as some fictional scenarios may suggest.