Dorcas' death in childbirth

Jonathan Laidlow · 04 Oct 1999, 11:36 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Jonathan Laidlow" <LAIDLOJM at hhs.bham.ac.uk>
Subject: (urth) Dorcas' death in childbirth
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 11:36:17 GMT
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0167 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0167.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hello folks,

I'm only barely keeping up with Urth at the moment - welcome to all=20
the new posters. I'm very pleased to see that all discussion of Short=20
Sun is being kept on the Whorl list - copies have yet to filter into the=20
UK as far as I can tell. I'm currently rereading Long Sun in=20
preparation.

On the Dorcas post - what a fascinating essay Roy! It deserves=20
more study before I respond in full, but perhaps I could answer the=20
point about Dorcas' death in childbirth.

You say that death in childbirth is a fictional device, and may just be=20
Caron's way of avoiding the issue. Now as recently as the=20
eighteenth century (and the nineteenth) death in childbirth was very=20
very common. To give an eighteenth century example which I've=20
picked up from my studies of Laurence Sterne, if a cesaerian was=20
required then the mother would die. There was no recorded=20
example of a mother surviving such an operation.  Many more=20
children would die during childhood, hence the need for large=20
families to help in the family employment, whatever that might be.

Now Urth does have hi-tech resources, but they are not available to=20
everyone, and I doubt very much that they were available to Dorcas=20
and Caron. I presume that medical knowledge for the masses was=20
at best at a pre-20th century level, and thus if Dorcas did indeed=20
have a difficult pregnancy, then she would likely not have survived.

A similar point about her age - before the twentieth century=20
daughters would often be married away straight after adolescence.=20
This was obviously much more common for poor families than for=20
rich. Even in fiction (and I'm thinking of that whole genre of novels=20
where a poor girl marries 'upwards' in society - Samuel=20
Richardson's 'Pamela' is perhaps the best C18 example) the girls=20
are usually very young. They would have been indentured as=20
servants as soon as possible, so that their poor family did not have=20
to support them any longer.

Jonathan
Visit Ultan's Library - A Gene Wolfe web resource
http://members.tripod.co.uk/laidlow/index.htm
Jonathan Laidlow
University of Birmingham, UK

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net