Dr. Metablog

Replacement Children

Friends, relatives, and stray internet pilgrims know that Dr. Metablog, aka Vivian de St. Vrain, etc. is a "replacement child" and has written about it in the blogpost Susan P. and also in brief remarks on Louis Aggasiz, Edward Gibbon, Thornton Wilder, and a guy from the old neighborhood.

Now, I'm happy to say, there's a new website devoted to the study of Replacement Children. You can access it here, and learn about Mark Twain, Frida Kahlo, Vincent van Gogh, Elvis Presley, and other famous and not-so-famous "replacements." It's worth a visit.  

Susan P. (1937-38)

This entry is written at the specific instruction of my daughter, who says, "your grandchildren will want to know about your birth. It's their history too." The following paragraphs are for them and for their descendants.

My older sister, Susan, died of pneumonia at the age of nine months on March 15, 1938. If she had lived, I wouldn't exist, nor would my ten descendants, and no one would notice.

I was born on March 11, 1939, just one year minus four days after Susan died. It seems obvious that I was purposely conceived as a substitute for the dead child -- and it therefore follows that I was delivered into a disrupted, stressed family. Was I to be treasured as a compensation for past grief or to be resented as an imperfect interloper? Or both, simultaneously? To raise the ante, it is also a fact that during that fatal March of 1938 when Susan lay dying, my older brother Eugene, then just shy of three years of age, was gravely ill of the same disease that killed his younger sister, and that although he was at death's door, he managed to pull through.

So let us consider the situation of my parents, Manny and Lil, in June of 1938, the month of my conception. Poor Susan lay a-mouldering in her tiny grave for just three months. The Great Depression was still going strong and Hitler's Nuremberg Laws had been in force since 1935. Father Coughlin, celebrity Jew-hater, was agitating thirty million American radio listeners a week. Kristallnacht was just five months away and most everyone knew that war was imminent. Residing on East 9th Street in Flatbush were my grief-stricken young parents, who had helplessly watched one child die and had come within a hairbreadth of losing another. We must imagine them reeling, tearful, clinging to one another, dealing as best they might with heartbreaking anxiety and pain. Yet despite public and personal disasters, they made the courageous choice to throw the dice again, and out of their anguish to bring forth another child -- and to run the real risk, in those pre-antibiotic days, of offering still another sacrifice to pneumonia or some other dread incurable illness.

If my parents were still alive, I'd congratulate them, celebrate them, not because their resilience produced me, but because to beget a substitute child in chaotic, dangerous 1938 seems to me, now, looking back from the perspective of 2020, to be an act of unfathomable courage.

Or so I would like to think. It's also possible that I'm here not because of their heroism but because of a failure of contraception. I'll never know. I didn't ask; they never said, and the facts are unrecoverable. Lil and Manny wouldn't dream of speaking aloud about anything so intimate as sex or reproduction, certainly not with their children and, who knows, perhaps not even with one another. In that regard, they were typical of their generation. Personal matters were kept close to the vest. 

When Lil was five months pregnant, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland. Exactly three weeks before I landed on this planet, 20,000 Nazi supporters rallied, complete with Fascist salutes, at the old Madison Square Garden on 49th Street. Four days after I arrived, on the anniversary --the yahrzeit -- of the death of little Susan, while my mother was regaining her strength in Manhattan's Park East hospital on East 83rd Street, German tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. For Lil, for Manny, personal and public crises intersected. Nazis foreign and domestic were at the gates, and inside the hospital, my mother was still mourning the loss of the little girl whom my Uncle Dan, my mother's brother, remembered as an "exceptionally beautiful child." And lying beside Lil in her bed was the newborn, who was welcomed with joy, I'm sure, but with ambivalence also. Not an eternally glowing-in-memory girl child but me --an undistinguished chap, to put it in the most favorable light. Not "trailing clouds of glory" but instead enveloped in a fog of danger and possibly regret.

My parents, as I have said, kept their emotions tightly buttoned, so while Susan was not mourned or even mentioned within the family, she was never forgotten. In fact, throughout my childhood she remained a mysterious ghostly presence. In my parents' bedroom was a simple display -- a child-size wood-and-wicker chair and above it, on the wall, a gold-framed picture of a very pretty infant. The shrine fascinated me, and I would sneak into my parent's bedroom to study it. Sneak? Yes, because their bedroom was a consecrated place not to be defiled by Eugene or Jonathan or me. Off limits. It was the sin of all childhood sins to violate the taboo and cross into the forbidden zone. My mother made an unholy fuss about this rule. "You are not to go into our bedroom. Ever." Which I did, regularly, when no one was looking --- but it felt like a midnight intrusion into a deep dark country graveyard. Very creepy. Who is that infant in the picture? And why is she not allowed to rest in peace? I knew better than to ask.

I never thought, then, to wonder how Manny and Lil, contemplating the gilded idol morn and eve, could fail to compare their frozen-in-time lost infant to her scruffy successor? Of course I was aware that my "difficult" mother was a deeply troubled woman. But never, trust me, did I have the least glimmer that the shade of the dead infant haunted our family -- and myself in particular. No child, certainly not me, would have been so insightful. It's transparent now, but it was anything but obvious then. Nor could anyone possibly have predicted that there was to be an area of study within the discipline of psychology called "The Replacement Child Syndrome" (RCS). And that I was unequivocally a textbook case of such.  

RCS lay dormant. Forty years later, and forty years ago, when I was in midlife, not having thought for decades about my dead sister or her shrine or my long-departed parents, I experienced something of a revelation. It came about indirectly, but dramatically.

I was teaching classes on Shakespeare's plays. and I found myself paying much more heed to Romeo and Juliet than that immature early tragedy warrants. I was especially intrigued by Shakespeare's invention of the character of young Juliet -- which is far more subtle than is necessary for the plot. With Juliet, Shakespeare attempted something utterly unprecedented in any previous work of literature. He cleverly situated his young heroine in a complicated family in which Juliet had, in effect, two mothers -- a birth mother, Capulet wife, who is cold, distant and aloof, and a metaphorical and therefore real mother, Nurse Angelica, who is undisciplined but sensual and sexual. The two mothers, carefully differentiated, precipitate or echo or explain the conflict within Juliet between propriety and passion. One mother embraces and promulgates Verona's rigid mores, while the other is impulsive, emotional, and anarchic. In addition -- and now it all was starting to become extremely personal for me -- Shakespeare provided Juliet with a backstory (unusual because his characters rarely have prior histories). It comes to light that the Nurse's own natural daughter had died in infancy, that the bereaved mother was engaged to suckle Juliet -- and that Angelica has been Juliet's surrogate mother and companion for almost fourteen years. So Juliet is, for the Nurse, clearly and obviously a replacement child. How curiously relevant! How provocative!

I then remembered that William Shakespeare himself was such a child. According to the Trinity Church records, John and Mary Shakespeare had suffered two tragedies before April 23, 1564 when William was born. Their first child, a daughter named Joan, had been baptized four years earlier, in 1560, but lived only for two months. A second daughter, Margaret, was baptized in 1562 and lived for just under one year. A full year! and then the grave! How horrible for all concerned! Young Will therefore entered the world as the boy child who replaced not one but two older sisters. Even in an age of staggering infant mortality, two such premature deaths must surely have weighed on both John and Mary and on William himself. Is it an accident that Juliet is the only certified replacement child in early modern English literature (at least, the only one that I can recall at this moment)?

Mulling these matters, I soon discovered that I had failed to register some additional facts about the Capulet family that by rights ought to have set my heart all aflutter. Listen to the Nurse nattering on about her surrogate daughter Juliet.

Even or odd, of all days in the year,

Come Lamass Eve at night shall she be fourteen,.

Susan and she -- God rest all Christian souls--

Were of an age.  Well, Susan is with God.

She was too good for me.

How could I have missed it?  Right at the heart of the Capulet family dynamics, and therefore at the heart of the play, is not just a dead infant and a dead daughter, but a dead Susan.  

I have to say that this discovery put my brain into quite an epiphanic tizzy. How could I not have recognized the parallels between the Capulet family and my own?  And also, given my near-compulsive interest in the bonds and affiliations among Capulet wife and Nurse Angelica and Juliet -- how could my conscious mind have ignored information that had so vexed my unconscious?  

Alerted by this 1595 play to my own personal being, I set out to learn about the Replacement Child Syndrome (RCS) in what is charitably called the "literature" of psychoanalysis. While almost everything I read was either obtuse or so encrusted with obscurantist jargon as to be indecipherable, it was not hard to distill the gist. According to the experts, a replacement is always vulnerable and at hazard, especially so if the deceased infant has not been properly mourned, or-- as they say -- if there has not been "closure." Such a lad or lass goes through childhood constantly judged to be inferior to the idealized dead child. At worst, the love that is owed to the living child may be withdrawn and the replacement resented --  less loved, or even unloved; tolerated but undervalued.

Had she lived, the dead girl, let us call her Susan, of infinite and golden potential, would certainly have grown up to be an exceedingly dutiful daughter as well as a concert cellist and a world-class figure-skater who when just two years out of Yale would have created a state-of-the-art gynecological clinic in an underserved village in Moldova. The other, the replacement -- me -- bawls and pukes, bites a neighbor child on the cheek, throws a colossal shitfit over a missing puzzle piece, shatters an heirloom lamp, steals comic books from the local candy store, wastes weeks moping in his bedroom, totals the DeSoto, and fails trigonometry. No wonder he's a disappointment.

Well, maybe I'm laying it on with a trowel, but that's the general idea. 

Now (this is still forty years ago) reconstituted as a Syndrome, I entered into my "poor poor pitiful me" period. I wasted kilowatts of energy and eons of precious time conceptualizing myself as a case of "wrongful birth." I shifted the blame for all my emotional foibles onto my parents, especially, to be honest, onto my mother. Right at her doorstep I laid low self-esteem, intermittent depression, fear of success, disabling shyness and even (this was a bit of stretch) procrastination. But it didn't wash and it didn't last. I'm ashamed and embarrassed that I allowed myself to attribute my personal problems to my willing but helpless mother. Not that there wasn't a smidgeon of truth to the RCS analysis. Freud says that "a man who has won the love of his mother is always a hero in his own eyes"; well, that kind of heroism wasn't going to be my lot. Of course I would have preferred to have enjoyed intimacy with a smiling supportive mother. Not what happened. But it was selfish and wrong of me to dwell on slights which were trivial compared to the traumas undergone by my parents.They, not me, were and are the heroes of this story.

The bedrock is that the RCS, though real, was only of middling significance to me. It was devastating for Juliet, because it led directly to her suicide, and it may have served as a spur to Shakespeare, who became Shakespeare and, incidentally, fathered a daughter named Susannah. For me -- well, it was it only important for the moment. I was a wounded child -- no, not wounded, scratched --but not a disabled one. I was healthy enough to pursue if not a distinguished, certainly a respectable career, to become a reliable father, to meet my obligations to my extended family and community and to form a long-lasting marriage -- and when that first marriage was cut short by disease and death, to achieve in old age a second mature and satisfying relationship. My parents must have done a great deal right, for I became what my father used to praise, without a shred of irony, as a "proper, tax-paying citizen." At this point in my octogenarian life, there's no room for that old self-pitying me; instead, there's great admiration and regard for both Lil and Manny, who endured. And who, in the successes of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, continue to thrive and prosper.  

An addendum: in the psychological "literature", I found no mention, neither jot nor tittle, of the family configuration in which a male child replaces a female. No doubt such situations have by now been thoroughly researched by trained analysts, but not back then, when such a discussion might have been useful to me. The case of Juliet, where one girl replaces another, has been explored, but not Shakespeare's situation, or mine. I wonder sometimes whether the case of a boy succeeding a girl might lead to gender confusion, or as they now say, "fluidity" (if, for example, the parents unconsciously favor female traits in their son). I don't mean sexual practice, because I myself have never been (or wanted to be) anything other than a vanilla heterosexual. But I'm not even slightly macho; I am strongly domestic, comfortable with roles that have been traditionally reserved for women. I'm a gatherer, not a hunter; not the kind of person who goes to the fights with the guys or plays rugby and eventually, shunning the entrapment of wife or family, rides off on his horse into the sunset. I am much more likely to clean the bathroom, weed the garden, make some bad rhymes, play casino with the grandkids, and whip up a beef stew for dinner. 

Another addendum: I always wondered why Lil and Manny decided to give me an awkward obscure Biblical name. They had no interest in anything remotely smacking of religion. So why choose the name of one of Job's false comforters?  What were they thinking?  During my pitiful period, I imagined that they chose the name because they were disappointed with me. We can't name him Susan, said their joint unconscious, so let's give him an ugly name the diminutive of which is female. That was my theory, but now I have another idea. Perhaps, in March of 1939, to resurrect an obscure biblical name was to give the middle finger to Hitler. If so, it was an act of defiance. I hope I'm right.

And finally: my younger brother Jonathan, who was as equally improbable a replacement as I, was born in July of 1942, seven month after the Day of Infamy. He too entered in troubling times. Jon was an extremely handsome youth, regularly gushed over by friends and family -- and slightly envied by me. One of his shaping childhood experiences is of my mother holding his head in her hands and saying, "You would have made a very beautiful girl."

Jon too is a gatherer rather than a hunter, and when I'm in the kitchen slicing the potatoes and carrots for a big pot of beef stew, it's his excellent recipe that I follow.

Another Replacement Child -- Peter Sellers

A "replacement child," narrowly defined, is a person who is intentionally conceived because an older sibling has recently died. Such substitutes must endure the lifetime burden of competing with a lost and often idealized child. Because it is almost impossible for such persons to please their parents, they easily become confused and frustrated, and in worst-case scenarios, pathological.  

One of the ways in which the "replacement child syndrome" manifests itself concerns the matter of self-identity. An adult "replacement child" might wonder, Who am I exactly?  He might find himself, especially if he has been raised from his earliest days as if he were someone else, uncertain of his own boundaries. 

The great comic actor Peter Sellers, was a classic replacement child. At birth, Sellers was named Richard Henry, but his parents, curiously, always called him Peter, after an older stillborn brother. And Peter he remained. Why would his parents do such a thing?  Would it not effect a child to be called not by his own name but by the name of a missing brother?

Sellers is famous for his ability to subsume his identity into the role he played.  He said that "If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am" -- because even when not acting, he was always Richard Henry playing the part of Peter.

To confuse him all the more, Sellers' father, who was Anglican, and his mother, who was Jewish, sent him to Roman Catholic schools.

Edward Gibbon -- Replacement Child

By strict definition, a replacement child is one who is conceived because an older sibling has died. According to the theory, such a child is at psychological risk, especially if the dead child has not been adequately mourned. 

Because he was an oldest son, Edward Gibbon, the greatest of all modern historians and the most brilliant prose stylist in the English language, would not seem to qualify as a replacement -- except that in his own curious manner of thinking, Gibbon “replaced” children who were born subsequent to him. 

Gibbon preened himself on his status in the family. “From my birth,” he said in his famous Memoir, “I have enjoyed the rights of primogeniture.” But primogeniture was not so much a chronological fact as it was a pinnacle to be defended. As he conceived it, Gibbon triumphed over would-be competitors to his supremacy. “I was succeeded by five brothers and one sister, all of whom were snatched away in their infancy.” Toward his dead siblings, and toward the parents who endured the heart-breaking death of six of their seven children, Gibbon was unnaturally cold and mercenary. “I shall not pretend to lament” the loss of those who would “oppress my inheritance.” Gibbon lacked empathy in part because he felt, with some justice, that his younger siblings were favored over him by his father. How could this be?   

The Memoir supplies an explanation. In an age of high infant mortality, Gibbon was a very sickly child. His life was at risk while other, later-born children seemed to be born healthier. As Gibbon himself puts it, “so feeble was my constitution, so precarious my life, that, in the baptism of each of my brothers my father’s prudence successively repeated my Christian name of Edward, that, in case of the departure of the eldest son, this patronymic appellation might be still perpetuated in the family.” This is odd indeed. In five separate instances, according to the future historian, a male child saw the light, and each time the child was named Edward. In one case after another, the outcome was the same. The infant who might have “oppressed his inheritance” succumbed and the heroic oldest son beat back the challenge. The first Edward therefore “replaced,” so to speak, a series of subsequent Edwards who might have superseded him. It's not hard to imagine that a sickly child, pursued by a series of infants each christened with his very own name, would feel threatened and might rejoice rather than mourn at their funerals. 

Although Gibbon attributes the pattern of naming to his father’s “prudence,” it is obvious that the phrase "my father's prudence” is an irony that masks a true fury. Was it prudence or was it his father's hope that the sickly child would be succeeded by a healthy one?  Hostility also shines through Gibbon's jealous account of his mother: "to preserve and to rear so frail a being [as himself], the most tender assiduity was scarcely sufficient; and my mother’s attention was somewhat diverted by her frequent pregnancies, by an exclusive passion for her husband, and by the dissipation of the world, in which his taste and authority obliged her to mingle.” The irony of this beautiful Augustan sentence conceals infantine rage: to translate into more forthright English, Gibbon objects that his mother conceived other children, claims that she should have preferred him to her husband, and asserts that she should have withdrawn from society to nurse him.   

To what degree Gibbon’s suppressed and ironic but still obvious anger toward his parents contributed to his peculiar temperament is difficult to say, but it is a fact that the bulk of his career was spent not only in tracing the decline and fall of Rome, the father of all European civilizations, but also in displacing an established patriarchal religion from its position of supremacy. The irony that he directed against his parents in his Memoir is the exact weapon that he learned to deploy against Roman failures and against triumphant Christianity. 

In addition, there's an untidy psychological wrinkle. Gibbon’s claim that the male children who succeeded him were all named Edward is a crucial part of his indictment of his parents. But it's an assertion that is not true and is not substantiated by parish records. There was no endless series of Edwards. Apparently, one succeeding child was so named but the rest enjoyed various different appellations. The most scrupulous of historians either invented or misremembered the dreadful slight that so wounded him. What psychological mechanism caused Gibbon to yearn to be even more of a replacement child than in fact he was? 

Replacing Children In In America

I finally got around to watching In America, a film which won all sorts of awards in 2002 and which I ordered from Netflix after it appeared on someone's best films of the decade list. It's a fine movie, especially if you enjoy piping your eye from dawn to dusk. Always susceptible, I cried a full quart. Samantha Morton, familiar from her role as Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown, is endowed with the most expressive face in the history of cinema, and the director of In America, Jim Sheridan, is smart enough to take advantage of her features.  

The story is not unfamiliar -- immigrants in America, culture-clash and assimilation, poverty and a bit of triumph at the end.  he film skirts dangerously close to cliche and occasionally falls over the precipice -- I'm sorry but I've seen too many movies in which an emotionally-stunted hero waits until the final frame before he breaks into tears.  

In America is at heart a drama about replacing the dead child. Johnny and Sarah Sheridan lost a boy to a brain tumor and they've been off balance ever since.  They're not going to be whole until they make another baby. Sarah's pregnancy is precarious and the parturition difficult, and in a contrived piece of hoakum, the baby doesn't begin to thrive until the suffering soul of a dying friend is mystically infused into her.

No thought is given (nor should it be) to the poor baby, whose whole life will be colored by her entrance into the world as savior and redeemer and who will be freighted with expectations that she will never be able to fulfill.  

On Aggasiz

Louis Agassiz was, Darwin aside, the nineteenth century's most acclaimed naturalist. He was the first to speculate about the ice ages and the first to suggest that mastodons and other giant quadrupeds had become extinct as a consequence of the deep freeze in Asia and America. Agassiz was much celebrated in his lifetime, and at his death, Harvard, where he taught, shut down for a day for his majestic funeral. James Russell Lowell contributed an eleven-page elegy to the Atlantic. "Seldom, if ever, has the death of a man of science been so deeply felt," reported The Nation.

These details are drawn from Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's (2009), an oddly-titled but informative and accessible history of Darwinism in gilded-age America.

Here's a striking and crowded sentence about Aggasiz, also drawn from Werth's book. "The son of a strong-willed assistant pastor to the Protestant congregation of a lakeside village in French-speaking Switzerland who married well, he was his parents' fifth child but the first to survive infancy." 

Agassiz was a therefore a "replacement child" with a vengeance. He "replaced" four lost siblings (but whether male or female Werth does not say). Imagine his parents' pain; imagine how young Louis must have been cherished and protected but also, possibly, afflicted with the 'guilt of the survivor.' Or how he must have unconsciously competed with his deceased and therefore perfect brothers and sisters. And then try to imagine both his mother's suffering and also how his aspiring and apparently devout father might have responded to such an appalling succession of family tragedies. 

Agassiz was America's foremost opponent of evolution. He rejected natural selection because, he claimed, "Darwinism" led inevitably to "atheism" -- which hasn't turned out to be the case, although I personally can't imagine why it hasn't. Agassiz took his own idiosyncratic route and proselytized for the curious and retrograde doctrine of "polygenism" -- the idea that the various races of man were separately -- and hierarchically -- created. Agassiz imagined eight different kinds of humans, ranked according to their "cranial capacity" -- Caucasian, Arctic, Mongol, American Indian, Negro, Hottentot, Malay, and Australian (thereby running afoul of both "monogenists" like Darwin and bible-worshippers who acknowledged only one creation -- that of Adam and Eve). For Agassiz, each species was "a thought of God." An odd path for usually observant scientist. Agassiz was the favorite intellectual of slaveholders and their apologists. 

Agassiz was also a virulent and odious racist. Here's what he wrote to his mother when he stopped at a hotel in which he was served by black waiters. "It is impossible to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on their heads, their bent knees and elongated hands, their large curved fingernails, and above all the livid colors of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance, and when they advanced that hideous hand toward my plate to serve me, I wished that I could leave in order to eat my bread apart rather than dine with such service. What unhappiness for the white race to have tied its existence so closely with that of the Negroes. God protect us." And so on, and more, and worse. I can't remember reading a paragraph that more turned the stomach or that more cried out for psychological analysis.       

I cannot help wondering whether there might not be a connection between Agassiz's status as a replacement child and his embrace of polygenism. Is it possible that he unconsciously thought that he was a special and superior person because he, of all his siblings, was chosen for survival?  And that in the same way, white people were chosen and superior among all the "races" of humankind. His deeply-held resistance to the evidence that persuaded almost all of his fellow naturalists is inexplicable -- unless he clung to the doctrine of special creation for reasons that were fundamentally irrational. Put it this way: Agassiz's unusual situation required him to believe that he, and people with whom he could identify, were marked for distinction -- and that all others were inferior. One of five among the siblings, one of eight among the races. How else could he free himself of the guilt that he lived and thrived while his apparently less deserving siblings had perished?

Broad-brush cheap pop psychologizing, to be sure -- but let's reserve judgment until we find some time to get ourselves to the library and learn a little about this brilliant, disgusting man. 

What We Read in the Fifties: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, although published in 1927, was still widely read in the 1950s both by the  general public and by students in classrooms all over America. It's a fine novel but it's unfortunate that Thornton Wilder's philosophical premise is so naive and lame. In 1714 a rope bridge over a gorge in Peru breaks and five people perish. Brother Juniper investigates the lives of the fallen, assuming that the good lord wouldn't have allowed them to die without a reason. Eventually, the well-meaning priest learns that the five victims were no worse and no better than any other quintet of ordinary mortals. His conclusion is displeasing to officialdom and both he and his compilation of facts are burnt by the Inquisition.

By the oddest of odd coincidences, I had recently read an essay on the rope bridges of the Incas, in which I learned that, though brilliantly designed, these bridges required annual renewal. My reading of The Bridge of San Luis Rey was therefore colored by questions not of theology but of engineering. Why didn't they repair the damn bridge?  Why did they think that a fiber bridge wouldn't rot?  Why doesn't Brother Juniper investigate the bridge maintenance department? The conclusions to which the novel seems to come -- that a) sometimes good people die for no good reason, b) that god is either indifferent or not there at all, and c) the Spanish inquisition was unpleasant -- don't seem particularly challenging. Is it possible that the novel's theses were daring in the 50s classroom?  They seem mighty tame today.

Though the frame of The Bridge of San Luis Rey is bland, the accounts of the five people who die are sharp and colorful and imaginative and rather beautifully written. There are moments, in fact, when Wilder's storytelling seemed almost post-modern. Here's part of a paragraph about the twins Manuel and Estaban. To me, it sounds like an extract from The Hundred Years of Solitude.

Because they had no family, because they were twins, and because they were brought up by women, they were silent. There was in them a curious shame in regard to their resemblance. They had to live in a world where it was the subject of continual comment and joking. It was never funny to them and they suffered the eternal pleasantries with stolid patience. From the years when they first learned to speak they invented a secret language for themselves, one that was scarcely dependent on Spanish for its vocabulary, or even for its syntax. They resorted to it only where they were alone, or at great intervals in moments of stress whispered it in the presence of others. The Archbishop of Lima was something of a philologist; he dabbled in dialects; he had even evolved quite a brilliant table for the vowel and consonant changes from Latin into Spanish and from Spanish into Indian-Spanish. He was storing up notebooks of quaint lore against an amusing old age he planned to offer himself back on his estates outside Segovia. So when he heard one day about the secret language of the twin brothers, he trimmed some quills and sent for them. The boys stood humiliated upon the rich carpets of his study while he tried to extract from them their bread and tree and I see and I saw. They did not know why the experience was so horrible to them. They bled.... 

I think if this extract were presented to ten literate readers, nine of them would immediately guess "Marquez." Of course, its Marquezness would be even more obvious if Manuel and Estaban would fly up to the ceiling or be transformed into a thousand glorious butterflies. I don't know whether Marquez ever read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised to discover that he had done so.       

Incidentally, Manuel dies and his twin Estaban wrestles with "the guilt of the survivor." Is it relevant that Thornton Wilder's own twin died at birth?  And does it follow that Wilder, despite the fact that he came from a large and accomplished family, might well be thought of as some curious sort of replacement child? 

A Recurring, Violent Nightmare

I wish I had pleasant dreams but I only have nightmares. Here's one of them. Beginning with early adolescence and continuing to this day, I've had a recurring dream in which I've murdered someone--I don't know whom. The victim is always an unidentifiable male, and his death is always violent. Ordinarily, I beat him to a bloody pulp with a shovel. I have problems disposing of the gory body, but usually I bury it next to the neglected garage that lay behind our house on East 9 Street in Flatbush where I lived my first seventeen years. It's an anguishing dream not because I've killed someone, but because I've failed to conceal the body properly and because I'm going to be arrested and punished. It's amoral  -- I don't feel guilty that I'm a murderer -- just embarrassed because I'm incompetent. It's a very realistic nightmare. A couple of times it's been so vivid to me that even after I was wide-awake, it took me ten or fifteen seconds to realize that I was not being hunted by the police and that I could proceed normally with my life.

I don't know why I should be so oppressed with this fantasy. In the daylight hours, I'm your run-of-the-mill peaceful person. Never killed anyone.

Imagine my surprise when I read (and studied the illustrations of) J. M. DeMatteis's 100% autobiographical "graphic novel" Brooklyn Dreams (Paradox, 2003) and discovered that my nightmare is not entirely my own. DeMatteis suffers from exactly the same recurring dream. "I remember the body -- buried out behind my apartment building... or maybe stuffed in a trash can across the street....  Some poor, innocent schmuck I've either hacked up with a machete... or machine-gunned with Cagney-like ferocity... or maybe just kicked down a flight of stairs."  DeMatteis labors under the guilt that's provoked by this dream, and, like me, he can't explain it except to speculate that his life is a nightmare from which he's trying to awake.  But here's what's so fascinating to me: DeMatteis is a product of the exact same Brooklyn neighborhood as I (see map).  He grew up at the corner of Ocean and Foster, and he hung out at Newkirk Plaza, a commercial island that would nowadays be called a shopping center, where I endured painful haircuts, carried my mother's dry cleaning back and forth, and entered and exited the BMT subway.  Was there something about Flatbush, or, more particularly, something about "the Plaza" that made us killers in our dreams. Yes, I rather think there was.

Is it significant that DeMatteis is a kind of replacement child? He is the survivor of a pair of fraternal twins. His potential sibling was spontaneously aborted -- although DeMatties speculates, that, prescient about life's forthcoming difficulties, he might have "jumped." DeMatties' mother was about to be "scraped" when the doctor had second thoughts. In Brooklyn Dreams, DeMatteis describes his mother's and father's hysterical, debilitating and inconsistent protectiveness -- traits often discovered in parents who haven't properly grieved the loss of a child. 

Is it possible that the person whom DeMatteis thinks he murdered is, on some level, the unborn twin?   

And so we have still another variation of the replacement child syndrome. 

Another Variation on the "Replacement Child" Theme

In Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son (1848), which I've just re-read, Dombey's treasured son Paul dies when his older sister, Florence, is about six years old. Dombey has never liked his daughter Florence (he seems to blame her for being a girl) and likes her less after he loses Paul. Dombey could transfer his affection from his dead son to a possible "replacement," his living daughter. But he shuns that very legitimate psychological option. Instead, Florence is neglected, ignored, exiled, and eventually even struck by her hard-hearted father. In real life, it's inevitable that Florence would become alienated, bitter, and distorted. In Dickens' fairy-tale world her love for her father endures and she remains cheerful and optimistic. Although she experiences a truly horrible childhood, she suffers no permanent psychological deficit. Eventually, she reconciles with her father, forgives him (sic!) and produces two children (named Paul and Florence, of course).  Dombey, now chastened, grandfathers these true replacement children.   

It's a big, good novel, and Dickens makes us laugh and cry but sometimes against our will and always in defiance of our knowledge of real--as opposed to idealized--children. Dickens' optimism and his faith in the power of forgiveness are wonderful but utterly otherworldly. Replacements, even quasi-replacements such as Florence, rarely fare so well.      

The Replacement Child: Juliet

In the narrowest definition, a "replacement child" is a being who is intentionally conceived because an older sibling has recently died. Such substitutes must endure the lifetime burden of competing with a lost and often idealized child. Because it is almost impossible for them to please their parents, they easily become confused and frustrated, or worse.

Here's a dry summary from a learned journal: "When bereaved parents give birth to a child or children subsequent to a perinatal death, their constructions of the family necessarily change. The subsequent child is thought to be at risk of psychopathology (the replacement child syndrome) if parents have not sufficiently grieved their losses."  "At risk of psychopathology" is a hesitant, euphemistic formulation. 

The term "replacement child" has also been defined more broadly: it may, for example, refer to any child in a family that has lost one or more of its offspring (rather than solely to one conceived as a direct consequence of a death). In an even larger sense of the term, there are all kinds of 'symbolic' replacements: one psychologist has gone so far as to suggest that any Jewish child born after the European holocaust should be so considered. This idea seems extreme.

In pre-industrial societies, replacement children received no particular notice because infant deaths were so very commonplace. While there must be many replacement children in traditional literature, the earliest who comes to mind is Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which was written in 1595. 

Juliet's biological mother is aloof and distant, but she has a second and more loving parent -- her nurse -- who does much of the actual work of mothering. The nurse has lost her own daughter, Susan, and has become wet-nurse to Juliet. "Susan and she -- God rest all Christian souls --/Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God;/ She was too good for me." Clearly, Shakespeare suggests, Susan has been idealized in her natural mother's mind. The Nurse has a replacement child in Juliet, a state of being that goes far to explain the profound bond between surrogate mother and surrogate daughter.

It is uncharacteristic of Shakespeare to discuss the infancy of his heroines, nor can I think of any other pre-modern work that devotes so much space to wet-nursing or to the trauma of weaning. Although he depicts in detail the relationship between Juliet and her nurse, Shakespeare does not seem to anticipate or foreshadow the interest that later centuries would take in the replacement child syndrome. Instead, he focuses on Juliet's sexual alacrity.

The nurse tells a pertinent story (and leaves us with the impression that she has told it many times before): when Juliet had just learned to walk, she fell and "broke her brow"-- cut her forehead, as we would say. "And then my husband --God be with his soul,/ He was a merry man--took up the child,/ 'Yea,' quoth he, 'dost thou fall upon thy face?/ Thou wilt fall backward when thou has more wit,/ Wilt thou not, Jule?'  And by my holidame,/ The pretty wretch left crying and said 'ay.'"  "Falling backward" is bawdy talk for a woman's posture in sexual intercourse. Retelling her husband's tale, the Nurse dramatizes her expectation that when Juliet comes of age, or "has more wit," she will be eager to fall backward. To this proposition Juliet -- "the pretty wretch"-- says 'Ay.'  Juliet's personal psychology, Shakespeare seems to hint, formed itself to gratify the suggestions of her surrogate mother.

The vigorous sexuality that might be appropriate for the nurse's natural daughter Susan, who would have been a servant girl, has been transferred to the bourgeois Juliet, who, if she had followed the example of her birth mother, would have been properly restrained, repressed, and diffident. In effect, the nurse contrives to live her own desires through her replacement child; the result is Juliet's sexual impetuosity and subsequent death.

William Shakespeare was born in 1564, but an older sister Joan was baptized in 1558 and another, Margaret, in 1562. Both died in infancy. The future playwright was therefore doubly a replacement child.

There's an additional complexity in the family drama because the infants he replaced were female. How this oddity affected his own psychological development is open to speculation. Perhaps because he was the oldest son in a family that had lost two daughters, he was especially cherished. Or perhaps a boy who replaced girls developed the empathy to create complex female characters in an English drama that, until Juliet, had limited itself strictly to one-dimensional stereotypes.