“Of A Broken Heart,” Sure, or A Dumbass Victorian Trope Explained

CW: Pregnancy, childbirth, holy shit health issues connected to same

So I was reading about one of the more idiotic Revenge of the Sith aspects on Twitter, as you do, to wit: Padme dying of The Sad in a world of advanced robot medical care. Someone else mentioned, as a dumb reason but not as an excuse, that Lucas had said he was drawing on the traditions of Victorian drama.

First of all: those are *generally* nothing to mess with unexamined. I’m more than passingly familiar with Victorian media, and everyone in the dominant culture back then was some degree or other of racist, sexist, imperialist, and on all the goddamn drugs. Sherlock Holmes stood out because he used that shit immoderately, but this was a time when you not only could buy cocaine and opium over the counter but were actively encouraged to do so, to say nothing of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Tonic. (The vegetable is gin.)

I’m not saying that all Victorian fiction was made by or for stoned bigots, and I’m not saying the time didn’t produce some damned fine works, but…it’s a lot easier to get away with certain tropes if your audience thinks a certain way about women or whoever, and it’s a whole hell of a lot easier to get away with anything if your audience is at least forty percent high at any given point. (I haven’t tested this scientifically, and don’t plan to unless Pringles offers me sponsorship funding, but there were Some Incidents in college.)

Second, and more specifically, the “woman gives birth, dies of broken heart slash disgrace” trope…okay, let’s talk about childbirth.

I admire, respect and, in some cases, love, people who choose to have kids, but/even more so because pregnancy and childbirth are the most fucked-up states that a healthy body can be in. Things Happen. Bones shift. Organs move around like they’re Busby Berkeley dancers. Substances emerge. The whole process has always struck me as less beautiful mystical experience and more late-Akira Tetsuo but ideally with a happier ending, and pretty much always a less trippy one with fewer motorbikes.

There is a lot going on, and a lot of places it can go wrong. The New Agey “oh it’s totally natural women used to just have babies in the field and then go back to harvesting crops” thing happens sometimes, but sometimes it super doesn’t. I have friends who work as genetic counselors and maternity nurses, I have friends and a sister who’ve given birth, and I watch a lot of Call the Midwife, and…hips aren’t always big enough, fetuses are assholes and turn the wrong way around or onto their sides or onto their own damn umbilical cords, and holy shit the placenta is just fifty-seven kinds of horror waiting to happen, is my impression. Nothing good involves the word “abruption.” Yikes.

(The TVTropes article on Death by Childbirth, by the way, describes the human placenta as unusually “aggressive” for mammals, in case that thing wasn’t Silent Hill enough.)

There are some evolutionary reasons this is worse for humans–basically, our heads are too damn big–but it’s not great for animals either. I read a lot of James Herriot as a kid, and while the picture book adaptations are all heartwarming puppies and kittens, in the actual stories the guy spends half his time shoulder-deep in the equipment of some reproducing farm animal. (Prolapsed uteri are easy to fix in sheep, hard in cows, impossible in pigs. I have never used this knowledge in my life, but I’ve had it since I was twelve. All Things Bright and Beautiful indeed.)

Before the parts of modern medicine that involve blood transfusions and surgery, childbirth was pretty frequently deadly, which is one of the reasons we get all those fairy tales about stepmothers. (Also half of them were real mothers and then people got squeamish, but that’s another story.) We didn’t have those in the Victorian age. We knew, in fact, just enough about medicine to completely fuck things up most of the time (q.v. the healthful cocaine thing).

See, certain elements of medical knowledge, like taking out bits of placenta (see above re: Fucked Up), advanced faster than others, like…washing your hands. And I’m not here to claim that midwives were better because of Intuitive Nature Womynnne Blah Blah Blah, but midwives were also generally not going from dissecting corpses to assisting in childbirth. Yes, that’s a thing that happened. A surprising amount.

Note: at one point, people did suggest that maybe some kind of sanitation would be a good idea, and a bunch of doctors got offended because “gentlemen don’t have dirty hands,” and if it seems like a fair number of men haven’t changed in two fucking centuries WELL HOW ABOUT THAT?

So a bunch of women got “puerperal fever”–read fucking streptococcus–and died, in addition to general childbirth-y dying, which was also pretty damn common (and the tight corsets of the age sure didn’t help, come to think of that). Hospitals weren’t exactly friendly to visitors or great about providing explanations, so if you weren’t a doctor or maybe a close relative, what you probably heard was that such-and-so gave birth and then died for some reason.

Plus, you definitely had the cultural connection between mental/spiritual character and physical health–it is well known in Victorian lit that women die either of being too worldly (Ruby Gillis, Daisy Miller) or too saintly (Beth March, Helen whateverhernamewas in Jane Eyre)–and the additional fact that childbirth means you Had The Sex and a baby was actually coming out of your less-than-mentionable parts oh my God the horror. “We never talked obstetrics when the little stranger came,” indeed. I read the darkest Anne of Green Gables novel, the one where her first kid actually dies and her friend has a Traveler-style angsty backstory involving being blackmailed into an abusive marriage *after* her father hanged herself and she found him *after* she saw her kid brother get run over by a hay wagon, and Anne’s two pregnancies get weird handwaves of “precious burdens” and “counting her days” and in one case a prolonged stork metaphor. This was an age when you never said “pregnant”–you were “in the family way,” maaaybe, or “in a delicate condition.” And that’s if you were *married*.

Combine an all-but-unmentionable condition, frequent deaths from mysterious-to-the-layperson (and even to many doctors, where infection was concerned) causes, and the attitude that people, especially women, could basically die  from either being too good for this sinful world (Brave Mother Gives Life for Child) or no better than they should be (Wanton Hussy Repents Too Late). I can’t say for sure that this is how the “dies of The Sads after giving birth” trope developed, but I can totally see a potential path there. (Plus, fictionally, dead parents are wicked convenient.)

That doesn’t mean it’s a good trope, though, and it’s sure not a good trope when it comes from people writing in the twenty-first century. It’s sexist, and furthermore, it makes no damn sense. People do die in or after childbirth in real life–especially when they’re doing so in less-than-favorable conditions–but it’s a nasty, gross business, more John Hurt than Beth March. It’s no less tragic than any other death but no more saintly or deserved. Glossing over that by saying “well we have Superscience Robots but she died of a broken heart what can you do?” just makes you look dumb.