SOURCE: "Perilous Parenting: The Deaths of Children and the Construction of Aging in Contemporary American Fiction," in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXI, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 56-72.

In the following essay, Gullette discusses the implications of children's deaths in contemporary midlife "decline" or "recovery" fiction, seeing these deaths as indicative of a fear of aging and of anxiety about parenting.

Children do still die, alas, in life—but the risk of their doing so may now be greater in American fiction than in American reality.¹ I want first to emphasize the fictionality of this event when it is taken up to motivate a plot. In fact, infant mortality has dropped in the socalled First World (although it has gone up shockingly in what some are now calling the Fourth World, our inner cities), and many children's diseases are preventable or treatable. In fiction, however, even about the middle class...