Gender and Grief
Beneath the surface of “On My Last Daughter” is a current of tension surrounding the relationship between gender and grief. The first line of the poem references both “parents’ ruth.” In other words, both parents have similar feelings of grief. However, in the fourth line, Jonson writes that remembering that Mary belonged to God “makes the father less to rue.” The word rue clearly recalls “ruth” from the beginning of the poem, but now only the male parent is relevant. It is his grief that the poem is attempting to negate. Conversely, the poem later refers to the mother’s tears, which actually help Mary to make her way to heaven. The dead child’s gender also matters. Her girlhood likely prompts Jonson to emphasize her innocence later in the poem. It also enables him to link her grammatically with both her mother and the Virgin Mary—the shared female pronoun, and the shared name, blur the lines between the three figures. Jonson seems much more comfortable with the grief shared between these three women than his own feelings of loss.
Body and Soul Dichotomy
The second half of “On My Last Daughter” hinges on the body/soul dichotomy. This binary was extremely important in Christian thought. It came out of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who said that all living things have both a body and a soul. The body is what the thing is made of, while the soul is its essence: what it’s meant to do. Early Christians adapted these ideas as a way of understanding the afterlife. The soul was said to be immortal: it existed before you were born, and continued on after you died. God would bring good souls to heaven, and send bad ones to hell. However, during the second coming, bodies would also be resurrected, and the soul and the body would be finally united. In “On My Last Daughter,” Jonson consoles himself by stressing that his daughter’s soul will live forever in paradise with God. However, he can’t stop himself from thinking about her body, which will be left in the ground until the second coming.
Virginity and Innocence
Jonson believes his daughter will be saved because she was “innocent.” The idea hinges on both her youth and her gender. In Christianity, the young are often glorified because they are less governed by worldly motivations than older people. The Gospels also emphasize that Christ favors the poor and the humble over the rich and powerful. Young children are some of the most powerless and weak people in society, and so the Bible celebrates them as those most likely to be saved. However, innocence was also associated with femininity. That isn’t to say that women were seen as inherently innocent: indeed, a lot of early modern writing argues that women are sexually desperate and deceitful. However, that negative caricature lent itself to contrast with another extreme: rare women who are entirely pure, honest, and chaste. Here, Mary’s youth lets her fit in the latter box. The fact that she shares a name with the Virgin Mary only enhances the association. According to tradition, Mary conceived her son Christ without having had sex, making her the most important virgin figure in Christian legend. By associating his daughter with the Virgin, Jonson further plays up her innocence and purity.
