Eva's illness, a gradual decline, has had its onset at some point during the two-year period between Chapters 21 and 22, and now the stage is set for the sequence of events that will move Tom closer to the climax and denouement of his story. Eva's illness, however, is only a signal that a change is coming, for her family and for Tom. Her illness can hardly be said to precipitate the events that come later, but merely to precede them (for, as we shall see, the actual cause-and-effect sequence of events that takes Tom away from New Orleans is something upon which Eva herself could have had no effect). Thus the first function of Eva's illness and slow decline, in terms of the novel's fictional integrity, is to reveal Eva's character, which in a very basic way is unlike that of any of the other three children portrayed in these chapters.
One would probably have to have lived during the nineteenth or perhaps the early twentieth century, in the United States at least, in order to understand the nature of popular response to the illness and death of a child. This subject was widely used in all kinds of literature, from popular songs to children's stories, its pathos exploited for all the tears it could draw forth. The popularity of verse, songs, drama, and fiction based on this subject, at a time when infant and child mortality was still so high that most families lost at least one child to disease or accident, may seem to us almost perverse. In one sense, this popularity was part of a widespread and rather creepy nineteenth-century sentimentalizing of death, something that has been explained in various ways.
