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MOURNING

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"The sorrow for the dead," mused Washington Irving (1783–1859) in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820), "is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced" (p. 153). The nineteenth-century literary preoccupation with mourning does indeed suggest a culture wedded to its sorrow over the dead. Depictions of mourning, much like those of marriage, reveal its dual function as a means of social ordering and as an index of emotional, or affective, and psychic topographies. The Puritan emphasis on the moment of death as a theologically instructive event gave way during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to an intense concentration on the emotional aftermath of loss. This shift dramatically altered the social meaning of death. Literary representations of mourning in this changed context foreground both an increasing interest in interiority and an investment in the development of proper affective relations to the past.

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics have often viewed with suspicion the elaborate culture of mourning developed in the nineteenth century, assessing it as a mode of sentimentalized false consciousness covering an inability to deal with the grim reality of death. But many cultural and ideological factors beyond the fear of death need to be considered when assessing past bereavement practices. In nineteenth-century culture, mourning designated both a set of conventions designed to order the borderline period between the loss of an intimate and the bereaved person's reintegration into ordinary social life, and an ongoing emotional activity suggesting the tenacity of ties to the departed. The spiritual significance of mourning was linked to the emotional value assigned by Romantic and sentimental writers to grief's refining effect on the personal integrity of the survivor. Literary manifestations of mourning depict a new relationship between feeling, (social) space, and (historical) time suggested by the aesthetics of memorial; a regulation of expressions of grief that addressed both the universality of sorrow and the racial, cultural, and gender specificity of mourning behavior; and the connections between the solicitation of feeling around mourning and appeals for social reform.

THE VALUE OF SORROW

Readers steeped in the post-Freudian understanding of mourning as a psychological process must recall that in the nineteenth century the term "mourning" indicated first of all a set of social conventions. The formal mourning period was highly ritualized: proscriptions on social events and communication, the draping of the home of the bereaved, and mourning clothes and veils all formed part of an elaborate system marking both the degree of kinship between the mourner and the departed and the time elapsed since death. While adherence to these conventions was understood primarily as a mark of respect for the dead, a refusal to observe formal mourning also suggested a lack of concern for communal norms. In the mid-century best-seller The Wide, Wide World (1851), by Susan Warner (1819–1885), for instance, the protagonist Ellen Montgomery, sent to live with her hard-hearted Aunt Fortune while her parents travel in Europe, learns of her mother's death through the scandalized gossip of neighbors who fault Fortune for not having dressed the girl in mourning. Paying too much attention to social conventions, however, was viewed as potentially more injurious than paying too little, for such attention implied that the departed could be replaced by the commodities of condolence. In her novel Hope Leslie (1827), Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867) disparages the embrace of fashionable mourning in a scene in which the protagonist's good-natured but foolish aunt, Mrs. Grafton, cheerfully explains how her friend Lady Penyvére managed to console herself for the disastrous loss of an entire family by ordering mourning clothes: "That is the great use of wearing mourning, as she said: it takes the mind off from trouble." Hope responds by gently upbraiding her aunt for confusing consumption with consolation; having recently survived a dangerous situation, she reminds her aunt, "If . . . I had lost my life the other day, all the mourning in the king's realm would not have turned your thoughts from trouble" (p. 268).

An insistence on the importance of feeling, rather than mere adherence to social form, dominated nineteenth-century literary depictions of mourning. A deep emotional relationship to the dead not only provided testimony to the merits of the departed but was also understood as a means of self-improvement for the mourner. As Irving's Geoffrey Crayon insists, "the natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind" (p. 149). Crayon compares the emptiness of the contemporary urban funeral to the banality of modern-day poetry, which, he contends, lacks the natural pathos of Shakespeare. Both failures, he asserts, result from the modern attention to form over content, a preference that has not yet infiltrated the charming customs of rural memorial: "There is certainly something more affecting in these prompt and spontaneous offerings of nature, than in the most costly monuments of art" (p. 150). The spontaneous memorial speaks more passionately than the artificial monument because the former testifies to a sincere emotional connection between the mourner and the departed, the kind of sincerity that constitutes the heart of the truly "poetical," as opposed to the "polite" alienation of modern life (p. 151). The quasi-spiritual significance assigned by romantics such as Crayon to the mourner's feelings turned emotion into a conduit for meaningful relations between past and present, relations that might regenerate the affective impoverishment of the modern world even as individual grief forced mourners to confront their own defects in character.

Such romanticized assumptions about the affective pedagogy of mourning shaped the aesthetics of memorial in the nineteenth century. The new "rural cemeteries" that appeared in the second quarter of the century were intended to produce the kind of contemplative relationship to the dead that Irving's Crayon lauds. The design of these park-like burial grounds, strewn with trees and ponds and sectioned by hills and winding paths, emphasized a Romantic approach to consolation, insisting on the spiritually regenerative capacity of nature while providing mourners with a measure of privacy for the indulgence of sorrow over the dead. The dominant motifs of nineteenth-century mourning art (classically robed mourners with heads bowed over graves, weeping willows, trees and urns symbolizing the eternity of the spirit) similarly suggested a dual connection to the eternal spirit of the departed and the earthly sorrow of the bereaved. The mourner in this new configuration was charged with the duty of carrying a personal connection to the past forward in time.

Guided by these convictions, literary scenes of bereavement deployed mourning itself as a form of consolation for loss, suggesting that mourning was not simply a mark of the value of the departed but itself a valuable and improving activity. This understanding permeated the literary forms and conventions most congenial to mourning: deathbed scenes and sentimental elegies. Initially popularized in evangelical tracts as episodes of spiritual pedagogy, deathbed scenes in nineteenth-century fiction supplemented the original focus on the religious authority of the dying person with an increased emphasis on the emotional testimony of the witnesses/mourners; such testimony spoke to the bonds grief created among survivors. In perhaps the best-known deathbed scene of nineteenth-century American fiction, the death of young Eva St. Clare in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) is closely followed by an exchange between the distraught slave girl Topsy, who laments that Eva was the only person to ever treat her kindly, and Miss Ophelia, Eva's northern aunt, who, touched by the child's distress, resolves to imitate Eva's behavior, sealing the pact by weeping along with Topsy.

The nineteenth-century poetic elegy also insisted on the value of mourning. Even as it bewailed the irrevocable loss of the irreplaceable dead, its focus on the painful feelings of the speaker/mourner became a form of consolation. In his elegy for Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance, a bereft Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) laments the silencing of his friend's pen, but the poem's attention to the pain of mourning as an opening to the speaker's dreamlike recollection of the past compensates in part for the impossibility of reversing time. In "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1867), an intimate elegy to Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman (1819–1892) also uses sorrow over the dead as a means of gaining an alternative perspective on the passage of time. The poet-speaker's grief over the departed, which returns each spring on the anniversary of the assassination, accompanies the regenerative blooming of the natural world. But suffering, the poem contends, is something from which the dead are exempted; it is rather for those who remain behind and is thus to be embraced as part of nature, both as a sign of loss and as a sign of life.

A NATION OF MOURNERS

In the final chapter of The Last of the Mohicans (1826), by James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), the frenetic adventure that dominates the novel gives way to a leisurely depiction of the funeral rites for the young Mohican sachem Uncas. Uncas's death is commemorated by an elaborate ceremony that Cooper adapted, with a number of Romantic flourishes, from John Heckewelder's ethnographic account of a Lenni Lenape funeral. Recounting the ornate formality of these rites, from the long, solemn period of near-motionless waiting with which the service opens to the elaborate song of lament contributed by a group of female mourners and finally to the ritual upbraiding of the young chief for abandoning his tribe by the grief-stricken survivors, Cooper emphasizes the touching emotional undercur-rent that runs throughout, coupling an insistence on the exotic nature of Indian ritual with an appeal to the universality of true feeling.

The nineteenth-century investment in the value of sorrow enabled mourning to be understood as a unifying force. The deep feeling associated with true mourning was seen not simply as creating authentic channels of historical transmission and avenues for self-improvement but as contributing as well to the establishment of affective social bonds between otherwise alienated strangers. Condolence rituals formalized the human capacity for sympathy that the eighteenth-century British philosopher Adam Smith analyzed as the foundation of democratic self-regulation, establishing a kind of fellowship of the bereaved (Theory of the Moral Sentiments, 1759). Accounts of such bonds—whether in Cooper's fictionalized account of the passing of Uncas, which transformed the Delaware into a "nation of mourners," or in the outpouring of writing that followed the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865—used the language of private feeling to emphasize their sincerity. Public figures became not simply revered but cherished and loved, as mourner-citizens participated in a spontaneous, affective coming together more durable than acts of collective democratic decision making such as voting. Public mourning, in this sense, provided nationalism with a spiritual dimension.

The multiple modes of productivity attached to mourning in the nineteenth century, however, required an observance of religious, cultural, and behavioral norms in the expression of grief in order to ensure that it functioned properly. Cooper's depiction of the Delaware funeral in The Last of the Mohicans is not intended for imitation; its melancholy may appeal to the reader but the "creed" the Delaware embrace is, the novel suggests, unacceptable to a civilized Christian culture. Accordingly, the chapter juxtaposes the Delaware rites and the simultaneous funeral of Cora Munro, a young Englishwoman. Although Cora is also attended by Delaware women and buried in the woods, her service, conducted by the colonial psalmodist David Gamut, consists of a simple hymn and prayer. The Christian burial ritual allows the novel at once to embrace the natural spirituality of true feeling and to assert the superiority of civilized Christian cultures over the Delaware culture, which, it implies, will soon follow the young sachem to the grave. The touching spectacle of Indian mourning serves, in effect, as an elegy for Native American culture as a whole.

The restrained norms of Christian bereavement were reflected in the increased attention given to the emotional dimension of mourning throughout the nineteenth century. Condolence manuals and sentimental literature alike insisted that, however heartfelt, mourning should never remain untempered by spiritual awareness. While grief was expected as a mark of attachment to the dead and was embraced as an opportunity for refinement on the part of the living, excessive indulgence in mourning was seen as a mark of disrespect for both the living and the dead. In The Wide, Wide World, for instance, Ellen Montgomery's prolonged grief for her mother is rebuked by her "adopted" brother John Humphreys, who reminds her of her duty to be consoled by pointing out that her mother, a Christian, would have wanted nothing less. Unrestrained mourning also had dangerous social implications, as comparative accounts of the denial and the refusal of consolation in Uncle Tom's Cabin suggest. Prue, a much-abused slave, is deprived of the opportunity to mourn her infant child by a harsh mistress. Unable to cope with her sorrow, she takes to drinking and dies a horrific, solitary death. Prue's fate is implicitly juxtaposed to that of Marie St. Clare, mistress of the St. Clare plantation and the mother of Eva. Marie's melodramatic fits of grief in the wake of her daughter's death fail to bring about any improvement in her character; moreover, they have a profoundly negative effect on the other members of the household, who are denied time for their own mourning because of the demands created by her hysteria. Even as well-composed mourning was understood to produce both interior refinement and external cohesion, abuses of grief were held to damage both the psychic and the social realms.

The prevalence of female mourners in didactic examples of unrestrained grief suggests a gendered division of labor in the culture of mourning. Yet, while the conventional allegorical figuration of the mourner as a woman has led many to assume that mourning in the nineteenth century was women's work, condolence manuals and sentimental literature suggested that men grieved as profoundly as women. But while men were indeed expected to mourn, they were under additional pressure to moderate expressions of feeling, particularly in public. True manliness consisted of an ability to feel deeply and, at the same time, to restrain the physical manifestations of feeling. In the final scene of Cooper's The Pioneers (1823), for instance, the grizzled frontiersman Natty Bumppo weeps before the grave of his lifelong companion, the Mohican sachem Chingachgook, but when his friends Oliver and Elizabeth Effingham approach, he hastily wipes away his tears. And Oliver also reacts with manfully restrained sorrow to the death of Chingachgook, who had adopted him as a son, and to the departure of Natty for the western wilderness. Women, in contrast, were expected to display grief openly, if not to excess; accordingly, Elizabeth, Oliver's wife, weeps unashamedly throughout the touching scene. In this sense, the part played by women in the cult of the mourner was in many ways comparable to the American social critic Thorstein Veblen's account, at the turn of the century, of their function in the culture of consumption (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899): women give ceremonial expression to values embraced by the culture as a whole.

MOURNING AND CRITIQUE

The nineteenth-century belief in the moral elevation of the mourner lent itself to the depiction of scenes of mourning as a call for social reform. This kind of appeal resounds throughout the pages of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, as the narrator repeatedly pleads with her readers to sympathize with the suffering of slaves by comparing their sorrows to the grief common to all who have mourned the loss of a loved one. But cultural differences in the experience of grief were also treated as evidence of the need for social change. The matter-of-fact description, in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), of the author's lack of emotional response to his mother's death—"Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should probably have felt at the death of a stranger" (p. 16)—might have struck readers steeped in the culture of mourning as shocking. Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), however, makes clear in his narrative that his startling failure to feel the loss of his mother is an effect of slavery's destruction of the very connections most valorized in the culture of mourning, namely, the deep emotional bonds that made familial affect the cornerstone of the social. Ten years later, in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass amplified this reflection, adding that he maintains a "lifelong, standing grief" not over his mother's death itself but over the loss of connection to her enforced by the slave system (p. 155).

While some nineteenth-century writers used mourning as a means of foregrounding the need for social reforms, others critically interrogated the assumptions surrounding the culture of mourning itself. In his short story "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) questions the tendency to make moral distinctions between types of sorrow. In the story, the residents of a New England village are disturbed when their minister, Reverend Hooper, suddenly and without explanation dons a black veil. This conventional sign of bereavement, unmoored from familiar social coordinates, becomes deeply unsettling, and the villagers anxiously debate whether the veil signifies ordinary mourning, the "type of an innocent sorrow," or a mark of penance for secret sin (p. 46). Hooper, however, refuses to choose between the two motives assigned to his veil, remarking only that both are common to all humanity. His refusal undermines the habitual assumption that grief is redemptive, while shame is simply corrosive. Finally, on his deathbed, Hooper announces that the veil reflects the habit of concealment itself. His insistence that all mortals hide both their sins and their deepest feelings from one another further troubles the tendency to depict grief as morally refining.

An even deeper critique of the assumptions surrounding the culture of mourning is conveyed by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) in his essay "Experience" (1844). Emerson notes that while people tend to seek truth in grief, it does not reveal itself there; reflecting on the death of his own son, he argues that such calamities "leave me as [they] found me,—neither better nor worse" (p. 29). Yet while Emerson challenges the productivity assigned to sorrow over the dead in the nineteenth century, his essay reproduces the desire for this productivity, the longing for authentic emotional experience as compensation for human "evanescence." Emerson's mournful renunciation of this fantasy—"I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature" (p. 29)—might be read as an elegiac reflection on the culture of mourning as a whole.

See also The Gates Ajar; Indians; Individualism and Community; Landscape Architecture; Leatherstocking Tales; Lyric Poetry; Manhood; Reform; Romanticism; Slavery; Uncle Tom's Cabin; The Wide, Wide World

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of the Year 1757. 1826. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers. 1823. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Douglass, Frederick. Autobiographies. New York: Library of America, 1994.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Experience." 1844. In The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3, pp. 25–49. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Minister's Black Veil: A Parable." 1836. Twice-Told Tales, edited by William Charvat et al., pp. 37–53. In The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, volume 9. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974.

Heckewelder, John. History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States. 1819. Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1876.

Irving, Washington. "Rural Funerals." 1819–1820. In The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, pp. 144–157. Reading, Pa.: Dutton, 1936.

"A Lady." The Mourner's Book. Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1850.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. "Hawthorne." 1866. In Poems and Other Writings, pp. 474–475. New York: Library of America, 2000.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. 1827. Edited by Mary Kelley. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Syme, J. B., ed. The Mourner's Friend; or, Sighs of Sympathy for Those Who Sorrow. Worcester: William Allen, 1852.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. 1852. Edited by Ann Douglas. New York: Penguin, 1981.

Whitman, Walt. "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." 1867. In Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, pp. 459–467. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Warner, Susan. The Wide, Wide World. 1851. New York: Feminist Press, 1987.

Secondary Works

Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Farrell, James J. Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

Halttunen, Karen. "Mourning the Dead: A Study in Sentimental Ritual." In her Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870, pp. 124–152. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982.

Kete, Mary Louise. Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.

Pike, Martha V., and Janice Gray Armstrong. A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America. Stony Brook, N.Y.: The Museums at Stony Brook, 1980.

Schorsch, Anita. Mourning becomes America: Mourning Art in the New Nation. Clinton N.J.: Main Street Press, 1976.

Sloane, David Charles. The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Dana Luciano