Exploring Grief

Towards a Sociology of Sorrow

Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Anders Petersen, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Anders Petersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367776800
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429574825
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As modern society's routine sequestration of death and grief is increasingly replaced by late-modern society's growing concern with existential issues and emotionality, this book explores grief as a social emotion, bringing together contributions from scholars across the social sciences and humanities to examine its social and cultural aspects. Thematically organised in order to consider the historical changes in our understanding of grief, literary treatments of grief, contemporary forms of grief and grief as a perspective from which to engage in critique of society, it provides insights into the sociality of grief and will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and cultural studies with interests in the emotions and social pathologies.

Part I

Grief and history

1 Grief in modern history

An ongoing evolution

Peter N. Stearns

Introduction

Both the standards applied to grief, and at least some of its most obvious expressions, have changed greatly over the past 250 years. In the Western world a dual transformation occurred. Traditional norms and rituals were first redefined in the 19th century, with a significant facet of Victorian emotional culture devoted to grief and appropriate responses to grief; the shift is quite clear, though its explanation is somewhat more elusive. Then, most obviously in reaction to huge environmental changes associated with the reduction of child mortality and the growing role of professional medicine, grief standards were redefined even more substantially in the early 20th century. While this second adjustment persists in many ways, its contours continue to be modified in societies that seek appropriate ways to combine grief with the latest advances in modern medicine and even psychology.

This chapter, after sketching some characteristic premodern patterns, will deal with the two major stages of modern adjustment in turn: first, the effort to express grief more fully and then the attempt to constrain the emotion in the interests of personal adjustment and smoother social relationships. Sketching this complex evolution also involves considering the causes involved, and the impacts of the recommended emotional styles.

Grief is, of course, a composite emotion, and any history must take into account different combinations of sadness with anger, or fear or (particularly in the past two centuries) guilt. Personality variables complicate the story as well, at any point in time: some individuals find it easier to accommodate the dominant styles of grief than others, and there are also important subcultures to take into account, by social class or ethnicity.

The most important overall challenge, however, in any history of grief, involves the tension between what might be assumed to be a fairly standard human sadness when faced with great loss, regardless of cultural specifics, and the impact of particular value systems and patterns of death that often not only work to channel grief in certain ways but also seek to restrain the emotion. This is a tension that unquestionably continues into the present, as societies seek to smooth some of the rough edges that have resulted from modern attempts to reduce the scope of grief.

The modern history of grief, and the substantial changes involved, have been most extensively studied in Western societies, both in Europe and the United States. But some important literature has emerged for Japan and elsewhere, as many regions, despite divergent traditions, seek to adjust emotional standards to rapid changes in the nature of death and loss, including the growing focus on the later-age segments of the population.

Traditional patterns

When historians first tried to tackle the subject of grief in premodern societies, they tended to seize on, and overemphasize, widespread fatalism. Several pioneering histories of the family, appalled by the high levels of infant and child mortality, assumed that parents must have become inured to the losses involved. One observer even suggested that premodern Western families probably displayed about as much emotion ‘as one would expect to find in a bird’s nest’ (Stone 1979; Shorter 1975). This claim was simply off the mark. Studies of parental diaries or annotations to family Bibles make it clear that the death of a child could be an intensely painful event, carefully noted by fathers and mothers alike at the time and in subsequent, anguished recollections (Vovelle 2000).

Indeed, historians and literary scholars have unearthed some of the most moving expressions of grief available, from written testimonies well before modern times. One study, for example, picks up the vivid commentary by three Japanese men around 1800, as they sought through writing to express a level of pain that simply resisted consolation on the death of a close friend, a wife, or a child (Kim 2015; Bolitho 2003). Similarly a 14th-century English poem, written by an unknown member of the gentry, released the grief felt on the death of a 2-year-old daughter: ‘I declare I never knew one so precious. Alas: I lost her in a garden… . I mourn, overcome with love, longing for my precious, spotless Pearl’ (McNamer 2015). One scholar has argued strongly for the successful expression and management of grief in premodern Europe, which he contrasts with a more troubled approach to death in modern times; and while his evaluation has been disputed, a number of scholars have sought to develop a similar dichotomy (Imhof 1996; Ariès 1981).

Most agricultural societies did generate some common beliefs and practices designed to minimize extensive grief. Many families sought to limit emotional attachments to very young children because of the probability that, on average, up to half of them would die before the age of 2. A Roman author, Epitectus, expressed a common sentiment: ‘When you kiss your child, you say to yourself, “Perhaps it will be dead in the morning”’. In some societies (classical Greece and Rome, China) widespread infanticide, as a means of population control, further illustrated and enhanced a degree of callousness (Rawson 2003; Stearns 2006). Many agricultural societies further surrounded themselves with abundant symbols of death – as in locating graveyards and sombre inscriptions in the centre of cities and villages, where they would be encountered as a normal part of daily existence – again promoting a certain level of emotional acceptance of the inevitable.

Agricultural conditions, and high rates of death, almost certainly inhibited any extensive sense of guilt when a family member died, and here too restraint particularly applied to children. Families in early modern Western Europe that sought various remedies for serious illness, including consultations with doctors, almost never bothered with this kind of recourse when a child was suffering – there simply seemed to be no point in challenging the dictates of God and nature. Considerable fatalism, at least on the part of husbands and fathers, may also have accompanied reactions to the frequent deaths of women in childbirth.

Even for adults, males above all, a further characteristic in many agricultural societies may have helped restrain grief upon the imminence of death: a definition of a ‘good death’ was clearly available, featuring an older adult suffering from a wasting illness. The experience of this kind of good death extended over several weeks, involving progressive wasting but not necessarily intense pain. In the process, both the victim and his family would have the opportunity to resolve any existing grievances and bid farewell, confident that appropriate rituals were being observed (Imhof 1996). Finally, of course, religious solace was a vital element in a family’s experience of a ‘good death’, where the presence of a religious official would help assure all parties that God’s will was being observed (Vovelle 2000; Houlbrooke 1981; Cressy 1997). Buddhist rituals, for example, heavily invested in providing comfort and counseling on the occasion of a death (Irish et al. 1993; Desjarlais 2016).

All three Abrahamic religions stipulated burial sites and practices, including the way a dead body should be dressed. Crying and sorrow might be recognized – many Muslim writers discussed grief quite poignantly, even on the occasion of deaths of children – but excessive wailing or rending of garments was discouraged as offensive to God and community (Jones 1997). Most of the major religions, including of course Hinduism with its beliefs in reincarnation, sought to emphasize the possibility that death could be a sweet release, into a better existence after life has passed (Koslofsky 2000).

Fatalism, plus community and religious pressure to keep grief in bounds, plus widely accepted customs and burial practices presumably could combine not to prevent vivid grief, but to offer reassurance and some channels for appropriate expression. It is important to remember that intense emotion might not be satisfied, as vivid written laments attest. Nor of course was traditional practice immune to change – for instance, the transition from Catholic to less elaborate Protestant rituals during the Reformation. Nevertheless, some sense of a combination of intense and certain frequent grief, and approved forms of expression, remains valid. It was this combination that would begin to be challenged by a new set of beliefs and practices in the Western world by the late 18th/early 19th centuries (Badone 1989; McManners 1985).

The Victorian approach

References to grief in written materials in the English language began to increase rapidly in relative frequency from the middle of the 18th century onward (see Figure 1.1). Obviously, changes in relative frequency of reference are at best suggestive; they do not demonstrate that grief itself was on the rise (or later, on the wane). But they do point to possible changes in relevant emotional standards, which other evidence on the whole bears out.

For both discussions and rituals attached to grief did shift in the Western world in the great cultural transitions of the late 18th century. Writers of various sorts began to discuss the emotion with growing fervour, and what data we have suggest that the shift affected private letters (a rising genre in any event) as well as published materials. Images of mourning proliferated, and women, particularly, increasingly became the family agents in dealing appropriately with death and loss. Some girls’ schools taught their students to emphasize figures of women draped over the tombstones of husbands or sons as they practiced their needlework. By the 1870s in the United States, girls could order dolls complete with coffins and mourning clothes, another indication of the new importance attached to preparing appropriate expressions of and responses to grief (Farrell 1980; Rosenblatt 1983; Stearns 1996).

The emotion was often hauled out for discussion and praise in 19th-century family manuals. Even the temporary absence of a loved one might be compared to death, as in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s letter to Sarah Peabody in 1940: ‘Where thou are not, there it is a sort of death’. But it was real death that seized emotional centre stage. It was the frequent subject of novels, which, like Louisa Alcott’s Little Women, focused on the tragedy of family loss through wasting disease (Lystra 1989; Miller 1882). Parlour songs, literally in the hundreds, were filled with the sorrows of losing a loved one. Grief peppered materials prepared for children, who needed to be prepared for the elaborate experience of contemporary grief. Thus, McGuffey’s Reader, in its 1866 edition, offered lessons on the response to death: ‘How still the baby lies/I cannot hear his breath/I cannot see his eyes/ They tell me this is death’ (McGuffey 1866). The emotion was clearly painful, but it also seemed essential to reflect the new intensity of family life. As a Protestant manual put it in 1882: ‘It may truly be said that no home ever reaches its highest blessedness and sweetness of love and its richest fulfillment of joy till sorrow enters its life in some way’ (Miller 1882; Evans 1888; Finley 1872; Alcott 1868; Stannard 1975; Jackson 1977).

Figure 1.1 Frequency of the term ‘grief’ in English, 1700–2008, Google Ngram Viewer, accessed on April 26, 2018.

A new wave of etiquette books picked up on the theme, suggesting that the grief emphasis was not merely a conceit of Romantic-age novelists and songwriters. The books and columns offered elaborate instructions on how to visit a bereaved family, to respect their deep grief while also extending support (Kasson 1991).

Finally, insofar as the historian can judge, real people – however guided by the fictional conceits – now needed to express intense grief themselves – more commonly (aided of course by growing literacy) than had been the case in the premodern past. References to ‘bitter tears’ were standard. An 1897 diary reference captured the common sentiment: ‘Jacob is dead. Tears blind my eyes as I write… . Now he is at rest, my darling Jacob. Hope to meet you in heaven. God help me to bear my sorrow’. And intense grief was often recalled, by men and women alike, through remembrance even years after the loss, in recollections that could have ‘crushing effect’. Recurrent visits to gravesites mixed relief with renewed sorrow (Wells 1994).

Not surprisingly, death rituals themselves became markedly more elaborate, though appropriate emotional interpretation may be challenging. Signs of mourning became more substantial. Gravestones themselves – now for children as well, an innovation – became far more expensive and showy. Some of this, admittedly, represented an intriguing 19th-century expression of rising consumerism, with expenditures designed to express emotion and honour the dead, but also impress the community at large. But the grief component could be very real. In a fascinating new expression of grief – and what would much later be called a search for closure – Americans after the brutal Civil War began to seek out dead sons, brothers and husbands in battlefield graves, and a new industry of modern embalming sprang up to cater to their needs to return the bodies for a proper burial back home. Here – admittedly encouraged by the advent of the railway, which facilitated searches, and also a new interest in embalming – was a first indication of the new grief expressions attached to deaths in combat that would gain further currency – and motivate considerable expenditure – in the 20th century (Faust 2008).

Several factors fed Victorian grief, again beyond the encouragement provided by lachrymose popular songs and novels. Three components can be suggested, operating in combination. First, traditional management of death became more repellent in several ways. New concerns about disease and hygiene prompted a massive relocation of cemeteries from the later 18th century onward, to keep them as a distance from population centres. Death in this sense became less familiar, its reminders less omnipresent. By the later 19th century revulsion at death would be further reflected, and encouraged, by new practices such as embalming, and a rivalry among funeral directors to make bodies as lifelike as possible; and by the emergence of funeral professionals, who took over the arrangements and began to move preparation from the home to new, dedicated centers. Less intimate familiarity with death as a routine (further encouraged, with urbanization, by removal from the experience of frequent animal death), increasing distaste and desire for concealment, certainly had their own emotional contours – including new levels of disgust. But the process might contribute to more vivid grief as well (Corbin 1986).

Second, most obviously, new grief expressions followed directly from the growing emphasis on familial love and affection, which became increasingly common currency particularly in middle-class experiences from the mid-18th century onward (Farrell 1980; Hohenschuh 1900; Burton 1908). Marriages were increasingly organized around romantic courtship, rather than mere parental arrangement. Of course, the shift hardly guaranteed enduring love, but it certainly encouraged an impulse to claim attachment, and corresponding sorrow at loss. One historical assessment thus notes a shift among upper-class men in the American South, from the considerable fatalism that wives’ deaths in childbirth seemed to occasion in the 18th century, to more vigorous sympathy and sorrow after 1800 (Dye and Smith 1986; Ulrich 1982; Lewis 1983; Hoffert 1987; Lockridge and Lewis 1988).

The same sentimental attachment certainly applied to the emotional culture surrounding children. As birth rates declined and ideas of childish innocence gained ground, parental, and particularly maternal, love was certainly encouraged by a new style of parental advice, providing the context in which new outpourings of grief, and intensified rituals, could apply to the loss of a child (Mintz 2004). The rise of the novel also encouraged grief in dealing with the death of loved ones (McManners 1985).

Third, grief became more entangled with guilt – that is, with a growing sense that certain kinds of death should be prevented. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: Towards a sociology of grief – historical, cultural and social explorations of grief as an emotion
• Part I Grief and history
• Part II Grief and literature
• Part III Forms of grief
• Part IV Grief and social critique
• Index