Arranging Grief

Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Dana Luciano

• Verlag: NYU Press
• Jahr: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814752333
• Thema: Littérature
• Thema: Critique littéraire

2008 Winner, MLA First Book Prize

Charting the proliferation of forms of mourning and memorial across a century increasingly concerned with their historical and temporal significance, Arranging Grief offers an innovative new view of the aesthetic, social, and political implications of emotion. Dana Luciano argues that the cultural plotting of grief provides a distinctive insight into the nineteenth-century American temporal imaginary, since grief both underwrote the social arrangements that supported the nation’s standard chronologies and sponsored other ways of advancing history.

Nineteenth-century appeals to grief, as Luciano demonstrates, diffused modes of "sacred time" across both religious and ostensibly secular frameworks, at once authorizing and unsettling established schemes of connection to the past and the future. Examining mourning manuals, sermons, memorial tracts, poetry, and fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Harriet E. Wilson, Herman Melville, Frances E. W. Harper, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Luciano illustrates the ways that grief coupled the affective body to time. Drawing on formalist, Foucauldian, and psychoanalytic criticism, Arranging Grief shows how literary engagements with grief put forth ways of challenging deep-seated cultural assumptions about history, progress, bodies, and behaviors.

1

Moments More Concentrated than Hours

Grief and the Textures of Time

“I cannot be serious!” John Adams announced in a March 2, 1816, letter to Thomas Jefferson. “I am about to write You, the most frivolous letter, you ever read.”¹ Inspired by recollections of his remarkable era prompted by Baron von Grimm’s Correspondance Litteraire, Philosophique et Critique, Adams wondered whether his friend Jefferson, given the chance, would choose to live his entire life over again, just as he had experienced it the first time. In Jefferson’s April 6 reply, which he proclaimed a “full match” for Adams’s frivolity, the third president of the United States assured its second that he would gladly relive his own life.² Declaring himself in sympathy with Adams’s belief in benevolence, Jefferson represented the possibility of repetition as a source of no little satisfaction. He contrasted his optimistic and “sanguine” embrace of Adams’s proposal to the negativity of those who would forgo the opportunity to relive their lives; these he scorned as pessimists, possessing “gloomy and hypocondriac [sic] minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future.”³But the lighthearted tone marking the two statesmen’s playful indulgence of this temporal fantasy vanished as the question of grief entered into the dialogue. An acknowledgment that sorrow came even to the optimistic prompted Jefferson to interrogate the moral purpose of pain:

I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have an useful object. And the perfection of the moral character is, not in a Stoical apathy, so hypocritically vaunted, and so unjustly too, because impossible, but in a just equilibrium of all the passions. I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote.⁴

Adams’s response to his friend’s question, in a letter dated May 6, 1816, followed Jefferson in abandoning the playful tone of previous missives to pursue the serious matter of grief. Adams theorized that grief signaled a “mechanical and inseparable” connection between pleasure and pain, so that the disruption of any continuity of pleasure—whether the death of a loved one or the failure of a business—must inevitably produce the pain we experience as grief.⁵ But this pain, in his view, was fundamentally productive. Insofar as it tempered the love for pleasure, discouraged excesses of “Imagination and Avarice,” and “compelled [mourners] to reflect on the Vanity of human Wishes and Expectations,” grief taught both resignation and virtue. Observing that all portraits of great men revealed “Furrows. . . ploughed in the Countenance, by Grief,” Adams proposed that the most effective legislators and judges were those who had been disciplined by sorrow.⁶ The mournful were best suited to governance, perhaps, because grief itself served a governing function in the ex-president’s assessment; he argued that it “compells [men] to arrouse their Reason, to assert its Empire over their Passions[,] Propensities and Prejudices.”⁷ Yet even as he saw grief working to abet reason by “sharpen[ing] the Understanding,” he also maintained that it “softens the heart,” supplementing that rationality with a well-managed capacity for feeling.⁸ Grief, that is, taught not only discipline but also sympathy; balancing reason with emotion, it produced both citizens and subjects. For Adams, then, the role grief played in the “just equilibrium” of the passions Jefferson idealized was that of maintaining the balance.

We can glimpse, in this epistolary conversation, the key terms organizing grief’s cultural significance at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The emergence of the subject immediately reigns in the imaginative play associated with the dream of reliving a revolutionary life, indicating that grief emphasized the limits posed by time, summoning the specter of loss and, with it, time’s irreversibility. Kept within these limits, however, grief possessed a significant degree of social productivity. Adams and Jefferson’s discussion suggests that as a “natural” impulse, the body’s automatic response to the vicissitudes of time as they took the form of loss, grief could provide both the sympathetic responsiveness and the impetus to self-governance that shaped the model American. For Adams, a lifetime of concentration on grief’s discipline perfected the moral, legislative, and economic capacities that protected against transience, “elevat[ing] [men] to a Superiority over all human Events.”⁹ Proper reckoning with the affective fallout of time as it collided with human bodies and souls would, in this view, enable the self-governed subject to rise above the debris, providing a measure of control not only over the body and its desires but also over time itself. But whereas Adams stressed the moral effect of grief, highlighting it as an opportunity for the exercise of the will, Jefferson’s comments emphasized, in contrast, the involuntary physiological aspect of feeling. His humoral typography of emotion depicted the self-control Adams commended as accessible only to the emotionally well-balanced, or “sanguine”; others, in his assessment, were constitutionally unable to maintain this kind of equilibrium. Typifying grief in this unhealthy form as “hypochondria,” a term used interchangeably with “melancholia” in eighteenth-century physiology, Jefferson suggested, in effect, that the feeling body might have not just a mind but a time of its own, defying the ordering of the will.¹⁰

The correspondence between the two ex-presidents heralds the emergence of grief in the nineteenth century as a means not simply of tempering but also of temporalizing the body and its feelings. The attention given to grief signaled a historically new emphasis on affection and sympathy as natural phenomena demonstrating the inherent sociality of the human animal, the idea that, as Jefferson wrote to another friend, “nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses.”¹¹ Yet the passionate dimension of human existence, Jefferson insisted, had its “proper place” in private life, outside the spheres of commerce and politics. This arrangement calls our attention not only to the spatial plotting but also to the distinct timing of private life as it occasioned a restorative return to this originary impulse.¹² The nature to which Jefferson refers here is a temporal principle, referring not, as Ernst Cassirer explains, to “the existence of things but the origin and foundation of truths.”¹³ Human emotion represented, in this vision, the instinctive swelling of the divine spirit within the human subject—the “social dispositions” that proved, as Jefferson had written, that “[t]he Creator. . . intended man for a social animal.”¹⁴

If grief, as I show in this book, came to occupy a place of epistemological privilege in this essentially narrative organization of the body and its uses, this is because the story grief tells effectively corresponds to this arrangement of the sociotemporal value of feeling. Extending further in its temporal implications than states like content or elation, grief, as John Adams’s account suggests, narrates the corrosion of attachment by time. Referencing the natural longing for connection that served as the foundation of human community, grief both appears as the inescapable condition of life in linear time, which inevitably severed some of those foundational bonds, and furnishes the impetus for memory to reconnect to the form of truth they represented. Grief thus provided an opportunity for the nineteenth-century subject to revisit the scene of human origins—experiencing, in the pain of its negation, the innate desire for bondedness to others that underscored the nurturant disposition of the natural world. The emotional aftermath of loss established human attachment as a foundational principle in a world in which traditional temporal frameworks were undergoing a radical transformation, beginning to shift toward a model of “history” as ordered, linear, and teleological. Given the dependence of modern nationalism upon this model of history, the former presidents’ willingness to submit to the disciplinarity of linear time by marking their engagement with the willed fantasy of reversal as idle play is unsurprising.¹⁵ Yet if the unquestioned dominance of linear time circumscribed as self-evidently “frivolous” a conversation about voluntary temporal repetition, the turn to grief as a means of both forswearing and continuing the discussion of alternate temporalities suggests that grief’s involuntary nature, coupled with its affiliation with the regenerative mode associated with private life, nevertheless held open the possibility of compensatory temporal forms—forms that offered ways of conserving the pleasures associated with the refusal of linearity without appearing to negate historicity as such.

In this chapter, I will begin assessing grief’s centrality to what Michel Foucault terms the deployment of sexuality: the intensification of the body, its uses, and its effects in modernity. Considering texts drawn from early and mid-nineteenth-century mourning culture, ranging from sermons and eulogies to consolation manuals and mourner’s handbooks to discussions of the new rural cemeteries, I demonstrate how the play of grief in nineteenth-century culture can illuminate the historical relationship between time and the body. Though the archive of the chapter is deliberately diffuse, in order to enable a general overview of chronobiopolitical deployments of grief, I have incorporated a particular focus on materials dealing with the death of children. This emphasis on child loss is motivated both by the fact that the death of a dependent child appears, as Karen Sánchez-Eppler points out, an “almost purely emotional event,” and hence one that offers particular insight into what constitutes an emotional event as such, and by the popular conviction that the untimely death of the child, though a common occurrence, is a disruption of the natural order of things.¹⁶ Child loss tellingly consolidates the affective and temporal energies of nineteenth-century consolation culture, providing a site where the longings of “nature” met the future-directedness of the “soul.” As the poem “On Seeing a Deceased Infant” expressed it, “The spirit hath an earthly part / That weeps when earthly pleasure flies, / And heaven would scorn the frozen heart / That melts not when the infant dies.”¹⁷ The first half of the chapter assesses the balance that middle-class mourning culture sought to establish between the earthly and heavenly directions of the spirit. For as the verses cited here indicate, grief in this period came to be justified as a natural and hence laudable expression of the human spirit. Moreover, despite the limited duration of the official mourning period, sorrow over the dead was expected to linger. I examine both the sacralized spaces set aside, in the early nineteenth century, for the indulgence of retained grief and the way consolation literature framed the contradictory temporal pull of the mournful moment, which slowed or suspended ordinary time in its yearning after sensual continuities. Middle-class mourning culture’s limitation of the exceptional temporalities associated with grief, its insistence on drawing the mourner’s potentially asynchronic attachments back toward the future-directedness of the civilized Christian, also supported cultural and biological accounts of racial and sexual difference in bereavement norms that constructed Native and African Americans as emotionally out of sync with the Anglo-American populace. Yet the widespread cultural appeal of grief, as I show, also offered reform-minded writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Apess a means of contesting the exclusionary time of national life by publicizing the grief it authored. Finally, the chapter closes with a consideration of the way the politicized time imagined in reform movements was distinguished from the prepolitical temporality associated with personal feeling. Examining grief’s appeal to love as the foundation of human relations, I uncover the asynchronic traces buried within consolation literature’s normalization of time through the structures of domestic privacy. These asynchronic traces point us, I suggest, to the temporally uncertain status of the “love” indexed by grief.

Time’s Change: The Production of the Human

The view that Adams outlines of loss as an occasion for self-discipline characterized the Puritan way of death, which insisted that the event of loss should orient survivors toward the pending moment of divine judgment. In the Puritan framework, death bespoke temporality in opposition to eternity; that is, it uncovered its “truth” as transience, emphasizing the fleetingness of human life by pointing insistently toward its end. Time, in this worldview, belonged to God alone, whose authority transcended it altogether; temporality was thus but the earthly shadow of the timeless truth of the divine, and indulgence in grief constituted a denial of this truth.¹⁸ The nineteenth-century understanding of mourning, in contrast, was marked by a historically new insistence that the proper response to death was an emotional one—a painful longing to return to a wholeness located in the past. The duration of this pain testified both to the value of what had been lost and to the sensitivity of the mourner, who recognized that value and responded appropriately, with intense suffering. Grief thus came to be valorized not simply as an impetus to self-chastisement but also as an emotional event, a feeling worth having for its own sake. By the eighteenth century, American sermons had begun to move away from the traditional disapproval of mournfulness as defiance of God’s will, using Biblical texts to argue that sorrow on the death of a loved one was to be expected. As a natural response, the sermons insisted, grieving could not be sinful, since sin was an act of the will. Nineteenth-century mourning culture expanded the corporeal dimension of this insistence on the naturalness of grief, representing deep, and deeply embodied, feelings of sorrow as not only an instinctive but also, crucially, a healthy response to loss, insofar as they signaled the mourner’s engagement with the affective dimension of human existence. Condolence literature spoke frequently of the “burning tears and aching sighs” of the bereaved, strong expressions that emerged from the “earthly part” of the spirit.¹⁹ These bodily emissions of the earthly were no longer rejected outright as false attachments to the temporal world, signs of a wayward preference for the flesh; instead, if kept within certain bounds, they were embraced as expected, sincere, and appropriate tokens of human love. In 1828, for instance, the Congregationalist minister Jacob Scales reassured his New Hampshire congregation that the Bible did indeed permit weeping over the dead, because it was natural. Tears, he asserted, were “an expression of sensibility. . . . Dear friends, removed from our sight. . . may naturally open the channel for a flood of tears. . . . There is a ‘time to mourn,’ and the stoick [sic], who forbids humanity to speak her native language, can scarcely deserve our love, or invite our envy.”²⁰ Scales’s coupling of the oft-cited passage from Ecclesiastes and the allusion to humanity’s “native” language—the language of the heart, as articulated in the speech of tears—demonstrates the extent to which a view of the essential benevolence of the natural, and of the feeling body as part of that redeemed nature, now informed even cautionary approaches to emotion. The “time to mourn,” in this configuration, is also the time of a return to this originary source, the time to speak the naturalness of feeling. The painful pleasure of bereavement—what mourning manuals referred to as “the luxury of grief”—was valued not just because it indexed the strength of interpersonal ties but, more fundamentally, because it verified an arrangement of time that underscored the foundational truths of human nature; indeed, as Scales suggests, those who refused to embrace truth, who insisted on suppressing feeling, were not only not admirable but actually unlovable.

The new emphasis on emotion reflected the expanded influence of feeling on faith. As the relationships American Christian denominations formed with the divine became ever more organized around love above fear, the doctrine of the vile flesh in need of regeneration gave way to a conception of spiritual grace as inherent in the human condition, and a growing emphasis was placed on human action rather than divine election as the way to salvation.²¹ This change is markedly visible in nineteenth-century consolation writing; for whether religiously affiliated writers sought to limit or to expand upon the authority of “nature,” the cultural centrality of grief itself demonstrates that they could no longer afford to ignore it. The new embrace of grief signaled its redefinition as an exemplary emotion, at once the evidence of and a way to activate this originary grace. Grief was still seen as an impetus to good behavior, demonstrating a desire for celestial reunion with the departed, but the self-control it occasioned flowed naturally from a spontaneous outpouring of feeling for the departed rather than conscious and fearful preparation for the moment of one’s own death. Grief, as outlined in the literature, served as the motivating impulse for the labor of love powering the mode of affective production that would come to be...