Grief’s recent history
In keeping with its broadly phenomenological approach, the book’s main aim is to explore the very being of grief. There is no easy answer to the question of the extent to which the essence of grief transcends cultures and eras. Nonetheless, the thesis of this book is that there is indeed something universal about what we refer to as grief, which means, for example, that we are able to understand the Greek tragedies, despite them being over 2,000 years old. At the same time, we need to remain mindful of the fact that there are, of course, many aspects of grief that do vary according to time and place, as we will see in the following chapters. I now conclude this introduction with a brief overview of the history of grief in my own part of the world, Denmark and the West, focusing on the last two centuries.
According to Horwitz and Wakefield, the oldest written reference to grief is found in the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, from the third millennium BCE (Horwitz and Wakefield 2007: 30). When King Gilgamesh loses his friend Enkidu, his grief is described as highly intense – so much so that he coats himself with dirt and wanders restlessly through the desert. These feelings are quite recognisable to modern humans, many millennia later. An even more famous description of grief is provided by Homer 1,500 years later. In The Iliad, after losing his friend Patroclus, Achilles too covers himself with dirt, and tears out his hair. Kofod (2017) has drawn up a historical timeline for grief, starting with the ancient Greeks, for whom grief was considered a ‘moral practice’ and an essential part of human reason. For both Plato and Aristotle, the objective was for individuals to regulate their emotions in a manner proportionate to the situation. Later on, under the influence of Christianity, medieval culture endowed grief with a religious aspect. But perhaps the most significant change came in the nineteenth century, when Romanticism replaced the ancient and medieval ‘cosmological grief’ – directed outward toward a meaningful cosmic order – with ‘inward grief’, in which individuals engaged in dialogue with their inner selves. It was, in other words, a transition from cosmology to psychology.
In their account of historical perspectives on grief, Stearns and Knapp (1996) argue that grief reactions are, to a certain extent, cultural constructs. They also date the important historical shift in the perception of grief to the early nineteenth century, when the West’s traditional (and previously relatively subdued) ways of expressing grief gave way to much more intense mourning practices, bordering on worship of grief, during the Victorian era. Although they appear natural, our modern grief responses, it is claimed, did not emerge until the early nineteenth century. The Victorian age is often thought of as a period of great self-control and suppression of desire, and yet expressions of grief were positively encouraged. Stearns and Knapp link this development in particular to the increasing importance of love in families, which had previously been purely practical units. Emotional ties between spouses – and between parents and children – were cultivated more intensely than before. At the same time, improvements in medical science facilitated the treatment of many more diseases and lowered mortality rates, particularly for children, far more of whom survived infancy. Poets started to write about death and grief, for both children and adults. Artistic expressions of grief were personal and immediate, as seen in this typical song from 1839:
Mingled were our hearts forever, long time ago;
Can I now forget her? Never. No, lost one, no.
To her grave these tears are given, ever to flow.
She’s the star I missed from heaven, long time ago.4
It became increasingly common to dress in black and to spend money on funerals, with the wealthiest building lavish monuments to their dead. The sculptor William Wetmore Story’s Angel of Grief (1894) is often seen as the culmination of the Victorian relationship to grief (even though Story was American). He produced it after his wife’s death, and it was his final sculpture. The original is in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, but it is frequently copied.
The original Angel of Grief by William Wetmore Story (1894)
Unlike earlier ornamentation of graves, which often sought to depict the deceased’s life or portray angels in Heaven (what might be called outward grief, directed toward the cosmos), Angel of Grief expresses the grief of the bereaved (which is inward and psychological). It does so in what now seems an almost archetypal way – the angel has collapsed with her arms over her eyes and face (I will return to this sculpture in Chapter 4). Grief is, in every sense, a heavy emotion, and this weightiness is beautifully conveyed by Story’s sculpture. Of course, the Anglo-Saxon world was not alone in defining grief in Victorian times, but Britain was a cultural superpower in those days, comparable with the USA today. Nowadays, grief discourse is not shaped by English poets and sculptors, but by pop musicians and Hollywood film and TV directors.
The early years of the twentieth century saw a gradual rethink of the Victorian era’s poetic and artistic idolisation of grief. Increasingly, it was considered preferable to conceal grief and move on. This trend was reinforced during the First World War, when expressing deep and lasting grief was considered weak and bad for morale. Throughout the twentieth century, Western countries gradually changed from industrial to consumer societies. Stearns and Knapp (1996) write that consumerism led to a further polarisation between positive and negative emotions, in which the former were to be supported and enacted. Conversely, the consumer society simply does not afford the same time for grief. People are expected to be flexible and adaptable, rather than mired in the past and maintaining their bonds with the dead. The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a burgeoning happiness industry, in which emotional culture focused on the positive, on ‘motivation’ and ‘passion’ (Davies 2015). Grief was almost diametrically opposed to the feelings of proactivity and euphoria that were dominant and in demand. Psychologists and psychiatrists began systematically drawing up symptom checklists and formulating psychiatric diagnoses for (‘complicated’) grief, in order to ensure that nobody grieved needlessly and the bereaved were able to resume their social and work roles quickly.
In simple terms, in the last two centuries, grief in the West has changed from being a normal part of life, expressed