American Cool. Peter N. Stearns

Almost all manners authors felt compelled to address grief as a significant part of public interactions.

      Of course, as in previous centuries, grief might go on too long in certain individual cases and require assistance from doctor or minister. But emphasis was placed on the enhancement to spiritual love that might be derived from emotional sharing, not on the dangers of excess. It is possible indeed that Victorian culture encouraged acknowledgment of grief over an unusually long span, as in the case of the father who noted long after the death of a child, “There are some wounds which are never healed—which break out afresh and trouble the afflicted heart. … I find but little abatement of that yearning and longing for his dear face.”

      References to grief in letters and diaries are notable for their open expressions of the intensity of grief, but they are equally as notable for their uniform assumption of emotional harmony as families and friends grouped to help each other articulate and cope with grief. Mourners frequently recorded the importance of family and community support. A father, grieving for a dead son, recalled the “substantial and visible tokens of sympathy from our numerous friends and neighbors.” Along with religion, this support made grief endurable. “The sympathy of friends is valuable but vain is all that man can do if the love of God be wanting. … We feel confident that it is well with our dear boy and that our loss is his gain.” The growing cultural response to grief, as well as individual acceptance of cultural norms, underlay what Philippe Ariès has termed a nineteenth-century transition from fear of death of self to fear of death of others.⁶⁴

      Sadness, in contrast, became perhaps more problematic than it had been before. A distaste for sadness had increased in the eighteenth century, at least as suggested in diaries, and by the nineteenth century this was enhanced by a masculine aversion to tears. The passive qualities of sadness, its lack of motivational intensity, may account for the decreased willingness to respond to this emotion. Against life’s minor tribulations, a cheerful countenance and a willingness to take effective remedial action won the readiest response. Sadness, if it must exist, should be private and undemanding of others.⁶⁵