According to family lore, Henry Adams startled relatives shortly after his wife’s death by impulsively tearing a black crepe mourning band from his arm and throwing it under the dinner table. He repeatedly told others that he wanted to press on with his life and not linger in a lethargy of self-seclusion or expressive grieving. Within six months Adams had left Washington on his trip to Japan, enclosing himself in an outer shell of stoicism and public silence about his wife’s self-destruction.1
During their years together, Henry and Marian Adams had scorned some aspects of mourning decorum, including the strict regulations on dress and conduct that reached their peak in the 1850s as they were approaching adulthood. The couple participated in a shift in attitudes that took place by the 1880s in the wake of the nation’s searing Civil War experience. It foreshadowed what French scholar Philippe Ariès has called a “brutal revolution” in the twentieth century in which death became a more private, hushed subject, and survivors were pressured to return to normal life and behavior as soon as possible after their bereavement. This newer philosophy stood in opposition to mid-nineteenth-century social pressures “to make private sorrow public” through frequent, highly visible expressions of sentiment after an initial period of seclusion. By the end of the nineteenth century, lengthy and too visible mourning was viewed by many as an act not of virtue but of self-indulgence—a lack of proper emotional regulation that impinged on the happiness of others.2
The Adamses and all of the other historical actors discussed in this book were residents of their time, place, and class. They received letters on black-bordered paper that signaled mourning, and after her father’s death Clover wore a respectful black bonnet when a friend accompanied her on occasional carriage rides. Henry no doubt pulled down some of the blinds in his house after her death to signal his seclusion, and family members likely placed mourning ribbons or a wreath on his door. He declined to see visitors immediately and then practiced extreme self-discipline in concealing his emotions from all but a few close relations and friends. The Irish Milmore family, American newcomers who were never members of the same elite Boston Brahmin society, participated in Catholic rites and somewhat different, probably more demonstrative, traditions among the diversity of expectations and practices brought to the United States by immigrants. The elderly William Wetmore Story, a longtime expatriate in Rome, acted out his grief with considerable melodrama and emotion suited to the older “Victorian” absorption in, and more public exhibition of, sorrow.
In the face of death, adult survivors are often ill prepared for the steps and choices they must take. But when they do act, it is within or against a framework of expectations defined by family rituals and traditions, religious training, period and regional customs, economic options, and even the physical geography of their chosen burial landscape and the availability of memorial materials like granite and bronze and the technologies for using them. Basic assumptions about what could or should be done were changing at the turn of the century, yet the extraordinary individuals discussed in this book had common concerns: they all sought ways to comprehend death’s impact and the means to respectfully shape their recollections of their lost ones within established societal boundaries. As they decided how to perform their grief and delineate the narrative contours of their memories, they remained, as Henry Adams noted, members of a “sad fraternity.”
Figure 14.
Half-mourning dress; New styles for dressing the hair, 1873. Print, 8 3/4 × 5 1/2 in. From The Peterson Magazine. Picture Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
At midcentury, bourgeois tradition had required one to two years of mourning for a deceased spouse or parent. Explicit stages of dress and decorum were prescribed in etiquette guides, including deep mourning (strict seclusion from society; the widow to wear dresses made of a lusterless black cloth) and, later, “half-mourning” (when a widow could attend a concert but not balls or dances and wear black with white, gray, or violet to express her imminent availability). Department stores in major cities, such as Lord & Taylor in New York, featured mourning departments, and women’s magazines pictured current styles (Figure 14). The width of the black border on stationery was also prescribed depending on the recentness and depth of one’s loss, growing narrower as time progressed. These codes were all meant to focus attention on the grief of the survivor in the period of Victorian sentimentalism, the cult of feelings that dominated literature and culture at midcentury. As scholar Karen Halttunen has explained, mourning was deemed an elegant and “necessary social mask” that allowed Americans aspiring to high social status an opportunity to demonstrate their gentility and to stress the bonds of family relationship, while deemphasizing the older focus on the physical body itself, on the morbid biological facts of death.3 There was always questioning and even criticism, however, of the sincerity of some who wore the black crepe clothing but not the spirit of widowhood—survivors who spent great amounts of money on elaborate funerals with shining black horses and hearses with glass windows, and who purchased expensive mourning wardrobes, including hats, gloves, shoes, black-bordered handkerchiefs, and elaborate jewelry. Women could be critiqued for coming out of mourning too soon or for staying in mourning too long (Figure 15). Deceitful expression of counterfeit or insincere emotions was a serious breach of decorum, burlesqued in cartoons and onstage. Parodies stressing mourners’ hypocrisy or mis-motives appeared in the media, and excess was ridiculed.
The Civil War placed the individual death within a larger framework of understanding, inspiring the formation of national cemeteries and contributing to the professionalization of medical and funerary industries. Death and grief services were depersonalized in the decades following the war, with relative strangers paid to complete intimate and highly emotional chores such as preparing the corpse that had once been performed by family members or religious communities. By the 1880s more Americans were dying in hospitals than at home, and the first funeral homes were appearing. Even if most wakes were still held in the family parlor, undertakers often presided over the details. After Marian Adams’s death, for instance, her family paid Washington, D.C., undertaker Joseph Gawler $265 for his services.4 Just the year before her passing, funeral directors meeting in Chicago adopted a national ethics code calling for “delicacy,” “secrecy,” respect for clients’ privacy, and a high-toned morality to elevate their profession.5
Figure 15.
Charles Dana Gibson, A Widow and Her Friends (New York: R. H. Russell; London: J. Lane, 1901), Sequence 25. Widener Library, Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Alongside these changes, less rigid mourning codes began to be recommended to individuals. “Mourning [dress] is not now usually worn for so great a length of time as formerly; and although some people—at least some women—are very censorious and exacting on this subject, society in general allows more liberty of choice than it once did,” etiquette advisor Florence Howe Hall wrote in 1887. To wear mourning dress, she counseled the next year, “is the correct thing,” but it “is not now considered obligatory.” Some described heavy crepe veils and extended seclusion as unhealthy; others saw the strong public emphasis on sadness, requiring companions to adopt a sober demeanor in the bereaved person’s presence, as burdensome and self-centered.6 Women were clearly the chief bearers of responsibility for mourning. Men, whose duties required them more often to go out into the world, were permitted greater flexibility in their conduct during a shortened bereavement period, and many did not wear special clothing beyond the days of the funeral and interment.
Figure 16.
Decorum: A Practical Treatise on Etiquette and Dress of the Best American Society (New York: Union Publishing House, 1880), cover.
The large number of etiquette guides published at the end of the century were written by diverse authors for a variety of audiences and cannot be taken as a complete and accurate portrayal of American social practices. But they do offer a rich and often neglected outline of standards that governed social interaction in the expanding urban bourgeois culture, as cultural historian John Kasson has explained.7 In the case of mourning, they provide a direct discussion of matters usually only addressed in private. The writers of these guides advised readers on ways to channel their social ambitions and particularly emphasized restrained behavior. “All manner of ostentation at funerals should be carefully avoided,” the 1880 manners book Decorum warned (Figure 16), declaring that the “heavy trappings of woe” were no longer in vogue.8 Scholar Blanche Linden has referred to this as the period of “Denial of Death,” which brought to a close the mid-nineteenth-century fascination with heavy veils, cameo brooches, and other accoutrements of sorrow. She noted that by the turn of the century lovely cut flowers often replaced black crepe drapes, stiff floral set pieces in the shape of crosses and anchors, and black feathers for funerals.9 Historian David Sloane has described 1855 to 1917 as the era of America’s “retreat from sentimentality.”10
In addition to revisions in mourning dress, greater emotional regulation and a “correct” philosophical stance were advised at the end of the century, reflecting larger societal concerns about the impoliteness of causing others to witness one’s grief. Genuine grief can appear ignoble or even ugly, convulsing the features and doing violence to human dignity; thus grief unrestrained and unconcealed could be considered a source of shame. Survivors were obliged to gain mastery over their emotions and facial expressions, what the English naturalist Charles Darwin described as unsightly “grief muscles” in his treatise The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals. Darwin found that grief often draws the eyebrows together, their inner ends becoming puckered into a fold or lump. The corners of the mouth are drawn down, the upper lip up, and the mouth may open in a groan or cry (Figure 17). He considered emotional facial expressions such as these as vestiges of the primitive, of animalistic functions, like a cat arching its back to warn enemies away since it did not have the ability to use any higher form of language, or of the childish. He concluded that most people can learn, however, to regulate their grief muscles through practice; to do so not only complied with rules of etiquette but improved one’s appearance. Darwin noted that expressions of repose or wonder, in opposition to grief, open the face. The brow is smooth and unfurrowed, matching more closely the goals of beauty found in high art.11
Figure 17.
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872), detail of plate II.
Survivors in the late nineteenth century were expected to remain in seclusion with the aid of family members and the new death industry workers until they could regain self-control. Once the bereaved could train themselves to manage and cloak the expression of their genuine feelings, however, they were advised to avoid casting a shadow over the collective happiness of others with their personal misery. They were encouraged to express an optimistic attitude about life. It was within the structure of this enforced masking of sincere emotions that Henry Adams, given his family’s public profile, found it appropriate to adopt an exaggerated silence after his wife’s death, especially since her ending was touched by scandal. Theodore Roosevelt, an acquaintance, also famously avoided mentioning his first wife after her death in 1884, even to his daughter Alice, turning stoicism into a brand of erasure.12 William Wetmore Story’s response to his wife’s death could be seen as an unregulated pathos, an emotional outpouring as outdated as his sculptural style.
Self-control was often equated in public discussions with moral character and a suggestion of good breeding. “It is not desirable to enshroud ourselves in gloom after a bereavement, no matter how great it has been,” advised the etiquette manual Decorum. “It is our duty to ourselves and to the world to regain our cheerfulness as soon as we may, and all that conduces to this we are religiously bound to accept, whether it be music, the bright light of heaven, cheerful clothing or the society of friends.”13
This was part of a trend toward “positive thinking” and public cheerfulness preached by late nineteenth-century advocates of a can-do breed of American optimism. In her guide entitled Our Society, Rose E. Cleveland added: “It is an encouraging sign of progress in the thought of a people, when their burial customs begin to lose much of the sombre and superstitious, and to take on more of the cheerful and philosophic.… [D]eath will always be terrible, inscrutable and solemn, and there is surely little need to add to its terrors by gloomy pall and winding sheet, and all the other sombre accessories of the past.” Grief, she said, “must not be selfish.… It is for the living and those we love that we must live, not for the dead, nor for dead customs, when the spirit of them has departed.”14 These comments and others like them indicated a belief that sincere grieving was unseen grieving.15
Those paying condolence visits were, for their part, now urged not to bring up the “painful” and morose subject of death but, as Florence Howe Hall put it, to show one’s sympathy “more by manner than in words” and to only give survivors an opportunity to speak about their loss if they wish to, “rather than to mention the subject one’s self.”16 The end of lengthy consolation letters was also often advised, with simplified expressions of concern encouraged.
In the light of medical advances such as the development of vaccines and a decline in tuberculosis rates, death would become a more predictable phenomenon by the early twentieth century, inevitable for the elderly but less likely to be waiting each day to strike a near one who had not reached a mature age. In Massachusetts, for example, infant mortality slipped from 131 deaths per 1,000 live births in the early 1850s to 79 in the early 1920s.17 Once a person survived to age four or five, the chances of living to adulthood increased dramatically. None of the myriad etiquette guides that appeared in the late nineteenth century, all of which included mourning sections, mentioned situations such as suicide. Despite its growing incidence in urban life, suicide remained a societal taboo. It was also an especially unexpected blow to the survivor, far different than the death of an invalid or aging parent, which might be viewed as a release from travail or pain.
Nor did most of the published guides refer explicitly to different ethnic or religious traditions, whose adherents in the predominantly Protestant United States swelled in the late century thanks to waves of immigrants from Europe. The majority of the more than five million immigrants who arrived in the 1880s were Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish, including many Italians and Eastern Europeans. Irish newcomers, who had been a significant portion of earlier waves of immigration from northern and western Europe, also continued to arrive in the decades after the Civil War, eventually threatening the power of the entrenched elite, socially and politically, in places like New York City and Brahmin Boston. The upper class’s insistence on restraint in mourning might be considered one effort to distinguish itself from the newcomers, described in Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s famous 1895 poem “Unguarded Gates” as “a wild motley throng,” as well as separating itself from the nouveau riche.18
Martin Milmore’s crowded funeral in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross featured an Irish priest and prominent citizens who served as pallbearers. His family’s traditions as well as his status as a quasi-public figure in Boston certainly affected mourning and funeral decisions. Irish Catholics in Boston often followed customs from the home country for holding wakes between the time of death and the funeral, a combination of celebration of life mixed with sorrow. The keen, a wailing lament, could be performed by women relatives like Milmore’s elderly mother or special professional mourners hired for the occasion to offer songs and chants to help participants move through their grief. A rosary might have been placed with the washed and shrouded corpse, which was likely attended around the clock by kin at the family home, and the rosary was perhaps recited together by a group of relatives led by a priest. At the Latin requiem Mass itself there was music as well as the scent of fragrant incense from censors waved over the body in prayer and veneration and from beeswax candles circling the casket, a sensory spectacle in a church filled with statues and colorful ornament to stir the feelings of mourners who understood themselves to be carrying on age-old rituals.19
The funeral service for railroad baron William Vanderbilt II, who died on December 8, 1885, just two days after Clover Adams, provided another striking contrast to the small in-home service that her family chose to have in its intense desire for privacy. Declared by newspapers to be “the richest man in the world,” the sixty-five-year-old Vanderbilt was said to have fallen dead of “apoplexy” on the floor of the library of his palatial Fifth Avenue home in New York City, collapsing “without a moment’s warning” while conversing with a guest. The details of his death and funeral were related in minute detail in the press. Sixty carriages were reportedly hired to transport the family and friends from the house to St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, where his specially made casket was placed on a low catafalque at the head of the center aisle. Singers led the congregation in an affirming chorus of “Nearer My God to Thee,” likely accompanied by organ music. Later, mourners in full regalia took boats to Staten Island and formed a procession to the Moravian Cemetery, where he had a year earlier ordered the construction of a $240,000 mausoleum with interior carvings based on biblical themes from the Creation to the Crucifixion.20
Poorer and servant classes lacked the financial resources and free time to mourn in such a conspicuous, or genteel, manner and adopted their own modified rituals. African Americans were segregated in death as in life, with separate funeral homes, burial societies, cemeteries, and customs. “Songs sung at funerals helped mourners release their emotions and they sometimes became overwrought with grief,” writes historian Elaine Nichols. “Deep mourning and wailing were expected, and not frowned upon, by the[ir] community.”21
Mental health experts are still seeking to understand the mourning process, in which rituals and remnants of the older mourning codes continue to serve practical as well as social functions. In the late nineteenth century, the survivor, unmoored by his or her experience, was required to avoid vulgarity while being torn between two realms: holding close and expressing an ongoing attachment to the dead person, and at the same time carrying out a duty to avoid being a burden to the living. At first a spouse whose closest lifemate is gone sometimes feels as if he or she were inhabiting the dead person’s body or life, looking out through their eyes and holding each of their possessions precious, guarding memories of their movements and habits. Thus Henry Adams, for instance, made gifts to close friends and relations of cherished pieces of Clover’s jewelry, understanding how preciously they would be held in her memory.22 Frank Duveneck clung to images of his deceased wife, such as the deathbed drawing made by his friend Louis Ritter, with an almost piteous air. The loved one was frozen forever in time, at age twelve or thirty-nine or forty-two, now a part of the past, face and voice and gestures beginning to fade with time. Postmortem or memorial portraits or photographs were often made, especially for children, of the fully dressed corpse, and drawings and death masks of prominent adults.
When survivors left the protection of private domestic spaces and moved into public ones, mourning clothing let others know their status of bereavement without requiring any discussion. For the sensitive it could provide an external cladding shielding inner feelings. In reality, the mourning periods, divided into stages of three months to two years, reflected in an exaggerated and codified fashion some of the realities of grieving. Survivors move to different understandings as they pass through a phased experience of loss, living adrift in a fluid world from the day they first encounter the shock, or the relief, of death to the days on which they confront important anniversaries. The deepest mourning for a close relation takes place within the framework of the first year, psychiatrists note, as the spouse, parent, or child marks each holiday and family benchmark of the calendar. Each familiar occasion forces a survivor to reexperience the absence and, slowly and painfully, to rearrange the shards of joint lives. Finally the bereaved person reemerges, with heartache ideally turning into a kind of wistful nostalgia.
Some believe that death is only a turning point in a continuing relationship, in which a kind of dialogue—surrounding memories of shared experiences, perhaps, and maintenance of shared values—goes on. But the grieving portion of remembering a person is usually conceived as a difficult but terminable process. Sigmund Freud thought so. In his Mourning and Melancholia (1917), which examined the experience and expression of grief, he said survivors must be resilient and complete a course of “grief work” to process their loss and reach a form of resolution. They must examine one by one their “memories and expectations” of the deceased, and confront the realization that the person who aroused those thoughts and emotions is dead. This is a “slow and gradual” energy-sapping process of “painful unpleasure” that persists until the internal work of reality testing is completed and the loss is overcome, Freud said.
In this Freudian scenario, mourning has been likened to an internalized slide show in which images associated with the dead person are slowly flashed across a viewing screen. At the end, in the normal course of things, the slides are placed in a box and the box placed in a closet, perhaps to be taken out again only occasionally over the years for review. If there is great trauma attached to certain moments in a relationship, however, the process may be more difficult. Freud described a psychological disorder called “melancholia” in which the survivor’s normal path to resolution is blocked, causing greater self-reviling and self-reproach. Modern-day researchers call this “complicated grief” or classify it as “prolonged grief disorder,” which can lead to destructive behavior such as suicide or substance abuse. “Its chief symptom is a yearning for the loved one so intense that it strips a person of other desires. Life has no meaning; joy is out of bounds,” and the survivor is given to uncontrollable bouts of sadness.23 Some have suggested that Marian Adams could never psychically resolve the death of her father on whom she was profoundly dependent. William Wetmore Story, unable to get beyond the death of his longtime wife, Emelyn, gave himself permission to join her in death. But Frank Duveneck lived a long life, talking affectionately about his past love for his artist wife, Lizzie, and inspiring generations of students with his painting.
These are some of the ways that individuals mourn. Exploring period attitudes toward mourning behavior and religious consolation helps us to understand that decisions about funerary memorials were not only the results of individual impulses but of an interconnected array of persuasive forces and social pressures. These played a role in late nineteenth-century rituals of bereavement—steps along the way in survivors’ quest for a renewed wholeness, a longed-for unity of lives shattered by death.