Feminizing Grief: Victorian Women and the Appropriation of Mourning
Abstract
The Victorians didn’t invent the culture of mourning. But they certainly codified how the culture of grief should be one largely shouldered and sustained by women. Mourning rules for women were characterized by restraint and reserve; subject to critique and control. How to mourn, for how long, and most especially, what to wear while doing it were among the gendered directives that illustrated how the most strident demands of mourning fell on women. The conventions of mourning were espoused in etiquette books and conduct literature to give form, structure and legitimacy to the ritual of mourning by presenting women as exemplary “vessels of grief.” The dynamic between decorum and death undergird a relationship that at once elides and exposes the most pressing concerns of womanhood. Ultimately, the Victorian mourning culture reveals an inability to settle on one definition, effectively illustrating that women mourners defy easy classification. This dissertation will map Victorian mourning conventions against alternative models of mourning offered in literature by Thomas Hardy, Anne Brontë, Frances Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell to argue that in Victorian Britain and America, the repressive and gendered mourning culture could be appropriated by women to highlight its most egregious limitations as well as its opportunities. This interdisciplinary dissertation uses an analysis of literature, art, material culture and periodicals to highlight both the inequities and opportunities presented to women in the mourning culture. I examine the inherently gendered dimension of grief to challenge the tenability of these prescriptive rules, resulting in a distinct dissonance that exposed the period’s inability to recognize that women’s experiences with death and mourning were much more complex. In some cases, the women were simply rule-breakers, but in other examples, survival surmounts mourning; grief is delayed or abandoned, or women are otherwise empowered by the very event that was thought to incapacitate them. Ultimately, this study argues that mourning was a space for women to challenge and circumvent the rules of grief in ways that show the rich complexity of the female experience in the Victorian period.
Table of Contents
Introduction -- "The peril of impropriety:" dress, decorum and the dictates of mourning -- "She was afresh taught by death what life should be:" tradition, duty and making meaning in mourning -- On the problem and potential of widowhood -- "They whom the war trampled on:" American women and the politics of mourning -- Afterword
DOI
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Degree
Ph.D.