Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning (review)

This volume supplies some interesting essays about mourning in literature. In particular, Stephen Behrendt's contribution, 'Mourning, Myth, and Merchandising: The Public Death of Princess Charlotte,' is a magisterial study of the material culture that served as forum for, and reaction to, the death of Charlotte Augusta during childbirth in 1817. Charlotte was the daughter of the Prince Regent and, like Diana, Princess of Wales – another 'people's princess' whose death mobilized a national reinterpretation of monarchy – Charlotte held a special place in the hearts of the nation. Widely perceived as under-appreciated by her irresponsible father, the child of an outcast mother and grandchild of a mad and ineffectual king, her unexpected death threw into relief a range of identifications with the monarchy and with the idea of England, even as it highlighted deep suspicions and dissatisfactions with national governance. Behrendt is particularly illuminating in his careful study of the material artifacts and commodities that mediated the people's mourning of Charlotte, a mourning which recognizes loss as one ground for uniting a nation that yet longs for tangible signs of its meaning. This mediation of loss paradoxically prepares the ground for its spiritual recuperation, as Charlotte came finally to be seen as supreme repository of the 'domestic virtues,' at once under threat and newly cherished in the wake of the myth-making that arose in response to her death.

Heather Dubrow's brief article, 'Mourning Becomes Electric: The Politics of Grief in Shakespeare's Lucrece,' is similarly incisive. Here she argues for the political valence of mourning, a valence that qualifies individual agency even as it can be generative of power and authority. This serves a sharp qualification to the familiar neo-Freudian readings of 'Lucrece,' a move that enables Dubrow to draw connections between the epic's rhetoric of mourning and the discourse of Shakespeare's other texts.

This volume does not uniformly sustain the high level of accomplishment represented by these two essays, though there are certainly pieces that reward study, notably Ernest Smith's fine 'Colossal Departures: Figuring the Lost Father in Berryman's and Plath's Poetry.' Here Smith calibrates fascinating poetic details and synthesizes them within a grammar of poetic loss. All the same, it is synthesis that this volume as a whole seems to be lacking. It is also lacking in fine tuning, as the pages are riddled with typographical errors and careless grammar. The project was first published by the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. Its general editor, Jonathan Hart, supplies the foreword to the book, in which he outlines his sense of its contribution to literary studies and its justification as a single monograph.

Some readers will find this overview and its purpose difficult to justify, as the book's organizing principle seems arbitrary and its selection of periods and texts random. Over half the pages of the book are devoted to articles on particular examples of contemporary elegy. There is one essay on the York Cycle plays (Leanne Groeneveld's 'Mourning, Heresy, and Resurrection in the York Corpus Christi Cycle'), two essays on Shakespeare (the one by Dubrow and another by Lisa Dickson, 'The King Is Dead: Mourning the Nation in the Three Parts of Shakespeare's Henry vi'), one on Renaissance French lyric (Melanie Gregg, 'Women's Poetry of Grief and Mourning: The Languages of Lament in Sixteenth-Century French Lyric'), and, in addition to Behrendt's essay, one more on nineteenth-century literature (Barbara Hudspith, 'Adam's Mourning and the Herculean Task in Adam Bede'). The rest focus on twentieth-century texts. Given Hart's claim, that 'the importance of this collection lies in its very breadth in examining the work of mourning in literary texts from the first centuries of literature in English to the present,' this is an insufficient historical overview. The essays themselves tend not to connect with larger questions about the history of mourning or of elegy. Indeed, the focus generally as it emerges from the collection as...