Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

The past decade or so has seen an outpouring of books particularly from literary scholars on the subject of death, grief and mourning. This efflorescence of scholarship might be yet another post 9/11 phenomenon—a need to understand what happens to a culture when time becomes reckoned by a different pace and measure. Or it may be in the time honoured tradition of revisionism that scholars noted lacunae in the thinking about these topics. Whatever the reason, a rich literature now exists that struggles with the meaning of grief and mourning in nineteenth-century America.

Dana Luciano's Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America joins books such as Russ Castronovo's Necro—citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth Century United States and Mary Louise Kete's Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-class Identity in Nineteenth Century America in exploring the meaning, indeed the centrality of mourning to white, middle class American culture. Linking her concerns—time, specifically sacred time, and the body—to grief and mourning Luciano contends that grief is a response "… to anxiety over the new shape of time by insisting that emotional attachment had its own pace …" Grief could not halt the quickened march of modern time but could resist it. In light of this argument, she provides fresh readings of giant names in antebellum literature such as Cooper, Emerson, Whitman, Sedgwick, Douglass as well as examining mourning manuals, sermons and memorial tracts.

Importantly, Luciano takes on Philippe Ariès, long seen as the founder of thanatohistory. Aris contends that Western culture's nineteenth-century cult of mourning preceded the denial of death in the twentieth century. By contrast, Luciano claims that rather than being the penultimate stage of the cultural erasure of death, nineteenth-century mourning effectively wiped out all forms of bereavement other than the Anglo-American. She challenges the notion, rooted in Ariès, that nineteenth-century mourning is no more than a "mere moment(s) in a larger history of decline" but instead draws attention to the "profound productivity of mourning."

She illustrates this "productivity" by arguing for the national and political importance of mourning following Lincoln's death. In a chapter that takes as its theoretical underpinning Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Luciano shows that the flood of Lincoln eulogies, in addition to using grief to bind the nation together, also highlighted Lincoln's "capacity for feeling" and identified him in essence as the "mother" of the reunited nation. A key part of this chapter is Luciano's reading of ex-slave seamstress Elizabeth Keckley's 1868 White House memoir which, she claims, demonstrates that "black grief over the assassination" was "both a mode of affirmative national belonging and a form of affective labor that could allow African Americans to move forward in national time."

I offer one criticism of what overall I believe to be a brilliant and original literary-historical study. While Foucault, Deluze, Anderson and other post-modern theorists illuminate Luciano's book, her reliance on theoretical jargon limits the readership of this important work. Luciano writes well and argues persuasively. Why obscure rather than enhance meaning?