American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman

3. Taking Care of the Dead: Custodianship and Opposition in Antebellum Elegy

   Taking Care of the Dead: Custodianship and Opposition in Antebellum Elegy What is the use of grief in the economy? —    ,  Elegy continued to be a popular and widely practiced genre in nineteenth-century America in part because of its traditional role in helping to sustain the idealizations to which mourning is characteristically devoted. These include the idealization of the object of mourning—its elevation to a position of unassailable virtue and undiminishing value—and also of the subject of mourning, who cherishes an image of himself or herself not only as a successful memorialist but also as the departed’s worthy remembrancer and heir. Both kinds of idealization depend on a sense of the coherence and durability of relations over time. If the value of both mourner and mourned is to be preserved and even mutually enhanced, then the basis of their connection, the source of their affiliation, must remain intelligible and persuasive. Thus, the attenuation of linkages in early nineteenth-century America between past and present, and between the dead and the living, challenged elegiac resourcefulness. Increased immigration, territorial expansion , racial and cultural assimilation, continued secularization and democratization all worked to reduce the authority of traditionalism in American life and to call more and more into doubt the notion that TAKING CARE OF THE DEAD  the dead were the moral and economic creditors of the living. As antebellum America came increasingly to distinguish itself through the social detachment of economic life—an economic life characterized at once by its burgeoning corporate ethos and by the collective violence of its expansionist designs—one consequence was the rapid, marketdriven devaluation of the dead and of the past. In response, antebellum elegy rehearsed, sometimes defensively, sometimes more aggressively, a commitment to the idealizations of mourning that was also a law of value: custom, precedent, ancestry, history should be affluent sources of meaning and authority in the present. Indeed, hundreds of early-nineteenth-century elegies are bound to the repetition of this law. Verses of conservative custodial remembrance proliferate, for instance, in response to the deaths of Presidents Jefferson and Adams. So, too, do poems—such as Lydia Sigourney’s tribute to “The Mother of Washington” and Jane Schoolcraft’s memorial to Ojibwa chief Waub Ojeeb—that seek to use elegy’s traditionalism as an oppositional resource for the celebration of the historically overlooked or maligned. Especially numerous were elegies for young children, whose individual deaths could not readily be deemed historically significant. Against the dehistoricizing energies of contemporary life, the commemoration of personal and collective losses laded the atmosphere . “The air is full of farewells to the dying / And mournings for the dead,” wrote Longfellow in an elegy for his infant daughter Fanny. Whether to “keep unbroken,” as Longfellow puts it, “[t]he bond which nature gives” between parent and child, or to promote public memorial allegiances to the forgotten and the disprized, antebellum elegists urge memory of the dead upon the living. In doing so, they also urge versions of themselves invested with the authority of the dead and of the values developed in association with them: for example, Jefferson’s republicanism, Waub Ojeeb’s hereditary valor, Fanny Longfellow’s innocence. And further, as elegists, they urge the authority of the genre itself. Yetthegenreisalsounderpressuretoadapt.Ifelegistsmustworkharder to liberate the individual suppressed and diminished by what Emerson calls the “sheaths and clogs of organization,” they must also encompass the aggregate suffering of groups and classes of the unnamed dead. In  TAKING CARE OF THE DEAD an era of corporatism—that is, of society’s perceived devotion to combinatorial urgencies—the public expression of personal bereavement can register as a protest against the devaluation of the individual. At the same time, elegists learn to practice a corporatism of their own, insofar as collective mourning can model an alternative to the massive social disavowals of slavery, Indian removal, and other programs of suppression and dispossession. In formal terms, this means that conventional elegies share space with more obliquely elegiac poems: poems that meditate upon death, that reflect broadly upon relations between the living and the dead, and that participate in elegiac conventions while often avoiding the personalism and occasionalism of traditional elegy. These more obliquely elegiac poems—among which none was more popular or widely imitated than William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”— extended the tradition of graveyard meditations on unspecified griefs popularized by Robert Blair...