Victorian mourning dress delicately marked the bereaved for tenderness.
Evidence
Grief is exhausting, as we all know. The bereaved are muddled and tense, they need allowances made. But who knows you are mourning, if there is nothing but a long face to set you apart? No one wants to go back to the elaborate conventions of the Victorians, but they had the merit of tagging the bereaved, marking them out for tenderness. And if your secret was that you felt no sorrow, your clothes did the right thing on your behalf. Now funeral notices specify “colorful clothing.” The grief-stricken are described as “depressed,” as if sorrow were a pathology. We pour every effort into cheering ourselves up and releasing balloons. When someone dies, “he wouldn’t have wanted to see long faces,” we assure ourselves—but we cross our fingers as we say it. What if he did? What if the dead person hoped for us to rend our garments and wail? — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 297
Categorization
- SEED: An essay on the lost social function of mourning dress — how losing the visible marker of grief deprived the bereaved of a claim on others’ care.
- XREF: Echoes the book’s earlier meditations on deathbed rituals and the loss of final meaning in dying.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 297