Henry James’s Black Dresses

Abstract

Shari Goldberg, “Henry James’s Black Dresses: Mourning without Grief” (pp. 515–538) While scholars have carefully discerned how nineteenth-century modes of mourning differ from Sigmund Freud’s later model, the distinction between mourning and grief, in texts of the period and beyond, tends to be collapsed. This essay argues that Henry James disentangles the two terms by insisting on mourning’s association with ritualistic, social behavior, most iconically the wearing of a black dress. In James’s writing, to be “in mourning” generally means to be physically within such a dress, without reference to one’s emotional state. His use of the phrase, particularly in “The Altar of the Dead” (1895) and “Maud-Evelyn” (1900), thus offers ways of thinking through responses to death apart from grief. One is that the black dress can obscure, rather than advertise, the wearer’s feelings. Another is that such garments may facilitate ongoing relationships with persons now dead. Such processes of mourning without grief are nearly impossible to recognize after the advent of psychoanalysis, yet this essay concludes by finding evidence of their circulation in today’s political resistance.