Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture: Shakespeare to Milton ed. by Margo Swiss, David A. Kent

Abstract

Margo Swiss and David A. Kent, eds. Speaking G riefin English Literary Culture: Shakespeare to Milton. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 2002. Pp. 365". U.S. $60.00 cloth. This collection of essays complements recent scholarship by such cultural historians as Ralph Houlbrooke and David Cressy in elaborating a more complicated and nuanced representation of early modern grief than the summary picture supplied by Lawrence Stone. It also builds on standard scholarship of literary genres pertaining to grief (most notably G.W. Pigman ill’s study on elegy) to identify important adaptations, resistances, and refinements to tradition and convention in early modern grief-writing. In scholarship that seeks to relate literature to other elements of culture, one of the most interesting questions is how and how adequately the artifice of literature represents and redresses the human experience from which it derives and to which it is addressed. The best essays in the present volume make clear attempts to answer this question in the literature of grief. Three of the best essays discuss female modifications to the generic tradition. Donna J. Long asserts that the maternal elegy (exemplified by Mary Carey, Lucy Hastings, Gertrude Thimelby, and Alice Thornton) should be seen as a mode within the broader genre and one that is shaped by social pressure to restrain grief over the death of a child. In this mode traditional elegiac elements of praise and lament are lost or downplayed and traditional attempts at consolation often fail as the elegist asserts her special role as mother and seeks poetic means to “recuperate” her sense of self. Similarly, W. Scott Howard argues that An Collins finds in the elegy’s traditional progression from private utterance of grief to “a consolation linking the public recognition of loss with universal principles” a pat­ tern for turning her own personal experience of mourning into a call for political action. Most notably, her elegy on the civil war (a poem of public mourning) translates her personal search for redemptive spiritual knowl­ edge into a promise of political reform. Margo Swiss’s essay also makes a connection between the private experience of one woman’s grief and its larger social implications. In a complex argument Swiss asserts that Milton opposes current conventions in depicting Adam’s reasoned but inadequate response to Eve’s “emotionally intelligent” tears which are an appropriate response of grief to her dream in Book 5 of Satan’s temptation. Hers is a “godly sorrow” that prophetically anticipates the universal grief of the Fall and ultimately draws Adam into a union of sorrow and redemption. In their shared grief, Adam and Eve model a “cooperative androgyne” that reflects the affective androgyny in the Father/Son relationship. 280 | Nelson Phillip McCaffrey effectively uses Freud’s distinction between mourn­ ing and melancholy to revisit Andrew Marvell’s problematical depiction of grief in “The Nymph’s complaining for the death of her faun.” McCaffrey augments and refines his theoretical framework with reference to Vamik D. Volkan and Daniel Josephthal’s theory of the “linking object” and his own elaboration of Heinz Kohut’s “self-object” (which he re-styles as “Narcissistic Idol”) to explain the Nymph’s inordinate mourning of her faun as an expression of melancholy that stems from her failure properly to grieve her sense of loss at her betrayal by the unfaithful Sylvio, who gave her the faun but spurned her heart. Michael McClintock’s excellent offering finds in Thomas Heywood’s Apologyfor Actors a theory of “affectivity ” (a character’s ability to project intense emotion) and the role that affective spectacle can play in the reformation of an audience by inciting grief, confession and ultimately reform. He then uses A Woman Killed with Kindness to exemplify Heywood’s contention that the affective force of theatrical representations (of grief in this case) reinforces social order, especially gender roles and familial bonds. Paul Stanwood similarly asserts that John Donne and Jeremy Taylor are able to provide in “artful discourse” an edifying channel for their audiences’s grief, but he does not provide so clear a model of how this artifice works. He shows that Donne followed the practice of his time in dividing his funeral sermons into...