Private Grief Research Articles

All Ranks Behaved Splendidly: Scottish Unit Histories of the Great War, 1916–1936

Scottish military units were strongly represented among the outpouring of unit histories that followed the Great War. A neglected genre, these works stand as cultural as well as military landmarks, expressing the private grief, but also striving to convey the importance and validity of the recent experience of war. The discussion that follows begins by explaining the aims and motivations behind Scottish unit histories. It then considers the mechanics of their commissioning, publishing and writing, before moving on to analyse the style, structure and key narrative themes of these works. It concludes by asking why, unlike the poetry, novels and personal memoirs which addressed the war, these ‘war books’ failed to become part of the common literary currency through which the Great War was later remembered. The article is accompanied by a comprehensive bibliography of these works.

Memory politics and material culture: Display in the memorial museum

When private grief is brought into the memorial museum, this transfer is a deliberate act that is seeking public acknowledgement and action. By considering the life history of a collection of objects now in the Museum of Free Derry (Northern Ireland), the use of objects in private mourning and as agents in the collective processes of public remembering is demonstrated. The story is one of loss and mourning that is intensified by the political context of the deaths. As cherished possessions, these objects are active in the private processes of grieving and recovery. In the memorial museum, they are agents in an evolving justice campaign, embedded in the political negotiations of the region.

‘The White Rose of Yorkshire’: Public Relations, Condolences and Grief Expression

In public relations, there is always unpredictability. It is part of a public relations strategists’ role to assess potential areas of crisis, to monitor the corporate mediascape for unpredictable events and to mitigate uncertainty for their clients be they organisations or individuals. But such public relations exercises are made more complex and unpredictable by the emotions experienced in public grieving. No recent commemoration has been so shocking and grief inspiring as that for British Labour Politician Member of Parliament for Batley and Spen in Yorkshire, Ms. Jo Cox who was shot and stabbed to death outside of her ‘constituency surgery’ in Birstall, West Yorkshire on June 16th, 2016. On her sudden and untimely death a nation and a Commonwealth ‘erupted’ into an expression of mourning, with some commentaries describing Ms. Cox as the ‘white rose of Yorkshire’ in a transient image, ephemeral pure and emblematic of their personal and public grief. As an MP who supported liberal causes, Ms Cox’s untimely death was also a political event. It occurred exactly at that moment of juncture when the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ factions of the BREXIT campaign were focusing their vitriolic fervor, all the more poignant as she died espousing the liberal cause that was defeated in the first Referendum held on June 23rd, 2016. In discussing the relationship between personal and private grief, this article will focus on the eulogies for Ms Cox and the condolence message phenomenon, primarily as a mediated organisational ‘operation’.

Self-Study in Emotion Work: Organizing Chaos by Negotiating Private and Public Grief

In order to improve her practice, a teacher educator explored emotions as catalysts for teaching and learning by asking the research question, “How can I support preservice teachers’ emotional intelligence (EI), as well as my own, as we negotiate the impact of strong emotions in the pedagogical environment?” Three levels of reflection (emotional, cognitive, and critical) provided a conceptual framework for organizing emotions during school violence and chaos. The year-long self-study of a small symmetrical peer-group structure provided a safe place for preservice teachers to engage in honest dialogue that allowed them to navigate professional norms. Participant frameworks and discourse analyses of transcripts revealed ways participants discursively managed (suppressed and expressed) their emotions according to the normative beliefs and expectations held about the teaching profession. Participants made connections to each other, which expanded their EI; however they also experienced disconnection from their missions (personal), due to their assessment of the teaching profession (public) as intolerant of authentic emotional display. Through self-study practices, the teacher educator claimed authority over her experiences by leveraging private emotions to call for public action, one critical step in communal healing and transformation of teaching and learning practices.

Even if the trauma is national, the grief is private

After having conducted lengthy research on people who have suddenly and traumatically lost a loved one, we found that the wider society treats survivors differently, depending on whether the death occurs singly (e.g. through suicide, homicide, accident or sudden child death) or many at once (e.g. through terror, natural disaster). Whereas many seem to assume that grief is easier to bear after mass death because the bereaved receive much attention from mainstream society, there are also advantages to having a more private grief after a single death. In this paper, we discuss both the stressful and supportive aspects applicable after mass death and single death.

How to stop a private grief becoming a professional burden

Rachel Varughese found work tough after the death of a beloved relative. However, she believes the experience has made her a better doctor

Learning To Sing, Learning To Love: Rereading Ted Hughes’s Crow Poems

Learning To Sing, Learning To Love: Rereading Ted Hughes’s Crow Poems Patrick Jackson (bio) Ted Hughes’s Crow poems, made most famous in his book Crow: The Life and Songs of the Crow, are of central importance to the critical study of Hughes’s work. Hughes himself considered them his “masterpiece,” explaining that the period during which they were written was the most intensely creative one of his life (Roberts 71). But despite all the critical attention the Crow poems have received, they have only very recently been examined in a biographical context. As Heather Clark has noted, critics have avoided discussing the poems in terms of Hughes’s personal life is for two reasons: first, because they have respected his wish for his poems to be read on their own, absent of biography; and, second, because the poems themselves go to great lengths to be impersonal, working on a mythological level of meaning rather than a personal or biographical level (Clark 187, Middlebrook 243). However, it has recently come to light that these poems were in fact very personal to Hughes. In a series of letters Hughes wrote to the critic Keith Sagar, only recently published, Hughes explains that his Crow poems were, at the time he wrote them, an expression of the grief and pain he felt in the aftermath of the most pivotal event of his life: the suicide of his wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath (Letters 718). This has been a startling revelation and casts the poems in an entirely new light. For over three decades, the poems had been read only as public expressions of public concerns— as, for instance, criticisms of the modern world or as meditations on human existence. But now these public expressions need to be linked to the private grief that was their source. How are these poems elegies? And, more specifically, how does Hughes write a public poem about a grief that he wants keep private? One way to begin to answer such questions is to examine a voice recording Hughes made in 1997 (the last year of his life) of the Crow poems, a recording that demonstrates some of the ways Hughes coped with his private despair over Plath’s death in the public arena of his poetry. First, it would help to outline the events that led up to the publication of the Crow poems. In 1963, Plath committed suicide in her London flat. Two years later, in 1965, her husband and literary executor, Hughes, published the book of poems that established Plath as one of the most important voices of modern poetry, Ariel. That Hughes felt the burden of Plath’s death and her poetic legacy is clear, and its effect on his own poetry was [End Page 300] undeniably great. By his own account, he stopped writing poems almost altogether for several years (Letters 718). This suspension of creative work was in part because he needed to take over the duty of editing and publishing Plath’s poems. But it also took a major toll on Hughes’s emotional life, and it was this more than anything that interfered with his poetry. He felt creatively paralyzed by Plath’s suicide, partly because he felt the need to express his grief in his work but did not want to publish his feelings directly to the public, a public that was not only hungry for scandalous details about her death and their relationship but also increasingly hostile to Hughes. Some readers and critics even openly accused Hughes of being responsible for Plath’s suicide because of his affair with Assia Wevill, which had prompted Plath and Hughes to separate. One American poet, Robin Morgan, went so far as to write a poem that accused Hughes of murdering Plath, and some people afterward took it upon themselves to shout the poem at Hughes during his public readings (Badia 183). By the late 1960s, Hughes began to write poetry again, and what he produced were the Crow poems. These poems center on a mythological, anthropomorphic bird named Crow, who is both a trickster and a survivor and who is always scavenging for his next meal in a bleak...

Painting words: Severn’s visual dialogue with Keats in The Fountain (1828)

Although the painter Joseph Severn left little in the way of textual commentary on Keats’s poetry in his extensive body of letters and memoirs, he did offer a rich analysis and response to the poet’s verse in his artwork, especially his portraits and his best early painting, The Fountain (1828). The picture not only provides a sophisticated reading of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) but also offers a coded assessment of Keats’s legacy. Further, it wrestles with the public debate over the causes of Keats’s death and, in the end, acts as a complex private memorial to the intense friendship between painter and poet. Severn’s picture takes as its textual source an influential poem by Samuel Rogers and as its visual sources a network of paintings, sculpture, and sketches that lend a multidimensional context to what appears at first to be a straightforward Italian genre scene. Together with key passages from his letters, these artworks persuade us that Severn had more on his mind than a pastoral landscape and that he was quietly revising and adapting the Greek myth of Hylas to explore the cultural debate surrounding the death of Keats and his own private grief.

‘You Can Never Fill the Gap That's Left’: Expressions of Brotherly Loss in the Second World War

Challenging the convention that male grief was always carefully managed and contained, personal narratives can reveal the range of emotional responses to the wartime deaths of brothers including weeping, anger, and guilt. Studying these reactions enables us to explore how predominantly young men traversed the difficult territory between expressions of public and private grief in the Second World War and its aftermath. Awareness of societal demands favouring the ‘stiff upper lip’—the ultimate masculine display of self-restraint—was insufficient to staunch passions. Men showed an acute awareness of the need to demonstrate emotional mastery by restricting their displays of emotion to private spaces and through their readiness to prioritize military and familial obligations over their own personal grief. Despite these conventions, for some men, their determination to mark the feelings they felt for their dead siblings and their memories of childhood companions overcame any reluctance to expose their grief.

Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) by Yen Le Espiritu (review)

BODY COUNTS: Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es). By Yen Le Espiritu. Oakland: University of California Press. 2014.In 2006, when Yen Le Espiritu published her seminal piece, The 'We-Win-EvenWhen-We-Lose' Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the 'Fall of Saigon' in American Quarterly, she was at the cusp of the wave of important new scholarship in refugee studies. Body Counts represents only a fuller extension of her work on the topic, but also a thorough elaboration of her deeper meditations about U.S. Empire and war for nearly two decades. A seasoned scholar of ethnic studies, Espiritu has produced numerous volumes on ethnic and immigrant experiences. This, however, is her first full-length exploration of refugees from Vietnam and she does it with commanding authority.As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, questions still linger as the United States engages in war in various parts of the Middle East. This timely and explicitly interdisciplinary book situates war within a complex web of empire, politics, militarism, and state policies that affect polities and populations. Her insistence on alternative ways to think about the history and memory of the Vietnam War powerfully reimagines remembrance by refugee subjects. Espiritu's feminist approach to illuminating private grief and public commemoration requires a methodology that engages in a critical juxtaposing of events, stories, and cultural practices that stitch together and make visible histories that were previously unexamined (21). Drawing from traditional and nontraditional sources such as her personal (often haunting) memories of the Vietnam War, oral interviews, archives, newspaper accounts, and sociological surveys, Body Counts pieces together what has been missing from dominant memories of the Vietnam War.Chapter One introduces readers to the field of refugee studies by discussing the significance of the title of the book. Espiritu poignantly flips what was commonly referred to as body counts, a military practice of counting confirmed kills that connoted progress during the Vietnam War, to insist that Vietnamese bodies be counted and accounted for throughout her study. Espiritu argues that the figure of the Vietnamese refugee should function not as an object of investigation but as a site of social critique (3) that enables a theoretical unraveling of the refugee category. Scholars have historically dealt with refugee subjects as a problem to be resolved by the nation-state. …

Death and bereavement in the First World War: the Australian experience

The First World War was a turning point in the cultural history of death and bereavement in Australia. The mass deaths of some 60,000 soldiers overseas led to communal rituals of mourning for the war dead and minimal public expressions of private grief. The mass slaughter of so many young men and the interminable grief of so many families devalued the deaths of civilians at home and helped to create a new cultural model of suppressed and privatised grieving which deeply constrained the next two generations. Emotional and expressive grieving became less common, mourning ritual was minimised and sorrow became a private matter.

“Se avessi un figlio!" Desideri frustrati di maternità nella poesia femminile ebraica

The desire of maternity, mostly a frustrated desire or perceived as such, is a recurring theme in the poetry of the so-called “founding mothers” of Hebrew female poetry, namely Anda Amir-Pinkerfeld, Rachel, Esther Raab, Yocheved Bat-Miriam. Although critics have often referred to this subject as a simple expression of private grief, it plays a significant role in the process of formation of a feminine poetic discourse in Hebrew and Israeli literature. This survey reviews the contribution of this topic to Hebrew and Israeli poetry through some significant examples selected from works published from 1929 to 2009.

Bad Timing andUlysses's Failed Jokes

James Joyce's Ulysses is punctuated by bad jokes. While the novel is itself comedic, the scripted rhetoric of humor throughout the narrative fails, revealing fractures in an Irish community divided by shared colonial experience. Good jokes depend on both communal feeling and participants' desire to experience time as pleasurably oriented to future gratification. Ulysses's bad jokes are symptoms of the striated and retrogressive experience of a colonized community, which is politically oriented to the past. Humor in Ulysses takes place in a nonsynchronous time (to adopt Ernst Bloch's term) at odds with the rhetorical forms of joking that are more usually associated with anticipation and futurity. The anteriority of the novel's joking is a reminder of the cultural memory in which Dublin is steeped; historical grievances, which in many ways determine each character's private grief, are set against the novel's prospective comedic form. In other words, Joyce counters the retrospective political life with his novel's comedic orientation to the future.

Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgehn: Presence in absence

One of the initial tasks in approaching this paper was to define the characteristics of the idea of 'lament' in somewhat structural terms. In fact, this goal of articulating 'lament' as a concept, as opposed to merely letting the multiple meanings of the word resonate as they will, was, for me, a persistent irritation. Or perhaps it was more like one of those occasions when one forgets a name, or a word, that then remains frustratingly, infuriatingly on the tip of one's tongue, because the tantalising idea that underpins the concept of 'lament' is surely one of absence.Every lament is an encounter with an absence. The classic, canonic and central laments are the elegies and threnodies that mark the felt absences of death. But, life being what it is, there are many other subjects for lamentation: lament for lost love, lament for lost youth, all the way to Beethoven's rage over a lost penny, which certainly qualifies as a lament, even if an infantile one. And what has been frustrating me in my definitional musings is that I cannot think of one single example of a lament that does not encounter the lost, the absent-either actual or potential.The nature of this encounter with absence varies by context. A musical ritual of mourning usually serves to place an individual's grief in a communal context: to share, and to locate mourning within a cultural tradition. In the lament as ritual, private grief is made public through communal enactment.In contrast, an artistic response to absence usually creates a presence: through art, music, poetry or an image of what or whom is lost is created within the work. In the lament as art form, from a real or literal absence, a figurative presence is generated: an image of the departed. Here, private grief is made public through communicative representation.The majority of my paper concerns the nature of this communicative representation in the first of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder: 'Songs on the Death of Children.' The notion of 'presence' is loaded, theoretically speaking, and is a contested one, and in some senses this short song of Mahler's is about to become the battleground on which the theoretical struggle for presence will be waged. But first I'd like to fling a few visual and textural laments into the mix, to provide some depth and perspective on the relationship between presence and absence. Sir George Clausen painted Youth Mourning in 1916. Interpretation here is not problematic: the image is of youth, as a vulnerable, naked young woman, lamenting the dead young men of World War I. The kneeling figure in a ritual posture of grief, together with the partial cross, frames in the background the waterlogged shell-holes of a Flanders field. The interesting thing here is the portrayal of absence-in particular, the cross being truncated at the edge of the canvas tells us that the focus of the composition of the painting has been shifted to what is central, to what is even more important. The cross and the woman frame, enfold-cradle, if you will-what is at the centre of the painting. And what is central is...absent. A palpable absence. We could imagine the mourning woman as Isolde, singing to a dead Tristan who only she can see. It is not that there is nothing at the centre of the painting: on the contrary, there is something, gone. A presence through absence.Rather than my waxing lyrical about this conceptual inseparability of absence and presence in the lament, it is probably better to let Shakespeare do so for me. Certainly Harold Bloom would approve of letting art speak in place of criticism.1 Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 64' is both a lament and a love song, and makes the point of presence in absence more compellingly than I could:When I have seen by Time's fell hand defacedThe rich proud cost of outworn buried age;When sometime lofty towers I see down-razedAnd brass eternal slave to mortal rage;When I have seen the hungry ocean gainAdvantage on the kingdom of the shore,And the firm soil win of the watery main,Increasing store with loss and loss with store;When I have seen such interchange of state,Or state itself confounded to decay;Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,That Time will come and take my love away. …

Memory and Guilt

Memory and Guilt

Living with the deceased: absence, presence and absence-presence

In this paper I build on my previous case-study focused research on memorialization to develop a thesis for absence-presence evidenced in vernacular memorial artefacts, spaces and performances at a variety of scales and locations across the British Isles. I make three key arguments: i) for bringing the universally significant experience of absence through bereavement to the fore in cultural geographies of absence; ii) for moving beyond representational and phenomenological analysis of memorial artefacts and spaces to focus critical attention on the contextualized interface between the representational and more-than-representational, embodied and affective practices that surround them, for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the living and the absent deceased; and iii) that this interface of form and practice at a variety of vernacular memorials and locations evidences dynamic negotiations of absence-presence. I explore the ways in which the emotions, memory and materiality of absence through death is expressed and negotiated in different memorial forms and landscape settings in the British Isles. Analysis is based on a range of empirical examples drawn from contemporary practices of memorialization and remembrance, and explores how living with absence as a result of bereavement is mediated through different material forms and practices including expressions of ‘continuing bonds’. The discussion is contextualized in relation to wider dialogue on absent presence, but argues that expressions of continuing bonds with the deceased evidence a relational and dynamic absence-presence. Practices associated with absence-presence intersect with growing trends to mark private grief and remembrance of individuals in public space, through the creation of a range of informal memorials that frame a ‘Third Emotional Space’ for the bereaved. The material memorialscape is indicative of the interwoven narrative journeys in and through particular place-temporalities for the living, for whom bereavement is a confluence of emotional-spiritual-practical way-finding.

Crowd-Sourcing Romantic Alienation: Following The Following

Crowd-Sourcing Romantic Alienation: Following <i>The Following</i>

Negotiating Wifely Virtues

This article attempts to examine how three seventeenth-century literati husbands mourned and wrote about their late wives. It argues that when the biographer of a deceased woman and her grieving husband coincided in the same person, the biographical narrative could be complicated considerably with Confucian biographical conventions of the “exemplary” becoming more likely to be challenged in moments of intensely private grief and, especially,deep personal guilt. The overlap between the biographical (private memories of a man’s deceased spouse) and the autobiographical (his own self-redemption agenda) adds to a husband’s need to re/negotiate and redefine wifely virtues in order to accommodate the personal feeling of his roles as husband/biographer, who, in the moment of mourning, may be more interested in the unique than the typical as memory tends to be retained better if a deceased person is remembered as an individual distinctly different from others.

Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn? Overview and Analysis

The article outlines the issues that the internet presents to death studies. Part 1 describes a range of online practices that may affect dying, the funeral, grief and memorialization, inheritance and archaeology; it also summarizes the kinds of research that have been done in these fields. Part 2 argues that these new online practices have implications for, and may be illuminated by, key concepts in death studies: the sequestration (or separation from everyday life) of death and dying, disenfranchisement of grief, private grief, social death, illness and grief narratives, continuing bonds with the dead, and the presence of the dead in society. In particular, social network sites can bring dying and grieving out of both the private and public realms and into the everyday life of social networks beyond the immediate family, and provide an audience for once private communications with the dead.

Crisis and disasters: a psychological response to grieving

In response to the increased frequency of critical situations such as disasters or emergencies, along with information speed,psychology has contributed to building an appropriate and necessary approach to this demand. In this paper we presentsome guiding theories for the development and consolidation of this field. Being a crisis period of psychological imbalanceresulting from the event or situation which poses a problem which is insurmountable using known coping strategies, thegoal of intervention in crisis is to solve problems that put a greater pressure in a short period by using a direct and focusedintervention, so that those affected may develop new adaptive strategies. An important demand is in coping with grieftriggered by disasters, which have definite contours and require psychosocial support for those affected, beyond the earlystages. In this combat, there is the difficulty in locating and identifying corpses so that cultural rituals are performed andallow completion of an ambiguous loss. The concept of presumed world is explored in the significance of the bereavementprocess after a disaster as a vector for the changes thus provoked. Being, at the same time, bereaved people and survivorsis a powerful experience of psychosocial transition, from the breakdown of the presumed world due to the need to respondto the demands of everyday life, in public and private grief. Transitioning between these two areas there is a reflection onpublic mourning, which also includes those who, without being directly involved with disasters, turn to different explanations,be they cultural, political or psychological.