The Silence of Grief ( Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

 

Frederick Elwell’s work, The Wedding Dress (1911). 

The previous painting was created 10 years after the Victorian era officially ended. Yet in many ways, Victorian society did not simply disappear with the end of Queen Victoria's reign. After 40 years living under a monarch who was deeply associated with mourning, propriety, and traditions, many Victorian customs remained deeply rooted in British society long afterward.

 The Queen was an important and the most influential public figure of her time; royal life had long been observed the public and chronicled. Monarchs often became cultural compasses, influencing everything from fashion and etiquette to social behavior and, in Victoria’s case, mourning.  Her public mourning reinforced the idea of how a widow should dress, behave, and publicly express or contain her grief.. This is why many customs associated with the Victorian era survived beyond the period itself and eventually became traditions.

Read more about Victorian customs: Here

GRIEF

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 

 I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless; 

 That only men incredulous of despair, 

 Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air 

 Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access 

 Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness, 

 In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare 

 Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare 

 Of the absolute heavens. 

Deep-hearted man, express Grief for thy dead in silence like to death 

— Most like a monumental statue set 

 In everlasting watch and moveless woe 

 Till itself crumble to the dust beneath. 

 Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: 

 If it could weep, it could arise and go.

A young woman wearing a veil and black clothing mourning at a tombstone, with her dog attending on he by C. Hancock, 1836.

What does grief look like when it has nothing left to say?

Psychology has developed multiple models, and modern grief research generally does not consider grief a fixed sequence that everyone passes through. The American Psychological Association explicitly says there is no “normal” timeline and that people should not expect to pass through grief in progressive stages.

The famous 5 stages by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Denial — “This can't be happening.”

Anger — “Why is this happening?”

Bargaining — “If only…” / “Please, God, if you could just…”

Depression — confronting the reality and pain of the loss.

Acceptance — beginning to acknowledge and live with the reality.

They were developed by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and published in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. Importantly, however, Kübler-Ross originally developed the model from interviews with terminally ill patients, describing their responses to their own impending death. It was subsequently applied much more broadly to bereavement and other losses.

And this is crucial: they were never meant to be a universal five-step recipe for grieving. The APA describes the model as nonlinear: stages can overlap, recur, or occur in a different order.