Mourning in America: Whitney Houston and the Social Speed of Grief

In England in the late 19th century, death was a highly ritualized affair. Wives were expected to wear special dresses — black, conservative, often accessorized with “weeping veils” — for up to four years following the death of their husbands; if you’d lost a sister or brother, six months of mourning garb was the norm. “Full mourning” (lasting for a year and a day after the death), “second mourning” (the nine months after that), and “half mourning” (the three-six months after that) weren’t suggestions or ironies; they were phases to be followed, and strictly.

To modern sensibilities, the whole idea of mourning suits and widows’ weeds seems extremely quaint and ridiculously confining and, overall, just what it is: Victorian. But the clothes and the strict guidelines for donning and doffing them were part of a larger purpose, which was to create a framework, an agreed-upon system of customs and rituals, that people could turn to amid the chaos of a death. The formal observance of a loss — whether for seven days or four years — carved a space for mourning that fit, by communal fiat, into the life of the community in question. By giving people an agreed-upon period of bereavement, the rituals also gave them, implicitly, an agreed-upon time to move on.
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