The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [157]
He could have given himself more credit; he understood a lot. It was a festival of irrationality. What many critics miss is that it was also the kind of “woman’s story” that can call people’s hidden grief out into public. Millennial zeros or not, Diana’s death let out a blast of inner rage, empathy, and plain sadness that could seem “close to violence.”
How did we get to the point where it seems like leaving a bunch of flowers is a big deal? Remember all the public drinking, sex, and dismemberment that used to go on at the bacchanalian festivals and the carnivals?! Not just in one or two towns, but everywhere, with everyone involved. Yet here, in response to floral pilgrimage, there were many scolds. Many people wanted to know why Princess Diana, who died five days before Mother Teresa, was so much more loudly mourned. People show their mutual grief because they have mutual grief; they show it in these eruptions when there are insufficient ways to show it scheduled into the regular calendar.
Consider this nasty mock eulogy: “The Princess…is dead. She no longer moves, nor thinks, nor feels. She is as inanimate as the clay with which she is about to mingle. It is a dreadful thing to know that she is a putrid corpse, who but a few days since was full of life and hope.”5 This time it is not Diana. The princess referred to here was Charlotte, and our curmudgeon is the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The year was 1817. Shelley was angry because within a day of the princess dying, three men—Brandreth, Turner, and Ludlam—were executed by the state, and Shelley thought they were more worthy of the country’s tears, which all seemed to be going to the princess.6 The men’s crime was called treason, but it appears to have been a protest against local job conditions: people were working fourteen-hour days and not making enough to feed their families. There were reputedly four leaders, but the one who instigated and orchestrated the whole thing, Oliver, turned out to be a government plant. Here, Shelley said, was a true tragedy. Many agreed, and many also knew that Princess Charlotte was not being mourned for being a person of exceptional character. Rather, as a princess, she was known for almost entirely domestic aspects of her life. Daughter of the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne of England, she had won much public attention when she refused her father’s first choice of husband for her—a prince famous for his drinking—and married for love a few years later in 1816. In the first nine months of her marriage she had two miscarriages, and then, late in 1817, she gave birth to a stillborn son and died herself the next day. She was twenty-one.7 The philosopher Harriet Martineau witnessed what followed in the country and described the death of Princess Charlotte as “the great historical event of 1817.” Moreover, “never was a whole nation plunged in such deep and universal grief. From the highest to the lowest, this death was felt as a calamity that demanded the intense sorrow of domestic misfortune.”8
Shelley claimed that he couldn’t understand why people would so mourn the princess. After all, he said, women die in childbirth all the time. These were nameless strangers to us, yes, but who among the mourners had ever really met the princess? Shelley reminded his reader that every day some family loses its wife and mother, often in poverty. “Are they not human flesh and blood? Yet none weep for them—none mourn for them—none when their coffins are carried to the grave (if indeed the parish furnishes a coffin for all) turn aside and moralize upon the sadness they have left behind.”9 Shelley did not see that in mourning the princess, the people were mourning all their dead young mothers, and expressing their own fears. People need public expressions of grief and fear in order to be happy; this kind of psychological work cannot be done alone. Vigils and memorials can be cliché, can feel shallow or scripted, but there is no need to question