The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [158]
There have been crabs who were against the Dionysian bacchanal, grumps against the carnival, and grinches to curse even our sedate modern holidays. But life is reinforced through these collective experiences. We have to get our fill of them, and we have to keep an eye on them. We should also keep an eye on who the crab is. Sometimes he or she is blessedly free of the burdens that are relieved at these experiences; sometimes he or she is alienated from the experience by gender, class, or personal taste. Sometimes, of course, he or she has a point, and should be heeded. Still, there is an odd amount of anger against this emotional mummery. What Shelley and many modern critics miss is that the great number of women who died in childbirth, often leaving orphans, contained a sadness apart from politics. Brandreth, Turner, and Ludlam, and Mother Teresa, were hailed by many as symbols of liberty and of selfless generosity. But these figures did not strike personal chords among the mass of people in the way the princesses did. Most of us have not tried armed revolt; most of us do not serve the poorest of the poor; but everyone has worried over someone’s bad husband, someone’s childbirth, and someone’s death. Charlotte and Diana were potent symbols of family grief, and there was both a sting and a comfort in knowing that calamity happened even to beautiful princesses.
There were a lot of grand, extreme funereal processions in the Victorian age, including one for Victoria herself, at the end of it. Victor Hugo’s funeral shocked everyone with its excesses as people flowed through “all the streets of Paris” following his funeral train. Apparently more people showed up to mourn him than the number that usually resided in Paris.10 There were poems and flowers and thousands of embroidered remembrances. How we mourn is a big deal. For most of the nineteenth century in Europe, public grief strove for excess. As the twentieth century opened, people began to reject many aspects of Victorian treacle and to insist on keeping funeral rites simple and noble. In the United States, the immense death toll of the Civil War brought a new dignity to burials. Our somber Memorial Day began in 1865, to help handle the unspeakable loss of life. There were just too many to be flowery about it. Now the graves of our soldiers are simple crosses, stars, and crescents. In Europe the change did not happen until they, too, were faced with massive death tolls, in World War I. In both cases, it began to seem gross to respond to the death of a celebrity with Victorian abundance when so many ordinary men and women were dying violent deaths every day.
In Europe and America, for most of the twentieth century, public grief over famous deaths was restrained, and the funerals were dignified. The most prominent death of what I think of as the short twentieth century (1914–1989) was that of President John Kennedy. His youth added to the tragedy that people experienced—and to the sadness that some people feel about it today, sometimes without knowing much about what he represented and what kind of times those were. His funeral was emotional, but its emotions were contained in somber ritual: the riderless horse, the salute given by his young son. It was poignant but austere. Not until the 1990s, again starting with a dead princess, did ornate public weeping, scribbled notes tucked into fences, and otherwise flowery grief come back in. The twentieth century—shocked by the scale of modern death—showed some gravity in funerals, memorials, and other responses to the news. The news itself was manly, and it generally called for a manly response. The young twenty-first century, like the nineteenth century, allows itself more feeling.
This rise in public mourning since the death of Princess Diana is a much discussed phenomenon in many countries, especially in the English-speaking world. An