Antebellum Americans were obsessed with mourning. Popular literature and public rituals of the period placed more attention upon the mourner than on the deceased. Urban church graveyards gave way to rural cemeteries, such as Boston's manicured Mount Auburn Cemetery. Their landscaped settings appealed to the grieving sentimentalist's concern with appearances, including orderliness, communal grieving, high morals, and civic pride. Peter Balaam deftly shows that not everyone, however, bought into the superficial shows of mourning. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Susan Warner and Herman Melville resisted genteel displays of bereavement. Juxtaposing biographical details with analysis of their work, Balaam examines the somewhat unconventional attempts these authors made to rectify the “disequilibrium of loss” (7).
Ralph Waldo Emerson's nearly inconsolable grief over the loss of his five-year-old son, Waldo, is well known. Balaam examines the role played by Charles Lyell's popular and influential work Principles of Geology on Emerson's efforts to come to terms with loss and pain. Emerson found solace in Lyell's idea of the earth as a place of endless, dynamic change balanced by destruction and creation. From this “emblem of compensation” (27) Emerson developed a “geological theodicy” (27) that viewed loss as part of a natural, beneficial order, rather than as an inevitable part of life. These ideas find their expression in the elegiac “Threnody” and the essay “Experience.”
The chapter on Susan Warner's moralizing novel The Wide, Wide World substantially deepens and revises past critical work by Jane Tompkins and others. Balaam interprets protagonist Ellen Montgomery's struggles as a reflection of Warner's involvement with neo-Edwardian New School Calvinism and a response to the exaggerated expressions of sympathy commonly found in novels of the day. Ellen does not so much demonstrate “feminist resistance beneath the novel's surface piety” as learn that the compensation for mastering “the art of losing” (154) is godly virtue.
The book's final chapter is a fine renegotiation of Herman Melville's engagement with grief and mourning. Melville's exposure to loss came early, with his father's fiscal ruin and sudden death. Balaam examines Melville's interests in the picturesque to show how The Piazza Tales may be read, in part, as a parody of Catherine Marie Sedgwick's popular picturesque fiction, particularly the moral perfection gained by her female heroines through the suffering of others. Melville undermines conventions of the literary picturesque with images of grieving women who cause his narrators to shift from objectifying others to objectifying themselves, resulting in “mournful reckonings of self-estrangement in intersubjectivity” (16).
Geology, New School reforms, and the picturesque aesthetic: one finishes the book with the understanding that these disparate responses to grief are complex resistances to nineteenth-century Protestant and societal norms of grieving. Balaam's fresh perspective on mourning in this period reveals that for these authors, at least, “grief is something harder and stranger and, ultimately, more important than their contemporaries necessarily knew” (9), making this densely written study an excellent companion to Karen Haltunnen's now classic book on American nineteenth-century sentiment, Confidence Men and Painted Women.
