Emma de St Saens (thank you to Sixtine for this image)
Dear friends and readers,
As yesterday I attempted to rest at home after several days of doing too much, driving myself to be sure and have finished all I promised I would do and told myself I needed to (for another blog, a diary one), when it was near 5 in the afternoon, and I felt so mentally tired I could read no more, and put a movie on my VLC media players, I knew I had faced what’s at the core of what I do and have felt from late last September when I knew he had decided dying quickly was the only “best” or (scarcely) endurable option left to him. (Cancer, folks.)
Grief is a euphemism, like “process” and “journey.” As a term, “grief” is not as bad as these cant terms as they imply a narrative and narratives by the nature of their coherence offer meaning and if they come to some end, a closure. More codifications of social pretending.
Anguish, tearing anguish is at the core of me. It’s so strong if I keep thinking about it, it seems to fill my body. I feel like I am going to burst with it. Then there’s bewilderment: I can scarcely believe he’s gone, that it all happened. (I include the whole horrible cancer experience which I shared with my beloved though I could not begin to realize and to feel what he did.) Some bad dream I awake from and don’t believe in only he’s not here. Absent. And I am held fast. He’s gone. All he was, all he made of life for us. I find myself wondering why I can process thoughts, enjoy this or that music or book and he’s not here. How can it be my brain is going and his is not. Recognition of this central core of what it is to be a widow explains to me all I am doing, why I do it, which just about everyone I talk to says “are the right things.” Why do they say this? And so swiftly and repetitively, all agreed. Strange this agreement. It’s implied these acts are good in and of themselves. Are they? They are the social life available to a person like me. Jim used to say it was so hard to get people to take anything seriously (that much American social life is dysfunctional). They are. more truly. routes of escape, temporary alleviation. This morning I was bleakly sad and lay in bed, with ClaryCat having tucked herself between my right shoulder and arm, until after 7 as then autumn light had come into the room.
What happens after a time is the widow or widower gets used to enduring this.
I wrote a paper last week, “The Depiction of Widows and Widowers in Austen’s Novels and Letters.” After I’ve delivered it at the EC/ASECS conference I will somehow get it up onto the Net and connect it to this blog. If anyone would like to see or to read it sooner, let me know and I could send it on. Austen is deeply antipathetic to the approach I take in this blog and yet writes out of a full awareness of it too, so they will eventually (when I put the paper online somehow or other) form two contrasting diptychs.
Both, this blog and that paper, are intended directly for others whose beloved partner has died and would like to break through the taboos and have acknowledged what they experience. I write for others like myself.
Andrew Davies’s Edward (spoken by Dan Steevens) in the 2008 Sense and Sensibility, speaking of his father’s death to Elinor (Hattie Morahan):
I was like a boat without its anchor; we must all have some one to listen to us, to understand what we feel.
So often Andrew Davies (for me) “corrects” Austen out of her own text viscerally and to the central searing point.
Dizzy, still from the nightly sleeping pill.
Sylvia
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
Dear Ellen,
I would appreciate receiving a copy of your paper: “The Depiction of Widows and Widowers in Austen’s Novels and Letters.”
Kind regards,
L. Langford
Nancy: Austen shows us widows, the unmarried spinsters and the lonely though married. I think the Bennet parents are both lonely though married The rich widows Mrs. Allen in S &S and Mrs, Ferrars in the same book come to mind. They control people through their control of money. There are rathder more poor widows– mrs. bates, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Dashwood– who isn’t destitute but who suffered a drop in consequence, residence, and style of living.
The widowers aren’t shown as particularly grieving nor much impacted by the death of the spouse. Sir Walter Eliot became more reckless on his soending and spoiled his oldest daughter and his heir, Mr. Eliot seemed to be uneffected at all by the death of his wife . If he had greived he had been consoled by the fortune he enjoyed.
Miss Bates is usually mentioned as a sinster without money, caring for a widowed mother and worried about what would happen to her when her mother died.
However. Miss Eliot is a spinster as well . She set her sights and her standards and her nose too high.She needs a bit of humility plus asurance that her dowry is intact — and the idea of being unmarried and having both younger sister go into to dinner before her– to push her to accept someone.
Nancy
In reply to Nancy,
There really is a firm distinction in Austen’s writing between widows and widowers and in the case of women the depiction hinges on what they inherit or lose and how this impacts them and all those around them; true that the widowers are marrying types, at least marriageable; those who seem permanent widowers are much older. That was the reality (and still is in part): women over 50 rarely remarry in comparison to men who remarry past 65 with some ease.
The emotional complex of suffering, loneliness is there too, but it’s presented from an angle of how becoming a widow/widower and the loss of the person affects everyone around the widow/widower — the rest of the family.
Studying the issue you begin to see that death is omnipresent in Austen, at least the chance and frequency of it, even if dying itself is not presented. We saw omnipresent death in the letters in the case of childbirth emphatically. Rereading the letters looking at the way she treats her brothers sheds a different kind of light on the letters too — a distancing in her.
A friend: “I’d be glad to read your widowhood paper, Ellen, if you’ll send it – though I may not get to it until I get back from Montreal.”
Why thank you. Nancy’s response to blur widowhood with spinsters or emotional loneliness in marriage may be seen as the common readers’ response, but not so, as the scholarly types similarly seek to blend the two and then discuss power. Again in our time people want to erase the state of widowhood. They don’t want to have to recognize it and if they do they want to deny its core.
These are different states — widows, never married, previously married, in solitude — seen less so today because spinsters can have money and they can have or have had a love life — and there are many divorced women alone. In my new gothic class, all older women, there are at least two widows beyond me and one divorcee I know of.
I’d like to read your essay, Ellen. I think the point you make about widows learning to “endure” the pain is only too right.
Clare
A friend: “I always love your blogs. The one on widowhood is wonderfully honest and to the point. Most of us take refuge in ” busy, busy”. It stops one from thinking too deeply about the real problem. I suppose we just evolve a way of going on, a way through the day without that essential person.”
Yes. Persuasion: “[Lady Russel} and Sir Walter, did not marry, whatever might have been anticipated on that head by their acquaintance … That Lady Russell, of steady age and character, and extremely well provided for, should have no thought of a second marriage, needs no apology to the public, which is rather apt to be unreasonably discontented when a woman does marry again, than when she does not; but Sir Walter’s continuing in singleness requires explanation.” He had proposed to two other women (” very unreasonable applications”). Austen then gives an ironic explanation.
When I first read about Mrs. Clay “who had returned, after an unprosperous marriage, to her father’s house,” I somehow got the idea she was divorced (although I knew divorce was very rare and difficult). But like Mrs. Smith, Lady Russell, and Lady Dalrymple, she is a widow.
Judy L: ” “I envy your ability to write so eloquently and profusely even in grief. “