general, most agree that the opening stage is one of
denial, followed by a period of anger, followed by
some kind of depression or disorganization, with
a final period of acceptance or reorganization. The
stages do not necessarily occur in order, and they can
and do overlap with one another. We can see these
stages played out in works of literature. For instance,
when Laurel must deal with her father’s death in
Eudora Welty’s The optiMist’s dauGhter, she
embarks on a journey that begins with her ideal-
izing her childhood, includes misplaced anger at her
stepmother, and ends with her acceptance of her life
in the present.
In one of the most famous literary expositions
on grief, in MeMoriaM, a. h. h. by Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, we see meditations on the denial of his
friend’s death when he says he is having trouble
accepting reality. He says, “By faith, and faith alone
embrace, / Believing where we cannot prove” (ll.
3–4). By the end of the poem, however, he seems
to have moved toward acceptance, saying, “Ring
out the old, ring in the new / Ring happy bells,
across the snow / The year is going, let him go” (ll.
103–105).
Sometimes one stage or one phase of grief domi-
nates the literature, as Homer’s The iLiad, when
Achilles, in his grief over the death of Patroclus,
vents his anger by cutting the throats of 12 Trojan
youths, or when the soldiers in Tim O’Brien’s The
thinGs they carried savagely kill the water buf-
falo and burn the village in a misguided attempt to
avenge the deaths of their fellow soldiers. Denial, on
the other hand, takes center stage in John Updike’s
rabbit, run, when Rabbit refuses to fully acknowl-
edge the horrific death of his infant daughter, and in
Toni Morrison’s sonG oF soLoMon, when Macon
finds Ruth alone and naked with the body of her
dead father.
Both Rabbit and Ruth may have a hard time
dealing with these deaths because they live in a
culture that finds grief, mourning, and their expres-
sion embarrassing. Grief has been defined by many
as an “open wound”—and others want to look
away from that wound, because to acknowledge it
is invariably difficult and confusing. Sandra Gil-
bert says about this phenomenon that “even while
it wounds the mourner, the embarrassment of the
comforter is a sign of a wound for which neither
mourner nor comforter has the proper language”
(254). Bertha Simos calls Western society a “death-
denying culture,” noting that the social psychologist
Erich Fromm has gone so far as to “suggest that
the increase in violence in society today is directly
related to our inability to grieve” (5). We see death
denial in literary characters such as the Tyrone fam-
ily in Eugene O’Neill’s LonG day’s Journey into
niGht, who avoid the topic of their long-dead infant
son and brother and ignore their mother’s obvious
grief (and subsequent morphine addiction). We see
it also in the reactions others have to Septimus War-
ren Smith, the disturbed war veteran in Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs daLLoway. Smith’s pain is an embar-
rassment, a fact that no one wants or knows how to
deal with, and ultimately this denial kills him. The
expression of grief is crucial to moving through its
process, as Toni Morrison says in suLa, “The body
must move and throw itself about, the eyes must
roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat
should release all the yearning, despair and outrage
that accompanies the stupidity of loss” (135).
Occasionally, even when grief is acknowledged,
mourners are unable regain a sense of normal, func-
tioning life without their object of loss. Psycholo-
gists call this “exceptional” or “pathological” grief,
and characters entrenched in this state make appear-
ances in literature as well. Ophelia, for instance, in
William Shakespeare’s haMLet, cannot fathom
the death of her father, Polonius, especially coupled
with the emotional torment she is receiving from
Hamlet, and, losing her grasp on reality, she drowns
herself. Sethe, in Morrison’s beLoved, is so dis-
turbed by her grief over having killed her daughter
that she is haunted by the ghost of this loved one
for most of her adult life. Perhaps most disturbing
is when the adult ghost of Beloved returns to wreak
havoc on Sethe’s life, to demand complete subservi-
ence to her at the expense of Sethe’s relationships
with Paul D. and with Denver, her living child.
Sethe should recognize this, that Denver, a child
fully part of this world, should take precedence over
the otherworldly Beloved; that she takes so long to
do so demonstrates the depth of her grief.
Of all the themes in literature, grief is perhaps
the only one that can serve to illuminate the nature44 grief