Under the pearl-hued sky of Paris, as a welcome spring breeze ruffled the trees above, I walked with a friend through Montparnasse Cemetery to pay our respects to a long-dead artist we both admire. As we wove our way through the marble headstones, we passed a group of people convening around a grave. At first, I assumed that they, like us, had come to visit a long-buried hero or celebrity. Perhaps it was a highly cultured tour group, I thought, noting that the crowd was outfitted in brightly colored shirts and pale jeans. But as we passed by, I suddenly spotted the hearse parked around the corner. I paused, briefly—there was one, no, two men in black suits, heads bowed. The rest, though casually dressed, were similarly postured, all standing around an opening in the soft earth. This was a graveyard and we had run into a funeral. I thought of a passage in Knausgaard’s The Morning Star, in which a man invites a stranger to a funeral. His six-year-old daughter has died and he cannot bear to go alone. The stranger hesitates: he doesn’t have appropriate attire for a funeral, he says. “ ‘For crying out loud, man,’ ” comes the indignant reply. “ ‘It’s a funeral. Everything’s over. It’s all darkness and misery. Who the hell cares about clothes?’ ” Since I read it, I have been returning to this phrase consciously and subconsciously. It contradicted one of my axioms: clothing is not only about surfaces or trivialities. It ought to reflect the seriousness of an occasion. Was I wrong? Does it actually matter? Does a grieving father really notice if the men gathered at his child’s burial are besuited or in black? Few sartorial traditions governing ceremonies remain. An old and thick tradition of rules and customs has disappeared almost completely. Debates now abound about whether one can wear white to a wedding. The custom of funereal dress has certainly fallen out of fashion. Since the late Middle Ages, plain black has been a symbol of bereavement. By the nineteenth century, there was a sartorial etiquette that governed grief: women’s periodicals outlined the ever-evolving social codes (down to the specific textiles deemed appropriate), and shops dedicated to mourning goods abounded. Black was the ultimate visual metaphor for the despair that attends loss. One was expected to dress for the abyss. George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke is a beacon of radiant sincerity, her faith in God and her devotion to her role as woman and wife total. Following the sudden death of her husband, she naturally clothes herself in traditional mourning attire, worn by widows for a minimum of one year. (Widow’s weeds, they used to be called.) The picture that Eliot paints is apostolic: “The widow’s cap of those times made an oval frame for the face and had a crown standing up; the dress was an experiment in the utmost laying on of crape; but this heavy solemnity of clothing made her face look all the younger, with its recovered bloom, and the sweet, inquiring candor of her eyes.” But, as Eliot writes, the attire is not purely an expression of devotion for her late husband. Though Dorothea may not have been in love with Casaubon, she does experience genuine grief in the palpable, sudden destruction of life as she knew and expected it. Mourning dress expresses the enormity of the upheaval, and communicates that upset to the people around her. Her crown of sorrow has a palliative effect. When her sister suggests that Dorothea take it off — Celia considers it a mark of enslavement, not bereavement — Dorothea declines. “ ‘I am so used to the cap — it has become a sort of shell,’ said Dorothea, smiling. ‘I feel rather bare and exposed when it is off.’ ” As the time since the death stretched on, widows were expected to transition from black to grey, and then from grey to a full palette. But the transition had to be instituted with the utmost delicacy. An article in the Pittsburgh Gazette Home Journal from 1904 cautioned: “The discarding of mourning should be effected gradually. It shocks persons of good taste to see a light-hearted widow at once jump into colors from deep black downing as though she had been counting the hours. If black is to be dispensed with, let it be slowly and gracefully, marked by quiet unobtrusiveness.” For the mourner there is psychological wisdom in this gradualism: the slowness of the external transition to vivacity mirrors the slowness of sorrow’s passing. Meanwhile, many nineteenth-century writers — Dickens, Balzac, Baudelaire—observed that the universal European style of black dressing for men cast a funereal spell upon all of society. About the frock-coat style known as le habit noir, Baudelaire observed: “Is it not the inevitable uniform of our suffering age, carrying on its very shoulders, black and narrow, the mark of perpetual mourning? All of us are attending some funeral or another.” Death and mourning in the Gilded Age were fashioned by strict codes, but by the turn of the twentieth century the culture loosened. Critics argued that mourning dress trapped a woman in grief. By World War I, the practice was totally abandoned. It was impractical: there were too many dead. Since then, outside of religious communities, visual symbols of grief have by and large disappeared. Perhaps the custom was too unforgiving — especially for women who could not afford to purchase an all-black wardrobe for the occasion, a kind of anti-trousseau — but it served a purpose, allowing us to navigate the social world sensitively thanks to such external significations. Our culture suffers for its indifference to such manners and codes, even if the proliferation of them had become unwieldy. Modern mourners live in a culture of increasing casualness and informality, in which they have been bequeathed few methods to communicate grief publicly, silently, usefully. Loved ones die, the world spins on, and people are not reminded to ask how are you? in the old, familiar octave. Death is
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