The Mourner's Dance by Katherine Ashenburg

Author:Katherine Ashenburg [Ashenburg, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-39870-3
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2002-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

The particular shape of a woman’s life made intensive mourning a predictable outcome, but feminist historians suspected something less neutral and potentially sinister. They saw in mourning customs an attempt to control women, particularly their sexuality. It is true that, as mourning practices and schedules became heavier in 19th-century Europe and its colonies, they were accompanied by a growing discomfort with the idea of widows remarrying. It was most often expressed by praising the “loyal” widow who remained one forever, with, after 1861, Britain’s Queen Victoria as the most exalted example.

Etiquette books stressed that, even when it was officially permissible for a widow to move from lusterless crape to something with a hint of shine, or from black to grey, white, and lavender, it was more seemly if she delayed for some days or weeks. The woman who had truly loved her husband, it was believed, clung to her mourning clothes. The thought of signaling by her clothing that she was available for courting filled her not with alacrity but with dismay. Shrouding the widow in a thick, malodorous fog of crape and hampering her way out of mourning with numerous niceties of timing and attitude must have encouraged some of them to think that it would be far simpler and more “natural” to live forever secluded and in black.

From the innuendos and social pressure, however stifling, of 19th-century Britain to the most horrendous of fates for the widow – sati – seems a great leap, but it was not necessarily so for the Victorians. Sati was much on their minds, since it had been outlawed in Bengal only in 1829, after much public agonizing, by Governor General Lord William Cavendish Bentinck. It remained a grisly low point in the treatment of widows, and it became almost commonplace among 19th-century progressives to criticize the excesses of mourning garb as a “symbolic” sati.

India is not the only place where widows perished as part of their husbands’ funeral ceremonies. Sometimes they died, as did slaves and pets, so that the husband would not be deprived of his pleasures in the next world; sometimes so that other men would not enjoy the widow; sometimes so that the widow would not enjoy other men. There are records of widow sacrifice in the dim past in Scandinavian countries and in Egypt; in New Zealand, Africa, the Fiji Islands, and among the American Indians before the missionaries came. In China, widows who remarried were considered unchaste, but if they committed suicide, honorary gateways were built to commemorate them.

But sati holds a special place in the Western imagination, partly because the British in India enumerated and closely observed widow burnings, and partly because the custom stubbornly persists. The first Westerners to record it were Alexander the Great’s soldiers in the Punjab in the 4th century B.C.; twenty-five hundred years later, there are still sporadic reports of sati.

Although its advocates claim it as a doctrine of Hinduism, there is no scriptural authority for sati that is not negated by an equally valid edict.

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