Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel by Jolene Zigarovich

Author:Jolene Zigarovich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Though Fennetaux remarks that placing hair in mourning rings decreased in popularity, we still witness the practice in the early nineteenth century. For example, in 1818, James T. Power, fearing he would die on a trip to Sierra Leone, wrote to his love Julia Woodforde describing his plans for a mourning ring to be made for her, entwining each of their locks of hair: “I purchased yesterday a Diamond Mourning ring, I will place a brade [sic] of your hair and mine in it. ON the inside I will inscribe James T Power died … leaving a vacancy for the date if this should be my fate shortly you will receive an account of the time and get it filled up and I have no doubt you will regard the ring with affection and wear it on my account.”45 These examples and others also indicate that sentimental practices that developed around mourning jewelry were not gender specific. Interlocked hair from two lovers generates notions of bodily connection, and intersects both love and grief. Lockets, rings, miniatures, and other material artifacts housing hair encapsulate the growing emotional economy centered on the body, loss, and mourning.

We have seen that jewelry acts as both love token and mourning memento, especially cherished if created with hairwork. In Elizabeth Justice’s Amelia, or, The Distress’d wife: a history founded on real circumstances. By a private gentlewoman (1751), published on the heels of Clarissa, Justice describes the deathbed preparations of Amelia’s mistress Mrs. Sweet, who has contracted smallpox. Her preparations include hair jewelry: “Two or three days before she died, she said to Amelia, My dear, you will oblige me to go to Mr. Blunt’s, the Goldsmith, and desire him to make a Mourning Ring with a Christal, in a Lozinge; for I should love to see the Rings that I design for my friends.”46 Though not described, the lock of hair, we can assume, would be encased. In Helen Craik’s anti-Jacobin Adelaide de Narbonne, with memoirs of Charlotte de Cordet (1800), Victorine opens a casket containing her dead parents’ valuables, including their miniatures, but it is their hair jewelry that is most prized and intimate: she discovers “lockets containing the united ciphers of her parents, done in their own hair.”47 Along with rings and brooches, lockets would be common relics for the middle and upper classes. This mourning locket is a beautiful example of mourning hairwork such as Craik describes, including the blond hair of the “Countess Dowager of Home died 15 Jany 1784” (inscribed on the back) with her initials “ECJ” under a coronet of gold and pearls under glass (fig. 4.2). In Elizabeth Griffith’s epistolary novel The Delicate Distress (1769), Lady Woodville describes a miniature portrait worn as a bracelet: “Charming lady Lawson! What an engaging countenance, what a quick sensibility in her looks, what an irresistible smile! I am not under a necessity of looking at my bracelet, to remind me that this portrait resembles lady Straffon: but lady Lawson is taller, thinner, and more of the brunette” (12).

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