Women in grief
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faced, let alone unattractive mourners. No sons, brothers, fathers – no masculine figures at all’ (1995: Foreword). Indeed the Saving Graces, in Oates’ view, are not nineteenth-century women at all. They belong to a different, distant era, to ‘an entirely other dimension of mythologised experience’. As expert embodiments of ritual mourning, they signal the required intensity of emotional distress which the death of a man might bring about, never embracing the graves of women. Adorning the tombs of the wealthy they represent the enormous losses sustained by women who were defined almost entirely by their relationship with a male partner. However, they hold the gaze effectively in that they do not depict what such women might actually be experiencing in private. Being other women, they are safely set apart – by their age, their beautiful, barely clothed bodies and by their expansive gestures of despair. THE FOREIGN WOMAN IN GRIEF The death ritual of pre-modern, non-western societies has recently come to be seen as a source of inspiration for more ‘enlightened’ approaches to contemporary western death (Walter 1994/5, Hockey 1996). As a result, it is not uncommon to find references to the ‘healthier’ or more ‘natural’ mourning practices of ‘old customs and other cultures’ (Riley, cited in Hockey 1996). However, many of the ethnographic accounts which are drawn upon in critiques of current practice are themselves constructed in the image of much that is familiar. For example, Wilson’s account of death ritual among the Nyakyusa of Tanzania (1939) shows a gender-divided ritual within which women are required to wail, while men are expected to dance. Participation in funerals is one of the ways in which members of Nyakyusa society escape suspicion that they have contributed to the death through witchcraft, and indeed fear pervades this ritual, whether it be of the spirit of the deceased, of the afterworld, of contagious diseases or of witchcraft accusations. It is as an expression of this fear, and therefore in order to assuage the spirit, that women wail and indeed bind their bellies with bark cloth to stem the trembling they are expected to experience. Later, men dance, in celebration of male potency, both sexually and in war. Durkheim (1965), similarly describes the centrality of women in the death ritual of the Warramunga, a native Australian group