Mourning ‘with a female heart’: Grief and gender in the late eighteenth century

Historically the female sex has been associated with emotionality and thus with expressive and/or prolonged mourning. With reference to Friedrich Theophil Thilo’s novel Emilie Sommer (1781-1782), I argue that in sentimental works from the late eighteenth century, the emotional work of grief is liberated from any essential gender association to circulate freely in the sympathetic epistolary exchange between characters. The gendering of mourning in the late eighteenth century is to be sought elsewhere: in psychological investigations which problematize the binary opposition between thought and feeling and examine the impact of grief on perception. An autobiographical text from the period, Sophie von la Roche’s travel journal Erinnerungen aus meiner dritten Schweizerreise (1793), illustrates that female mourners are expected to adhere to ‘objective’ standards where emotion and reason are concerned, not to portray their grief as subjective, creative process.