The Question of Pity: Style, Feeling, & Morality in Joan Didion
“First of all, the ones in sorrow should be urged if possible to sit in a sunny room and where there is an open fire. If they feel unequal to going to the table, a very little food should be taken to them on a tray. A cup of tea or coffee or bouillon, a little thin toast, a poached egg, milk if they like it hot, or milk toast. Cold milk is bad for one who is already over-chilled.” -Emily Post, “On Funerals” in Etiquette (1922)
“When someone dies, I was taught growing up in California, you bake a ham. You drop it by the house. You go to the funeral. If the family is Catholic you also go to the rosary but you do not wail or keen or in any other way demand the attention of the family. In the end Emily Post’s 1922 etiquette book turned out to be as acute in its apprehension of this other way of death, and as prescriptive in its treatment of grief, as anything else I read.” -Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
It should not surprise us that Didion anoints Emily Post’s 1922 etiquette manual as the most insightful book on the subject of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion explains that her satisfaction with the etiquette manual stems from its historical place: very simply, it derives from a time when death was a part of everyday life and was therefore susceptible to the rituals and duties of ordinary social congress, much like a dinner party, though sadder. But this is not the whole story. “It spoke to [her] directly” because it respects specificity and emotional distance.
Emily Post’s concrete practicality relieves those who are a party to grief of uncertainty by its minute legislation of correct action: where to sit in church, what to bring to the home. Specificity in this case is a social ethics, a set of discrete behaviors (not abstract maxims that can be interpreted variably) towards others that demonstrate “competency” and “sensitivity” in the aftermath of death. For Didion, Post’s greatest insight lies in her appreciation of the physiology of the griever, the somatic responses to loss in, for instance, the lack of appetite or increased agitation. Because the book attends to physical, not emotional, manifestations of grief, it provides a proper guide for those caring for the grieving. The most important advice is to protect the bereaved from “all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear”: You might bring a ham, but “you do not wail or keen or in any other ways demand the attention of the family.” Other people’s emotions – even those of one’s most intimate friends and family—are thereby properly bounded and contained, opening a space around the bereaved that maroons her with her own unbearable sense of loss.
The problem that Didion leaves herself is to chart the expressive latitude of the griever, which she formulated as “the question of self-pity” in the first pages of her book. “Life changes fast./Life changes in an instant./You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends./The Question of Self-Pity.” Didion uses these lines as a leit motif, repeating one or more of the four throughout the memoir, each return marking out her relationship to self-pity as she cycles through a year of grief. By the end, Didion has not changed her mind about self-pity—it remains a degraded outlook—but she has begun to revise her relationship to it.
In the last return of “the question of self-pity” toward the conclusion of the work, Didion makes her strongest reassessment of the morality of attending to one’s own feelings of loss. While she is certain that her own youthful scorn of self-pity was rather easily held, her more dramatic recalculation comes with the emotion itself. First she describes the collective horror of self-pity, our “abhorrence” of it conveyed in the synonyms for the word: thumb-sucking, boo hoo poor me, indulge, wallow. These words convey the childish satisfactions of grief from which the moral adult abstains. Didion concludes: “Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given.” Most universally reviled? pestilential? This hyperbole, never Didion’s stylistic preference, suggests the extent of her anxiety. But finally, Didion makes her tentative peace with self-pity by weighing it against the form of consolation she finds even more morally dubious: self-delusion. Reassessing her attachment to the popular music of her grandmother’s generation, she comes to realize that what she took to be tough-minded optimism was, in fact, emotional self-indulgence. She finally concludes: “We are not idealized wild things./We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all” (198, YMT). The Year of Magical Thinking has finally been able to record Didion’s emotional devastation, not in an outpouring of grief, a “wail” or “keen,” but merely in the allowance it makes for emotional self-reflection.
Deborah Nelson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at The University of Chicago. This piece is excerpted and abridged from Deborah Nelson’s forthcoming book Tough Broads: Suffering in Style. Do not cite or quote without permission from the author.
Photograph: On a patio deck overlooking the ocean, Quintana Roo Dunne (L) leans on a railing with her parents, American authors and scriptwriters John Gregory Dunne (1932 - 2003) and Joan Didion, Malibu, California, 1976. (Photo by John Bryson/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
–Deborah Nelson
