Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love. Lisa Appignanesi

diaries, and were reviled for adulterating the historic record. Not that I shared their status, either social or historical, but I understood their need to control. Without those gestures towards order, towards keeping the dead in their preferred image, they themselves might easily tumble into visible madness, the tearing out of hair and shredding of clothes.

      I was a contemporary independent woman. I had never – in the way of women and widows before the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870 – been the legal property of my husband, a femme co(u)verte, turning over my identity and my earnings to him, depending solely on him and unable to recoup what might initially have been mine even after his death. No. Laws and customs had changed, but the word ‘widow’ still contained a whiff of sulphur, particularly if you weren’t young enough to be merry.

      I could now definitely see the attraction of hoisting papers into the fire and not having to sort and sift, let alone finding or keeping for posterity what was best forgotten. If I hadn’t yet considered jumping into a pyre, practising suttee or sati, like those good Hindu wives of yore (‘good wife’ being what the word means), who purportedly thought of themselves as part of their husbands and certainly had no independent legal life or means, it’s because flames are not the way I want to go.

      The archaic ‘viduity’, meaning widowhood, chimes with vide or ‘empty’, suggesting lack and want. In Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, the gloomy old protagonist, trapped in never-ending repetition, hears the word in an early tape of himself he is replaying:

      The word ‘widow’ comes from the Indo-European word widhewo married to the Latin vide, all of which means ‘to be empty, separated or destitute’. It’s one of the few words in which the basic form applies to women, the suffix ‘er’ being necessary to specify the male. If this is because men on the whole have not, either historically or today, stayed widowers for very long, the dictionaries don’t say. In John Bowlby’s classic study of mourning, which focused on the bereaved aged forty-five or younger, 50 per cent of men in the statistical cohort of 700 had remarried or were about to after a year or less of mourning. The women took very much longer to re-couple, if at all.

      Back on the year that is gone, with what I hope is perhaps a glint of the old eye to come, there is of course the house on the canal where mother lay a-dying, in the late autumn, after her long viduity.

      He starts, plays the section again and, murmuring the word, goes off in search of a dictionary from which he reads a long definition that puzzles, then amuses him. Is it the word itself, the fact that he no longer quite recognizes it, or that his mother is at last off to join his father that gives Krapp momentary pleasure?

      Sylvia Plath’s devastating poem ‘Widow’ has a near-Gothic resonance – ‘widow’ is a word that consumes itself, a dead syllable with a shadow of an echo, a ‘great, vacant estate!’. Daddy’s idealizing daughter, Plath was her mother Aurelia’s alone from the age of eight. It was a relationship fraught with difficulty. Plath rarely manifested her deeper thoughts to her mother. She enacted them in suicide attempts instead. Aurelia outlived her by thirty-one years, a terrible fate for both. The widow wears death as a dress, Plath writes.

      Freud uses the word ‘widow’ only three times in all the twenty-three volumes of his work in English. It was the loss of the father that spurred his thinking and his seminal The Interpretation of Dreams; and later, like Darwin, the terrible loss of a daughter. Darwin and his wife Emma treasured a box full of their little Anna’s keepsakes – discovered at their home, Down House, long after their deaths. Freud, who stoically eschewed sentiment, nonetheless made one of his great discoveries about absence and how it can be contained and mastered by repetition through his daughter Sophie’s son, Ernst, and his game of ‘fort/da’ – Gone and Here. This consisted of the child throwing a spool on a string out of his cot and retrieving it while uttering the words: the child’s ability to control the going and coming of his toy transformed an unhappy situation – parental absence – into a manageable one through a repeated game. If at the time eighteen-month-old Ernst played this game, his mother was not yet permanently gone, when Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, she was.

      Some might speculate that Freud’s resistance to thinking directly about the condition of those left behind by their spouses is not unlinked to the fact that his own, rather demanding, mother outlived his father by thirty-four years and died only nine before her eldest son. Widows, female or male, don’t even come into The Psychopathology of Everyday Life where you’d imagine they’d be rampant. But, then, widows are scary people – or scared people, which may not always be far from the first.

      Freud’s first use of the word ‘widow’ is in relation to anxiety caused by abstinence, the second in the context of a taboo among many native peoples against consorting with the dead. Illness and death seem to be contagious, so the prohibitions stretch to widows and widowers. In some places, the very presence of people who have been close to the dead is considered unlucky, and may indeed kill those who lay eyes, certainly hands, upon her or him. Lurking behind such practices, and the sense of threat surrounding the widow, Freud suggests, is the danger of temptation.