Note: This post contains unmarked spoilers for Hamnet. For the full experience, read it on Substack.
The Oscars are this evening, not that anyone gives a shit anymore.
The smart money says that, having snagged the equivalent award in the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes, Jessie Buckley is a lock for Best Actress for her starring turn in Chloe Zhao’s period drama Hamnet. I went to see it in the cinema last weekend and can attest that such an accolade would be well-deserved: her performance as Agnes Hathaway1 is an intensely physical (even primal) portrayal of a woman overwhelmed by grief. In a way, the excellent performances from Buckley and Paul Mescal are almost better than the material deserves, elevating a screenplay which struck me as somewhat undeveloped and underwritten. I also think we need a temporary moratorium on Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight”, quickly becoming this generation’s “Adagio for Strings” and the go-to soundtrack for movies about mothers grieving the deaths of their children.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, a brief synopsis. William Shakespeare marries Agnes Hathaway, with whom he has three children: a girl named Susanna, and a pair of twins named Hamnet and Judith. William moves to London to pursue his career in the theatre, while the rest of the family stays behind in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of eleven, the already sickly Judith contracts a serious infectious disease which she appears sure to succumb to. Armed with her knowledge of herbal medicines, Agnes makes every effort to treat her illness, while William races home from London. Alas, in a tragic reversal, Judith makes a full recovery, but Hamnet contracts her illness, which proves fatal. Agnes and William are devastated by Hamnet’s death, with Agnes harbouring resentment towards William for his absence. Several years later, William channels his bereavement into his masterpiece, the tragedy of Hamlet. Agnes goes to see it being performed in the Globe theatre, with William portraying the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the title role by an actor who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Hamnet. The sight of what her son might have looked like as a young man has an immense effect on Agnes, and she smiles for the first time since his death. It’s an affecting tribute to the power of art to move and to heal.
Emerging from the cinema and wiping tears from our eyes, I remarked to my girlfriend that, as moderns, it’s difficult for us to comprehend the kind of relationship that people in the sixteenth century had with death. For most of human history, mothers dying in childbirth was a routine occurrence. In modern Western countries, a child dying in infancy is exceptionally rare, but in the sixteenth century, raising children was a numbers game. Parents would have eight or nine children, fully cognisant that half of them would not live to see their fifth birthday. Even in the most underdeveloped countries in the modern world, the infant mortality rate is a fraction of what it was in Europe in the seventeenth century or earlier.
A graph of child mortality over time. I struggle to envision a society in which literally half of all children would die before turning five. Note that this chart only dates back to 1751, over a hundred and fifty years after the setting of Hamnet, in which I can only imagine things were even worse.
In light of this, William and Agnes’s reactions to the death of their son are unavoidably anachronistic: they find his death just as shocking and unexpected as any modern married couple would. In the last decade of the sixteenth century, there’s simply no way that two adults of this socioeconomic status could have three children without understanding that at least one of them likely would not live to adulthood. The film even sort of acknowledges this when William’s mother points out to Agnes that three of William’s siblings died before the age of ten.
My mother once explained to me that, with infant mortality being such a horrendous commonplace in earlier eras, parents would deliberately avoid forming strong emotional bonds with their children until such time as they could be reasonably confident the child would survive to adulthood. Such an attitude might strike us as cold and heartless, but that’s only because we’re fortunate enough to live in a time and place in which infant mortality is an extreme rarity. In the sixteenth century, parents had operate under the assumption that one of their children might die young, and prepared accordingly.2 It’s a defensive strategy not unlike the emotional distance doctors are encouraged to maintain with their patients: a doctor who emotionally fell apart every time one of his patients died simply would not be able to do his job effectively.
A clip from Scrubs in which Dr. Cox explains how important this is.
This got me thinking about attachment theory.
This is a concept in psychology first proposed by the psychiatrist John Bowlby. He theorised that children’s early experiences with their parents (or lack thereof, in the case of orphans or those taken into foster care) are formative, and govern how children will tend to form emotional attachments with others in the future. The three canonical “attachment styles” are:
- Securely attached: Securely attached people feel comfortable in platonic and romantic relationships, expect their romantic partner to meet their emotional needs, and are more than happy to meet their romantic partner’s emotional needs.
- Insecurely attached – anxious: Anxiously attached people often suffer from low self-esteem, require regular reassurance that their romantic partners still like them, and tend to act out and engage in “protest behaviour” if they feel their needs aren’t being met. This is the classic “needy” or “clingy” woman who complains that her boyfriend doesn’t pay enough attention to her.
- Insecurely attached – avoidant: Avoidant people are put off by emotional intimacy and use detachment strategies to distance themselves from their friends and romantic partners. They often have unrealistic ideas about love and romance, fantasize about an “ideal” partner with whom they will feel no qualms about becoming intimate with, and idealize past romantic partners as a means of maintaining distance between themselves and their current partner. When women complain about men being “commitment-phobic” or “emotionally unavailable”, this is who they’re complaining about.
Amir Levine and Rachel Heller’s book Attached is a fascinating introduction to the concept. A major limitation is that some of the terms are defined in a rather slippery fashion. Levine and Heller start by assuming, as Bowlby did, that one’s attachment style is largely determined by formative childhood experiences. But elsewhere in the book, they do seem to begrudgingly acknowledge that nurture isn’t the only game in town and that people might be genetically prone to one attachment style over another, and that traits such as sex might influence this. (It isn’t hard to imagine how deliberately keeping one’s sexual partners at an emotional remove might be an evolutionarily beneficial strategy – at least, for the sex which does the impregnating. Genghis Khan certainly didn’t spend much time writing sonnets dedicated to the mothers of his children.) They also recognise that one’s attachment style is not set in stone and that a securely attached person can “rub off” on their insecurely attached partner (or vice versa).
Perhaps attachment style is the wrong term. What I’m really driving at is not so much attachment styles (in the sense of one’s “natural” tendencies for how to act in an intimate relationship) but attachment strategies.
As we saw above, even a naturally friendly and gregarious doctor who thinks fondly of his patients nonetheless knows the importance of maintaining a certain emotional distance from them. If he were to react to a patient’s death in the same way he would if a close friend of his died, he would spend half the year on compassionate leave, rendering him unable to help his surviving patients. Any doctor who doesn’t learn this lesson will eventually be selected out of the talent pool, no longer able to shoulder the emotional burden of coping with the deaths of dozens or hundreds of loved ones. Logically, this implies that emotionally avoidant doctors have a major advantage over their securely attached peers: the latter must learn to suppress their natural predisposition to forming emotional bonds with those around them, while the former do that by default.3
Now think about this concept, not in terms of “survival” in the sense of career progression, but actual, life-or-death survival.
Imagine that you were the parent of several small children, and one of them unexpectedly died before the age of five. In all likelihood, you would be emotionally devastated. You would spend many long hours curled up in bed; your friends and family would likely have to chip in to help caring for your other children; you would probably not work for several months. Such an emotional response would be perfectly appropriate in our modern society, when a small child dying before the age of five is exceptionally rare.
But in a more primitive society like that in which William Shakespeare lived, such a reaction would be completely untenable. The concept of taking compassionate leave to process your grief simply didn’t exist (except for the exceptionally wealthy, who didn’t have to work anyway). Your friends and family likely won’t be in a position to look after your children for you: they’re already working twelve-hour days just to put food on the table for their own children, and two or three additional mouths to feed was no small ask. Like it or not, someone has to till the fields and milk those cows, and that someone will have to be you. A parent who responded to the death of their young child by curling up in bed for months would likely starve.
In light of this, parents had little choice but to maintain an emotional distance with their children, so that they could remain relatively functional if the worst were to befall them. Just as with our doctor example above, this is a situation in which the emotionally avoidant have a competitive advantage: unlike their securely attached peers, avoiding forming emotional bonds with others comes naturally to them. A securely attached parent with a close emotional bond to their young child would likely be so devastated by the loss of that child as to be completely unable to function, thereby selecting themselves out of the gene pool. If attachment styles are innate and subject to genetic predisposition, it’s conceivable that emotional avoidance might even have achieved fixation. When one in four (or even one in two) children die before the age of five, a parent forming emotional bonds with their young children simply isn’t a viable strategy.
In our era, in which infant mortality is rare, the selective pressure on parents to be emotionally avoidant is essentially non-existent, and parents are expected to form strong emotional bonds with their children from a very young age (indeed, the state can even take children into care if their parents are deemed emotionally neglectful: imagine how bizarre that statement would sound to someone in the sixteenth century). Given this, one would logically expect emotionally avoidant behaviour to be rare. After all, there is no society in human history in which the risk of being emotionally devastated by the death of a loved one (including a child) has been lower.
But if anything, the opposite seems to be true. Millennials and Gen Z are having far less sex and far fewer romantic relationships than previous generations. Gen Z are the most sexless generation in human history, with 44% of Gen Z men reporting no dating experience at all during their teen years. Derisive jokes about the “male loneliness crisis” hide the fact that what’s really going on is a human loneliness crisis, with 27% of Gen Z reporting having no close friends at all.
In a society in which death is an omnipresent fact of life, emotionally insulating oneself from those around you is a sound strategy. I truly don’t know what to make of people applying the same strategy in a society in which premature death is practically unheard of.
1Shakespeare’s wife was actually named Anne Hathaway, but the film renames her Agnes to avoid confusion with the actress of the same name (who was herself named after the historical Anne Hathaway).
2This has got me thinking about the concept of psychological trauma, which was traditionally defined as the emotional responses exhibited by people after experiencing distressing events outside the realm of normal human experience (examples including rape, bodily injury, natural disasters etc.). This implies that which events are “traumatic” and which aren’t is a fundamentally statistical matter: an event which might be “outside of the realm of normal human experience” in one society might be common in another. The idea that the death of a minor child would qualify as “traumatic” for a modern married couple, but would not for a married couple in the sixteenth century, sounds a bit weird. But it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. To a greater or lesser extent, all of our emotional responses are shaped by the culture in which we are raised. It’s reasonable to assume that modern parents would feel more emotionally devastated by the death of their child than would parents who grew up in an environment in which children dying was fairly common.
3As entertaining as it was to read, this was one of many major bugbears I had with Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. In one chapter, he points out that the single most important factor determining whether a patient files a medical malpractice suit against their doctor is not whether they believe he is medically culpable for poor patient outcomes (or even criminally negligent), but simply how much they like him: as a rule, patients don’t sue people they like. I don’t doubt that this is true: my disagreement with Gladwell is that he seems to think this is a point in support of his thesis (namely, the importance of relying on intuition and snap judgement), when to me it could not be a greater indictment thereof. My goal in going to the hospital is to get better: I’m not here to make friends, and certainly not to make friends with my doctor. A competent doctor who does everything in his power to help his patient should not get sued just because of his substandard bedside manner. Conversely, an idiotic doctor who kills patients by the boatload should not get off scot-free just because of his winning smile. I’ll take Dr. House over Patch Adams any day, thank you.
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Notes -
Good post. AAQC'd. I agree that there is a strong cultural component when it comes to attitudes and reactions to childhood mortality, for the same reasons. I would so far as to say it applies to miscarriage, I am somewhat confident that women in India do not make nearly as much of a fuss about them, when compared to American counterparts. That includes wanted and planned pregnancy. It is usually treated as a sore disappointment, instead of a reason to break down and receive a great deal of sympathy. We are also much more pragmatic when it comes to abortions, especially terminations due to physical abnormalities in the fetus.
Of course, everyone would be extremely sad and upset if the baby was birthed at term or someone's child died during infancy. Most people younger than my nearly centenarian grandpa do not remember the days of 50% infant mortality here. Antibiotics and cesareans made a HUGE difference.
PS: I think you should have saved this for Scott's book review contest, especially if you added more citations in support of your theories.
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I'm pretty sure that "Emotional Avoidant" is women pathologizing a man who just wants to keep fucking them but not do feel-y relationship stuff with them, because he's too hot to need to bother.
Similar to "Hysteria" or "Drapetomania." I just hear it said too much and it makes me roll my eyes, it's becoming one of those words like Abuse, Gaslighting, Love-bombing, et cetera.
Nah, I'd say it covers a lot of autistic or adjacent men too, in my experience. Women require a non-negligible amount of emotional labor, as much as they claim to be responsible for all of that. I'm lucky some of it comes naturally, but I often have to make an intentional effort.
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Curiously, although the authors of Attached acknowledge that men are more likely to be avoidant and women more likely to be anxious, they point out that cross-sex examples aren't hard to come by, and even go so far as to diagnose the title character of (500) Days of Summer as avoidant.
Those are probably actually emotionally avoidant people, since they don't represent one woman's entire dating history, and weren't diagnosed by Reddit.
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That's a reasonably recent theory which I don't necessarily agree with. We have written sources from the Classical world on down where people express grief over losing children. What did happen was a completely different attitude to showing emotion; a gentleman or virtuous man would have control of himself and would not express either excessive grief or joy. That could come across as "cold and heartless attitude", but it's just a matter of chronology: the past is indeed a different place. You don't laugh at jokes in public, only fools and stupid people do that. Same way that you don't weep and wail over a death in public:
And yet the parents did grieve, and did set up funerary monuments and inscriptions:
King Henry VII had children who died in infancy and who were remembered:
Upon the death of his eldest son, he and his wife were very affected by it by all accounts. They were very grieved, but they mutually supported each other by reinforcing the idea of "stiff upper lip" (to use an anachronism of my own):
I think we tend to flatter ourselves by comparison with the past; we're a culture that has legitimised abortion as a human right, and I've seen attitudes on display both in the context of abortion discussion and in the historical past, where it's expressed "oh they have [six/seven/eight] children, they can't possibly care for them all!" with overtones of 'large families' being inherently abusive. We may kill our children in the womb, but the ones who are allowed to be born are wanted, they're loved, we care about them in a way that people who have four+ kids just cannot possibly care in the same way!
Any written sources from the Classical world that have come down to us, concern only the top ~10% of society, if that. Your average illiterate peasant wouldn't have left a gravestone with an inscription for us to find; he couldn't have if he wanted to. (And not just because he was illiterate and couldn't write a message, that could be - and sometimes was - fixed with a standardized template; mainly he couldn't have afforded the stone or the services of a mason.)
Do note: we have an epitaph or two for dogs from Roman times. This doesn't tell us anything about the common Roman experience. All it tells us is that there were at least a few people in the entire Roman empire, during its entire existence, who could afford a stela for their dog. (It may well have been conspicuous consumption rather than any actual feelings; or perhaps it was both.)
We have stones for dogs today, too. Even in rich Western countries it's not common, but it does exist; maybe in another two thousand years, when our civilization has fallen and another has arisen, someone will dig one up and write a treatise on it. It will say absolutely nothing about our society today.
Before they had abortion, they had infanticide. It was common and normal in the Roman Empire. The Christians tried to ban it, they banned it over and over and over again for a thousand years, which tells us people didn't listen to the ban and kept doing it.
There's places where it still happens today, despite the availability (though perhaps not accessibility) of medical abortions. Every once in a while, a third-world immigrant still tries to expose their baby even in the West, and then everyone's shocked.
Yes, the poor leave little record behind them.
Except for the bones.
I do think a lot of modern attitudes towards the past are self-flattery; we're so much better, more empathic, more cultivated.
People used to go on about how the poor and lower classes of society were literally less sensitive to pain than the better-off, the blue-bloods. A literal physical difference, so suffering and pain affected them differently and didn't mean the same thing.
People are people. They grieve and rejoice the same as we do.
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If you look into the history of poorhouses, you will also find stories of people whose life were ruined due to grief from losing children. So we can see that even those most likely to loose their children, could still feel intense sorrow over the event.
Only having few written sources on people grieving their lost kids is also not necessarily indicative that it did not happen. People tend to write about either the exceptional or what they consider important. If something is extremely common, even if sad and tragic, then it is possible that only those very close to the event itself would be interested in writing down their experience. But for most of history, only the elites were capable of writing. In other words, it is possible that grieving was common place and that many were deeply affected, but because it was considered an ordinary part of life, most people did not care to write about it.
I would not assume that people were less attached to their kids just because survival was less guaranteed.
Besides, people are quite god at surviving. Humans have an impressive capacity to soldier on in the face of all kinds of pain if the only alternative is starvation.
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I doubt your description of grief was accurate for most people at any point in history, including now. I know women who were widowed with young children, and in general they don't entirely break down. It's super sucky, yeah. But they work and care for the babies and sometimes move houses and all sorts of functional adult things. This is not on account of not loving their husband! People do all sorts of difficult things, they work in the bottom of mines until they die, too, and fight in the trenches.
In the same societies with high infant mortality, mothers had to nurse their babies basically full time, and also carry them everywhere they went. Helping with the reaping? Carry the baby. Going to bed? With the baby. People talk about babies not having an idea of themselves as separate from their mothers for some time, and the "fourth trimester." Losing an infant would be like a super sucky miscarriage or stillbirth, something modern women do still experience. I know someone who lost her baby at a couple of months old, and she's really upset about it, for sure. She talks about it and posts memorials and raises money for causes that are trying to help babies with similar problems. But, yeah, she did still have to care for her other children and go back to work in a reasonable amount of time.
One thing I think might be more important is that women bearing and losing multiple children is more symmetrical with men fighting in wars (and losing friends, it's not like soldiers at war have a reputation for unusually cold friendships) than with men working jobs, especially office jobs. A society where men fight and possibly die, and women bear and raise children, and possibly die, is tenable. One where men work office jobs and women also work office jobs, but can bear children if they choose, as their hobby, is not tenable at scale (gestures to modern world).
(But all people in previous societies were religious to some extent, which does probably improve purpose and resilience. The woman who lost her baby also talks about wanting to see her baby again in Heaven, which was a big concern, and why Catholics have infant baptism)
Oh yeah, there wouldn't have been an entire controversy over the fate of unbaptised babies if the attitude then was "sucks that the kid died, but shit happens, let's have baby number ten to replace them".
Have most Catholics come to terms with the abolition of purgatory? I'm genuinely curious.
You mean Limbo, not Purgatory 😁 Limbo was never officially a doctrine, it was a 'best guess'. Attitudes have moved on, so there's the hope that the unbaptised infants go to Heaven instead. But nobody is going to contradict Fathers of the Church so there's still room for 'neither confirmed nor denied'.
Thank you for the context, you're right, I meant limbo, though I'm not sure what the distinction is. I'll look it up.
You say this, on a forum where I am like 99.999% certain self-described have argued against recent Papal-endorsed changes in doctrine. I wouldn't expect otherwise on the Motte, we'd argue with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates about regressive tax regimes and a DEI policy that unfairly privileges consumptive orphans.
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I think most self-identified Irish Catholics literally wouldn't know what purgatory was, nor that it had been abolished.
I'm old enough that I did learn about Limbo. You're probably correct that most Irish Catholics today would believe Purgatory had been abolished if they read it online, even though that's not true 🤣
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