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 -
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.
Oh, there's a lot of ignorance around. The problem in the immediate wake of Vatican II was that the baby got thrown out with the bathwater; religious education/Christian Doctrine/catechism classes in schools got scrapped or turned into "let's discuss social justice!" instead of teaching doctrine. The idea was that we'd get rid of all the old legalistic formulism and have personal relationships with Jesus and be people of the Spirit, unfortunately part of that relied on "well the family and the home should be where faith is transmitted, it's not the job of the school".
So the schools thought the parents would teach the basics. But the problem there was (1) the parents were used to the schools being the place where the catechism was taught (2) they had learned it all off by rote but didn't have a solid understanding (this was the problem the new paradigm was trying to address) so they couldn't explain and teach basic doctrines because they didn't understand themselves in the first place.
So that left the kids falling between two stools. I'm just old enough that I did get the old-fashioned "these are the Ten Commandments" type teaching up to sixth class, but I'm not joking (or only half-joking) when I say I get all my theology out of Dante. The notes for non-Catholics as to what he's talking about in the various translations published are really useful.
I had an ex-girlfriend who was, among other things, a Biblical scholar with a focus on Dante. I recall her telling me that his approach to theology was... unorthodox, even if some aspects have been normalized.
Ah, you mean like where he has pagan characters both real and from fiction among the saved? Yeah, he pushes the envelope a lot. And he uses literary devices to suit his own purposes, e.g. the terraces of the mountain of Purgatory and the circles of Hell.
But he doesn't go straight into heresy or other definitely contradictory to doctrine issues (sure, he picks and chooses amongst the listing of the nine choirs of angels and it's maybe a bit presumptuous of him to put his preference into the mouth of a saved soul in Heaven, but it's not something that is definitively sinful).
He's solid on the basics, and good grief did I need that, because like I said: the old catechism had been tossed out, the new thing was all the social-justice stuff (even if not under that name) with the result that years later, I was the only person in a group of about twenty women who could recite the Ten Commandments. I'll take "unorthodox but not heretical approach to theology" over "how many what now?" modern 'education'.
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