Sorrow is an

emotion Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definitio ...

, feeling, or sentiment. Sorrow "is more 'intense' than

sadness Sadness is an emotional pain associated with, or characterized by, feelings of disadvantage, loss, despair, grief, helplessness, disappointment and sorrow. An individual experiencing sadness may become quiet or lethargic, and withdraw them ...

... it implies a long-term state". At the same time "sorrow — but not unhappiness — suggests a degree of resignation... which lends sorrow its peculiar air of dignity".Wierzbicka, p. 66 Moreover, "in terms of attitude, sorrow can be said to be half way between ''

'' (accepting) and '' distress'' (not accepting)".

Cult

Romanticism Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...

saw a cult of sorrow develop, reaching back to ''

The Sorrows of Young Werther ''The Sorrows of Young Werther'' (; german: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the '' Sturm und Drang'' period in Ge ...

'' of 1774, and extending through the nineteenth century with contributions like

Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his ...

's " In Memoriam" — "O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me/No casual mistress, but a wife" — up to

W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...

in 1889, still "of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming". While it may be that "the Romantic hero's cult of sorrow is largely a matter of pretence", as

Jane Austen Jane Austen (; 16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots of ...

pointed out satirically through Marianne Dashwood, "brooding over her sorrows... this excess of suffering" may nevertheless have serious consequences. Partly in reaction, the 20th century has by contrast been pervaded by the belief that "''acting'' sorrowful can actually make me sorrowful, as William James long ago observed". Certainly "in the modern Anglo-emotional culture, characterized by the 'dampening of the emotions' in general... sorrow has largely given way to the milder, less painful, and more transient sadness". A latter-day Werther is likely to be greeted by the call to '"Come off it, Gordon. We all know there is no sorrow like unto your sorrow"'; while any conventional 'valeoftearishness and deathwhereisthystingishness' would be met by the participants 'looking behind the sombre backs of one another's cards and discovering their colored faces'. Perhaps only the occasional subculture like the

Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, phi ...

ian would still seek to 'call up from the busy adult man the sorrow of animal life, the grief of all nature, "the tears of things"'.

Late modernity Late modernity (or liquid modernity) is the characterization of today's highly developed global societies as the continuation (or development) of modernity rather than as an element of the succeeding era known as postmodernity, or the postmod ...

has (if anything) only intensified the shift: 'the postmodern is closer to the human comedy than to the abyssal discontent...the abyss of sorrow'.

Postponement

'Not feeling sorrow invites fear into our lives. The longer we put off feeling sorrow, the greater our fear of it becomes. Postponing the expression of the feeling causes its energy to grow'. At the same time, it would seem that 'grief in general is a "taming" of the primitive violent discharge affect, characterized by fear and self-destruction, to be seen in mourning'.

Julia Kristeva Julia Kristeva (; born Yuliya Stoyanova Krasteva, bg, Юлия Стоянова Кръстева; on 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who ha ...

suggests that 'taming sorrow, not fleeing sadness at once but allowing it to settle for a while...is what one of the temporary and yet indispensable phases of

analysis Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (3 ...

might be'.

Shand and McDougall

Sadness is one of four interconnected ''sentiments'' in the system of

Alexander Faulkner Shand Alexander Faulkner Shand FBA (20 May 1858 – 6 January 1936) was an English writer and barrister. Born in Bayswater, London, he was the son of Hugh Morton Shand, a Scot (grandson of William Shand, 2nd Laird of Craigellie), and his wife Edri ...

, the others being fear, anger, and joy. In this system, when an impulsive tendency towards some important object is frustrated, the resultant sentiment is sorrow. In Shand's view, the emotion of sorrow, which he classifies as a primary emotion, has two ''impulses'': to cling to the object of sorrow, and to repair the injuries done to that object that caused the emotion in the first place. Thus the primary emotion of sorrow is the basis for the emotion of pity, which Shand describes as a fusion of sorrow and joy: sorrow at the injury done to the object of pity, and joy as an "element of sweetness" tinging that sorrow. William McDougall disagreed with Shand's view, observing that Shand himself recognized that sorrow was itself derived from simpler elements. To support this argument, he observes that

grief Grief is the response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or some living thing that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, grief also has physical, cogniti ...

, at a loss, is a form of sorrow where there is no impulse to repair injury, and that therefore there are identifiable subcomponents of sorrow. He also observes that although there is an element of emotional pain in sorrow, there is no such element in pity, thus pity is not a compound made from sorrow as a simpler component.

Cult

Postponement

Shand and McDougall

See also

References

Further reading