The Rituals of Mourning: Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s “The Coast of Wales”, or Why It Is Important to Perform Grief

Abstract

This essay explores Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s short story ‘The Coast of Wales’ (2015), which describes a widow’s visit to her husband’s grave in a cemetery near Dublin. Although taking the reader to the dark recesses of grief, the author infuses her characteristic humour in her narrator-protagonist, to the point that this becomes a story of hope and renewal as much as of pain and mourning. This essay will focus on the performativity and ritualisation of grief and on how the social conventions around death intersect with the personal experience of mourning. Understanding bereavement as both an individual and a collective process, rather than as a medical condition, I will focus on the story’s inscription of colour, elements of the animal and natural world, and landscape to generate a glimpse of healing within the experience of emotional distress. Working within a Medical Humanities framework, the analysis will be necessarily interdisciplinary, making use of literary criticism, memoir, medical, and psychological literature alike.