Funestos capillos: when women's hair expresses the profound pain of grief

Abstract

The protagonism of female figures is quite significant in the Latin literary representation of the funeral liturgy. In this sense, the hair of bereaved women plays a relevant role in the expression of the pain of grief and comprises, along with other elements, the performance of female grief. Based on the analysis of textual sources by Latin authors, we propose to observe how the speech of male authorship appropriates of female hair as a gender marker in written language in the mourning diction and if this representation constitutes a socio-cultural mechanism, which configures the female figure as an emotional body. We also tried to understand how the representation of the the hair of bereaved women is elaborated in a way to metonymically conceive the dismal female emotion as a rhetorical device, designed to accentuate the tragic pathos of mourning.