A closer look
Performative grief didn't start on social media. During the hyper-morbid Victorian era, mourning was basically a competitive sport. Widows supposedly used 'lachrymatory bottles' to catch their tears when a loved one died. The logic was that once the tears evaporated from the stoppered bottle, the official mourning period was over. While modern historians suspect many of these were just perfume bottles, the fact that Victorians were dramatic enough to make the myth believable says it all.
