“A Fully Consummated Sacrifice upon Her Altar”: Victorian Cremation as Metamorphosis

This paper ponders the ways in which the cremationist movement of the 1870s provoked the articulation of a range of beliefs concerning the afterlife, the body as matter, and the definition of the human. Using Louis Édouard Fournier’s painting The Funeral of the Poet Shelley (1889) as a case study, I consider cremation as the visible metamorphosis of matter, asking why such a practice and concept emerged as a uniquely satisfying way to manage the corpse. I trace a connection between the desirability of swift and total transformation of bodily form, the concomitant dread of decomposition, and a new understanding of the relationship between self and body that coupled the spheres of science and art.