Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Notes

Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. Laura M. Stevens cites this commercial as exemplifying the persistent association of the Indian with death in the American cultural imaginary. I am arguing, however, that the PSA’s staging of what is, in effect, an act of auto-mourning deserves consideration through the lens of affect, rather than mortality alone. See Stevens, “The Christian Origins of the Vanishing Indian,” in Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, eds., Mortal Remains: Death in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 2. On the history of time in this period, see Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress and Decadence (Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830–1930 (New York: Longman, 1994); Raymond Chapman, The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature (London: Croon Helm, 1986); Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford , UK: Blackwell, 1989). For a critique of the way these studies fail to take sufficient account of the gendered politics of time, see Patricia Murphy, Time Is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). See also J. T. Fraser, ed., The Voices of Time: A Cooperative Survey of Man’s Views of Time as Expressed by the Sciences and by the Humanities (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981). 3. See Buckley, The Triumph of Time. Both Bowler and Gilmour point out that this dominant linear historiography coexisted with what Bowler calls “cyclical” and Gilmour calls “apocalyptic” approaches. See Bowler, The Invention of Progress; Gilmour, The Victorian Period. 4. Gilmour, The Victorian Period, p. 25. 5. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), esp. pp. 135–49. 6. Phillipe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 67– 269 68. See also Phillipe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. part 4, pp. 407–556. 7. In their important adaptations of Ariès’s framework to the North American context , David Stannard and James J. Farrell both echo Ariès’s insistence that the focus on mourning amounts to a repression of death’s finality. Stannard, for instance, asserts that the “self-indulgence, sentimentalization, and ostentation of the nineteenth-century approach to death” reveals “a world that had lost a meaningful and functioning sense of community,” and Farrell describes the period as the core of what he designates the “dying of death” in America, the concealment of the reality of death within a framework of “liberal optimism” that negated its status as an individual rite of passage . See David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 185; James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). 8. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, p. 5. By pointing to this similarity, I am not suggesting that death has not been repressed or denied in the West during this period ; the point of Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis is not that repression does not exist but that repression should be understood as simply one among a range of strategies characterizing a particularly modern mode of production. 9. Charles O. Jackson, for instance, admits that in order to arrange the essays in his volume Passing: The Vision of Death in America in accordance with an argument derived from Ariès’s framework, he was required to omit work dealing with regional and ethnic variations in the culture of death and dying. Charles O. Jackson, ed., Passing: The Vision of Death in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1977), p. x. Recent crosscultural studies such as Joseph Roach’s seminal Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) have helped to correct this omission. 10. Indeed, some scholars dismiss this body of work as itself an act of melancholy worship; Joachim Whaley, for example, asserts that Ariès’s writing is “not a work of scholarship but a piece of nostalgic devotional literature.” Joachim Whaley, ed., Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981), p. 8, quoted in...