Habeas Corpus: Death in Nineteenth-Century America

By the time Philippe Ariès published his panoramic survey of Western attitudes toward death in 1977, L’homme devant la Mort (translated as The Hour of Our Death in 1981), it had become a truism that in modern-day America, d—-h was the ultimate taboo. In The American Way of Death, published in 1963, Jessica Mitford exposed more than the shady business practices of the funeral industry. The ghoulish and laughable details of cosmetic reconstruction and “slumber rooms” she gleefully provided demonstrated our own unwillingness to look death squarely in the face. Ariès’s study made it clear just how new—and American—this way of death was. In the early Middle Ages, the men and women of Christendom accepted death as a part of the life of the community and died secure in the knowledge of their eventual resurrection. Such “natural” attitudes, Ariès claimed, persisted among traditional peasant folk even into the nineteenth century; but, among other classes, and under modernizing social conditions, they were superseded by other perspectives. Enlightenment rationalists analyzed death as a purely biological phenomenon. Nineteenth-century romantics focused their attention on the “beautiful death” and the grieving survivors it left behind. But by the early twentieth century, death had become invisible, an embarrassing, even obscene fact to be hidden away. For Ariès, however, contemporary America occupies a unique position in what he called “the geography of the invisible death” (p. 594). For the most part, death is denied, but mourners are allowed to confront death—or, at least the illusion of the “life-like” corpse—in that uniquely American institution known as the funeral home. The distinctive rituals of the American funeral industry—the upholstered casket, the embalmed body, the viewing of the deceased—are not modern at all, Ariès argued, but instead “express the resistance of romantic traditions to the pressures of contemporary taboos” (p. 600).

Gary Laderman accepts Ariès’s proposition that by the twentieth century death had become taboo in American society. In seeking the origins of this development, he takes a fresh and fruitful approach. Rather than examining attitudes toward some vague abstraction called “death,” Laderman focuses on the ways in which northern Protestants perceived and treated the bodies of the dead. Antebellum Americans invested the corpse with many meanings, sacred and secular, but in the postbellum era, the corpse lost its symbolic potency and became a desacralized object managed by the funeral industry. That shift in sensibility and practice occurred in the decades after the Civil War and it became literally embodied in the formerly reviled, newly sanctioned practice of embalming. With the corpse drained of both blood and meaning, death in America would never be the same.

When Laderman examines antebellum attitudes toward the dead, he is not moving into uncharted territory. In the last several decades, historians have explored death in this era in its many material and cultural manifestations—rural cemeteries, posthumous portraiture and photography, consolation literature, mourning etiquette. ¹ What emerges is a romantic cult of death, in which faithful Christians die in a state of blissful anticipation of heavenly reward and their grief-stricken relatives seek consolation in the healing power of nature and the expectation of eventual reunion. Such notions flourished among a particular class of people—northern, white, middle-class Protestants, Arminian in their religious outlook, urban in their secular orientation. Laderman focuses on these same men and women—it was their world, he argues, in which the corpse lost its symbolic power—but there is a good deal more to his story than the much visited Mt. Auburn Cemetery and much read Agnes and the Little Key (1857). Even among this particular group of Americans, he insists, there was more than one way to understand death. When Calvinism crumbled, no single theology could match its level of cultural power—indeed, religious authority as a whole lost its command—“leaving the dead,” in Laderman’s...