Death inside out Author(s): Philippe Aris and Bernard Murchland Reviewed work(s): Source: The Hastings Center

Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, Facing Death (May, 1974), pp. 3-18 Published by: The Hastings Center Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3527478 . Accessed: 23/05/2012 14:51
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EIGHT CENTURIES OF DEATH IN THE WEST

Death inside
out
PHILIPPEARIES
die-whether he came by this knowedgeon his own or was told by somebodyelse. The story-tellers of former times assumed as a matterof coursethat man is awareof his forthcomingdeath. La Fontaine is an example. In those days, deathwas rarelysudden, even in cases of accident or war. Sudden death was very much feared not only becauseit did not allow time to repent but more importantlybecause it deprived man of his death. Most people were forewarnedof their death, especiallysince most diseaseswere fatal. One would have had to be a fool not to perceivethe signs of death; moralists and satirists took it upon themselves to ridiculethose who refusedto admit the obvious. Roland was aware that death was about to carryhim off; Tristanfelt his life ebbing away and knew that he was going to die; Tolstoi's peasant, responding to an inquiryabouthis health,says: "Death is at hand."For Tolstoi as for La Fontaine, men adopted a familiar and resigned attitude before death. This does not mean that thinking about death remained the same over this long period of history. Nonethesurvivedin cerless, some basic similarities tain classes from one age to anotherdespite the emergenceof other attitudes. When the dying personfailed to perceive his lot, it fell to others to tell him. A pontifical documentof the Middle Ages made this a responsibility of physicians,and for centuriesthey executedit faithfully.We find

HE

ATTITUDES

com-

monly held about death by modernmanwhether sociologists, psychologistsor doctors-are so novel and bewildering that scholars have not yet been able to detach them from their modernityand situatethem within a broaderhistoricalperspective. This is what I shall attemptto do in the following article, with respect to three themes: the dispossessionof the dying person, the denial of mourningand the new funeral rites in America. I. How the DyingPersonis Deprivedof His Death For thousandsof years man has been the sovereign master of his death and the circumstancesattending it. Today he no longer is and these are the reasonswhy. First of all, it was always taken for granted that man knew he was going to
This article was translated from the French by Bernard Murchlland. Translation by permission from the European Journal of Sociology VIII (1967), 169-95. An opening, brief bibliographic commentary intended for a European audience has been deleted from this translation.

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4
one at Don Quixote'sbedside: "A physician was sent for, who, after feeling his pulse, took a rathergloomy view of the case, and told him that he should provide for his soul's health, as that of his body was in a dangerouscondition."The Artes Moriendi of the fifteenthcenturystipulateda "spiritual" friend for this task (as opposed to a "carnal" friend) who was called the nuntius a mortis, title and a role that is more than a little shocking to our modern sensibility. As we advancethroughhistoryascending the social ladder in an urbanenvironment, we find that man advertsless and less to his impendingdeath. He must be preparedfor it by others upon whom he consequently becomes more and more dependent.Probably sometime in the eighteenth century, the physician renounced a role that had long been his. By the nineteenth century, the doctor spoke only when questionedand then with certain reservations.Friends no longer intervenedas they did in the time of Gerson or even as late as Cervantes. From the seventeenthcentury onward, the family assumed this responsibility,which may be taken as a sign of the evolutionin family sentiment.For example: The year is 1848 and we are with a family called La Ferronnays.Madame La Ferronnaysfalls sick. A doctordiagnosesher case as serious and shortlyafterwards calls it hopeless.The woman's daughterwrites: "When she finished her bath and as I was about to tell her what the doctor had said, she suddenly said to me: 'I can no longer see anything and fear I am going to die.' She then recited a short prayer. How consoling those calm words were to me in that terriblemoment!" The daughterwas relievedbecause she was sparedthe painfultask of tellingher mother that she was going to die. Such relief is a modern trait but the obligation to inform anotherof imminentdeathis very ancient. The dying were not to be deprived of their death. Indeed, they had to preside over it. As one was born in public so too one died in public. This was true not only of kings (as is well known from SaintSimon'scelebratedaccount of the death of Louis XIV) but of everyone. Countless tapestriesand paintings have depicted the scene for us! As soon as someone fell ill, the room filled with people-parents, chilfellow workers.All dren,friends,neighbors,

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windows and doors were closed. The candles were lit. Whenpeople in the streetsaw the priest carryingviaticum,custom as well as devotion dictated that they follow him to the dying person's bedside, even if the person were a stranger. As death approached, the sick-room became a public place. In this context we understandthe force of Pascal's words: "We die alone." They have lost much of their meaningfor modern man because we literally do die alone. What Pascal means was that, despite the crowd gatheredabout, the dying person was, in the end, alone. Progressivedoctors in the late eighteenthcenturywere firmbelievers in the curative powers of fresh air and complainedbitterly about this public invasionof the rooms of the dying.To their minds, it would have been far healthierto open the windows,put out the candles,and send everyone home. The public presenceat the last moments was not a pious practice imposed by the Church,as we might think. The clergy, or at least the more enlightenedof them, had tried long before the doctorsto restrainthis mob in order to better prepare the sick person for an edifyingend. Beginningwith the fifteenth century, the Artes Moriendi recommended that the dying person be left alone with God so as not to be distracted from the care of his soul. As late as the nineteenth century, very pious individuals, having submitted to all these customary practices,might request that the many onlookers leave the room so that nothing would disturbtheir final conversations with God. But these were cases of rare and exemplary devotion. Long-standing custom dictated that death be the occasion of a ritual ceremonyin which the priest had his place, but so did numbersof other people. The primaryrole in this ritual was played by the dying person himself. He presided with controlleddignity;having been a participanthimselfin many such occasions,he knew how to conduct himself.He spoke in turnto his relatives,his friends,his servants, including "the least of them," as SaintSimon put it in describing the death of Madame de Montespan. He bade them adieu, asked their forgiveness, and gave them his blessing.Investedwith a sovereign authorityby approachingdeath (this was especially true in the eighteenthand nine-

DEATH INSIDE OUT

5
dignifiedor a mark of self-esteemto speak franklyabout the imminenceof death.How often have we heard it said of a loved one: "I at least have the satisfactionof knowing that he died withoutbeing awareof it." The "without being aware of it" has replaced the "being aware of one's approaching death" of other times, when every effort was made to make the dying awareof what was happening. In fact, it may be that the dying frequently know perfectly well what is happening, but remainsilent to spare the feelings of those close to them. (Of course,the dead do not share these secrets.) In any case, the modern family has abdicatedthe role playedby the nuntiusmortis,who from the Middle Ages until the dawn of modern times was not a memberof the immediate family. As a result,the dying have also abdicated their role. Why? Because they fear death? Hardly. Fear of death has always existed, and was always countered, often with humor.Despite a naturalfear of death, society obligatedthe dying to play out the final scene of farewell and departure.The fear of death, it is said, is ancestral,but so it. No, the fear are the ways of overcoming of death does not account for the modern practiceof denyingone's own death. Again, we must turn to the history of the family for an explanation. In the late Middle Ages (the age of Roland which lives on in the peasants of Tolstoi) and the Renaissance, a man inin his own death sisted upon participating becausehe saw in it an exceptionalmoment -a momentwhich gave his individuality its definitiveform. He was only the master of his life to the extent that he was the master of his death.His deathbelongedto him, and to him alone. From the seventeenthcentury onward, one began to abdicate sole sovereigntyover life, as well as over death.These matterscame to be shared with the family which had previouslybeen excluded from the seriousdecisions;all decisionshad been made by the dying person, alone and with full knowledgeof his impendingdeath. Last wills and testaments provide evidence of this. From the fourteenthto the beginning of the eighteenth century, they were a spontaneous and individual meansof expression,as well as, a sign of distrustor, at least, the absence of trust-toward

teenth centuries), he gave his orders and This was the made his recommendations. case even when the dying was a very young girl,virtuallya child. Today, nothing remains of this attitude toward death. We do not believe that the sick personhas a rightto know he is dying; nor do we believe in the public and solemn character accorded the moment of death. What ought to be known is ignored;what ought to be a sacred moment is conjured away. A Reversalin Sentiment We take it for grantedthat the first duty of the family and the physicianis to keep about his conthe dying personuninformed dition. He must not (exceptional cases apart) know that his end is near; he dies ignorantof his death. This is not merelyan accidental feature of our contemporary mores; on the contrary,it has taken on the force of a moralrule. VladimirJank616vitch made a clear statementin proof of this at a recent medical conferenceon the theme: ShouldWe Lie to the Sick?1"In my mind," he declared, "the liar is the one who tells the truth. I am against the truth, passionately againstthe truth.For me there is one law that takes precedence over all others and that is the law of love and charity." Since traditionalmorality made it mandatory to inform the dying of their state, law presumably has been uniJanke1evitch's violated until recent times. Such versally an attitudeis the measureof an extraordinary reversal in sentiment and thought. What has happened?How has this change come about?We mightsupposethat modern societies are so fixed upon the goals of affluenceand materialwell-being,that there is no place in them for suffering, sorrow,or death. But this would be to mistake the effect for the cause. This change in attitudetowardthe dying is linked to the changingrole of the family in modern society and its quasi-monopoly over our emotionallives. We must seek the cause of modern attitudestoward death in betweenthe sick personand the relationship his family. The latter does not consider it
IVladimir Jankelvitch, Mddecine de France [177] (1966) 3-16; reprinted in La mort (Paris: Flammarion, 1966).

6
the family.Today the last will and testament has lost its character of moral necessity; nor, is it any longer a means of warm and personal expression. Since the eighteenth century, family affections have triumphed over the testator'straditionaldistrustof his heirs. This distrusthas been replacedby a trust so absolute that written wills are no longer necessary. Oral wills have recently become binding for the survivors and are now scrupulouslyrespected.For their part, the dying confidentlyrely on the family's word. This trustingattitude,which emerged in the seventeenthand eighteenthcenturies, and developed in the nineteenth,has become, in the twentieth,a prime source of alientation.No sooner does a member of the familyfall mortallyill than the rest conspire to conceal his condition from him, as well as his deprivinghim of information, freedom. The dying person becomes, in effect, a minor like a child or mental defective. His relatives take complete charge of him and shieldhim from the world.They supposedly know better than he what he must do, and how much he should know. He is deprivedof his rights,particularly the formerlysacred right of knowingabout his for it, and organizing it. death, of preparing Now he allows this to be done for him because he is convinced that it is for his own good. He gives himself over to the affectionof his family. And if, despite all, he divineshis condition,he pretendsnot to know. In formertimes, death was a tragedy -often lightenedby a comical element-in which one played the role of the dying person. Today, death is a comedy-although not without its tragic elements-in which one plays the role of the "one who does not know" he is going to die. Of itself, the pressureof familysentiment probablywouldnot have changedthe meaning of death so drastically,had it not been for the progressof medicalscience. It is not so much that medicine has conquereddisease, however real its achievementsin this
realm, but that it has succeeded in substituting sickness for death in the consciousness of the afflicted man. This substitution began to take place in the second half of the nineteenth century. When a sick peasant in Tolstoi's Three Deaths (1859) is asked how he is, he answers, "death is at hand." On the contrary, in The Death of Ivan Ilych

HASTINGS CENTER STUDIES

(1886), after overhearinga conversation that leaves no doubt in Ivan's mind about his condition, he obstinatelybelieves that his floating kidney and infected appendix will be cured by drugs or surgery.His illness becomes an occasion for self-delusion. His wife supportsthis illusion, blaminghis illness on his refusal to obey the doctor's orders to take his medicineregularly. Of course, it is true, with advances in medical science, serious illness terminates less frequently in death. And chancesof recovery are greatly improved. Even when recovery is partial, one can still count on many years of life. Thus, in our society (where we so often act as thoughmedicine had all the answers,or look upon death as somethingthat happensto others,but never to oneself) incurabledisease,and especially cancer, has taken on, in the popularimagiand hideous traits nation, all the frightening of death. depictedin ancientrepresentations Even more than the skeletons or macabre mummies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, cancer is today the very image of death. Disease must be incurable, and regardedas such, before we can admit the reality of death and give it its true name. But the anguishcausedby this kind of honesty is so great that it constrainssociety to hastily multiplythose many inducementsto silence that reducea momentof high drama to the banalityof a Sundayafternoon picnic. As a consequencewe die in virtual secrecy, far more alone than Pascal could have imagined. This secretiveness comes from a refusal to openly admit the death of those we love and a proclivityto soften its realityby callingit a diseasethat may be cured. There is anotheraspect to this problem that Americansociologistshave noted. In what one mightbe temptedto regardas nothing more than illusory conduct, they have shown the de facto presenceof a new style of death, in which discretion is the modern form of dignity. With less poetry, this is the kind of death approved of by
Jankdlvitch in which the hard reality is coated over with soothing words of deception. A New Model of Death In their Awareness of Dying Glaser and Strauss report on their study of six hospitals

DEATH INSIDE OUT

7 crises of despairthe sick go through,their tears, their cries and, in general, any exceptional emotive or noisy outburst that would interfere with hospital routine and trouble others. This is an example of what Glaser and Strauss call, "embarrassingly graceless dying," the very opposite of an "acceptablestyle of dying." Such a death would embarrass the survivors. This is what must be avoided at all costs and this is the reason why the patient is kept uninformed. What basically matters is not whether the patient knows or does not know; rather,if he does know he must have the consideration and courage to be discreet. He must conduct himself in such a way that the hospitalstaff is not remindedthat he knows and can communicatewith him as though death were not in their midst. For communicationis necessary. It is not enough for the dying to be discreet;they must also be open and receptive to messages. Their in this mattershould be as emindifference to barrassing the medical personnel as an excessive display of emotion. Thus, there are two ways of dying badly: one can be either too emotionalor too indifferent. The authors cite the case of an old woman who was at first well behaved, in accord with acceptableconventions; she cooperated with the doctors and nurses and bore her illness courageously.One day she decided that she had struggled enough,that the time had come to give up. Whereupon she closed her eyes, never to open them again, signifyfrom ing in this way that she had withdrawn the worldand wishedto awaither end alone. In former times, this withdrawal would have been respectedand accepted as normal. But in a California hospital it disconcerted the medical staff so much that they flew in one of her sons from another city to persuadeher to open her eyes on the grounds that she was "hurtingeverybody." Sometimespatientsturn to the wall and refuse to move. We recognizein such acts one of the oldest gestures of man in
the face of death. In this way did the Jews of the Old Testament die. So died Tristan who turned toward the wall and exclaimed that he could no longer keep a hold on life. But in such ancestral reactions the California doctors and nurses saw only an antisocial refusal to communicate, a culpable renunciation of the will to live.

in the San Francisco Bay area.2 They recorded the reactions to death of an interrelated group that included the patient, his family, and the medical personnel (doctors and nurses). Whathappenswhenit becomes clear that the patientis near death?Should the familybe told?The patient?And when? How long should a life be artificially maintained?At what momentshould the patient be allowedto die? How should doctors and nurses act in the presenceof a patientwho does not know, or at least appearsnot to know, that he is dying? Or one that does know? Every modern family is certainly confrontedby such questions,but in a hospital context an important new factor is present: the power of modern medicine. Today, few people die at home. The hospital has become the place where modern man dies, and this fact lends added importance to the Glaser and Strauss study. But the interestof their book goes beyond its empiricalanalysis. The authorshave in fact uncoveredan ideal of death that has replacedits traditionalpublic character,as manifested for example in the theatrical pomp of the Romanticera. We now have a new "style of dying" or rather"an acceptable style of living while dying," "an acceptable style of facing death." The emphasisis on acceptable.What is important is that one die in a manner that can be acceptedand toleratedby the survivors. Doctors and nurses (although the latter less so) wait as long as possible before telling the family, and scarcely ever tell the patient himself, because they fear becoming involved in a chain of emotional reactions that would make them lose selfcontrol. To talk about death, and thus admit it as a normal dimension of social is no longer sociallyacceptable; intercourse, on the contrary,it is now somethingexceptional, excessive, and always dramatic. Death was once a familiar figure and the moralistshad to make it hideousin orderto inspire fear. Today, mere mention of the
word provokes an emotional tension that jars the routine of daily life. An "acceptable style of dying" is, therefore, a style which avoids "status forcing scenes," scenes which tear one from one's social role and offend our sensibility. Such scenes are the
2B. G. Glaser and A. L Strauss, Awareness of Dying (Chicago: Aldine, 1965).

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Let us note that patientsare not blamed in such cases merelybecause they have demoralizedthe medical staff, or because of failure to performtheir duty but more seriously because they are consideredto have lessened the capacity to resist the sickness itself-an eventualitythat becomes as fearsome as a "status forcing scene." That is why Americanand English doctors are today less inclined to keep patients in the dark about their condition. But we must of such signs. the significance not exaggerate They may indicate no more than the pragmatichope that the patientwill respondbetter to treatmentif he knows his condition and will, in the end, die as discreetlyand with as much dignityas if he knew nothing. In Reflections on America, Jacques Maritain describes the good American'sdeath: The medical staff induces in him a kind of dream-likestate in which he thinks that to die amidstthese smilingfaces and these unilike the wings forms, white and immaculate of angels, is a genuinepleasure,or at least a momentof no consequence-"Relax, take it easy, it's nothing."3 Take away the professional smile and add a little music, and you have the contemporaryphilosopher's humanistic death: "To ideal of the dignified, disappearpianissimo and, so to speak, on tip toe" (Jankelvitch). II. The Denial of Mourning We now see how modernsociety deprives man of his death. Whateverdignityremains must be purchased at the price of not troubling the living. Reciprocally, modern society forbids the living from showing too muchemotionover the deathof a loved one; they are permittedneither to weep for the departednor to appearto mourntheirpassing. In times past mourningwas the ultimate expressionof sorrow.It was both legitimate and necessary. Grief over the death of a close one was consideredthe strongestand most spontaneous expression of emotion. Duringthe MiddleAges, the most hardened warriors and the most renowned kingsbroke into tears over the bodies of friends and relatives.They wept, as we wouldsay today,
3Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America

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like hysterical women. King Arthur is a good example. He often fainted, struck his breast, and tore at his skin until the blood flowed. On the battlefield,he fell to the groundin a swoon beforehis nephew'sbody and then set out in tears to find the bodies of his friends. Upon discovering one of them, he clasped his hands and cried out that he had lived long enough.He removed the helmet from the dead man's body and, aftergazinguponhim for a long time, kissed his eyes and mouth. We find many instances, in those times, of the most exand uninhibitedemotional outtraordinary bursts.But, with the exceptionof those few whose sorrowwas so great that they had to retire to a monastery, the survivors soon resumednormallife. From the thirteenthcentury on, we notice that expressionsof mourningbegin to lose theirspontaneity and become more and more ritualized.The grandgesticulations of the earlyMiddleAges are now simulatedby professionalmourners (who can be found in some parts of Europe even today). The Spanishhero, El Cid, requestedin his will that there be no flowersor mournersat his funeral, as had been the custom. The iconography of fourteenth and fifteenthcentury tombs depict mournersaround the body of the deceased,clothedin black robes with their heads buried in penitent-like cowls. We learn from sixteenthand sevendocumentsthat funeral proteenth-century cessionswere composedlargelyof substitute mourners:mendicantmonks, the poor, and orphans, all clothed for the occasion in blackrobesfurnished by the deceased.After the ceremony, each received a portion of breadand a little money. Apparentlyclose relativesdid not attend the funeralservices.Friendswere offereda banquet-banquets so excessively festive that the Churchtried to suppressthe practice. Last wills refer to such festivitiesless and less, or mentionthemonly in censorious language. We notice that the dying frequently requested and sometimes insisted upon the presence of a brother or a son in the funeral procession. Often this was a child, who was offered a special legacy for his much desired presence. Would this have been the case had the family attended funerals as a matter of course? Under the old regime we know that women did not

(New York: Scribner's, 1958).

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attendfunerals.It is probablethat from the end of the Middle Ages with the increasing ritualizationof mourningrites, society imposed a period of seclusion upon the immediatemembersof the family, a seclusion which would have excluded them from the obsequies.They were represented by priests and professionalmourners,religious,members of pious organizations, or simply those who were attractedby the alms distributed on such occasions. The periodof seclusionhad two purposes. First of all, it gave the bereaved some privacyin which to mourntheirloved ones. Protectedfrom the gaze of the world, they waited for their sorrow to pass as a sick person waits for his illness to abate. One, Henri de Campion,makes mention of this in his Memoires. In June, 1659, his wife died in childbirthand the child, a daughter, died shortly afterwards. He wrote: I was heartbroken and fell into a pitiful state.My brother andmy sistertook me to ConcheswhereI remained seventeen days andthenreturned to Baxferei to put my affairsin order.Not beingableto inhabit my housebecauseit reminded me too muchof my belovedwife, I bought a propertyin Conchesand lived there until June, 1660 (which is to say until the firstanniversary of my wife's death) at which time I perhad followedme. So ceivedthatmy sorrow I returned to my formerhome in Baxferei with my children, whereI am presently living in greatsadness.

and black mourning crepe. By this time, however, the period of seclusion was more voluntarythan obligatory:it no longerprohibited close relativesfrom participating in the funeralservice,pilgrimages to the graveside, or the elaborate memorial cults that characterized the RomanticAge. Nor were women any longer excluded from the obsequies. In this regard,the bourgeoisiewere the first to break with tradition,followed some time later by the nobility, among whom it had been consideredgood taste for a widownot to attendher husband's funeral. At first the nobilityceded to the new practices discreetly,usuallyhiddenin some dark corner of the churchwith ecclesiasticalapcustom proval.Little by little the traditional of seclusion gave way to the new practice of honoring the dead and veneratingtheir tombs. Women'spresenceat funerals,however, did nothing to radically change the private character of mourning: entirely clothed in black, the mater dolorosa, she is hidden from the world's sight except as symbol of sorrow and desolation.Nonetheless, mourningwas now more moral than physicalin nature. It was less a protection of the dead from oblivion than an affirmation that the living must rememberthem, that they could not go on living as before. The dead no longer needed society to protect themfrom the indifference of theirclose relatives;nor did the dying any longer need written testamentsto make their last will knownto theirheirs. The new family sentiment of the late Second, the periodof seclusionprevented eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the survivorsfrom forgettingthe deceased thus combinedwith the ancient traditionof too soon. It was in fact a time of penance seclusion to transform the mourningperiod from an imposedquarantine into a right to during which they were not permittedthe activitiesand pleasuresof normallife. This express, with all due propriety,deeply felt precautionwas not unhelpfulin preventing sorrow. This markeda returnto the spona hasty replacementof the dead person. taneity of the high Middle Ages while Nicolas Versoris, a Parisianmerchant,lost conservingthe formal ritualsthat had been his wife to the plagueon September 3, 1522, introduced aroundthe twelfthcentury.If we one hour after midnight.On December 30 were to trace the historicalcurve of mournof that same year, he was engagedto a docing it would look like this: until the thirtor's widow, whom he marriedas soon as tenth century, a time of uninhibitedand he could, which is to say on January 13, even violent spontaneity,followed through 1523, "thefirstfestive day afterChristmas." the seventeenthcenturyby a long period of This custom continuedthroughthe nine- ritualization,which gave way in the nineteenth century. When someone died the teenth to an age when sorrow was given immediatefamily, servants, and often the full and dramatic expression.It is likely that domestic animals as well, were separated the paroxysmof mourning in the nineteenth from the rest of society by drawn curtains century stands in some direct relationship

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to its attenuation in the twentiethcenturyin somewhatthe same way as the "dirtydeath" of Remarque,Sartre,and Genet in the postwar periodemergedas the other side of the "noble death" celebratedby Romanticism. Thus, the significanceof Sartre's gesture, more laughablethan scandalous,of urinattomb. It took a ing on Chateaubriand's Chateaubriand to produce such a Sartre. It is a relationshipof the sort that links eroticismto Victoriansexual contemporary taboos.

today. In 1915, his father was lost in the sinkingof the Lusitania,and Gorer was, in his turn, given special attention. "I was treatedwith great kindness,like an invalid; no demandswere made on me, I was indulged, conversation was hushed in my presence."One day during a walk, he attemptedto convey his desolationby telling his Nanny that he would never be able "to enjoy flowers again," whereupon she him and told him not to be reprimanded morbid. Because of the war his mother was alBecomesForbidden lowed to take a job where she found diverMourning sion from her sorrow. She would not have Some form of mourning,whether spon- had such a recourse at any earlier date; taneousor obligatory, has alwaysbeen man- but at a later date she would not have had datory in human society. Only in the the support of the mourning ritual. Thus twentiethcenturyhas it been forbidden.The Gorer experiencedin his childhoodthe trasituation was reversed in a single genera- ditional manifestations of mourning and tion: what was always commandedby inthey must have made a strong impression dividual conscience, or the general will, is on him for they remainedvivid in his memnow rejected. And what was, in former ory many years later. During his youth in times, rejected is now recommended.It is he had no furtherexpostwar the period, no longer fitting to manifest one's sorrow perience of death. Once he saw a cadaver or even give evidence of experiencingany. in a Russian hospital he visited in 1931; Credit for uncoveringthis unwrittenlaw unaccustomedto the sight of death, this of our civilizationgoes to the British socichance viewing seems to have captured ologist, GeoffreyGorer. He was the first to his imagination.Gorer's case was not ununderstandthat certain facts, neglected or usual. Unfamiliarity with death is common moralpoorly understood by the humanistic unnoticedconsequenceof today-the long, ists, did, indeed, constitutea characteristic longevity. J. Fourcassi6has shown attitudetowarddeath in industrialsocieties. greater how it is possible for today's children to introductionto his In an autobiographical grow to adulthoodwithoutever seeing anyDeath, Grief and Mourning,Gorerrecounts one die. Gorer was, however, surprised some personal experiences which led him when his inquiryrevealedthat more people to the discoverythat death is the principal had witnessed death than he would have taboo of our time.4The sociologicalinquiry But he also observed that they suspected. he undertookin 1963 on attitudestoward quite spontaneouslyadopted the same bedeath and mourning in Englandmerelyconhavior patterns as those who had never firmed,detailed,and enrichedideas he had seen a death, and forgot it with all possible alreadypublishedin his "The Pornography haste. of Death,"a remarkable articlebased upon Gorer was later surprised when his his personalexperiencesand reflection.5 a well-knownphysician,fell into a brother, Gorer was born in 1910. He recalls that state of depression after his wife's death. the whole family mourned the death of Edward VII. He learned, as do French Intellectualsin Englandhad alreadybegun funeralrites and children,to take off his hat when a funeral to abandonthe traditional external manifestations of sorrow as so many processionpassed in the street and to treat and But primitive superstitious practices. those in mourning with special respect-Gorer did not at the time see connecany practiceswhich seem strange to the British
4Geoffrey Gorer, Death, Grief and Mourning (New York: Doubleday, 1965). 51bid., pp. 192-99. See Gorer, for this article and subsequentquotes.

tion between his brother's pathological despair and the absence of mourning rituals. The situation was different in 1948 when he lost a close friend who left a wife and three children. Gorer wrote:

DEATH INSIDE OUT

11

When I went to see her some two months after John's death, she told me, with tears of gratitude,that I was the first man to stay in the house since she had become a widow. She was being given some good professional help from lawyers and the like who were also friends; but socially she had been almost completely abandoned to loneliness, althoughthe town was full of acquaintances who considered themselves friends. Gorer then strongly suspected that the changes that had taken place in mourning customs were neither anecdotal or insignificant. He was discovering the importance and serious consequences of these changes, and a few years later, in 1955, he published his famous article. Decisive proof came in 1961 when his brother, who had remarried, was diagnosed as suffering from incurable cancer. His brother's doctor, a friend since they were in medical school together, "asked me to decide whether his wife, Elizabeth, should be informed; he had already decided to hide the truth from Peter; and he and his colleagues engaged in the most elaborate and successful medical mystification to hide from Peter's expert knowledge the facts of their diagnosis." He consulted an old and respected friend about his dilemma and was advised that Elizabeth should be told. "One of the arguments he advanced was that, if she were ignorant, she might show impatience or lack of understanding with his probably increasing weakness, for which she would reproach herself later; she could use the final months of their marriage better if she knew them for what they were." The prognosis was for a lingering illness but much to everyone's surprise Peter died suddenly in his sleep. Everyone concerned congratulated themselves that he had died without knowing it, an eventuality widely regarded as a desirable one in our culture. In this family of intellectuals, there would be no funeral vigil and no exposure of the body. Since his death took place at home, the body would have to be prepared. Gorer evokes what took place in colorful language: It was arrangedfor a pair of ex-nurses to come to lay out the body. They imparted a somewhat Dickensian tone; they were fat and jolly and asked in a respectful but

cheerful is the patient?" Some tone,"Where half hour later their work was done, and they came out saying,"The patientlooks
lovely now. Come and have a look!" I did

surnot wish to, at which they expressed

prise. I gave them a pound for their pains;

the leader,pure SarahGamp,said, "That for us duck?Cheers!"and went through it intohermouth. No mentionwas made throughall of this of eitherdeath or the corpse.Peter was still regarded as a "patient"despite the biothat had taken place. logical transformation Preparingthe body for burial is an ancient rite. But its meaning has changed. It formerly had as its object to make the body reflect the ideal image of death prevalent in society; the intention was to create a sense of dependency,to present the body in a helpless state, with crossed hands, awaiting the life to come. The Romantic Age discovered the original beauty that death impartsto the humanface and these last ablutionswere designed to rescue this beauty from the pain that had generatedit. In both cases, the intentionwas to create an image of death: to present a beautiful corpse but a corpse nonetheless.Today we no longer have a corpse but somethingalmost alive. "The patientlooks lovely now." Our fairy's touch has given it the appearanceof life. All signs of pain have been erased, not in order to capturethe hieratic beauty of the dead or the majestyof those in repose, but to presenta cadaverthat retains the charmsof somethingliving, something "lovely"and not at all repulsive.The preparationof the body is today intended to mask the reality of death and give the pleasingillusion of life. We must remember that in Gorer's England this practice was whichis why the familycould just emerging, not share the old nurses' enthusiasmfor their handiwork.In the United States, on is a fine art and the other hand, embalming corpses are exhibitedin funeralhomes with
great pride. The Meaning of Cremation Gorer's family was deluded by neither the beliefs of another age nor the flashy talents of American morticians. Peter's body was to be cremated, and cremation in Engthe motions of raisinga bottle and emptying

12
land (and no doubt in Northern Europe generally) has a special meaning which Gorer's study clearly brought out. Cremation is no longer chosen, as was long the case, in defiance of the Church and tradiditionalChristiancustoms.Nor is it chosen solely for reasons of convenienceor economy, reasons which the Church would be disposed to respect in memory of a time whenashes,like those of Antigone's brother, were as venerableas a body that was buried. The significance in modern of cremation cuts it reflects the rational England deeper; is of times and modern nothing less spirit than a denial of life after death, although this was not immediately apparentfrom the resultsof Gorer'sinquiry.Of sixty-fourpersons interviewed,forty favored cremation over burial and they offered two basic reasons for this preference.It was first of all consideredthe most efficientmeans of disposing of the body. Thus one of the respondentsin the study had her mothercrematedbecauseit was "healthier" but stated, "I think for my husband,who was buried, cremationwould have been too final." The second reason is connected to the first: cremationmakes cemeteryritualsand periodic visitation to the graveside unnecessary. But it should be noted that such practices are not necessarilyeliminatedby cremation.On the contrarythe administrators of crematoriums do everythingin their to to venerate their enable families power cemdead just as they do in the traditional eteries. In the memorial rooms of crematoriums one can have a plaque installed whichperformsa functionanalogousto that of the tombstone.But of the forty persons interviewedby Gorer, only one had opted for such a plaque and only fourteenwrote their names in the memorialbook which is the day opened each day to commemorate of the death. This may be seen as a kind of intermediary solution between complete oblivion and the permanency of the engraved plaque. If families choose not to
adopt commemorative practices available to them it is because they see in cremation a sure means of avoiding any form of cultic homage to the dead. It would be a serious mistake to see in this refusal to commemorate the dead a sign of indifference or insensitivity. The results of Gorer's study and his autobiographical

HASTINGS CENTER STUDIES

testimonyis evidence to the contrary that the survivorsare and remaindeeplyaffected by a death in the family. For furtherproof of this let us turn to Gorer'saccountof his brother'scremation.Elizabeth, the widow, herdecidednot to come to the cremation self-she could not bear the thoughtthat she mightlose controlandotherpeopleobserveher grief;andshe wishedto sparethe childrenthe distressing experience.As a theirfather's deathwas quite consequence, for them by ritualof any kind, unmarked and was nearly even treatedas a secret, for it was severalmonthsbeforeElizabeth could bear to mentionhim or have him mentionedin her presence. Notice that her absencewas not due to any of the traditionalreasonsor to indifference but to a fear of "losing control."This has become a new form of modesty,a convention which requiresus to hide what we were formerlyobliged to manifest,even if it had to be simulated:one's sorrow. Notice, too, that children are also affected by this modern mandate. Even in France,wheretraditional practicesare more in evidence,middle-classchildrenrarelyattend the funeralsof their grandparents. Old people who are several times grandparents are buried by adults who are more rushed and embarrassed than grieved, with no grandchildren present. I was especially struck by this when in the course of my researchI came across a numberof documents dating from the seventeenthcentury in which the testator insisted that at least one of his grandchildren be in his funeral procession,althoughhe may have been indifferentto the presence of other relatives. At that time, we might recall, mourners were often recruitedamongorphans.In numerous representationsof the dying, the painteror engraveralways includeda child among those gatheredabout the deathbed. So Elizabeth and her childrenstayed in their countryhome on the day of her husband's cremation. Geoffrey joined them that evening, overcome with grief and fatigue. His sister-in-law welcomed him in her usual self-assured manner. She told him that she had passed a pleasant day with the children. "They had taken a picnic to the fields where the grass was being cut for silage." Elizabeth, who was born in New England, quite

INSIDE OUT DEATH naturallyadoptedthe conductshe had been taught in America and which the English expectedof her: she acted as if nothinghad happenedand so made it easier for others to do the same and thus permit social life to continue without even momentaryinterruption by death. Had she risked a public demonstration of her sorrow,society would have censoredher like a fallen woman.She was, moreover,avoided by her and Peter's friends. They treatedher, she said, "like a leper."Only if she acted as thoughnothing had happenedwas she again of consequence socially acceptable.Gorer observesthat "at the period when she most needed help and comfort from society she was left alone." It was in the monthsfollowingPeter'sdeath that he decidedto undertakea study of the modernrefusalto mournand its traumatizing effects. Fromthe CabbagePatchto the FlowerGarden Gorer argues that this state of affairs began with the decline of social supportfor funerealritualsand the special status of the mourningperiod. He perhaps accords too much importanceto the two World Wars as catalystsin this evolution.New conventions made their appearancegradually,alin such a way that their most imperceptibly originalitywent unnoticed.Even today they are not formalizedin the mannerof traditionalcustoms.Yet they are just as powerful an influence on behavior. Death has become a taboo, an unmentionable subject (as says over and over again in Jank61evitch his book on death), something excluded from polite conversation. Gorermountsimpressiveevidence to show that in the twentieth century death has taken the place of sex as the principaltaboo. He writes that in our time,
there has been an unremarked shift in prudery; whereas copulation has become more and more "mentionable"...death has become more and more "unmentionable" as a natural process .... The natural processes of corruption and decay have become disgusting,as disgustingas the natural processes of birth and copulation were a century ago; preoccupationabout such processes is (or was) morbid and unhealthy, to be discouragedin all and punishedin the

13
were told young. Our great-grandparents

that babies were found under gooseberry are likely our children bushesor cabbages; to be told that those who have passedon lable) are changedinto flowers,or lie at rest in lovely gardens.The ugly facts are the art of the embalmhidden; relentlessly
ers is an art of complete denial. (fie! on the gross Anglo-Saxon monosyl-

Children used to be told that a stork broughtthem but they could be present at deathbeds and attend funerals! Sometime after the middle of the nineteenthcentury, their presencecaused a kind of malaiseand there was a tendencyto at least limit their participationwhen in fact it was not prohibited altogether.Childrenwere presentat the deathsof Emma Bovary and Ivan Ilych but they were permittedonly a brief visit and then escorted from the room on the pretext that the agonies of the dying would be too much for them to bear. Although theirpresenceat the deathbedwas gradually prohibited, they were allowed their traditional place at the obsequies, clothed from head to foot in black. Today children are initiated at an early age into the physiology of love and birth, but when they express curiosityabout why they they no longer see their grandparents are told (at least in France) that they have gone on a long trip or (in England) that they are restingamong the flowers.It is no longer a case of babies being found under the cabbagesbut of grandparents who disflowers! Relatives the of the appear among deceased are thus forced to feign indifference. Society demands of them a form of self-controlsimilarto that demandedof the dying themselves. For the one as for the other, what is importantis to show no sign of emotion.Society as a whole behaveslike a hospitalstaff. Just as the dying must control their feelings and cooperate with the doctors and nurses, so must the bereaved hide their sorrow, reject the traditionalperiod of seclusion (becausethis would betray
their feelings), and carry on their normal activities without so much as missing a step. Otherwise, they would be ostracized by society, a form of seclusion that would have consequences quite different from the traditional mourning period. The latter was accepted by all as a necessary transition period and carried with it forms of be-

14

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havior that were equally ritualisticsuch as ing mannerin a novel by Mark Twain in which a woman refuses to accept the death of visits of letters condolence, obligatory of and the succors religion. of her husbandand each year lives out his sympathy, treated like sexual impossible return. Her friends conspire to the bereaved are Today with those afflicted supportthis illusion.Todaywe can'timagine deviants, contagiousdiseases, or other asocial types. Whoever anyone participatingin such a dark comwishes to spare himself this stigma must edy. Twain's charactersacted out of kindhide his true feelings in public and reveal ness and generositybut their action would them only to his closest friends. As Gorer be viewed by today's society as something embarrassingand shamefully morbid, inputs it, one weeps in private just as we undressand go to sleep in private, "as if it deed, a sign of mental illness. We thus ask were an analogueof masturbation." ourselves, with Gorer, whether or not a social pathology that refuses to large part of contemporary recognize today Society to confront in our refusal does not originate the bereavedare sick people who need help. of death-in the society's denial of reality with illness. It refusesto associatemourning and the The traditionalcustom was in this respect mourning right to weep for the dead. more comprehensive, perhaps more "modern," more sensitive to the pathologicaleffects of repressed moral suffering. Gorer III. New FuneralRites in the considers it a mark of cruelty to deprive United States anyoneof the beneficence guaranteed by the Based on the foregoinganalysis,we might ancient custom. In their mourning,Gorer be temptedto concludethat our suppression notes, those strickenby the deathof a loved of the reality of death is part of the very one need society's help more than at any structureof contemporary civilization.The other time, but it is precisely then that soelimination of from death conversation and withdraws its to assistance and refuses ciety mediagoes handhelp. The price of this failure is very great from the communications in misery,loneliness,despair,and morbidity. in-hand with the priority of materialwellThis prohibition of a decent period of being as the principal trait of industrial mourningforces the bereavedto bury him- societies. This is especially the case in self in work; or to push himselfto the very Northern Europe and America, the main limits of sanity by pretendingthat the degeographicalareas of modernity, although ceased is still living, that he never went there are exceptions where older thoughtaway; or, what is worse, to imagine that patternsstill prevail.I am thinkingof some he himself is the dead person, imitatinghis sectors of Catholic France and Italy, of gestures, his voice, his idiosyncrasies,and PresbyterianScotland, and of the lower classes even in countries that are indussometimes simulatingthe symptomsof the sicknessthat carriedhim off. This is clearly trially advanced.Modernitydependson soneuroticbehavior.We see in such behavior cial conditionsas much as geographyand even in the most progressivecountries is instancesof those strangemanifestations of exaggerated grief which seem new and limited to the educated classes, whether modernto Gorerbut are nonethelessfamil- believers or sceptics. Where modernityhas not penetratedwe find that eighteenthand iar to the historianof customs. They once found an outlet in rituals which were acnineteenth century Romantic attitudes knowledged, recommended, and, indeed, toward death still prevail, such as the cult even simulatedduringthe prescribed period of the dead and venerationin cemeteries. We should not be misled by the survival of mourningin traditionalsocieties. But it
must be admitted that only the appearances are the same. In former times such rituals had the purpose of liberating. Even when, as often happened in the Romantic Age, they exceeded the limits of custom and became pathological, they were not repressed as something monstrous but were patiently tolerated. This tolerance appears in a strikof such attitudes, however; while they characterize large numbers of people, they are seriously threatened today. They are doomed to inevitable decline, along with the earlier, less developed mentalities with which they are linked. They are also jeopardized by a model of future society which would continue the process of emptying

DEATH INSIDE OUT

15

that alreadydominatesmiddle-class families, whether liberal or conservative.We need not be entirelypessimisticabout this evolution because it is probable that the denial of deathis so boundup with industrial civil-

a model death of all existential meaning,

In America, on the other hand, the art of laying out the body forms part of a seriesof new rites that are both complicated and sumptuous. These include:the embalming of the body, its exhibitionin a funeral parlor, visitation by friends and relatives, ization that the one will disappear with flowers and music, solemn obsequies, and, the other.Nor is the denialof deathuni- finally, intermentin a cemeterythat looks thecase,as we pointed out,because like a park. The latter is embellishedwith versally it is not foundin manysectorsof society. monumentsand is intended for the moral I amnot thinking nowof backward partsof edification of visitors who are more like Old Europe but of that strongholdof touriststhan pilgrims.There is no point in the UnitedStates.America has describingthese rites further.They are well modernity, beenthe firstamong modern societies to at- known to a wide public as a result of tenuate the tragicsenseof death.Therewe Waugh'sbook, which has been made into can observe firsthandthe new attitudes a film, and Jessica Mitford's The Ameri-

toward death.Someof theseweresatirized in The LovedOne, Waugh's novel,written in 1948.6In 1951, Roger Cailloissaw in them an exampleof hedonistic sleightof hand: Deathcan be facedwithout fear,not becauseof somemoralability to transcend the fear it provokes, but because it is inand because evitable in fact thereis no
reason to dread it. What we must do is
simply not think or talk about it.7

can Way of Death.8 Such books are mis-

we have said aboutdeathin Everything the preceding of the pages-the alienation thedenial of mourning, etc.dyingperson, holdstruefor America withthe one exceptionof burial TheAmericans have practices. not simplified funeral ritesas muchas the this singularity we English.To understand must continueour earlieraccountof how modem mandies,withtheemphasis nowon the time betweendeath and burial.The timebeforedeathand afterburial, together with the peculiarmourning rites modern manaffects, is no different in America than in anyothermodern The difference society. comesin the intermediary period.We recall how the two nursescharged with prethe of Gorer's brother admired paring body theirown work.But in England this kind of enthusiasm is not sharedby societyat large. What mattersto the Englishis to
get rid of the body as decently and as quickly as possible. That is why they favor cremation.
6Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One (London: Chapmanand Hall, 1950). TRoger Caillois, Quatre essais de sociologie contemporaine (Paris: Perrin, 1951).

leading, however, insofar as they suggest that these rituals are no more than a form of commercialexploitationor a perversion of the cult of happinessheld dearby Americans. More deeply, they testify to a refusal to have death emptiedof all meaning,a refusal to let death pass without solemnizing the occasion ritualistically. This is one reason why cremationis less widespread in the United States. American society is very attached to these rituals,althoughthey seem somewhat ridiculousto Europeansand Americanintellectuals (whose attitudesare reflectedin Mitford's book). So much so that for a time death is somethingfamiliar,something one can talk about. Ads of this sort are common in America: "The dignity and integrityof So-and-SoFuneralHome costs no more. Easy access. Private parking for over one-hundred cars." Of course, there is no doubt that death is a consumerproduct. But what is noteworthyis that it has become so, togetherwith all the publicityattendantupon its commercialstatus, despite the banishmentof death elsewhere in society. American attitudes toward the immediately deceased constitutean exception to modern attitudes toward death in general. In this case, they break the normal
pattern of modernity and grant the deceased the social space traditional societies had always reserved for them, space that has been practically eliminated in industrial societies. In their way, Americans are carrying on the
8Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).

16
tradition of bidding a solemn farewell to the dead, and this in spite of the iron-clad rule of expediencythat governs conduct in technological and consumer societies. In France many of the hospitalsdate from the seventeenth century (when the sick were

HASTINGS CENTER STUDIES

idea of making a dead person appear alive as a way of paying one's last respects may well strike us as puerile and preposterous. As is often the case in America, this practice is part and parcel of a syndrome that includes commercial interests and the language of advertising. But it also testifies to a rapid and unerring adaptation to complex and contradictoryconditions of sensibility. This is the first time in history that a whole society has honored the dead by pretending that they were alive.
subjected to humiliatingand coarse treatment at the hands of vagabonds and delinquents) and the bodies of the dead are still kept in cold rooms like so much meat. The French are, consequently,in a good position to appreciatethe need for a time of recollectionand solemnitythat strikes a balancebetween the anonymityof a collective morgueand the finalityof burial. In another age such a time could have been observedin the home. But modernattitudesare set againsthavingthe corpse too close to the living. In Europe the intelligentsia rarely keep the body in the house,

even if the deathoccurs there.This is partly for hygienic reasons, but more because of a nervousfear of losing control.The American solutionis to depositthe body in a neutral place, halfway between the anonymity of the hospitaland the privacyof the home. This place is called a funeralhome, a special buildingthat is in charge of a kind of innkeeperwho specializesin welcomingthe dead. The time spent here is a compromise between the decent but hasty and deritualized services of Northern Europe and the more archaic ceremonies of traditional mourning.The new funeralrites createdby the Americansare also a compromisebetween their desire to observe a period of solemnityafter death and their general acceptance of society's taboos. That is why these rituals are so differentfrom those we are used to and why, consequently,they strikeus as somewhatcomical, even though they retain some traditionalelements. The half-closed coffin exposing the upper half of the body is not an inventionof American morticians. It is a practice dating from the Middle Ages and can still be found in Mediterraneanareas like Marseilles and parts of Italy. A fifteenthcenturyfresco in the church of St. Petronius in Bologna depicts the remainsof Saint Mark reposing in a coffin of this type. The Mortician's Art Still, it must be borne in mind that these funeral home rituals have quite radically changedthe meaningof death. In fact, it is not death that is celebratedin these rituals; it is rather death transformed into the apof life the mortician's art. Forpearance by was intendedprimarily to merly embalming of impart somethingof the incorruptibility the saints to the dead, especiallythose who had been celebratedand veneratedin life. One of the miraclesrequiredfor sainthood is an uncorrupted body. By helpingto make the body moreincorruptible, was embalming
looked upon as a way of cooperating in the work of sanctification. In modern America chemical techniques for preserving the body make us forget death by creating an illusion of life. What friends and relatives pay respect to amidst the banks of flowers and the soothing music is the life-like appearance of the deceased.

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17
womanwho neededpsychiatric treatment because her husband's funeral was with a closed casket, no visitation, and burial in another state with her not present." (In effect, this representsthe practice of the progressiveEnglishman.) "The psychiatrist called him (the funeral director) to learn about the funeral or lack of one. The patient was treatedand has recoveredand has vowedneverto be partof anothermemorialtype service," that is to say a simplified commemoration of the dead.9 Funeral directors, whose interests are threatened by a trend toward simplicity, draw upon expert psychologicalopinion to defend their business. They argue that by replacing sorrow with sweet serenity they are providingan importantpublic service. Because it tempers the anguish of the bereaved and designs cemeteriesfor the hapsees piness of the living,the funeralindustry itself as having a beneficientmoral and social function. In America today cemeteries play a role that was intended for future at necropolises by French urban-planners the end of the eighteenthcentury when a royal edict prohibitedburial within the city walls. As a result, provisionsfor new cemeterieshad to be made, and a vast literature described what they should be like and what in particularPare Lachaise of Paris (which became the model of all modern cemeteries in both Europe and America) should be like. One is struckby the resemblance between these eighteenth century texts and the prose of modern American funeral directors and the moralists who support them. Mitford'sbook offers abundant evidence of this similarity.Americais the tone and style of the Age rediscovering of Enlightenment. Rediscovering?Perhaps we should say that they have never lost them. Some historiansof Americansociety think that the Puritanismof the eighteenth century impeded the developmentof a hedonistic attitude toward death and that contemporaryoptimism does not predate the twentiethcentury.Whetherthe influence
is direct, then, or a repetition, after a century's interlude, in either case the similarity is striking. Had it not been for the influence of Romanticism, Pire Lachaise would have
9lbid., p. 93.

The idea of death is banished from this ritual as is all deep sorrow. Roger Caillois grasped this point so well when he noted that those fully clothed corpsesgive the impressionthat they are merely taking a nap. While it is a fact that this illusion is dispensed with in those sectors of English society described by Gorer and in the American intelligentsia,it is also a fact that the general public goes along with it and this is no doubtevidenceof a profound trait in the American character. The idea of makinga dead personappear alive as a way of paying one's last respects may well strikeus as puerileand preposterous. As is often the case in America, this practice is part and parcel of a syndrome that includes commercialinterests and the But it also testifies languageof advertising. to a rapid and unerringadaptationto comconditionsof sensiplex and contradictory This in history that is the first time bility. a whole society has honored the dead by that they were alive. pretending Somethinglike this happened once before in history, but involved one person only. I refer to Louis XIV, King of France. Whenhe died he was embalmed,clothedin the purple robes of his consecration,laid out on a bed that looked somethinglike a judge'sbench-all as thoughhe wouldwake up at any moment.Banquettables were set up, no doubt reminiscentof the ancient funeralfestivitiesbut more a symbol of the rejectionof mourning.The king did not die in the mindsof his subjects.Dressedin festive garments,like a rich Californianin a funeral parlor, he received his court for a last time. The idea of the continuityof the Crown dictated a funeral rite that was, in effect, much like those of contemporary Americadespitea time difference of several centuries,and like them it may be regarded as a compromise between the desire to honor the dead and the desire to put them out of mind as something unmentionable. The Americans,who believe in their way
of death (including the practices of their funeral directors) as they do in their way of life, give these rituals a further justification

that is very interestingbecause it bears out

in an unexpected way Gorer's theory about the traumatizing effects of the denial of mourning. Jessica Mitford reports this case: "Recently a funeral director told me of a

18
become another Forest Lawn, the famous cemetery in Los Angeles caricaturedby Waugh. Romanticismthwarted a development in this directionand its influencestill persists in the popular representationsof death and in gravesidecults. On the other that in America hand,we get the impression the Romanticinfluencewas short-livedand thatthe spiritof the Enlightenment, although diminishedby Puritanism,was more influwould ential. If this is the case, Puritanism have had the samebrakingeffectin America as Romanticismdid in Europe, but would have died out earlier,thus fosteringa mentality much like that of the Enlightenment, the seedbed of so many modern attitudes. We cannot help thinkingthat in this matter as in so many others (in Constitutional law, for example) America is closer to the eighteenthcentury than Europe is. The Crisisof Deathandthe Crisis of Individuality We concludethat in the last third of the twentiethcenturysomethingof monumental is takingplace of which we are significance just becoming aware: death, that familiar companion of yore, has disappearedfrom our language. His name is anathema. A kind of vague and anonymousanxiety has taken the place of the words and symbols elaboratedby our ancestors.A few writers like Malraux and Ionesco make some attempt to restoredeath'sancientname which has been obliterated from our languageand social conventions.But in normal existence it no longer has any positive meaning at all. It is merely the negative side of what we really see, what we really know, and what we really feel. This represents a profound change in attitude. In truth, death did not occupy a large place in the minds of men during the high Middle Ages or for some time It was not outlawedby edict as afterwards. it is today; ratherits power was weakened
by reason of its extreme familiarity. But from the twelfth century onwards, people became more and more preoccupied with death, at least this was the case among the

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clergy and the educatedclasses. This concern emerged graduallyin connectionwith two distinct themes: in the twelfth and thirteenthcenturiesin connectionwith the theme of the Last Judgment and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in connection with the theme of the art of dying. The Artes Moriendi depicted the whole universe in the death-room:the living of the earth, the blessed of heaven, and the damnedof hell, all in the presenceof Christ and his heavenly court. The life of the dying person was thus summedup for all time and, whoever he might be, he was in this restrictedspace and for this brief moment the very center of the natural and worlds.Death was the occasion supernatural for individualself-awareness. We know from several sources that the late Middle Ages was a time of emerging individuality,when men began to define themselvesas entities distinctfrom the collective representations of the human race. It was a time of rampantindividualism in religion, in economics (the beginnings of capitalism), and in culture at large. The most conclusiveevidenceof this individualism is, in my opinion, to be found in the wills and last testamentsof the time. These became a literaryform in their own right and a means of individualself-expression. When a will is reducedto a mere means of disposingof the deceased'swealth as it is today, it is a sign of a declineor at the very least of a change in our conceptionof individuality. The progress of science, the affirmation of the rightsof man, and the rise of the middleclass in the eighteenth century testify that that age was also a heyday of individualism. But it was an individualism alreadyin eclipse, for in the unnoticedintimacy of daily life, individualfreedomwas already threatened,on the one hand, by and, on the other,by the family constraints demandsof professional life. The clear corover death betweenthe triumph respondence and the triumphof individuality duringthe late Middle Ages invites us to ask whether a similarbut inverse relationship might not exist today between the "crisis of death" and the crisis of individuality.