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to The History of Private Life
Responses
to Death in Nineteenth Century America
In
early February, l862, William Wallace Lincoln, the 12 year old
son of President Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln,
contracted a slight chill. At first, the illness appeared to be
minor, but within a few days the boy's condition worsened. His
body was wracked with fever, probably as a result of malaria,
and on February 20, young Willie died.
His
mother's grief was inconsolable. For months, she lay prostrate
and stunned. In her letters she poured out her emotions: "Our
home is very beautiful, the grounds around us are enchanting,
the world still smiles and pays homage, yet the charm is dispelled??everything
appears a mockery....We are left desolate...."My question
to myself is, 'can life be endured?'"
Twentieth
century Americans rarely have to directly confront the facts of
mortality. Death in our society is largely confined to the elderly
and most deaths take place not in homes but in hospitals. Professionals
- doctors, nurses, and morticians - handle the dying and dead.
Corpses are injected with waxes and fluids intended to make them
look younger and healthier, while coffins are selected for their
superior padding to "comfort" the deceased. Even our
language is filled with circumlocutions that allow us to evade
the fact of death. We speak of the deceased as having "passed
away."
A
century ago it was impossible to evade the fact of death. Premature
death remained commonplace. As late as 1900, the chance of a marriage
lasting forty years was just one in three. Death typically took
place in the home following a protracted deathbed watch. Family
members themselves had to lay out, wash, and shroud the corpse.
Viewing of the deceased took place at home, not in a funeral parlor.
Death was a tangible reality that could not be escaped.
Letters,
even those written by ordinary men and women, recorded the details
of death in excruciating detail. Such letter writers invariably
described the deceased's illness, the deathbed drama, and the
funeral, and offered reflections on the transitory nature of life.
In 1836, a Carrolltown, Alabama, resident responded to the death
of a loved one with words that were echoed in countless letters:
"The heart whithers and joy sickens and dies and existence
becomes a troubled dream." An Indiana youngster wrote a brief
poem following the death of his two brothers and sister:
My brothers [and] sister kind & dear
How soon you've passed away
Your friendly faces now I hear
Are mowldren in the clay
Death
had not yet been sanitized and prettified.
For
many nineteenth Americans, the death of a spouse or children was
a crippling blow that seemed too heavy to bear. After his wife
died in 1861 of burns suffered when her dress caught fire, poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow announced that his life was over. Outwardly,
he might appear calm, but inwardly he was "bleeding to death,"
"utterly wretched and overwhelmed." After his wife committed
suicide, Henry Adams, the noted historian, insisted that her name
never again be spoken in her presence. Following the death of
his 24-year old daughter in 1895, Mark Twain was paralyzed with
grief. "It is an odious world, a horrible world," he
declared. "It is Hell; the true one." The family abandoned
their house in Hartford, never to return. Ten years after he had
received the telegram announcing that his daughter Susy died of
meningitis, Twain commented acidly, "It is one of the mysteries
of our nature that a man, all unprepared can receive a thunder-stroke
like this and live."
The nineteenth century witnessed a host of efforts to soften the
pain of death. To spare mourning relatives the painful details
of funerals, the first professional undertakers appeared. These
men laid out and attended the corpse, made the coffin, dug the
grave, and directed the funeral procession. During the Civil War
professional embalming became increasingly common, and in the
1880s, cosmetic restoration of bodies became widely available.
Because it was impractical to embalm and restore bodies in the
deceased's home, funeral parlors began to appear at the end of
the nineteenth century.
Another
effort to soften the pain of death was the appearance of a new
kind of cemetery during the early nineteenth century. Colonial
burial grounds were distinctly unpleasant places??overcrowded,
filled with weeds, and marked by the odor of decay. So bad were
conditions in New York that residents blamed a yellow fever epidemic
in 1822, which killed 22,000 residents, on the unsanitary conditions
in the city's cemeteries. Beginning in 1831, when the Massachusetts
Horticultural Society purchased a 72-acre tract of fields, ponds,
trees, and gardens in Cambridge and built Mount Auburn cemetery,
a new kind of landscaped garden cemetery began to replace urban
grave yards. The new garden cemetery was a place of tranquility,
where grieving relatives could find solace in the beauty of nature.
The attempt to draw a link between death and beauty was also evident
in the effort to rename the coffin a "casket," a word
that meant a jewel box.
At
the same time that architects began to design bucolic garden cemeteries
"with everything that can fill the heart with tender and
respectful emotions, poets and novelists tried to romanticize
death in verse and fiction. Popular novelists like Harriet Beecher
Stowe devoted enormous attention to the subject of death. Indeed,
so excessive was her concern with death that Oscar Wilde later
quipped, “you would have to have a heart of stone not to
laugh.” Timothy Arthur Shay, author of the best?selling
temperance novel Ten Night in a Bar-Room, devoted sixty pages
to a description of the death of one character. A torrent of death
poetry consolatory essays, and mourning manuals became available
to middle class readers after 1830, with titles like Agnes and
the Key of Her Little Coffin, The Empty Crib, and Stepping Heavenward.
In Heaven, such books declared, the deceased were released from
worldly cares and loved one were reunited perpetually.
Many
mid?nineteenth century Americans who suffered grief following
the death of loved ones found consolation in Spiritualism??the
belief that the spirits of the dead survive and can communicate
with the living through spirit writing, table, tippings, ouija
boards, rapping, and materialization of spirits in the flesh.
After the death of her son Willie, Mary Todd Lincoln began to
seek out medium and attend seances in an effort to communicate
across the "very slight veil [that] separates us, from the
'loved and lost.'" Spiritualism in the United States began
in 1848 when Katherine and Margaret Fox, two sisters from Hydesville,
New York, claimed to communicate with the spirit of a man who
they said had been murdered in their house. (In 1888, Margaret
publicly confessed that the rappings were caused by an abnormality
of her big toe). At a time when faith in religious orthodoxy was
declining and many Americans were demanding tangible proof of
an afterlife, Spiritualism seemed to offer evidence of human survival
after death.
Popular
culture in twentieth century America has been filled with images
of violence and killing, but, unlike nineteenth century culture,
has, until quite recently, had few discussions of death and dying
- a fact that led one analyst to charge that death had replaced
sex as the taboo topic in our culture. In American society today,
most deaths take place in sterile hospitals or nursing homes.
Funerals have been shortened and simplified, and cremation has
become much more common.
Since
the mid-1960s, when an investigative journalist named Jessica
Mitford published a book harshly critical of The American Way
of Death, there has been a growing reaction against the "medicalization"
of death. In recent years, terminally ill patients have asserted
in court the right to decide how and when and where to die. A
growing number of terminally ill men and women have chosen to
die at home or in homelike settings known as hospices.
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