Alexandria Anderson - The American Etiquette of Mourning: The Disappearance of the Crape and Veil (original) (raw)
Related papers
Facing the "King of Terrors": Death and Society in an American Community, 1750-1990
The American Historical Review, 2001
Facing the "King of Terrors" : death and society in an American community / Robert V. Wells. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.). isbn 0-521-63319-2 (hbk.) 1. Death-Social aspects-New York (State)-Schenectady-History. 2. Mortality-Social aspects-New York (State)-Schenectady-History. 3. Funeral rites and ceremonies-New York (State)-Schenectady-History. 4. Mourning customs-New York (State)-Schenectady-History. 5. Schenectady (N.Y.)-Social life and customs. I. Title. hq1073.u62s348 2000 306.9′09747′44-dc21 99-21118 isbn 0 521 63319 2 hardback Contents List of Illustrations page vii List of Tables ix List of Abbreviations x Preface xi
Mortality, 2002
This paper explores the commemorative dimensions of death, dying and bereavement in contemporary America as embodied in material and visual culture. Focusing in particular on the Oklahoma City National Memorial (dedicated in 2000 and now managed by the US National Park Service) and on temporary shrines constructed near Columbine High School in Littleton, CO (the site of a murderous rampage in 1999), it asks how and why such commemoration is organized-by whom and for whom? What do these practices and ritualsboth seemingly spontaneous public practices and those managed by speci c institutions-reveal about American attitudes toward death and grief? What do they tell us about who (and what) is deemed memorable in their absence, in US history, and in terms of an imagined national future? Indeed, what is the role of memory in the material and visual culture of death, dying and bereavement in contemporary America? For most of the past century and until quite recently, the USA was often characterized as a death-denying society in which public discussions of dying, death and bereavement were essentially taboo, and death itself largely relegated to the institutional, private setting of the hospital (80% of Americans, for example, die in hospitals). Contemporary debate surrounding abortion, AIDS, euthanasia and gun control, however, as well as increased popular interest in 'good death', the afterlife and bereavement therapy, suggest the questioning and perhaps the lifting of certain death-related taboos. By extension, visibly public material culture rituals pertaining to death and grief suggest broad and diverse interests in 'reclaiming' death, in making death meaningful on personal, individual levels and challenging an 'American way of death' that has largely been, since the mid-19th century, the purview of medicine, science and technology. This paper speculates on the commemorative dimensions of death, dying and bereavement in contemporary America as embodied in visual and material culture, and in particular at the sites of tragedy and trauma.
Death Becomes Her: On the Progressive Potential of Victorian Mourning
Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 41, no. 4, 2013
University of Texas – Pan American On the occasion of her Golden Jubilee, Queen Victoria was depicted in a woodcut by William Nicholson that was to become extremely popular (Figure 1). So stout that her proportions approach those of a cube, the Queen is dressed from top to toe in her usual black mourning attire, the white of her gloved hands punctuating the otherwise nearly solid black rectangle of her body. Less than thirty years later, another simple image of a woman in black would prove to be equally iconic: the lithe, narrow column of Chanel's black dress (Figure 2). Comparing the dresses depicted in the two images – the first a visual reminder of the desexualized stolidity of Victorian fidelity, the second image an example of women's burgeoning social and sexual liberation – might lead one to conclude that the only thing they have in common is the color black. And yet, twentieth- and twenty-first-century fashion historians suggest that Victorian mourning is the direct antecedent of the sexier fashions that followed. Jill Fields writes, for example, that “the move to vamp black became possible because the growing presence of black outerwear for women in the nineteenth century due to extensive mourning rituals merged with the growing sensibility that dressing in black was fashionable” (144). Valerie Mendes is more direct: “Traditional mourning attire blazed a trail for the march of fashionable black and the little black dress” (9). These are provocative claims given that most scholarly accounts of Victorian mourning attire – whether from the perspective of literary analysis, fashion history or theory, or social history or theory – offer no indication that such progressive possibilities were inherent in widows’ weeds. Instead, those accounts focus almost exclusively on chasteness and piety, qualities required of the sorrowful widow, as the only message communicated by her attire: “Widows’ mourning clothes announced the ongoing bonds of fidelity, dependence, and grieving that were expected to tie women to their dead husbands for at least a year” (Bradbury 289). The disparity in the two accounts raises the question: how could staid, cumbersome black Victorian mourning attire lead to dresses understood to embrace sexuality and mobility?
In considering the funeral practices in the reign of Victoria, a number of questions are raised: why did Victorians choose to ritualize death, what were the rituals in which they engaged, what were the outward trappings of mourning, and how and where did they dispose of the deceased. It can be argued that during Queen Victoria’s long reign, the celebration of death reached its peak, which raises the further question of the degree to which the death, funeral, and grieving for Prince Albert affected the pattern of British mourning.This paper seeks to consider the various elements of mourning and funerals during the Victorian Era.
New mourners, old mourners: Online memorial culture as a chapter in the history of mourning
How does online mourning differ from offline mourning? Demographic, social and technological changes alter mourners’ social relationships with both the living and the dead, and hence their experiences of grief. Online technologies comprise the latest chapter in this story; earlier chapters include family/community mourning (pre-industrial), private mourning (twentieth century), and public mourning (turn of the millennium). Pervasive social media in which users generate their own content have significantly shifted mourners’ social interactions and the norms that govern them, partly in new directions (such as enfranchising previously stigmatised griefs; more potential for conflict between mourners and others) but partly returning to something more like the relationships of the pre-industrial village (such as everyday awareness of mortality, greater use of religious imagery, more potential for conflict among mourners). Online, mourners can experience both greater freedom to be themselves and increased social pressure to conform to group norms as to who should be mourned and how.
Modern(izing) Burial in Interwar American Literature
2014
This dissertation aims to study literary representations of interwar American deathways as reflections of modernity. The study of burial in United States history tends to focus on mid-to late-nineteenth century movements that distance the dead from the living. This dissertation argues that these practices left Americans ill-equipped to process the influx of death from the conflict areas of World War I, keen to allow the further development of the funeral industry during the interwar period, and anxious about the certain rise in death tolls that would result from World War II. Interwar literature, therefore, exhibits a difficulty in meaning-making that extends to the increased death toll and the modernization of deathways between the world wars. Novels examined include John Dos Passos's 1919 and One Man's Initiation: 1917; William Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary; Willa Cather's One of Ours; Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One; and Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun. iii DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to those who helped-directly or indirectly-in its completion, including my dissertation committee, my family, my friends, and my husband, Robert Marshall.
(2017) The changing nature of death and mourning
The paper examines obituaries appearing in the Hungarian daily Népszabadság during the second half of the twentieth century. It argues from a social constructivist stance that the reading of these texts gives us insights about the prevailing norms and values related to death. It posits that the issue of death brings to the surface general cultural values as well. Its aim is to see how these norms and values have changed as the political and social structure changed in Hungary. First, the paper looks at general statistical data regarding obituaries which show a decline in their numbers. Using a topic framework, the elements and the structure of the texts are identified. In a detailed analysis of these elements, the paper examines the questions of authorship, informing, traits, identity, the announcement of death, achievements and the funeral, respectively. The findings put existing theories on the ‘death taboo’ in an empirical context in a number of ways. Instead of signifying a death taboo, metaphorical expressions of death show a secular, demystified but not tabooed relationship towards death in Hungary in the second half of the twentieth century.