Allure of Death: The U.S. Way of Life

The dead are everywhere. Americans have long been obsessed by what they imagine to be the intimate lines of contact between the dead and the living. Current examples of funereal fascination include this summer’s stunningly successful film “The Sixth Sense,” which focuses on a boy who can see the dead, as well as the last song on Madonna’s powerful album “Ray of Light,” which tells of the singer’s encounter with the decomposing bones of her dead mother, after being swallowed by the Earth in a cemetery. Cyberspace, too, is crowded with death-related sites like findagrave.com, which will locate the final resting places of famous public figures.

Yet, many have asserted that America is a death-denying society and that the topic is taboo in daily life. Beginning in the 1960s, this cultural assessment, advanced by an array of psychologists, sociologists, doctors, funeral directors and journalists, shaped conventional wisdom about the place and meaning of death in American life. One of the most authoritative voices was Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, whose “On Death and Dying” linked the vocabulary of denial with the language of death. Kubler-Ross identified denial as the first stage to the ultimate acceptance of death among terminal patients, but she also argued for a much larger tendency to refuse the reality of death.

According to her thesis, the first half of the 20th century was an era marked by denial. The modern experience of death was tied to such developments as the rise of hospitals as places of dying, advancements in scientific and medical knowledge, increased analytic interest in the psychology of grief, the dramatic growth of funeral homes and the diminishing force of religion in explaining away death--factors that, supposedly, contributed to the disappearance of death in American life.

This argument is potent, but in light of current evidence, it could be that the sweeping generalizations of the “taboo” thesis actually misdiagnosed American attitudes, even in the early decades of this century. Consider, for example, the frenzy surrounding Rudolph Valentino’s funeral in 1926; the popular desire to repatriate the dead in the two world wars; the return of deceased characters in the 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Our Town”; the popular and hilarious figure from the early years of radio, “Digger O’Dell”; or the psychic imprint the death of Bambi’s mother made on generations of children after the film’s release in 1942.

In fact, in the first half of the 20th century, Americans found many ways to keep the dead in mind. At the turn of the century, mummies ran wild in early motion pictures, a notion that held exotic appeal to moviegoers at the time. Archeologists had recently discovered ancient funeral artifacts, including mummified bodies, in ancient Egypt. Closer to home, anthropologists studying Native American societies in the United States often relied on skeletal remains to produce knowledge about the “vanishing” Indian. It is also in this period that funeral homes emerged and dramatically spread throughout the country; their success depended, in part, on providing survivors with a last moment with the embalmed body of a deceased relation.

Dating back to colonial times, Americans have displayed unmistakable signs of morbid obsession. Many Puritan sermons focused on the decomposing corpse as a tangible symbol of human corruption that served as a useful object of reflection in the moral education of society’s members. When George Washington died in 1799, towns and villages held public ceremonies that often included a mock funeral with an empty, though highly symbolic, coffin. Washington’s body was entombed at Mount Vernon.

In the early 19th century, penny newspapers and crime and trial pamphlets published graphic scenes of violence and bodies in various states of decomposition. While men were especially avid readers of this genre, women read and produced their own literary reflections on the meaning of mortality. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” for example, includes one of the most famous deathbed scenes in American culture: the death of Little Eva.

In 1825, Dr. Jacob Bigelow, a Boston physician and botanist, called a group of citizens to his home to discuss burial reform. This conversation led to the American “rural” cemetery movement, which simultaneously moved the dead out of the cities and turned burial grounds into pleasant, morally uplifting places to visit with the family. In the mid-19th century, the spirits of the dead were integrated into family life in numerous ways. For example, the Fox sisters, Margaretta and Catherine, who claimed they had contacted the spirit of a dead Indian chief, initiated a hugely popular religious movement known as Spiritualism. Around the same time, post-mortem photography, in which corpses were “posed” for the camera, became a fashionable means of memorializing the dead and keeping them in their domestic place.

During the Civil War, the most deadly war in U.S. history, one of the most popular songs in the Union armies focused on antislavery hero John Brown, whose body lay “a moldering in the grave.” National leaders, contemplating the carnage on battlefields, tried to convince the public that the blood of young men had a curative, regenerative power for the life of the nation. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, one of the country’s most hallowed documents, illustrates the religious power of the dead in consecrating American soil. When the president was assassinated after the war, Lincoln’s embalmed body traveled on a funeral train to numerous Northern cities, and hundreds of thousands of citizens made a pilgrimage to view the sacred remains of their fallen president.

Whether we try to deny, avoid, disguise or outwit the realities of death, one thing is sure: Like most religious societies, America keeps the dead firmly in mind. The material and cultural landscape is too infested with ghosts, personal lives too haunted by the loss of significant others, collective memory too dependent on the blood of martyrs, for death to easily slip away from the sight of living Americans.

A range of events and cultural expressions, from the Puritan to the postmodern present, speaks to the enduring fixation on death and the compulsion to imagine the dead back to life, a trait not unique in world history. Just consider the popularity of vampire lore in Eastern European countries, the prevalence of ancestor worship in numerous cultures in Asia or, one of the most obvious examples, the centrality of death and resurrection in the Christian world.

America has been called a Christian nation, but the variety of views on death and the flights of imaginative fantasy that circulate within popular culture, both yesterday and today, suggest that the religious imagination is not fettered by theological doctrines or church dogmatics. The dead return as channeled spirits, names on a wall, ax-wielding cadavers, guardian angels or URL images on a memorial Web site. They will not be denied because an integral component of American society, like any society, is to collectively reflect on the meaning of death and imaginatively revive those who pass before us. *