The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  Fashionable widow’s wear, circa 1916.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  Lou Taylor’s Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (Allen & Unwin, 1983) is a comprehensive, richly illustrated survey of this subject that will be of particular interest to readers who thrill to such passages as: “The portrait shows her wearing a black dress over a white yoke, which replaces the bib-type barbe. She wears a deep ruff and cuffs in white lawn edged with reticella lace and a white lawn Paris head, without the hanging back panel. Edged with lace, it is covered on the crown of the head with a transparent white veil or ‘head-rail.’ Veils of this type replaced the tippeted mourning hoods by the end of the sixteenth century and were known as arched hoods.”

  An excellent essay by costume historian Barbara Dodd Hillerman, “Chrysalis of Gloom: Nineteenth-Century American Mourning Costume,” appears in Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong’s A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America (Museums of Stony Brook, 1980), published as the catalogue for the exhibition of that name.

  Mourning for father or mother should last one year. During half a year should be worn Henrietta cloth or serge trimmed with crape, at first with black tulle at the wrists and neck. A deep veil is worn at the back of the bonnet, but not over the head or face like the widow’s veil, which covers the entire person when down. Mourning for brother or sister may be the same; for step-father or step-mother the same; for grandparents the same; but the duration may be shorter. Mourning for children should last nine months. The first three the dress should be crape-trimmed, the mourning less deep than that for a husband. Wives wear mourning for the relatives of their husband precisely as they would their own, as would husbands for relatives of their wives.

  —Harper’s Bazaar, April 17, 1886

  DEATH QUIZ

  Black might seem like the appropriate shade to wear when you’re grieving the loss of a loved one, but mourning colors actually vary quite a bit around the world. Match the culture below with the color associated with mourning:

  1. Egypt A. Red

  2. Abyssinia B. Yellow

  3. Iran C. Brown

  4. China D. Blue

  5. Thailand E. White

  6. South Africa F. Purple

  Answers: 1-B; 2-C; 3-D; 4-E; 5-F; 6-A

  Hairwork Jewelry

  The superstitious belief that possessing a lock of someone’s hair gives you power over that person is ancient and widespread. In many cultures, a haircut can be a dangerous proposition. If the clippings aren’t properly disposed of, a sorcerer might get hold of them and gain control of your soul. Conversely, to voluntarily bestow a lock of your hair on another person is a mark of absolute trust.

  Even in our modern, scientific society, there’s a sense that a person’s spirit inheres in his hair—which is why, in the not-so-distant past, young women routinely kept strands of their sweetheart’s hair in heart-shaped gold lockets (or, in a somewhat creepier vein, why serial killer aficionados will pay good money for some of, say, Charles Manson’s barbershop trimmings).

  The Victorian era witnessed a vogue for so-called hairwork jewelry—everything from bracelets and brooches to necklaces, rings, and stickpins fashioned from intricately woven hair. Some of these items were love tokens, others were made to commemorate important events, while still others were purely decorative (nothing like a nice set of human-hair earrings to complement a ball gown). Many of these pieces, however, were made for memorial purposes—to accessorize the elaborate bereavement costumes that were de rigueur for Victorian widows. Wearing them was a way for mourners to keep a piece of their loved ones close to their hearts.

  Victorian memorial hair jewelry (which has become an increasingly pricey collectible) came in various shapes and styles. One of the most popular was an oval pendant or pin with a glazed compartment containing a lock of the loved one’s hair and surrounded by the words “In Memory” inlaid in Gothic gold letters. Even more common was the rectangular brooch or medallion depicting a gravestone inscribed with a memorial motto: “Not lost, but gone before,” “I weep, heaven rejoices,” “Sacred to the memory,” and so on. Rising beside the tombstone was a weeping willow tree whose dripping branches were composed of actual wisps of the deceased’s hair.

  Victorian hairwork brooch.

  (Nowadays, the tradition of turning little bits of dead people into memorial jewelry is being carried on by a company called LifeGem, which converts hair clippings or cremains into synthetic diamonds. See “Hair Today Memorial Gemstone Tomorrow” in the “Cremation” section.)

  If you’d like to read more about this subject (or begin a collection of your own), you won’t do better than C. Jeanenne Bell’s lavishly illustrated Collector’s Encyclopedia of Hairwork Jewelry (Collectors Books, 1998). You’ll also find lots of useful information at www.hairwork.com.

  Hold That Pose

  In the 2001 fright film The Others, an Englishwoman (played by Nicole Kidman) and her two young children inhabit a big spooky house that appears to be haunted by a family of ghosts. (Spoiler alert: It turns out that Nicole and the kids are the ghosts!) At one point in the movie, Kidman’s character comes upon a dusty old album filled with photographs of dead people.

  It’s natural for viewers to assume that these pictures are fakes—creepily convincing images cooked up by the folks in the special-effects department. In point of fact, however, most of them are the real deal—actual specimens of what are known as postmortem portraits, morbid photographic keepsakes that were particularly popular during the death-besotted days of the Victorian era.

  The practice of making artistic likenesses of corpses did not, of course, begin (or end) with the Victorians. The ancient Egyptians outfitted their royal mummies with sumptuous gilded death masks. In fifteenth-century Europe, wax death masks were routinely created for newly deceased kings. As cultural critic Alan Riding explains, “When a king died, it was considered important that his body lie in state long enough for people to travel from distant towns to pay it homage. Since the corpse could not be exposed for as long as three weeks, it was discreetly replaced by a mannequin with only molded copies of the head and hands on public view.”

  By the late eighteenth century, the sale of celebrity death masks had become a lucrative business. The doctor who molded a death mask from Napoleon’s entire head made a bundle selling bronze and plaster reproductions. Madame Tussaud got her start making a wax death mask from Robespierre’s decapitated head, hot off the guillotine. In the following century, reproduction death masks of great composers—Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin—were especially big sellers.

  Death masks haven’t been the only form of postmortem portraiture. In the past, wealthy families frequently commissioned paintings of their newly deceased loved ones, a practice that apparently began in seventeenth-century Holland. Artworks of this kind fall into two major categories: commemorative portraits showing the corpse on its deathbed, and so-called posthumous mourning pictures depicting the dead subject (generally a child) as if he or she were still alive.

  This latter type of memorial painting was especially popular in mid-nineteenth-century America. Typically, the grieving parents, wishing to possess a visual record of their lost little one, would call in an artist to make a life-size portrait within days of the child’s passing. Though modeled on the corpse, the picture would show the child as he or she was in life: playing with a favorite toy, for example, or cuddling with the family cat.

  At the same time, the artist would include a conspicuous allegorical emblem to indicate that the child was actually deceased. A bright-eyed little girl might be shown holding a rose with a broken stem, signifying that her blossoming life had been cut short. Or a somber young boy might be posed beside a lake with a receding boat in the background—a symbol of the passage of life to the distant shores of death. So popular were these paintings in the middle decades of the nineteenth century that many struggling American artists were able to keep body and soul together by specializing in the
genre. As one painter wrote to a friend, “It sometimes appears as if my only patron is Death.”

  With the invention of the daguerreotype in 1840, photography began to replace painting as the preferred medium for mortuary portraiture. Framed photographs of corpses—especially babies and young children—became a common feature of the American household. Professional photographers advertised their ability to “take pictures of dead persons on one hour’s notice” at either their studios or the residence of the deceased. The practice was so common that, as scholar Jay Ruby notes, photographic supply houses manufactured special accessories for “sepulchral daguerreotypes,” such as black mats decorated with floral patterns on which a dead baby could be artfully posed. In keeping with the intensely sentimental nature of the Victorian “cult of mourning,” the subjects were made to appear peacefully asleep, often in their cribs, baby carriages, or cradles.

  Though postmortem photographs are generally regarded as a unique hallmark (if not a pathological symptom) of the Victorian era, the practice of taking pictures of the dead has persisted into modern times, albeit in a somewhat altered form. Throughout the twentieth century and up to the present (as Jay Ruby demonstrates), American families have continued to take snapshots of their departed family members. In contrast to the typical nineteenth-century postmortem picture, however, these images tend not to be close-ups of corpses but photos of the open coffin on display at the funeral home.

  Morbid as this practice might seem, there is really nothing surprising about it. We live, after all, in an age when people feel compelled to capture every instant of their lives on camera. In a society where fathers feel free to bring camcorders into the delivery room to record their children’s birth, it’s natural that the opposite pole of existence would end up as a picture in the family album.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  A seminal essay on American memorial paintings is Phoebe Lloyd’s “Posthumous Mourning Portraiture,” included in Pike and Armstrong’s A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America (Museums of Stony Brook, 1980). Jay Ruby’s Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (MIT Press, 1995) is a fascinating, richly illustrated survey of the subject. Stunning examples of American postmortem photographs can be found in Stanley Burns’s Sleeping Beauty (Twelve Trees Press, 1992)—the source of many of the dead-people pictures shown in the film The Others—and its sequel, Sleeping Beauty II (Burns Archive Press, 2002).

  Victorian Postmortem

  Photography:

  A How-to Guide

  The process of taking postmortem pictures is detailed in this excerpt from an article by a gent named Charles E. Orr that appeared in an 1877 issue of the trade journal the Philadelphia Photographer:

  My mode of procedure is as follows: where the corpse is at some distance and cannot be conveyed to the [studio], my first step is to secure proper conveyance, select and carefully prepare a sufficient quantity of plates, pack necessary instruments, implements, chemicals, etc., being careful not to forget any little thing necessary. Proceed at once to the cellar or basement of the house, that being more spacious, and generally affording better opportunity of shutting out the light than any other room, set up the bath, have your collodian and developer in readiness, your fixer, etc., handy, secure sufficient help to do the lifting and handling, for it is no easy task to bend a corpse that has been dead more than twenty-four hours. Place the body on a lounge or sofa, have the friends dress the head and shoulders as near as in life as possible, then politely request them to leave the room to you and your aides.

  If the room be in the northeast or northwest corner of the house, you can almost always find a window at the right and left of a corner. Roll the lounge or sofa containing the body as near into the corner as possible, raise it to a sitting position, and bolster firmly, using for a background a drab shawl or some material suitable to the circumstance. By turning the face slightly into the light, you can produce a fine shadow effect, if so desired.

  Place your camera in front of the body at the foot of the lounge, get your plate ready, and then comes the most important part of the operation—opening the eyes. This you can effect handily by using the handle of a teaspoon. Put the upper lids up; they will stay. Turn the eyeball around to its proper place, and you have the face as nearly as natural as life. Proper retouching will remove the blank expression and the stare of the eyes. Such with me has proved a successful experience.

  We die only once, and for such a long time!

  —MOLIERE

  Widow Sacrifice

  Being forced to wear mourning clothes for two and a half years after the death of your husband might seem like a heavy burden to bear. But compared to the ordeals inflicted on women in other parts of the world, Victorian widows had it easy.

  In many traditional societies, women have had only one function: to serve their spouses with a slavish devotion, even in death. When a husband expired, his wife, having lost her raison d’être, was expected to follow suit, so that she could continue to perform her matrimonial duties in the afterlife.

  In some societies, the newly bereaved widow was ritually strangled, poisoned, or clubbed to death. In others, such as the Bena Kanioka tribe of the Congo, she might be buried alive (women who were not overly enthusiastic about this procedure had their arms and legs broken so they could not escape from the grave). Or more exotic sacrificial methods might be used. “In the Melanesian New Hebrides,” writes social historian Lou Taylor, “a special conical cap made of spiders’ webs was used for smothering widows—the task being performed by the widow’s son.”

  The best-known form of this practice is the Hindu ritual known as sati, or widow burning. The term derives from one of the names applied to the goddess of marital felicity and also denotes a faithful wife or chaste woman. Its more common meaning refers to the once-widespread custom in which an Indian woman would immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre either by lying beside his corpse before the fire was lit or by throwing herself onto the flames.

  Though formally prohibited by British colonial law in 1829, sati persisted well into the twentieth century (a highly publicized case took place in September 1987, when a childless eighteen-year-old widow named Roop Kanwar committed sati in the village of Deorala). Even today—and despite the passage of the Sati Prevention Act in the wake of the so-called Deorala affair—it reportedly still occurs on rare occasions in certain remote, rural areas of India.

  For a general survey of this subject, see Joerg Fisch, Burning Women: A Global History of Widow-Sacrifice from Ancient Times to the Present (Seagull Books, 2006). For more on the specifically Hindu version of this custom, see Sakuntala Narasimhan, Sati: Widow Burning in India (Viking, 1990); John Stratton Hawley Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India (Oxford University Press, 1994); and Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes of Immortality: Widow-Burning in India (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

  When Grief Is a Relief

  In an essay published in the January 29, 2007, issue of Newsweek, Jennifer Elison, a professional grief counselor from Montana, makes a startling admission. Two decades earlier, in October 1985, her physician husband was killed when his subcompact car was struck by a semi as he drove home from work. When informed of his death, Elison experienced a “bewildering mix” of emotions: shock, sadness, anger. Mostly, however, what she felt was “overwhelming relief.”

  As Elison goes on to explain, her seemingly storybook marriage was really a sham. Dominated and demeaned by her rigid, belittling mate, she was desperately unhappy. Little wonder that she secretly exulted in the news of his death.

  Elison eventually discovered that her experience was far from unique. For many people—and not just the wives of abusive spouses—the death of a close relative can be liberating. Think of the middle-aged daughter who has spent years acting as nursemaid to an invalid parent. Or the young couple faced with the prospect of sacrificing their lives to the round-the-clock care of a severely disabled child.
Or the grown woman who has watched her once-adored kid brother descend into a nightmarish existence of incurable mental illness.

  Of course, it’s not very nice “to be glad someone is dead”—particularly when that someone is your nearest kin. In our culture, as Elison points out, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s now-famous formulation of the five stages of grief has taken on the status of dogma. “Woe to the person who doesn’t fit into the mold,” Elison writes. To feel relief instead of sorrow at the news of someone’s death seems so shameful, if not monstrous, that people can rarely admit to the emotion—even, sometimes, to themselves.