English Essays

Victorian Death

'Death is swallowed up in victory
O death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?'
(1Corinthians 54-55)

'Truly, a beautiful secret has been proclaimed by
the blessed Gods! Mortality is not a curse, but death
is a blessing'
(Eleusinian Mysteries, Source Unknown)

When I die I shall be content to vanish into
nothingness.... No show, however good, could
conceivably be good forever.... I do not believe in
immortality, and have no desire for it. (H.L. Mencken)

The literatures of all the peoples that have ever stood under the sun confirm a single inevitability: death. Where these literatures differ is in the meaning they attribute to that death, to the nature of the afterlife that they speculate succeeds it, and to the nature of its attendant rites and rituals by which passage to that life is assured. Frescos of girls dancing on the graves of loved ones from the walls of the palace of Miocene suggest to us that the ancient Cretans welcomed and celebrated death; the above words of the Eleusinians and ancient Israelites tell that felt they knew how to conquer death; whereas rationalists since the Enlightenment speak of death as absolute cessation. Where then in this spectrum of death do the representations of Victorian literature fall, and what are their unique and peculiar features?

On hearing the phrase 'Victorian death' most people's immediate associations probably call up some of cemeteries, morbidity, scenes from a Dickens novel, long processional funerals. And these images have some truth in them. This essay seeks to refine these images as clearly as possible and so to present an analysis of the five main stages or 'rites' of Victorian literature: death, funeral, burial, mourning and judgment. This essay seeks to make these representations as broad as possible: examining death amongst poor and rich, women and men, old and young. The first section of this essay looks at two moments of death itself: Jude's famous deathbed scene in Jude the Obscure and Emile Bronte's poem Last Lines.

'His face was quite white, and gradually becoming rigid. She
touched his fingers; they were cold, thought his body was still
warm. She listened at his chest. All was still within. The bumping of nearly thirty years had ceased.' (Jude the Obscure, Chapter 53, p1)

The final chapter of Jude the Obscure presents perhaps the most famous deathbed scene in all Victorian literature: that of Jude himself. This melancholy scene exhibits the standard and classical features of Victorian deathbed writing: infirmity, a wife in attendance as nurse, pleasant and ironical descriptions of nature outside the room of the dying, loneliness, and religious doubt. Jude is shown in severe ill-health laying in his bed -- 'his face was so thin that his friends would hardly recognize him' -- whilst Arabella attends to him as nurse. She leaves for a moment to walk outside to find a beautiful summer day where every type of human activity is going on around her - all in starkest contrast to Jude who will never see these pleasures of the world again. As death approaches Jude is all alone, and his feeble plea of 'A little water, please' is answered only by 'the deserted room that received his appeal' (Ch. 53 p2). His near last words are desperate: 'Water - some water - Sue - darling - drop of water - please - oh please!', and then, as life passes from him, like Job three thousand years before, he makes a series of bitter accusations against the Creator who has abandoned him. Melancholic scenes as this are so frequent throughout Victorian literature because they mimic the grueling reality of disease, poverty, and general hardship that characterized so much of Victorian society. The religious rebuke is frequent in the literature too, usually suggesting the dejection of those men and women who having had no privileges in life are refused mercy by God also. Whilst such representations of moments of death are numerous they are not universal, and this next text conveys an entirely different attitude by some one facing death.

Emile Bronte's poem Last Lines (1986) is gives an entirely different tone to the imminent prospect of a person's death. The poem is in first-person, and the speaker in the first words cries in defiance to death

'No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear'

The poet affirms total affirmation of the Christian creed before the moment of death: it holds no fear, and can have no influence upon a true Christian. And these words are typical a common Victorian resilience to the death that, in contradistinction to the scenes of Jude's death, affirmed the Creator as the source of greatest strength and fortitude in moments of desperation and before death. The speaker is protected from the 'storm-troubled sphere' of earthly misery by the certain promise of 'undying life.' Anchored on the 'steadfast rock of immortality' God's promise of deliverance is absolute for those who abide by his commandments. Representations of funeral and burial in Victorian literature are so intimately meshed into each other that it is sensible to treat them here in the same analysis. Funeral and burial are stages two and three of the Victorian process of death identified in the introduction to this essay. The main representations of these themes are twofold. The first describes funeral and burial as acts of family and public catharsis: that is, as acts through which the deceased's family and community, and the public generally, are helped to heal in their bereavement. The second representation is a damning rebuke by Victorian writers of the decadent and ostentatious abuses and manipulations of this process. Similarly, the reader finds in Victorian literature a biting critique of the wholly different experiences of funeral and burial between those who are rich and those who are paupers.

The first representation then shows funeral and burial as stages of a complex culture and national atmosphere of grief and mourning. John Hinton describes this heavy public emphasis upon grief and death ritual as a 'socially approved catharsis of grief' where 'viewing the body and taking part in the funeral emphasize beyond all doubt that the person is really dead. The condolences, the discussions of the deceased in the past tense, the newspaper announcements . all affirm loss' (Hinton 1979, p186-187). Beverly Raphael has further said that funeral and burial were 'an opportunity for re-establishment of the social group, for a re-enforcement of its life and unity' Raphael 1984, p37). These quotations tell that in a society as deeply affected by high death-rates as Victorian England was that it became necessary to pour out this grief at a national level. But the cathartic intentions of public and high-profile funeral and burial were often grotesquely distorted when seen in practice. Thus many Victorian authors, perhaps most obviously Dickens, scarified and ridiculed what they saw as the ornamental decadence and wasteful excess of these events. The deepest cutting of such criticisms was the accusation that Victorians had come to believe that the grander and more ostentatious a person's funeral and burial then the more honorable and morally-upright that person must be. Criticisms such as this have been made of Victorian culture ever since. Bertram Puckle in his Funeral Customs of 1926 spoke of the 'madness' of the endless processions that wound daily through the streets of London and commentated of Victorian funeral extravagance that 'a foolish display of wealth to uphold family honour is a very foolish old human failing' (Puckle, 1926). This tendency to ostentatiousness was indemic, and it was the responsibility of writers to comment upon it.

The next two sections of this essay examine these representations of funeral in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations; and burial in George Eliot's and Dickens's Oliver Twist.

'Who could sit upon anything in Fleet-Street during the busy hours of the day, and not be dazed or deafened by two immense processions, one ever tending westward with the sun, the other ever tending eastward from the sun, both ever tending to the plains beyond the range of red and purple where the sun goes down ?' (Two Cities, Ch. 20, p1)

Mr. Jeremiah Cruncher - an appropriate sounding name for someone who makes money from the bodies of the dead! - has an avidity for funerals, a lust for them . they fascinate him. He is a man for whom 'funerals had at all times a remarkable attraction' (p2), a man who stands 'dazed and deafened' by the 'immense procession' before him. For Cruncher funerals are majestic, triumphant and spectacular affairs. What is more, Cruncher's fascination with funerals was typical of a vast swathe of Victorian aristocratic, professional and working classes. In this passage from A Tale of Two Cities Dickens's highlights in a sardonic and mocking tone some of the absurdities and fallacies of Victorian public opinion and belief about funerals.

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