NOTE ON WESTERN ATTITUDES TOWARD DEATH: MIDDLE AGES TO THE PRESENT (20TH CENTURY)


I finished reading a book about Western Attitudes toward Death: From the middle ages to the Present, published in 1974 by Philippe Aries. Well, I didn’t read all of it. I started from the middle, part three. The changing human perception of death is divided into four parts:


Used to be a familiar concept, death was seen as a collective destiny of species (55). But slowly, with the development of individualism, death became one’s own death. 


At the end of the 15th century, literature concerning death began to take an erotic turn, combining Thanatos with Eros, revealing extreme complaisance before the spectacle of death, suffering, and torture. Death was juxtaposed with the orgasmic trance.


Complaisance (becoming friendly) toward death is the first change that appears at the end of the 18th century and has become one of the characteristics of Romanticism (61). The tombs began to serve as a sign of the dead’s presence after death. This is derived from the survivors’ unwillingness to accept the departure of their loved ones (70). The cult of memory was born. Tombs were moved from the churches to people’s homes and public cemeteries (72). By the end of the 18th century, a new concept of society was born: a society composed of both the dead and the living (74).


Then, in the 19th century, emotions were manifested to the extreme; a passionate sorrow was generated (59). The very idea of death moved people, and there came the era of mourning: thy death is also my death (67).


Between 1930 and 1950, one no longer died at home but in the hospital alone. The hospital used to serve as a shelter for the poor and pilgrims, but now it has become a medical center where people get their injuries cured and where one struggles against death; it now serves the specific purpose of dying. Death becomes a technical phenomenon obtained by a cessation (final stop) of care, a cessation determined in a more or less avowed way by a decision of the doctor and the hospital team (88). Death has been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped (88-9). Emotions must be avoided both in hospitals and everywhere in society. One does not have the right to become emotional other than in private. Cremation has become more popular.


In the UK, the phenomenon of making death a taboo has begun. The more society was liberated from the Victorian constraints concerning sex, the more it rejected things having to do with death (93). The reason was to support the need for happiness: the moral duty and social obligation to contribute to the collective happiness by avoiding any cause for sadness or boredom and appearing to be always happy even in the depths of despair (94).


In the USA, this interdiction (taboo) of death to preserve happiness was born around the beginning of the 20th century. As for America, the concept of death changes according to the ruins of Puritans, the urbanized culture dominated by rapid economic growth, and the concept of capitalist-driven happiness (100). Unlike in Europe, embalming is the characteristic of the American way of death (98). This is derived from the refusal to accept death, and that death has become an object of commerce and of profit (99). The culture of mourning was suppressed. Farewell revisitation (visiting the preserved dead) becomes a thing. If the dead disappears, how can they make money?


Reference:

Aries, Philippe. Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Translated by Patricia M. Ranum. London: Marion Bayors, 1976.