Where Death Never Died

by Matt Blanchard

OCTOBER 4, 2007 TAGS: ART, HISTORY, COPING, LOVE COMMENTS (2)

Take a tour of the Museum of Mourning Art, where the fascinating and odd rituals of death in the 18th and 19th century live on.

Try to imagine it: Your grandmother has passed away, so the entire family decides to wear black woolen clothing for the next 12 months. Your sister sends out funeral announcements decorated with skeletons and serpents, while grandpa orders a headstone carved with a winged skull and the words “prepare to die.” Before the service, you cut a long hank of your grandmother’s hair so you can braid it into a hair-wreath for display on the living room wall.

These common death rituals of the 18th and 19th centuries are unthinkable today, leading some to charge that Death, once a constant preoccupation of Western culture, is itself dying out. In his influential 1955 article, “The Pornography of Death,” sociologist Geoffrey Gorer announced that death had replaced sex as the principle taboo of American life. Fascinated by killings on film and television, we banish real death to hospitals and funeral homes. We refuse to discuss it, even with the dying.

Yet the stark old rituals have a visceral pull, and for those who feel it, there is no more enlightening locale than the Museum of Mourning Art, an odd little institution entirely dedicated to explaining the rituals of death before Death “died.”

Established in 1990, the museum gives a street address that turns out to be the stone gates of Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a prewar suburb of Philadelphia. Visitors are taken by appointment only and must find their way through the graveyard to the Toppitzer Funeral Home, a full-scale replica of George Washington’s Mt. Vernon estate. A dim, locked chamber in the south wing of this building contains the museum.

Once inside, the museum’s 200 artifacts – coffins, books, jewelry, clothing, eulogies, embroidery, furniture and art – quickly put the modern viewer in an astonished mood, like an amnesiac searching through family photos: How could we have forgotten all this?

There are a few purely practical items, like the wooden box coffin from 1610 with a glass face plate, apparently to allow scent-free viewing of the deceased in the years before embalming. And there’s the brutal English cemetery gun from 1710, a flintlock booby-trap meant to blast the legs of anyone who tripped the wire near fresh-dug graves. The bullets were intended for grave robbers, often sent by medical students who needed bodies for dissection. Sadly, they cut down hapless mourners just as well.

But most of the collection is symbolic art, revealing a trans-Atlantic culture that was, until this century, obsessed with death. “Their lives were spent preparing for death,” says docent Elizabeth Wojcik as she begins her tour.

Wojcik’s first stop is European emblem books of the 16th and 17th centuries. Since literacy was rare, emblem books used symbolic engravings, or emblems, to teach moral verities that would lead to heaven. One shows a dying man at the moment he exhales his soul. Hell opens with flames and the devil’s agent at the foot of the bed. Heaven opens with the crucifix shaking by the side of the bed. The man’s soul, symbolized as a naked, sexless body, is being pulled from the man’s mouth by a hairless dog with a bird’s head, and is heading straight for the flames.

Other engravings depict elaborate funeral processions for aristocrats who believed resurrection depended on the sheer volume of prayer on their behalf; some lasted three days, involving scores of mourners. And a book from 1651, Rules and Exercises for Holy Dying,” strikes a surprisingly therapeutic note on grieving: “Let thy grief sit down and rest upon thy own turf and weep until a shower springs from thy eyes to heal the wounds of thy spirit.” In other words: Go ahead and cry.

In America, mourning art begins with the tombstones of colonial New England, whose stark, winged-skull designs of the late 1600s gave way to less menacing winged-cherub designs by the late 1700s. (Not given to grave robbery, the museum displays headstones only in facsimile.)

The same softening of death’s edge can be traced in the museum’s 70-piece collection of mourning jewelry. Rings were the most common type, given out to friends as a reminder to pray for the deceased. Designs of the early 1700s bore tiny skulls and crossed bones in gold on black enamel. Later, as the preacher’s threat of “eternal damnation” was replaced by a sweeter promise of “eternal rest,” the jeweler’s symbolism would shift to weeping willows and sad women in various poses: laying a wreath, leaning on an urn, petting a dove.

Incredibly, these detailed scenes were rendered on nickel-sized ivory disks, not with brush strokes, but with clipped bits of human hair. The craft was so popular Sears & Roebuck got into the business.

American mourning art really explodes with the death of George Washington in 1799, the new republic’s first Princess Di-style celebrity death event. The museum possesses one of five mourning rings made with Washington’s hair, a bust of the man by Josiah Wedgewood, and several framed embroideries done by young ladies of the era, whose period stitching still draws curious textile students from across the country.

Our admirable frankness about death continued into the nineteenth century with books like The Last Days of Emma, published by the Philadelphia Sunday School Union in 1835. It’s a children’s book in which the young heroine’s dress catches fire. She’s dead by page 11.

“It’s not exactly All Dogs Go to Heaven,” Wojcik remarks. “But death was a very, very common thing at that time, so it was openly discussed and openly planned for.”

Death was indeed very common: As late as 1900, average life expectancy in the United States was a mere 47 years. Today it’s nearly 78. And death was also young: Nearly half of all deaths in 1900 were of people younger than 15. Today the young account for a mere 1.6 percent of those who die.

The 20th century would see death, the erstwhile “king of terrors,” hustled off-stage by many hands. Modern hospitals took the dying man out of his bedroom, and the rise of funeral homes put an end to the living room wake.

But what about mourning art? Does it survive beyond the cemetery wall? What about all those photos at Ground Zero? What about those vinyl windshield memorials: “In Memory of Lucia 1965-2006”?

“I’m not saying it’s a lost art,” offers cemetery president Gary Buss. “But people don’t do it like they used to.”

Matt Blanchard, a freelance writer, teaches writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.