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Mortal Remains: Death in Early AmericaFrom University of Pennsylvania Press
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Mortal Remains introduces new methods of analyzing death and its crucial meanings over a 240-year period, from 1620 to 1860, untangling its influence on other forms of cultural expression, from religion and politics to race relations and the nature of war. In this volume historians and literary scholars join forces to explore how, in a medically primitive and politically evolving environment, mortality became an issue that was inseparable from national self-definition.
Attempting to make sense of their suffering and loss while imagining a future of cultural permanence and spiritual value, early Americans crafted metaphors of death in particular ways that have shaped the national mythology. As the authors show, the American fascination with murder, dismembered bodies, and scenes of death, the allure of angel sightings, the rural cemetery movement, and the enshrinement of George Washington as a saintly father, constituted a distinct sensibility. Moreover, by exploring the idea of the vanishing Indian and the brutality of slavery, the authors demonstrate how a culture of violence and death had an early effect on the American collective consciousness.
Mortal Remains draws on a range of primary sources—from personal diaries and public addresses, satire and accounts of sensational crime—and makes a needed contribution to neglected aspects of cultural history. It illustrates the profound ways in which experiences with death and the imagery associated with it became enmeshed in American society, politics, and culture.
- Sales Rank: #1444235 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-07-05
- Released on: 2012-07-05
- Format: Kindle eBook
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Great book on death and dying in American history
By Justin Holcomb
I taught "Death and Dying" at the University of Virginia for 7 years and used this book every time.
This is an important book that introduces new methods of analyzing death in early American history. Those interested in early America, from 1620-1860, will find much of value, as will those interested in death and dying. This book argues that in an attempt to make sense of their suffering and loss while imagining a future of cultural permanence and religious vitality, early Americans crafted metaphors of death in particular ways that have shaped the national mythology. Early Americans reveal that mortality was inseparable from national self-definition and that experiences with corpses, death, and dying had an early effect on the American collective consciousness.
The goal of Mortal Remains is to emphasize America's beginnings in terms that are different from the way the story is generally told. To accomplish this, the essays cover a variety of subjects relating to individual and community experiences with death during the formative period in America's history. To describe the profound ways in which experiences with death and images associated with death became enmeshed in American society, politics, and culture, the book incorporates interdisciplinary approaches toward studying death and offers a survey of the latest methodologies used by social, cultural, and art historians, as well as literary and material culture scholars.
The book is a collection of conference essays arranged in four parts covering collective loss, politics, corpses, and the after life. Part 1 starts with chapter 1, "The Christian Origins of the Vanishing Indian," which investigates America's preoccupation with the image of the vanishing Indian. Laura M. Stevens attributes the origins of this phenomenon to the writings of seventeenth century English missionaries that focused on accounts of wartime loss and accounts of the "good death" enacted by Christianized Indians. Many of these accounts induced grief regarding the vanishing of Indians without moral accountability as the English and Americans saw Indian death as a sign of productivity and progress.
Chapter 2, "Blood Will Out" by Daniel A. Cohen, discusses the antecedents of modern American notions of crime as mystery by analyzing popular, seventeenth century, English murder publications. These stories of gruesome murders and dismemberment elicit a desire for capital punishment to be enacted rather than compassion for the victims. In comparison to the case of dying Indians who quietly vanished, this essay identifies a voyeuristic and moralistic fascination with the violent, punishing deaths of the guilty.
In the third chapter, "Tale of Two Cities," Robert V. Wells examines three traumatic epidemics and compares the responses recorded in the personal diaries of Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister, and Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker matron. Wells' analysis of these experiences with epidemics highlights the various understandings of what constitutes "good deaths" and "bad deaths." Because of the unfamiliar forms and high numbers of deaths, epidemics disrupted normal death rituals and produced social chaos and fear.
Part 2 begins with chapter 4, "Death and Satire" by Nancy Isenberg. Here Isenberg assesses the significance of the feminine personification of death in Benjamin Franklin's engraving, Magna Britannia; Her Colonies Reduc'd (1765 or 1766), William Hunter's engraving The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1752), James Gillray's print Britannia's Assassination (1774), and many others. These engravings and prints promoted the popular Anglo-American association of gender with terror. By associating the female form of death with sexual disorder, they depicted widely understood fears--fear of dissection, social death, and sexual violation. Grotesque images of female rage and slaughter became indistinguishable from the death of the public sphere.
Chapter 5, "Immortalizing the Founding Fathers" by Andrew Burnstein investigates a less violent but equally political process of state legitimation. The hyperbolic prose in the eulogies and public commemorations of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson was central in the construction of a comforting civil religion. Through religious symbolism, these founding fathers were presented as exemplars of the cause of national unity.
Julia Stern, in chapter 6-- "The Politics of Tears," focuses on the obsession with death and taboo sex in the fiction of the 1790s such as Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and William Hill Brown's Power of Sympathy. Early American readers lusted after death and satisfied it with the newly created fetish of the perfect female victim. Stern argues that, in responding to these novels, readers found a means to define national identity through collective sympathy and to reinforce social classes by their rebuke of that which is taboo.
Part 3 begins with chapter 7, "Major André's Exhumation." Michael Meranze analyzes a diplomatic struggle that took place between 1780 and 1821. George Washington had John André hanged in New York in 1780 for being a spy. In 1821, the British consul in New York exhumed Andre's body and brought it to Westminster Abbey for burial. Andre became a symbol of civility lost in the Revolutionary world and his returned remains summoned hopes of international reconciliation.
Chapter 8, "Patriotic Remains" by Matthew Dennis, also examines bodily remains by comparing the way settlers viewed Indian burial mounds with the rather different treatment of the bones of patriots. Indian mounds were viewed as sacred relics on sacred land and settlers viewed themselves as the rightful heirs of the land. The vanishing Indian from chapter 1 lost all claim to their land and now to their past. Bones of patriots fared no better. The bones of Revolutionary War sailors who died aboard British prison ships and were buried in sand off Brooklyn washed ashore the New York coast. A tomb for the martyred brave was built but it was quickly forgotten in the zeal for urban pioneering. Indian and patriotic bones play the role of the forgotten other in the national memory.
In chapter 9, "A Peculiar Mark of Infamy," Douglas R. Egerton demonstrates how white southern masters resorted to the threat of dismemberment to discipline the bodies and souls of their slaves. Because public executions could be turned into displays of defiance, masters used dismemberment as a form of retribution beyond the grave. According to certain African traditions, this was a fate worse than death because the dead would be denied an afterlife, unable to protect the family left behind, and forced to wander the earth as a ghost.
Part 4 begins with chapter 10, "Immortal Messengers." Elizabeth Reis examines the popularity of angels in American religious life, especially during the Great Awakening and in Shaker congregations. Sightings of angels and reports of their talking, writing, and touching the living were common and they quickly became a permanent fixture in the religious iconography of American culture.
In Chapter 11, "`In the Midst of Life we are in Death'," Nicholas Marshall examines ordinary diaries and letters. In the same way that other Americans turned to angels to aid in communicating with dead relatives, Marshall notes that others turned to comforting visions of heaven where they reconstituted their friends and families. Sectarian division weakened as the search for a more comforting, sympathetic, and sentimental religious experience resulted in many people attending several different, denominational churches.
Chapter 12, "The Romantic Landscape" focuses on the close connection in Washington Irving's stories between romantic legend and a sentimentalized landscape of the dead. By transforming his home and vista into a retreat and shrine for his family, Irving re-enchanted the world and created a sentimental geography all his own. Thomas G. Connors argues that this was a nostalgic return to the innocence of childhood and to a simpler, uncorrupted American past. Through Irving's work, romantic ideas about death survived in the national consciousness.
As good and highly commendable as the book is, the nature of the book as a collection of essays reveals its single weakness. Despite the comprehensive introduction, the book reads like a "series of vignettes" (2). The collection lacks coherence beyond the fact that each essay deals with death in American history.
However, this minor shortcoming cannot obscure the richness of detail in the book, an investigation that encompasses a broad range of early American responses to death. An additional strength of Mortal Remains is its study of neglected aspects of American culture. This aspect of the book illustrates the profound ways that experiences with death and the imagery associated with death influenced not only religion, but also other issues--national politics, gender politics, and race relations--that are easy to relate to our contemporary concerns. Isenberg and Burnstein's work makes a significant contribution to the discussion of death and dying in American history and its value for interdisciplinary study.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A well-chosen series of essays that helps modern readers of ...
By georgecdavis
A well-chosen series of essays that helps modern readers of Early American history to realize that the people who lived through the famous events were beset by the constant omni-presence of death in a manner with no counterpart in modern American society
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Right balance between academic and 'readable'
By Mara Kaktins
Very interesting information in these scholarly articles. I bought this book for research purposes and was very pleased with the content.
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