The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883.

By Gary Laderman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. xi plus 227pp. $28.50).

Historians and other observers have often depicted twentieth-century American culture as one which denies death. Certainly the modest literature on the topic suggests that historians have been no more interested or willing to look at death than their fellow Americans. Thus, this book by Gary Laderman on American attitudes toward death in the nineteenth century is a welcome addition to what we know.

The book consists of two major sections that focus on the years between 1799 and 1865, from the death of George Washington to that of Abraham Lincoln, plus short introductory and concluding sections that set the findings in a broader perspective. Recognizing that all cultures must find some way to dispose of dead bodies in a way that is emotionally and symbolically satisfying, Laderman examines how changing attitudes in the nineteenth century transferred the responsibility for handling the corpse from family and community to professionals such as doctors and undertakers. In particular, he explores how "the changing status of the corpse" in white Protestant northern communities shifted from a "symbolically powerful though liminal object to a commodity at the heart of a nascent industry."(p. 7-8) In addition to describing how bodies were handled, he also is concerned with "the symbolic and meaning systems used ... to interpret and imagine the dead."(p. 10) According to Laderman, the de-Christianization of death, along with cultural conflict and discord, facilitated turning bodies over to professionals.

The first section of the book (Chapters 1-6) establishes a model for the rituals of handling the dead, and then demonstrates how that model was being challenged before the Civil War dealt it damaging blows. Laderman's basic model consists of three stages. The first part of the rituals involved the preparation of the body for display and burial; the second part included rituals surrounding the transportation of the body to the grave; the third part was the actual interment. Laderman stresses the importance of community and family involvement in these rituals, as well as the central role of the final "gaze" on the body. While what he says in this regard is important, he makes no mention of the fact that these rituals were imbedded in longer and more complex rituals associated with death. While he might not want to utilize a system as complex as the one this reviewer presented in this journal in 1994, some awareness that the rituals of burial were connected to those leading up to death and to the re-integration of survivors into the community after interment would add to understanding those rituals that are the main focus. After establishing the standard, Laderman turns to the urban world to trace the nascent challenges to the norm. In cities, class differences, business opportunities, and bureaucratic needs began to undermine familial and communal control of burial. He then explores three separate changes in the ways corpses were "imagined." New religious interpretations emphasized the liberation of the spirit from the body; linking death to natural processes reduced the fear of death; and sensational literature linked death with sex and violence while medical men justified gazing on the body for knowledge.

Where these changes would have ended is uncertain, but the Civil War gave an additional impetus to new attitudes toward corpses. Chapters 7 to 12 all revolve around the extraordinary scale of death during the war, and how soldiers and civilians responded. Many became desensitized to death, viewing corpses with remarkable detachment. On the other hand, the scale of death meant that as each individual death was reduced in meaning, it became important for political leaders to link those deaths to some grander, symbolic purpose, some national moral regeneration. The scale of death meant also that bureaucratic systems to handle bodies and keep records were necessary. Business opportunities developed for those willing to aid families in retrieving fallen loved ones from strange soil. Although embalmers emerged as the principal businessmen to benefit from the war, photographers also profited from public fascination with authentic and staged scenes of death.

Laderman uses Abraham Lincoln's death and burial, managed by professionals from start to finish, to suggest how after the Civil War, scientific attitudes, consumer culture, rising professionalism, and religious rejection of resurrection combined to make the corpse into a commodity to be managed by experts for profit. The symbolic meaning of the corpse for family and community had all but disappeared.

There is much of value in this study, but two limitations emerge from Laderman's approach. First, the analysis seems too caught up in what Susan Sontag has described in her thoughtful criticisms of the metaphors of illness as the "military metaphor." For example, just before the Civil War, "Conflicting discourses and contradictory representations proliferated."(p. 50) It seems obvious that northern Protestants were searching for different ways to imagine and handle bodies because old symbol systems were no longer satisfying, but that does not necessarily mean conflict and struggle. Second, Laderman too often presents cultural forces as autonomous, as when "social, economic, and religious circumstances conspired to appropriate the corpse and redefine its representational value for the public." (p. 164) As a result, real human beings are rarer in this study than they ought, perhaps, to be. When and how, for example, did scientific thought and consumer culture reach down into thousands of communities and affect the choices of individuals and their families? Perhaps the appeal of professionals to handle bodies was not only from the forces Laderman describes, but also from a long and lingering repulsion on the part of family members who had prepared bodies in the past, as much from necessity as from desire. Too often we hear the voices of prominent promulgators of high culture, without knowing how, or even if, those voices were heard in the villages and on the farms. Laderman has shown how alternative imaginings of the body emerged. What we need now is to know why and when those alternatives were accepted.

Robert V. Wells Union College