NOTES 1 See Philippe Aries, Images of Man and Death, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1985). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 Reprinted in Geoffrey Gorer, Death, Grief and Mourning (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), 192-199. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3 See Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1950) and Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4 See Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1961). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5 An exception is Norman O. Brown, who nonetheless views the relation of life and death instincts as one of ambivalence rather than opposition. See Life Against Death (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6 Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 393. Aries owes a considerable (and acknowledged) debt to Georges Bataille for these ideas. See Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7 For an examination of Victorian pornography, see Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (New York: New American Library, 1977). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8 See David E. Stannard, "Where All Our Steps Are Tending: Death in the American Context," in Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, eds., A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America (Stony Brook, N.Y.: The Museums at Stony Brook, 1980). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9 The Early Poems of William Cullen Bryant (New York and Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1893), 30-31. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: Washington Square Press, 1962), 302. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11 See Robert Fulton, "The Sacred and the Secular: Attitudes of the American Public toward Death, Funerals, and Funeral Directors," in Robert Fulton and Robert Bendiksen, eds., Death and Identity, rev. ed. (Bowie, Md.: The Charles Press Publishers, 1976), 158-172. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 12 See Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 107ff. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 13 Aries considers this to be one of the principal characteristics of modern attitudes toward death in the West. See "The Reversal of Death: Changes in Attitudes Toward Death in Western Societies," in David E. Stannard, ed., Death in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 134-158. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 14 Quoted in Lewis O. Saum, "Death in the Popular Mind of Pre-Civil War America," in Death in America, 43. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 15 Ibid., 45. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 16 See Aries, Images of Man and Death. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 17 Another version of this scene is reproduced in Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., Twenty Days (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 18 Several historians have claimed that the practice was restricted to America. Though it does seem to have been more common in the United States, it was unquestionably practiced all over Europe. For the incorrect claim, see Floyd and Marion Rinhart, "Rediscovery: An American Way of Death," Art in America 55:5 (September-October 1967), 78-81 and William Welling, Photography in America: 1839-1900 (New York: Macmillan, 1976); for a refutation, see Jay Ruby, "Post-Mortem Portraiture in America," History of Photography 8:3 (July-September 1984), 201-222. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 19 For a discussion of the importance of photography during the rise of American nationalism, see Richard Rudisill, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 20 Floyd and Marion Rinhart cite fees for postmortem daguerreotypes of as high as $75, a very large sum for the mid-nineteenth century. Though this cannot reflect the average cost of such pictures, it is significant as an outside figure, since it is much more expensive than even the most costly of normal portraits. Rinhart, 80. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 21 See Aries, Images of Man and Death, 199ff. The recumbent tomb figures of the late Middle Ages, discussed at length by Aries, depict their subjects lying in state, not lying in bed, as do the later paintings. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 22 See Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 22ff. As Michel Ragon points out, the Protestant Revival was also a revival of the idea that death was a state of sleep prior to the resurrection of the body. While the postmortem photographs that depict their subjects as asleep may have some relation to this idea, it is more likely that they stem from the popular conception of death that grew out of it. See The Space of Death: A Study of Funerary Architecture, Decoration, and Urbanism, trans. Alan Sheridan (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 208. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 23 For an overview of psychological and sociological theories of bereavement, see John S. Stephenson, Death, Grief, and Mourning: Individual and Social Realities (New York, London: The Free Press, 1985). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 24 Erich Lindemann, "Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief," in Death and Identity, 213. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 25 See Edmund H. Volkart, with the collaboration of Stanley T. Michael, "Bereavement and Mental Health," in Death and Identity, 239-257. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 26 For a survey and interpretation of a number of paintings that include these elements, see Phoebe Lloyd, "Posthumous Mourning Portraiture," in A Time to Mourn, 70-89. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 27 Aries, among others, calls embalming a denial of death. See Death in America, 154. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 28 For a discussion of funerary effigies, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 212ff. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 29 See Robert W. Habenstein and William M. Lamers, The History of American Funeral Directing (Milwaukee: Bulfin Printers, 1960). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 30 See Saum, Death in America. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 31 See Ann Douglas, "Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern United States, 1830-1880," in Death in America. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 32 Quoted in Lynne Kirby, "From Household to Cemetery: Representing the Death of a Child," in The Preserve of Childhood: Adult Artifice and Construction: Images of Late-Nineteenth Century American Childhood (Binghamton, N.Y.: University Art Gallery, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1985). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 33 Stefan Lorant, Lincoln: A Picture Story of His Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 34 Examples of accounts published in the year of Lincoln's death include The Terrible Tragedy at Washington: Assassination of President Lincoln (Philadelphia, Barclay & Co., 1865); Illustrated Life, Services, Martyrdom and Funeral of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Brothers, 1865); The Lincoln Memorial: A Record of the Life, Assassination, and Obsequies of the Martyred President (New York: Bunce & Huntington, 1865); and William T. Coggeshall, Lincoln Memorial: The Journey of Abraham Lincoln From Springfield to Washington, 1861, as President Elect and From Washington to Springfield, 1865, as President Martyr (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State Journal, 1865). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 35 For an account of the reaction to Lincoln's assassination, see Thomas Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge, La. and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). If Stanton knew his Roman history, he might have recalled that when a funerary effigy of Julius Caesar that realistically depicted all of his knife wounds was put on public display, the crowd was sufficiently moved to burn down the Senate. See Freedberg, 215-216. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 36 The earliest known war photographs were made during the Mexican War (1846-48). See Pat Hodgson, Early War Photographs (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1974); and Martha Sandweiss, Rick Stewart, and Ben W. Huseman, Eyewitness to War: Prints and Daguerreotypes of the Mexican War, 1846-1848 (Fort Worth and Washington, D.C.: Amon Carter Museum and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 37 See John Hannavy, Roger Fenton of Crimble Hall (Boston: David R. Godine, 1976) and Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, eds., Roger Fenton, Photographer of the Crimean War: His Photographs & His Letters From the Crimea (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 38 I am grateful to Dr. Ulrich Keller for the opportunity to read several chapters from his unpublished book on photography of the Crimean War. The issue of Fenton's social class is central to his argument. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 39 For a detailed account of the photographic documentation of Antietam, see William Frassanito, Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 40 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 544. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 41 The number of later occasions on which Civil War photographers were able to document casualties were limited. Frassanito, 284ff. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 42 New York Times, October 20, 1862, 5. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 43 Ibid. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 44 "Doings of the Sunbeam," Atlantic Monthly 7:69 (July 1863), 11-12. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 45 That Holmes employs a language of repression is noted by Alan Trachtenberg in "Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs," Representations 9 (Winter 1985), 1-32. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 46 Holmes, 12. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 47 For a discussion of the pictorial reportage of the Civil War, see Andrea G. Pearson, "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly: Innovation and Imitation in Nineteenth-Century American Pictorial Reporting," Journal of Popular Culture 23:4 (Spring 1990), 81-111. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 48 Frassanito, 286. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 49 See Habenstein and Lamers. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 50 See Alice Morse Earle, "Death Ritual in Colonial New York," in Charles O. Jackson, ed., Passing: The Vision of Death in America (Westport, Conn, and London: Greenwood Press, 1977), 30-41. See also Lawrence Taylor, "Symbolic Death: An Anthropological View of Mourning Ritual in the Nineteenth Century," in A Time to Mourn, 39-48, 49 and Habenstein and Lamers. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 51 The demand for elaborate cemetery monuments was pivotal in the development of a school of American sculpture. See Frederic A. Sharf, "The Garden Cemetery and American Sculpture: Mount Auburn," Art Quarterly 24:1 (Spring 1961), 80-88. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 52 See Habenstein and Lamers. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 53 See Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 25-26, and Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1988). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 54 The meanings of funeral arrangements can be found in the undertakers' catalogs of the period. My source is J. Newman & Sons' Illustrated Catalogue of Floral Designs (1885). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 55 See Leroy Bowman, "The Effects of City Civilization," in Passing, 153-173. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 56 For a brief history of embalming in America, and a description of the procedure, see Vanderlyn R. Pine, Caretaker of the Dead: The American Funeral Director (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1975). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 57 Chicago Daily Tribune, May 2, 1865, quoted in Caroline R. Heath, Four Days in May: Lincoln Returns to Springfield (Springfield, Ill.: Sangamon County Historical Society and Illinois State Historical Society, 1965). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 58 See Robert Fulton, "The Traditional Funeral and Contemporary Society," in Vanderlyn Pine, Austin H. Kutscher, David Peretz, Robert C. Slater, Robert DeBellis, Robert J. Volk, and Daniel J. Cherico, eds. Acute Grief and the Funeral (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1976), 23-31. See also Paul E. Irion, "The Funeral and the Bereaved," 32-40. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 59 Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 95. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 60 See Habenstein and Lamers. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 61 Twenty Days. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 62 See Otto Rank, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development (New York: Agathon Press, 1968). For a discussion of Rank's ideas, see Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York and London: The Free Press, 1973). For Freud's theories on the subject, see Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1959). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 63 For the popularity of stereographs, see Edward Earle, ed., Points of View: The Stereograph in America--A Cultural History (Rochester, N.Y.: The Visual Studies Workshop Press in collaboration with The Gallery Association of New York State, 1979), especially Harvey Green, "`Pasteboard Masks': The Stereograph in American Culture 1865-1910," 109-115. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 64 For the history of European burial customs, see Aries, The Hour of Our Death, 29ff. See also Chapter 1: "Grim Graveyards and Common Pits: Death Banal, the Past Forgotten," in Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 15-33. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 65 For a discussion of burial practices in seventeenth and eighteenth century America, see John L. Brooke, "`For Honour and Civil Worship to Any Worthy Person': Burial, Baptism, and Community on the Massachusetts Near Frontier, 1730-1790," in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600-1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 463-485. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 66 Dissenting Baptists and other groups affected by the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century were exceptions to this. However, as dissenters, they departed from the norm by definition. See Brooke. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 67 See Chapter 6: "Grave Problems in Boston: The Burial Controversy of 1823," in Linden-Ward, op. cit., 149-166. See also Stanley French, "The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the `Rural Cemetery' Movement," American Quarterly 16 (March 1974), 37-59, reprinted in Death in America, 69-91. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 68 See Thomas Bender, "The `Rural' Cemetery Movement: Urban Travail and the Appeal of Nature," New England Quarterly 47:2 (June 1974), 196-211, reprinted in Material Life in America, 505-518. See also Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860 (New York: George Braziller, 1966), 198ff. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 69 Cornelia W. Walter, Mount Auburn Illustrated (New York: R. Martin, 1847), 9. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 70 Wilson Flagg, Mount Auburn: Its Scenes, Its Beauties, and Its Lessons (Boston and Cambridge: James Munroe and Company, 1861), 35-36. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 71 For Green-Wood Cemetery, see Donald E. Simon, "The Worldly Side of Paradise: Green-Wood Cemetery," in A Time to Mourn, 52-64. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 72 Nehemiah Cleveland, Green-Wood Illustrated (New York: R. Martin, 1847), 9. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 73 See Edwin Dethlefsen and James Deetz, "Death's Heads, Cherubs, and Willow Trees: Experimental Archaeology in Colonial Cemeteries," American Antiquity 31:4 (1966), 502-510. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 74 See Linden-Ward, 134ff. It has also been pointed out that the urn replaced the skull as an alchemical vessel of transformation. See Anita Schorsch, "A Key to the Kingdom: The Iconography of a Mourning Picture," Winterthur Portfolio 14:1 (Spring 1979), 41-71. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 75 Linden-Ward, 136. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 76 See Linden-Ward, Chapter 2: "English Gardens: Models of Melancholy, Nature, and Design," 35-63. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 77 For a comparison of eighteenth century English gardens with a nineteenth century American rural cemetery, see Margaretta J. Darnall, "The American Cemetery as Picturesque Landscape: Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis," Winterthur Portfolio 18:4 (Winter 1983), 249-269. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 78 For the history of Pere Lachaise, see Richard A. Etlin, The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1984) and Linden-Ward, Chapter 3: "The French Cult of Ancestors and Pere Lachaise Cemetery," 65-104. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 79 See Linden-Ward, Chapter 11: "The Rage for Mount Auburn: Sacred Site or Pleasure Ground," 295-320, summarized by the same author with additional material on other rural cemeteries in "Strange but Genteel Pleasure Grounds: Tourist and Leisure Uses of Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemeteries," in Richard E. Meyer, ed., Cemeteries and Graveyards: Voices of American Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich. and London: UMI Research Press, 1989), 293-328. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 80 Hammatt Billings, "Sketches at Mount Auburn," in Damrell V. Moore and George Coolidge, eds., The Boston Almanac for the Year 1857 (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1857), 51. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 81 For A.J. Downing and his influence on American taste in the mid-nineteenth century, see Harris, The Artist in American Society, and Clifford E. Clark, Jr., "Domestic Architecture as an Index to Social History: The Romantic Revival and the Cult of Domesticity in America, 1840-1870," in Material Life in America, 535-549. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 82 The Horticulturist 3:4 (October 1848), 157. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 83 The Horticulturist 4:1 (July 1849), 12. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 84 For the history and social background of Spiritualism, see R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) and Geoffrey K. Nelson, Spiritualism and Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 85 See Fred Gettings, Ghosts in Photographs: The Extraordinary Story of Spirit Photography (New York: Harmony Books, 1978). Earlier accounts of Mumler and other spirit photographers include James Coates, Photographing the Invisible (Chicago: Advanced Thought Publishing Company, 1911) and Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case for Spirit Photography (New York: George H. Doran, 1923). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 86 Spiritual Magazine 4:2 (February 1863), 88. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 87 American Journal of Photography 5:11, New Series (December 1, 1862), 263-4. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 88 Harper's Weekly Journal of Civilization 13:645 (May 8, 1869), 289. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 89 [Elbridge Gerry], The Mumler "Spirit" Photograph Case: Argument of Mr. Elbridge T. Gerry, of Counsel for the People, Before Justice Dowling, on the Preliminary Examination of Wm. H. Mumler, Charged With Obtaining Money by Pretended "Spirit" Photographs (New York: Baker, Voorhis & Co., 1869), 19. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 90 Gerry, 22. Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 91 Miss [Georgiana] Houghton, Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye (London: E.W. Allen, 1882). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 92 See Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (New York: Schocken Books, 1970). Return ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------