Death in America [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512818857

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D E A T H IN A M E R I C A

Philippe Aries Ann Douglas Stanley French Jack Goody Patricia Fernandez Kelly Mary Ann Meyers Lewis O. Saum David E. Stannard

DEATH IN AMERICA

E D I T E D , WITH AN I N T R O D U C T I O N BY D A V I D E . S T A N N A R D

University o f Pennsylvania Press 1975

Copyright < 1974 T r u s t e e s of the University of Pennsylvania Introduction by David E. S t a n n a r d and " G a t e s A j a r " by M a r y Ann Meyers copyright f 1975 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Inc. Substantial portions of this book were originally published in the American Quarterly the editorship of Bruce Kuklick and are reprinted here by exclusive a r r a n g e m e n t . All rights reserved Library of C o n g r e s s C a t a l o g C a r d N u m b e r : 75-10124 I S B N (cloth): 0-8122-7695-7 ISBN (paper): 0-8122-0184-0 Printed in the United S t a t e s of A m e r i c a

under

CONTENTS Editor's

Introduction

Death and the I n t e r p r e t a t i o n of C u l t u r e : A Bibliographic Overview Jack Goody Death and the P u r i t a n Child David E. Stannard Death in the P o p u l a r Mind of Pre-Civil W a r A m e r i c a Lewis O. Saum Heaven O u r H o m e : C o n s o l a t i o n L i t e r a t u r e in the N o r t h e r n United S t a t e s , 1830-1880 Ann Douglas T h e C e m e t e r y as C u l t u r a l Institution: T h e E s t a b l i s h m e n t of M o u n t A u b u r n and the " R u r a l C e m e t e r y " M o v e m e n t Stanley French Death in Mexican Folk C u l t u r e Patricia Fernändez Kelly G a t e s A j a r : D e a t h in M o r m o n T h o u g h t a n d Practice Mary Ann Meyers T h e Reversal of D e a t h : C h a n g e s in A t t i t u d e s T o w a r d Death in Western Societies Phillippe Aries

INTRODUCTION

IT HAS

BEEN

A COMMON

PRACTICE

THROUGHOUT

HISTORY

FOR

MEN

TO

personify death in a great variety of ways. As well as the literal identification of a specific spirit of death in most of the world's religions, there are the more popular images of death as the Grim Reaper, the Pale H o r s e m a n , the Destroying Angel, the King of Terrors, and so on. It is now twenty years since the English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in a brief essay published in Encounter, suggested that another name might be added to this pantheon. Although he did not actually use the term, Gorer in effect pointed out that in the modern West death possessed the characteristics of the emperor who wore no clothes. And, as happened in that f a m o u s children's tale, once Gorer spoke the forbidden words identifying death as the "new pornography" about which nothing should be said in polite company, he was joined by a rousing and rising chorus of echoing voices. Since that time, with ever-increasing frequency, the reading public has been deluged with all manner of writings on the problem of death in the modern West, and particularly in modern America. One of the striking things about this recent literature on death and dying is that at first glance the themes pursued most often seem curiously contradictory. On the one hand there is the popular social criticism, exemplified by Jessica M i t f o r d ' s The American Way of Death, focusing on the excesses of the funeral industry and its largely successful effort to construct its own " g r o t e s q u e cloud-cuckoo-land where the trappings of Gracious Living are t r a n s f o r m e d , as in a nightmare, into the trappings of Gracious Dying." 1 On the other hand there is the more scholarly sociological analysis of the c o m m o n fate of most Americans who now die in hospitals and rest homes, deserted by their families and friends, and faced with doctors and nurses so intent on maintaining their professional demeanor that they avoid personal contact with the dying at every turn—so lonely that they are forced into such pathetic strategems as removing their bedside telephones from the hook in order to at least hear a human voice. 2 Under closer scrutiny, however, what becomes clear is that each of these responses—the extravagant masquerade of death, and the determined 'The American Way of Death (New Y o r k : Simon and S c h u s t e r , 1963), p. 16. 'Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 44. Cf. Barney G . Glaser and Anselm L. S t r a u s s , Awareness of Dying (Chicago: Aldine, 1965); and Jeanne C . Quint, The Nurse and the Dying Patient (New Y o r k : Macmillan, 1967).

viii

Introduction

avoidance of the dying—are reactions with a c o m m o n source. For the phenomenon of death has become something of an acute e m b a r r a s s m e n t to modern m a n : in a technological world that h a s effectively ruled out of o r d e r explanations of a mystical nature, man is brought up short in his inability to u n d e r s t a n d or give meaning to death. T h e answers of the past a r e no longer a p p r o p r i a t e ; the answers of the present are insufficient. Death is t h u s avoided as much as possible, and when it is no longer possible—when a body must be c o n f r o n t e d and dealt with—it is turned over to professionals who provide their own special skills in the effort of denial. T h e dead a r e t r a n s f o r m e d in a p p e a r a n c e with the aid of such p r o d u c t s as N a t u r e - G l o " t h e ultimate in cosmetic e m b a l m i n g " ; they are provided with " B e a u t y r a m a A d j u s t a b l e S o f t F o a m Bed C a s k e t s , " and are placed in " s l u m b e r r o o m s " for viewing by the bereaved; and, if c i r c u m s t a n c e s are sufficiently favorable, they may even be f o r t u n a t e enough to spend the f u t u r e in a Forest Lawn crypt outfitted with air conditioning and piped-in music. Forest Lawn, of course, is by no m e a n s a typical American c e m e t e r y . Neither, perhaps, are all of the other a p p r o a c h e s described above typical of every American funeral. They are, however, vivid exemplars of the general direction funeral c u s t o m s have taken in A m e r i c a during the twentieth century. It also may not be typical for the dying individual to reach for his bedside telephone merely to be afforded the privilege of hearing a voice. But if it is not typical, it is not so in large m e a s u r e because the dying are generally not capable of such activity—for the g r e a t majority of d e a t h s now occur in hospitals where the dying individual has long been sedated into unconsciousness. O n e 1967 study of approximately two hundred and fifty d e a t h s in California hospitals, for example, reported that barely a dozen subjects had been conscious when death took place, and none of these had been engaged in conversation at the time. 3 Indeed, the t e r m "social d e a t h " is now well established in the sociological lexicon as describing that point when an individual is sedated into a pre-death c o m a t o s e s t a t e and effectively regarded f r o m then on as a corpse; this a f f o r d s the hospital staff the convenience of adequate time to m a k e p r e p a r a t i o n s for the o c c u r r e n c e of actual death, allowing t h e m to see to it, for example, t h a t the individual's eyes are properly closed, as this is a m o r e difficult task to p e r f o r m once d e a t h has taken place. 4 P e r h a p s in part as a response to these earlier works, still another type of literature on death and dying has recently emerged. This latest literature can perhaps best be described, with no flippancy intended, as of the " h o w 3 David Sudnow, Passing On Prentice-Hall, 1967). p. 89. 'Ibid., p. 74.

The Social

Organization

of Dying (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:

Introduction

ix

t o - d o - i t " variety, instructing survivors on the m o s t dignified and rational w a y s of coping with the d e a t h s of loved o n e s and of p r e p a r i n g for their own e v e n t u a l d e m i s e . Along with t h e recent proliferation of societies dedicated to t h e ideal of simplicity and g r a c e f u l n e s s in the f a c e of d e a t h , and of hospital s e m i n a r s on the m o s t h u m a n e ways of treating the dying, it m a y well be t h a t we a r e in the midst, o r at least on the verge of m a j o r c h a n g e s in t h e m o d e r n A m e r i c a n a t t i t u d e and a p p r o a c h to d e a t h . But if this very personal a p p r o a c h is t h e m o s t recent variation on the c o n t e m p o r a r y l i t e r a t u r e on d e a t h , it is also the o n e with the deepest r o o t s in the t r a d i t i o n s of W e s t e r n m a n . A n d it is also t h e best e x a m p l e of m o d e r n m a n ' s t r e a t m e n t of d e a t h not only as a r e s p o n s e to the secularization of the religious universe, but also as a c o n s e q u e n c e of the m o d e r n ordering of social s t r u c t u r e . F o r w h e t h e r we look to the hedonistic advice of Siduri the wine maiden in the ancient M e s o p o t a m i a n Epic of Gilgamesh, to the h a r r o w i n g b l o c k - p r i n t s of t h e medieval Ars Moriendi, o r to t h e sentimental poetry on death in nineteenth c e n t u r y school b o o k s , it is evident t h a t few e r a s in h u m a n history have been without s o m e sort of advice l i t e r a t u r e on the best way of m a k i n g a g o o d end. W h a t is m o s t striking a b o u t these historical p r e c u r s o r s , however, is not their m e r e presence, but the fact t h a t they have varied so m u c h in the advice they have had to o f f e r — a n d t h a t this advice h a s been a reflection of t h e specific c u l t u r e ' s way of life as m u c h as it h a s been a r e a f f i r m a t i o n of t h e p r o f o u n d disquietude the p r o s p e c t of d e a t h h a s always b r o u g h t to the mind of m a n . T h e physical residue of d e a t h is the m o s t valuable m a t e r i a l a r c h a e o l o g i s t s have h a d to work with in u n d e r s t a n d i n g t h e life of prehistoric m a n , for t h e earliest evidence of uniquely h u m a n - l i k e behavior a m o n g o u r a n c e s t o r s — p r e - d a t i n g even the c r u d e s t cave paintings by al least terts of t h o u s a n d s of years, and p e r h a p s even preceding the d e v e l o p m e n t of the ability to express a b s t r a c t ideas in l a n g u a g e — a r e the r e m a i n s of t h e ritualized binding and coloring of the dead by Paleolithic m a n . S u c h coloring, a l m o s t invariably with a red o c h r e s u b s t a n c e , is generally interpreted as suggestive of a new life for the d e a d , while t h e binding, usually with the c o r p s e in a p r e - n a t a l position, has been variously i n t e r p r e t e d either as indicating a belief in rebirth o r as an a t t e m p t at c o n s t r a i n i n g the dead f r o m returning to h a u n t the living. Recently, speculations have even been m a d e concerning N e a n d e r t h a l a t t i t u d e s t o w a r d children, cripples, and the aged, based on detailed analysis of N e a n d e r t h a l g r a v e sites. 5 But whatever the specific findings m a y be, the 5 R a l p h M. Rowlett and Mary J a n e Schneider, " T h e Material Expression of Neanderthal Child C a r e , " in Miles Richardson, ed.. The Human Mirror Material and Spatial Images of Man (Baton Rouge: Louisiana S t a t e University Press, 1974), pp. 41 58. For estimates of the early stages of m a n ' s development when engagement in burial ritual first appeared, see (among many sources) J o h a n n e s Maringer, The Gods of Prehistoric Man (New Y o r k : Knopf, 1960), p. 37; and V Gordon Childe, "Directional Changes in Funerary Practices During 50,000 Y e a r s , " Man. 45 (1945).

χ

Introduction

important point is that the physical remains of prehistoric man's burial rituals are the earliest real evidence we have of man's ability to carry out and respond to abstract thought. With the rise of modern anthropology and the sociology of religion in the nineteenth century, scholars recognized in the rituals surrounding death what Jack Goody has termed "the kernel of their studies."* Death has since often been regarded as the source of all religion and even, as Goody notes, as the origin of Greek tragedy and of the Olympic games. 7 But if there is disagreement on some of this, one general connection between death and the organization of human culture that has been repeatedly observed and analyzed since the turn of the present century is the tie between attitudes toward death and the sense of community purpose and meaning a people may or may not enjoy. Writing in 1907 Robert Hertz, a young student of Emile Dürkheim, noted that in virtually all cultures the death of an important leader brought on a significant response by the society at large, while that of someone less critical to the functioning of the community was often barely noticed. He made the elementary but seminal point that if sociologists and anthropologists were to make any sense of this they would have to recognize that every individual in a society possesses not only a biological being, but also a "social being" that is "grafted onto him" by other members of the society. 8 The death of an important individual thus brings with it serious damage to the social fabric, and a natural and spontaneous effort is then made by the society to compensate for the loss. This is particularly evident in the dramatic funerary rites of smaller, more unified societies where, as Robert Blauner has more recently written, "much 'work' must be done to restore the social system's functioning." 8 Such smaller, more unified, simpler societies were the rule in America until at least the early years of the nineteenth century. Prior to then, and in small scattered pockets since then, death generally brought with it a substantial disorganization of the community's structure and ongoing functions. Whether or not the family was a more cohesive unit in the past—a question of some continuing debate among social historians—in virtually all American communities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the family was well-integrated into the web of community cohesiveness. Death had a great deal of meaning for the individual, meaning that admittedly differed substantially from time to time and from place to place, and it had •Death. Properly, and the Ancestors ( S t a n f o r d : S t a n f o r d University, 1962), p. 13. 'Ibid. " R o b e r t Hertz, " T h e Collective Representation of D e a t h " (1907), in H e r t z , Death and the Right Hand, translated by R. and C N e e d h a m (Glencoe, III.: The Free Press, 1960), p. 76. •Robert Blauner, " D e a t h and Social S t r u c t u r e , " Psychiatry. 29 (1966), 387.

Introduction

xi

a great deal of meaning for the community; but because its meaning was diffused throughout the community at large, its burden was lightened somewhat from the shoulders of the immediate family whose sense of bereavement was widely shared. We are now well into the closing years of the twentieth century. The tides of secularization in religion, specialization and diversification in c o m m e r c e , and individualism and mobility in social relations have long swept over the civilization of our time. Few individuals can any longer, when faced with death, find solace in the promise of a spiritual paradise, or can locate a sense of genuine importance for themselves in either their work or their community. When they face death they must often do so with a sense of its meaninglessness, and of their own insignificance; and when their small circle of intimates are forced to provide the meaning that is absent, they must often turn to the only source available—the commercial funerary establishment. •

·

*

None of the essays in this volume were written with a single theme in mind, other than that they should address the problem of death. They were written by historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and art h i s t o r i a n s each with his or her own choice of chronological, geographical, and conceptual focus—and they can and should be read primarily with their individual concerns in mind. There are, however, a good many overlapping and complementary themes. The relationship between death and childhood, death and religion, death and social class, death and cultural expression are only a few such c o m m o n denominators. It was intended that this collection would help fill a prominent gap in the contemporary literature on death by providing historical background for what has almost invariably been a parochial concern for the present. But in assembling these writings it b e c a m e clear that each in its own different way was also a building block toward a general history and perhaps at least a partial explanation for the disturbing turns the concept of death has taken in modern American society. The brief opening comment by Jack Goody introduces some of the recent scholarship on death in a variety of social settings and suggests certain reasons for its continuing importance to those who would seek to understand the many levels of organized human culture. Despite the fact that, as he puts it, "only the bare bones of death are seen today in Western societies," Goody demonstrates ways in which modern studies of traditional cultures—from the work of anthropologists in Africa and Asia to that of the Annales school of French social historians—can assist in understanding the contemporary cultural suppression of death.

Xll

Introduction

M y own essay on childhood and death in Puritan New England focuses on a problem treated at least in passing in the later articles by S a u m , Douglas, Kelly and Aries. T a k i n g issue with s o m e recent interpretations o f the meaning o f childhood in early A m e r i c a n society, I suggest that the Puritans' c o n c e r n s and f e a r s o f death had their roots in the imposition, on the child's naive sense o f reality, o f a vision o f death beset with theological pessimism and internal c o n t r a d i c t i o n . Death often had terrifying meaning for the Puritan, but such meaning, I argue, can only be grasped by understanding the world-view o f the relatively closed society in which the Puritan lived. In a sense, the early M o r m o n m o v e m e n t can also be characterized as a closed society, but one in which the picture o f the world o f the living and the world o f the dead differed fundamentally from that of the Puritan. M a r y Ann M e y e r s points out that a sense o f continuing, evolutionary " p r o g r e s s " m a r k e d the thought o f the founders o f M o r m o n i s m , with the result that death did not bring with it the stunning changes traditionally perceived in the Christian c o s m o l o g i c a l s c h e m e . N o r , as a consequence, did the M o r m o n suffer the deep-seated apprehension in the face o f death so c o m mon to Christianity in general and so exaggerated in the Puritan c o n t e x t . But in the eventual m a i n s t r e a m of A m e r i c a n culture, Puritans and M o r m o n s alike were something o f an a n a c h r o n i s m . T h e i r contrasting visions o f death suggest s o m e o f the ways the elasticity o f Christian d o g m a can provide a p p r o a c h e s to the problem that vary even to the point of opposition. But with the dawning o f the nineteenth century and the e m e r g e n c e o f cultural R o m a n t i c i s m , a broader gauge " A m e r i c a n " vision o f death began settling in. O n e o f the earliest pieces o f evidence attesting to this new sentimentalized attitude toward death was the construction, in 1796, of New Haven's G r o v e S t r e e t C e m e t e r y . A s S t a n l e y French indicates, the new rural c e m e t e r y m o v e m e n t o f the early nineteenth century—exemplified finally by B o s t o n ' s M o u n t Auburn C e m e t e r y , built in 1831—carried with it strong c u r r e n t s o f R o m a n t i c i s m , but also the seeds o f a rising ethic o f possessive individualism. If, as French concludes, the rural c e m e t e r y movement was at least in part an effort at " c u l t u r a l uplift . . . during the Age o f the C o m m o n M a n , " so too was much o f the literary outpouring on death that marked that era. At a time when religion was increasingly becoming the province o f women and children, as Ann Douglas vividly d e m o n s t r a t e s , death (like religion) took on new meaning. S c h o o l b o o k poetry and popular consolation literature spread wide the m e s s a g e that death was a thing to be desired and hoped for with all one's h e a r t : it m e a n t deliverance from this mundane world, and glorious reunion with loved ones in the dazzling palaces o f heaven. Death was indeed so marvelous, wrote one popular author o f the

Introduction

Xlll

time, that God had found it necessary to implant in man a natural apprehension of it, in order to " k e e p his children f r o m rushing uncalled inlo his presence, leaving undone the work which he has given them to do. 1 0 Heaven literally became home to much of nineteenth century America. But not to all of it. Lewis O. S a u m ' s combing of various state and local archives for evidence of attitudes toward death among less urban and less urbane Americans during roughly the same period as that studied by French and Douglas has turned up strikingly different results. Far f r o m spiritualism and sentimentality, S a u m found an attitude of frankness and openness, a "seeming insouciance"; and far from envisioning in death the splendor of " t h e golden stair" to heaven, the subjects of S a u m ' s inquiry saw death as, at best, "escape f r o m the world's sadness." It was, he writes, " a qualified, even a negative vision. But for people whose quotient of delight had had severe limitations, it seems to have been heaven enough." Patricia Fernandez Kelly's essay on death in Mexican folk culture provides an instructive comparison which can help in understanding the fundamental differences among nineteenth century Americans in their attitudes toward d e a t h — a s well as extending the boundaries of this volume beyond the restriction of viewing the United S t a t e s as all that is " A m e r i c a n . " Despite the centuries of forced immersion of Mexican folk life in a powerful solution of European Christianity, Kelly shows that the resulting syncretistic cultural fusion has been characterized by much retention of traditional beliefs and attitudes. The tenacity of folk culture has been such, for example, that the idea of the Resurrection—so central to the Christian metaphysic—is largely ignored in c o n t e m p o r a r y Mexican folk religion. Although it is, of course, vastly different f r o m either of the approaches to death described by Douglas or S a u m , in its openness and its absence of romanticization the attitude toward death of Kelly's subjects seems conceptually closer to that of the " c o m m o n " people described in S a u m ' s essay than to that expressed by the consolation literature that is at the core of Douglas' study. One tentative conclusion that might be drawn f r o m this parallel—a conclusion that is underscored by some of the m o r e recent theoretical work that has been done on death and social s t r u c t u r e " — i s that, in contrast to those nineteenth century Americans who wrote and read the volumes of sentimental literature on death and who celebrated M t . Auburn and its many subsequent imitators as a charming " d o r m i t o r y " for the deceased, the provincial and folk cultures of the United S t a t e s and Mexico were better '"John Pierpont, The Garden of Graves ( D e d h a m , Mass.: H. M a n n , 1841), p. 7. " E . g . , Blauner, " D e a t h and Social S t r u c t u r e " ; and Le Roy B o w m a n , The American Funeral: A Study in Guilt. Extravagance, and Sublimity (Washington. D C.: Public Affairs Press, 1959).

xiv

Introduction

able to maintain a sense of communal unity and integrity, were less affected by the socially alienating forces of modernism, and thus had less of a need to create an artificial meaning for the experience of death. In these societies death continued to have the significant disruptive effect on the social fabric described by Hertz more than half a century ago, and its meaning remained clear both for the individual anticipating death and for those who would survive. In the more urban, cosmopolitan world that is the subject of French and Douglas* essays—a world witnessing the emergence of commercial specialization and social isolation and mobility—this " n a t u r a l " social disruption occasioned by death was rapidly losing its force; sentimentalization and the locating of heaven as the real " h o m e " for all men was one way of recreating the sense of community that was thus lost, and of re-establishing meaning in the experience of death that waned with the lessened cohesiveness of the social structure. But such efforts were doomed to eventual failure. For as their central premise they had a widely-felt and literally conceived religious world-view, a world-view that had become essentially anachronistic before the middle of the twentieth century. The search for meaning in death became no less demanding—if anything, it was intensified—but if it was to be found it would have to be located in a world of increasing secularization. As Philippe Aries points out in his concluding essay, avoidance and denial on the one hand, and commercial exploitation on the other, seem to have been the inevitable result. 12 Moving back well beyond the Puritan experience which m a r k s the chronological beginning of this collection, Aries views contemporary American attitudes toward death in the context of developments having their roots in the early Middle Ages. With the shifting pattern of family life at the heart of his analysis, Aries sees the modern concern with death as a reversal of certain structural themes that marked the medieval era, a reversal intimately bound up with what he calls the modern "crisis of individuality." But Arifcs is careful to avoid the "moralistic and polemical" tone of social criticism that he notes has marked so many of the recent treatments of modern American funerary ritual; indeed, he views the contemporary American approach to death as an almost heroic a t t e m p t to devise new rituals to fit new conditions. And in so doing he implicitly supports the contention stated earlier that the two most striking and seemingly contradictory characteristics of our culture's response to death and dying— avoidance and ostentation—are merely variations derived from a c o m m o n source. Each is a necessary, and yet by itself inadequate, response to a world in which religion has lost much of its power to explain, and to a so1J I have developed some of these themes more fully in the closing chapter of a forthcoming study, The Puritan Way of Death A Study in Religion. Culture, and Social Change.

Introduction

xv

ciety in which the death of an individual touches deeply only a small h a n d f u l of intimates. It is in opposition to these tendencies toward avoidance and ostentation that the new l i t e r a t u r e on death, the hospital s e m i n a r s on the t r e a t m e n t of the dying, and the societies c o m m i t t e d to openness in the face of death have arisen. But, as all of the essays in this volume suggest, the success of such endeavors is dependent upon m a j o r changes in the world-view and social s t r u c t u r e of the society at large. For if any single t h e m e d o m i n a t e s the entirety of this work, it is that the way a people look at death and dying is invariably and inevitably a direct c o n c o m i t a n t of the way they look at life.

DEATH A N D THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC OVERVIEW JACK

GOODY

THE FACT OF DEATH PROVIDES A CENTRAL FOCUS AROUND WHICH HUMAN

cultures develop in two main ways. Firstly, there is what we may loosely call the conceptual aspect of death; secondly, the organizational. Or to put it another, and not altogether overlapping, way, there is the anticipation of death and the actuality of death, the ideology and the interment. The first of these clusters of meaning lies at the core of much religious and indeed philosophical activity, and from it perhaps stems the whole mesh of religious beliefs. The inevitable fact of death needs to be reckoned with and accounted for; it has to be explained and to be included in a wider scheme of representations, a belief system, a religion, an ideology. In a recent volume on " t h e origins of a sense of G o d , " J. Bowker argues that religion has failed to disappear because of the great " c o n s t r a i n t " of death; the role of religion is to find a way through this limitation to human existence. 1 The theme echoes Malinowski and the many scholars of previous centuries who, taking a cue from the actors themselves, stressed the link between the journey of the soul (death, survival, immortality and passage to the other world), the dualistic concept of the human being (body and spirit/soul), and the existence of spiritual beings. The theme requires little elaboration. It characterizes Euhemerist explanations of the origin of religion, and runs through the evolutionary schemas of 19th century scholars like Herbert Spencer and Ε. B. Tylor. 2 Indeed it is enshrined in the latter's minimum definition of religion. 3 But such specula1 The Sense of God: Sociological, Anthropological and Psychological Approaches to the Origin of the Sense of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). "For a fuller account see the opening chapter of Jack Goody, Death, Property and the Ancestors (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1962). J For a recent comment, see Gillian Ross, "Neo-Tylorianism: A Reassessment," Man, 6 (1971), 105 16

2

Jack

Goody

tions about origins, whether from the pen of theologians, sociologists or historians, are backed by little evidence. Historically the elaborations of human burials in the Upper Palaeolithic strongly suggest the existence of a symbolic and ideological halo around the physiological facts of death, specifically in the use of red ochre, of special burial positions, and other funerary rituals. Such a set of beliefs would clearly require the elaboration of a complex system of communication which permitted the reference to "concepts" that were not physically present to the actors, in other words, a language. But whether these forms of disposing of the dead constituted in any way an "origin" of the whole complex of religious beliefs must remain guesswork, though one that fits with an acceptable logical model. But when we come to deal with the religious activities of specific societies, then the role of death and the dead is clearly of central importance. H. Sawyer has recently argued that in West African religion God is indeed the Great Ancestor. 4 On another level, since death is the ultimate misfortune, religious cults that offer some hope of dealing with man's calamities, with disease and with want, inevitably have to deal with death. Herein lies a basic contradiction; such cults have not only to ward off death but also to comfort the bereaved and the dying, since mortality is a state of being both avoidable in the shorter run and inevitable in the long. Christ is at once the earthly healer and the heavenly savior. The complex of beliefs and practices surrounding death are of great significance to the sociologist and historian alike. In treating general aspects of the "world view," the historian is inevitably handicapped because what usually persists as documentary evidence of "belief" are the written elaborations of specialists. Indeed the very fact of reducing such beliefs to writing may well have some radical influence upon them. For those working in a living society, there is the questionnaire, which often has similar disadvantages, or, better still, the passive ear, an instrument of research whose utility is often greatly underrated. But apart from the literary reflections of priest, poet and philosopher, death leaves other material traces of which historians and sociologists have recently begun to make considerable use. In the first place we have the will, that is, testaments made in anticipation of death, which in earlier times were concerned not only with the disposition of property but also with the fate of the soul. Notable among achievements in this field has been the work of French historians of the "Annales" school, especially that of M. Vovelle. Following up the study of Daumard and Furet based on marriage contracts, a work that was central in the formation of a school of "Fhistoire quantifide," Vovelle examined a large number of wills not in a search for the manner of distributing property but in order to es'God: Ancestor or Creator? (London: Longmann, 1970).

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tablish " l ' h i s t o i r e d e s m e n t a l i t d s , " a history of the mind r a t h e r than ideas, since he was interested in the generality of individuals and hence the over-all d i s t r i b u t i o n of will-making a m o n g the p o p u l a t i o n at large w a s of crucial imp o r t a n c e . In this r e g a r d he was f o r t u n a t e in his choice of 18th c e n t u r y P r o vence, where even in the r u r a l a r e a s between 60 and 70 per cent of m a l e s and 4 0 to 50 per cent of f e m a l e s m a d e written t e s t a m e n t s , as c o m p a r e d with less t h a n 20 per cent a r o u n d Lyon. 5 Looking at the spiritual t e s t a m e n t s t h a t developed as p a r t of t h e will a f t e r the C o u n t e r - R e f o r m a t i o n , Vovelle a t t e m p t s t o a s s e s s the p o p u l a r mind. T h e spiritual e l e m e n t h a s c e r t a i n f o r m u l a i c qualities a b o u t it, r e p e a t e d in will a f t e r will over d e t e r m i n e d g e o g r a p h i c a l a r e a s . But the f o r m u l a s a r e not fossilized; they c h a n g e over t i m e , and hence can be used, Vovelle a r g u e s , to r e c o n s t r u c t c h a n g i n g a t t i t u d e s to d e a t h . T h i s e x a m i n a t i o n leads h i m to c o n c l u d e t h a t t h e r e was a p r o f o u n d c h a n g e in the collective sensibility d u r i n g the 18th c e n t u r y , t h e c e n t u r y of t h e E n l i g h t e n m e n t , which he describes as " d e c h r i s t i a n i s a t i o n . " A s c o m p a r e d with the B a r o q u e world which preceded it, men were less confident of their p a s s a g e to the o t h e r world, and m o r e c o n c e r n e d with t h e physical a s p e c t s of d e a t h . Such c h a n g i n g a t t i t u d e s a r e linked with t h e c h a n g i n g position of w o m e n and with c h a n g i n g a t t i t u d e s within t h e family." S i m i l a r kinds of study can be carried out on o t h e r of the m a t e r i a l r e m a i n s t h a t t h e advent a n d a c t u a l i t y of death leave behind. T h e analysis of g r a v e g o o d s is central t o r e c o n s t r u c t i o n s of p r e h i s t o r i c societies, where they t h r o w light on t e c h n o l o g y , stratification and m i g r a t i o n as well as indicating a t t i t u d e s t o w a r d d e a t h . A p a r t f r o m g r a v e g o o d s , t h e r e a r e t h e m a r k e r s of g r a v e s , t o m b s t o n e s , which in literate societies offer a rich h a r v e s t of biographical and s o m e t i m e s attitudinal m a t e r i a l . U s i n g t h e inscriptions on R o m a n t o m b s t o n e s K. H o p k i n s and earlier w r i t e r s have m a d e a useful c o n t r i b u t i o n to social a n d d e m o g r a p h i c studies. 7 In m a n y societies f u n e r a r y a r t i f a c t s also t a k e a m o r e artistic f o r m , playing a m a j o r p a r t in the history of a r t . T h e i m p e t u s is to p r e s e r v e s o m e m a t e r i a l m e m o r i a l of t h e d e a d , p a r t of his physical being, then an object such as t h e stool he sat on, i m b u e d with 5 G. and M. Vovelle, " L a M o r t et l'au-delä en Provence d ' a p r e s les autels des ärties du P u r g a toire ( X V e - X X e siicle)," Annates ES C . 24 (1969), 1602 34 [repr. as Cahier des Annates. No. 29]; and M. Vovelle, Piete baroque et dtchristianisation en Provence au XVIlie siicle (Paris: Plön, 1973). T h e s a m e kind of variation is e n c o u n t e r e d with written m a r r i a g e c o n t r a c t s , the figure of SO per cent in Paris contrasting with the rare o c c u r r e n c e in N o r m a n d y . It should be added that the t e s t a t o r s a r e o f t e n themselves illiterate; at the beginning of the century s o m e 31-38 per cent of men sign their wills, only 15 per cent of w o m e n (Vovelle, 1969, p. 606), and there is little change by the time of the Revolution. Cf A. D a u m a r d and F. Furel, Siruclur el relations sociales ä Paris au XVUIe siede (Cahiers des Annales. No. 18).

' C f . Philippe Aries, " L ' a p p a r i t i o n du sentiment m o d e r n e de la famille d a n s les t e s t a m e n t s et les t o m b e a u x . " C o m m u n i c a t i o n to the conference on the H i s t o r y of the Family, C a m b r i d g e , 1969. 7 K. Hopkins, " O n the P r o b a b l e Age S t r u c t u r e of the R o m a n P o p u l a t i o n , " Population Studies. 20(1966), 245-64.

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his body dirt, and t h e r e f o r e his personality, and subsequently (with the development of plastic and graphic techniques) the shift to a b s t r a c t or figurative a r t i f a c t s representing the individual, of which the modern f o r m s are p e r h a p s a sculpture in a p r o m i n e n t place, an ancestral portrait in the hall, a tinted p h o t o g r a p h on the mantlepiece. 8 At earlier stages, the physical m e m o r i a l was both a place of c o m m u n i o n as well as one of simple c o m m e m o r a t i o n ; it was a focus for propitiating the a n c e s t o r s rather than for a mere cult of the dead. T h e n a t u r e of the physical m e m o r i a l varied f r o m the ancestral tablets of traditional China to the stools of Ashanti, the clay pots of the Tallensi to the simple a n t h r o p o m o r p h i c shrines of the L o D a g a a , and the completely naturalistic heads of bronze that played a part in the worship of royal ancest o r s in Ife and in Benin. 9 In A f r i c a the religious significance of wood carving, bronze casting and s c u l p t u r e hardly needs c o m m e n t ; much of this centers a r o u n d the dead. These material objects, significant in themselves for the study of religion and the history of art, have also been used as indices of social attitudes. The style of the bronze heads of Benin kings b e c a m e increasingly d e c o r a t e d and florid, a change which B r a d b u r y sees as going hand in hand with the greater centralization in the state, the g r e a t e r isolation of the m o n a r c h . In Provence, G. and M . Vovelle have t r a c e d changes in the iconography of altarpieces of chapels for souls in p u r g a t o r y between the 15th and 20th centuries, changes which they see as indicating shifts in the collective sensibility; for example, during the c o u r s e of the 19th century, the souls in purgatory are not simply recipients of the p r a y e r s of the living, rather they are acting as m e d i a t o r s with the deity; there is a shift f r o m service to serving. 1 0 It is not only in the sphere of the graphic a r t s that funerals have had an influence on creative activity. W i t h o u t wishing to espouse a theory of the "See, for example, W . A. Douglass, Death in Murelaga Funerary Ritual in a Spanish Basque Village (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1969), p. 140: " T h e r e is one Basque c u s t o m that does serve to preserve the m e m o r y of specific individuals In the sola, a dining room furnished with the household's finest f u r n i t u r e and reserved for banquets on special occasions, the walls are covered with p h o t o g r a p h s of f o r m e r and present household m e m b e r s Over time a picture gallery of deceased m e m b e r s is established." ' O n China see Emily M. A h e r n , The Cull of the Dead in a Chinese Village (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1973); these shrines were tablets in the literal sense, on which were inscribed the n a m e s of the dead, not unlike the engravings on a war memorial or the fancy lettering of a roll of honour. On the Tallensi see Meyer F o r t e s , Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (Cambridge: C a m b r i d g e Univ. Press, 1959); F o r t e s , " P i e t a s in Ancestor W o r s h i p , " Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 91 (1961), 166 91; and Fortes, " S o m e Reflections on A n c e s t o r W o r s h i p in A f r i c a , " in F o r t e s et al., African Systems of Thought (London: Oxford Univ Press, 1965). On the L o D a g a a see G o o d y , Death. Property and the Ancestors And on Ife and Benin see R. E. B r a d b u r y , Benin Studies (London: Oxford Univ Press, 1973); and F. Willett, African Art (London: T h a m e s and H u d s o n , 1971) ,0

G. and M . Vovelle (1969), p. 1625.

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kind put forward by Ridgway for Greek d r a m a , which he saw as owing its birth to funeral performances, there can be little doubt about the dramatic quality of those rites in many societies. This is particularly true in oral cultures where the funeral sums up, in a significant way, the past history as well as the social relations of the man who died. In other words the obituary is acted out, as indeed are many of his closest ties. 11 The result is a dramatic performance utilizing standardized incidents in the past life of the deceased or the methods of punishment to be meted out to those who had harmed him. For the funeral is often an inquest as well as an interment, a pointer to revenge against a supposed killer or to ways of warding off death in general. We can look at the rituals and beliefs of death not only to get an idea of collective attitudes toward the other world, beliefs about spiritual beings and the fate of the soul, or indeed bereavement, that is, the individual's reaction to loss. We can also examine them to throw light upon the relations between members of the social group, whether living or dead. For behavior at funerals is often the occasion for revealing not only details of individual life histories, "family secrets" otherwise hidden, but also the generalized attitudes, both positive and negative, characteristic of the actors in the funeral drama, husband and wife, father and son, mother and daughter, brother and sister. Such attitudes are brought out with greatest clarity in matters dealing with the transmission of relatively exclusive rights, whether pertaining to material property or to less tangible possessions such as roles and offices. We can look at such transfers from two angles, firstly from the relational one, secondly from the wider standpoint of the community and the transmission of the basic means of production. For in pre-industrial societies, and often in industrial ones, inheritance has to do with control of "the commanding heights of the economy," being the major way of transferring land and small enterprises. The fact that such transfers are usually between kin helps to perpetuate certain forms of social differentiation and turn it into a "class" system. On the relational level, interpersonal tensions are often revealed in the course of the funeral ceremonies both in generalized and in individual form. Expression is often given, again in the customary or personal form, to the kind of ambivalent attitudes toward the death of close relatives that is epitomized in the words spoken by Mark Anthony, when in the midst of his affair with Cleopatra, he hears of the death of his wife, Fulvia. There's a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it: W h a t our c o n t e m p t s do often hurl f r o m us, We wish it ours again; the present pleasure, By revolution lowering, does become "E.g., Goody (1962), p. 129.

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The opposite of itself: she's good, being gone; The hand could pluck her back that shov'd her on. (Anthony and Cleopatra, I, ii, 123-28) The incidence of these tensions, that is, the particular relationships within which they fall, will vary with the particular mode of transmission. Let us consider first the transfer of office. Where succession occurs at death, the funeral (or the death itself) may well be the occasion for the installation of a successor. Hereditary succession, involving the passage of office between kin, varies in several ways. For example, there is the extent of dynastic eligibility: narrow dynasties, such as characterized modern Europe, entailed the continual shedding of the more distant members; while mass dynasties of the Anglo-Saxon type (widespread in Africa) involved election or rotation between segments. 1 2 In the first case the inevitable tensions between the incumbent and his successor fall between close kin, while in the latter, such relationships are relatively free of potential conflict on this score. Systems of inheritance also differ in the laterality (i.e. whether siblings are eligible), in direction (patrilineal or matrilineal) and in the eligibility of women. Each of these variables, which are interconnected in various ways, shifts the balance of interfamilial tensions in critical ways, ways that are often given explicit expression in the funeral ceremonies, or in less formal behavior that surrounds the death, providing an insight into the innermost reaches of family cleavages and solidarities. Of this the reader of English detective fiction needs hardly to be reminded. Where would the investigators or indeed the plot get were one unable to ask the question, which of the interested parties stood to lose or gain by the death? There are many problems in the analysis of societies that are related to variations in the mode of transmission. For example, where the family farm, the industrial enterprise or in Lear's case the kingdom, is passed on before the death of the holder, his situation is inevitably more precarious and very precise arrangements are often made for his continuing support. Does this early handing over also affect the attitude of the survivors to his death or indeed to death in general? Is this reflected in mortuary custom or funerary monument? Is the relatively small attention given to funerals in contemporary societies related to the earlier establishment of one's descendants, to the non-familial avenues for placement and opportunity, the state schemes for the maintenance of the old and the bureaucratic procedures for retirement? Why is it that in the present day funerals are of much less significance than in earlier times and in other cultures, the main spheres of the work of the social historian and the social anthropologist? The reason is simple. " J a c k G o o d y , ed.. Succession

to High Office (Cambridge: C a m b r i d g e Univ. Press. 1968).

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T o d a y funerals have so much less work to do. There is the sense of personal loss to be dealt with. But bereavement is more personal and less a m a t t e r for joint participation, given that local ties are limited by frequent change of residence (mobility), by the diversity of work (division of labor, participation in different enterprises), and sometimes by the deliberate search for anonymous neighbors that marks many urban areas. The lack of communitas, of gemeinschaft, the growth of individualism, involves a certain withdrawal f r o m each other's personal problems including their deaths and their dead, unless these occur within the context of national calamity. Aligned with this change is the shift of responsibility, even for one's own parents and children, onto the resources of the state rather than of the individual or even of the community. The individual's links run direct to the state, mediated by income tax officials and the appropriate ministry, rather than by kith or kin. Hence only the bare bones of death are seen today in Western societies. With smallef households and low mortality, each individual experiences a close death very infrequently, if we understand close in both a spatial and social sense. In childhood, one is often kept away from the immediate facts of death, either by parents (if it is a sibling) or by relatives or friends, if it is a parent. Grief is suppressed rather than externalized. As an adult, one is immediately concerned only with the death of spouses (usually husbands, because of differential marriage ages) and parents (usually the father first, followed by the mother); even the deaths of siblings, separated by space and by sentiment, take on little significance. Indeed they often assume less importance than the funerals of work colleagues and even of national leaders. This has not always been so, nor is it necessarily so in contemporary society. There are important class differences, not simply related to mobility; and there are important cultural differences, even in the urban setting. It is more common in the United States than in England to see the kind of announcement that one finds so often in the New York Times: " T h e Alumni Association Academy Mt. Saint Vincent, Tuxedo Park, records with deep sorrow the untimely death of its beloved member and extends its deepest sympathy to the members of her family." Here the associations to which an individual belongs announce their loss, not simply by representation at the funeral but by public advertisement. In Israel, the epitome of the associational state, the newspapers are filled with large displays from the m e m b e r s of the same associations, while the bereavement of more important national figures receives attention from state corporations, office workers and private individuals who can afford to take the advertising space in newspapers. The extent of the consumption in funerals and their expense, a fact to which social r e f o r m e r s have often devoted attention, has always been an important aspect of domestic and societal economy.

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The fact of death still provides the theme for much human contemplation and social action; it gives rise to an area of human behavior where the interests of both M a r x and Freud are equally relevant, where the analysis of both economic and psychological variables is called for. It is the most critical, the most final, of crisis situations, which capitalizes culture and social organization for actor and observer alike.

Further References Useful in the Comparative Study of Death Customs and Cultural Organization Aries, P. "Attitudes devant la vie et devant la m o r t du XVIIe au XIXe siecle," Population. 4 (1949), 463-70. Bloch, Μ. Placing the Dead: Tombs. Ancestral Villages, and Kinship Organisation in Madagascar (New York: Seminar Press, 1971). Brain, J. " A n c e s t o r s as Elders in Africa: Further Thoughts," Africa. 43 (1973), 122-33. Busia, K. A. " T r e a t m e n t of the Sick and Funeral Rites in Akan C u l t u r e , " in The Challenge of Africa (New York: Praeger, 1962). Feret, M. et al. Le mystere de la mort et sa cilibration. (Paris: Coll. Lex Orandi, 1956). Gorer, G. Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (London: Cresset Press, 1965). Keesing, H. " D e a t h , Property, and the Ancestors: A Reconsideration of Goody's Concepts," Africa. 40 (1970), 40-49. Kopytoff, I. " A n c e s t o r s as Elders in A f r i c a , " Africa. 41 (1971), 129-42. McKnight, J. D. "Extra-descent G r o u p Ancestor Cults in African Societies," Africa. 37 (1967), 1 21. Mandelbaum, D. G. "Social Uses of Funerary Rites," in H. Feifei, ed., The Meaning of Death (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959). Martelet, G. Victoire sur la mort. Eliments d'anthropologic chritienne (Paris, 1962). Morin, E. L'Homme et la mort dans I'Histoire (Paris, 1951). Nketia, J. H. Funeral Dirges of the Akan People (Achimota, 1955). Plath, D. W. " W h e r e the Family of God Is the Family: The Role of the Dead in Japanese Households," American Anthropologist, 64 (1964), 300-17. Sangree, W. H. " Y o u t h s as Elders and Infants as Ancestors; The Complementarity of Alternate Generations, Both Living and Dead, in Tiriki, Kenya, and Irigwe, Nigeria," Africa. 44(1974), 65-70. Tenenti, A. " L a vie et la mort ä travers l'art du 15e siecle," Cahier des Annales Ε.SC. (Paris, 1952). 11 senso della morte e l'amore de la vita net Rinascimento (Torino, 1957).

DEATH A N D THE PURITAN CHILD

DAVID

E. STA Ν Ν ARD

F R O M T I M E T O T I M E IN T H E H I S T O R Y O F M A N A N E W I D E A O R W A Y O F L O O K -

ing at things bursts into view with such force that it virtually sets the t e r m s for all relevant subsequent discussion. The Copernican, Darwinian and Freudian revolutions—perhaps, as Freud on occasion noted, the three most destructive blows which human narcissism has had to endure—are among the extreme examples of such intellectual explosions. Others have been of considerably more limited influence: the concept of culture in anthropology is one example, the frontier thesis as an explanatory device for American history is another. At still another level is the seminal study of a particular problem. An instance of this is the fact that throughout the past decade historians of family life have conducted their research in the shadow of Philippe Arifcs' monumental study. Centuries of Childhood, a work that established much of the currently conventional wisdom on the subject of the family in history. One of Aries' most original and influential findings was that childhood as we know it today did not exist until the early modern period. " I n medieval society," he observed, . . as soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his mother, his nanny or his cradle-rocker, he belonged to adult society."' It was not until the 16th and 17th centuries, and then only among the upper classes, that the modern idea of childhood as a distinct phase of life began to emerge. The picture Aries sketched, drawing on such diverse sources as portraiture, literature, games and dress, was predominantly one of French culture and society; but it was clear that he felt his generalizations held true for most of the Western world. Recent studies in colonial New England have supported Aries' assumption of the representativeness of his French ' P h i l i p p e A r i e s , Centuries of R a n d o m H o u s e , 1962), p. 128.

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findings in extending his observations on medieval life to 17th and 18th century Massachusetts; but the support for this contention is unsteady, balanced as it is on much less substantive data than that on which Aries' argument rests. The clothing of children as adults—only one strand of evidence in Aries' historical tapestry—has been seized by some colonial historians and used as the principal basis for claiming that in 17th and 18th century Massachusetts there was little or no distinction between children and adults. "If clothes do not make the man," writes Michael Zuckerman, "they do mark social differentiations"; and, adds John Demos, "the fact that children were dressed like adults does seem to imply a whole attitude of mind." 2 The phenomenon that both writers accurately describe, the similarity of dress for children and adults, may well suggest social differentiations and/or imply a whole attitude of mind—but not necessarily the one claimed. In the first place, to argue in isolation of other data that the absence of a distinctive mode of dress for children is a mark of their being viewed as miniature adults is historical presentism at its very best; one might argue with equal force—in isolation of other facts—that the absence of beards on men in a particular culture, or the presence of short hair as a fashion shared by men and women, is a mark of that culture's failure to fully distinguish between men and women. In all these cases there are alternative explanations, explanations that do not presuppose that special clothing for children, or beards for men, or different hair lengths for adults of different sexes, are universally natural and proper cultural traditions. As to the specific matter of dress, children in New England were treated much the same as children in England. Until age six or seven they generally wore long gowns that opened down the front; after that, they were clothed in a manner similar to that of their parents. Rather than this stage marking an abrupt transition from infancy to adulthood, as Alan Macfarlane has pointed out it more likely was merely a sign that children had then reached an age where sexual differentiation was in order. 3 Second, and most important, the supporting evidence that Aries brings to bear in making his case for the situation in medieval France generally does not exist for colonial New England; when it does, it makes clear the fact that there was no confusion or ambiguity in the mind of the adult Puritan as to the differences between his children and himself. Puritan journals, autobiographies and histories are filled with specific references to the differences between children and adults, a wealth of parental advice literature exists for ' M i c h a e l Z u c k e r m a n , Peaceable Kingdoms ; V » England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New Y o r k : R a n d o m House, 1970), p. 73; J o h n D e m o s , A Little Commonwealth Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New Y o r k : O x f o r d Univ. Press, 1970), p. 139. 3 Alan M a c f a r l a n e . The Family Life of Ralph Josselin. A Seventeenth Century Clergyman (Cambridge: C a m b r i d g e Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 9 0 - 9 1 .

Death and the Puritan

Child

the 17th century that gives evidence of clear distinctions between adults and children well into their teens, and a large body of law was in effect f r o m the earliest years of settlement that made definitive discriminations between acceptable behavior and appropriate punishment for children, post-adolescent youths and adults. 4 The m a t t e r of children's literature is one case in point. Arifcs has argued, both in Centuries of Childhood and elsewhere, that in France " b o o k s addressed to and reserved for children" did not appear until " t h e end of the 17th century, at the same time as the awareness of childhood." Recently M a r c Soriano has supported Arids' contention by showing that prior to the stories of Perrault in the 1690s, French literature and folk tales were directed " a l m o s t entirely" at an adult audience, though of course children were exposed to them as well. 5 The situation was quite different in both old and New England in the 17th century, as William Sloane showed almost twenty years ago. Limiting himself to a definition of a child's book as " a book written only for children"—a limitation which excludes books which subsequently became children's fare and " w o r k s which are the tools of formal instruction"—Sloane compiled an annotated bibliography of 261 children's books published in England and America between 1557 and 1710.® It is true that most of the books listed would not meet Z u c k e r m a n ' s definition of a child's book as one which provides " a sequestered simplicity c o m m e n s u r a t e with a child's capacities," but that is not because children were viewed as synonymous with adults; rather, it is because 17th century New Englanders had a different view f r o m that held by Z u c k e r m a n or other 20th century parents of the nature and capacities of children. 7 The differentness of that view is crucial to this essay, and it will be developed at some length. But first it must be recognized that there were indeed children at home and in the streets of Puritan New England, and that this was a fact recognized—and never questioned—by their parents, ministers and other adults in the community. In many ways those children were seen and treated as different from children of today. In many ways they were different: to analyze, as this essay will, the Puritan child's actual and ' F o r a convenient collection of some of this material see R o b e r t H. B r e m n e r , ed.. Children and Youth in America ( C a m b r i d g e . Mass.: H a r v a r d Univ. Press, 1970), 1:27- 122. 'Philippe A r i i s , " A t the Point of Origin," in P e t e r Brooks, ed., The Child's Part (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 15; M a r c Soriano, " F r o m Tales of W a r n i n g to F o r m u l e t t e s : The Oral Tradition in French Children's Literature," ibid., pp. 24-25. 'William Sloane, Children's Books in England ά America in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1955). ; Z u c k e r m a n , p. 77. It should be acknowledged that s o m e of Aries' contentions have been challenged within the French historical setting. O n the m a t t e r of the presence or absence of an adolescent stage, for example, see the i m p o r t a n t essay by Natalie Z . Davis, " T h e R e a s o n s of Misrule: Youth G r o u p s and Charivaris in Sixteenth C e n t u r y F r a n c e , " Past and Present. 50 (Feb. 1971); an extension of Davis' a r g u m e n t to 17th century London is Steven R. S m i t h , " T h e London Apprentice as Seventeenth-Century A d o l e s c e n t , " Past and Present. 61 (Nov. 1973).

David Ε.

12

Stannard

anticipated confrontation with death is but one of many ways in which the extent of that difference can be seen. But it is too much of a leap, and there is no real evidence to support the contention that in 17th century New England, as in 15th and 16th century France, there was little or no distinction between children and adults. Probably at no time in modern history have parents in the West agreed on the m a t t e r of the correct and proper approach to child-rearing. Certainly this is true of our own time, but it was equally so in the age of the Puritan. " A child is a man in a small letter," wrote John Earle in 1628, yet the best copy of Adam b e f o r e hee t a s t e d of Eve o r t h e Apple. . . . H e e is nat u r e s fresh p i c t u r e newly d r a w n e in Oyle, which time and much handling d i m m e s and d e f a c e s . His soule is yet a white p a p e r unscribled with o b s e r v a t i o n s of t h e world, wherewith at length it b e c o m e s a b l u r r ' d N o t e b o o k e . He is purely h a p p y , because he k n o w e s no evill, nor h a t h m a d e mearles by sinne, to be acquainted with misery. . . . N a t u r e and his P a r e n t s alike d a n d l e him, and tice him on with a bait of S u g a r , to a d r a u g h t of W o r m e - w o o d . . . . His f a t h e r hath writ him as his owne little s t o r y , wherein hee r e a d s t h o s e dayes of his life t h a t hee c a n n o t r e m e m b e r ; and sighes to see what innocence he h a ' s outliv'd. 8

In view of this attitude among certain Englishmen of the 17th century— an attitude that, it appears, became prevalent in colonial Maryland and Virginia—it should come as no surprise to read in the report of a visiting Frenchman at the end of the century that " I n England they show an extraordinary complacency toward young children, always flattering, always caressing, always applauding whatever they do. At least that is how it seems to us French, who correct our children as soon as they are capable of reason." This judgment was echoed a few years later by an Englishman reflecting on the c u s t o m s of his people: " I n the Education of Children," wrote Guy Miege in 1707, " t h e indulgence of Mothers is excessive among the English; which proves often fatal to their children, and contributes much to the Corruption of the Age. If these be Heirs to great Honours and Estates, they swell with the Thoughts of it, and at last grow unmanageable." Had Miege been writing a bit later in the century he might have sought evidence for his assertion in the life of Charles James Fox who, at age five, had been accidentally deprived of the privilege of watching the blowing up of a garden wall; at his insistence his father had the wall rebuilt and blown up again so that the boy might witness it. On another occasion, 'Micro-cosmographie (London, 1628), p. 5.

or, A Piece of the World Discovered in Essays and

Characters

Death and the Puritan Child

13

when the y o u n g C h a r l e s a n n o u n c e d his intention of d e s t r o y i n g a w a t c h , his f a t h e r ' s reply was: " W e l l , if you m u s t , I s u p p o s e you must."® But neither John E a r l e in 1628, nor C h a r l e s Fox in 1754 were P u r i t a n s ; and neither H e n r i M i s s o n in 1698, n o r G u y Miege in 1707 were c o m m e n t i n g on P u r i t a n a t t i t u d e s t o w a r d children. H a d they been, their r e p o r t s would have read very differently. In 1628, t h e s a m e y e a r that J o h n E a r l e w a s rhapsodizing on t h e i n n o c e n c e and purity of children, and on p a r e n t a l a c c o m m o d a t i o n to t h e m , P u r i t a n John R o b i n s o n wrote: A n d s u r e l y t h e r e is in all c h i l d r e n , t h o u g h n o t alike, a s t u b b o r n n e s s , a n d s t o u t n e s s of m i n d a r i s i n g f r o m n a t u r a l p r i d e , w h i c h m u s t , in t h e first p l a c e , b e b r o k e n a n d b e a t £ n d o u / ι ν . . . T h i s f r u i t of n a t u r a l c o r r u p t i o n a n d r o o t of a c t u a l r e b e l l i o n b o t h a g a i n s t G o d a n d m a n m u s t be d e s t r o y e d , a n d n o m a n n e r of w a y n o u r i s h e d , e x c e p t we will p l a n t a ' n u r s e r y of c o n t e m p t of all g o o d p e r s o n s a n d t h i n g s , a n d of o b s t i n a c y t h e r e i n . . . . F o r t h e b e a t i n g , a n d k e e p i n g d o w n of t h i s s t u b b o r n n e s s p a r e n t s m u s t p r o v i d e c a r e f u l l y f o r t w o t h i n g s : first t h a t c h i l d r e n ' s wills a n d w i l l f u l n e s s be r e s t r a i n e d a n d r e p r e s s e d . . . . T h e s e c o n d h e l p is an i n u r i n g of t h e m f r o m t h e

first,

to s u c h a m e a n n e s s in all t h i n g s , as m a y r a t h e r p l u c k t h e m d o w n , t h a n lift t h e m up.'0

In place of Earle's child, seen as " y e t t h e best copy of A d a m b e f o r e hee tasted of Eve or the A p p l e , " t h e P u r i t a n child was riddled with sin and c o r ruption, a depraved being polluted with t h e stain of A d a m ' s sin. If t h e r e was any c h a n c e of an individual child's salvation, it w a s not a very good c h a n c e — a n d in any case, the k n o w l e d g e of who w a s t o be c h o s e n f o r salvation and who was not to be chosen was not a m a t t e r f o r e a r t h l y minds. " B e c a u s e a small and c o n t e m p t i b l e n u m b e r a r e hidden in a huge mult i t u d e , " Calvin had written, " a n d a few g r a i n s of w h e a t a r e covered by a pile of chaff, we m u s t leave to G o d alone t h e k n o w l e d g e of his c h u r c h , whose f o u n d a t i o n is his secret e l e c t i o n . " " T h e q u e s t for salvation w a s at the c o r e of everything the devout P u r i t a n t h o u g h t and did; it w a s t h e p r i m a r y s o u r c e of the intense drive t h a t carried him a c r o s s t h o u s a n d s of miles of t r e a c h e r o u s o c e a n in o r d e r to found a Holy C o m m o n w e a l t h in t h e m i d s t of a 'Henri Misson, Mtmoires et Observations Faites par un Voyageur en Anglelerre (Paris, 1698), ρ 128; Guy Miege, The Present Stale of Great Britain (London, 1707), p. 222; John Dnnkwater, Charles James Fox (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), pp. 14-15. On the leniency of parental discipline in some families in the American colonial South see Edmund S. Morgan, Virginians at Home (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1952), pp. 7-8, where an English traveler is quoted as saying of Maryland and Virginia: " T h e Youth of these m o r e indulgent Settlements, partake pretty much of the Petit Mailre Kind, and are pamper'd much more in Softness and Ease than their Neighbors more N o r t h w a r d . " "New Essays Or. Observations Divine and Moral, in Robert Ashton, ed.. The Works of John Robinson (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Soc., 1851), 1:246-48. "John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T . McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 2:1013.

David Ε. Stannard

14

wilderness; it was his reason for being. A n d yet, despite his conviction of G o d ' s p u r p o s e f u l presence in everything he did o r e n c o u n t e r e d , f r o m Indian w a r s to ailing livestock, full confidence in his own or anyone else's salvation was rendered impossible by the inscrutability of his G o d . He was driven t o strive for salvation at the s a m e t i m e t h a t he was told his f a t e was both pred e t e r m i n e d and u n d e t e c t a b l e . T o be sure, P u r i t a n s believed there were signs o r " m a r k s , " indications of G o d ' s will, t h a t laymen and ministers alike could struggle to detect in their p e r s o n s and in t h o s e of m e m b e r s of the c o n g r e g a t i o n . But these signs were subject to i n t e r p r e t a t i o n and even feigning, and could never be regarded as m o r e than suggestions of s a i n t h o o d . F u r t h e r , only very rarely was an app a r e n t childhood conversion accepted as real by a c o n g r e g a t i o n . T h u s , J o n a t h a n E d w a r d s devoted a g r e a t deal of a t t e n t i o n to y o u t h f u l conversions during t h e s t o r m y e m o t i o n a l i s m of the G r e a t Awakening, but only a f t e r first noting: " I t h a s h e r e t o f o r e been looked on as a s t r a n g e thing, when any have seemed to be savingly w r o u g h t upon, and r e m a r k a b l y changed in their c h i l d h o o d . " And even J a m e s J a n e w a y , whose A Token For Children: Being

an Exact Assessment

of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary

Lives, and

Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children, was one of the best-read b o o k s of 17th and 18th c e n t u r y P u r i t a n s , a d m i t t e d in a later edition that o n e of his e x a m p l e s of early spiritual d e v e l o p m e n t — t h a t of a child who supposedly began showing signs of salvation between t h e ages of two and three— seemed to m a n y " s c a r c e credible, and they did fear [it] might s o m e w h a t prejudice t h e a u t h o r i t y of the r e s t . " 1 2 But if conversion was unlikely at an early age, it was at least possible. Given the alternative, then, of a p a t h e t i c a c c e p t a n c e of their children as depraved and d a m n a b l e c r e a t u r e s , it is hardly surprising t h a t P u r i t a n p a r e n t s urged on their offspring a religious precocity t h a t s o m e historians have int e r p r e t e d as t a n t a m o u n t to p r e m a t u r e a d u l t h o o d . " Y o u c a n ' t begin with t h e m Too soon," C o t t o n M a t h e r w r o t e in 1689, They are n o s o o n e r wean'd Devil

but they are to be taught.

. . . A r e they Young?

Y e t the

has been with t h e m already. . . . T h e y g o astray as s o o n as they are born.

They no s o o n e r step

than they stray,

they no s o o n e r lisp than they ly. S a t a n g e t s

t h e m to be proud, profane, reviling and revengeful, as young pray, why should y o u not be afore-hand with

as they are. And I

him"3

Puritan children, even " t h e very b e s t " of w h o m had a " C o r r u p t N a t u r e in t h e m , and . . . an Evil Figment in their H e a r t , " were thus driven at the "Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. C. C. Goen (New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 1972), 4:158; James Janeway, A Token for Children (1679] (Boston: Caleb Bingham, 1802). p. 59 u Small Offers Towards the Service of the Tabernacle in this Wilderness (Boston, 1689), p. 59.

Death and the Puritan Child

15

earliest age possible both to recognize their depravity and to pray for their salvation. In the event that children proved intractable in this regard the first parental response was to be " w h a t saies the Wise man, A Rod for the fools back"; but generally m o r e effective—and m o r e insidious—was the advice " t o watch when some Affliction or some Amazement is c o m e upon t h e m : then G o d opens their ear to Discipline."' 4 If Puritan p a r e n t s carried out these designs with fervor it was of course out of love and concern for their children. But at least some of the motivation may well have had guilt at its source; as M a t h e r and others were frequently careful to point out: " Y o u r Children are Born Children of W r a t h . Tis through you, that there is derived u n t o t h e m the sin which Exposes t h e m to infinite W r a t h . " 1 5 W e should not, however, pass too quickly over the m a t t e r of the Puritan p a r e n t ' s genuine love for his children. Even a casual reading of the m o s t noted Puritan j o u r n a l s and autobiographies—those of T h o m a s Shepard, S a m u e l Sewall, C o t t o n M a t h e r — r e v e a l s a deep-seated parental affection for children as the m o s t c o m m o n , n o r m a l and expected attitude. T h e relationship between p a r e n t s and children was often c o m p a r e d with that between G o d and the Children of God. " T h a t God is often angry with [his childrenl. " S a m u e l Willard wrote in 1684, "afflicts them, and withdraws the light of his c o u n t e n a n c e f r o m them, and puts them to grief, is not because he loves t h e m not, but because it is that which their present condition requires; they are but Children, and childish, and foolish, and tf they were not s o m e t i m e s c h a s t e n e d , they would grow wanton, and careless of duty."" 1 Indeed, in the s a m e work in which C o t t o n M a t h e r referred to children as " p r o u d , p r o f a n e , reviling and revengeful," he warned p a r e n t s that " T h e y

must give an account of the souls that belong unto their Families. . . . Behold, thou hast Lambs in the Fold. Little ones in thy House; God will strain for it, —if wild beasts, and Lusts carry any of t h e m away f r o m the Service of God through any neglect of thine thou shalt s m a r t for it in the fiery prison of G o d ' s terrible Indignation." 1 7 Children, then, were on the one hand deeply loved, " L a m b s in the Fold"; as Willard noted: " I f others in a Family suffer want, and be pincht with difficulties, yet the Children shall certainly be taken care for, as long as there is anything to be had: they are hard times indeed when Children are denied t h a t which is needful for t h e m . " 1 8 On the other hand they were depraved and polluted; as Benjamin W a d s w o r t h wrote: " T h e i r H e a r t s naturally, are a m e e r nest, root, fountain of Sin, and wickedness." 1 ® Even " C o t t o n M a t h e r , The Young Mans Preservative (Boston, 1701), ρ 4; Small Offers, p. 62. 15 Cares About the Nurseries (Boston, 1702), p. 32. "The Child's Portion (Boston, 1684), p. 31. ''Small Offers, pp 18-19 " W i l l a r d , p. 16. " " T h e N a t u r e of Early Piety as it Respects G o d , " in A Course of Sermons on Early Piety (Boston, 1721), p. 10.

David Ε. Stannard

16

most innocent infants, dying before they had barely a chance to breathe, could at best be expected to be given, in M i c h a e l W i g g l e s w o r t h ' s phrase, " t h e easiest r o o m in H e l l . " 7 0 I f the state o f a child's spiritual health was an extremely w o r r i s o m e and u n c o m f o r t a b l e matter f o r the Puritan parent, the state o f his physical health was not less so. In recent years historians of colonial N e w England have convincingly shown that the colonists o f certain N e w England towns in the 17th and early 18th centuries lived longer and healthier lives than did many o f their countrymen in England. This finding and the many others by these new d e m o g r a p h i c historians are important to our understanding o f life in early N e w England; but in acknowledging the relative advantages o f life in s o m e N e w England communities c o m p a r e d with parts o f England and Europe in the 17th century, we should be careful to avoid blinding ourselves to the fact that death was to the colonist, as it was to the Englishman and F r e n c h m a n , an ever-present menace

a n d a menace that struck with a par-

ticular vengeance at the children o f the c o m m u n i t y . Philip J. G r e v e n ' s study of colonial A n d o v e r , Massachusetts is noteworthy f o r both the skill o f the author's analysis and the stability and healthiness o f the families whose lives he studied. A s Greven

explicitly

points out, c o m p a r e d with Boston and other N e w England communities, A n d o v e r ' s mortality rate was exceptionally low, though it did c l i m b steadily in the 18th century. It is worth dwelling briefly on the differences between Boston and A n d o v e r , because the power and sophistication o f G r e v e n ' s w o r k can tend to suggest an implicit, and erroneous, picture o f A n d o v e r as a representative N e w England town. It may or may not be representative o f a certain type o f Puritan c o m m u n i t y — a sufficient number of collateral studies have not yet been done to determine this—but demographically it was vastly different f r o m Boston, the hub o f the H o l y

Commonwealth.

M o r t a l i t y rates in A n d o v e r during the early 18th century, when those rates were on the increase, fluctuated within a normal annual range o f about half those in Boston during the same p e r i o d — s o m e w h e r e between fifteen and twenty per thousand in A n d o v e r , somewhere between thirty-five and f o r t y per thousand in Boston. Epidemic years are excluded f r o m these calculations in both cases, but it should be noted that A n d o v e r ' s worst epidemic lifted the death rate to seventy-one per thousand, while Boston's worst epid e m i c during the same period pushed the death rate well over one hundred per t h o u s a n d — o r more than 10 per cent of the resident population. 2 1 In the 17th century, the smallpox epidemic o f 1677-78, joined by the n o r m a l death

KThe

Day of Doom

( L o n d o n , 1687), stanza 181.

" P h i l i p J. G r e v e n Jr., Four Generalions: Massachusetts

Population,

Land, and Family

in Colonial

Andover.

( I t h a c a : Cornell Univ. Press, 1970). For Greven's brief specific c o m p a r i s o n of

A n d o v e r and Boston, see pp. 196-97, note 14; detailed information on Boston can be found in

Death and the Puritan

Child

17

rate, probably killed off more than one-fifth of Boston's entire population. "Boston burying-places never filled so f a s t , " wrote a young C o t t o n M a t h e r : It is e a s y to tell the time when we did not use to have the bells tolling for burials on a S a b b a t h m o r n i n g by sunrise; to have 7 buried on a S a b b a t h day night, a f t e r M e e t i n g . T o have coffins c r o s s i n g each o t h e r as they h a v e been carried in the street. . . . T o a t t e m p t a Bill of M o r t a l i t y , and n u m b e r the very spires o f g r a s s in a Burying P l a c e s e e m t o have a parity of difficulty and in a c c o m p l i s h m e n t . 2 '

Indeed, if Andover fares well in comparison with mortality figures for English and European towns, Boston does not: it was not at all u n c o m m o n for the death rate in Boston to hover near or even exceed that for English towns like Clayworth that have been cited for their exceptionally high mortality rates. 2 3 One of the problems with all these figures, however, is the almost inevitable underestimation of infant mortality; as Greven and other demographic analysts freely acknowledge, most infant deaths were unrecorded and their number can now only be guessed at. One such guess, a highly informed one, has been made by Kenneth A. Lockridge. In a study of Dedham, Massachusetts in the 17th and early 18th centuries, Lockridge found that an upward adjustment of 1/9 on the town's birth rate would most likely take account of unrecorded infant deaths. 2 ' If the same adjustment is made on the birth rate of colonial Andover a fairly accurate comparison of childhood birth and mortality rates can be made. Although Greven traces a trend throughout the generations examined showing a steady drop in fertility and life expectancy rates as Andover became more urbanized, if we view the period as a whole the town remains a John B. Blake, Public Health in the Town of Boston, 1630-1822 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), Appendix II; an excellent recent study is E. S Dethlefsen, "Life and Death in Colonial New England," Diss. Harvard University 1972. JJ C o t t o n Mather to John Cotton, Nov. 1678, in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, series 4, 8 (1868), 383 84; contemporary estimates of the toll of the epidemic were made by John Foster and Increase Mather in T h o m a s Thatcher, A Brief Rule to Guide the Common People (Boston, 1678) See Blake, ρ 20; for the population of Boston at the time and an estimate of the death toll of the disease, see Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: Urban Life in America. 1625-1742 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964 [orig. pub. 1936J), pp. 6,87. " P e t e r Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age (New York: Scribner's, 1965), pp. 146-47. " " T h e Population of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736," Economic History Review. 19 (1966), 329. Cf. John Demos' estimate that in Plymouth Colony a 10 per cent infant mortality rate, though seemingly "surprisingly low," is a reasonable figure. Demos, pp. 131-32. Seventeenth century attitudes to early infant death are reflected in sources other than the formal records: on the first page of hi % Journal T h o m a s Shepard enumerated the birth dates, and in one case the death date, of his five sons but Shepard had seven sons, the two not mentioned having died in infancy See Michael McGiflert, ed., God's Plot The Autobiography and Journal of Thomas Shepard (Amherst, Mass.: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1972), pp. 81, 33, 69.

18

David Ε.

Stannard

good example of one of the healthier communities in New England. Using the Lockridge adjustment to include unrecorded infant deaths, the average number of children born per family in Andover throughout the century under discussion was 8.8. Of those, an average of 5.9 survived to adulthood. In other words, approximately three of the close to nine children born to the average family would die before reaching their twenty-first birthday. But, as Greven notes, the most vulnerable period in life was that "beyond infancy but prior to adolescence—the age group which appears to have been most susceptible, among other things, to the throat distemper prevalent in the mid-1730's." Again applying the infant mortality adjustment to Greven's figures, the rate of survival to age ten for all children born between 1640 and 1759 was approximately 74 per cent—with a generational high of 83 per cent and a low of 63 per cent, this latter figure of course indicating that at one point fewer than two out of three infants lived to see their tenth birthday. During the period as a whole, more than one child in four failed to survive the first decade of life in a community with an average birth rate per family of 8 . 8 . " Thus a young couple embarking on a marriage did so with the knowledge and expectation that in all probability two or three of the children they might have would die before the age of ten. In certain cases, of course, the number was more than two; Greven discusses instances when parents lost six of eleven children in rapid succession, including four in a single month, and four of eight children in less than a year—and this in a town remarkable for the relative health and longevity of its residents. In Boston the rate was much higher and even the most prominent and well cared for residents of that city were constantly reminded of the fragility of life in childhood. T h o m a s Shepard, for instance, had seven sons, three of whom died in infancy; the other four outlived their father, but he died at 43—having in that short time outlived two wives. As Joseph E. Illick has recently pointed out, Samuel Sewall and Cotton Mather each fathered fourteen children: " O n e of Sewall's was stillborn, several died as infants, several more as young adults. Seven M a t h e r babies died shortly after delivery, one died at two years and six survived to adulthood, five of whom died in their twenties. Only two Sewall children outlived their father, while Samuel Mather was the only child to survive Cotton." 2 6 It is important for us to recognize that conditions for living in colonial New England were sometimes superior to those in 17th century England and Europe. But it is equally important for us not to lose sight of the fact " G r e v e n , pp. 188- 203. " " P a r e n t - C h i l d R e l a t i o n s in S e v e n t e e n t h - C e n t u r y E n g l a n d a n d A m e r i c a , " in Lloyd d e M a u s e , ed , The History of Childhood ( N e w Y o r k : P s y c h o h i s t o r y P r e s s , 1974) I are g r a t e f u l t o P r o f e s s o r Illick f o r allowing m e to e x a m i n e his m a n u s c r i p t p r i o r t o p u b l i c a t i o n

Death and the Puritan

Child

19

that the Puritan s e t t l e m e n t s were places where "winter was to be f e a r e d , " as Kenneth Lockridge has written, where " h a r v e s t s were a g a m b l e that kept m e n ' s minds aware of Providence, plague arose and subsided out of all h u m a n control and infants died in n u m b e r s that would shock us today." 2 7 It has often been noted by writers on the Puritan family that the prescribed and c o m m o n personal relationship between p a r e n t s and children was one of restraint and even aloofness, mixed with, as we have seen, an intense p a r e n t a l effort to impose discipline and encourage spiritual precocity. P a r e n t s were reminded to avoid becoming " t o o fond of your children and too familiar with t h e m " and to be on their g u a r d against " n o t keeping constantly your due distance." 2 8 E d m u n d S. M o r g a n has shown how this " d u e d i s t a n c e " worked in both directions, as when Benjamin C o l m a n ' s d a u g h t e r J a n e wrote to her father requesting forgiveness for the "flow of a f f e c t i o n s " evident in some of her recent letters. C o l m a n responded by urging her to be " c a r e f u l against this E r r o r , even when you say your T h o u g h t s of Reverence and Esteem to your F a t h e r , or to a Spouse, if ever you should live to have o n e , " and c o m m e n d e d her for having " d o n e well to correct yourself for some of your Excursions of this kind toward m e . " " M o r g a n has also seen the c o m m o n practice of " p u t t i n g children o u t , " both to early apprenticeship and simply extended stays with other families, often against the child's will, as linked to the maintenance of the necessary distance between p a r e n t and child; " t h e s e economically unnecessary removals of children f r o m h o m e , " he writes, probably resulted f r o m the fact that " P u r i t a n p a r e n t s did not trust themselves with their own children, that they were afraid of spoiling t h e m by too great affection." 3 0 M o r g a n ' s suggested explanation for this practice seems logical and convincing, but there may have been an additional, deeper source for both this practice and the entire Puritan attitude toward severely restrained displays of fondness between parents and children. For children, despite the natural hold they had on their p a r e n t s ' affection, were a source of great emotional d i s c o m f o r t for them as well. In the first place, there was a very real possibility, if not a probability, that parental affection would be rewarded by the death of a child before it even reached puberty; the " d u e d i s t a n c e " kept by Puritan p a r e n t s f r o m their children might, at least in p a r t , have been an instinctive response to this possibility, a means of insulating themselves to some extent against the shock that the death of a child might bring. This, of course, would be potentially true of any society with a relatively high rate of ' : L o c k r i d g e , ρ 343 " T h o m a s C o b b e t t . 4 Fruitful! and L M England Magazine. American Biblical Repository, Biblical Reportory, Christian Spectator or Spirit of the Pilgrims

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cemetery a t t r a c t e d m u c h a t t e n t i o n a n d w a s a m a j o r a t t r a c t i o n f o r visitors to t h e N e w H a v e n a r e a . T i m o t h y D w i g h t asserted: " I have a c c o m p a n i e d m a n y A m e r i c a n s , a n d m a n y foreigners into it; n o t o n e of w h o m h a d ever seen or h e a r d of a n y t h i n g of a similar n a t u r e . It is i n c o m p a r a b l y m o r e solemn a n d impressive t h a n a n y spot of the s a m e k i n d , within my k n o w l edge; a n d if I a m to credit t h e d e c l a r a t i o n of o t h e r s , within t h e i r s . " H e f u r t h e r declared his belief t h a t " t h e cemetery will extensively d i f f u s e a new sense of p r o p r i e t y in d i s p o s i n g of t h e r e m a i n s of the d e c e a s e d . " 2 7 T h e Scottish traveler, Basil H a l l , w h o was generally c o n t e m p t u o u s of m o s t things A m e r i c a n , a d m i t t e d t h a t the cemetery was " o n e of the prettiest b u r y i n g places I ever s a w , " a n d stated t h a t it was " c e r t a i n l y s o m e i m p r o v e m e n t " over the s t a n d a r d " s o p p y c h u r c h y a r d , where the m o u r n e r s sink a n k l e d e e p in a r a n k a n d offensive m o u l d , mixed with b r o k e n b o n e s a n d f r a g m e n t s of coffins." 2 8 By 1833 t h e f a m e of the c e m e t e r y was such that o n e writer c o u l d rhetorically d e m a n d : " A n d w h o h a s not h e a r d of the b e a u t i f u l cemetery of N e w H a v e n ? It has been t h e m e of m o r e f r e q u e n t praise a m o n g us t h a n any o t h e r receptacle of the d e a d , save only Pere la Chaise."29 Despite the a u t h o r ' s claims, it w o u l d be M o u n t A u b u r n a n d not the N e w Burying G r o u n d which w o u l d c a p t u r e the p u b l i c ' s i m a g i n a t i o n . In Boston in 1825 J a c o b Bigelow o r g a n i z e d a few p e o p l e w h o were interested in p r o m o t i n g a g a r d e n cemetery to look for a s u i t a b l e piece of l a n d . A n u m b e r of lots c a m e u n d e r c o n s i d e r a t i o n , but finally they settled o n 72 acres a l o n g the C h a r l e s River near H a r v a r d College. T h e l a n d w a s a pleasant, heavily w o o d e d tract with a variegated t o p o g r a p h y of m a n y little hills, valleys a n d s t r e a m s . T h e highest p o i n t reached over a h u n d r e d feet a b o v e the river, a n d f r o m this hilltop o n e c o u l d see D o r c h e s t e r H e i g h t s , m o s t of B o s t o n , C a m b r i d g e a n d the College, a n d the river m e a n d e r i n g off into the c o u n t r y t o w a r d the west. T h e area w a s generally k n o w n as " S t o n e ' s W o o d s " f r o m its original o w n e r , but H a r v a r d s t u d e n t s m o r e f r e q u e n t l y referred to it as " S w e e t A u b u r n " b e c a u s e they a s s o c i a t e d their favorite picnic g r o u n d with Oliver G o l d s m i t h ' s idyllic p o e m " T h e Deserted Village" (1770). 3 0 A p p a r e n t l y not m a n y p e o p l e h a d h e a r d of the 27

T i m o t h y D w i g h t , Travels. I, 138. Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828 ( E d i n b u r g h : A d e l l , 1829), 11, 201. H i s wife a g r e e d w i t h h i m : U n a P o p e - H e n n e s s e y , e d . . The Aristocratic Journey Being the Outspoken Letters of Mrs. Basil Hall Written During a Fourteen Months' Sojourn in America ( N e w Y o r k : P u t n a m s , 1931), p p . 1 1 3 - 1 4 . 2, B . E d w a r d s , " B u r i a l G r o u n d , " p. 201. F o r P e r e la C h a i s e see b e l o w , p p . 53, 54. w T h e a c c o u n t of t h e f o r m a t i v e s t a g e s of M o u n t A u b u r n d r a w n f r o m J a c o b B i g e l o w , A History of the Cemetery of Mount Auburn ( B o s t o n : J, M u n r o e , 1860), p p . 1 - 1 2 9 ( h e r e a f t e r cited as H M A ) . T h e o r i g i n of t h e t e r m " S w e e t A u b u r n " f r o m O a k e s I. A m e s , " M o u n t A u b u r n ' s S i x s c o r e Y e a r s , " Publications of the Cambridge Historical Society ( 1 9 5 1 52), p p . 77- 95, 78. 28

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Institution

77

success of the N e w H a v e n c e m e t e r y , so to p r o m o t e his novel s c h e m e Bigelow s u c c e e d e d in c o m b i n i n g the cemetery g r o u p with the recently inc o r p o r a t e d M a s s a c h u s e t t s H o r t i c u l t u r a l Society. H e used the a r g u m e n t that t h e p r o j e c t e d p u r c h a s e of S t o n e ' s W o o d s w o u l d p r o v i d e a m p l e land for b o t h interest g r o u p s . By A u g u s t 1831 the c o m b i n e d forces h a d acquired e n o u g h s u b s c r i b e r s to p u r c h a s e the tract, which was r e n a m e d Mount Auburn. As the e n t e r p r i s e w a s initially o r g a n i z e d the H o r t i c u l t u r a l Society was the tail t h a t w a g g e d t h e d o g b e c a u s e the act of i n c o r p o r a t i o n was a revision of the Society's c h a r t e r p e r m i t t i n g it to create a n d m a i n t a i n a " r u r a l c e m e t e r y . " ( T h i s was t h e origin of w h a t b e c a m e the generic term f o r the new type of c e m e t e r y . ) H o w e v e r , the H o r t i c u l t u r a l Society was to get very little benefit f r o m its d o m i n a n t p o s i t i o n in the j o i n t e n d e a v o r . T h e initial a p a t h y with which t h e p u b l i c received the cemetery p r o p o s a l was rapidly o v e r c o m e w h e n t h e p u b l i c b e c a m e a w a r e of t h e extensive supervisory p r o visions of the r u r a l c e m e t e r y . People w o u l d not have to worry a b o u t the r e m o t e g r a v e s of their loved o n e s a n d f r i e n d s being subject to the d e p r e d a tions of s u p p l i e r s to t h e medical p r o f e s s i o n or o t h e r f o r m s of d e s e c r a t i o n because the new c e m e t e r y w a s to be effectively fenced a n d subject to cons t a n t supervision of a s a l a r i e d staff consisting of s u p e r v i s o r , his secretary, a g a t e k e e p e r a n d a g a r d e n e r . Also the c e m e t e r y was not created exclusively for t h e affluent u p p e r class to which the f o u n d e r s of the institution all belonged. T h e f o u n d e r s m a d e it clear to the p u b l i c t h a t M o u n t A u b u r n was o p e n t o a n y o n e w h o wished to p u r c h a s e a lot, a n d that it was a n o n p r o f i t o r g a n i z a t i o n in which the p r o c e e d s f r o m plot sales w o u l d be spent exclusively in m a i n t e n a n c e a n d i m p r o v e m e n t s . T h e a p p e a l of M o u n t A u b u r n t o t h e lower classes was successful. M a n y f a r m e r s , mechanics a n d small b u s i n e s s m e n applied to p u r c h a s e p l o t s on the p r o v i s o t h a t they c o u l d be p a i d for in l a b o r or articles used in the i m p r o v e m e n t of the place. 3 1 T h e c e m e t e r y p r o p o s a l soon drew m u c h m o r e s u p p o r t t h a n did the H o r t i c u l t u r a l Society's plans, which never m a t e r i a l i z e d , a n d in 1835 the t w o g r o u p s f o r m a l l y split a p a r t . 3 2 T h e d e d i c a t i o n of t h e new cemetery t o o k place in S e p t e m b e r 1831. O n e of the little valleys w a s fitted out as a t e m p o r a r y a m p h i t h e a t e r , a n d a b o u t t w o t h o u s a n d p e o p l e a t t e n d e d w h a t was described as a s o l e m n a n d m o v -

3I H A S. D e a r b o r n . " A R e p o r t on t h e G a r d e n a n d C e m e t e r y , b e f o r e the A n n u a l M e e t ing ο; t h e H o r t i c u l t u r a l S o c i e t y . S e p t e m b e r 30, 1831." in H M A , p p . 167 74. 178. 32 E v e n t h o u g h t h e t w o g r o u p s split u p . o n e s h o u l d n o t h a v e t h e i m p r e s s i o n t h a t t h e c e m e t e r y g r o u p w a s u n i n t e r e s t e d in t h e h o r t i c u l t u r a l a s p e c t s of t h e c e m e t e r y . M o u n t A u b u r n i n s t i t u t e d a l o n g - t e r m p o l i c y of d i v e r s e p l a n t i n g a n d c u l t i v a t i o n f o r d e c o r a t i v e a n d ins t r u c t i o n a l p u r p o s e s . T h e a r t i c l e by O a k e s I. A m e s , " M o u n t A u b u r n ' s S i x s c o r e Y e a r s , " discusses this in d e t a i l .

78

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ing o c c a s i o n . 3 3 T h e c e r e m o n y f e a t u r e d t h e B o s t o n U n i t a r i a n a n d W h i g e s t a b l i s h m e n t : t h e R e v . H e n r y W a r e Sr., H a r v a r d ' s Hollis P r o f e s s o r of Divinity, gave t h e i n t r o d u c t o r y p r a y e r ; t h e R e v . J o h n P i e r p o n t , U n i t a r i a n m i n i s t e r of t h e H o l l i s Street C h u r c h , B o s t o n , w r o t e a special h y m n for t h e o c c a s i o n ; a n d J u s t i c e J o s e p h S t o r y delivered a p o w e r f u l a d d r e s s . S t o r y ' s a d d r e s s w a s a g e n e r a l i n d i c t m e n t of prevailing burial c u s t o m s a n d an a n n o u n c e m e n t of t h e p r o p e r role of the cemetery as c u l t u r a l institution. He declared that c o n t e m p o r a r y Christian attitudes and practices c o n c e r n i n g b u r i a l were, u n f o r t u n a t e l y , n o t the e q u a l of t h o s e of earlier h e a t h e n c u l t u r e s , a n d t o p r o v e his p o i n t he briefly s u r v e y e d the b u r i a l cust o m s of t h e E g y p t i a n s , G r e e k s , H e b r e w s a n d o t h e r s . " O u r c e m e t e r i e s , " he c o n c l u d e d , " r i g h t l y selected, a n d p r o p e r l y a r r a n g e d , m a y be m a d e s u b servient t o s o m e of t h e highest p u r p o s e s of religion a n d h u m a n d u t y . T h e y m a y p r e a c h lessons, to w h i c h n o n e m a y r e f u s e to listen, a n d which all t h a t live m u s t h e a r . " 3 4 W i t h t h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t of M o u n t A u b u r n , the c o n c e p t i o n of t h e cemetery as a n i n s t r u c t i o n a l i n s t i t u t i o n a n d i n c u l c a t o r of morality b e c a m e a m o r e c o m m o n t h e m e in t h e c o n t e m p o r a r y d i s c u s s i o n s of t h e p u r p o s e a f . a r u r a l c e m e t e r y t h a n a r g u m e n t s c o n c e r n i n g o v e r c r o w d e d facilities a n d h e a l t h h a z a r d s . T i m e a n d a g a i n , t h e belief t h a t " a r u r a l cemetery is a s c h o o l of b o t h religion a n d p h i l o s o p h y " w a s reiterated. 3 5 T h e s w e e t e s t m e m o r i a l s o f the d e a d are t o b e f o u n d in the a d m o n i t i o n s t h e y c o n vey, and the instructions they give, to f o r m the character, a n d govern the conduct, of the living.36 It is n o t s o l e l y , n o r e v e n c h i e f l y w i t h r e f e r e n c e t o the f e e l i n g s with w h i c h w e reg a r d o u r o w n last c h a n g e , t h a t w e find r e a s o n s for t h e s e h a l l o w e d a n d b e a u t i f u l places of repose.

It is p r i n c i p a l l y t o their i n f l u e n c e u p o n the living, in the ele-

v a t i n g a n d p u r i f y i n g effect they exert. . . ,37

In t h e new t y p e of c e m e t e r y t h e p l e n i t u d e a n d b e a u t i e s of n a t u r e c o m b i n e d with a r t w o u l d c o n v e r t t h e g r a v e y a r d f r o m a s h u n n e d place of h o r -

1}

Boston Courier, cited in HMA. p. 15. ^ " A d d r e s s delivered on the dedication of the C e m e t e r y at M o u n t A r n u m , S e p t e m b e r 24th, 1831," in HMA, pp. 143-67, 153 56. 35 Wilson Flagg, Mount Auburn: Its Scenes, Its Beauties, and Its Lessons ( B o s t o n : J a m e s M u n r o e , 1861), p. 37. 36 Levi Lincoln, " A n A d d r e s s Delivered on the C o n s e c r a t i o n of t h e Worcester [Mass.] R u r a l C e m e t e r y , S e p t e m b e r 8, 1838" ( B o s t o n : D u t t o n & W e n t w o r t h , 1838). p. II 31 Oliver P. Baldwin, " A d d r e s s Delivered at the D e d i c a t i o n of H o l l y w o o c C e m e t e r y , 25th of J u n e . 1849" [ R i c h m o n d , Va.j ( R i c h m o n d : M a c F a r l a n e & F e r g u s o n , 1849). p. 9. See also Frederick C . W h i t n e y , " A d d r e s s Delivered at the C o n s e c r a t i o n of E v e r j r e e n C e m e t e r y . August 7, 1850" [Brighton, Mass.] (Boston: J o h n Wilson, 1850), pp. 1 2 1 3 .

The Cemetery

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79

Institution

Plate 1: "Pilgrim P a t h , " an 1840s view in M o u n t A u b u r n C e m e t e r y c o n v e y i n g t h e characteristics a n d a t m o s p h e r e of the " r u r a l c e m e t e r y . " R e p r i n t e d f r o m C o r n e l i a W . W a l t e r , Mount

Smtilie(New

Auburn

Illustrated

in a Series

of

Views

from

Drawings

by

James

York: R. M a r t i n , 1847). C o u r t e s y of the B o s t o n A t h e n a e u m .

h o r i n t o a n e n c h a n t i n g p l a c e o f s u c c o r a n d i n s t r u c t i o n ( s e e P l a t e 1). world of n a t u r e would inculcate primarily the lessons of n a t u r a l

The

theology.

T h e f u l l n e s s o f n a t u r e in t h e r u r a l c e m e t e r y w o u l d e n a b l e p e o p l e t o s e e d e a t h in p e r s p e c t i v e s o t h a t t h e y m i g h t r e a l i z e t h a t " i n t h e m i g h t y

system

o f t h e u n i v e r s e , n o t a s i n g l e s t e p o f t h e d e s t r o y e r , T i m e , b u t is m a d e s u b servient to s o m e ulterior p u r p o s e of r e p r o d u c t i o n , a n d the circle of creation and

destruction

is e t e r n a l . " 3 8

In a l e s s o n

" E l e g y " a n o t h e r m o r a l i s t s t a t e d t h a t if in o u r grounds we come across some

flower

reminiscent wanderings

Gray's

b l o o m i n g u n s e e n in a r e m o t e

we s h o u l d experience " a feeling of t h e s p o n t a n e o u s a n d f r o m this example: " M a n

of

through

goodness

should learn from H i m , to

of

be the

the spot

God" same

e v e r y w h e r e t h a t h e w o u l d c h o o s e t o b e in t h e s i g h t o f h i s f e l l o w s , a n d t o h a v e all h i s a c t i o n s p r o c e e d f r o m a d e e p , u n c o m p r o m i s i n g c o n v i c t i o n d u t y , a n d l o v e of w h a t is r i g h t , r a t h e r t h a n f r o m a h o p e o f

of

reward."39

38

" M o u n t Auburn. \PH England Magazine ( S e p t . 1831), 236 39. N e h e m i a h A d a m s . " M o u n t A u b u r n . " American Quarterh Observer. 149 72, 159 60. 39

3 (July

1834),

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Stanley

French

Even t h e w i n d s in t h e trees of t h e cemetery " r e p r e s e n t t h e vicissitudes of life: but they inculate the lesson t h a t there is n o a d v e r s i t y t h a t is not followed by a better d a y . " 4 0 Such t e a c h i n g s of n a t u r e w o u l d be c o m p l e m e n t e d by the instructions of art. T h e t r a d i t i o n a l W e s t e r n conceit t h a t m a n w a s a p a r t f r o m a n d a b o v e n a t u r e w a s present even in the t h e o r y of the new c e m e t e r y . O n e c o m m e n t a t o r stated t h a t t h e n a t u r a l beauties of M o u n t A u b u r n were so a d m i r a b l y suited for its new p u r p o s e t h a t " i t is difficult to p e r s u a d e one_self t h a t m a n h a d no agency in f o r m i n g it." D e s p i t e t h e natural perfections of M o u n t A u b u r n , the writer c o n t i n u e d : " N a t u r e u n d e r all c i r c u m stances was m e a n t to be i m p r o v e d by h u m a n care; it is unnatural to leave it to itself; a n d the traces of art a r e never u n w e l c o m e , except * h e n it de£eats the p u r p o s e , a n d refuses t o follow the s u g g e s t i o n s of n a t u r e . " 4 1 T h e c o n t r i b u t i o n s of art w o u l d cultivate the f a c u l t y of taste, a n d they w o u l d serve t o r e n d e r t h e lessons of history t a n g i b l e a n d to i n s p i r e t h e sentiment of p a t r i o t i s m . T h e m o s t basic " i m p r o v e m e n t , " of course, was simply the l a y o u t of t h e cemetery. A t M o u n t A u b u r n a system of carriage a v e n u e s a n d graveled f o o t p a t h s s u i t a b l e t o t h e t o p o g r a p h y w a s c o n s t r u c t e d . T h e a v e n u e s b o r e n a m e s of trees, f o o t p a t h s of flowers. T h e r e was also selective t h i n n i n g of trees for family p l o t s . The m i n i m u m size family plot was 15 by 20 feet ( a n d sold initially f o r $60.00). Each family plot c o u l d be fenced, but only in m e t a l or s t o n e , n o t in .vood. T h e grave m a r k e r s w o u l d have to be of stone, except t h a t slate, the t r a d i t i o n a l material for h e a d s t o n e s in the old b u r y i n g g i o u n d s w a s specifically disallowed. T h e r e were no specific restrictions on t h e style of gravestones, but a p p r o v a l by the trustees a c c o r d i n g to their c a n o n s of t a s t e was :mplied. T h e f u n c t i o n of m o n u m e n t s , a c c o r d i n g t o J u s t i c e S t o r y , was to s h o w the living " m u c h of o u r destiny a n d d u t y . " T h e lives, e v e n t s ar.d e x a m p l e s of history are for m o s t people lifeless on the p r i n t e d p a g e . " I t is the t r o p h y a n d the m o n u m e n t , which invest t h e m with a s u b s t a n c e of local reality." 4 2 A new a w a r e n e s s of history p r o v i d e d by t h e artistic m e m o r i a l s of a rural cemetery w o u l d r e i n v i g o r a t e the sense of p a t r i o t i s m Governor Levi Lincoln cogently expressed this issue in his d e d i c a t o r y address of the W o r c e s t e r R u r a l C e m e t e r y in 1838 when he d e c l a r e d t h a t the g e n e r a t i o n of p a t r i o t s w h o created the c o u n t r y is "all but f o r g o t t e n . " Time, m o r t a l ity, the mobility of A m e r i c a n society a n d t h e influx of new peoples have " l e f t but few w h o can n o w claim affinity to the t e n a n t s of ".hat ancient c h u r c h y a r d " (an old W o r c e s t e r b u r y i n g g r o u n d ) . 4 3 T h e new r u r a l ceme^ W i l s o n F l a g g , Mount Auburn, p. 9. • " W i l l i a m B. O . P e a b o d y . " M o u n t A u b u r n C e m e t e r y . " \orih 1831). 397 406.