Changing attitudes, changing times
Ok, I promised some posts on various topics that crossed my mind the other day (foolish girl). For my first instalment I thought I’d tackle death.
As I mentioned to
cardigirl, this reflection was prompted by a training session I went to on photographic identification and conservation. The conservator running the training session handed around a number of old photographs of dead people, including two of dead babies. These were taken in the mid to late nineteenth century. To modern sensibilities, or at least those of my colleagues’, this practice appears a bit morbid, but it was once quite common.
One explanation to our reactions was ‘Oh the photos were taken in America, they have quite a different attitude to death there’ but I’m not sure that this really covers it. I can remember reading quite a bit about Victorian era mourning at one stage, and I was sure I’d heard of people photographing the dead in Australia as well. I then remembered that we had at least one photograph in our museum collection of a mother and her young child, where the child is displayed in a coffin. (Curiously I find this sort of image less disturbing than the ones where they prop up the dead as if they’re still alive.)
A quick internet search revealed this rather interesting site from the Australian Musuem: http://www.deathonline.net/remembering/mourning/victorian.cfm which confirmed my suspicion. Photography and elaborate Victorian mourning rituals were growing in popularity at similar times, and photography replaced paintings of the deceased. Portraits were kept as mementos of the dead. In the case of children they were particularly popular. This might be partially explained by the fact that you had to sit still for ages to have your picture taken, so in the nineteenth century children were easier to photograph once they’d died, and families still wanted a keepsake. (At our course we were also shown a picture of a lovely little boy, well and truly alive, with his father's hand clamped firmly on his head to stop him from moving and spoiling the picture.)
All of this started me thinking about changing attitudes towards death. The idea of photographing a dead person today is frankly creepy, judging by the reactions I get from most people. We’ve certainly moved away from the elaborate Victorian mourning rituals which were popular around the time South Australia was colonised by the British. In the Victorian era death was a part of life. The dead would lie in the house for several days, to be viewed by friends and family in the coffin, before burial. (If anyone is interested in a fictional account of mourning rituals around this time, and the gradual change they undertook moving into the Edwardian era try Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels, I highly recommend it.) I could go on for much longer about changing religious attitudes and ideas about the body being taken up to heaven but I’ll skip all that, because what I’m really interested in is how removed from death we seem to be today. Once children would have been expected to traipse past the dead and pay their respects. Today I expect that most parents, in Australia at least, would want to shield their children from such an experience if possible.
I’ve never seen a dead body. I’ve been to a few funerals, and a couple of people who were close to me have died, but I’ve never actually seen a dead person. I grew up on a sheep station, so I’ve seen dead animals, and I’ve seen them killed. Death is not an entirely remote concept for me. However, it does seem to be something that we’re determined to keep at a distance in today’s society, and with advances in medicine and life-style we seem to be determinedly pushing it further and further away. We don’t like talking about it and we don’t like to be confronted with it.
I’m not sure what all this means, and whether our approach today is any better or worse than the Victorians. I haven’t even begun to explore different cultural attitudes to death, but this post is getting too long already. It just struck me that as a society, in Australia at least, we have changed our attitudes significantly in 200 years or so, and this might say something about us as a people, and our approach to life.