No One Here Gets Out Alive: Burying Dead the American Way

Establishing American Rituals

As Americans sought to define themselves during the early years of the twentieth-century, the foundation of the funeral industry was conceived. Victorian ideologies, such as the parlor within the home began to wane as families spent more time out of their residence. Originally used for public meetings within the home, funerals typically took place in the parlor. Prior to the advent of embalming, a body would be cleaned, dressed, and prepared for a viewing that would take place in the parlor. However, as American’s lifestyles were being transformed, so too were the rituals upon which they buried their dead. Among these, social norms no longer dictated that funeral services take place within the home. As the progressive reforms of the early twentieth-century took hold, funeral parlors and the directors who owned them replaced family members, ministers, and friends in overseeing funeral services. In Inventing the American Way of Death 1830-1920, Farrell contends that these early reforms altered the national psyche and transformed the processes by which Americans bury their dead. As a result, less attention was given to the soul of the deceased. Instead, the bereaved became the focus of the funeral director. It was under this pretense that the primary objective for the disposition of the dead became the care and containment of the body, location of internment, and funeral planning.[1]  These guidelines have remained the standards by which the funeral industry flourished in America.
Death evolved from the macabre into a celebration of life in which survivors are enabled to escape the trappings of death or what Historian Philip Aries has described as American’s “death-denying” culture.[2] These changes, which place an overall emphasis on the presentation of the body are perhaps the underlying key for which a century-long argument regarding the purpose and practices of the funeral industry has been the result. Taken together, changes in culture, technology, and within the industry itself have all helped the grim reaper in holding the scythe. Furthermore, as a collective group, the reforms of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century established the foundation of the funeral industry that has become familiar in contemporary America. The transformation of the funeral industry itself has resulted in a commodity-based establishment that provides far more than the disposition of the deceased. Instead, the industry provides the bereaved with services by which they can escape the trappings of death. In doing so, the living have supplanted the dead as the primary focus of funerary providers. Moreover, the market-based funeral service became a successful business model whose central focus aimed to help the living create order out of chaos for what some have argued, is an exorbitantly high cost.
 
[1] Ibid.
[2] Philippe Aries, Western Attitudes Towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1974). For further interpretation see also: Philippe Arie’s, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981).

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