Elegy on Death

DEATH'S DOOR

Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve

By Sandra M. Gilbert

Norton. 580 pp. $29.95

Was there ever a time and place so vexed by death as millennial America? As news, as entertainment or as something in between, images of mortal catastrophe besiege us. In a sense, they hold us hostage, for mourn as we may the victims of tsunami or hurricane, or the hapless wedding guests blasted by a suicide's bomb, we can, at least at the moment, do nothing for them. We cannot put our arm around the widow's shoulder to share the burden of grief, or cover the face of the dead child and help bear him gently to the grave.

But what of the more immediate, personal death, the death in the family, the loss we can, indeed must, address directly? As Sandra M. Gilbert amply illustrates in her comprehensive new study of how death is encountered in the modern era, even then our natural urge to grieve may be stonewalled by silence.

"We live in a culture where grief is frequently experienced as at the least an embarrassment and sometimes even as a sort of illness," Gilbert writes, recalling the moment in 1991 when the surgeon who had "successfully" operated on her husband's prostate informed her of his subsequent death. A representative of the hospital's Office of Decedent Services handed her a Bereavement Packet. "Lacking traditional strategies for solace," she observes, "we're so dumbfounded by death that we'd rather leave the pain to professionals."

An emeritus literature professor at the University of California at Davis, Gilbert has a gift for shining a bright light into the cultural shadows. Her groundbreaking 1979 study of 19th-century female writers, "The Madwoman in the Attic" (co-authored with Susan Gubar), opened up the field of feminist literary criticism. She turned her attention to the universally relevant but deeply distressing topic of death after her husband died. The tension between the intimate, individual experience of grief and the vast public spectacles of death that have haunted the last, and bloodiest, century energize her long, erudite meditation.

"History makes death just as surely as death makes history," Gilbert reminds us. The disintegration of redemptive religious faith, the traumatic experience of global warfare, the medicalization of dying, the effects of film and video, and the evolution of burial customs have conspired, she argues, to undermine traditional communal avenues of mourning and compel the poet, now deprived of the consolations of traditional elegy and lament, to devise new terms of expression.

This study is an ambitious undertaking, one that may put the reader in mind of those manic late-night TV advertisements-- "But wait, there's more!" And anyone impatient with the insistent contrariety and self-referential tendencies of postmodern criticism will at times grow restless.

But Gilbert's wide-ranging approach turns up unexpected insights. Could the recent upwelling of interest in animal rights, for instance, which asserts animals' consciousness of suffering, represent a last-ditch effort to revive the belief that humans have eternal souls by bestowing them first on animals? Or consider the invention of the stethoscope. How profoundly altered was the doctor-patient relationship when the caregiver no longer needed to place head to chest to hear a heart beat?

But while "Death's Door" will be extremely useful to cultural analysts, it is above all a work of profound literary scholarship. Here are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, their verses revealing and embodying "our literary culture's passage from a traditional Christian theology of 'expiration' to a modern, post-Christian (anti) theology of 'termination.' " Here Wallace Stevens tentatively proposes what he called a "mythology of modern death" in which death "is absolute and without memorial." And Sylvia Plath makes an extended appearance, emitting a "long hiss of distress" at the "great abeyance" of mortality.

Herself a poet, Gilbert never strays far from the specific. Her exploration begins by examining her own experience of her husband's death and her struggle to "signify my grief" before the censure of public squeamishness. It concludes by considering the ways that recent poets, in verses that document unflinchingly, sometimes almost unbearably, the physical details of death, have constructed "a defiant poetics of grief that insists on meticulously documenting loss and sorrow."

"Contemporary verse resists the repression of death as determinedly as the great modernists resisted the repression of sex," she finds. For what is left to us now but to bear witness? Web sites serve as digital funeral urns. Spontaneous shrines spring up at the sites of traffic accidents. In the "new order of industrialized violence," Gilbert writes, "only an act of witnessing . . . can constitute a properly elegiac tribute to the slaughtered multitudes."