Morbid Fascinations - our obsession with death
A Battle in Print by Tony Walter, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath
Fifteen or 20 years ago, the jury was out – does our society deny death, or are we morbidly fascinated by it? For some it was the great taboo of our age. And yet in 1979, M Simpson’s bibliography, Dying, Death and Grief, began wryly: ‘Death is a very badly kept secret; such an unmentionable topic that there are over 650 books now in print asserting that we are ignoring the subject’. The 1987 update added another 1,700 books. In a three-month period in the mid-1990s with no major wars or disasters, my colleagues and I found over half the stories and pictures of
It is safe to say that, as far as the mass media are concerned, the secret is now well and truly out: we humans die. More broadly too, practices are changing – British and American doctors generally tell patients if they have cancer, hospices fit snugly into suburban side streets, millions visit exhibitions of plastinated cadavers. Of course, in everyday conversation and behaviour taboos remain. Whilst we are generally pretty up-front about sex in our society, there is still a time and a place, and most of us prefer it this way. The same is true of death. Social taboos and rules need not equate with psychological denial.
I do not want to exaggerate the extent to which death has become uncensored. Though the boundaries as to what the press can show of dead bodies have been fast expanding, for every hundred press photographs taken at the scene of a gory accident, disaster or war scene, only a tiny handful remain publishable. Despite training, some doctors, nurses and clergy remain terrified of death. Middle aged people who can talk about cancer may not be able to discuss impending dementia with their elderly parent. Unlike the Irish ‘I’m sorry for your troubles’, the English insist on their stiff upper lip and have no ritual form of words with which to address the grieving.
Nor is either the ‘old’ denial of death or the ‘new’ morbid fascination the same throughout the modern world. In less individualistic countries like
And remember: morbid fascination with the corpse is not necessarily the same as fascination with mourners’ emotions, nor with one’s own mortality. But given such caveats, how to explain our current morbid fascinations?
Back in 1955, Geoffrey Gorer wrote a short but influential article in Encounters, ‘The Pornography of Death’. He argued that if sex was the taboo of the nineteenth century, death has become that of the twentieth. And when something as fundamental and ultimately inescapable becomes socially taboo, it does not disappear – it re-surfaces in pornography. Gorer was thinking of publications such as Second World War comics in which the Hun shot dead by the brave Tommy is no more human than today’s Page Three girl. We might consider today’s death-oriented exhibitions and websites in this light, except that, given their visibility and popularity, it is hard to claim them as the underbelly of a taboo.
Some of the new openness about dying and grieving may be part of a new emotional expressiveness in a number of western cultures, particularly Britain – hierarchy has declined, people are expected to express their feelings, affluence and peace offer time to explore doubts and traumas. A
A key shift concerns the extended time people now face, still with the knowledge of their own mortality. Medical advances mean life-threatening disease (heart disease, cancer, HIV+) may be diagnosed decades before death, and even the terminal phase can continue for up to a year or two. The old hiding of the dying in hospital side wards is no longer possible – sufferers of terminal diseases are walking around, working in the office next to you. Many of us would like to die in our sleep fifteen or twenty years after retirement at the end of a good day on the golf course, but we know it’s more likely to be an extended cancer or dementia, with our autonomy and dignity threatened. No wonder so many of us consume the autobiographical or biographical ‘pathographies’ of the dying, whether by John Diamond or Dennis Potter or John Bayley’s portrait of his wife, Iris Murdoch. The old medieval ars moriendi assumed a few days to put yourself right with maker and family after contracting cholera or some other infectious disease that killed in days; pathography writers and the hospice movement inaugurate a new ars moriendi, how to live with death for months or years.
Add to this the internet, patients’ charters, informed choice, and challenges to medical paternalism, and it is clear that conversations between the dying and medical practitioners have irrevocably changed.
Whatever the explanation for the new openness, the question remains: is it a good thing? Where is the dividing line between morbid fascination and a healthy interest in our own anatomy? Between voyeurism, and a memento mori that spurs us to live more positively in light of our mortality, recent research lays doubt over the real benefits of expressing your feelings against the supposedly repressive stoicism. Though health workers need to know what does and does not work in terms of mental health, cultural critics may prefer other criteria. Explaining morbid fascination must come down to the historical moment we inhabit. We are social beings and emotional expressiveness reigns not because it is necessarily healthy, but because we inhabit a culture shaped by sixty years of peace and affluence. Should we experience again several years of world war or killer pandemic, we may well witness a general return to stoicism. Many elderly people are stoics by necessity, having to deal with several friends and family dying each year. Morbid fascination, and expressiveness, are found more among younger and middle aged people for whom the Grim Reaper is a distant figure.
Tony Walter works at the Centre for Death & Society,
References
Gorer, G. (1965). Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary
Simpson, M. (1987). Dying, Death and Grief: a Critical Bibliography.
Walter, T., M. Pickering and J. Littlewood (1995). ‘Death in the news: the public invigilation of private emotion’. Sociology 29: 579-96.
date created:27/6/2006 17:36:35
last updated:27/9/2006 17:06:31