For many people living in today’s Western societies, the human corpse is dealt with from the perspective that the dead body is nothing more than an empty shell as the true individual, the essence of the dead person has already left this realm and traveled to whatever lies beyond. According to funeral director Thomas Lynch, this approach is “proffered as comfort in the teeth of what is a comfortless situation, consolation to the inconsolable” (1999: 21). Even without the statement regarding a shell having been made, the corpse appears to be somehow lighter than it was despite its position as if the person were sleeping. The life force that previously kept the body animated is no longer there, leaving an obvious and irrefutable emptiness behind. This belief in the body as merely a shell is also assisted by the fact that the corpse in modern times is no longer prepared for disposal by the loving hands of the friends and family left behind. It is easier to bear the impersonal nature of sending the body away to a funeral home for preparation when one considers that the living soul has already departed and the loved one is only ‘symbolically’ present through the empty husk they’ve left behind. However, as a means of comforting themselves, mourners frequently purchase silk linings, pillows, mattresses, and other ‘comfort’ items that the non-living corpse will never enjoy, appreciate or even notice. These are the last gifts the living can ever bestow upon their loved one and, they hope, the spirit of the deceased will at least know they weren’t unceremoniously dumped into the ground like a pile of garbage.
While the body as a shell remains a widespread perception, the actual belief is revealed to be much different in that the ‘shell theory’ of dealing with corpses simply does not offer the sort of comfort true belief in this theory should instill. As Lynch relates in his book, one woman mourning the death of her teenage daughter following a battle with leukemia reacted violently to the suggestion that the body before her was simply a ‘shell’, claiming ‘that is my daughter until I tell you otherwise’ (1999: 85). Mourners continue to feel that their loved one is present in the room containing the lifeless corpse and families continue to spend thousands of dollars on burial rites they would not normally spend for something as meaningless as shelving away a dried husk. The fallacy of the corpse as an empty shell can be seen not only in the high dollars spent each year on unnecessary funeral expenses as modern societies continue to distance themselves from the corpse itself and, as a direct result, increased mystery and horror become associated with it through children’s stories and media outlets. Despite these distortions, the corpse continues to retain a sense of power all its own, earning legal protections and capable of conveying more truths about the individual than the ‘shell’ theory would acknowledge.
A great deal of the expense families incur as a part of the funeral process is found in their concern over preserving the body, a concern that would not arise if the family truly believed it was a mere shell of the former inhabitant. This type of funding is not provided to a favorite outfit, former house, or well-used car. Funeral homes make a tremendous profit by selling mourners on the promise that the body can be preserved for all time through embalming or high-quality sealed caskets. Aiken (2001) points out families in California will regularly pay as much as $5000 for a funeral despite the fact that the price of safely disposing of human remains is far lower. Investigations led by journalists attempting to uncover gross manipulation within the funeral system have revealed funeral home practices designed to inflate expenses with an eye toward astronomical profits while clergy members have openly admitted helping families pick out coffins in return for a ten percent commission from the funeral home paid at a later date (Winner, 1999). Despite the promises, though, the only way to prevent putrefaction is to cremate the remains, which immediately defeats any hope of preservation and is often consideration families don’t wish to accept because it means the complete destruction of any trace of their loved one on earth.
Although we still observe the basic funeral functions of our forebears, modern western society has continued to distance itself from death in numerous ways that have served to take some of the significance out of the event and ingest it instead with frightening mystery. “Before the turn of the century, Americans may have been more in touch with death and as a result less fearful of the corpse. Farm accidents and childbirth complications caused many deaths in a more agrarian and medically advanced society. Traditionally, Americans used to keep the deceased in their homes until everyone had a chance to view a body” (Emerick, 2000: 43). By personally washing and dressing the body, preparing it for display in the front room, and holding visitation within the home itself, Americans experiencing death at a higher rate were more comfortable working with and around a corpse. As a result of this closer association with the dead body, they were also more comfortable with the related concepts of death and dealing with what was left behind. Children, witnessing these events, grew up without the same sorts of aversions to the dead that children today experience. The major shift in this practice can be traced to the early 1900s as Ladies’ Home Journal reflected in one of their articles that “the parlor should be renamed the living room to disassociate it from funeral parlors. Children were discouraged from going to funerals” (Emerick, 2000: 43). As it became less and less appropriate to show the body in the home, fear and mystery regarding the corpse began to grow.
That this distancing from the corpse has had a negative effect upon our view of it is evident in the innocent lives of the children. Many adults are often puzzled by a hastily drawn collective breath of air by every child in the car when a cemetery is spotted along the side of the road. Very brave children might quickly and breathlessly explain that if you don’t hold your breath while you pass a cemetery, you will breathe in one of the dead spirits and be possessed for the rest of your life. Others might inform you that the polluted air of the cemetery will cause you to live the rest of your life completely alone because it will stay with you and scare away anyone who might want to date you. While there seems to be no foundation or long-term history behind these superstitious beliefs, they make it clear that even very young children have developed a fear of the corpse. Neither of these beliefs suggests they have anything to do with death itself or the peace of the eternal grave, but instead, seem directly linked to the concept of the corpse as a missing piece of the individual or as a thing so rotten it can infect the living tissue permanently. These early beliefs are carried forward into more mature minds in the form of relatively innocent ghost stories regarding cemeteries and bodies seeking their missing spirits.
From once being laid out in the family’s most formal room for days at a time as a means of respect and farewell, the corpse has today become an object of horror and fear beyond proportions. In thousands of ghost stories and numerous Hollywood films, the corpse emerges from the grave perpetually hungry for something it can never attain. These creatures seek brains (presumably as a means of attaining a mind or spirit), blood (as symbolic of life), and unfulfilled desires of a past life. Again, this sort of fear and loathing of the dead body can be directly traced to the hands-off approach to death experienced only within modern society. “American culture has a definite fear and repulsion of the corpse. This is evident because of today’s utilization of funeral homes and medical services” (Emerick, 2000: 43). Greater medical knowledge in the modern age has given rise to greater awareness of the various diseases and dangers a corpse may represent to the living. To protect themselves, anyone handling corpses in a professional capacity – morticians, coroners, police officers, etc. –use plastic gloves before touching any portion of the body, a fact made obvious as actors snap the gloves around their wrists in dramatic fashion on every police film ever made. “The corpse, then, is the repository for grotesque and tainted death” (Emerick, 2000: 43) to which the once-living soul fell victim and from which care must now be taken so as not to affect the rest of the room.
While some may opt to believe that the corpse is little more than an empty shell reflecting the person that once lived within it, one truth remains unarguable. Human societies around the world have always recognized that the corpse is incontrovertible proof that an individual who was once living is now dead. Stories of people being buried alive are frightening precisely because if the mistake is realized, the body is still dead by the time it is brought back out of the ground. The legislation now exists in most developed countries to guard against this possibility, such as the practice of embalming, which removes the bodily fluids and replaces them with preservatives, effectively ensuring death before burial. Regardless of the evidence of this type of ‘life after death which is really life after coma, the body remains proof that the individual once existed, so as long as the body exists, which could be hundreds of years, there is some vestige of the individual on earth. The gravesite thus becomes the place of linkage for the individual as the living have a physical place to visit in which a physical element of their loved one resides. Regardless of the empty feeling of the corpse, the fact also remains that the corpse retains a great deal of the identity of the individual that housed it. Comments often heard at a funeral frequently make reference to how beautiful the individual looked, how restful, or how much he resembles his ‘old’ self before illness and pain set in. For this reason, prior to burial, the corpse becomes the repository of all those unexpressed feelings and wishes of the individuals being left behind. By allowing the body to become a substitute for the whole person, family members and friends are able to find a sense of closure with the deceased and a sense of renewed purpose as they realize their own mortality.
Despite its lack of power to do anything on its own, the corpse retains a further sense of power in its simple existence. There are now laws in existence designed to protect the rights of the dead as there are laws to protect the rights of the living. Many of these laws have been written to replace the cultural and religious taboos regarding the dead that have ceased to exist in an increasingly globalized and fractured society. “For many years, the federal government and most, if not all, state governments have had laws protecting gravesites, and rightly so. Gravesites should be protected whether they are located within an established cemetery or whether they are historical or prehistorical graves located at random throughout the land” (Yeager, 2000: 12-13). Other laws, such as the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, require museums and other organizations that receive federal funding to return the human remains they have dug out of ancient burial sites back to their tribes and descendants. Grave looting is not unheard of, not just for the collection of potential valuables in the form of precious metals or stones, but sometimes for the simple items such as pottery or items of antiquity and sometimes, as shown in the case of the museums, for the body itself.
When the body itself is the desired object, it is not always for such ‘high’ purposes as a museum display, though. There is in existence a class of people who become sexually aroused by the presence of a corpse. These individuals are termed necrophiliacs and they remain largely a mystery to the scientific community. According to Bob College, “sex and death have always been linked … The French refer to the orgasm as the ‘little death’ and strangulation is quite commonly employed as a sexual stimulant. Shagging corpses is simply a natural progression” (cited in Sex and Death, 2008). Others suggest that having sex with the dead represents the ultimate control over the partner as the (already dead) partner is left completely powerless and totally destroyed at the end of the session. Stories provided by necrophiliacs themselves shed little light on their reasoning for this strange attraction and serve instead to disgust and horrify ‘normal’ individuals not afflicted with this desire. As a result, while it does exist and has even been suggested to become regulated by the government as a means of protecting the corpses of loved ones, necrophilia remains as much a mystery as death itself.
Part of the power of the corpse lies in its ability to provide clues as to the identity and history of the individual human being it once was. The power of the corpse to call out a guilty conscience is illustrated in court cases witnessed by forensic anthropologists such as William Maples: “I have seen the tiny, wisp-thin bones of a murdered infant stand up in court and crush a bold, hardened adult killer, send him pale and penitent to the electric chair. A small fragment of a woman’s skullcap, gnawed by alligators and found by accident at the bottom of a river, furnished enough evidence for me to help convict a hatchet murderer, two years after the fact” (Maples, 1994: 2). The corpses of stone-age men found in ice caves have provided the modern-day with ideas regarding how these men died, but also ideas regarding how they lived, what they made, the foods they ate, and, in some cases, even the level of scientific knowledge they possessed. Forensics is an entire field of study dedicated to understanding the messages and clues left behind within the bones and tissues of the corpse, contributing to the identification of the individual and understanding of their death.
Although the corpse itself is seen as powerless and a mere shell, it nevertheless retains its ability to convict criminals, arouses sexual deviants and identify the individual who has died. They inspire incredibly deep feelings of connection between loved family members to the point of extreme physical and emotional upheaval should something untoward happen to the body before or after burial and command great respect in the form of exorbitant sums being paid to ensure a comfortable and preserved eternity. The mystery of the corpse, brought about by the disconnection with death observed in the past century with the modern societies of the Western world, has led to an entire industry in which the corpse is used and abused as a source of horror and symbol of insatiable hunger. While we still observe the funeral ceremonies and rituals of death celebrated by our forebears, much of the meaning of such rites has been lost within this separation as conflicting viewpoints and understandings clash to try to determine what the deceased would have wanted. While separation has led to a commonly-held belief that the corpse is merely a discarded shell of a loved one, close experience reveals that the corpse is much more eloquent and retains a great deal more of the personality than such a trite ‘consolation’ gives credit for.
References
Aiken, Lewis R. (2001). Dying, Death, and Bereavement. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Emerick, Elizabeth J. (2000). “Death and the Corpse: An Analysis of the Treatment of Death and Dead Bodies in Contemporary American Society.” Anthropology of Consciousness. Vol. 11, N. 2-3: 33-47.
Lynch, Thomas. (1999). “You should show up for your own funeral.” US Catholic. Vol. 64, N. 11: 20-22.
Maples, William R., and Michael Browning. (1994). Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist. New York: Doubleday.
“Sex and Death.” (2008). Sleaze Magazine. Vol. 52. Web.
Winner, Lauren. (1999). “Death, Inc.” Christianity Today. Vol. 43, N. 5: 82‑87.
Yeager, C.G. (2000). Arrowheads & Stone Artifacts: A Practical Guide for the Amateur. New York: Pruett Publishing.