“Discuss the significance of dead bodies in three works of literature” (Jan 2008)
***Some names and dates unchecked, as I wrote with my internet off to try to encourage myself not to look things up. Same with quotes -- to the best of my memory. Sorry for probably butchering Derrida, theory bros. I talk about suicide lots. Cheery. Have fun! AC. ***
As Derrida writes in Spectres of Marx, humans are the only species to display fear of the bodies of their own dead, to construct elaborate rituals for burying or otherwise disposing of them, and to place some degree of credence in the ideas of zombies, ghosts, or the otherwise re-animated undead. Why this fear and this obsession? Philosophers and critics have speculated that dead human bodies allow a type of self-reflection not found in other animals, and thus reinforce a reminder of our own mortality. In literature, this fascination with and simultaneous repulsion from dead bodies surfaces frequently, but with different cultural and generic resonances over time. In this paper, I will examine three instances of literary representations of dead bodies across the development of the novel in English, arguing that in the early English novel, dead bodies appear primarily for dramatic effect and shock value, forcing readers to encounter the consequences of dramatic action in a near-theatrical way. By the nineteenth century, when the novel was a more well-developed genre, dead bodies continued to shock, but also took on other generic conventions, allowing authors to explore the gothic and supernatural. Finally, in the post-modern novel, dead bodies often stand in as figures for the past, becoming aesthetic objects and symbols of things that will not stay buried. In short, while the dead body in literature always has the power to shock, as the novel progresses, it combines this shock value with generic innovation and commentary on larger aesthetic and societal concerns.
Published in 1688, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is populated by dead bodies, both those on the literal pages of the novel and those percolating through into the text via its historical context and publication history. In the decades leading up to its composition, England was enduring the bloodiest civil war yet seen in European history, and royalists like Behn were well aware that the safety of their King Charles I was in jeopardy, although even they may not have anticipated his January 1649 execution. The regicide of the king and the reign of Oliver Cromwell threw England into an unprecedented crisis of power, followed by the return of Charles II in 1660 and the exclusion crisis of 1685. This social context is well-documented with regards to Oroonoko; some scholars read Oronooko as a disguised version of the soon-to-be-deposed Catholic King James II. While the publication of the novel predated the Glorious Revolution and the arrival of William and Mary of Orange in 1688/89, it is worth noting that Behn, an ardent royalist and supporter of James II, would have noted the historical echoes of the earlier regicide. The dead body of King Charles I, then, figures largely over Oroonoko, and finds reiteration in the dead body of another prince -- that of Oroonoko himself.
Within the text itself, the question of what it means to kill royalty rises repeatedly in the treatment of the bodies of both Oroonoko and Imoinda. In a ghastly and heart-wrenching scene, Oroonoko kills his beloved Imoinda (and thus their unborn child) rather than surrender her to the white slave-owners, seeing this death at his hands as preferable to and more honourable than slavery. Oronooko then lies at her side, grief-striken, for a full week. The text does not obscure the physical realities of Imoinda’s death; indeed, it describes the awful smell of her decomposing body in great detail, forcing both readers and characters within the novel to acknowledge the material nature of death. Imoinda’s rotting body, ruthlessly presented, removes the possibility of rendering her death a saintly martyrdom, instead forcing the presence of the gruesome realities of slavery into the spotlight (although, of course, whether this text comes down as decidedly anti-slavery is another object for debate). Oroonoko’s own demise presents a similar refusal to gloss over the physical realities of death; under torture, he lives far longer than any man reasonably should, and is systematically dismembered, losing his ears, nose, and genitalia. In a fit of rage, Oroonoko disembowels himself with his bare hands, thus literally spreading his body for all to see, including the narrator and readers. This insistence on theatrical, bloody, and inescapable bodily death hearkens back to earlier theatrical traditions found in genres such as renaissance revenge tragedy. Since Behn also wrote very successfully for the stage (The Fair Jilt also features graphic theatrical portrayals of dead bodies), it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that she might have been familiar with the work of dramatists such as Webster, Johnston, or even Shakespeare, whose tragedies frequently put dead bodies on display. In this early novel (arguably the first novel in English), then, dead bodies present themselves as inescapable and shocking reminders of both historical and artistic realities -- by aligning Oroonoko with Charles I, however opaquely, Behn places before her readers not only the body of a “noble slave” but also a deposed king. By insisting on the bodily reality of his death and Imoinda’s, she shocks audiences, refusing to aestheticize very real contemporary concerns of the future of the monarchy and, arguably, the slave trade.
Appearing a century and a half later, Emily Brontë’s only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847) also features dead bodies prominently in its narrative. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, this motif has developed a distinct literary tradition, and is embroiled in social, generic, and aesthetic trends and contexts. Since Wuthering Heights is replete with characters dropping dead, we certainly do not struggle to find episodes featuring dead or dying bodies. Most interesting to me, however, are those bodies used to underwrite, one, the novel’s context within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social and legal systems, and two, its use of the gothic genre. The bodies of both Catherine Linton née Earnshaw and her brother Hindley Earnshaw most overtly exemplify these two uses of dead bodies in the novel. As XXX ***I read this on Victoriaweb but don’t remember the person’s name*** writes of Hindley Earnshaw’s death, both Dr. Kenneth and Heathcliff concede that Hindley died “drunk and debauched” after locking himself in Wuthering Heights and consuming fatal amounts of alcohol. What Heathcliff alone points out, however, is that by legal standards, this type of death could have been considered a suicide under eighteenth-century law (though published in 1847, the novel’s action takes place in the decades leading up to its 1801-02 narration; Brontë chooses indiscriminately from mid-nineteenth and late-eighteenth century law as it suits her plotting). As Heathcliff asserts, properly speaking, Hindley should be denied a proper burial and “buried at the crossroads”; this plan, however, would also make Hindley’s property liable to seizure by the crown as a suicide, and thus prevent Heathcliff from assuming his title (gained via Hindley’s debts) as master of Wuthering Heights. The management of Hindley’s dead body, then, becomes an essential and complex element of the novel’s perverted inheritance plot, forcing Heathcliff to conform to social pressure to bury Hindley respectably in the churchyard, rather than casting his body outside of the religious order and denouncing him as a suicide, in order to reak further havoc on Hindley’s son and heir Hareton Earnshaw and his extended family.
The novel’s second arguable suicide and contentious dead body is that of Catherine Linton, née Earnshaw. Here, too, the legal culpability for Catherine’s death is complicated; by refusing food, Catherine provokes her own illness, although arguably she does not intend her own death (Veronica, I don’t know how to talk about this compassionately -- I’m just ventriloquizing critics here -- help!). In a moment that Q.D. Leavis recognized as emblematic of Yorkshire folklore, Catherine sees herself in a mirror while in the throes of her illness, and declares, “I have killed myself”. Yorkshire folklore told that if a sick person saw themselves in the mirror while ill, their spirit would flee their body for their reflection, and they would die. On Heathcliff’s visit, Cathy accuses him of murdering her, saying she could forgive even her own murderer. Here, again, legal contexts take hold; under the law of 1847, an accessory to suicide was legally culpable for the death of a suicide. Cathy’s accusation, then, is not merely one of passion, but one with potential to hold serious weight in a court if pursued. Her death, although not explicitly acknowledged as a suicide, again brings dead bodies centre-stage. As the novel notes, the village was surprised at the place of her burial, laying her neither at Wuthering Heights in the family estate nor at Thrusscross Grange, but rather in the churchyard, under the wall. By the nineteenth century, suicides were again permitted to be buried in churchyards, but often the position under the wall rather than in a family plot marked their disgraced means of death. Thus, while Catherine’s body is never explicitly framed as the result of a suicide, her positioning under the church wall reveals much about her status at death.
Catherine’s dead body also becomes an object of gothic fascination, especially for Heathcliff. Since suicides were rumoured to be restless ghosts, his injunction that Cathy must haunt him for the duration of his life and his eventual assertion, before his own death, that she has done so affirms the argument that Cathy’s death was indeed at her own hand. Late in the novel, Heathcliff recounts that the night Catherine was buried, he removed all the soil from her tomb, hoping to see her one last time rather than to be separated by a mere two metres of earth. Similarly, eighteen years later, Heathcliff again removes the lid of her coffin and sees her dead body lying, still recognizably her, although able to be disturbed by any breeze. This dead body, unnaturally preserved, figures heavily in Heathcliff’s obsessions, and solidifies the novel’s place in the gothic genre. Since Catherine’s body continues to function in the novel long after her death, readers are taught to take seriously Mr. XXX (narrator dude’s) assertion that “time stagnates here”; even death does not entirely arrest the influence of one character over another.
***If I knew a little more about Emile Durkheim and nineteenth-century sociology about suicide, this is where I might drop it in -- curse me for not paying attention in class***
Jumping forward another 150 years brings us to the postmodern novel, specifically Margaret Atwood’s Canadian classic, Surfacing (1973?). Here, readers are faced with two dead bodies; that of the narrator’s aborted child, and of her estranged and drowned father. These two bodies are metaphorically conflated, functioning primarily as symbolic vehicles for self-expression and self-discovery for the unnamed first person narrator. While the drowned body of her father does make a literal, physical appearance in the novel and catalyzes the narrator’s retreat into an animal-like state in the woods, the emphasis is not so much on the physical body as on its polyvalent symbolic meanings. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator believes (or at least leads the reader to believe) that she has been married and left her husband and child in the states. The trip to her childhood home in Quebec to search for her missing father at their isolated cabin in the woods doubles as a journey of self-discovery and ultimately self-reconcilation. On encountering her father’s dead body underwater, weighted down by his ever-present camera, the narrator is forced to acknowledge that her story of a failed but respectable marriage and legitimate child had been only a fiction, designed to cover up the more traumatic truth of an affair with a professor, an unplanned pregnancy, and a forced abortion. Diving under the water and meeting her father’s dead body, the narrator reflects, “I can feel my child surfacing within me, forgiving me”. Whereas previously she imagined the dead body of her aborted fetus to be contained in a jar or otherwise preserved in some detached, scientific manner, her encounter with her father’s dead body allows her to come to some kind of reconciliation with her past and with herself. Her retreat to the wilderness, her animal-like sex with Joe with the intention of conceiving another child, and her rejection of civilization all occur in response to her encounter with her father’s all-too-physical, bloated, and grotesque dead body. While very real, however, this physical dead body functions more to spur existential reflection and self-discovery than as a generic construct or a theatrical staging device, as we have seen in earlier novels. ***THIS IS WHERE I HIT THE 1-HOUR MARK***.
Over some three hundred years of the history of the novel, then, we can see how the presence of dead bodies in literature changes according to cultural context, literary genres, and aesthetic trends. What remains, however, is exactly that: their presence. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida discusses the visor effect with regards to ghosts and “hauntology”; we feel we are being watched, but we can neither prove nor disprove it. Perhaps this centuries-long literary fascination with dead bodies can be partially attributed to this near-supernatural power of watching. Derrida encourages us to learn to speak with the dead. In some of these books, characters do literally converse with dead bodies; Oroonoko lying beside Imoinda as her corpse decomposes, Heathcliff admiring Cathy’s un-decomposed face, and the narrator of Atwood’s novel coming to understand her own past only through an encounter with the dead. While generic expectations may change, the essential interaction with and simultaneous repulsion from and attraction to the dead seems to remain a fixed presence in the novel in English.
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