What was with Victorian Death Culture?
Today, the grandiose and dramatic mourning culture of the Victorian Era is an easy target for the wry smiles and pointed fingers of modern society. Women wearing black for a full year, photos of the deceased looking as lively as possible displayed all over the home, and a celebration of life with the deceased lying peacefully on the dining table are all practices that were a necessity for mourning in the 1800’s, though today some of them would result in a police visit to your home! Everyone loves to indulge in the macabre stories of the Victorian Era, especially around Halloween, but why were these practices implemented, and what’s with the Victorian obsession with death?
The Victorian mourning culture, often referred to by modern scholars as the “cult of death”, began with the era’s namesake, Queen Victoria. She mourned the death of her husband for forty years, wearing black each day and keeping her home exactly as it was the day her husband died. At the time, mortality rates were so high that mourning was a way of life for those who were still alive. In fact, a whopping 57% of children didn’t survive past the age of five! Grief from loss was such a common struggle in the 1800’s that it quickly became the only emotion that was “acceptable” to display in public, nearly contradicting the wildly suppressed and conservative societal culture of the era.
If everyone around you was dying at alarming rates, and your tomorrow wasn’t given, you’d surely fall into a query of existentialism. This writer speculates the Victorians struggled with existential dread quite often, which is why the focal point of death was the deathbed itself. The deathbed is where families watched their loved ones cross into that great unknown, where they watched them straddle the veil between life and death, and looked into their eyes as they saw beyond mortal imagination. It’s no surprise that everyone wanted to be in the room when it finally happened.
Families would gather around the death bed, leaning forward with anticipation of the revered “last words”. The last words of a person held great importance to the Victorians, they believed that any words spoken in death could hold life’s true meaning, as the person was the only one in the room who could see both sides- the side of the living, and the side that had only been written about in religious texts.
Noted to be nearly as important as last words were the words written by novelists, poets, and scholars. Death was not as medical as it is today; the Victorians leaned heavily on faith and philosophy to explain the mournful terrors they were exposed to nearly every week. As poets and novelists wrote immortal works of art that romanticized death and mourning, the culture of death grew more extravagant and prominent. Complex mourning rituals that affected not only a family’s wardrobe, but their home as well, made it very clear who was in mourning. Women, seen as vessels of mourning and grief, subjected themselves to the most extravagant mourning rituals of all. While men feared not being grieved properly, women feared being seen grieving improperly. While the rituals of mourning in the Victorian Era may seem exhausting today, they provided stability during the tumultuous process of grief.