Vigor Mortis: From Fear to Fashion - Discarding the Death Taboo Book

Vigor Mortis--witty, insightful and frequently surprising, tracks changing British attitudes to death and contains hundreds of interesting facts. Did you know for example that in Victorian times, children and babies had to strictly observe mourning protocol, even for distant relatives? And that children were sternly advised to "die well", i.e., stoically and without making a fuss, in sermonising magazine articles and illustrative stories? Kate Berridge examines our often ambivalent and irrational behaviour when it comes to dealing with death and the historical factors that have shaped our social mores. The Great War was a huge watershed in that mourning dress became discouraged because it would have been too damaging to national morale to see such stark visual representation of how badly our troops were faring. Freud wrote in 1915 "We can no longer maintain our former attitude to death and yet have not found a new one". The shifting focus from spiritual to material has raised our fear of death to all-time neurotic highs and yet the subject is in many ways more taboo than it has ever been. Berridge examines the strange phenomenon that such repression throws up: the mass grieving for princess Diana with her funeral a cathartic channel for personal losses, and "death as the new sex" with its dark and dangerous allure a staple thrill-factor for ad and image makers. Death is the subject to end all subjects and one that many of us would rather not contemplate. But Vigor Mortis deserves readers not simply because it appeals to our sense of morbid fascination but because it shows us how even our most private biological moments are governed by our place in history. It puts death in its place: dragging it out of the dusty back room of our consciousness and into the light and, in making us laugh, banishes a few bogeymen into the bargain. --Rebecca JohnsonRead More