This exaggeration of mourning in the nineteenth century is indeed significant. Like the sexual act, death was henceforth increasingly thought of as a transgression which tears man from his daily life, from rational society, from his monotonous work, in order to make him undergo a paroxysm, plunging him into an irrational, violent, and beautiful world. The macabre literature of the eighteenth century united the young monk to the dead beauty over whom he was keeping watch.
The baroque theater staged its love scenes in tombs, such as that of the Capulets. Theresa of Avila with God, he juxtaposed the images of the death agony and the orgasmic trance. When Bernini portrayed the mystic union of St. Athletic, nude executioners strip the skin from St. These are eroticomacabre themes, or simply morbid ones, which reveal extreme complaisance before the spectacles of death, suffering, and torture. I mean, on the contrary, that today it has become wild.”įamiliarity with death is a form of acceptance of the order of nature,įrom the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, countless scenes or motifs in art and in literature associate death with love, Thanatos with Eros. Death is “unwanted and fought against …on the hospital bed, while one is unconscious, alone, and… to eschew death until the last minutes.”Īriès argued that it is modern, forbidden death that is wild: “I do not mean that death had once been wild and that it had ceased to be so. Aries final age is “Forbidden death,” which began at the end of the 19 th century with the arrival of the modern hospital and medical technology. From the 18 th century came “Thy death” when death was feared and the dead were deeply mourned. “Tamed death” was followed by “One’s own death,” when death became personalised: Christianity introduced the idea of judgement, and the dying would go to either heaven or hell. Dying was a public event, and children attended. They knew when death was coming and what to do. The dying and their families accepted death calmly.
“Tamed death,” which lasted until the 12 th century was a time when death was familiar and an integral part of life. Philippe Aries, the French historian, introduced the idea of “tamed death” in his important book Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present that identified four ages in how people dealt with death.
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