The Dead Still Among Us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry, and Death Culture

Abstract

I. The Death of the StorytellerBY THE TIME THE NINETEENTH CENTURY reached its close, it was already possible to look back at Victorian death culture with nostalgia. With the rise of secularism, the slide toward what Diana Fuss has called the death of death had begun. 1 No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept by, to be worn as jewelry, nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene, linger upon the lips of the dying to mark and revere those last words, record the minutiae of slipping away in memorials, diaries, and letters. Rooms of houses were increasingly less likely to hold remains; no one had died in the beds in which the living slept. 2 Walter Benjamin, who wrote often about what was lost in the nineteenth century, sees the turning away from death as going hand in hand with the disappearance of the art of storytelling. 3 Writing in the early 1930s, he called his contemporaries "dry dwellers of eternity" because "today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death" (Illuminations 94). Avoiding the sight of the dying, Benjamin argues, one misses the moment when life becomes narrative, when the meaning of life is completed and illuminated in its ending. He privileges the shared moment of death, when relatives, and even the public, gather around the dying to glean final words of wisdom, to know perhaps, in the end, the whole story. Historian of death Philippe Ariès describes a Christian account of the final ordeal of the death bed, when in the moment of death the salvation or damnation of the dying is determined, thus changing or freezing, for good, the meaning of the whole life. Scholars of nineteenth-and twentieth-century death culture tend, on the whole, to agree that towards the end of the century, a process that began earlier reached a completion -that the death of the other not only became less of a shared experience among a community, but last things such as final words and remains were increasingly to be pushed to the back of consciousness and hence to the lumber room of meaning and importance. 4 The following paper will approach these themes, but from a slightly different angle and with a separate set of tools. Rather than the epiphanic moment of the deathbed scene explored by Peter Brooks, Garrett Stewart, and Elisabeth Bronfen and so central to the work of the 127

In Memoriam

“…As well as cheapness, home-made memorials had the advantage of excluding intermediaries from their production, and of being adulterated in the process. As the industry in relics developed, falsification became a major concern, with unscrupulous artists switching jewels in brooches or replacing the deceased's hair with an anonymous donor's hair of the same color that was coarser and, thus, easier to work (Lutz 2011). Therefore, these working-class relics had guaranteed authenticity, serving as a genuine "fingerprint" (Lutz 2011) of the deceased.…”

“…Lutz describes the body and the book as interconnected. At a literal level, owners had for centuries hidden relics of the deceased within the confines of a bound volume: locks of hair, pinches of cremation dust, even mummified organs (Lutz 2011). However, this interconnection also worked on a metaphorical level, with inscriptions fossilizing moving life into static representations, active subjects into passive objects.…”

“…Shortly after David's death, his sister Beth came across the book Helps Heavenward amongst his personal belongings. Its content of Christian parables likely provided comfort to Beth in the months following his death; knowing that David's hands had turned the pages of the book gave it the status of a "contact relic" (Lutz 2014), connecting the two siblings across the void between life and death. Beth subsequently inscribed the endpapers "in memory of" David, noting his date of death.…”

Finding Difference in Emotional Communities: New Feminisms of Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Centuryceand Sixth Millenniumbce

“…Research into the emotional aspects of nineteenth-century mourning jewellery, and its status as objects of embodied memory and grief (e.g. Hind 2020; Holm 2004; Lutz 2011; Sheumaker 1997), has begun to question the idea that such objects were purely performative. Lutz (2015) examines the materiality of these ‘secular relics’, which often contained locks of hair, photographs and miniatures, through their depictions in literature, as tactile objects of remembering.…”

Tempering Grief through the Victorian Home’s Furniture and Objects

“…For instance, locks of hair spun into jewellery provided portable mementos of loved ones, and a solemn reminder of one's own mortality. 10 Spiritualism adapted these kinds of performative and material aspects of conventional bereavement to produce an enhanced consolatory experience in séance and daily life at home. Victorian spiritualism was ultimately pushed aside by a pragmatic way of knowing and conceiving of the world, the home, and oneself, which was distanced from domains of spirituality and Christian faith.…”