Overcoming Death: Conserving the Body in Nineteenth-Century Belgium

Abstract

The start of the nineteenth century coincided with the development of a new aesthetics of death. Funerary rites became more elaborate; cemeteries and tombstones were increasingly adorned, and corpses were embellished before their burial. At the centre of this beautification of death movement was a new individualised and "sentimentalised" relationship with the dead. 1 Paying respect and tribute to the personhood of the deceased became an important aspect of mourning and funeral culture. At the same time, a more romanticised view of the afterlife was portrayed with an emphasis on the promise of reunion in life after death. 2 In European funerary culture, the "death as sleep" metaphor became a popular representation of death as it allowed mourners to separate the idea of death from a final state of being and corresponded with the Christian narrative of resurrection. In this narrative, the transition from life to

Reassessing the pauper burial: the disposal of corpses in nineteenth-century Brussels

“…The rise of ostentatious funerals among middle classes and embalming practices for funerary purposes, which produced aestheticized, lifelike corpses, are clear indications of an increasingly sentimental mourning culture (Buklijas, 2008, pp. 580-581;Carol, 2011Carol, , 2015Deblon & Wils, 2017;Tarlow, 2002). In this respect, the increasing attention paid to the outward appearance of the corpse and its burial have often been referred to in relation to the individualization of death (Ariès, 1977).…”