Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve: A Cultural Study - Hardcover

Gilbert, Sandra M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393051315 ISBN 13: 9780393051315

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006

Synopsis

"The most comprehensive multidisciplinary contemplation of mortality we are likely to get." -Thomas Lynch, New York Times Book Review

Prominent critic, poet, and memoirist Sandra M. Gilbert explores our relationship to death though literature, history, poetry, and societal practices. Does death change;and if it does, how has it changed in the last century? And how have our experiences and expressions of grief changed? Did the traumas of Hiroshima and the Holocaust transform our thinking about mortality? More recently, did the catastrophe of 9/11 alter our modes of mourning? And are there at the same time aspects of grief that barely change from age to age? Seneca wrote, "Anyone can stop a man's life but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it." This inevitability has left varying marks on all human cultures. Exploring expressions of faith, burial customs, photographs, poems, and memoirs, acclaimed author Sandra M. Gilbert brings to the topic of death the critical skill that won her fame for The Madwoman in the Attic and other books, as she examines both the changelessness of grief and the changing customs that mark contemporary mourning. 25 illustrations

About this title

About the Author

Sandra M. Gilbert (1936―2024) was a distinguished literary critic and poet. Together with Susan Gubar, she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the NBCC.

Reviews

A few reviewers refer to a letter of William Butler Yeats in which he stated that "sex and the dead" are the only topics of interest "to a serious and studious mood." Sandra M. Gilbert famously tackled the former in her landmark study of women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic (coauthored with Susan Gubar, 1979). Following the death of her husband as a result of medical malpractice, Gilbert picked up an academic study of elegies she had begun in the 1970s and created this "graduate seminar on mourning" (Harper's). Critics praise this extraordinarily learned rumination on the nature of death for its empathetic tone and its refusal to resort to navel gazing. With death in vogue in entertainment circles (from Six Feet Under to The Year of Magical Thinking), Gilbert delivers a book as ageless as its subject.

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Starred Review. Many readers will relate to Gilbert's grief following the unexpected loss of her husband in 1991: "death suddenly seemed... urgently close, as if the walls between this world and the 'other' had indeed become transparent." In the process of mourning, the acclaimed coauthor of Madwoman in the Attic returned to a project she had abandoned in the early 1970s and invested it with the candor of recent loss. The resulting mélange of literary criticism, anthropology and memoir looks at death across time and culture: in the Nazi concentration camps, 9/11, and the 21st-century "hospital spaceship," as well as through photographs, paintings and poetry. "Like the sun, death can't be looked at steadily," wrote La Rochefoucauld, heralding the modern view of the matter. (The medievals, in contrast, thought the process of dying was much scarier than death itself.) For Gilbert, the passage from a Christian theology of "expiration" to a modern "(anti)theology of 'termination' " is best embodied in the poems of Whitman and Dickinson. Her close readings of our cultural history will entrance anyone interested in an intelligent analysis of the ways we grieve. (Jan.)
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In 1991, Gilbert lost her husband of 33 years after a relatively routine operation. Ten years later, the nation lost thousands of its citizens in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. To answer the question of how we as individuals cope with death on personal, societal, and even universal levels, Gilbert parses the poetry of Plath, Lawrence, Tennyson, and Rossetti, among others. Their work imbues the mourner's remorse and despair with solemnity and majesty, and in so doing, elevates grief to lyrical heights. Originally planned simply as a literary critique of poetic elegies, Gilbert's study grew in scope to include interviews, so that she pairs critical analysis with observations by contemporary survivors--herself included--to reveal the plain and plaintive honesty that makes first-person accounts so compelling. Gilbert's understanding of and empathy for the panoply of emotions and rituals surrounding death are comforting in the extreme. Those who have experienced the death of a loved one will recognize themselves in this meticulously researched, comprehensively organized, and exceptionally caring examination of society's attitudes about mortality and mourning. Carol Haggas
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Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393051315
• ISBN 13: 9780393051315
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 580