430 - Images of Man and Death

Images of Man and Death
By Philippe Aries
Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1985. 271 pp. $35.00.

"Death loves to be represented," Aries writes in the Introduction, and this statement is abundantly documented in this book. Images of Man and Death is a fascinating book that explores the range of Western attitudes toward, and practices surrounding, death. Rather than merely illustrating the text, the several hundred black-and-white photographs and nine colorplates constitute the historical evidence on which the text comments. From tombstones to sculpture to paintings and photographs, Aries shows the varieties of representations of death in the Western Christian world from the beginning of the Christian era to the present. The text abounds with interesting facts: church burial services began only in the late middle ages; women's tombs, at first rare, became frequent in the fourteenth century, while children's tombs became common only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; although virtually absent earlier, there was an "explosion of purgatories" in the seventeenth century; the origin of the word "sardonic" lies in sardaine, a poisonous root: "'Those who die from eating it look like a person laughing'; the sardonic laugh is the laugh of the skeleton."

In spite of the fascination of the images and text, however, the book's overall effect is that of a curious anomaly: its prima facie claim to be both a coffee-table book and a scholarly book is not substantiated. It probably fails as a coffee-table book because of its topic. But neither is it a scholarly book due to, on the one hand, its lack of documentation, and, on the other hand, its frequent failure to provide an original and satisfying interpretation of the phenomena discussed. Concerning the first problem, Aries suggests in the one-page bibliography that the reader in search of further documentation and bibliography should refer to his earlier book, The Hour of Our Death. Concerning the second problem, the book should be thought of-as Aries says in the Introduction-as a film of a series of cultural images of death rather than as an attempt to give cultural or religious reasons for the various practices.

431 - Images of Man and Death

I suppose that it is unreasonable to expect Aries to apply gender analysis to his evidence, although it is crucial to interpretation of some of his visual representations of death. For example, it would be valuable to have some exploration of the misogyny of the omnia vanitas theme discussed in chapter five, a visual theme that consistently depicts a gruesome skeleton seducing a beautiful woman, and presumably, through her the male spectator who is attracted to her. Rather than identifying cultural gender assumptions, however, the book simply reflects them; male language for humanity is used throughout, and the male is assumed to be the normative human being.

Aries concludes with a very short chapter on the present that seems to contradict his introductory claim that "death loves to be represented." Commenting on contemporary "reluctance to give death a symbolic representation," he enigmatically remarks that this reluctance is "characteristic of a new culture." Although he excludes media and films from his analysis, claiming-without explaining-an "incompatibility between an image that is fixed and printed and the mobile images of the cinema," he discusses briefly a still from Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers. Even more puzzling is his reason for neglecting to acknowledge that, in fact, images of death have never been as constant, multiple, and accessible as they are in today's media, both in news and entertainment media. Perhaps the difficulty of identifying a symbolic representation of death is not so much because of the absence of representations as it is due to the impossibility of finding a single image of death that is characteristic of all of Western culture. Even if he remained with the explicitly funerary art that comprises much of his visual evidence, he would have found much of interest and horror in such cultural phenomena as Forest Lawn Cemetery in California.

Despite these difficulties, Images of Man and Death succeeds in its agenda of making a record of a large variety of Western representations of death. Samuel Johnson once remarked that "nothing concentrates the mind of a man better than knowing he is going to be hanged in a fortnight." Perhaps so, but, as Aries' book demonstrates, visual images of death come close to having the same effect.

Margaret R. Miles

Harvard Divinity School
Cambridge, Massachusetts