“14” in “Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth”
14
Rot and Recycle
Gothic Eco-burial
Laura R. Kremmel
The gothic arose out of eighteenth-century graveyard poetry’s obsession with mortality and decay. When poet Robert Blair vows “to paint the gloomy horrors of the tomb” in one of these early examples, “The Grave” (1743), he reaches for “low-brow’d misty vaults / Furr’d round with mouldy damps and ropey slime,” and “thy trusty yew, / Cheerless, unsocial plant! That loves to dwell / ’Midst sculls and coffins, epitaphs and worms.”1 A more well-known text that inherits such macabre fascination might be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in which Frankenstein remarks, “To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.”2 His goal may be to defeat human death, following a growing attitude of his age that humans should be exempt from mortality, but he does not disregard the influence of human decay: “bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm.”3 From his study of reciprocity between corpse and surrounding environment, “how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain,” he identifies the corpse’s valuable contribution to the living ecology of the grave, just as Blair notes the intermingling of animal and plant matter in graveyards.4 Mary Shelley was no stranger to cemeteries herself. Scenes of Frankenstein scavenging in charnel houses while grieving the loss of his mother call to mind stories of Shelley lingering around her own mother’s grave in St. Pancras Old Churchyard.5 Of course, by her own death in 1851, St. Pancras was considered one of the most toxic of the London cemeteries, and Shelley’s parents were exhumed to be buried with her elsewhere.6 Spaces where the dead are laid exhibit human convergence with the nonhuman and the anxieties, dangers, and possibilities of a network of decay.
Both Blair and Shelley use the imagery of the grave to evoke horror, shock, and disgust, associations that remain strong for much of the Western world. Despite missions like the Order of the Good Death7 to remove fear from funerary rituals, social norms maintain a repulsion toward mortality, tied to concerns that human decay leads to loss of human exceptionalism through fearful integration into the ecology of the grave. As a result, modern funerary rituals are designed to sustain the human recognizability of the deceased, holding back this multispecies union. As ecofeminist Val Plumwood puts it, “Human Exceptionalism positions us as the eaters of others who are never themselves eaten and has profoundly shaped dominant practices of self, commodity, materiality, and death—especially death.”8 The attitude that hybridity—allowing the corpse to join a network of decay with living nonhuman entities—destroys human exceptionalism is based not on the fact that the body becomes less human (because the process of decay is very human) but rather on the anthropocentric idea that the human should be elevated above the rest of the planet. As anthropologist Anna Tsing writes, “entanglement bursts categories and upends identities,” which causes discomfort, particularly during times of loss.9 The shift from Anthropocene to the “myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages” that Donna Haraway calls the Chthulucene clashes with limited ideas about honoring the dead.10
Modern traditions of Western death care are in part motivated by defenses and defensiveness, exhibited by avoiding discussion of death and attempting to preserve and isolate the body. Yet, Haraway stresses the impossibility of these practices through terms like sympoiesis, “making-with,” and ongoingness, “nurturing, or inventing, or discovering, or somehow cobbling together ways for living and dying well with each other in the tissues of an earth whose very habitability is threatened,” all widely applicable to the multispecies network of decay in the grave.11 To some, this convergence, this “making-with” (which Haraway carefully says is “not a synonym for mutually-beneficial”), is an afront to the memory of the human and a source of horror.12 These attitudes motivate destructive treatment of human remains, impacting the surrounding ecosystem of which they become a part. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this means overcrowding churchyards so that the dead can remain part of the family parish and community. Starting in the late nineteenth century, this also means using wasteful, dangerous materials to protect the human form from hybridity. Gothic language and images are used to emphasize the destruction of both.
Death care treatments force the body into continued participation in the Anthropocene by contaminating soil and groundwater, wasting materials, and creating pollutants in service to an artificial idea of human wholeness. As I argue in this chapter, the gothic imagination unsettles the notion of the sanitized, isolated corpse at the core of human exceptionalism, acting as an agent of ecocriticism by actively promoting transformation and hybridity through human decomposition. While the idolization of nature in Romantic gothic literature dramatizes the decay and nonhuman hybrid networks of the grave, the hyperactive gore of the twenty-first-century gothic in examples like NBC’s adaptation of Hannibal (2013–15) similarly illustrates the power of decomposition to dismantle sustained anthropocentrism of the dead. Though locating the corpse within the context of horror appears to do little to alleviate anxieties about it, the gothic importantly acknowledges and emphasizes decomposition by obsessively making it visible. Jesse Oak Taylor, for these reasons, posits that the gothic can offer literature of the Anthropocene its genre conventions as reliable tools that “[imbue] pollution and toxicity with the bodies of ghosts, doppelgangers, and demons,” revealing that nature “is not merely diminished or domesticated but also resurgent, uncanny, often terrifying.”13 In other words, with gothic elements come agency and power.
The gothic will always be a space where fear is expected and explored, providing useful contexts to discuss mortality and decay, which are already connected to fear. Even when those discussions begin outside this generic space, the anxiety and horror associated with the existential loss of human exceptionalism in the grave trigger an impulse to reach for gothic frameworks. I argue, then, that the gothic, in championing abject hybridity throughout its literary tradition, also provides a discursive framework to confront anthropocentric ideas about death. In this way, it serves a vital role in disrupting avoidance of death processes by making those processes visible, undeniable, and accessible. Unlike other contexts, such as religion and science, the language of the gothic can facilitate discussions about innovative and transgressive eco-burial techniques that are accompanied by extremes in disgust and disturbance. Crucially, the rhetoric of terror and horror exposes the natural processes of death that, as Kristeva famously says, “we thrust aside in order to live” and forces an engagement with their cultural and environmental impact, highlighting the power of biological and ecological processes to be frightening but also commonplace.14 In doing so, it expands the possibilities of “making-with” and “ongoingness” within death care, shifting human relationships with the nonhuman networks of the grave’s ecology and expanding the possibilities of these “entities-in-assemblages.”
Figure 14.1. Cemeteries were overcrowded, causing health concerns. St. Pancras Old Church, Pancras Road, London, looking west. Etching by G. Cooke, 1827. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
In the eighteenth century, the corpse was an object of fear, not just as a shocking prop in gothic tales or a daunting reminder of mortality, but also as a dangerous source of threatening nonhuman entities: miasma, toxins, and disease. In fact, most continue to view a corpse as medically dangerous today, despite evidence to the contrary.15 As Suzanne Kelly puts it, “embalming accompanied by a new order of funerary practices, redrew the lines of dirty and clean, remaking the decay of the dead body into a pollutant,” while introducing the actual pollution of formaldehyde and other chemicals into the body and where it is buried.16 In short, discussions of death have been fraught with concerns about the contamination of the corpse and its need for sanitation and containment through methods that do threaten the environment and public health. The gothic disrupts these notions of sanitation by valuing networks of decay.
The Nineteenth-Century Cemetery: Keeping the Dead Around
As one of the most quintessential gothic locales, the cemetery is in no way a dead space. Its occupants grow into various states that feed and nourish a complex ecosystem that Sarah Bezan calls “necro-ecology,” the “vitalism of decomposition,” which integrates a body into a larger, nonhuman network.17 Her use of the word vitalism is particularly meaningful within a Romantic-era medical context, in which the vital element gave the body a mysterious life power. In drawing attention to the morbid vitality of the grave, the gothic encourages that same awe. Dead matter in the necro-ecology is remarkably hyperactive, joining a complex nonhuman network of organisms and microorganisms. Thus, when I refer to “dead/death” in this chapter, I refer only to the annihilation of the human as an individual, not to the end of the human body’s necro-ecological life.
In the nineteenth century, while gothic writers like Shelley were raising the dead, the dead were causing their own trouble. The Industrial Revolution brought a visible influx of bodies to urban areas, bodies that would eventually need to be buried. As a result, this period saw an increased anxiety about cemeteries for two related reasons: overcrowding and pollution. Urban churchyards, subject to the “packing system,” suffered an excessive volume of bodily remains in their small, central locations: the same plot became subject to multiple burials, multiple coffins stacked on top of one another. If the first body was not deep enough to allow for this, it was dug up and reburied farther into the earth. As a result, the bodies at the top were often close enough to the surface to be easily exposed and the living exposed to them.18 A health inspector in Huddersfield estimated in 1850 that one churchyard held 38,298 bodies, “nine bodies per square yard distributed in what he estimated to be twenty-one layers.”19 The same overcrowding was reported in early American cemeteries in the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly in Boston and New York.20 Calls for burial and cemetery reform in Britain began as early as the 1720s and culminated in the 1850s, a timeline that also includes the birth and rise of the gothic and its preoccupation with dangerous corpses and life after death.21
Both burial reform literature and the gothic situated the living as victims of the dead but also the dead as victims of a system in need of change. One emphatic reformer, Francis Seymour Haden22 of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, describes of the early nineteenth century, “The soil of the old city graveyard had become so saturated and super-saturated with animal matter that it could no longer properly be called soil.”23 According to medical theory, it was not the bodies themselves that were the problem but rather the air that they infected and the odors they caused, the amount of soil insufficient to subsume the concentrations of decay. Before germ theory, bad smells were thought to carry miasma or effluvia, spreading illnesses that could be fatal. Both Haden and an earlier outspoken surgeon, George Alfred Walker, go to great lengths to describe the various conditions under which the most dangerous miasmas were produced. Walker’s 1839 Gatherings from Graveyards claims that cemeteries in their current overcrowded state were a danger to public health, equating the dead to a supernatural curse or phantom infiltrating spaces and seeking revenge for their improper care. The packing system and the buildup of miasma are worsened, reformers argue, by human attempts to preserve the body. Sealing the coffin protects it from soil, moisture, and wormlife for a short time, Walker argues, but it also causes effluvia to amass, becoming more dangerous when it eventually breaks free.24
Cemetery reformers were not shy or formal when it came to describing the damage miasma could cause,25 and Walker is particularly known for deliberately borrowing the popular dramatic language and tropes of tales of terror that would have been recognizable to nineteenth-century audiences. He calls cemeteries a “national evil—the harbingers, if not the originators of pestilence,” claiming that the “injurious and destructive agencies” they contain are “constantly in operation, and armed with invisible and irresistible powers” and “pestiferous exhalations.”26 Granting an agency to the corpse that is startlingly akin to the gothic tradition’s graphic depictions, he condemns “the tremendous risk incurred by the mutilations of the resistless dead . . . thus made the instrument of punishment to the living.”27 Of cemeteries and the bodies within them, he claims, “their insatiable appetite, yet unglutted, is constantly devouring fresh victims.”28 Haden uses similar language, referring to burial practices causing “a vilification of the dead.”29 In fact, every gothic scene of a ghost or a skeleton attacking or wooing the living to join it in death is a demonstration of what these reformers claimed could happen in overcrowded, miasma-filled cemeteries. The gothic, then, provides characters, language, and images to portray the severity of anthropocentric damage.
Figure 14.2. Walker warned that cemeteries should not be used for social events while the problem of overcrowding existed. G. A. Walker, Lectures on the Metropolitan Grave-yards. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
The cure to these systemic burial ills was reciprocity between necro-ecology and the body—the nonhuman network and the human—which was not just appropriate but the right of the dead. Haden, in particular, claimed to stand for the right to proper burial, including full access to conditions that promote decomposition: soil, oxygen, hydration, and the vermin that aid in those processes, the worms and maggots used by gothic writers to accent graphic scenes of human mortality. The infamously graphic author Matthew Lewis provides ample representative use of such necro-ecological concepts within the early gothic tradition. His depiction in The Monk (1796) of the imprisoned Agnes in her living grave, cradling her dead child while maggots and worms rove both their bodies, refuses to exceptionalize the human by saving it from nonhuman assemblages. In his 1801 poem “Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine,” a dead knight returns to enact vengeance on his unfaithful lover. When he lifts his visor, “the worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out, and sported his eyes and his temples about,” flaunting the vitality of decomposition’s multispecies networks.30 Such vivid descriptions acknowledge the power of this ecology below or beyond human observation, a power of the natural that rivals the supernatural. These texts confront that power by making it frightening.
Gothic elements, then, depict decomposition as an active process that appears threatening, but less so than the anthropocentric avoidance of decay described by reformers. At the same time that Walker and Haden characterize the buildup of decomposing bodies as human-made villains, the gothic’s use of the supernatural turns this villainy into an agent of ecocriticism: had these bodies been provided conditions that promote decomposition, they would not have overwhelmed this necro-ecology. Gothic justice and revenge, promoting ecological processes for a narrative purpose, illustrate the human body in the act of hybridity. John Keats features such gruesome examples of necro-ecological revenge in the poem “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil” (1818). When Lorenzo is murdered, his animal matter begins to fully participate in a nonhuman network when his lover Isabella brings his head home and plants it in a pot of basil, which “drew / nurture besides, and life, from human fears, / from the fast mouldering head there shut from view.”31 The head, no longer just human, appears as part of the basil and its soil, tormenting the killers and driving them into exile. Natural burial in this literature may seem to be dangerous, but only in the form of Lorenzo’s revenge, a specifically gothic postmortem threat driven by the murderers’ neglected value of life and power of death.
Modern Remains: Purifying and Polluting the Dead
Anxieties and misconceptions about unsanitary overcrowded cemeteries in the nineteenth century differ little in the twenty-first century. Cemeteries may not be as overcrowded as those using the London packing system, but they are quickly reaching full capacity in urban areas. These concerns, combined with the cost of funerary services, are slowly pushing some to consider eco-burial options. The rhetoric of the rights of the dead to decay and of the avoidance of burial pollution are surprisingly similar to rhetoric used in the ages of Walker and Haden. Haden, who claimed “that the natural destination of all organized bodies that have lived, and that die on the earth’s surface, is the earth” encouraged burying bodies soon after death and “in coffins (if we must have coffins) of such a construction as will not prevent their resolution. No coffin at all would, of course be best.”32 A current advocate for green burial, Suzanne Kelly likewise claims that burial in crypts and cremation “[distance] the dead body from its own decomposition and [eradicate] the ecological value of its reintegration into the cycles of nature. In sum, the drive to distance the dead body from its own decay . . . [creates] a prohibition on returning the dead body to the elements.”33 As outspoken mortician and founder of the Order of the Good Death Caitlin Doughty adds, “The soil teems with life, as does the dead body. . . . Microscopic sorcery takes place when a body is placed just a few feet deep in the soil.”34 Attempts to seal the body within caskets and crypts interfere with the body’s right to engage in the aforementioned “myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages” that Haraway describes as a crucial turning away from anthropocentric practices.
Natural burial, an option in some areas, involves no lasting materials that would interfere with the necro-ecology by polluting or hindering hybridity: everything buried is biodegradable, rejecting caskets treated with sealants, adorned with varnish and metal, and placed within cement vaults that enable landscaping. Rather than an elaborate headstone, a simple rock found within the area or a native plant is used to mark the grave, particularly for the more extensive green burials, which occur in designated green cemeteries.35 Twenty-first-century ecocritical concerns focus on the materials36 employed by the funeral industry to prepare and bury the body: rather than an excess of gore overwhelming an ecosystem, there is a chemical/material lack of gore. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Western death care not only preserves the body by encasing it away from the necro-ecology but also delays composition by filling the body with toxins. Embalming grew out the medical field’s need to preserve bodies for dissection or display, until it became a popular way to preserve and transport bodies killed during the American Civil War and to augment British Victorian death culture in the 1890s.37 Though the Civil War standard—arsenic—is no longer used, embalming chemicals, such as formaldehyde and methanol, can have harsh effects on soil and water quality, not to mention those who prepare them.38
Figure 14.3. Caitlin Doughty demonstrates a natural burial in an episode on her YouTube channel, “Ask a Mortician.” “ECO-DEATH TAKEOVER: Changing the Funeral Industry, Dec. 15, 2017,” https://youtu.be/pWo2-LHwGMM.
Altering the timeline of decomposition can also add to ecocritical concerns. Katrina Spade, the innovator behind the decomposition company Recompose, explains, “In the weeks and months following a conventional burial, [embalmed] bodies slowly decompose anaerobically, and this lack of oxygen creates methane, a particularly powerful greenhouse gas.”39 As Tsing helpfully explains, “until quite recently . . . the most important interspecies interactions, in this worldview, were predator-prey relations in which interaction meant wiping each other out.”40 Allowing the body to decompose leaves it exposed to interactions that are seen as predatorial (i.e., food for worms), and embalming is thought incorrectly to prevent that. The gothic exposure that the Chthulucenic notion of “multispecies assemblages” is more complicated stands to shift these assumptions.41
The popular option of cremation may avoid these specific threats, but it also creates dangerous pollution through the release of mercury and other toxins into the atmosphere, as well as consuming large amounts of energy.42 Nonetheless, cremation is mistaken by many to be an eco-friendly alternative: fire is considered to be “clean.” New options, such as alkaline hydrolysis or water cremation, get stalled in production for the simple fact that they are seen as disturbing, uncivilized, and downright gothic by producing an easily disposable sludge along with bone ash. A 2008 bill attempting to legalize alkaline hydrolysis in New York (where it is still not legal, except for medical remains) was nicknamed “Hannibal Lecter’s Bill” for the fear that the residue would make its way into water and food matter, relocating a practical and environmentally conscious method of body disposal to dramatic and fearful gothic contexts.43
Though Hannibal is undoubtedly best known for his lavish feasts of human flesh, the hyperstylized NBC adaptation also features inventive and less-discussed examples of eco-burial. The first episode, “Apéritif,” sets the tone as special agent Will Graham and his psychiatrist Hannibal help the FBI track down the serial killer the Minnesota Shrike, a hunter who “honors every part” of his prey. In fact, in good eco-conscious fashion, the Minnesota Shrike case is classified as an abduction case: no bodies, body parts, or bodily debris is left behind. Only when you waste the body does it become murder, the killer explains, a philosophy shared by many of the murderers in the show. This perspective is predicated on an enduring relationship between the dead and the surrounding world: what is created from the corpse adds beauty, performs a function, or alleviates pain. Thus the body takes on new life beyond the anthropocentric limits of conventional death care, transforming and hybridizing with a necro-ecology that exceeds even the boundaries of Bezan’s definition. Recycling or repurposing the dead by losing its humanness occurs so frequently throughout the series that any of a number of examples could have been chosen for discussion, including the killer who turns bodies into musical instruments, since recycling the body into decorative or functional objects has precedent in today’s funeral economy.44 There’s also the killer who plants a human–tree hybrid in a parking lot, a take on current efforts to combine conservation efforts with green cemeteries, as well as technology that theoretically allows you to “become a tree” when you die.45 There is also the killer who lobotomizes patients in pain and turns them into beehives, though this so far has no equivalent in the present death industry. Because it speaks directly to some of the controversial innovations in eco-burial today, the remainder of this chapter will focus on the killer who plants his own mushroom garden.
Figure 14.4. Screenshot of the mushroom garden in NBC’s Hannibal, season 1, episode 2, “Amuse-Bouche” (2013).
Exemplifying the astounding symbiotic force belowground, mushrooms and other fungi also elicit cultural reactions of revulsion and “grossness” to which the contemporary gothic aspires. Episode 2, “Amuse-Bouche,” centers around a forest patch of corpses, planted with their arms sticking out of the ground to intravenously feed them and facilitate the growth of mushrooms. Aesthetically exposing and augmenting the biological processes that occur in decomposition, the scene triggers the abject where animal meets fungal matter. Remove the serial killer, however, and this method is not far from a controversial technique that has captured the cultural imagination for its environmental involvement and disturbing embrace of hybridity. Since 2008, Jae Rhim Lee and her company, Coeio, have been working on an alternative burial option that initiates decomposition with fungal spores. The Mushroom Suit, renamed the Infinity Burial Suit, is a biodegradable burial garment with “biomix” mushroom mycelium sewn into it. According to the company, whose name means “coming together,” the goals are to “aid in decomposition, work to neutralize toxins found in the body, and transfer nutrients to plant life.” They claim that the Mushroom Suit boosts biological and ecological processes, removing pollutants in the body46 through mycoremediation (the process by which mushrooms neutralize toxins) and protecting the body’s right to nourish the earth by decomposing.47 As anti-gothic as this sounds, the FAQ section of the website implies that this method is also burdened with disturbing associations: questions such as “Will the mushrooms eat me while I’m alive?” (the answer is no). Though, perhaps, they were right to ask. During experiments, Lee fed “shiitake and oyster mushrooms with [her] own body tissues and excretions—her skin, hair, nails, blood, bone, fat, tears, urine, feces, and sweat.”48
Figure 14.5. Jae Rhim Lee models an early version of the Infinity Burial Suit in her 2011 TEDGlobaltalk, “My Mushroom Burial Suit.” https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee_my_mushroom_burial_suit.
Though there is debate about whether the suit actually works and convincing criticism of its insinuation that green burial is toxic and unsafe,49 the concept behind it has become popular for its green claims.50 In 2019, the Mushroom Suit became a topic of social media conversation when the late actor Luke Perry was buried in one. Though the volume of positive and curious responses shows a growing acceptance of eco-burial options that embrace transformation and hybridity, many cannot help but move this conversation to the gothic, reacting in disgust and leaving comments like “No! Makes me ill. I’m never eating another mushroom” and “Wow, that’s a really terrible thought.”51 News of Perry’s burial broke just weeks after Washington became the first state to legalize human composting, led by Spade. When still experimenting with composting techniques, Spade was aware of her project’s gothic undertones. In an informal interview, she said, “Wait, let’s not call them ‘experiments,’ that makes it sound like I’m a mad scientist. . . . We’re here setting up the mounds. No, that’s equally creepy.”52 News of human composting promoted similar, more heated social media debates, including the exchange “It’s respect for the Earth,” “You respect dirt. I’ll respect men,” and the comment “Oh my god can you imagine the smell?”53 These commenters buy in to the funeral industry’s “promise of preserving and protecting the body from the elements that surround it” and the “promise to protect the dead body from its own decomposition back into the earth.”54 Resistance to human transformation into nonhuman networks is still based on the notion that the body must be sterilized and the environment, already “dirty,” pollutes it. At the same time, the preceding comments suggest that the corpse also threatens a misconceived idea of the earth as pure. The mushroom exists in the space between these conflicting ideas. As conflicting, negative perceptions of eco-burial options show, the gothic and horror are where these conversations can exist, at least for now.
The killers in Hannibal do not share these aversions to decay, combining the productive abject of both the mushroom and the gothic. As one character notes, the mushroom killer “enthusiastically [encourages] decomposition,” and the graphic and repeated display of such decomposition throughout the episode is a primary source of horror, beautiful and grotesque in its attention to the details of the necro-ecology of which Will is clearly in awe.55 Both the episode and current burial innovations echo those nineteenth-century conversations about a corpse’s integration into the environment. Walker, Haden, Lee, and Spade see “encouraging decomposition” as a solution to types of pollution caused by mismanagement of body disposal and, again, as the right of the deceased. The mushroom gardener in Hannibal revels in the decay that leads to expansive network growth, honoring it as an achievement beyond the human, beyond the Anthropocene.
The killer’s regard for hybridity goes even further than natural burial, however, as he harvests necro-ecological energy and applies it to what he sees as a problem with humans in isolation: the inability to connect. In the killer’s words, “if you walk through a field of mycelium, they know you are there. . . . The spores reach for you as you walk by.”56 By planting bodies for the purpose of growing mushrooms that make connections, the killer draws attention to the powerful reciprocity of elements above- and belowground, hybridizing humans and fungi into one necro-ecological network stronger than any human community. Tsing corroborates the wonder of the mushroom’s capacity to connect, referring to its atmosphere as an active city and the fungi within it as web builders joining other organisms together for feeding as well as sharing nutrients. “Follow fungi into that underground city, and you will find the strange and varied pleasures of interspecies life,” she writes, an intimate assemblage similar to what the mushroom killer describes.57 Like Haraway’s notion of Chthulucene, she seeks alternatives to the Anthropocene, finding that mushrooms represent a mingling of human and nonhuman: “the very stuff of collaborative survival.”58 The celebrated visuals of Hannibal demonstrate how this works in close-up, slow motion of the incredible growth within nonhuman death networks. As Tsing says, “making worlds is not limited to humans.”59
Figure 14.6. Screenshots demonstrating the movement and communication of multispecies networks in NBC’s Hannibal, season 1, episode 2, “Amuse-Bouche” (2013).
The gothic flaunts the unsettling but undeniable power of these decomposition processes; it amplifies, acknowledges, and participates in the concerns of eco-burial reformers, while also presenting a creative—if sinister—platform for discussion and images on which to draw. As innovative eco-burial options expose anxieties and misconceptions about bodily remains and burial practices by instigating a turn toward gothic contexts, opportunities to disrupt the urge to sanitize and isolate human remains also arise. At the same time that reform texts in the past and today draw on gothic to illustrate and instigate change, the gothic graphically demonstrates the macabre and disturbing value of alternative burial practices that disrupt anthropocentric attachments and promote the nonhuman network of the grave. Opportunities for conversations about mortality, decomposition, and necro-ecology within the context of stylized gothic fear encourage a reevaluation of death-related fears outside the text, making fear an important part of ecocritical conversations that challenge the boundaries and exceptionalism of the human.
Notes
Robert Blair, “The Grave,” in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 368.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, ed. David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 33.
Shelley.
Shelley.
According to legend, tracing the name on her mother’s grave taught young Mary to read, and she would have secret meetings with Percy Bysshe Shelly at the same location.
Samantha Matthews, Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 144. In the 1860s, overcrowding and the new railway line would cause exhumation of thousands of graves, which author Thomas Hardy took charge of managing.
A death positive movement begun by mortician Caitlin Doughty and primarily run by women working in various areas within and around the death industry.
Val Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile, ed. Lorraine Shannon (Canberra: Australian National University, 2012), 91.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 137.
Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 160.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 58, 130.
Haraway, 60.
Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 100.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the sight and smell [of remains] are unpleasant, but they do not create a public health hazard.” “Interim Health Recommendations for Workers Who Handle Human Remains after a Disaster,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, September 15, 2008, https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/handleremains.html. Thomas W. Laqueur adds in The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015) that “twenty-first-century doctors who ought to know better still act as if corpses are a threat to health. . . . There is no medical foundation for this policy. . . . Rotting flesh may be disgusting, but it is not a good vector of disease” (231–32).
Suzanne Kelly, “Dead Bodies That Matter: Toward a New Ecology of Human Death,” Journal of American Culture 35, no. 1 (2012): 43.
Susan Bezan, “Necro-Eco: The Ecology of Death in Jim Crace’s Being Dead,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 48, no. 3 (2015): 192–95.
Lisa Murray, “‘Modern Innovations?’ Ideal vs Reality in Colonial Cemeteries of Nineteenth-Century New South Wales,” Mortality 8, no. 2 (2003): 136.
Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 225.
Tanya D. Marsh, “A Brief History of the American Cemetery,” in Changing Landscapes: Exploring the Growth of Ethical, Compassionate, and Environmentally Sustainable Green Funeral Service, ed. Lee Webster (2016), 15–16.
Karen Sánchesz-Eppler, “Decomposing: Wordsworth’s Poetry of Epitaph and English Burial Reform,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 42, no. 4 (1988): 416.
Sometimes spelled “Hayden.”
Francis Seymour Haden, Earth to Earth: A Plea for a Change of System in Our Burial of the Dead (London: Macmillan, 1875), 54.
Haden, 96.
And scholars such as Thomas W. Laqueur claim that even they knew what they said wasn’t true, that the dead were less dangerous than the living (229–30).
George Alfred Walker, Gatherings from Graveyards: Particularly Those in London (London: Longman, 1839), iii, v, vii. Similar to the “noxious exhalations [that] may arise from dead bodies,” as described by Dr. Samuel Ackerly of the New York Board of Health in 1822. Marsh, “A Brief History,” 17.
Walker, Gatherings, 10.
Walker, 5–6.
Haden, Earth, 5.
Matthew G. Lewis, “Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine,” in Tales of Wonder, ed. Douglass H. Thomson (Peterborough, U.K.: Broadview Editions, 2010), 64.
John Keats, “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil,” in The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse, ed. Caroline Franklin (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2011), 476.
Haden, Earth, 7, 16.
Kelly, “Dead Bodies That Matter,” 47.
Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 108.
“What Are Natural Burials and Green Funerals?,” The Good Funeral Guide, https://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/what-is-a-green-funeral/. If green burial seems anti-gothic, the Good Funeral Guide’s web page includes the comment “the best look is probably the there’s-nobody-here look,” which fits well within particularly contemporary gothic tropes.
According to the Green Burial Council and Mary Woodsen’s often-cited statistics, every year, the United States buries 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluid, containing 827,060 gallons of toxins like formaldehyde; 1.6 million tons of concrete; 20–30 million feet of hardwood; and 64,500 tons of steel. Caskets and vaults are treated with a host of chemicals that can leak into the ground. See Webster, ed., Changing Landscapes.
As Jani Scandura points out, this trend coincides with the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Scandura, “Deadly Professions: ‘Dracula,’ Undertakers, and the Embalmed Corpse,” Victorian Studies 40, no. 1 (1996): 1–30. She writes, “Dracula, the truly consummate undertaker, does not just beautify corpses; he preserves them eternally. Indeed, he seems to embalm them” (9).
Norman L. Cantor, After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010), 83–84.
Katrina Spade, “How Your Death Affects Climate Change,” in Webster, Changing Landscapes, 97.
Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 139.
Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” 160.
Doughty, From Here, 135.
Philip R. Olsen, “Flush and Bone: Funeralizing Alkaline Hydrolysis in the United States,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 39, no. 5 (2014): 681.
For example, the company LifeGem will turn ashes into a diamond, Andvinyly will press ashes into a vinyl record, and Art from Ashes will incorporate ashes into glass baubles.
Bio Urn and Capsula Mundi are two examples that involve burying ashes with seeds or young trees. However, ashes do not themselves add any organic or nutritional content that promotes plant growth. Doughty, From Here, 148. In fact, many claim that ashes prevent root growth. Marketing them as a green alternative is part of what those in the field call “greenwashing.”
According to Coeio’s website, “the Centers for Disease Control in the US says we have 219 toxic chemicals in our body. These include tobacco residues, dry cleaning chemicals, pesticides, fungicides, flame retardants, heavy metals, preservatives, etc. The CDC reports that the chemical Bisphenol-A (BPA), a synthetic estrogen and plastic hardener which causes reproductive and neurological damage, is found in 93% of adults age 6 and older.” Józef Żychowski and Tomasz Bryndal’s study of cemetery groundwater contamination, “Impact of Cemeteries on Groundwater Contamination by Bacteria and Viruses—a Review,” Journal of Water and Health 13, no. 2 (2015): 285–301, identifies potential pollutants in “chemical substances applied in chemotherapy” (285) as well as other cosmetic and medical items. However, how threatening these chemicals are is a subject of debate.
Jae Rhim Lee, “Coeio: The Infinity Burial Suit,” http://coeio.com/.
Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012): 228.
As Sarah and Tim Crews argue in “Decomposition Is Free, So What’s Up with the Infinity Burial Suit?,” in Webster, Changing Landscapes, the mushroom suit as an art project admirably represented transformation. When it transitioned to a functional, selling object, it became dangerous greenwashing that, they claim, ignores the science of decomposition (187–89).
Joe Sehee, “Is There Hope for the Planet in a ‘Post Truth’ World?,” in Webster, Changing Landscapes, 207–8.
See Janet Haneberg (@JanetHaneberg), “No! Makes me ill. I’ll never eat another mushroom,” Twitter, May 6, 2019, https://twitter.com/JanetHaneberg/status/1125519379993714689, and Dena Lee (@Denalee907), “Wow :/ that’s a terrible thought. Just cremate me and spread my ashes down in SW Florida in the Gulf of Mexico, set my spirit free o:),” Twitter, May 5, 2019, https://twitter.com/Denalee907/status/1125239741937541121. These are, of course, alongside countless jokes about him being a “fun guy.”
Doughty, From Here, 110.
Fowlthing, comment on Hallie Golden, “Could ‘Human Composting’ Mean a Better, Greener Death?,” CityLab, January 14, 2019, https://www.citylab.com/environment/2019/01/human-composting-washington-katrina-spade-burial-death/580015/; Carl Jacobs, comment on Hallie Golden, “Could ‘Human Composting’ Mean a Better, Greener Death?,” CityLab, January 14, 2019, https://www.citylab.com/environment/2019/01/human-composting-washington-katrina-spade-burial-death/580015/; Urbandetail, comment on Hallie Golden, “Human Composting May Soon Be Legal in Washington State,” BoingBoingNet, April 22, 2019, https://boingboing.net/2019/04/22/human-composting-may-soon-be-l.html.
Suzanne Kelly, “Dead Bodies That Matter: Toward a New Ecology of Human Death,” Journal of American Culture 35, no. 1 (2012): 45.
“Amuse-Bouche,” Hannibal: The Complete First Season, season 1, episode 2, dir. Michael Rymer, NBC, 2013.
“Amuse-Bouche.”
Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 137.
Tsing, 23.
Tsing, 24.
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