Death, Grief, and Mourning

GEOFFREY GORER. Death, Grief, and Mourning: A Study of Contemporary Society. Pp. xxxiv, 205. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. $4.50.

The popular media have had a lot of slightly sick fun lately with American funereal practices. Forest Lawn, the Disney-land of the dead (to use Jack Paar's epithet), has become a kind of apotheosis of the self-parodying tendencies in mass culture. The liberated, "rational" minority has been trying to exorcise such "inanities" by traditional satirical strategies. Into this simple-minded program for secularization comes a paradoxical book--an analysis of death, grief, and mourning which argues that industrial society's lack of mourning rituals to contain grief has resulted in a wide variety of neurotic behavior.

In addition to the more obvious effects of repressed sorrow and endless despondency, Geoffrey Gorer attributes a surprising array of maladaptive behavior--excessive fear of cigarette cancer and atomic war, violence in amusement media, callousness about traffic fatalities, and vandalism--to the absence of "civil mourning," analogous to "civil marriage" in a half-secularized society.

To the nonsocial scientist unqualified to ascertain the validity of his methodology, this kind of speculation at the very least seems far-fetched. Indeed, the autobiographical prologue in which the author recounts his own encounters with death surprises the humanist who regards the value of social science as its objective study of regularities or patterns in behavior not as the deeply felt, fully articulated analysis of individual experience-the province of literature and art.

On the other hand, one is fascinated by the paradox that the least secularized elements in British society--Orthodox Jew, Scottish Church, and Roman Catholic--seem to have the most humanly useful rites of passages for the bereaved and that the most "advanced" thinkers, middle-class professionals, seem the least prepared for their encounters with bereavement.

Most credible of his hypotheses is the speculation that a kind of prudery over death similar to Victorian reticence about sex prevails today generating by transference a pornography of death. However, his plea for therapeutic openness about dealing with death, based on the analogy of the decline of sexual prudery, implies that a rational, common-sense approach is more important than rituals for the bereaved. Talking it out is not a ceremony.

Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 365, The Peace Corps (May, 1966), pp. 221-222 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social Science