| 摘要: | In the nineteenth century, while urbanization and industrialization brought forth drastic changes in social structure and weakened the link between mankind and land, both sides of the Atlantic saw the society evolving from one with clear social hierarchy based on a land-oriented economy and bloodline to one characterized by class mobility and consumerism. The familial order must therefore be strengthened by other social systems, among which were the rituals of funeral and mourning. Keepsakes or mementos of death and mourning thus became an essential part of daily life. With the uprising of consumerism, the culture of death was also subsumed by the fashion and manufacture industries, and mourning vestments and mementos of death also became commodities. Among these, keepsakes made from hair and embalmed bodily parts seem most fascinating (and macabre) for the modern society. The nineteenth-century imagination of death was also reflected in the literary delineation of mementos. These mementos are neither humans nor things, preserving the existence of the dearly departed with a symbol or icon, but also transforming them into an actual object that can be touched, worn, and collected. The memento of death is both a metaphor and a metonymy. The imagery of snow is quite prominent in the works of Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Christina Rossetti, who were renowned for their delineation of death and mourning. Wrapped in snow, the dead bodies in these texts become frozen in time, as if trapped in a snow globe. Theodor Adorno calls the world within a snow globe ＂Nature morte＂-namely ＂still life＂ or ＂dead life.＂ It is a world both static and dynamic, a world of both the living and the dead. This world of immutability-albeit forever imbued with a possibility of change-answers to the nineteenth-century mourner's imagination of an eternal ＂life＂ beyond. This sense of eternity was also manifested in the popularity of embalming and hair ornaments, which were ubiquitous, both symbolically throughout the texts of the three poetesses and historically in their lives. This paper thus explores the delineation of death and mourning in the texts of nineteenth-century poetesses by discussing first snow and the tactile memories of the dead and then the death memorabilia that invites a sense of touch, with the intention of further exploring the nineteenth-century material culture through discussions of the fine and breachable line between human bodies and objects, visuality and tactility, life and death, and the active and the passive. |
