| This project is an investigation of the ways in which early to mid-nineteenth-century culture understood the paradoxical dead body. For survivors in the nineteenth century, the dead body had several potential post-mortem lives. It could make death soothing or frightening, serve as a means to control social behavior, alleviate disease, and serve justice. I argue that men and women developed narratives that defined a corpse's possible post-mortem trajectories, meanings, and uses. Together, these narratives compose a social history---the life of the corpse in nineteenth-century culture---played out in the realms of the novel, law, medicine, and politics. Each narrative is a hybrid of discourses that both constructed and criticized it; in all cases, novels assess the corpse narratives and present alternative solutions often available only in the realm of fiction. While each faction agreed that what the living did with the dead affected the impact of death and the corpse on survivors, they did not agree with one another about the nature of that impact, nor what should be done with the dead. Nonetheless, all narratives endeavored to exert some control over death by managing the corpse. By properly managing the dead body, the narratives' proponents argued, the living can make death less fearful or decrease its incidence. The first chapter's subject is industrial novels' critique of the good death narrative. The second chapter investigates the impure corpse in the medical-sanitarian narrative of the 1830s and 1840s and offers a social history of the corpse out of which emerges a narrative of social control enacted on the bodies of the poor. Situated within the context of the battle for control over the underclass dead body during the 1820s and 1830s, the third chapter investigates the trio of intertwined and mutually dependent narratives that sprung up around the body-to-be-dissected. Finally, the fourth chapter investigates how the Victorian inquest endeavored to produce a narrative of the body's death, and how novels question the inquest's ideals, criticize its several failings, and offer the novel's narrative as the ultimate solution in telling the dead's tale. |
