Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve: A Cultural Study

by Sandra M. Gilbert

"The most comprehensive multidisciplinary contemplation of mortality we are likely to get." -Thomas Lynch, New York Times Book Review Prominent critic, poet, and memoirist Sandra M. Gilbert explores our relationship to death though literature, history, poetry, and societal practices. Does death change;and if it does, how has it changed in the last century? And how have our experiences and expressions of grief changed? Did the traumas of Hiroshima and the Holocaust transform our thinking about mortality? More recently, did the catastrophe of 9/11 alter our modes of mourning? And are there at the same time aspects of grief that barely change from age to age? Seneca wrote, "Anyone can stop a man's life but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it." This inevitability has left varying marks on all human cultures. Exploring expressions of faith, burial customs, photographs, poems, and memoirs, acclaimed author Sandra M. Gilbert brings to the topic of death the critical skill that won her fame for The Madwoman in the Attic and other books, as she examines both the changelessness of grief and the changing customs that mark contemporary mourning. 25 illustrations

Genres: Nonfiction, Grief, Death, Essays, Philosophy, Literary Criticism

580 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Sandra M. Gilbert was an American literary critic and poet who published in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. She was best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar, with whom she co-authored, among other works, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Madwoman in the Attic is widely recognized as a text central to second-wave feminism. She was Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis.
Gilbert lived in Berkeley, California, and lived, until 2008, in Paris, France. Her husband, Elliot L. Gilbert, was chair of the Department of English at University of California, Davis, until his death in 1991. She also had a long-term relationship with David Gale, mathematician at University of California, Berkeley, until his death in 2008.

Reviews

[Kate♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5stars

[Gloria]

Front Cover: Bleak, cold pic of an empty room and a door where you can't see beyond.
Back Cover: Reviews from journals such as the Washington Post & Library Journal. Includes author summary (professor at UC (Davis) in California.

Inside: Many accolades from people like Joyce Carol Oates & Journal of the Amer Medical Assn.

Topics: Hospitals, Rituals, History of how death has been perceived

Tone: Lofty, Intellectual (big words), Dense Text, Poems/Quotes Included

Content: This is not a practical guide for navigating hospitals and funeral homes, but rather an all encompassing overview of how various groups in the world handle this rite of passage.

[Loren · Rating 1 out of 5]

One would expect that a book that calls itself Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve would discuss just such things. Perhaps it would be an anthropological study or, as the misleading library information on its credits page suggests, explore the “social aspects” of death. Instead, Death’s Door is an uneasy mixture of literary analysis and personal...I hesitate to say essay, because the thoughts, events, and remembrances in the memoir-like portions of the book are rarely complete. It is as if the author is driven to confess the dark thoughts that plagued her after her husband’s death and yet can’t bring herself to actually provide the reader with enough information to actually grasp what happened to him and how she felt about it. Or perhaps, having covered that information in another book, she didn’t feel the need to recap it here.

Either way, the personal parts of each chapter are much more compelling than the readings Gilbert offers of the snatches of poems reprinted here. The usual suspects are trotted out again and again: Thomas Hardy, Sylvia Plath, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams. She has limited herself to poetry (and occasionally prose) that directly addresses the author’s loss. Why that means she’s limited to analyzing work that is generally 50 years old or more is less clear. She references Paul Monette and some of the other survivors of the AIDS plague without giving them as much weight as heterosexual survivors from earlier in the century. What this means, then, is that Gilbert’s definition of modern does not mirror mine. She mentions the effects of 9/11 on modern American only in the Preface and again in her final chapter, but the reference feels like an afterthought, perhaps suggested by an editor in an attempt to attach the book to the present.

Taking the book as it stands, I would have preferred to read the source poems Gilbert discusses, rather than picking my way through her selected passages — a line here, a stanza there. I feel that I don’t know enough context from the poems or from the poets’ lives to know if the citations actually fit Gilbert’s theories. And because she won’t be honest about her own life, I don’t trust her to be honest in what she’s sharing.

Although I have a reasonably large library devoted to death, dying, and grief — including several anthologies of poetry on the subject — I did not find Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve a useful addition of my collection. Perhaps, if you’re a death-obsessed English major who misses the days of being lectured to, this is the book for you. Otherwise, don’t be lured by its title.

[Cheryl Gatling]

This book is a remarkable piece of scholarship. Sandra Gilbert set out to explore how poets write elegies to the dead, and how that writing has changed over the years. She analyzes poems by DH Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Robert frost, TS Eliot, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Donald Hall, and Wallace Stevens, and that is only the beginning. If a poet has written about death (and what poet hasn't?) Sandra Gilbert has read and pondered their work.

But along the way her subject ran away with her, and snowballed. She reminisces about the death of her own husband (some of the more touching parts of the book), and contemplates medieval art, the Holocaust, medical technologies, roadside shrines to the dead, the trenches of WWI, the AIDS epidemic, the American funeral business, and 9/11. I think that if anything at all has been written about death, Ms Gilbert has read it. At times I thought the sheer weight of the evidence made the book something of a ponderous slog to get through, despite Ms Gilbert's obvious intelligence and sensitivity.

I also thought the muchness of it all sometimes made it difficult to follow the thread of her argument. But this is it: In the past, society had a view of death as "expiration," or the breathing out of the soul, which would ascend to God. This view was accompanied by rituals which brought comfort, mostly religious rituals. And the poetry of the time had religious imagery, or pastoral imagery with references to classical gods.

The modern view of death is that of "termination," a complete ending. The industrialization and dehumanization of death delivered on a massive scale by wars and other disasters has made the old consolations useless. Modern writers write about death in the form of bearing witness. They describe the brutality, the horror, the specifics of how the death happened, and they recall details of the life of the deceased. Is there any consolation? Well, not really. But the last word is that facing up to the reality of death, looking clear-eyed at that "door" through which our loved ones vanish, and through which the pain of widowhood (or other loss) enters our lives, is a kind of victory in itself.

[Jeannette · Rating 1 out of 5]

Confession up front - I didnt read all this book. I started out, plodded along, got bored, started skimming, especially over all the poetry, then stuttered to a stop about 1/3rd the way through. The book is way too long, the writing turgid and sloppy by turns, the aims obscure, the whole subject drowned under the authors own grieving. So many other more positive and enlightening books out there.

[Jeanice Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are interested in how modern humans approach dying and grief through poetry then this is a great read.

[Grace]

The fact of totalizing treatments of literature is that they simply can’t include everything. What makes this tome interesting is the scope of its topic: death. Implicit in the discussion of death is the assertion that everyone experiences said phenomenon, making it a universal norm. To a certain extent, this is true. However, I think that the subtitle “Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve” ought to be reframed. This is a treatment of death and grief in a distinctly Western European tradition.

Gilbert gives an entire chapter to the Holocaust, how could she not, yet neglects the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the subsequent Jim Crow eras with its atrocities of lynching. (And Hiroshima, and Vietnam, and death row - all instances of “death events” or phenomena. This would bother me less if she explained WHY she was not discussing then)Even in her discussion of photographic relations to death, she does not touch upon Emmett Till. An entire chapter is dedicated to Sylvia Plath, with barely a mention of Toni Morrison or Lucille Clifton, who both address death and grief just as or more explicitly than Plath. (There is also a split Dickenson/Whitman chapter, and a Ginsburg/Williams chapter) Neglecting to utilize these resources, and to dwell almost entirely on primarily white instances of death means that this book, while pretending at totality, is extremely specific in its depiction.

As I’ve said before, totalizing literature is a misnomer; you can’t totalize literature. There’s too much of it. However, I do think that by asserting that this book is about “Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve,” Gilbert makes an argument about both modernity, as well as who is included in the “We” that participate in the literary tradition of mourning. Though what Gilbert DOES discuss is, as always, textually rooted and thorough in its own way, I wish that more thought had been given to the framing of this narrative, in order to address its areas of scholarly silence. It’s simply not ethical to frame something as a universal observation or statement, and to simultaneously root it so deeply in the specificity of white-European tradition.

[Cathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most dense book that I've read in a long time. Difficult at times because although I minored in Humanities, she relies heavily on the works of people like Tolstoy, Keats, Whitman, Kipling, Hughes, Poe, Plath, Bronte, Eliot, Tennyson, & Milton. I've reads bits of each of these, but am in no way a scholar. She looks at how we talk about death through personal experience, poetry, photography, and the digital landscape.

"It seems to me that the 'mythology of modern death' whose assumptions shape our ends increasingly depends on a definition of death as TERMINATION rather thank on a conception of death as EXPIRATION."

"In our time death has come 'perilously close to being declared a personal guilt'"

"We are creatures who seem both to HAVE and BE bodies"

"The hearse leads mourners down the road of life because death is after all the only ineluctable fact beside birth, the hearse is the vehicle toward which and ultimately in which, all journey"

"Deaths door didn't close, can't & won't close. Death's door is always open"

[Ann Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, a qualified "really liked it." Exhaustively researched but a bit too much of an academic read for most people, I imagine. Gilbert is a fine poet and her inquiries into the work of poets such as Plath, Dickinson, and Whitman are profound; it's also an intriguing idea to explore the "how" of the ways "modern grieving" developed through several avenues. She looks at psychology, social attitudes, war, religion, science, politics, and literature and how all of these (including economic impulses and media) have contributed to current (U.S.) cultural concepts of the "best" way to die or even to talk about death in mixed company.

All the same, I found much of the prose tedious...too many direct quotes squashed together as evidence, a peculiar chronology, and some repetition of key ideas that the scholarly reader doesn't need. Her examination of our ambiguous, fraught, embarrassed attitudes is welcome, even spot-on. I'd nevertheless prefer a prose with fewer rhetorical questions. Maybe the problem for me is her attempt to bring in the personal with the scholarly--those readers who prefer the former may want to read her memoir Wrongful Death instead.

For nerdy types interested in philosophy, poetry, and sociology, her bibliography is to die for. My to-read list is now about 30 books longer than it was.

[Bookmarks Magazine]

A few reviewers refer to a letter of William Butler Yeats in which he stated that "sex and the dead" are the only topics of interest "to a serious and studious mood." Sandra M. Gilbert famously tackled the former in her landmark study of women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic (coauthored with Susan Gubar, 1979). Following the death of her husband as a result of medical malpractice, Gilbert picked up an academic study of elegies she had begun in the 1970s and created this "graduate seminar on mourning" (Harper's). Critics praise this extraordinarily learned rumination on the nature of death for its empathetic tone and its refusal to resort to navel gazing. With death in vogue in entertainment circles (from Six Feet Under to The Year of Magical Thinking), Gilbert delivers a book as ageless as its subject.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Victoria]

not a feel good, summer beach read kind of book, but so far, fairly interesting. i am appreciating the way the author combines memoir with the tools of literary and cultural analysis to discuss her own experience of grieving as well as the history of elegies and cultural traditions of loss. it's a nice change from some of the other books i've started on grieving and mourning, which I've found to be not very well written and consisting mostly of touchy-feely personal accounts of death. Sometimes critical distance can be just as therapeutic.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of my personal preparation for a 'death" course I'm teaching in fall semester. This book provides a wealth of references to literature concerned with the topics of death and dying, particularly focused on the manner of grieving in Western culture.

[Andrea]

This is not a book. It's a tome. Sit back, relax. I'll be on this one for awhile.