Literary Depictions of Death

Although death is a prominent theme in literature from the most ancient times to the present, it has always been depicted in connection with other themes. Scholars of the past century noticed that death was the source of most myths. In fact, symbolic or imaginative representations of death are found in some form in every culture, first as a revelation, then as a sacred tradition and finally as an exemplary model. Thus, the theme of death goes hand in hand with the evolution of literature, both in oral and written practices, and including all genres and species.

In the history of collective attitudes about death, it was thought that death representations were [Page 662]mirrored by the extant societies and the successive epochs. Yet, figures of death may be totally contextualized; they spring from our own imagination. Consequently, death is difficult to define as an object; we can only conceive it as metaphor, allegory, dislocation, allusion, or play on words. This entry briefly reviews the historical background of the literary depictions of death. It then focuses on how literature helps us understand death as a human experience and as a pretext for writing. Finally, it examines modern approaches to death in the field of literary criticism.

How Common Understanding of Death Affected Literature

Ancient literature focused on the cult of the dead through epic poems, songs, and tragic plays. Medieval life, and thus its literature, was driven by war with death depicted either as a vision of horror or of heroism, depending on authors' goal to condemn or to praise war as a means to write history. In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, the Arabian motif of the trip into the other world becomes central. It is filtered through Christian ideals as an allegory of the different states of mind that a person can experience. Thus, Inferno stands for evil and vice; Paradise is the image of good and virtue, and Purgatory is the transition between the two by means of repentance and expiation.

The Renaissance period, with William Shakespeare as the most representative figure, revived tragic stories of Greek antiquity and refurbished them in a way that put together love and death, bringing the tragic to paroxysm. French classicism continued the tradition of what scholars called “the theater of great passions,” although with a sense of property and civil responsibility. The legendary characters such as Medea, Phaedra, and Iphigenia were no longer marionettes in the gods' hands, but victims of their own passions.

Seventeenth-century English Puritanism considered death by imagining the life beyond. John Milton's Paradise Lost is a transcription of the biblical myth as an allegory of the puritans' struggle against absolutism and aristocracy. However, after the publication of theEncyclopédie in France in the 18th century, the preoccupation with life after death was condemned as a form of putting down life on earth.

At the same time in England, the black novel was born, with its terrifying, gothic depictions of haunted castles, which have since inspired modern thrillers. Obsession with death was already a preromantic theme with the so-called poets of the dark, to whom the effusion of the mourning and the attraction of the tomb were constant sources of meditation. Cemetery wandering, vampirism, melancholia, and predilection with suicide were preferred literary themes during the 19th-century periods of Romanticism, Parnassianism, and Symbolism, which were followed by existential questioning upon “le mal du siècle” during the 20th century. The shocking experiences of the past century marked literature with grave accents of pessimism and nihilism. Themes of collective death (plague, genocide) and suicide promoted the idea of the absurdity of life and the belief that human destiny was mere chance.

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