ABSTRACT
The current interest in death as a general topic of research-what has been termed the ‘death awareness’ movement (Huntington and Metcalfe 1979), began in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the publication in Encounter in 1955 of Geoffrey Gorer’s article ‘The Pornography of Death’, closely followed by Jessica Mitford’s book. The American Way of Death. Both had an immediate popular appeal and both were critical of contemporary western attitudes to death. Gorer’s article claimed that as Victorian taboos about sexuality declined, they were replaced by new taboos about death. These taboos led to a sort of ‘social invisibility of death’ and to restrictions on outward expressions of grief and mourning. Mitford’s book was directed against the funeral industry for profiteering on people’s distress and creating an elaborate display that she saw as being inappropriate to the American way of life.
