Afterword

By probing the intersection of sex, gender, and death in eighteenth-century literature, the contributors to Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature have exposed a historically specific paradigm previously unexplored. Key aspects of understandings of death have pointed to a rise of secularism as critical to the formation of the modern state. Although cultural life comprised varying currents, in terms of mourning rites, burial practices, and attitudes toward the body, we can identify a distinct shift in eighteenth-century death. I would argue (as seen in this volume's introduction) that death becomes pleasurable as the individual gains control over the body, and as the church's grip on it slips; power over and contemplation of one's own body, corpse, and burial contain pleasing results. As Bronfen and Goodwin remark, “The gesture of repression, which is also a gesture to obtain (the fiction of) mastery, is so multiply encoded, so infinitely various, that we might call it pied beauty. But uncanny beauty.” ¹ In distinct ways, the contexts of these chapters in Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature render rich material for historians, literary critics, and scholars of death, sexuality, and literature as they take into a fuller account this uncanny and morbid beauty. Each raises complex issues in terms of textual portrayals of death, whether these representations are extreme fantasy or actual modes of cultural formation (such as group identities and ideologies). As a whole, these chapters offer evidence of the conflation of death with sexuality: in juridical form, as Ruth Anolik and Ian McCormick cite in their chapters; in medical depictions of the female body, as Marcia Nichols illuminates; or in literary form, as all of these chapters explore. In Western culture, death deploys tensions in gender constructions, and provides a framework for fantasies of power. This collection has uncovered ways in which the dead body is animated in cultural discourse. Identity, gender, and sexual preferences are constructed upon discursive engagements with the corpse. And as many chapters in this collection have shown, often the dead body (both literal and figural) is female, or if male, inherently feminized. We can state with certainty that whatever the gender association, the corpse embodies the potential for the erotic. It stands in for spectacular, spectral, fantastical nonnormative sexuality.