ABSTRACT
In Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology, Michael Wheeler remarks that during "the Victorian Age, highly conventionalized social customs and funerary rituals eased the transition from the deathbed to the bed that is the grave". In Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture, Deborah Lutz states that elegies functioned in similar ways to shrines, "as structures used to lament loss and to remember the absence of the body". The desire for a good death is notably often gendered and eroticized in the period; the beautiful death of the virtuous woman in literature is full of mystery and erotica. The scene in the death room paints a portrait of the beautiful death that the people will see revisioned in the nineteenth-century novel. Notoriously peculiar, Victorian death rituals were often shrouded in the mystical and erotic. They offered passage from life to death, practical therapeutics, and rites for the living to ease grief and pain.
