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1. 1 2016-12-12T09:49:38+00:00 Kyle Brett 425ed005fc457ac8e436783036f285b42b192fb4 Physical Artifacts Kyle Brett 1 plain 2016-12-12T09:49:38+00:00 Kyle Brett 425ed005fc457ac8e436783036f285b42b192fb4

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• 1 2016-11-26T15:14:01+00:00 Wearing and Burying Death: Fashion, Mourning, and Public Displays of Death 12 Third Section plain 1954 2016-12-15T14:34:04+00:00 In this chapter, we begin to take a turn away from the dead. No longer personalizing, remembering, or glorifying the dead, Victorians, through their mourning practices and displays, begin to metaphorically and literally wear the dead. Here the dead who are being mourned are no longer total subjects, but rather layers to be placed over and displayed by the living mourners. This section attempts to expose the commodification of the grieving process and view such commercialization as an attempt by Victorian mourners to claim and reshape their subjectivity through their dead. No longer a private sphere of grieving, mourners within this section (for good or ill) go public, flaunting their living bodies for the dead. While critics may focus more on the psychological and fictional representations of Victorian mourning, building the foundation of the critical narrative of the Victorian obsession with death, I rather want to reframe this discussion. Included here are some fictional tales, but they are closely informed by the contemporary print-culture. By focusing more on these non-fictional and editorial texts, I argue that we are not just viewing the evolution and criticisms of the Victorian death-culture, but also building off of the previous chapter's formulation about the subjectivity of the dead and the emphasis on the subjectivity of mourners of the dead. Doing so, we no longer see this obsession as morbid, but are rather challenged to recognize the social superstructures that may inform, or distort, private acts of mourning. 
  
  The first section highlights the commodification of the dead directly, showcasing the artifacts of the dead that, within recent years, have become a cliché of the period—allowing movements like the Order of the Good Death to flourish in the twenty-first century. Here we see a collection of both mourning fashion and jewelry that remind not only the wearer, but those that observe the wearer in public, about the dead. Each reading is taken from prominent periodicals, showing the elaborate spectacle of death that entwined itself into public display.
  
  Yet, not every Victorian enjoyed such flagrant spectacles of grief. In this second section, we turn our attention to the popular critique of the outward mourning practices of the larger public. We begin with a contemporary overview of the mourning attire that we studied in the previous section, then move on to satirical pieces from periodicals that publically shame, or provide contextual details about the resistance to such public displays of death and mourning. Finally, we turn, yet again, to utopian fiction to see how, even in the realm of fantasy, the Victorian mindset surrounding death and grief becomes blatantly self-aware and biting.
  
  For reading: You can either click any of the sub-sections presented on this page, or start with "Paint it Black" and follow the prescribed path to the end of this chapter.