The late nineteenth century is often viewed as an era of increasing secularism and agnosticism amid the influence of Darwinian theory and the growth of a mass consumer culture. Yet most American consolation literature continued to be either explicitly or implicitly religious. It expressed confidence in a loving and kind Christian God and envisioned the dead sleeping peacefully in the grave or happily ensconced in a “better place” closer to the Lord. An acceptance of God’s plan for mankind was regularly raised as the only real means to find comfort in a situation that shocked and tested faith. A personal morality of patience, peace, and resignation was stressed, and far less emphasis than in previous centuries was placed on the presence of evil and danger in the world. At the same time, liberal religion and a growing curiosity about non-Christian faiths such as Buddhism, together with the questions science raised about evolution, contributed to a greater diversity and openness in the forms consolation could take. It was possible to view life and death as a riddle—a variable, beautiful, even wondrous mystery beyond the power of earthly humans to resolve. Cemetery memorialization at the turn of the century drew from all of these currents. Arts writer William Walton, for example, observed a “definite movement” in which funerary sculpture sought to give expression to many of the “thronging images, hopes and fears, with which man has in all ages pieced out the scantiness of his knowledge of the unknown.”1
One of the goals of all religious faiths is to explain death and help people prepare for it. The church provides rituals to assuage grief, traditions that draw even the nonfaithful or fallen-away to religious institutions at the moment of loss. In doing so, it serves a deep human need. Historians have found that people around the world have tried since ancient times to figure out where the conscious person goes at the moment of death—the “vanishing” point—and why people must die.2 A common trope among various religions has been to see death as a transition between different manifestations of life, be it a new life in heaven and then resurrection or a series of rebirths in Eastern philosophies. But Albert Raboteau, a professor of religion, noted, “Even with the most confident faith, death destroys the illusion that life goes on to an endless series of tomorrows and raises the classic question: How could God let this happen?”3
A socially enforced optimism based on acceptance of the mysterious workings of God was one reason given for revising behavioral codes at the end of the nineteenth century. “According to our belief the loved one has gone to a happier world, free from all pain and care. Why, then, should we surround ourselves with the tokens of a woe that is in some sort a rebellion against the decrees of Divine Providence?” Florence Howe Hall asked in one of her diatribes against extended mourning.4 Etiquette expert Mary Sherwood also called black clothing “a negatory of our professed belief in the resurrection” and a confession of the human “logic of despair” at a time when rejoicing was really in order.5 The proper Christian response was to reject despair, which was equated with doubt, denial of faith, and atheism. In Roman Catholicism, in fact, despair had long been associated with one of the seven cardinal sins, denoting a willful lack of joy—a refusal to fully embrace God’s world and God’s goodness.6
The pressure to abandon grieving and celebrate the afterlife was part of a “doctrine of assurance” that emerged after the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant revival movement in the early nineteenth century. This doctrine suggested that adults who had led lives of virtue and children whose innocence had not yet been tarnished should anticipate their own salvation, resurrection, and relocation to a place often imagined in mid-nineteenth-century sentimentalist poems and songs as a heavenly house or mansion. With the promise of salvation, death could be viewed as a sweet deliverance from life.7 This perspective related to a mentality of “dogged optimism” also found in mass culture’s obsession with progress, innovation, and advances in science and technology.8
All evidence indicates that the majority of Americans believed that humanity was a creation of God, who continued to guide individuals as father and friend, and who was less the harsh judge he had once been seen to be. For much of the population, literal belief in the Bible persistently undermined the impact of scientific findings such as the concept of evolution, discussed by Charles Darwin in his On the Origin of Species (1859). Darwin’s findings suggested that God was a bystander to the processes of natural selection, and that man, rather than being a special divine creation, had evolved like the animals to his current state. Positivists went on to predict that science would eventually be able to explain all of the workings of nature and the universe.
In consolation literature and in church funeral services, by contrast, Americans were advised to resign themselves to faith in God’s higher power and purpose. Satin-mounted memorial cards, adorned with doves, urns, and flowers (Figure 18), often used verses such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem expressing firm belief in a hereafter: “There is no death”: “What seems so is transition; / This life of mortal breath / Is but a suburb of the life Elysian, / Whose portal we call Death.” On a similarly comforting brochure for the Mitchell Company, “Asleep in Jesus” could be selected.9
Figure 18.
Memorial Card Co. Advertising brochure for memorial cards. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ca. 1891. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur, Delaware.
Death could provide a moment of doubt, a crack in religious faith, however. For example, on April 12, 1880, Charles A. Belin wrote Mrs. Samuel du Pont in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, acknowledging that after the loss of his wife he was struggling to seek consolation in God: “My heart is overwhelmed with grief.… God has visited me with a great deal of affliction.… [T]he cup seems overflowing,” he said. She anxiously urged him to understand what happened as part of God’s “merciful measure” and not to see it as a fickle or capricious act of a punishing, malevolent greater force.10
After the death of the California railroad baron Leland Stanford in 1893, his highly religious widow, Jane Stanford, responded to consolation letters by describing her personal suffering and then imagining her husband reunited in heaven with their son, who had passed away eight years earlier. “I ask myself each day how can it be. I live with this great overwhelming sorrow upon me,” she wrote a clergyman. “Alone! All Alone! My aching bleeding heart cries,” she told a friend, “but I look afar and see the joy beyond in the Fairer Land, Father and Son together—father at rest from the toils of the earth.” She later commissioned a bronze statue of herself kneeling on a cushion next to the pair, who are standing together above her on stepped pedestals (Figure 19).11
Figure 19.
Larkin Mead, Stanford Family Monument, 1899–1900, Stanford University, Stanford, California. Photo by Cynthia Mills.
Liberal religion stressed good deeds on earth as the best response to the trials of loss. For instance, the Reverend Edward Henry Hall of the First Church (Unitarian) of Cambridge, who officiated at Clover Adams’s funeral, had once urged in his sermon titled “Our Dead”: “The hurrying ranks of those who work and live cannot pause at the graves of the fallen for idle grief, but catch up their lives into their own, and press forward for the higher and larger tasks which their lives have made possible.… What each generation asks of the next is to prove the value of its work already done, by carrying it forward without delay, if need be in wider and loftier ways.”12 When Hall himself died in 1912, a poem read by the minister at his funeral did not mention either evil or doubt or even Jesus’s explicit compassion, but softened the blow by figuring Hall as going to bed sooner than his friends and relations: “Thou hast but taken thy lamp and gone to bed, / I stay a little longer as one stays / To cover up the embers that still burn.”13
Years later, Henry Adams would talk about his “mansion” in Rock Creek Cemetery, the gravesite where his wife’s memorial finally stood—a term that meshed with the period’s domestication of death and alluded to Jesus Christ’s promise to his followers that “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2). Adams had regularly attended Unitarian services in Boston, studied the Bible, memorized religious verses, and “went through all the forms” of faith as a youth, recalling that he believed in a “mild deism.” But as a young adult he suffered a “disappearance” of belief in conventional religious institutions.14 His intimate friends thus avoided religious language and bromides in consolation letters. His closest friend, John Hay, wrote, “I cannot force on a man like you the commonplaces of condolence. In the presence of a sorrow like yours, it is little for your friends to say [that] they love you and sympathize with you—but it is all anybody can say. Everything else is mere words.” Hay went on to express his confidence that Adams had the fortitude to bear up under his sorrow and recited the need for patience, courage, and other moral values that were part of Protestant culture even if he did not mention religion. He also spoke of the bright candle Clover had been, illuminating the lives of those around her: “Is it any consolation to remember her as she was? That bright intrepid spirit, that keen fine intellect, that lofty scorn of all that was mean, that social charm which made your house such a one as Washington never knew before, and made hundreds of people love her as much as they admired her? No, that makes it all the harder to bear.”15
Americans looked far and wide for sources of consolation, regardless of historical or geographic origin, as part of a syncretic turn-of-the-century search for meaning that embraced Asian traditions, personal spiritual experience, and medieval ideas about the nature of “wonder.”16 After Clover’s death, Adams was drawn to Eastern religions as he considered the relative appeals of reason, belief in human progress, and faith or “felt” cognition in a quest for some sort of abstract, universal “truth” or “truths” that would lead to consolation.
Adams’s 1886 trip to Japan was not only an attempt to still his restlessness; it also represented a personal exploration of religious expressions in Asia. He talked half-humorously, half-seriously with his traveling companion John La Farge about going on a quest for nirvana, a cessation or release of the passions. A greater pluralism of religious ideas was tolerated among Americans amid investigations of agnosticism at century’s end, and Buddhism was much discussed at this time in educated circles. This seemed to be especially true in Boston, where Phillips Brooks, the Episcopal minister of Trinity Church (and Adams’s second cousin), wrote only partly in jest in 1883 that a large part of the populace “prefers to consider itself Buddhist rather than Christian.”17 Individuals like Adams with a family background in Unitarianism, which deemphasized rigid creeds and ideas of hell, seemed especially open to Eastern ideas, albeit within the framework and perspective of their own experiences. Because of its merchant connections, New England had been exposed to Asian cultures for generations. Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia, a life of the Buddha rendered in free verse, was at a height of popularity in America.18 Travelers’ reports, trade items, and expositions helped to create a related vogue for Japanese interior design and gardens as well.
In 1883 and 1884 collector Isabella Stewart Gardner and her husband, John Lowell Gardner Jr., made an ambitious yearlong trip through Japan, China, Cambodia, Java, Burma, and India seeking to visit major Buddhist, Shinto, and Hindu sites. Mrs. Gardner in particular was drawn to the temples not only for their picturesque qualities but in a desire to witness alternative or parallel devotional rituals in faiths “extolling peace, contemplation, the negation of desire,” writes historian Alan Chong.19 A few New Englanders, like Clover’s cousin William Sturgis Bigelow, stayed in Asia for years. Their reports helped to whet the tastes of friends like Adams, who no doubt heard stories of religious services held in spectacular architectural and garden settings amid the scent of incense and the sounds of chanting and bells. During his trip to Japan with Henry Adams, La Farge became increasingly interested in Taoism and meditation, and was inspired to make several paintings of the white-robed Kwannon, an intermediary Buddhist figure, meditating on human life (Figure 20).
Adams’s interest had been a long-standing one. This look to the East and the idea of nirvana had been alluded to repeatedly, for instance, in his novel Esther, published in 1884 under a pseudonym. The novel’s theme is one of spiritual hunger at a time when science had fueled new questions about religion, and the term “neurasthenia” was coined for a disease brought on by the anxieties, constraints, and alienation of modern life. In an uncanny foreboding of Clover’s death the next year, the main character is left seeking answers about life and death (and the Episcopal minister who wants to marry her) after the demise of her father.20
Figure 20.
John La Farge, Kwannon Meditating on Human Life, 1894. 36 × 34 in. Collection of The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.
Eastern ideas of the fluidity and continuity of life and death, in a kind of “co-existing flow,” were attractive to some Americans seeking answers in their own lives. Buddhism, for instance, sees death as but one stage in an endless cycle of regeneration. This idea softens the harshness of its blow, removing human existence from the iron grip of time and its limits.21 But the tenets of Eastern faiths got tangled up with the religious traditions and assumptions held by nineteenth-century westerners who were comfortable with seeing death as a portal to heaven and resurrection. They filtered the religious sites they visited through Christian eyes. La Farge, for his part, compared Japanese images of the Buddhist intermediary figures known as bodhisattvas to Renaissance Madonnas or Catholic saints. Isabella Gardner visited Catholic missions during her trip to Asia, considering them another aspect of her exotic adventure.
Writer Henry James’s philosopher-psychologist brother William James (Figure 21), an influential theoretician who taught at Harvard University, commented that Buddhism and Christianity are both essentially “religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life.” He devoted a portion of his Varieties of Religious Experience to the deep-seated American interest in conversion and the expectation that it is part of an adult’s life path—redemption in some form and a second birth. Out of these transitions can be born a more deeply conscious being.22 This notion that life events like death can be transformative portals offered another form of consolation (through the intermediary interest in Asian religion and philosophy) for New England intellectuals like Adams who were otherwise disdainful of evangelical notions of second births.
Figure 21.
Henry James and William James, ca. 1900. Photo from Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, vol. 2 (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920).
William James, who knew the Adamses and the Bootts well and certainly knew much about the Storys, was one of the great thinkers of his day who tested a pragmatic approach to philosophy and daily life. In his revolutionary study of American religion, he examined personal affective experiences instead of looking at church doctrines and institutional infrastructures, as others had done. His book The Varieties of Religious Experience, which has been called “the founding text of the modern study of religion,” related many first-person accounts that he linked to a human drive for a sense of wholeness and “equilibrium succeeding a period of storm and stress and inconsistency.”23 James also explored human suspicions of the supernatural. Stories of the paranormal, séances, and other emanations of spiritualism reached a high point in the decades after the 1848 case of the Fox sisters, who could elicit answers from an invisible spirit in the form of mysterious rapping sounds in their upstate New York home. Such paranormal accounts were often associated with notions of hoax and fraud. Instead of dismissing the possibility of being able to communicate with people in the afterlife, however, James investigated reports in the most scientific fashion he could, observing mediums, for example, and awaiting a hoped-for transmission from a dead friend. He and a small group of scientists on both sides of the Atlantic studied the possible connections to another realm outside the material world made via “ghosts and raps and messages from spirits” that “can never fully be explained away.”24 Many Americans participated in their own informal experiments in clairvoyance, and in his novel Esther Henry Adams at least acknowledged his awareness of spiritualism’s pull, when he described a scene aboard a train in which “the tap-tap of the train-men’s hammers on the wheels beneath sounded like spirit-rappings. These signs of life behind the veil were like the steady lights of shore to the drowning fisherman off the reef outside.” On one occasion, Clover Adams sent a friend a copy of William Dean Howells’s novel Undiscovered Country (1880), which features séances and a man’s mislaid faith in spiritualism.25
William James saw individual faith as necessary for a healthy society and thus approved of a human “will to believe,” the title of another of his books. He expanded the idea of faith, however, to include such things as notions of the supernatural that were outside the established church. “A man’s religious faith … means for me essentially his faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddle of the natural order may be found explained,” he wrote. Science had yet to offer only “the minutest glimpse of what the universe will really prove to be when adequately understood,” he said; thus people should act as if the invisible world they imagine were true.26
People have a right to believe in a higher metaphysical power and an individual channel of devotion, James said; it is part of the freedom of human will to do so. In his view, religion could be defined as one’s personal experience and self-reflection about it, rather than the church and its rigid hierarchies and structures of belief. A world that exists beyond the senses, continuous with our consciousness, may cause us to have religious feelings, however vague, that satisfy our yearnings more fully than religious institutions, he wrote. Thus, like Adams, he surrounded himself with people who were often interested in notions of creativity, alternative religious systems, and mysticism as well as scientists.
Amid his self-reflections, James periodically fought his own melancholia, and he devoted a lecture in 1895 to the seductive appeal of suicide, talking about the need to grasp the great “maybe” of life. Suicide could suggest a person’s lack of fortitude and faith in God, a rejection of the wondrous happiness religion could offer. Unitarians, among others, probably met the event with doctrinal silence. At the turn of the century, they likely no longer saw it as an absolute barrier to eternal salvation; those ideas were beginning to fade in established religion as the years passed.27 “In the old days … the Church treated suicide victims much as it did murderers and not only condemned them to [heavenly] punishment, but to earthly ignominy in refusing them Christian burial,” wrote George Upton in the Independent in 1904, “but with the increased weakening of ecclesiastical authority and a growing doubt of eternal punishment and, sometimes, uncertainty as to the definite nature of the hereafter, this restraint has largely disappeared.”28 He reported that suicides were on the increase, especially among women, blaming “our modern complex life [which] gives frequency to self-destruction.”
James, writing before Freud’s analysis, described melancholy as an incapacity for joyous feeling. Contrasting the positive temperament of someone like Walt Whitman for whom life is full of delight, he spoke of others who cannot help having naturally pessimistic temperaments: “That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides declare.” James talked about how deep within each of us is a place of Binnenleben (hidden life, hidden self), a “dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingness and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears.” He urged in his lecture that we grasp the great “maybe” of life and fight against the dark attractions of self-destruction.29 In these words and many others, James was among the “modern” educated Americans who, like Adams, valued wonder and the inability to explain the secrets of life, God, and death.
James and Adams, like other leading artists and thinkers of their generation, were familiar with the controversial ideas outlined by Darwin in his On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man (1871), that nature was ruled by violent and random forms of natural selection, by chance and not tightly controlled design, and that man was not a special creature of God but different from animals only by matters of degree. They carefully considered the relations between faith and science, experimenting with positivist science that relied on observable phenomena. Yet they were also strongly attracted to Herbert Spencer’s promotion, in his talks and in his book First Principles, of a brand of agnosticism in which “in its ultimate essence nothing can be known,” neither the reality of religion nor the reality of science. Spencer talked about the “Unknowable” and wrote that “the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.”30
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the sculptor who would create Adams’s famed cemetery memorial, mused about an apparent “Great Power that is over us” and concluded that mankind was headed to an uncertain future. “The principal thought in my life is that we are on a planet going no one knows where, probably to something higher (on the Darwinian principle of Evolution),” he once wrote.31 At Walt Whitman’s burial in 1892, the agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll celebrated the poet’s openness of faith and wonder, declaring at his graveside, “Again we, in the mystery of Life, are brought face to face with the mystery of Death.” Whitman, he said, “accepted and absorbed all theories, all creeds, all religions, and believed in none. His philosophy was a sky that embraced all clouds and accounted for all clouds.”32
Henry Adams, a true polymath, later in life also investigated French cathedrals and thirteenth-century Christianity, crossing temporal boundaries as well as geographic ones in his continued quest for understanding and consolation. In Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), he sees the French cathedral as the site of a unity, purpose, and mystical wonder lost to his own epoch—understandings of a past era that he said only a child or very old person can hope to grasp. Thomas Aquinas, who was one focus of Adams’s study of medieval culture, had written about the importance of the emotion of wonder in religious life. He associated it with a longing that is resolved not by comprehending the object of wonder, but by appreciating its mystery, by remaining in awe of it and by venerating it as something that cannot be understood. The “wonder experience” was often associated with paradox, a mixture of opposites as in the sphinx made of the head of a bird and body of a lion, or an experience so extraordinary that standard understandings cannot explain. Seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes called wonder “the first of all passions,” saying, “wonder is a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.”33
What appealed to James was a sense that the questing human spirit could be in contact with a realm greater than oneself and the material world, a domain outside and beyond ourselves that we only suspect exists. Modern-day scholar William Kastenbaum has talked of an “emergent quality” that people seek—a sense that the soul could feel liberated, somehow continue to develop, and be part of an evolving relationship between life and death—as a great potential comfort.34 Perhaps this is why some grieving patrons seeking to memorialize their lost ones in the Gilded Age cemetery chose to do so with a combination of aesthetic beauty and mystery. They sought and generated a form of funerary art in which the great Unknown, the riddle of life and death, was embraced. They wanted monuments that moved visitors in new ways—not with cloying sentiment and confidence about man’s place in God’s heaven, but with a sense of perfect wonder, a sense that a veil could be lifted for a momentary glimpse here on earth of the meaning of death. There was a dream of a death that was not terrifying and grim for their lost one but that was transformational, performed with a mystic experience, a profound sense of beauty, love, and understanding, and a connection with the larger universe in some form, somewhere, somehow. For the imaginative and sensitive viewer with these sophisticated goals, three-dimensional statues in the sensory landscape of the cemetery provided a focus for highly private meditation, psychic exploration, and reflection about the hereafter.