ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS shot on April 14,1865, died on April 15, and lay in an open coffin in the East Room of the White House on April 18. On April 19, he was moved to the Rotunda of the Capitol, and on April 21 put on a train that traveled for 1,700 miles, first on a loop through Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and New York, then north through Albany, Utica, and Syracuse, then west through Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago. Its destination was Springfield, Illinois, where three weeks later he was finally buried.
Three weeks! He lay in state in various tents and public buildings at every stop along the way. Bonfires and flags lined the route, stations were draped in black, the train passed beneath arches of evergreens, and mobs held up portraits of the President wreathed in pine boughs. It was a long and slow goodbye. By the time the funeral train arrived in Ohio, two weeks after Lincoln’s death, reporters had begun to comment on the shrunken and decayed condition of his face. Some suggested that good taste required the authorities to close the coffin. Putrefaction had not set in, not completely, but imperfect embalming had. An embalmer who accompanied the train had “improved” the face several times, between stops, but apparently his improvements only made matters worse.
Arterial embalming had first been practiced about a hundred years earlier. But in the United States it hadn’t been used extensively until the Civil War. Lincoln himself had charged a certain Thomas Holmes with devising a way to preserve the bodies of Union soldiers long enough to transport them north from southern battlefields. Popular histories call Holmes the Father of American Embalming, but he had plenty of competitors, some of whom claimed that Holmes’s chemicals left corpses discolored. Whether this was one of Lincoln’s problems isn’t clear; the offended were discreet.
When he first lay in state, moreover, the tasteful were impressed. A reporter for the New York World, George Alfred Townsend, said of Lincoln’s embalmer, “He has not changed one line of his grave, grotesque countenance, nor smoothed out a single feature. The hue is rather bloodless and leaden, but he was always sallow. . . . The white satin around it reflects sufficient light upon the face to show that death is really there.” Townsend then described the embalming itself, a process that hasn’t substantially changed since Lincoln’s death; my brother’s body had been similarly treated. His skull was sliced off and the brain removed, blood drained from the body through the jugular vein, and the empty blood vessels charged with a “chemical preparation” through an incision in the thigh. What this preparation was, Townsend didn’t specify. Formaldehyde wasn’t used until 1893. The pioneer of arterial embalming, William Hunter of England (1718–1783), used essential oils, alcohol, cinnabar, camphor, saltpeter, and pitch or rosin.
Thomas Holmes, on the other hand, was said to use zinc chloride and arsenic. He charged $100 each for embalming Union soldiers, and the war made him rich. He himself was said to be well preserved: lean and square-shouldered, with a full Prussian mustache, short wiry hair, and Rasputin eyes. A textbook exemplar of Kierkegaard’s definition of purity of heart, he buttonholed others with the passion of someone who willed one thing all his life.
The one thing was to stem the tide of putrefaction that resulted from death. But in pursuit of this goal, he trailed behind him a wake of rotten corpses. He was kicked out of New York University’s School of Medicine for leaving bodies around in inconvenient places—on professors’ desks, for example—having walked off and forgotten them, he explained, in the heat of his studies. After his death a number of corpses were found in his cellar, and for a while police thought they’d discovered a nineteenth-century version of our John Wayne Gacy. But all were found to be wards from the city’s orphanages, who were given to Holmes after their deaths for his experiments.
During his lifetime, he kept bodies in closets and bodies in cellars and displayed the embalmed head of a man in a glass case in his drugstore. The head and shoulders of a fourteen-year-old girl sat on his living room table. In the window of his drugstore, on a marble slab, lay a human arm, preserved, said a sign, by Innominata, his secret recipe for embalming. The sign also claimed that “invalids traveling by land or sea can now carry with them all that is necessary to insure the return of their bodies in a perfect state of preservation,” thanks to Innominata, $3 the gallon.
During the war, he embalmed more than four thousand soldiers, but favored officers over enlisted men. Brigadier Generals Farnsworth, Rice, and Stevenson were all embalmed by Holmes, enabling public ceremonies to be held that turned out to be rehearsals for Lincoln’s rite. Robert Wilkins, in The Bedside Book of Death, suggests that Holmes himself embalmed Lincoln, but the historical record doesn’t bear him out.
When Lincoln was shot, arterial embalming may have been a novelty, but embalming itself was as old as the Egyptians. Herodotus writes that practitioners of this “distinct profession” in ancient Egypt removed brains by means of hooks pushed through the nostrils, and flushed out with drugs what they couldn’t reach, the brain being considered an insignificant organ. They opened the torso and removed all the plumbing, then dehydrated the body by packing it inside and out with natron. Body cavities were then repacked with the viscera and stuffed with various ingredients, including sawdust, bundles of resin-soaked cloth, and sometimes onions and lichens. Then resin was poured in and the openings sealed with wax.
Arterial embalming, as proposed by William Hunter, simplified and improved this process by employing the body’s inner meshwork of blood vessels. Hunter could not have devised his method without the work of William Harvey and Marcello Malpighi one hundred years before him. By chopping up frogs, they demonstrated that the vascular system included capillaries that permeated all the tissues of the body. So embalming materials now could work from the inside out instead of the outside in.
In his New York World description of Lincoln’s embalming, George Townsend pointed out the obvious: this was not Lincoln anymore, but his effigy or replica. “All that we see of Abraham Lincoln, so cunningly contemplated in this splendid coffin, is a mere shell, an effigy, a sculpture. He lies in a sleep, but it is the sleep of marble. All that made this flesh vital, sentient and affectionate, is gone forever.”
Effigy: a likeness, portrait, image. From the Latin effigies, something fashioned. To hang, burn, or execute in effigy is “to inflict upon an image the semblance of the punishment which the original is considered to have deserved; formerly done by way of carrying out a judicial sentence on a criminal who had escaped” (Oxford English Dictionary). So effigies represent absent bodies.
But they represent present bodies too, albeit bodies hollowed out by absence—by death. If a corpse is a presence embodying an absence, so are effigies, which makes embalmed corpses the epitome of effigies. Embalming began as the determined project to fashion from the dead a replica of the living. Not only was an Egyptian king emptied out—his brains and viscera removed—but his face was coated with resin and his body painted red with a mixture of ocher and gum. Artificial eyes were inserted in his sockets and, often, artificial hair attached to his head. The heads of early mummies were modeled with pastes or plaster; later, portrait masks were used. The idea was to make the corpse an idealized dwelling for the ka, the double or spirit, which had left the corpse behind. To reoccupy its body, the ka had to recognize it; if it did, then resurrection was assured. So it was wise to multiply one’s chances. The corpse was painted and plastered, and the resulting mummy, wrapped in linen, was sealed up in several more effigies: one or two anthropomorphic coffins nested inside each other, as well as a mummy board, which covered the mummy and was painted identically to the coffins. The paintings showed the person inside, or his idealized effigy, eyes wide open, arms, like the mummy’s, crossed at the chest, and robe covered with images and text from the Book of the Dead.
Among the prominent pictures on Egyptian coffins, one stands out: a scarab beetle pushing a disk of the sun. Real scarab beetles, we know, have been pushing balls of dung through the desert for millennia. Beetles born from seemingly lifeless dung naturally led the Egyptians to identify them with resurrection. And a beetle pushing the sun ahead of it often represented Ra, the sun god, reborn each morning in the sky.
In 1981, anatomists at the University of Bristol unwrapped a mummy whose coffin displayed the scarab beetle once above the crossed hands and four more times down the length of the body. Parts of the mummy were so well preserved that the Somerset police could take its fingerprints—but parts crumbled to dust as they were being unwrapped. The reason for the deterioration was insect damage. Three-thousand-year-old beetles were found perfectly preserved in the mummy’s wrappings, and the Bristol scientists concluded that beetles had laid eggs in the corpse sometime during the embalming process, when it was exposed. In photographs, their carapaces make them indistinguishable from living beetles. They are as good an example of successful auto-effigies as anything we have from the ancient world, and—who knows?—with their body-length cases, they might have been the first inspiration for Egyptian mummies and coffins.
Some cultures set aside the corpses of their dead and fashion separate effigies, often stuffed with straw and intended for ritual immolation. When we think of effigies we think of straw, or wax. In ancient Rome, a wax mask of the deceased was worn by an actor during funeral processions. He imitated the dead man’s mannerisms and gestures, while additional actors, also wearing wax masks, portrayed his ancestors welcoming the newly dead. In Sumatra, wooden dolls—effigies of the deceased—dance at their own funerals.
One culture that has left behind detailed records of its elaborate funeral practices buries its kings in three separate coffins: one for the corpse, one for the heart, one for the entrails. For a week, vigils and religious rites are held in the presence of these coffins (their presence being magical), then the heart and entrails are interred to the chants and songs of the tribe. Meanwhile, an effigy of the dead king is being made, a kind of stuffed doll. The limbs and trunk are made of wicker, and the head and hands are molded of wax, with hair attached by putty and face realistically painted. Mimetic realism was important to these people, and mimesis itself might therefore be thought of as based on death.
The effigy is dressed in linen and satin, with leg stockings of linen interwoven with gold, a cloak or mantle on its shoulders, and a large collar made of animal fur. Propped up, it presides in a sort of great hall for a number of days, and twice a day the nobility of the tribe assembles in its presence to eat. Then the king’s effigy is removed, the coffin with the corpse brought in, and the hall of honor becomes a hall of mourning. Only now can the son and heir come forth to grieve for his father. He does so in his capacity as son, not successor. The son of the dead king in effect now rules; he issues orders and decrees, and directs all the arrangements for the funeral. But he wears purple instead of red—the king’s color—and when he leaves the hall he terminates his unofficial mourning by ritually giving his purple cloak away. Furthermore, the son can’t be present when the effigy is present, for the same reason that the effigy could not be in the same place as the coffin: because it is a legal and metaphysical impossibility for two kings to exist simultaneously. And the effigy, in fact, is king of the tribe until the son is invested as ruler.
Two days later, in the funeral procession, the effigy is back and the son and heir gone. The effigy is treated like the king himself marching triumphantly through the community, because that’s what he is. Even in the procession, the coffin and effigy never appear together. The coffin goes first, amid trappings of a private funeral for a distinguished man, as opposed to those of a public funeral for a king. Representatives of the dead king’s family (minus the son) walk behind the coffin in deep mourning. The effigy is carried at the end of the procession, arrayed in full kingly regalia and surrounded by retainers. And accounts of this ceremony all agree that the effigy cannot be distinguished from the “real” king by people just a few feet away.
This culture, incidentally, is that of early modern Europe. The tribe is the French, and the seven-week ceremony I’ve just described is the funeral of Francis I, in 1547.
“She looks like wax,” we sometimes hear, or think, at wakes. That may be because wax has been used to “improve” her face. Lincoln’s embalmer used wax. Like the French, the English for centuries displayed waxen effigies of kings and queens after their deaths. The English believed the king had two bodies, a natural body and a body politic—the latter not subject to decay and death—and this became the basis of their use of effigies at state funerals. When Henry V died—the English king who was heir presumptive of France—his effigy was paraded through France, whose people subsequently adopted the customs described above. England, however, never felt the need to spatially separate effigy and corpse, as the French did. The effigy was placed on the coffin, to be paraded at the funeral, then displayed at Westminster Abbey after the burial.
By the eighteenth century, when the practice had ended in England, the surviving effigies could be seen propped against the wall in the upper section of Bishop Islip’s chapel in the Abbey, as though no one quite knew what to do with them. Horace Walpole described them as those “curious but mangled figures . . . now called the ragged regiment.” By World War II, they’d made it to the basement, which was flooded in the bombing of London, and the wax, canvas, straw, and plaster became subject to the ravages of rot every bit as much as natural bodies.
The practice of constructing royal effigies ended in the eighteenth century because William Hunter’s discovery of arterial embalming enabled royal corpses to become their own effigies. The old wax and straw effigies had accomplished two contradictory tasks: to delay a king’s burial and to circumvent putrefaction. Delay was a practice often recommended to the sensitive, to reassure them that they would not be buried alive by mistake. Putrefaction provided that assurance, but was offensive to survivors. So: effigies on the one hand and sealed coffins on the other. Only arterial embalming could accomplish these apparently incompatible aims. Some doctors even recommended embalming as the ultimate insurance against premature burial, on the theory that the first cut would waken any comatose person.
Fear of premature burial seems to have mostly disappeared with modern medicine, but in centuries preceding the twentieth, and in most cultures, it was no laughing matter. Edgar Allan Poe exploited this fear in his story “The Premature Burial,” and entrepreneurs in the nineteenth century invented all sorts of devices to guard against it, from nipple pincers to test fresh corpses; to waiting mortuaries, popular in Germany, in which corpses, smothered in flowers as they waited to be embalmed, lay with a finger attached to a string leading to a bell in an adjoining room, where a vigilant custodian listened for a ring; to the German Count Karnice-Karnicki’s invention in 1896 of a tube leading out of a buried coffin to a box with a flag and bell in the cemetery above. The slightest movement of a buried person’s chest would be detected by delicate machinery, which would trip the flag and ring the bell. The tube would amplify cries for help.
Still, wax effigies never completely died out. Jeremy Bentham, who coined the phrase “the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers,” lived with one foot in the eighteenth and one in the nineteenth century. He is best remembered as a founder of utilitarianism, and forgotten as the man who first proposed the Suez and Panama canals. In recent years, Michel Foucault has demonized Bentham as the inventor of the panopticon for the central surveillance of convicts, Foucault’s chief image of the disciplinary society. Followers of Foucault who wish to vilify Bentham may do so in person, by the way—he was never buried. Bentham may be seen in a permanent display at University College, London.
Bentham’s book on the preservation of corpses, Auto-Icon, declared that the human body, when dissected, “instead of being an object of disgust is as much more beautiful than any other piece of mechanism as it is more curious and wonderful.” He envisioned future worlds in which burials would be obsolete, and preserved corpses, or auto-icons, would sit in temples of remembrance, their “habiliments” protected from decay by Indian rubber. By means of auto-icons, historical events could be represented and even reenacted, not by wax models, as in Madame Tussaud’s museum, but by the historical figures themselves. “If a country gentleman have rows of trees leading to his dwelling, the auto-icons of his family might alternate with the trees; copal varnish would protect the face from the effects of rain.”
It is a singular historical distinction to pioneer a social movement of one. Bentham became the first and only auto-icon. As directed in his will, his corpse was first publicly disassembled by a surgeon, Dr. Southward Smith, then his bones were wired together, his body packed with hay, seated, and dressed in Bentham’s best clothes. The head was, according to Bentham’s directions, treated “after the manner of the New Zealanders”—that is, desiccated, to be fastened on the effigy. But after standing it in a pan of sulfuric acid and using an air pump to draw away the fluids, Smith ruefully observed that all its facial expression had fled. Bentham had carried in his pocket for the past twenty years a pair of glass eyes, and these were mounted in the sockets, but unfortunately provided no relief from disgust. His dried head was not beautiful, curious, or wonderful, and was consequently placed between the feet. A wax head was made, and a capacious Panama hat placed on top, and a cane wedged in one hand—then the auto-icon was installed in its glass case at University College. (The real head was later stored in a box in a university vault.) By Bentham’s directions, his auto-icon was for a number of years wheeled in to be present at meetings of those societies formed by his friends and disciples, “for the purpose of commemorating the founder of the greatest Happiness System of Morals and Legislation.” Apparently, he was also there for several meetings of the university’s board, whose minutes note “Mr. Bentham present but not voting.”
Barbara Jones calls Egypt and the United States the “two great embalming cultures.” She points out what many historians of American funerals do, that the Civil War created a class of skilled specialists trained in the preservation of corpses. With preserved corpses, ceremonies of remembrance for ordinary people could become miniextravaganzas—compared to Lincoln’s maxi one—and thus the “whole curious American funeral” began.
But she leaves out one step, as most other historians do. American wakes and funerals didn’t take their present form until around 1900. In the thirty-five years between the Civil War and the new century, photography came into its own. The early years of photography coincided with the war, which cemented, in the photographs of Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and others, the partnership between photography and death.
That partnership still thrives, as evidenced by books like Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, Luc Sante’s Evidence, Stanley Burns’s Sleeping Beauties, Barbara Norfleet’s Looking at Death, and countless others: collections of mug shots, crime shots, medical and posmor-tem photographs, shots of accidents and disasters, of battlefields and morgues, depictions of bodies and faces chemically bleached of the erotic, or silvered with sentiment, in the postures, both posed and surprised, of death. The wonder of it lies in the absence of wonder.
Photography creates stillness out of motion and repose out of violence; it snatches memory from the amnesia of time, and preserves in light what decays and rots and sinks from view back into earth’s darkness. Its solutions, like the embalmer’s, are chemical, and like the embalmer it makes effigies of bodies. In fact, the dead made ideal subjects for early photographers, who were spared the necessity of warning them to keep still.
Photos are not just representations, not mirrors, not the apogee of scientific realism; they are effigies, fashioned to replicate the dead and preserve them for the living.
These twin legacies of the Civil War, photography and embalming, worked in tandem to produce American funeral practices, especially the wake. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the postmortem portrait was one of a photographer’s chief means of employment, like weddings today. For the wealthy, a tradition of summoning an artist to paint a portrait of the dead in a pose of restful sleep preceded such photos, as grotesquely dramatized in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Photography was cheaper and quicker, and therefore less macabre. The Boston firm of Southworth & Hawes advertised miniatures of “Deceased Persons either at our rooms or at private residences. . . . We take great pains to have Miniatures of Deceased Persons agreeable and satisfactory, and they are often so natural as to seem, even to Artists, in a deep sleep.”
Most people die with their mouths and eyes open, a phenomenon disconcerting to the living of all cultures. Traditionally, eyes have been closed to ward off the evil eye or to prevent ghosts from returning to the body through its openings. A face arranged with its eyes and mouth closed suggests sleep, of course, especially when the Deceased Person lies on a bed or is recumbent on a sofa. So “The Last Sleep” became a staple of nineteenth-century photography, and often served as the title of postmortem photos. For a time, photography democratized the effigy, once the exclusive property of kings and aristocrats. Photography enabled ordinary people to memorialize their lives too—it distinguished the undistinguished. The bedroom and the parlor were the usual settings for postmortem photographs, precursors of funeral parlors and their “slumber rooms.”
Democratic practices often find themselves absorbed by a mercantile economy and the cult of the professional. By the time undertaking was professionalized, after 1880, and funeral “directors” replaced family members in laying out the dead, and funeral “homes” became common, the iconography and ideology of wakes and funerals were already in place, thanks to photography. “One idea should always be kept in mind,” said W. P. Hohenschuh, author of The Modern Funeral (1907), “that is to lay out the body so that there will be as little suggestion of death as possible.” The only alternative, then, was sleep.
Hohenschuh also advocated the use of clothes worn in life instead of shrouds or winding cloths, and the application of cosmetics to make the flesh look not only natural but healthy. Wakes and funerals as Americans know them today quickly took their present form, and strangely dovetailed with our hospital culture. Today we die in hospitals amid persons with whom we conspire to pretend we aren’t really dying. Then, once dead, we’re magically restored to the appearance of health, all the more significant in a society for which health is salvation.
Kneeling before Paul, I noted how rosy his cheeks appeared to be. Rouge had been applied, plus rose-colored lighting. His eyes were closed but the desiccated lids did not telegraph the pupils, thanks to eye caps. His mouth looked relaxed, with lips slightly parted, having been carefully sewn in this position. His white teeth, painted with transparent nail polish, positively gleamed, and his nostrils, stuffed with plastic pellets, hadn’t collapsed as dead nostrils do. He really did look alive, or close enough to it. Of course no one at a wake actually thinks the dead aren’t in fact dead. The wake is a fiction to which we willingly submit, a memorial tableau centered on an effigy. And the technology of wakes—the tissue builders, creams, the cotton padding in the cheeks, the “demisurgery” that restores a broken morphology—all contribute to an effect we know perfectly well is just that, an effect. The fear erased by embalming is not the fear of death but one conceivably worse, of being buried alive. In American wakes, this fear becomes aestheticized, and death’s utter strangeness becomes a solemn cartoon—and those who grieve most may discover themselves also uncannily suppressing laughter.
Culture achieves the triumph of its power to inscribe the corporeal when we are dead. Bodies, however, don’t always cooperate. Their biology can be a volcanic eruption overwhelming our modest cultural scribbles. So in the final battle between culture and nature, surprise—nature wins. American methods of embalming—combined with airtight coffins and waterproof vaults—usually result in accelerated decay once the theatrics are done, because anaerobic bacteria flourish in such environments.
We are, in life, walking, talking crematoriums and incubators. Cells in our bodies and bacteria just along for the ride continually die, while others, their offspring, are born and multiply. Microorganisms are dead when they’ve irreversibly lost the ability to reproduce. We’re killing them all the time by washing our hands, by brushing our teeth, by ingesting antibiotics. They die so we can live; but when we die, they thrive. Like a clan of never-ending Snopeses, they throw a perpetual house party in our bodies, and inevitably wind up burning the place down. Decay produces heat, after all. Dr. Brouardel of turn-of-the-century Paris pricked his corpses with needles to let the gases escape, then set fire to the holes and watched the long bluish flames burn off the products of decomposition.
One more step toward the deep freeze.