Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve: A Cultural Study [Hardcover]

Sandra M. Gilbert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 16, 2006

"The most comprehensive multidisciplinary contemplation of mortality we are likely to get." -Thomas Lynch, New York Times Book Review

Prominent critic, poet, and memoirist Sandra M. Gilbert explores our relationship to death though literature, history, poetry, and societal practices. Does death change;and if it does, how has it changed in the last century? And how have our experiences and expressions of grief changed? Did the traumas of Hiroshima and the Holocaust transform our thinking about mortality? More recently, did the catastrophe of 9/11 alter our modes of mourning? And are there at the same time aspects of grief that barely change from age to age? Seneca wrote, "Anyone can stop a man's life but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it." This inevitability has left varying marks on all human cultures. Exploring expressions of faith, burial customs, photographs, poems, and memoirs, acclaimed author Sandra M. Gilbert brings to the topic of death the critical skill that won her fame for The Madwoman in the Attic and other books, as she examines both the changelessness of grief and the changing customs that mark contemporary mourning. 25 illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Many readers will relate to Gilbert's grief following the unexpected loss of her husband in 1991: "death suddenly seemed... urgently close, as if the walls between this world and the 'other' had indeed become transparent." In the process of mourning, the acclaimed coauthor of Madwoman in the Attic returned to a project she had abandoned in the early 1970s and invested it with the candor of recent loss. The resulting mélange of literary criticism, anthropology and memoir looks at death across time and culture: in the Nazi concentration camps, 9/11, and the 21st-century "hospital spaceship," as well as through photographs, paintings and poetry. "Like the sun, death can't be looked at steadily," wrote La Rochefoucauld, heralding the modern view of the matter. (The medievals, in contrast, thought the process of dying was much scarier than death itself.) For Gilbert, the passage from a Christian theology of "expiration" to a modern "(anti)theology of 'termination' " is best embodied in the poems of Whitman and Dickinson. Her close readings of our cultural history will entrance anyone interested in an intelligent analysis of the ways we grieve. (Jan.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

A few reviewers refer to a letter of William Butler Yeats in which he stated that "sex and the dead" are the only topics of interest "to a serious and studious mood." Sandra M. Gilbert famously tackled the former in her landmark study of women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic (coauthored with Susan Gubar, 1979). Following the death of her husband as a result of medical malpractice, Gilbert picked up an academic study of elegies she had begun in the 1970s and created this "graduate seminar on mourning" (Harper's). Critics praise this extraordinarily learned rumination on the nature of death for its empathetic tone and its refusal to resort to navel gazing. With death in vogue in entertainment circles (from Six Feet Under to The Year of Magical Thinking), Gilbert delivers a book as ageless as its subject.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 580 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (January 16, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393051315
• ISBN-13: 978-0393051315
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.8 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #827,448 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comfort and Context from Gilbert's Clarity and Compassion, June 6, 2006

By 

Janet Riehl "Riehlife Village Wisdom for the ... (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve: A Cultural Study (Hardcover)

"Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve" is a splendid achievement and a fine companion for the "Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies." I believe the elegies collection gave birth to "Death's Door."

Gilbert combines clarity and compassion, an essential combination to bring to the ultimate topic: death. The book is divided into three major parts: I. Arranging My Mourning: Five Meditations on the Psychology of Grief; II. History Makes Death: How the Twentieth Century Reshaped Dying and Mourning; II. The Handbook of Heartbreak: Contemporary Elegy and Lamentation. From this selection of categories alone, you can savor her ear for phrase and mind that adventures and gathers together psychology, History, and Literature.

Gilbert is woman and scholar and teacher and writer in this magnificent book. I read "Death's Door" as my mother lay dying and found much comfort here. I received the additional benefit of having the context of my own work illuminated and enlarged.

Sandra M. Gilbert's "Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve" gave me a context to place my work within. "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary" fits into a tradition I was not consciously aware of as I wrote. I felt I had come home into a larger family with many voices.


Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A survey of social and cultural history documents different processes of death and grief in society, May 20, 2006

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve: A Cultural Study (Hardcover)

Surveys of death and grieving often embrace the psychology so much that there isn't much room for other approaches, so it's surprising to find a treatment which blends a poet and critic's vision and experiences with a focus on the psychology of pain and recovery. Such a survey is DEATH'S DOOR: MODERN DYING AND THE WAYS WE GRIEVE. A survey of social and cultural history documents different processes of death and grief in society, while the author struggles with her own reactions to deaths of loved ones. Her different viewpoints help DEATH'S DOOR stand apart from the myriad of titles on the topic.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Her own experiences and a survey of the literature, May 2, 2006

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve: A Cultural Study (Hardcover)

We humans are the only animals that know we are going to die. The only real questions are how and when. For Ms. Gilbert's husband, he went in for a relativly minor operation and never recovered.

We use a lot of euphemisms to refer to death: a hit, a contract, passing away, crossing Jordan. And through the twentieth century we have seen a lot of death: World War I with its machine guns and poison gas, The Holocaust (In capitals, that means the jewish one in Germany, but there have been several from Turkey/Armenia, Cambodia, 'ethnic cleansing,' and the current Darfur situation.), Natural disasters from tsunamis, earthquakes, and of course 9/11.

There's been a lot of literature about death, from the Bible through Shakespeare to numerous others (Amazon lists hundreds of titles). This particular book has two real strengths: First comes from Ms. Gilbert's mastery of the language and her analysis of her own feelings of grief. Then there is a carefully made selection of quotes from past literature.

I don't know that this makes our own future any more clear, but it certainly helps in the understanding of our grief when a loved one dies.