The Journals of Martha E. McMillan

The Influence of the Domestication of Death and Communal Grieving in Nineteenth-Century Cedarville (1898 – September-December) Kathy Roberts 2015 A community’s view of death reveals its perspective on life. Though death remains constant throughout time, various communities address death differently. Researchers can study a group’s worldview by analyzing how the community addresses illness, grieves, and remembers its dead. People have always feared death, but a paradigm switch began in America after the Enlightenment. However, while the secular world transitioned its view on death, Christians remained unique in their view of death, even though their views differed by denomination. While America was domesticating death in the late nineteenth century, the Presbyterian- influenced Cedarville community had a unique perspective of death which included grief as a way to stabilize society. The Age of Enlightenment followed by the Romantic Era caused Americans to begin to domesticate death. During the Enlightenment Era’s emphasis on rationality, people sought to place death within an ordered framework and standardized process. This began “The Dying of Death” in America (Farrell 4). Death scholar, James Farrell, cites one metaphor for this paradigm shift; “Death is regarded no longer as a king of terror, but rather as a kindly nurse who puts us to bed when our day’s work is done. The fear of death is being replaced by the joy of life” (5). Modern life increased life expectancy and the pace of life which focused people’s minds on living rather than their inevitable dying. In response to the Enlightenment, the Romantic Era attempted to counter the movement’s rigid rationality by emphasizing aesthetics, intuition, and emotion. Thus, in the nineteenth century, people’s views on death began to reflect 148