The Journals of Martha E. McMillan

Romantic sentimentalism on top of Enlightenment order. Farrell writes, “Sentimental Americans domesticated death, thus trying to overcome their terror of it, by developing socially acceptable channels for Romantic expressionism” (34). Some of those “socially acceptable channels for Romantic expressionism” included preserving the body, dressing the deceased body in a suit, photographing the body then having a portrait drawn of it, and burying it in a vault. People also announced loved ones’ deaths with mourning cards and publicized their grief through the popular genre of child death poetry. Additionally, Americans in the nineteenth century began burying people in “Garden Cemeteries” rather than in family and church graveyards. These new, rural cemeteries featured “a large expanse of lanes, grass, trees, and shrubbery” (Graham 197). Farrell writes, “At death, said rural cemetery supporters, the individual could expect to commune with God, with nature, and with deceased family and friends” (Farrell 105). Nineteenth-century Americans domesticated death through sentimentality to lessen people’s fears of it. While secular America was domesticating death to lessen its terror, Christians also transitioned their beliefs about death. Prior to the Victorian Era, American Protestants viewed death grimly because they believed that God smote people with death as a punishment for sin and depravity. Farrell explains that during this time, “Like the Presbyterians, most Americans of the evangelical era believed that God intervened directly with death to chastise his sinful children and to remind survivors of their own mortality” (Farrell 36). As the secular world transitioned their views about death, Protestants also began to see death as more of a natural part of life to transition Christians from this life to the next. Thus, Protestants started viewing death as less of God’s punishment and more as a reason to celebrate the life of the deceased person and gather for societal solidarity. Scholar Margaret Baker Graham explains the transition from Puritan to Presbyterian mentalities as, “Fear of hell gave way to the promise of salvation as Protestants 149