SEX AND DEATH
Jerry Harkins


JOHN WARNE “BET-A-MILLION” GATES (1855-1911) was an American industrialist (U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Texaco) whose funeral was held in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Plaza Hotel. He was interred in an impressive mausoleum near the Jerome Avenue entrance of Woodlawn Cemetery. The bronze door is graced by a high relief partial nude sculpted by Robert I. Aitken. She is seen from the back in a posture of grief almost as though resisting the closing of the door that has brought home the finality of her lover’s death. In spite of a little strategic drapery, the sculpture has an obvious if muted erotic aspect. We see a strong well proportioned womanly body. She is graceful but not a sylph. She is young but not a teenager. She is vulnerable but not virginal. She is idealized but not unbelievable. Most interestingly, her eroticism is uncommon for an American cemetery. [1] In Nineteenth Century France and Italy, especially, nude or nearly nude women were regular features of urban cemeteries, most notably Père Lachaise in Paris and Monumentale in Milan, and the figures were often less draped than the Gates nude and more explicitly erotic. [2] Often they are, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “…in a pose of swooned, vulnerable abandon, as if grief were a form of erotic surrender.” [3] Although by no means pornographic, they tend to be considerably more erotic than most sculptural nudes.

Oates also implies that the sculptures and the graves they adorn “belong to the nineteenth century.” Well, of course. Prior to the Nineteenth Century, only major figures built elaborate permanent tombs. These abound in iconic women but few of them are overtly erotic. For example, the tomb of Michelangelo has three grieving women seated around his sarcophagus. All three are beautiful but there is little suggestion of eroticism. The figure on the viewer’s right wears what appears to be a diaphanous undergarment with a shawl on her right shoulder and drapery in her lap. The center figure is fully clothed in a classic pose of grief with her head resting on her right hand and arm. It is sometimes said these figures are allegorical representations—possibly Muses—of painting, sculpture and architecture. [4] If true, then these were the women who attended the artist during life and with whom he might have had a passionate if not erotic relationship. In any event, the story they tell is surely highly charged and it is not inconceivable that they symbolize a relationship that is erotic in Plato’s sense of the human yearning for ideal beauty and finality.

The faint eroticism of Michelangelo’s tomb and even that of the Gates mausoleum are subtle compared to the abandon discussed by Ms. Oates which appears to have been a short-lived vogue related perhaps to the cataclysmic social and political upheavals of nineteenth century Europe. Overt eroticism was much less common in the United States, in part because of our Puritan heritage and in part because we were preoccupied by more mundane distractions. [5] Early American grave markers were often quite ghoulish and those erected in the nineteenth century might be ornate but rarely played on the sex and death theme. Their descendants have generally sanitized all such emotions to the point that even such sex symbols as Mae West and Marilyn Monroe are interred in utterly simple wall crypts. Even when an attractive figure adorns a grave, there is no suggestion of eroticism. For example, Daniel Chester French’s Mourning Victory, the centerpiece of the Milmore Memorial in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, is a beautiful but hardly erotic woman. [6]

The tension between Eros and Thanatos is one of the great themes of human culture, noted and discussed long before it became a central subject for Freud who associated the former with the life instinct and the latter with the desire for stasis. Freudian theory postulates that life is a constant struggle between these forces. It is fair to say that succeeding generations of philosophers and psychologists have found this notion intriguing but ultimately not compelling. It lacks a dynamic principle that allows the healthy person to resolve the conflict and lead a productive life as, in fact, most people do. Perhaps that missing element is a kind of spirituality as represented by Bacchus (Dionysus) who is often conflated with Eros even though they are distinctly different. [7] It is true that both invoke ecstasy as a means of encountering the divine. They share the epithet Eleutherios, Liberator, the one because of the liberating quality of wine, the other ecstatic sex. But Bacchus speaks for all the joys and passions of life. Sir James Frazer refers to him as the God of life-death-rebirth and alludes to the obvious parallels with the story of Jesus. Joseph Campbell, too, writes of Bacchus as the son of Persephone, Goddess of Death: “the ever-dying, ever-living slain and resurrected son, Dionysus-Baccus-Zagreus.” [8] Almost surely, this derives from the more ancient archetype of the Green Man known in more recent times in England and Ireland as John Barleycorn who represents the giving of life to others from the sacrifice of his own. Eros, then, would be a subsidiary theme in the service of this all-embracing motif. He is explicitly and sharply focused on sexuality, in some cases, homosexuality. Interestingly, he is usually depicted as a pre-pubescent child or an adolescent and his childishness is an important element of many of the stories about him. In the earliest of these, he is the son of Chaos and Gaea who embodies the force of their erotic love which is nature’s fundamental creative urge or life force. In other words, he is the product of eroticism, not its originator. Although his origins were attenuated in later versions, his primordial nature never completely disappeared. Plato proposed that he was the son of Poros and Penia, Wealth and Poverty respectively. Still later, he was said to be the son of Aphrodite and Ares, love and war. In all these incarnations, there are intimations of great force, even compulsion, and great pleasure.

It might seem that Bacchus would make a better foil for death than Eros, the totality of life vis a vis the finality of death. Actually, whenever Eros or Cupid is invoked in anything more literary than a greeting card, there is often the subtext of exactly the Bacchanalian revelry Pope Benedict XVI was complaining about in his first encyclical (see Note 7). This is evident in many funeral rituals where Eros is involved. In rural Ireland until recently it was a custom to adjourn from a wake for a death-defying interlude of heavy drinking, fighting and fornication al fresco. This custom was obviously a ritualistic way of defying death and also almost certainly a re-enactment of the symbolic sexual union of the new king with the land, a renewal ceremony in which, once again, ecstasy is a bridge between death and rebirth. Thus it would be wrong to focus on the Bacchanalian aspects of such doings which, I suspect, are a cover for the erotic undertakings. And Eros represents more than sexual release. Frazer notwithstanding, he is the symbol of rebirth, not necessarily the physical rebirth of the individual but the spiritual renewal of the community.

Rebirth and renewal are subtle ideas. In most versions of the John Barleycorn song, for example, no mention is made in the lyrics of his resurrection but in the associated dances he always springs up at the end bigger and stronger than ever, just as the barley plant did after being harvested and looking barren through the winter. Ancient and medieval farmers may not have understood the biology involved but they were awed by the annual reappearance of the crop. In some stories, Barleycorn was the king who mated with the earth, ruled for a year and was then killed so his blood might fertilize the earth. [9]

It is reasonable to suggest that the association of sex and death is not so much about either as it is about hope. We are used to hearing Hamlet’s lament, “But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / no traveler returns.” But in the First Folio it is not “dread.” The line is, “But for a hope something after death?” and the question mark seems important. For a very brief moment in the nineteenth century, cemetery art was enlisted in the service of this hope. Then, perhaps as the garden cemetery movement grew, people became embarrassed at the prospect of explaining swooning angels and ecstatic nudes to children. We will never know why it arose and why it vanished so soon. But it was not merely a passing fetish. It was an expression of one of our species’ most fundamental ideas.

Notes

1. She: erotic imagery is almost always in the form of a female figure and almost always adorns the tomb of a man. The most famous exception is the full length effigy of Victor Noir on his tomb in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise sculpted by Jules Dalou. Although M. Noir is depected as quite dead (i.e., complete with the entry wound of the fatal bullet) he nonetheless has an impressive erection which has been the object of the ministrations of successive generations of Parisian maidens hoping to find a husband. (The author is grateful to Dr. Caterina Y. Pierre for calling this story to his attention. See her article “The Pleasure and Piety of Touch in Aimé-Jules Dalou’s Tomb of Victor Noir.” Sculpture Journal, 19.2, 2010, pp. 173-85.)

2. See: Robinson, David, Saving Graces: Images of Women in European Cemeteries, W.W. Norton, 1995.

3. Ibid, p. 10.

4. There were no Muses of these arts in the classical world although later artists often contrived them. The Michelangelo sculptures were executed by three different sculptors following, perhaps, an overall plan developed by the architect Giorgio Vasari. The three figures each hold something that could be an emblem of the art they symbolize. The standardization of such emblems was a preoccupation of the period.

5. Compared to Europe, America in the nineteenth century was both a simpler and a more stable society. In addition to the Gates sculpture, there are fully clothed mourning women adorning some American grave sites, notably in the South. For example, two very female angels in the eroticized swoon described by Joyce Carol Oates stand atop the Aldigé memorial in Metirie Cemetery in New Orleans. Another example is the elaborate memorial to James “Diamond Jim” Fisk at the Prospect Hill Cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont. Four lovely young women in various states of undress circle the base, each holding a symbol of one of his earthly interests in the manner of Michelangelo’s tomb. Fisk’s muses seem to have been money, railroads, steamship lines and the theater. The last-named was not an artistic interest but the source of most of his mistresses.

6. The Milmore Memorial is not a grave marker. The actual family plot is at a different location in the same cemetery. The woman is the angel of death who is shown interrupting the sculptor Martin Milmore at work. It is one of French’s most emotional works. She reaches out gently to stay the sculptor’s hand as if to say, “Come, it is time to rest from your labor.” A marble copy of the bronze original is prominently displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

7. I believe Pope Benedict XVI conflates Eros and Bacchus when he complains of the “divinization of eros” by which he means “…a divine madness which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness.” (See his encyclical letter God Is Love: Deus Caritas Est, U.S. Conference of Bishops, 2006.)

8. There are several accounts of Bacchus’ origin. His mother is generally said to be the mortal woman Semele who was seduced by Zeus. In another version, Bacchus was conceived through an indirect, unusual and gruesome union of Zeus and Persphone. Zeus impregnated Semele in the usual way and she gave birth to Zagreus who was then killed by agents of the jealous Hera. Zeus then created mead out of the dead infant’s heart and gave it to Semele to drink which is how she became pregnant with Bacchus.

9. Frazer refers to this king as “Corn King” and it is not clear whether he is using an abbreviated form of Barleycorn or has made a typical nineteenth century mistake. Corn, of course, was not introduced into Europe until the beginning of the sixteenth century.