In author Jessica Mitford’s short story “The Story of Service”, Mitford contrasts the extensive services provided today by funeral directors to the simpler, more straight forward services that would have been provided over a hundred years ago. In doing this she reveals how laying the dead to rest has become an attempt to preserve their liveliness. She writes, “Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed-transformed from a common corpse to a Beautiful Memory Picture” (Mitford, pg. 43). Mitford’s adjectives describing the embalming process make it sound like a rather lengthy and gruesome process to get to the end result. It makes me wonder, is it worth it? Interestingly, Mitford describes how the popularity of embalming is really concentrated, and not widespread worldwide, as well as rather costly. She states, “In no part of the world but in North America is it widely used. The purpose of embalming is to make the corpse presentable for viewing in a suitably costly container” (Mitford, pg. 43). This raises the question, why is embalming specific to North America? Why do we value viewing the dead in a presentable way, more so than other cultures in other parts of the world? Why do we put their bodies through such a process? In putting them through such a process, it is almost like we want to present them if they had not died. Mitford explains, “The object of all this attention to the corpse, it must be remembered, is to make it presentable for viewing in an attitude of healthy repose. ‘Our customs require the presentation of our dead in the semblance of normality… unmarred by the ravages of illness, disease or mutilation,’ says Mr. J. Sheridan Mayer in his Restorative Art” (Mitford, pg. 47). We can imagine the amount of work it takes to make a body look “normal”. But, I think Mitford’s point is how this process of embalming seems so far from normal and so unnatural. I think her point in writing this essay was to make us question why it is that this has become a tradition of funerals.
