Why Jessica Mitford was wrong

Theology Today, Jan 1999 by Long, Thomas G

THE TWO FACES OF JESSICA

Given her record of reform, it seems wrongheaded, even churlish, to criticize Jessica Mitford's stance on funerals. After all, virtually by herself she called an entire service industry to ethical heel. When, for example, The American Way of Death was first published in 1963, many funeral establishments hid their pricing policies like state secrets. Today, anyone can ask a funeral home for a detailed price list of goods and services and, as a right of law, receive it. More important, a whole consumer culture is now on guard when dealing with the funeral industry, and a network of not-for-profit funeral and memorial societies has bloomed. More than anyone else, Jessica Mitford is to be thanked for this.

But, for all the good she did, Jessica Mitford was also wrong about funerals-wrong in ways that really matter, wrong in ways detrimental to the human spirit and to the deep rituals of faith communities. Because of Jessica Mitford-or, more precisely, because of the way her attitudes about funerals have been taken over into popular opinion, Americans are in danger of losing the capacity to mark ritually the profound significance of the experience of death, to place our losses into a larger framework of social and religious meaning.

Precisely where Jessica Mitford has done damage can best be understood if we discern that The American Way of Death incorporates two distinct intentions, two separate methodologies, in a way, two different Jessica Mitfords. First, there is Jessica Mitford the consumer advocate, the muckraker, the junkyard dog on patrol, suspicious, vigilant, sharp-toothed. This Jessica is eager to dig up evidence of industry wrongdoing and to rip into any funeral director foolish enough to pad the bill, to lie to the grief stricken, to cheat the innocent, or even to mutter empty euphemisms in the face of death. This Jessica was feisty, controversial, unrelenting, and, insofar as she made an unwary public more alert and informed, is worthy of the praise she has received.

But there is another Jessica at work in the pages of The American Way of Death-Jessica the secular rationalist, Jessica the anti-ritualist, Jessica who remained at heart the stiff-lipped Edwardian aristocrat with little tolerance for "folk" ceremonies of mystery and wonder. The first Jessica, the consumer advocate, thought funerals were too costly; the second Jessica, the rationalist, thought they were just plain silly and sentimental. Jessica the consumer advocate thought American funerals were based on the greed of morticians; Jessica the rationalist thought American funerals were based on nothing but gullibility, foolish illusions, cotton-candy euphemisms, and groundless religious myths.

Like her fellow countryman Evelyn Waugh, who sent up the American funeral in his satirical novel The Loved One, the second Jessica found in funerals the ideal target for social mockery of American folkways, the occasion to engage in some British tut-tutting over the shallowness, sentimentality, and vulgarity of American culture generally-a sport that continues to this day. Indeed, the emotional catharsis in England surrounding the death of Princess Diana, with sobbing crowds milling around outside Westminster Abbey while Elton John crooned "Candle in the Wind" inside, caught the British intelligentsia off guard. Many groused that they no longer recognized their own country and that the mediainduced display of showy public grief seemed "all too American" in its hysterical intensity.3 Particularly galling to British traditionalists was the criticism levied toward Queen Elizabeth, and the royals generally, for failing to loosen up and to place their grief, Geraldo-like, on public display. Commenting on this trend of measuring the royal family by American cathartic standards, Adam Gopnik notes that one of the established political roles of the modern monarchy has been precisely "to resist popular emotion" and that before "no one ever thought that the British monarchy could come under attack for looking insufficiently irrational."4