Mostly.
But all kidding aside, it is important that I put what I learn into practice. This is what is important to me- graveyards are a pretty big part of my life, after all. So I thought I'd share a couple of examples of how I've managed to incorporate it into my education. The following are a couple of essays that I've written about issues surrounding graveyards and their archaeology.
Houses of the Dead: The Evolution of Graveyards in Gothic Literature
It is a common scene in Gothic literature. Maybe it is the damsel in distress, fleeing barefoot through the headstones in her billowy white nightgown. Maybe it is the corpse bride, wandering sylph-like through the mausolea and memorials, unaware of any watchers. Maybe it is the villain, hiding amongst the bones of the dead. Maybe it is the gravedigger, preparing for the next day’s funeral when a ghost chooses to appear to him, imparting a message of impending doom. Or maybe it is the romantic hero, come to lay flowers at the foot of his dead beloved. Whoever the character, the setting is as familiar to the sense of the Gothic as any location could possibly be. It is the graveyard, and everybody has seen it before.
The graveyard or cemetery is one of the most common tropes in Gothic literature. However, the walled place where the crosses are all in a row and shady rest under the trees is usual is a relatively recent development, with the oldest proper graveyard having just celebrated its 200th anniversary. The graveyard as we know it is not a static concept; rather, it has changed in the past and may yet change again. And as the concept of what makes a graveyard developed, so to did its role in the Gothic. Over time, burial grounds changed from a set piece to a dynamic location with which characters actively engage and interact, essentially mirroring their real-time development.
In 1764, when the first Gothic novel was published, there were no graveyards as they are understood today. All bodies were buried in the greens and lawns around churches. The majority of this space would invariably be consecrated and fenced, while a section would be kept separate for the burials of foreigners, suicides, criminals, and heathens. Occasionally, disease would necessitate the use of mass graves, but generally in Europe and especially in England, individual burials in consecrated ground was the normal way to treat a body. However, while the ideal was one body to a grave, this never happened. Urban expansion and high mortality rates, particularly amongst the lower economic classes, led to churchyards simultaneously shrinking and having to handle higher traffic. Complicating the matter further was the intolerance of cremation; it was considered a serious offense to desecrate a body by burning it. Stories of clandestine cremations were later used as bases for more lurid tales, one such being that of Sweeney Todd, where the scent of burning bodies attracts attention from the neighbors and ultimately leads to Todd’s undoing. This has a factual background, coming from places like Spa Fields where illegal cremations were performed by night1. Churches with large crypts had the option of disinterring the bodies after decomposition and storing the bones, but small parishes could only dig deeper. In some London churchyards, bodies were buried twenty-five deep. Is it any wonder, then, that graves and the churchyard were so easily associated with terror?
Early Gothic authors certainly seized upon them as perfect scenery for the macabre. They were popular settings for chase sequences or apparitions. However, characters didn’t stay long– at least, not living characters. A churchyard might be mentioned many times, but involvement with one was dangerous. Only two kinds of people stayed long in churchyards: the dead and the evil (who were often soon-to-be dead). Matthew Lewis’s The Monk is a good case of this: Early in Matilda’s corruption of Ambrosio, the couple take refuge in a tomb. This is foreshadowing for their later use of mausolea. Ambrosio’s greatest tomb-related sin occurs when he enters the drugged Antonia’s tomb to take advantage of her “by the side of three putrid half-corrupted Bodies.2” Although he lifts her from the coffin itself, “the gloom of the vault” and “the surrounding silence3” only serve to further his unholy desires. The sepulchre has become “Love’s bower4” to Antonio; clearly, here, he has become mad. No person in their right mind would consider a crypt full of decaying bodies romantic, after all.
Matilda, for her part, has been using a tomb as a base of operations for her demon-summoning. Little explanation is needed as to why this leads to an unpleasant fate– dealing with magic is dangerous enough, but becoming a black magician seals one’s fate. In the endgame of the novel, the two attempt to take refuge in the tomb, which has been a somewhat-hidden door. This does not fool the soldiers of the Inquisition, come to find them, and the two are dragged from the tomb, only to return to it later. While both survive their initial encounters with the churchyard, neither emerges uncorrupt. The decay around them essentially ruined them; they entered the verboten land of the dead and could not come out and rejoin the living.
For many years, the idea of a churchyard was the only expression of a burial ground in literature. This concept began to change in 1804 with the opening of the Père Lachaise in Paris. This was the first cemetery to use the familiar park-like setting distanced from main residential areas. It also was not attached to a particular parish, meaning that it allowed for an intermingling of social classes that was unlikely to happen in life. Death, after all, is the great equalizer, and having both rich and poor in the same ground was a revolutionary idea. For many years, the Père Lachaise was unique. However, the design was adopted in London to deal with the unpleasant churchyard situation. By the 1830s, churchyards were no longer a viable option. The crowded areas of London had the greatest problems. Parish membership was determined by residence, so there was very little mingling of social classes within parishes- and thus, within churchyards. Since poor neighborhoods tended to be the most crowded and have higher rates of mortality, their churchyards were filled beyond capacity. Aside from the stench of decomposition, this overcrowding became a serious health issue, leading to breakouts of cholera. In 1832, Parliament put forth a motion to abolish the old practice of churchyard burials and create cemeteries like the one in Paris. This act, known as the Cemeteries Act of 1832, encouraged private companies to create incorporated graveyards. Kensal Green was the first of the incorporated, public graveyards. While it was Anglican, it was not exclusive to one parish, which was a first for London. Six others followed, eventually known as the “Magnificent Seven.” For years, these large cemeteries have served as London’s main burial grounds. These seven park-like graveyards were renowned for the beauty and grace of their landscaping and architecture, leading to a revolutionary new way of thinking about burial grounds.
By the time of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the cemetery’s role in both society and literature had changed. This had much to do with the popularity of the London cemeteries as more than burial grounds. In the late Victorian age, Highgate had become a fashionable destination. Instead of being foreboding places, they were welcoming. They had become liminal spaces, where the dead slumbered peacefully and the living came to visit. It was a place where the living could engage with the dead, and this was seized upon by the Gothic authors- notably, Bram Stoker. In Dracula, the cemetery is not a place of flight, but of action. The characters engage with the space in a way that was previously impossible. While the space is the domain of the dead (and the undead), it is also a space that the living can use and emerge from alive.
However, Stoker does not abandon the older version of the graveyard entirely. The first pivotal burial ground scene occurs prior to the return to England, when Jonathan Harker discovers “an old ruined chapel, which had evidently been used as a graveyard5.” The soil that Dracula brings to England is being excavated here; Dracula himself sleeps in the vaults. In this sequence, Stoker deliberately evokes the old image of the outlawed churchyards, both to give his readers a sense of an older world and a more backwards world. Dracula’s first victim in London, Petrof Skinsky, is found in a religiously-identified churchyard. He is “found inside the wall of the churchyard of St. Peter, and that the throat had been torn open as if by some wild animal6.” This brief entanglement of churchyard and macabre calls to mind the often-grisly scenes of the pre-Act churchyards.
In contrast, the place of Lucy Westenra’s interment is clearly meant to evoke Highgate Cemetery. Although it is identified as “the churchyard at Kingstead7,” Stoker’s description of large family mausolea, “ghastly white” tombs, and “cypress… yew… [and] juniper8” call to mind the appearance and plantings of the park cemeteries. It is said that Stoker often took his lunch in Highgate, which at his time would have been a voguish pursuit. Curiously, the one feature of the graveyard that sets it apart from the actual Highgate is its low wall, which is mentioned by Dr. Seward. This distinction in all likeliness was made because, while Stoker’s audience would not have been aware of the various facets of fictional vampire lore, they would have been familiar with Highgate and the other London cemeteries. All of these had high walls that were difficult to climb. They may have questioned the group’s ability to get over such a wall, so Stoker paid attention to this detail. It is also quite possible that he is drawing on the imagery attached to several Dublin churchyards, many of which do have low walls. Ultimately, this makes Kingstead a synthetic accretion of various burial grounds from Stoker’s experience, which paradoxically removes it from and places it within the real world. It is a place to be understood, but not really a place to visit, except in the mind’s eye.
But aside from the short wall, trees, and white memorials, Kingstead has little textual imagery. It is not described with the lavish detail that authors like Anne Radcliffe used to detail their environments; there is no need. Essentially, by the time of Dracula the cemetery has become a codified trope: if the author mentions a cemetery, he or she bypasses the need to give an elaborate description of the place and can focus on the action. Details that the author chooses to give only enhance the atmosphere; they do not redefine it. In these cases, familiarity is actually a good thing and adds to the ghastly air by letting horror seep into peoples’ ideas of a place they know intimately.
The blurring of lines between such distinct dichotomies that occurs in large graveyards is also an element that contributes to a strong Gothic atmosphere. The undead Lucy Westenra is obviously the prime example of this- she is a monster neither alive nor dead, her beauty twisted into a perverse sexuality. She is anathema to those who loved her in life, for she has broached one barrier too far. In Dracula, social classes can mingle in life– an American, a Dutch Catholic, a lawyer, and a lord become a team when pressed by a common threat– just as they can mingle in death in the graveyard. But life and death? That line cannot be crossed without invoking the monstrous.
In the most recent Gothic, cemeteries evoke a polarized reaction, obtaining a new dichotomy to smudge. They are either places that have been completely romanticized, or they are places of terror. In America, many folktales and urban legends have developed around the idea of a haunted cemetery; they are often guarded on Halloween night to deter vandals and thrill-seekers. In Britain, Highgate’s status as a gothic setting has continued in both literature (Neil Gaiman tends to make use of it) and other media. It is a common filming location, and in the 1970s, was home to the apocryphal Highgate Vampire.
Of course, not all graveyards are frightening. Particularly often in music, they are places of comfort. Themes of loss and sorrow run deep in the Gothic, and cemeteries as we understand them today can help mourners transition between stages of grief. Because of their accessibility, they make it possible to commune with the dead, which can often help a mourner move on. It is unlikely that this feeling will ever change, but it is also unlikely that cemeteries will remain exactly as they are, both from a literary and social standpoint.
Part of the cemetery’s allure is the general age of these burial grounds. Most are old,
But like every other manmade design, cemeteries will change as society changes. The current trend is the “green cemetery,” a take on the park setting that eliminates the memorial stones, ornate tombs, and ideas about corruption and preservation. These cemeteries allow bodies to decay naturally and are very peaceful places that have completely lost the sinister aura of their predecessors.
However, natural burials have made appearances in American horror in the form of the Native American burial ground, upon which foolish developers tend to build and terrible things then tend to happen. Perhaps in the future, these natural burial grounds will converge with them as a stock environment for the use of authors wishing to give their stories a gloomy, dangerous atmosphere. The potential for contrast is intriguing. But regardless of future possibilities, it seems unlikely that the graveyard as a setting for Gothic tales will ever fade from vogue. The cemetery has become too useful as a shorthand for fear, darkness, loss, and the general flavour of the Gothic.
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