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other hand, persists best in the southern parts. Aries sees the foundation of "inverted
death" in a certain "existential and quasi-popular attitude" to nature: at the sian, a
conception of nature as eliminating death, then a belief in technology capable of supplanting
nature, suffering and death. 1 He cautions, though, that it would be wrong [0 oppose a
Protestant Anglo-Saxon model of death to a Catholic traditional one: social class appears to
be it more determining factor than religion, with recognizable traits of "tamed death"
persisting in the lower classes.
In addition, he points out that the Anglo-Saxon cullural area is not homogeneolls as
regards attitudes 10 death, thallhere is considerable difference between the British and the
North American way of death. Britain shows a radical denial of death including the
suppression of mourning, a simplified funeral, cremation and dispersion of the ashes.
While Ihis represents the purest form of "inverted death," attitudes in Canada and the
United States combine this with "thy death,"2 a qualification which has escaped the
atlention of other commentators. 3 Aries sees North American death as ambivalent: whereas
death is hidden from {he moment of its occurrence until the final disposal of the remains,
the old ritual persists in between under a "varnish" of modernity.
While grief and mourning, exalted in the just preceding age, have become "forbidden"
as social indecency, Aries sees the modem attitude as deriving from the romantic one and
even preserving some "traditional" ideas. Affection or the intolerable idea of earthly
separation would be the profound reason for the conspimcy of silence or lying surrounding
the dying. Beside the "dispossession of death," and the "interdiction of ritual mourning,"
he sees these "new rites" emerging in American society functioning as a compromise
between the solemn homage paid to the deceased in the past and the pressures of
contemporary ta1:>oos.4 Death in present-day Newfoundland provides an illustration of this
ambivalence.
I Aries, lIomme 2:303-05.
2 Arics, lIomme 2:305-11.
3 Ar ics is referring to Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One (London: Chapman, 19411) and Roger
Caillois, Qualre eHai.f de sociologie conlemporaine (Paris: Perrin. 1951).
4 Arics, Essuis IllO.