『묘지명 소고』와 영국묘지개혁: 위생과 대중 교화

Abstract

This essay captures and discusses the moment William Wordsworth opposes and resists the structure of subordination and domination in British burial reform in the 18th and 19th centuries. For the safe disposal of the dead, burial reformers idealize the upper-middle class sanitary ways of disposal, producing suitable and instructive moral effects through the cemetery. John Claudius Loudon puts into practice burial reformers' principles in his cemetery design and builds space that displays order, safety, security, and sanitary conditions. However, the rational distribution and hygienic imperative of his cemetery not only tame death and reduce it to socially amicable dimensions but also encompass and reinforce the moral and general sentiments of the ruling class. Unlike the burial reformers, Wordsworth in Essays Upon Epitaphs affirms and embraces the dead, while listening to their voices in the epitaph. For him, giving them a proper burial constitutes the ideal community. The community arising from the cemetery does not integrate into either the socially amiable aesthetic-moral values or ruling class ideology, as intended by burial reformers. While building rapport and a sense of communal identity through the grave and its epitaph, Wordsworth is keenly aware of the impossibility of eliminating the ghostly domain between the living and the dead. He attempts to build the ideal community upon mourning and loss that, by binding together the dead and the living, does not allow affectation to stand in the place of affection.