Dead Beauty: The Preservation, Memorialisation and Destruction of Beauty in Death

Abstract

‘Death is the mother of beauty’, wrote the American poet Wallace Stevens in ‘Sunday Morning’. Indeed, some of the attributes of beauty — stillness, calm, repose — are attributes of death (Bronfen 1992). For Freud (1952), death and beauty share a hidden identity; representations of beauty can articulate an anxiety about and desire for death and may be viewed as an aesthetic substitution for it. For Lacan (1986) this means that a function of beauty is to guide us to our own deaths, to present death as a dazzling sight.