Summary Of Behind The Formaldehyde Curtain
Kayla Burnett
Professor Maharaj
October 7, 2014
Analysis
Renowned journalist, Jessica Mitford, in her essay, “Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain”, describes in great detail the practices of embalming and the various procedures the body goes through after death in America. Mitford’s purpose for writing this essay is to explore what exactly happens behind the scenes in a funeral home, which is kept secret in our society. In her essay, Mitford clearly opposes the process of embalming, a regular practice at funeral homes in America, that can happen without any consent of the dead person’s family. Throughout the essay, Mitford voices her opposition toward the process of embalming, arguing the legality of the process of embalming, and the way American
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She is trying to relay to the reader the reality of what actually happens after the body is taken to the funeral home, also pointing out the secrecy surrounding the subject in America. By going in to tremendous detail of the shocking duties morticians perform on the bodies in the funeral homes to prepare them for viewing, explaining all the priming and propping of the body, it causes the reader to question how much he or she really knows how much goes on behind the scenes in the funeral home industry. Mitford is provoking the readers to think about the legality and really the morality of how the body is treated after …show more content…
She further explains how America is the only country in the world that has the custom of having the option of having an open casket funeral, a custom which perplex many people from other cultures. This revelation causes the reader, who may be American, to question and contrast different customs, and how the American custom surrounding death differs vastly from others around the world. Mitford writes, “Consequently well over 90 percent of all American funerals feature the open casket-a custom unknown in other parts of the world. Foreigners are astonished by it” (Mitford 5). She goes on to tell a short story regarding an English woman who went to her American coworker’s funeral. The lady explains how shocked she was to see her dead coworker in an open casket, face masked with makeup. She even says she felt she might have giggled, with the oddness of looking at him laying there. After that experience, the lady decided she would not go to another American
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495 Words | 2 PagesBut nobody knows what’s going on inside the preparation room, all they see is their deceased relative, good as new, when they walk by the open casket during the funeral. Mitford depicts the American funeral industry’s manipulation of death throughout the essay with either blatant or thinly-veiled verbal irony. In the last paragraph, Mitford states that the funeral director has put on a “well-oiled performance" where "the concept of death played no part whatsoever”, unless providing it was “inconsiderately mentioned” by the funeral conductors. This is extremely ironic because a funeral is supposed to revolved around death, and this makes us think about funerals and the embalmment process in a way that we usually don’t. These processes takes away the cruelty and brutality of death and make it seem trivial while making our deceased relatives life-like, with pink toned skin and a smile on their face, and death is not like that at all.
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