Love Beyond Death

This illustrated volume explores the eroticisation of death in the literature, art, and music of the 19th century and the popular culture of our time. Death was the natural enemy of love in the arts of the West until the late 18th century. Then the two mated in artistic fancy, death being celebrated as a font of sensual bliss. Through the 19th century voluptuous visions of death pervaded high culture. Keats fell "half in love with easeful death", and as Heine told it, "Life only warms in death's cold arms". For Whitman, death was "the word of the sweetest song". Flaubert tempted his Saint Anthony with Lust and Death fused into a single figure. Zola saw love and death intermixed in "the sombre pit of the human soul". Mahler sounded death as a rapturous stillness, while Rilke caressed the dead through tender verses. At mid-century, painters and poets alike competed in depicting Ophelia drowning in ecstasy. At the century's end the figure of the femme fatale haunted the cultural elite. Then after 1914 this whole morbid complex sank into popular culture. What were the source and the sense of this erotocisation of death in the arts? To answer this question, Rudolph Binion explores a variety of prose and poetry, painting and sculpture, lyrical and instrumental music, interlacing love and death. He compares modern with premodern treatments of key subjects such as Salome and Mary Magdalene, supporting his text with an array illustrations. In conclusion, he traces this fantasy of carnal love beyond death to the Christian message of spiritual love beyond death, which modern, post-Christian culture has both discarded and salvaged. In "Love Beyond Death: The Anatomy of a Myth in the Arts", Rudolph Binion investigates the various art forms where the conjunction of love and death are found and provides an explanation for this unusual match. Supporting his text with some of the most sinister, alluring, and provocative images from the 19th century, Binion provides the reader with an account of the development of this artistic obsession, and its passage into the popular culture of the 20th century.