The Elegiac Death Mask: A New Convention of Elegy

ABSTRACT In this dissertation, I unveil a previously unrecognized convention of elegy, the Elegiac Death Mask. I identify it in elegies, track its evolutionary swerves, and convey its role and meaning in elegy. The Elegiac Death Mask confirms death in the most direct sensory way possible. The EDM imagery is very powerful at articulo mortis. I hope to uncover the veil of words that has hidden this imagery for more than four centuries of Anglophone elegy. To do so, I will combine a range of critical theory with close readings of sixty-four Anglophone elegies that captured the Elegiac Death Mask (EDM) by forty-eight elegists from Edmund Spenser’s “Astrophel” (1596) through Carol Ann Duffy’s “Water” (2009). In the first step toward such a study, I define the EDM as the face-to-face sensory interactions between the mourner and the deceased at articulo mortis within a matrix of the human physiological senses. Second, I reveal the birth of the Elegiac Death Mask in the Hellenistic pastoral elegies of Bion of Smyrna and Moschus of Syracuse. From those roots, I show that the Anglophone EDM burst into elegy in Edmund Spenser’s “Astrophel” and experienced a paradigm shift in John Milton’s “Lycidas.” Third, I argue that from Milton onwards, the EDM experiences further evolutionary swerves while remaining surprisingly consistent within its two paradigms, Spenserian “demonstrations of love” and Miltonic “gory visages” through literary periods all the way into twentieth and twenty-first century elegies. Fourth, I discuss how the EDM provides the elegist with a powerful tool to capture those final sensory interactions between mourner and deceased at articulo mortis, thus deepening the experience for mourner, deceased, and reader. I conclude that such a study could also deepen our grasp of elegy. The EDM is a convention of elegy that provides a definitive final separative act that directly opens the potential for any of the several critical pathways to consolation the elegist may engage, from Pastoral through Freudian through Feminist, Modernist, and Contemporary.