In Jessica Mitford’s essay “The Story of Service”, she provides us with an overall negative view of the funeral “industry”. Although she doesn’t actually say it, she implies that funeral directors are trying to hide what is really going on. They purposely avoid the concept of death and try to hide it with a variety of ridiculous procedures, and pretend that it’s not all a fake show. Mitford even questions “is this all legal? The processes to which a dead body may be subjected are, after all, to some extent circumscribed by law” (Mitford43). Mitford continues to provide us with her biased negative view as she presents us her claims.
One claim that Mitford makes in her essay is that “the object of all this attention to the corpse, it must be remembered, is to make it presentable for viewing in an attitude of healthy repose” (Mitford47). I agree with this claim in the sense that i believe the whole reason for this process is just for the show at the end. All the gruesome procedures are just leading up to the final product. The funeral directors don’t care about the person that they’re operating on, because to them, it’s just a body that needs to look presentable for the public.
Another claim that is made is when Mitford writes how “embalming is indeed a most extraordinary procedure, and one must wonder at the docility of Americans who each year pay hundreds of millions of dollars for its perpetuation, blissfully ignorant of what it is all about, what is done, and how it is done” (Mitford44). I also agree with this statement, because it is true that not many people even know what goes on behind those ‘formaldehyde curtains’, but they don’t even bother to question it. Embalming gets done all the time, by millions of Americans, without a second thought behind it. When in reality, this procedure is actually quite morbid and would surprise many people, if they only knew the half of it.
Mitford uses a rather humorous tone when it comes to many of her thoughts on this topic, including when she writes about the funeral director, saying how “he has done everything in his power to make the funeral a real pleasure for everybody concerned. He and his team have given their all to score an upset victory over death” (Mitford51). I have a more complicated view on this claim, because i don’t necessarily believe that the funeral directors see this as a ‘victory’, or that they feel joy from watching this. I think that they are just doing their job, and yeah, they’re probably glad when everything works out as planned, but i think Mitford is being a bit dramatic when she writes this. I don’t that the funeral directors believe that they can make a funeral pleasurable in any way, they’re just trying to make it as nicely prepared as they can.
One last claim that i picked out of Mitford’s essay, is the passage where she writes that “embalming is not, as funeral providers habitually claim, a legal requirement even when the body of the deceased is to be on display in an open casket” A textbook, The Principles and Practices of Embalming, comments on this: ‘there is some question regarding the legality of much that is done within the preparation room'”(Mitford44). Here, Mitford uses the quote from a textbook, to back up her own views on how she believes that there needs to be some questioning with regards to if this procedure is legal. She seems to believe that embalming is unethical and that the embalmers are hiding things from the public eye.
aspenladieu 