MeganRitter

"Mrs. Pritchard would go thirty miles for the satisfaction of seeing someone laid away."

So Mrs. Pritchard gets her jollies from funerals? In the post I lined to I talk about how little children are generally unable to see another's tragedy, especially if that tragedy in some way benefits said children. I suppose in the rural Depression-era South a funeral might be an exciting social event: good food, companionship, a break from the drudgery of everyday life. I mentioned in class, and I'll point it out again here, that the Anne of Green Gables books are FULL of people who just love to go to funerals. This certainly can't be a characteristic of any one genre; Lucy Maud Montgomery and Flannery O'Connor lived at roughly the same time, but Montgomery was nothing close to Southern Gothic. Her work is actually the most famous in all of Canadian literature. So, no, she wasn't a Southern writer by any stretch of the imagination. Moreover, where Flannery's stories are dark with the depths of human folly and cruelty and just plain rotten luck, Montgomery's work reflects the sweetness of Victorian romance. Two women who could not be more different, writing at the same time on the same continent: Could there really be something to all this excitement over funerals? Has anyone else run across this theme elsewhere? Are we as a species so depraved, so incapable of mercy and sorrow, that at any time in our history we enjoyed going to funerals for the excitement or the food or perhaps the sheer drama? Are we really so crazy that we ever forgot to mourn a death and instead celebrated it for the chance to go have our jollies at a funeral?