In 1955 the English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer published a short but influential article on death and mourning in the Anglo-American literary journal Encounter. His argument was that twentieth-century Western societies had replaced sex with death as the most shameful and forbidden of public topics, and that prudery in relation to matters of human mortality and bereavement had given rise, as it had previously done with sex, to a furtive appetite for pornographic phantasies of violence and destruction in mass market novels, horror comics and Hollywood films, as well as a shrill and self-righteous condemnation of such violence that was equally misguided. Following the death of his brother in 1961, from a cancer that the family doctor had recommended should be kept hidden from the patient himself, Gorer returned to the theme of the emotional repression, privatization and de-ritualization of grief, supporting his investigation with a survey of 1,628 adults in Britain combined with 80 follow-up interviews. The findings of his research were published in Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (1965), a book that is regularly cited as the first major sociological statement of the so-called ‘denial of death’ thesis.1 In this chapter I am going to summarize the main contours of this thesis before reviewing, in the chapter that follows, some of the criticisms that have been made of it.

The taboo of death and dying

In all nineteen cases of terminal cancer reported by the bereaved in Gorer's interviews, the dying had, like Gorer's own brother, been kept ignorant of the fatal nature of their illness, ostensibly to shield them from despair, but in Gorer's view also to protect the living from having to deal with the dying person's misery or fear.