The Gender of Death in Art

"It is our perception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us." -Dam Hammarskjold

After discussing the connection between the gender of the word "death" and its representation as male or female in the artwork of certain cultures, I was curious and began researching. I came across an interesting article, "The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and History" which provides numerous examples of this connection but also points out a few peculiar exceptions. The author Karl S. Guthke presents several other explanations for gendered depictions of death. One is that gender of objects does not predispose individuals to form gendered images of objects.

This argument shaped by Greville Corbet argues that instead, semantic factors he calls "quasi-mythical, folkloric concepts" about abstractions such as death present in a community influence how its members view death. These are often developed very early in the culture's history. Guthke proposes that Graeco-Roman myths and Biblical tales forged the earliest lasting perceptions of the nature of death. For example, in the Bible, Satan is the fallen angel named Samuel while in mythology, Aurora, the Fates, and The Kers were all female representations of death.

When examining how languages without gendered words depict the concept, Guthke found that perceptions were based on semantic categories such as animate/inanimate, human/nonhuman, rational/irrational, strong/weak, a combination of these factors or several others not listed. He argues that these categorizations, formed by perceptions integrated into the cultures centuries and millennia ago, play more of a role in our perception of death than the gender of the word does.

Perhaps the gender of the word influences perceptions because of its literal assignment of gender to the abstraction; I believe the historic preconceptions play a bigger role. For example, in Scandinavian languages, death was masculine until gender disappeared from the language in the Middle Ages; it then became feminine. Once the influence of the grammatical gender was absent, Scandinavians relied on cultural indicators, which originated from the "primitive animism" of the culture's beginnings.

Examples of contradictions in literature and art are present in most languages, but here I will cite only Spanish, French and German cases. In Spanish "la muerte" is feminine, but in both Don Quixote and King Balthasar's Feast, death is represented as a male. In the first, he is a young male actor and in the latter, he is a nobleman with a sword in tow who identifies himself as the son of sin. In German, the piece "The Best Physician" by Alfred Kubin depicts death as a tall, slender woman dressed in a black robe and a large necklace. She is suffocating a dying man by placing her hand over his mouth. However, in German "der Tod" is a masculine word. In French, death is portrayed as a male in several cases despite it's femininity: "la mort." In Jean Grandville's piece "Journey to Eternity" death is a soldier dressed in military garb, a ceremonial headdress and holding a battle sword. He appears to be leading the group of mean behind him to their deaths. These are just a few examples of such contradictions. There are numerous others listed in the article.

This argument seems legitimate and is supported by numerous examples; however, what is excluded from the study is how the numbers compare. It's interesting that he found so many contradictory examples, but how many of these are there in relation to the number of depictions that follow the gender of the word?