As the gravediggers start to bury Paddy Dignam's coffin under
"heavy clods of clay," Bloom thinks, "And if he was alive all
the time? Whew! By jingo, that would be awful! No, no: he is
dead, of course. Of course he is dead. Monday he died. They
ought to have some law to pierce the heart and make sure or an
electric clock or a telephone in the coffin and some
kind of a canvas airhole. Flag of distress." Bloom's alarm,
and his proposed remedies, are not peculiar to him. They were
a pronounced cultural phenomenon in the Victorian era.
In his book At Home (2010), Bill Bryson discusses
Victorian anxieties about death: "Edgar Allan Poe exploited
one particular fear to vivid effect in his story The
Premature Burial in 1844" (399-400). (The Cask of
Amontillado and The Fall of the House of Usher
play on the same phobia.) "Catalepsy, a condition of paralysis
in which the victim merely seemed dead while actually
being fully conscious, became the dread disease of the day.
Newspapers and popular magazines abounded with stories of
people who suffered from its immobilizing effects" (400).
Bryson recounts the story of a woman who broke out of such a
state just as her coffin was about to be buried, and he
mentions studies in New York City and London in the second
half of the 19th century that unearthed gruesome evidence
suggestive of people having died, conscious, inside their
coffins.
The morbid fear of suffering this fate became so widespread
that it acquired a name, taphephobia or taphophobia
(from taphos, grave). People began leaving
instructions that their hearts should be removed before burial
or their arteries cut open—a practice reflected in Bloom's
thought that a law should be passed requiring undertakers "to
pierce the heart." Entrepreneurs also began designing
"safety coffins" just like the one that Bloom imagines. Bryson
describes one model with "a cord, which opened a breathing
tube for air and simultaneously set off a bell and started a
flag waving at ground level. An Association for
Prevention of Premature Burial was established in Britain in
1899 and an American society was formed the following year.
Both societies suggested a number of exacting tests to be
satisfied by attending physicians before they could safely
declare a person dead," such as "holding a hot iron against
the deceased's skin" (401).
Reliable evidence is hard to come by, but people were
probably buried alive by mistake fairly often before the 20th
century, and few human fears are greater. Bloom's train of
thought is representative not only of Victorian neuroses and
Victorian reformist impulses. It coheres also with the
skepticism and sensitive imagination that he displays
throughout the cemetery chapter as he refuses to be comforted
by the usual bromides and platitudes. And it suggests that his
empathetic responses to human and animal suffering do not stop
even at the grave's edge.
