The Loved One

The love triangle among Aimée, Dennis, and Mr. Joyboy emerges in these chapters. Mr. Joyboy woos Aimée by sending her smiling corpses, while Dennis enchants her with poetry that she thinks he’s writing—but the verse is mostly from famous poets. Aimée’s admiration for Mr. Joyboy’s work shows how blind she is to the profit motive behind the expensive sculpting of the corpses. Instead, she views it all as a sacred form of art. In addition, the fact that Aimée doesn’t recognize the work of any of the famous poets that Dennis quotes and thinks Dennis wrote the verses highlights the British perception of Americans as innocent and naive. In fact, Dennis defines his relationship with Aimée in those terms in Chapter 7 when he tells his boss that he is the “protagonist of a Jamesian problem” (107) and explains that all of Henry James’s stories were about “American innocence and European experience” (107). It’s obvious that he considers himself the seasoned European in the relationship.

Waugh articulates his personal view of embalming as a ghoulish practice through the eyes of the protagonist, Dennis. Upon seeing Sir Francis’s pickled and painted corpse, Dennis describes it as “ageless as a tortoise and as inhumane; a painted and smirking obscene travesty by comparison with which the devil-mask Dennis had found in the noose was a festive adornment” (67). However, in another example of his lack of honesty in his relationship with Aimée, Dennis hides his opinion about Sir Francis’s corpse from her because he knows that she regards her work as art.

Sir Francis’s funeral in Chapter 5 accentuates the stratification of the Hollywood movie industry. Status in the industry determines whether one attends the wake or the funeral:

The stars, the producers, the heads of departments would come next day for the interment. That afternoon they were represented by underlings. It was like the party held on the eve of a wedding to view the presents, attended only by the intimate, the idle and the unimportant. The Yes-men were there in force. Man proposed. God disposed. These bland, plump gentlemen signaled their final abiding assent to the arrangement, nodding into the blind mask of death (68).

Interestingly, the film stars and producers make a show of attending Sir Francis’s funeral even though the studio didn’t consider him important enough to inform him of his firing before giving his office to someone else.

In addition, this section clearly establishes how important religion and spirituality are to Aimée, as she reaches out to a spiritual guru for advice. Ironically, Aimée revealed earlier that her father “lost his money to religion,” (80) apparently scammed by a con artist or cult leader. Now, Aimée appears to be headed down a similar path, as Guru Brahmin later turns out to be a charlatan. In a sense, his role is parallel to that of the funeral home, which taps into people’s sense of spiritual obligation to sell expensive burial products. In a way, Aimée is being hoodwinked both by the Guru Brahmin and the funeral home because of her sole focus on the spiritual aspects of life and her apparent ignorance of underlying monetary motivations.

The American-British cultural rift reemerges in these chapters, but Aimée gives it an American slant. She complains to Guru Brahmin about Dennis being “Un-American” (90) and cynical. When Dennis suggests that Aimée’s promotion to embalmer will allow them to be married, Aimée tells him, “An American man would despise himself for living on his wife” (97).

The lingering effects and memories of World War II manifest themselves in this section. Dennis recalls how his wartime experience sparked his poetry writing:

[His poems] had taken their shapes in frigid war-time railway journeys—the racks piled high with equipment, the dimmed lights falling on a dozen laps, the faces above invisible, cigarette-smoke mixing with frosty breath; the unexplained stops, the stations dark as the empty footways. He had written them in Nissen huts […] (75).

Aimée’s avoidance of war work during World War II led her into the mortuary business: “You see I graduated in ’43 and lots of girls of my class went to war work but I was never at all interested in that,” she tells Dennis (81). She then explains that she found a job at a hair salon and was eventually asked to style the hair of one of her favorite clients who had just died. Ironically, both Dennis and Aimée become familiar with and to some extent desensitized to death during the war, albeit under different circumstances.