On Coffins, Briefly
Stone sarcophagus taken out of tomb at Thebes by the Earl of Belmore, Feb. 1818. Hand-colored chromolithograph. George Scharf, artist (1788–1860); Charles Joseph Hullmandel, lithographer, 1789–1850. Issued in 1882 by J. Murry, Publisher, London. General Research Division, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 22, 2023.
What is it about coffins? Boat-like, they suggest travel as much as they do an invitation to repose, with elegant lines and careful carpentry. They might be sealed against invading waters, at least temporarily, and, so enabled, float un-sinking upon such frightful rivers of archetypal memory and the mind as Styx and Acheron, allowing for navigation in the gray borderlands between life and death.
Indeed, a natural affinity between water and so-purposed wood is hard to miss and has been widely observed, with examples from literature rising prominently on the tide. Most conspicuous among them is Queequeg’s coffin in Moby-Dick, where the analogy is made explicit, as Ishmael, the book’s eloquent narrator, recounts:
“[Queequeg] called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry he had learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket were laid in those same dark canoes, and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way. He added that he shuddered at the thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the usual sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the death-devouring sharks. No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket; and all the more congenial to him, a whaleman, that like a whaleboat, these coffin-canoes were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and much lee-way adown the dim ages.” (Moby-Dick, Chapter CX)
Richard Basehart as Ishmael floating with Queequeg’s Coffin in John Huston's film Moby-Dick (1954), photograph Erich Lessing for Magnum Agency.
And then there’s Dracula, who famously makes the voyage from his ancient Carpathian homeland to the land of Shakespeare in the belly of a ship, nestled within the close embrace of his body-long box—a vessel within a vessel—the count at once resting, extending his already long undead life, and journeying.
Max Schreck as Count Orlok rising from his coffin below deck on the Demeter in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony in Horror (1922), an unauthorized and unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The notion of coffin as vehicle for journeying and life-extension is carried further in the work of magicians and illusionists, who employ their coffin-like cabinets to suggest mutability of matter and the possibility of transformation (“the metamorphosis,” “the vanishing man,”) as well as the promise of immortality (“sawing a woman in half,” “the sword box”).
“Thurston, Kellar's Successor: The prisoner of Canton,” 1908. Lithograph. Publisher: Strobridge Litho Co. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 23, 2023.
“Professor Herrmann” (1923). Egyptian Hall Museum collection, Pasadena, California.
Harry Houdini, “overboard box escape” (ca. 1910–1926). Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 22, 2023.
But, of course, the idea of coffin as magical vessel of transformation and transit is as old as civilization itself, with Egypt having set the standard—their body-boats of stone still with us today, having floated on the seas of time like messages in bottles landing up on the strange shores of our museums, their messages carved in hieroglyphics on their sides.
Howard Carter (left), 1873–1939, and unidentified man seated beside coffin of King Tutankhamen, removing the consecration oils, which covered the third or innermost coffin, 1926. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.