In his oft-cited essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), Edgar Allan Poe stated that “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (165). With this statement Poe reached back to the male Anglo-Romantic poets who preceded him (Praz 209) while placing his finger firmly on the pulse of the Victorian age where the trope of the beautiful female corpse proved immensely popular across the literary canon from early in the century where it was featured, to diverse ends, in such poems as Robert Browning's chilling “Porphyria's Lover” (1836) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's melancholic “The Lady of Shalott” (1842), through to such compellingly bizarre fin-de-siècle novels as H. Rider Haggard's She (1887) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). This weirdly fetishized cultural object long held its grip on the Victorian imagination. The beautiful female corpse, often ritually and misogynistically killed into art, was used to consolidate established gender roles, memorialize the innocence and purity of unrequited love and engender meditations on aesthetic ideals, the ultimate fate of beauty and the ephemerality of life and empire. Evidence of its tremendously iconic nature beyond Britain's borders—in the European imaginary—is plentiful but perhaps best illustrated in the fact that Sarah Bernhardt, the renowned French actress, had over 50 publicity photos taken of herself in her coffin, her most valued piece of furniture that served to remind her of her own mortality and in which she sometimes slept or regularly reclined to learn her lines (184). According to Bram Dijkstra, in language suggestive of a type of pornographic fetishism, “photographs of her [Sarah Bernhardt] lying thus in near-excelsis did the rounds of afficionados and appropriately thrilled men everywhere” (45).

Elisabeth Bronfen has cogently and painstakingly unpacked the rich and adaptable semiotic nature and power of the Othered beautiful female corpse through which “culture can [simultaneously] repress and articulate its unconscious knowledge of death which it fails to foreclose even as it cannot express it directly” (xi). As Bronfen further explains in relation to the gendering of this figure, culture manages to translate, rather counterintuitively, its anxiety about the corruptible corpse—where identity and gender and beauty will be inevitably obliterated—into desire in the form of the beautiful woman.