Social Drama of Diana's Death
When Diana Taylor describes the social drama surrounding Princess Diana's death, she describes the "quasi-sacred" realm on which an "illusion of a cohesive, 'universal' audience" is played out (135). Like Di's death, the terrorist attacks of September 11 offered a global spectacle. September 11 was a social drama that thoroughly follows the Turner model outlined by Taylor. The breach of norm and crises were spectacularly visible and immediately apparent. Similarly, the redressive action and reintegration phases have been played out to construct a sense of universality. Joan Didion also constructs universality in her story "After Life." A prelude that includes tribute to September 11 tricks the reader into anticipating that what comes next is a personal memoir of a 9/11 tragedy. When it becomes clear that Didion is describing an unrelated death, the reader has already accepted Didion's universality. The reader feels a part of a fabricated social drama. Didion's story is compelling because it is about human universals like "death...illness...probability and luck...good fortune and bad...marriage and children and memory...grief...the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends," (2). Her tragedy contains un
When readers encounter Didion's tale they also mourn for the death of a man they didn't know, and sympathize with his widow. Early in the story Didion describes how she had to revisit the memory through what she told to others. By writing down her tragedy Didion involves each and every reader in her story. Didion delves into difficult and dangerous emotional territory by addressing the suddenness of her husband's death, contrasting that feeling from the one that occurs after a more predictable loss of loved ones who were old or infirm. Her universal assumptions seem slightly annoying because the author assumes that her experience is shared by all her readers. Writing is not just recording for Didion; writing is an active process of remembering. "After Life" immortalizes the processing of grief: showing that suffering is a universal human experience and that any death, of someone we know or not, can become a social drama. With Diana's death, the Crown denied her belonging to the family and thus denigrated her memory in the eyes of the British public. It affects the authors own experience by creating a permanent legacy of the event and her reaction to it. Didion notes on page 3: "meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs," (3). iversal elements and it therefore appears as a social drama. Ordinariness gave way to extraordinariness. A core theme of "After Life" is the realization that a tragedy punctuates an otherwise ordinary day, week, month, or year. The title of "After Life" suggests that Didion sought such immortality for her husband and for herself.
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Acceptance Essays
