THE DANCE OF DEATH IN THE WORKS OF STRINDBERG, ENSOR, AND MANN: A STUDY IN THE GROTESQUE

The Dance of Death is a subject most closely associated with the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but this subject can be found in every century since the fourteenth in literary, visual, and musical works. This dissertation concerns itself with the Dance of Death in the works of Strindberg, Ensor, and Mann.Strindberg's Dance of Death I and II (1901), Ensor's paintings and graphic works done between 1880 and 1900, and Mann's Der Tod in Venedig (1912) are each analyzed in detail to determine what elements they retain from the traditional Dance of Death, how they add to or change the subject, and how they each employ the grotesque.The Dance of Death in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries changes from the universal statement found in the Middle Ages to a more personal statement about the artist's confrontation with his own death. But the works still retain a procession, the confrontation between the living and Death, and the themes of the power, suddenness, inevitability of death, and death as the great equalizer. The modern images are more economical and concentrated and emphasize the absurdity of the individual confronted with their own death.The Dance of Death is basically a procession of the living and Death in which the themes of the power of death, the suddenness and inevitability of death, and the equality of all mortals in the face of death is stressed. The touchstone used to analyze the works considered is the aesthetic of the grotesque. The grotesque is defined as the paradox of the ludicrous and the horrible, the comparison between ordinary reality and a distortion of it, the tension created through the juxtaposition of the comic and the terrible, and the non-resolution of these opposites.