The Loved One (1948) is a dark satire by English author Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). Dennis Barlow is a British writer trying to make it in Hollywood. While planning his roommate's funeral, he discovers the American funeral industry's strange and predatory business practices. In The Loved One, Waugh uses dark humor and satire to poke fun at American attitudes toward death and the snobbery of the British expat community in Los Angeles.
The Loved One: Summary
In Britain, Dennis Barlow enjoyed moderate success as a poet and moved to Los Angeles after WWII to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood. After losing his job at a movie studio, Dennis is forced to work at Happier Hunting Ground, a pet funeral home. Sir Francis Abercrombie, an actor and important figure in the British expatriate community in LA, visits Dennis to warn him that his current position reflects poorly on the community and pressures him to find a better career or leave Los Angeles.
Dennis is a detached and sometimes dishonest character. Did Waugh intentionally make him a dislikable character?
When Dennis' roommate commits suicide, Abercrombie sends Dennis to take care of the service at the Whispering Glades Funeral Home. There he meets a beautiful young woman called Aimee Thanatogenos, who works as a junior cosmetician. While she explains the complex embalming and preparation process, Dennis begins to sense a spark of attraction. Aimee also speaks of her deep admiration of the funeral home's senior mortician Mr. Joyboy.
Fig. 1 - Dennis is initially shocked by the flashy and expensive funeral services in America.
Dennis returns days later to view the body and meets Mr. Joyboy, who explains his embalming process in graphic detail. He also explains the extravagant extras and pricing system he uses to maximize profits. Since Dennis is struggling to write a eulogy for his roommate, Aimee takes him on a tour of the cemetery for inspiration. The pair discuss poetry, and Dennis recites other poets' works and passes them off as his own. Aimee compliments him on his talent and recognizes she may be falling in love.
Torn between her developing love for Dennis and deep admiration for Mr. Joyboy, which she thinks could be love, Aimee writes to an advice columnist known as "The Guru Brahmin." In reality, the "Guru" is a group of writers who respond to her letter by suggesting she marry the more stable Mr. Joyboy. Aimee ignores the advice and instead agrees to marry Dennis.
Dennis passes off the works of famous poets like Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) as his own. The source of one of the poems Dennis quotes remained a mystery for many years. In 1981, scholars finally identified the prose as the work of English poet Richard Middleton (1882-1911).
Embarrassed by his lowly role at the pet cemetery, Dennis hides his job from Aimee. During a pet funeral, Dennis meets a pastor and realizes preaching is a much more lucrative job. Meanwhile, a rejected Joyboy becomes bitter about Aimee's engagement with Dennis. When he discovers Dennis has passed off other poets' work as his own, he arranges to reveal Dennis' actual job by arranging for Aimee to attend a service at the pet cemetery.
When Aimee discovers the truth, she breaks off the engagement and agrees to marry Joyboy but continues to have reservations. After a distraught Dennis confronts Aimee, she worries she may have made a mistake by choosing Joyboy. Desperate for advice, she calls the offices of "The Guru Brahmin." One of the writers, in a drunken state, scolds her indecisiveness and hangs up. Unable to make a decision, Aimee feels completely lost and attempts to overdose on barbiturates. After waking the following day, Aimee goes to Whispering Glades and injects herself with embalming fluid.
Fig. 2 - Highly toxic, embalming fluids are used to preserve dead bodies.Mr. Joyboy discovers Aimee's body on the premises and fears the scandal could ruin his life and business. He asks Dennis to help him cover up the death and Dennis tells him to come back after closing time. In the meantime, Abercrombie confronts Dennis about his plans to become a preacher and begs him to return to England to spare the British community further embarrassment. Dennis agrees to leave but tells Abercrombie he needs money for the airfare. Abercrombie promises to raise the money and return.
Aimee struggles to make decisions and often reaches out to a love columnist about significant life choices. What point is Waugh trying to make with Aimee's indecisiveness?
Joyboy returns to the pet funeral home with Aimee's body. Dennis plans to incinerate the remains and return to England. He reasons that people will assume Aimee has run away with him. In return for disposing of the body, Dennis asks Joyboy to cash a comprehensive insurance policy and give it to him for airfare and expenses. Dennis cremates Aimee and, in a moment of dark humor, arranges for Joyboy to be added to the funeral home, meaning he will receive a memorial card every year commemorating his beloved "pet."
The Loved One: Characters
Here is a look at the main characters from Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One.
Dennis Barlow
The novel's protagonist is an English poet struggling to make it in the movie industry. Forced to work in a funeral home for pets, Dennis has become an embarrassment to the stuffy group of British expatriates who live in Los Angles. Dennis is often shown to be aloof and detached from other people. As he struggles to find purpose in his life, he feels limited and frustrated by the expectations of the other British expats.
Aimee Thanatogenos
Aimee is the junior cosmetician at Whispering Glades Funeral home and the center of the novel's love triangle. While Waugh depicts Aimee as well-educated and highly skilled at her job, he also depicts her as unable to make decisions. This is reflected in her childish devotion to the founder of Whispering Glades and her urge to get life advice from a relationship columnist. Her first name is French for "loved one," and her surname is the Greek word for "born of death."
Mr. Joyboy
Mr. Joyboy, the manager and senior mortician at Whispering Glades, is in love with Aimee. Extremely talented and ruthless, Joyboy successfully manipulates grieving families into spending excessive amounts of money. His technique depends upon preparing the corpses with a ghoulish grin known as the "Joyboy smile." He is physically unattractive but has a magnetic personality which he uses to coerce those around him.
After Evelyn Waugh's book Brideshead Revisited (1945) became an international bestseller, the author was invited to America by Hollywood executives interested in making a film adaption. Waugh's first visit to America proved to be a miserable experience for the writer but also provided him with the inspiration for The Loved One.
While the rigid British class system dictated that servers never converse with guests, in America, Waugh was shocked by cheery servers who inundated him with personal questions. He found the bustling streets of New York overwhelming and complained about the city's ugly skyscrapers.
When the writer reached Los Angles, things went from bad to worse as the studio executives ultimately failed to understand the religious undertones of Brideshead Revisited and pressured the writer to produce a more simplistic screenplay of his work.
Fig. 3 - The Forest Lawn Memorial park, also known as the Hollywood Hills cemetery, remains a popular tourist attraction.
On the advice of friends, Waugh visited Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the resting place for many of Hollywood's most famous actors, directors, and producers. Expecting the cemetery to be a beautiful and serene site, Waugh instead found it a tacky and ugly abomination. The graveyard was full of loud and colorful headstones which contained speakers that piped in birdsong and soothing music. Whereas graveyards in England were solemn resting places, Waugh saw the American sensibility towards death as an overblown and distasteful display of wealth.
Waugh began to explore the American funeral home industry and heavily researched the book Embalming Techniques (1917) by Hubert L. Eaton, the founder of Forest Lawn. His research led to the creation of the darkly witty satire of The Loved One.
Waugh would make three further visits to America over the next several years, where he engaged in speaking tours and carried out the research. During these trips, his heart softened toward America as he explored the country's spiritual and educational areas.
The Loved One: Themes
Evelyn Waugh uses The Loved One to explore the American culture and the country's approach to death.
Commercialization and avoidance of death
Waugh's trip to America left him with severe culture shock, particularly concerning American attitudes towards death. In England, death and funerals were somber affairs that did not shy away from the inescapable sadness of loss, while the American culture had a more sentimental and glitzy approach.
In the novel, Mr. Joyboy constantly upsells bereaved families on useless and expensive additions such as satin lining for the coffin's interior. Waugh saw these predatory practices as exploiting Americans' inability to deal with death. By preparing corpses to look life-like and happy, Americans did not have to face the finality of death. The bright, shininess of the coffins and graveyards ultimately serve as a distraction to take people's minds off the gravity of death.
Waugh felt this avoidance of death was extremely unhealthy and childish. As American culture became more focused on ideas of comfort and convenience, he argues that Americans would become increasingly unable to cope with the darker realities of life, most notably death.
The Loved One: Genre
During the early stages of his career, Evelyn Waugh was considered one of Britain's leading satirists. Works like Vile Bodies (1930) and Decline and Fall (1928) mocked the British class system and stuffy aristocracy. However, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Waugh turned to more serious literary styles to explore his spirituality and conversion to Catholicism.
The Loved One is a return to his roots as a satirist. The novel uses dark humor and cutting wit to ridicule the American funeral industry and the shallowness of the British expat community in Los Angeles. Waugh uses the dark contrast between Mr. Joyboy's add-ons and the graphic descriptions of the actual preparation process. The embalmer and beautician work to give the corpses gruesome smiles, which are supposed to be comforting to the family but are, in reality, horrifying.
While characters like Mr. Joyboy pretend they offer solace and comfort to the grieving families, Waugh depicts them as predators taking advantage of vulnerable people. Instead of helping people come to terms with death, they allow them to ignore it with shiny distractions and expensive extras.
The novel's subtitle, An Anglo-American Tragedy, refers to Waugh's belief that English and American cultures are incompatible and will never see eye-to-eye. While much of the book attacks the shallowness of American culture, Waugh also presents the British expat community as highly hypocritical. They constantly complain about American culture yet also display some of its worst traits, including an obsession with money and social status. This snobbery is ultimately used against them as Dennis scams a substantial amount of money out of the community.
The Loved One: Quotes
The Loved One is Evelyn Waugh's dark satire on the funeral home industry and the shallowness of American culture. Here is a look at some of the novel's darkly humorous quotes.
"It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard." - (Ch. 1)
Lord Ambercrombie, the leader of the British expat community in Los Angeles, often complains about the vapid nature of Americans. While some of the observations on America come from Waugh's disastrous visit to the country in 1947, the novel also mocks the shallow snobbery of the British abroad.
"Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed a postcard would go to Mr Joyboy: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you." -(Ch. 10)
At the novel's end, Dennis adds Joyboy's name to the Happier Hunting Ground mailing list. This type of dark humor highlights the absurdity of how America treats its dead. The novel constantly contrasts an overly sentimentalized approach to death with the graphic realities of funeral homes.
The Loved One - Key takeaways
- The Loved One is a dark satire by English author Evelyn Waugh.
- The novel tells the story of a British writer who explores the profit-driven world of American funeral homes.
- Waugh was inspired to write the book after a disastrous visit to America, where he was shocked by the culture's approach to death and burial.
- The Loved One uses dark satire to criticize the predatory practices of the American funeral industry.
- The novel employs dark humor and satire to target American culture and the shallowness of the British expat community in America.
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