«Tricks and Fun»: subversive pleasures at Newfoundland wakes

Death used to be an integral part of life that united home and community, but today we deny it. Dying persons are routinely sequestered from the living in specialized hospital wards. Professionally trained morticians prepare cadavers to be "life-like" for public display in funeral homes. Domestic funerary customs and rituals, community mechanisms of consolation and collective support for the bereaved, no longer appear to be with us. In Newfoundland, however, this loss is relatively new. Through the first half of this century, and on rare occasions even into recent decades (Buckley and Cartwright 1983), the traditional house wake in Newfoundland has been an important social context for the enactment of forms of mediation and magical agency, a liminal cultural scene in which various rites of passage for deceased persons have taken place. In a significant study of the traditional Newfoundland house wake, Gary R. Butler has shown how "a structured deployment of interior spaces" has assisted in resolving the