Review of Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found by Frances Larson

*Severed* by Frances Larson (2014). Published by Liveright.

In the world, there are some books one would never existed out in the wild, but when you’re wandering your local library and spot them on the shelves, it seems like it’s too good to be true.

I’ve always had a strange interest about guillotines since learning about the French Revolution in the seventh grade; my interest evolved as I grew older because I was interested specifically in how people were fascinated by the guillotine as a public spectacle. Why did people flock to public executions and treat them like a theatrical event?

I was in my library’s history section, bored, looking for something to read over the summer break when I saw Severed in the section with all the other books on French literature. Now, this isn’t a book that’s exclusively on France.

It’s more European ideology based and how the ideas of heads were viewed in Europe, and the closest you get beyond that is how the colonial voyagers would go to indigenous islands and see how the native people there shrunk heads, which then made them want to collect native heads.

I ended up reading this book in three sittings, and with pictures to back up certain section, I will definitely say this was an interesting read overall.

Onwards with the review!

A history of how heads—and losing them—symbolizes something more in Western culture.

We begin Severed with the practices of indigenous people. There’s an opening section about shrunken heads and how they became something that were commodified with the arrival of the Westerners to islands, as well as bits about how during World War II, the Americans who were stationed on the Pacific islands often collected the heads of killed Japanese soldiers.

Whether they found the heads on the ground, they would collect the heads (one man had an entire sack of them), despite the military claiming to ban them, and then would naturally dry them and peel the skin off.

That was a history I had no idea about and was mildly horrified to read, as there was one story about how a soldier sent a Japanese soldier’s skull to his girlfriend back home, and she was photographed with it on her desk.

Then there were soldiers who used the heads as company, such as the American soldier who contemplates the skull’s life and what he left behind with his death. For some, when the skulls had to be sent back to Japan years later so surviving family members could have the remains of their loved ones, it becomes a family object that they’re sad to send back to where it belongs.

We then transition into beheadings as a public spectacle. A fact I found interesting was that most medieval methods of cutting off a head were often inefficient and the head wouldn’t go clean off, so the executioner would have to hack off the person’s head.

Sometimes they didn’t die immediately, which was even more horrifying to realize. The crowds, if the spectacle wasn’t good enough for them and the head didn’t come off quick enough, would go and kill the executioner if they were displeased enough.

So then there’s the bit of the French Revolution, which introduces the guillotine. Before, when the public executions were a spectacle, it now became something sanitary. Up to seventy heads were being chopped off per day, which made it a routine procedure.

One of the more interesting anecdotes here is when the king’s mistress is being lead up to the chopping block, and she breaks her character. In the French Revolution one was expected to be monotonous and brave when they went up to the guillotine, but she was screaming and crying.

This put doubt into the audience, who wondered then if she should be killed. The spell was broken and suddenly there was sympathy.

At the same time others, like Madame Tussauds, profited off the entire system in place. She’d go around making death masks and they’d go on display, giving her renown in neighboring countries like England.

This is something I found myself pondering throughout the book: the buying and exchanging of death that was consistently appearing. One would collect heads or pay to see the spectacle, which says a lot about humans as a whole in my humble academic opinion.

Overall Thoughts

There’s a lot of interesting tidbits scattered through the book. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of collecting heads and their removal, and how it changes and morphs depending on the person who’s being discussed.

There’s a guy who digs up the grave of a musician he thought was brilliant in the early 1800s, then he puts the musician’s skull on his mantle and tells all his guests about who it is when they come to visit. Apparently that was a big thing at the time, and the leading intellectuals and artists lived in fear that their bones would be excavated and put on display.

Overall, I found these facts to be interesting. I wouldn’t reread the book, but I am definitely glad I read it. It’s for a specific kind of person though, one who approaches such topics with academic intrigue.

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