Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century

Author(s): Margaret Higonnet

Source: Poetics Today , 1985, Vol. 6, No. 1/2, The Female Body in Western Culture:
Semiotic Perspectives (1985), pp. 103-118
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1772124

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 SUICIDE: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE
FEMININE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY*

MARGARET HIGONNET
English, Connecticut

The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most

topic in the world.
E. A. Poe, The Philosophy of Composition

I. INTERPRETATIONS: SUICIDE AS SIGN

Suicide, like woman and truth, is both fetish and taboo

gesture, it is doubly so for women who inscribe on the
cultural reflections and projections, affirmation and negat
nineteenth century, women's suicide becomes a cultur
As Baudelaire suggests, the captain of this century -
Goethe's Werther and Durkheim's Le Suicide - is death.
To take one's life is to force others to read one's death. For when
we categorize a death we do not record a pure fact (if any such
exist). Rather, we produce a reading that depends upon the physical
and subjective context: natural or unnatural death, homicide or
suicide. As with all human actions, we ask questions about free will
and determinism. In the case of suicide the hermeneutic task is
particularly elusive. Only when the primary evidence has be
destroyed does the trace exist to be followed and interprete
Interpreters bring to the task different conceptions of the natur
different private and public aims or fears. Consequently, almos
century after Durkheim we do not have reliable national or
comparative statistics, a problem that undermines Durkheim's own
arguments. The difficulty or even impossibility of reaching a
"correct" reading has led some to consider suicide a random
phenomenon that corresponds to the infinite variety of human
motivations. Women's voluntary deaths are even more difficult to
read than men's because women's autonomy is always in question
and their intentions are opaque.

* Long conversations with Patrice and Anne Higonnet helped shape this article; Guy
Cardwell, Carolyn Heilbrun, Susan Suleiman, and Irene Tayler helped test my ideas.

Poetics Today, Vol. 6:1-2 (1985) 103-118

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104 MARGARET HIGONNET

To embrace death is at the same time to read one's own life. The
act is a self-barred signature; its destructive narcissism seems to some
particularly feminine. Some choose to die in order to shape their
lives as a whole; others fragment life to generate the energy of fission
or elision. In their deaths, many are obsessed with projecting an
image, whether to permit aesthetic contemplation or to provoke a
revolution in thought. The desire to control one's own life may
extend into manipulation of the lives of survivors - and women are
thought to be particularly prone to this motive. The act may be
dedicated, like a poem, to someone in particular. In order to limit
the intrinsic ambiguity of the act, many suicides are doubled by
explanatory texts. Cato reads Plato's Phaedrus. Madame Butterfly's
intertext is a sword inscription: "Death with honor is better than life
without honor." Lucretia must explain her gesture to distinguish
herself from other women: nec ulla impudica lucretiae exemplo
vivet. Language becomes action; action becomes and yet requires
language.
The very means of suicide may be taken as a key to motive. Thus
Freud finds sexual wish fulfillments: "To poison oneself is to
become pregnant; to drown is to bear a child; to throw oneself from
a height is to be delivered of a child" (Freud 1955, Vol. 18: 162n).
The ways in which women choose to die differ from those chosen by
men. Men jump, and shoot themselves. Today, women more often
take sleeping pills, drink household poisons, or turn on the kitchen
stove, although guns are gaining. The cynical view is that women
deliberately employ ineffective methods.
In fact suicide is nowhere a predominantly female problem.
Women commit suicide roughly half as often as men. Modem
statistics for the voluntary deaths of women are more uniform from
country to country than for any other factor of analysis, such as
religion, wealth, or health. Women's sex protects them, even in
countries that institutionalize female suicide, like India. At the same
time, the tables indicate that women make attempts that do not end
in death two to three times as often as men (Baechler, Durkheim,
Shneidman and Farberow). When women represent the death of the
self on their bodies, they do so in a gesture that remains open-ended.
These statistics are a rough measure of actuality. They directly
conflict with our mythic vision of suicide as feminine. As a general
matter we seem to imagine death as a return to the mother. More
specifically, as Freud argues in "The Theme of the Three Caskets,"
we identify the choice of death with the third casket - the pale and
dumb third sister, the White Goddess, or Atropos. Thus in Mayan
mythology, the supreme ritual offering of one's own life was
represented by a goddess, Ixtab (Dresden Codex, Museo Nacional de
Antropologia, Mexico D.F.). The perception of suicide in the modern
West betrays a far more ambivalent symbolic function given to both

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 FEMININE SUICIDE 105

women and death by bourgeois culture. At leas

century, this performative utterance has been in
increasingly feminine symptoms, whether of
illness. Indeed, it is startling to realize the
nineteenth century feminized suicide.
The historical interest of the subject lies
contradictions it makes manifest. What concerns us most here is the
gap between what we know about this act when it is undertaken by
women, and its representation and interpretation.

II. SUICIDE IN AN AGE OF HIGH CAPITALISM

That ideologically grounded interpretation determines t

over suicide and even its "factual" perception can be s
radical shift in attitudes at the end of the eighteenth centur
to the shift in epistemes Foucault and critics like M. H. A
traced from Linnaean classification and mechanism to an
organicism, is the shift from a moralistic but potentially he
of suicide to a more scientific yet demeaning acceptance of t
illness.
Classical instances of women's suicide are perceived as masculine:
Antigone, Cleopatra, Hasdrubal's wife, and Arria, who stabbed
herself to encourage her husband and said, Paete, non dolet.
Charlotte Corday, the self-appointed Girondiste martyr of the
French Revolution, is one of the last in this tradition. She was
immediately perceived as a man, a Cato, although her body was
subjected posthumously to a degrading sexual examination sketched
by one of David's pupils.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, this violation of social norms
is treated as a malady; the victims of suicidal depression are subject
to "vapors," to be treated by better food, travel, or elevating
literature. To "cure" the symptoms of such radical choice is to deny
their voluntary nature. In effect, the very notion of suicide as an
intentional act dissipates in the course of its scientific reassessment.
An extreme instance of the newly passive female suicide may be
found in the story of a French lover who pushed his pregnant
mistress into the Seine. "We live," he explained, "in an age of
suicide; this woman gave herself to death."
To medicalize suicide is to feminize it. Since much of the scientific
literature perceived woman as an abnormal man, the link between
her genetic defect and suicidal illness was readily made. Furthermore,
the traditional perception of women's weak character, which I will
discuss in the next section, helped assimilate them to the image of
suicide as a phenomenon of mental breakdown. The feminization of
suicide was also prepared by the eighteenth-century cult of the Man
of Sensibility, which reformulated the Greek congeries of meanings
around pathos: passion, passive suffering, pathos.

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106 MARGARET HIGONNET

In the Romantic period, the focus of aesthetics s

(Aristotle) to character (Herder, Coleridge). Accor
depictions of suicide, the focus shifts from func
the same time, the stock motives for suicide na
become more "feminine" than in classical times. After the French
Revolution voluntary death is depoliticized. This pattern is visible
the case of men as well as women. The century starts with t
Catonian, republican sacrifice of a Jacopo Ortiz, but his story i
already Wertherized: an impossible love occupies far more verbal
emotional space than the plight of Napoleonic Italy. Keats yearns
experience love perpetually - "or else swoon to death." One of t
great expressions of Romantic idealism, Shelley's "Adonais" clos
its poetic quest with an image that precisely marks the new
perception of suicide as somehow passive: his spirit's bark is "driv
far from the shore of life. Later in the century, Wagner lin
Schopenhauer's darkly idealist view that life's aim is death w
Romantic, transcendental love in his Tristan and Isolde; the
symmetry of the lovers' duets underscores the new identification of
men's experience with women's.
This nineteenth-century reorientation of suicide toward love,
passive self-surrender, and illness seems particularly evident in the
literary depiction of women; their self-destruction is most often
perceived as motivated by love, understood not only as loss of self
but as surrender to an illness: le mal d'amour. The eighteenth
century still offers in Emilia Galotti a forceful suicide like Lucretia's
that links sexual to political abuse of power. The great literary
suicides of the nineteenth century, Emma Bovary and Anna
Karenina, imply disintegration and social victimization rather than
heroic self-sacrifice. The means of death are accordingly remytholo-
gized. Classically, an Antigone as weaver of her own destiny hanged
herself. Eighteenth-century heroines like Clarissa accommodated the
official condemnation of suicide by a form of anorexia, in which
they lingered pallidly, relishing in anticipation the reception of their
message. Gradually, in what we may call a development of the
Ophelia complex, the suicidal solution is linked to dissolution of the
self, fragmentation to flow. The abandoned woman drowns, as it
were, in her own emotions.
The social illnesses that seemed central to Durkheim are complexly
linked to contaminated femininity. Ironically, the woman who
attempts to escape from the patriarchal economy of sexual exchange
becomes entangled in the symbolic nets of the new consumer
economy. Her struggle to liberate herself emotionally is overlaid by
signs of profligacy; these in turn are interpreted as symptoms of a
degeneracy whose only cure is death. This logic projects onto
women's unleashed sexuality the causes as well as the costs of

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 FEMININE SUICIDE 107

commodity fetishism; the century exorcises

sacrificing the old fetish to the new.
It is revealing that the most famous literary su
period is a Man of Sensibility whose virtues turn out to be
symptomatic of his fatally feminine susceptibility. Werther's weakness
is indicated from the outset: hypersensitive, too excited by Nature to
be able to read, unable to control his feelings or to consider the
pragmatic situation in shaping his behavior. In his famous debate
with Albert, who condemns suicide as foolish, vicious, and cowardly,
Werther argues that to break down under passion is "a fatal illness."
"Human nature has its limitations... I find it just as astonishing to say
that a man who takes his own life is a coward, as it would be
improper to call a man a coward who dies of a pernicious fever"
(Goethe 1962:59). When Albert objects to Werther's generalizations,
the best instance of a natural and inevitable "sickness" Werther can
find to defend his position is that of a girl who had drowned herself
when abandoned by a lover who was "her all." Werther associates h
own "fever" with madness and with women destroyed by love. His
insistent quest for mirrors of his own condition reflects the
(feminine) narcissism that Hagstrum notes - "Werther is driven, deep
within, by love of self and love of similitude" (1980: 263). His tale
framed by allusions to Leonore, whose unrequited love for him
apparently destroyed her, and to Lessing's Emilia Galotti. Among th
several male foils to Werther's plight, the closest is Heinrich, th
former secretary of Lotte's father; Heinrich too is feminized,
collecting herbs and flowers in an Ophelia-like madness. Werther's
death is thus marked by many analogues that characterize it a
feminine.

III. FRAGMENTED IDENTITY

Suicide is interpretation. Its subject-object has always b

and ethos. The problem of women's identity as separat
potentially part of society emerges with particular cla
nineteenth century; indeed, the "woman question" cry
issues of bourgeois individualism. The earlier, carnivales
'"woman on top" becomes the madwoman in the attic; Bertha
Rochester's plunge from the roof doubles Jane Eyre's flight into the
unknown barren heath. Women's self-sought deaths are ambiguous
within this historical context. They may affirm identity or erase it.
The breakdown of one's sense of identity is conventionally
considered a major factor in suicide by modern psychologists like
Homey or Farberow. It is assumed that women commit suicide less
often than men because they have weaker or more fluid ego
boundaries. Recent work by Dinnerstein and Chodorow indicates
that girls form their identity in a gender continuum with their

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108 MARGARET HIGONNET

mothers, whereas boys use gender distinction as a me

separate identity. Because of their identity in gen
mothers or because of social training, women have
perceive themselves through their relationships to fam
as isolated individuals.
Where literature links suicide to the disintegration of identity, the
catalysts differ by gender. Men identify themselves with their
political standing, their heroic self-image. We can, of course, point to
instances of devotional male suicide parallel to the woman's suttee:
Saul's swordbearer, or Antony's Eros. But the dominant example of
male disintegration would be a figure like Sophocles' Ajax, whose
military dignity has been destroyed along with the animals he
slaughtered in his madness. And even Ajax rationally chooses death
as the only way to salvage the honor sullied when Odysseus won
Achilles' shield.
For our fictions of women, suicidal disintegration far more often
has to do with their sexual and amorous relationships. Traditionally,
myths of female suicide have focused on two themes: defeated love
and chastity. The insistent representation of women - rather than
men - who commit suicide for love complements the familiar
assumption that woman lives for love, man for himself. If Brutus
commits suicide for the nation, Portia commits suicide in order not
to live without Brutus. "Defeated" love may stem either from an
accident-like death that separates the two lovers or, more frequently
perhaps in literature than life, from abandonment. The woman who
loses her man is perceived to lose herself; she follows him, like Hero
after the drowning of Leander, or despairs fatally at her betrayal, like
Dido. The loss of the man fuses with that of life. Thus Tennyson
describes his Mariana in a setting of death - blackest moss, broken
sheds, crowing nightfowl - that symbolizes her state of mind, the
breakdown of her "confounded" senses when abandoned by her
lover.
If the theme is unsurprising, it may be notable that many of those
traditionally linked to it are women distinguished for their accom-
plishments in non-amorous domains. Their suicide, as reported by
writers like Plutarch or Vergil, ironically undercuts that professional
dimension in their lives. Aeneas regretfully quits Dido for the future
of the race; Dido neglects her kingdom to mount a funeral pyre
whose flames visible from afar will remind Aeneas of their love.
Feminist critics like Annis Pratt see identity itself as the cost of
female desire: "until only very recently, the biological price of erotic
initiative has been unwanted pregnancy or abortion, and the
psychological price paid by the woman who indulges in her own
sexuality, an abortion of selfhood" (1977: 88-89).
Love itself can, of course, be taken as a form of suicide for a
woman. Freud, who threatened suicide himself should he lose his

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 FEMININE SUICIDE 109

fiancee, says, "In the two opposed situations of b

in love, and of suicide, the ego is overwhelmed by t
in totally different ways." (Freud 1957, Vol. 14:2
using Nancy Miller's categories for eighteenth and n
novels, whether the "euphoric" plot resolved by
describable future is not more static and fatal to its heroine than the
"dysphoric" plot that takes her to a dramatic suicide. Mrs.
Dalloway's narrow white bed links her imaginatively to the shell-
shocked Septimus, a stratagem integrating sexual and political
fictions typical of Virginia Woolf's art. Phoenix-like, the woman as
lover dies into a "higher" dedication to a masculine self. The
perversion of this romantic ideal of self-abnegation can be traced
back to the sublimated erotic appeal of female Christian martyrs, and
forward to the nineteenth-century cult of the beautiful corpse,
studied by Mario Praz. The vaporization of women as lovers finds
extreme expression in variations on the Liebestod. Tristan's death
provides the only material cause for that of Isolde.
Much like love or lost love, rape has been affiliated with the
breakdown of a woman's identity. The focus on chastity, of course,
involves that precisely which distinguishes woman as woman, and
does so in terms of possession by a man, fetishistically. If woman is
taken to be a commodity, rape means total devaluation: reified, then
stolen, she has no essence left to justify her continuing existence.
Trespass necessitates tripas. This ambiguous identification of women
with their bodies ironically colors the defence of women's suicide
from ancient times to the present. Even in periods that generally
condemned self-murder, Church fathers and the patriarchy endorsed
it in the face of rape (Ambrose, Jerome, Donne). Saint Sophronia
properly protected herself thus against assault, albeit at the expense
of herself. More insidiously,' suicide serves magically to purge the
assaulted body, in a sense displacing responsibility for the violation.
Augustine was exceptional in condemning the suicide of chastity on
the ground that true chastity is that of the soul.
Although the catalyst is physical assault, the suicide of chastity
may have metaphysical implications. To know a woman is to possess
her. But truth, unlike knowledge, cannot be possessed. For Nietzsche,
therefore, woman was a metaphor for the ineffability of truth. To
erase the body is a radical way of erasing the violence of knowledge
or pseudo-truth.
A woman may thus choose death after defilement, not to confirm
her status as property, but to reaffirm her autonomy. The story of
Lucretia is instructive on the virtual illegibility of this message.
Lucretia's violation exemplifies social and political tyranny. Lucretia
destroys herself after she has been doubly reified as a sexual object.
First her husband, Collatinus, too proud of her beauty and virtues to
rest content with his private enjoyment, invites his kinsman Tarquin

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110 MARGARET HIGONNET

to observe his wife. For Collatinus, Lucretia is a p

for speculative enjoyment. Tarquin, whose father's t
the nation, presses beyond speculative to act
Lucretia when her husband is absent. This rape then
Tarquins' reliance upon force to obtain their
Collatinus' implicitly oppressive sexual politic
finally turns the dagger against herself, she has
understood to be affirming the patriarchal value
fidelity to her husband. Shakespeare poignantly
internalization of Tarquin's aggression, "She bears
left behind." Yet her gesture points to more perv
political structures, still pertinent to modem cul
marital rape and dictatorships.
The physical control of Collatinus and Tarquin
their abuse of language. Lucretia has become a v
she does not submit to the rape she will be killed
her reputation defiled. Against these verbal constru
as woman, Lucretia must set her own. She calls
friends to hear her story and know her in her diff
language is revolutionary: she calls on her family
cast off the tyranny of the Tarquins. Her defian
general rebellion, as the Botticelli cassetta at the Ga
Boston shows: she strikes herself, surrounded by ar
subsequent rebellion is led by the family friend Bru
after Livy stressed the political role of Brutus, a
argued (1982), they undertook the masculine dom
essentially revolutionary, heroic instance of female
But chastity is no longer a code word for female v
in the nineteenth century those writers concer
liberation realized that the Lucretia myth w
transformed. In Ibsen's demystifying Hedda Gabl
is a modem Lucretia, abandoned to the sexual bl
Brack by her proud but ineffectual husband and
convention from politics. This underlying myth
ambiguity as heroic victim, which has split comm
same time, Ibsen rewrites chastity as Hedda's frigid
"huntress of men," the whore, Diana's namesake.
Elvsted, he further complicates the interpretation o
Hedda's marketing of her own marriage, her ad
fixation on the hierarchical values represented
and her "pretty illusions" about a Dionysiac fu
experience only vicariously or by sublimation
violent piano-playing), all contrast strangely wi
Thea's indifference to social condemnation. Yet T
her commitment to a revolutionary, proleptic hi
reflex of her dedication to Eilert Lqvborg. Hedda

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 FEMININE SUICIDE 111

independence could make her a modern woman

both imaginative and generative. Her suicide is n
sterilely aesthetic.
As Hedda Gabler shows, in the nineteenth ce
female identity comes to focus on the dispari
aspiration and social actuality. The death of
attributed to the deficiencies of social institutions: she attacks her
own body, having introjected society's hostility to her deviance. He
gesture is symptomatic of social illness. Or her death may be referred
to the dangers of individualism itself. Selfhood, with its reflexive
doubling, constitutes fragmentation of the self. Woman typically
just such a fragmented self, perceived in mirrors and through others.
Because of their identification with mirrors, women's individualism
further threatens to take the form of narcissism. For the romantics,
solipsism was the horrifying obverse of individualism; the Fichtea
Ich was understood to cut the self off from all anchoring othernes
i.e. from objective reality, and thereby to unleash a devouring ego.
Emma Bovary's self-mythologizing climaxes in suicide in a way
that seems to betray Flaubert's fears of his own narcissistic
psychology and aesthetic. We are not surprised that in her las
moments "she asked for her mirror and remained bent over it for
some time" (Flaubert 1965: 237). Her suicide reflects back on her
life in a way that unmasks her transcendental desires as narcissist
through a parody of the erotic "blazon," the love poem that
enumerates the parts of a woman's body.
When Emma hastily crams her mouth full of poison we ar
inevitably reminded of her restless craving for escape from
ennui and insatiate desires. Flaubert doubles the image of a
transcendental quest with one of sensuous needs as extreme unctio
is applied to what we may call her erogenous zones, upon the mou
that had "cried out in lust," upon the nostrils "that had been so
greedy of the warm breeze and the scents of love." She embraces the
crucifix: "then she stretched forward her neck like one sufferi
from thirst, and glueing her lips to the body of the Man-God, sh
pressed upon it with all her expiring strength the fullest kiss of love
that she had ever given" (p. 23 7). It is perhaps not irrelevant to th
ironic juxtaposition that Christ's death on the cross was regarded b
early Church fathers as a suicide.
Emma's disintegration is both physical and spiritual. The arseni
she eats repeats the self-sought corruption of her heart and mind by
literary falsehoods as well as by her lovers' lies, in an ironically
materialized reenactment of Don Quixote.

IV. WOMAN AND SOCIETY: THE MASCULINE PERSPECTIVE

Flaubert, who confessed that he dreamed of suicide in his

could say that he himself was Madame Bovary. Yet even

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112 MARGARET HIGONNET

nineteenth-century male writers most sympathetic to

in bourgeois life subvert the heroism of women's volun
their focus on social and masculine victimization; the reliance on
social explanation which climaxes in the realistic novel - and in
Durkheim underplays the heroine's choice - at the same time that its
social determinism exculpates us of our complicity in the functioning
of social institutions.
One of the triumphs of Flaubert's art is the ironic imbrication of
Emma's self-delusions and la betise sociale. Emma herself considers
her act, perhaps in the light of the novels that had poisoned her
imagination, as heroic: "now her plight, like an abyss, loomed before
her. She was panting as if her heart would burst. Then, in an ecstasy
of heroism that made her almost joyous, she ran down the hill... and
reached the pharmacy" (p. 229). Werther had described the suicide:
"Petrified, out of her mind, she stands in front of the abyss. All is
darkness around her. . . She feels alone, abandoned; and blindly,
cornered by the horrible need in her heart, she jumps and drowns her
torment in the embrace of death" (pp. 60-61).
But his shift to an externalized depiction of the dying woman
indicates that, here, Flaubert is not Emma Bovary. In the broader
view, Emma dies not so much by her own choice as by the
victimizing effects of a society that imprisons young women in
convents and then in traditional families and perverts their hopes for
individual self-fulfillment through an ideology of romantic love and
bourgeois consumption. Though sensuous in appearance, her desires
are ideological constructs that have little to do with instinctuality:
they have been fostered by the trivial wish-fulfillment novels she
consumed at the convent. As Walter Benjamin has argued in
connection with Baudelaire (1978), the devaluation of the material
world by Christian allegory is paralleled and surpassed by the
nineteenth century's devaluation of the material world by commodity
fetishism.
Flaubert's social criticism cuts two ways. Emma rejects traditional
values, and, appropriately enough, her home, emblem of woman's
constricted world, is seized on the day she decides to take her life.
Yet she embraces false values: a mix of nostalgia for aristocratic
luxuries with an appetite for contemporary novelty that parallels the
modem "scientific" thinking of Homais. When she links feudal
decoration (her Gothic prie-dieu or her first lover) to fashion in her
attempt to retrieve a habitable interior, her confusions exemplify
perfectly the utopian phantasmagorias or ambiguities that Benjamin
calls the "law of dialectics seen at a standstill" (1978:157).
The feminization of suicide in the nineteenth-century goes hand in
hand with a - realistic yet disturbing - denial of woman's ability to
choose freely. Even Anna Karenina, one of the most compassionately
drawn heroines of nineteenth-century fiction, is shown to vacillate in

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 FEMININE SUICIDE 113

her last moments. Tolstoy makes her act mani

"I shall punish him and escape from everyone
also deprives it of dignity through small but a
by her red handbag, she struggles free and caref
the tracks at the right moment. Yet just as she d
"she was terror-stricken at what she was doin
am I doing? What for?' She tried to get up" (
a result, the car that hits her is "something hug
overwhelms her, an emblem of larger socia
control.
This trend in nineteenth-century fiction and drama finds an
extreme formulation in Strindberg's Miss Julie. When the valet Jean
hands his mistress the razor with which she will kill herself, he
commands her to do the deed and she walks offstage in a hypnotic
stupor. The reversal of their social relationship in this moment is a
superficial irony, for his is indeed the voice of a larger, patriarchal
social order. Strindberg has "motivated the tragic fate of Miss
Julie with an abundance of circumstances." She has been driven
forward by her improper upbringing, heredity, her menstruation, and
the aphrodisiac stimulus of Midsummer Night's Eve. But her doom is
dictated by social conventions and by the author's belief in woman's
passivity. For all his irony about the brutal, cynical spectacle of life,
Strindberg insists that woman is a "stunted form of human being,"'
inferior to man in strength, sensitivity and initiative. The educated
"half-woman" who has won equal civil rights - today we might
speak of androgynous woman - "represents degeneration." Women,
like children and the half-educated, he says, "still retain a primitive
capacity for deceiving themselves and for letting themselves be
deceived, that is, for succumbing to illusions and responding
hypnotically to the suggestions of the author" (Strindberg 1974:566,
568, 564). The logic of this "modem" tragedy is purely circular.

V. EASY DEATHS

We can see a strange paradox in the nineteenth-cen

overdetermination of women's suicides. Most significantl
treated as a virtually involuntary form of surrender to soci
Yet Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Miss
in violent ways that accentuate the finality of what used
self-murder. By contrast, both in fact and in literat
perceive their own suicides in ways that could be des
visionary rather than violent.
From time immemorial, women have been thought to seek
way out, a painless and beautiful way of dying. Cleopatr

1. Standard English translations omit the additional manuscript material fro

remarkably misogynist introduction to Miss Julie.

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114 MARGARET HIGONNET

tells us, spent her last weeks searching for the

painful means. In Shakespeare too, her search fo
reinforces - at least from a Roman perspectiv
narcissism and cowardice. She has taken mandrago
gap of time: "Now I feed myself with most
(Antony and Cleopatra: Act I, Sc. 5). And of cou
flight from the battle of Actium. From her
however, the bite of the asp resembles the nibble
breast, as well as the sexual embrace of the lover,
is about to join. The layering of death and birth
the asp to ouroboros. At the same time, she selec
mar neither her physical splendor in life nor the Ro
death, in patent contrast to Antony's botche
suffering. Her asps not only escape inspection by
scarcely any trace. Appropriately, then, her mode
as much a puzzle as are her life and character
mystery of her Eastern grandeur eludes the reify
materialist Octavius Caesar.
The search for easeful death leaves its trace on the literature
written by nineteenth-century women. Of course, in their representa-
tions of female suicide, these writers address many of the same social
and psychological issues that preoccupy men. The tension between
free will and social determinism, between autonomous affirmation of
identity and the breakdown of identity remain central, no matter
what the sex of the writer. Nonetheless, there are curious differences:
women tend to treat the suicides of their own sex as if they were
somehow not definitive, and they tend to minimize the physical
anguish of death. (We must remember that for women the suicide
attempt is often not final.) Although men like Keats also call on
"soothest Sleep" to "seal the hushed casket of my soul," they are
not in the end deceived by this "fancy." By contrast, Christina
Rossetti yearns to be "sleeping at last in a dreamless sleep locked
fast." One explanation for the special function of death in this
woman poet's imagination lies in her poem "From the Antique": "I
wish and I wish I were a man: / Or, better than any being, were not"
(Rosetti 1896:78). The only way for a woman to attain a state of
wholeness may be to move beyond the body.
The heroine drifts into destruction, often literally carried by water
that reflects the fluidity of her own identity. The unknown in death
takes shape as uncertaintly of act and motive. Read affirmatively, the
image of the flood for Maggie Tulliver illuminates a dimension of
mystical transcendence in female suicide. Similarly, because it is in
swimming that Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening has
found release and independence, her death has been interpreted as a
quest for oceanic oneness or an affirmation of the anima (Chopin
1976:202, 218, 221).

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 FEMININE SUICIDE 115

Women do not, however, often assign to the s

their own sex such clear teleology. Kate Chopin
example, fades into a dream-like engulfment of
waves of the past. Her regressive death brings in
ambiguities in the relationship of woman to chil
has noted, "In the ideology of Victorian wom
signalled not maturity but death into a perpetu
paradoxically, the intact child is in securest possession of the
mobility and power of her potential adult future" (1983:52-53).
The immature, romantic conception of sexuality as painless and
passive ecstasy marks Edna's adolescent hopes and her final thoughts
as she surrenders to the water. Chopin underlines the irony of this
illusion by detailing the pain of childbirth in her penultimate scene
and by delineating sympathetically Edna's need to free herself from
the demands of her children. "I would give my life for my children,
but I would not give myself" (Chopin, p. 48). Chopin suggests that
most women pass from a thoughtless and at best impulsive childhood
to a mechanical adulthood measured by the involuntary rhythms of
childbearing and rearing. Edna has difficulty finding a path between
the two, a mode of reflective development and integration. In the
heroine's inability to write her own story, we see in turn Chopin's
impasse in writing a nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman; the
nineteenth-century version of this genre dictates a "voyage in" that is
turned toward death (Hirsch 1983:23-48).
The problem of will foregrounded in these novels can be
distinguished from the problem of feminine passivity traced by most
male writers. Chopin sets the leitmotifs of feminine regression against
others that mark the possibility of independence, artistic and
personal. Though shrivelled and dark, poor and isolated, Mlle. Reisz
is the significant mother of the motherless Edna; her music and
sympathy liberate Edna's own art and mediate her passions.
Self-assertion for a woman in the face of social constraints entails
high costs. But there is choice, rather than social victimization. The
path toward freedom for Edna is negative: she sheds everything
external to herself, first the routines and bienseances of the alien
Creole culture, then her family and home, and finally her clothes and
herself. The original title of this Kiinstlerinroman was A Solitary
Soul.
The ambiguity with which the woman author represents female
suicide may betray what Freud described as the universal denial of
our own death: our unconscious "does not believe in its own death;
it behaves as if it were immortal." Although she must deny her own
death, the author can, nonetheless, experience death through her
work. As it happens, this double experience lies behind Freud's
explanation of our response to tragedy: "There alone too the
condition can be fulfilled which makes it possible for us to reconcile

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116 MARGARET HIGONNET

ourselves with death; namely, that behind all the vi

we should still be able to preserve a life intact" (Fr
291, 296). The woman author is, as it were, reading h
that of her protagonist. One problem with this explana
is that it does not apply equally to the descriptions
male protagonists' suicides.
An alternative line of inquiry presents itself. It can b
the fluidity and lack of finality in these deaths is th
equivalent of women's actual avoidance of a final sta
suicide attempts. We need to study further possible pa
women's adaptive procedures in constructing their
modifictions of rigid formulas in their fictions. W
century women subscribe to the genre of the Bildu
envision a journey not to socially defined order
downward to the unknown, and they bring the fina
generically imposed deaths into question.
In summary, the disparities between act and attempt
and perception, have made female suicide an extreme
hermeneutic problem. Sociologically speaking, for w
of voluntary death has been cut loose from its referen
expresses not merely a deathwish but an incom
impossible life-wish. As in so many other aspects of wo
is the appearance or the representation rather than
matters. As Simone de Beauvoir said, "women have
rather than agents. The suicide of Lucretia has had
symbol" (Beauvoir 1953:162).
The literary transcription of this physical "discour
exacerbates these contradictions and at the same tim
for dynamic effects. Women's suicide has given shap
greatest works of literature, from Antigone to Anna K
theme which in various periods has permitted write
relationship of Sein to Schein, to juxtapose silent res
dominant discourse, and to demonstrate the costs of
to the individual. For all this, the woman in the su
disappear. Although the nineteenth century first re
cally the differences between men's and women's su
it displaced onto women the literary burden of suicide
represented more than it knew. The great work
written by men in the nineteenth century reduce t
facts of women's suicide. The voluntary act often appe
the quest for autonomy is replaced by breakdown of id
In literature written by women, by contrast, we f
that disturb the norms of genre and of femal
Epimethean, these works force us to read back
ultimately unknown charcter of death and of
presumptions about motive, genre, and social orde

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 FEMININE SUICIDE 117

moment is no longer decisive. The transformation

in many of these women's works brings into
features of women's experience: its elusively su
the constriction of independent activity into dep
and the fundamental fusion of communication with

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