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DEATH RIGHTS Romantic Suicide Death Rights Item Type Book Authors Koretsky, Deanna P. DOI 10.1353/book.83163 Publisher SUNY Press Rights Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Download date 30/09/2021 12:51:27 Item License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Link to Item https://www.sunypress.edu/p-7004-death-rights.aspx DE AT H RIGHTS DE AT H RIGHTS Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism Deanna P. Koretsky Cover art: The Suicide, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French, 1803–1860), ca. 1836. Oil on canvas. The Walters Art Museum, Creative Commons. Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2021 State University of New York Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or trans- mitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Koretsky, Deanna P., author. Title: Death rights : romantic suicide, race, and the bounds of liberalism / Deanna P. Koretsky. Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020028028 | ISBN 9781438482897 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781438482903 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Suicide in literature. | Literature and race. | Romanticism. | Liberalism in literature. | Suicide and literature. Classification: LCC PN56.S744 K67 2021 | DDC 809/.933548--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028028 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 For Jay. Everlong. 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 1 2 3 4 5 Contents 6 7 8 9 10 11 Acknowledgments ix 12 13 14 Introduction 1 15 Chapter 1 Liberty and Death 23 16 17 Chapter 2 Chained to Life and Misery 47 18 19 Chapter 3 Writ in Water 73 20 21 Chapter 4 In Sympathy 97 22 23 Chapter 5 Marvelous Boys 117 24 25 26 27 Notes 129 28 Bibliography 169 29 30 Index 193 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 vii 1 2 3 4 5 Acknowledgments 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 I am grateful, first and foremost, to Rebecca Colesworthy, the hard- 15 est-working editor in academic publishing, and to the entire team 16 at SUNY Press for believing in this book. I can’t thank the anony- 17 mous readers enough for their generous and thorough feedback. I owe 18 more than I could possibly express here to the trusted friends, brilliant 19 colleagues, and supportive mentors who patiently read and commented 20 on parts of this project when it was in various states of nonsense. You 21 know who you are, and I know that I couldn’t have done this without 22 you. 23 This book has been made possible in part by a major grant from the 24 National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclu- 25 sions, or recommendations expressed in this book do not necessarily 26 reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This 27 book was also supported by a UNCF-Mellon Faculty Development 28 Award, without which I’d probably still be writing. An early version 29 of chapter 1 appeared previously as “Habeas Corpus and the Politics of 30 Freedom: Slavery and Romantic Suicide” in Essays in Romanticism 22, 31 no. 1 (2015): 21–33, and parts of it are reproduced with permission of the 32 licensor through PLSclear . An early version of chapter 4 appeared as 33 “Unhallowed Arts: Frankenstein and the Poetics of Suicide,” in European 34 Romantic Review 26, no. 2 (February 2015): 241–260, and parts of it are 35 reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 36 37 38 39 40 41 ix 1 2 3 4 5 Introduction 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Each suicide is a poem sublime in its melancholy. 15 —Honoré de Balzac, Le Peau de Chagrin 16 17 18 Darkling I listen; and, for many a time 19 I have been half in love with easeful Death. 20 —John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” 21 22 23 The Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes 24 Is like the Scorpion girt by fire; 25 In circle narrowing as it glows, 26 The flame around their captive close, 27 Till inly searched by thousand throes, 28 And maddening in her ire, 29 One sad and sole relief she knows – 30 The sting she nourished for her foes, 31 Whose venom never yet was vain, 32 Gives but one pang, and cures all pain, 33 And darts into her desperate brain: 34 So do the dark in soul expire, 35 Or live like Scorpion girt by fire. 36 —Lord Byron, The Giaour 37 38 39 40 41 42 1 2 DEATH RIGHTS 1 uicide is a complicated response to a broken world. The factors that 2 Smotivate someone’s decision to die are personal and, to a large extent, 3 fundamentally unknowable. But cultural narratives about suicide are 4 ours to read and weigh; they show us what it is to live in this world. This 5 book recalls a historical moment when stories of suicide were used to 6 rouse the racial consciousness of a nation. It is a book about why those 7 efforts failed and how they were eroded by a cultural narrative still in 8 circulation today—one that idealizes certain suicides in service to ideol- 9 ogies of white male supremacy. 10 In the ubiquity of sentiments such as those expressed in the epigraphs 11 from Balzac, Keats, and Byron, we are reminded that literary romanticism 12 characterized itself by brooding sensuality and irremediable malaise and 13 that these strong emotions often were understood to result in suicide. 14 Nor was interest in suicide limited to “high” literatures during this 15 era. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, English newspapers 16 published suicide notes (some real, others made up for shock value), 17 while politicians debated ancient laws dictating how people who died 18 by suicide should be buried (at crossroads, with stakes driven through 19 their hearts—a gruesome practice finally eliminated in 1822).1 The 20 subject of the last epigraph, Byron’s “Scorpion girt by fire,” led the British 21 ethologist C. Lloyd Morgan to conduct a series of sadistic experiments on 22 whether animals consciously kill themselves, using scorpions as his test 23 subjects.2 Suicide even helped to launch the modern fashion industry: the 24 blue and gold suit worn by the title character of Johann Wolfgang von 25 Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired one of the first ready- 26 to-wear styles produced for mass market consumption, and a popular 27 perfume of the day was called Eau de Werther.3 With suicide being such 28 a prominent and profitable cultural phenomenon, it is surprising that, 29 among a recent wave of scholarship on the cultural history of suicide, not 30 a single monograph has focused on romanticism.4 31 One reason for this may be that romanticism’s role in the history of 32 suicide seems self-evident. There is little doubt as to the relationship 33 between romantic literature and the myth of the tortured artist— 34 implicitly white and almost exclusively male—who is tragically undone 35 by his own brilliance.5 This myth remains with us even today. One 36 especially clear example is Savage Beauty, the retrospective of the work 37 of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen that opened in 2011 38 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the show’s most widely 39 publicized pieces were McQueen’s intricately constructed coats, many 40 of which were styled for the exhibition so as to be instantly reminis- 41 cent of romantic figures like the subject of Caspar David Friedrich’s 42 Introduction 3 painting The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.6 The show also included 1 pieces influenced by the Flemish masters, the Scottish Highlands, the 2 Tudors, Plato’s Atlantis, and others.7 While McQueen cited inspira- 3 tion from many historical periods and subjects, the show was organized 4 into sections titled “The Romantic Mind,” “Romantic Gothic and 5 Cabinet of Curiosities,” “Romantic Nationalism,” “Romantic Exoti- 6 cism,” “Romantic Primitivism,” and “Romantic Naturalism,” effectively 7 rendering McQueen’s entire corpus in terms of the aesthetic arguably 8 most explicit in the curation and presentation of his coats. When 9 an expanded version of the show opened at the Victoria and Albert 10 Museum in 2015, the association between McQueen and romanticism 11 was scaled back in its promotion, suggesting that in 2011, the heavy 12 emphasis on romanticism was at least partly reflective of McQueen’s 13 much-discussed 2010 suicide.8 14 There are good reasons for the myth’s endurance. Rendering suicide 15 an extension of someone’s art dulls the unsettling violence of the act of 16 ending one’s own life.
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