Department of English and American Studies English

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Eva Baliová

Suicides of female writers and the influence on their works

Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

2019

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..

Eva Baliová

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my supervisor, Milada Franková, for her patient guidance and encouragement. I am genuinely grateful for her support and help.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2

2. The Art of Suicide 4

3. Mental Illness 8

3.1. Traumatic event or experience 9

3.2. Delusions and hallucinations 11

3.3. Depression, insomnia and existential ennui 13

4. Gender oppression 17

4.1. Lack of freedom 17

4.2. Marriage and children 20

5. The Act of Suicide 25

5.1. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway 25

5.2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “Making a Change” 29

5.3. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar 31

6. Conclusion 36

7. Bibliography 38

8. Summary 41

9. Resumé 42

1. Introduction

This thesis will examine the connection between the works of three prominent British and American female writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, namely Virginia Woolf, Sylvia

Plath, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, all of whom committed suicide. The main claim of this thesis is that there are some similar aspects in their works that could have predicted their suicidal intentions. The authors selected for this paper lived in different decades, they wrote in various styles, and yet, they are all famous for their deliberate choice of ending their own life. Therefore, it seems, that the act of suicide, which is a uniquely human phenomenon, is appealing to people and they are fascinated and drawn towards this subject at an artistic and fictional level as well as they are trying to understand the reasons behind it.

On that account, the areas of research are grouped into several categories, such as mental health, gender oppression, and suicide attempts. The focus will be put on selected stories that are widely known, namely, Mrs. Dalloway, The Bell Jar and The Yellow

Wallpaper, and others. In addition, the intention of this thesis is to show that even though the works of the authors mentioned above often fall under the 'suicide art' label, they have a great literary value by themselves. Nevertheless, the parallels between the lives of characters in the works and the lives of the writers who created them are noticeable.

This thesis works with a certain number of points that are present in the majority of the selected books. Sometimes, there are some exceptions, but they are always explained and elaborated on in the opening of each chapter. In the beginning, the matter of the length of the books needs to be cleared. The novels The Bell Jar and Mrs. Dalloway are works of a bigger range than the short story The Yellow Wallpaper written by Charlotte Perkins

Gilman, therefore, it doesn't contain all the points that this thesis works with. To correct this discrepancy, another short story, “Making a Change”, written by Gilman will be analyzed alongside the others.

As has been noted, the thesis is divided into four main sections. The first part introduces the topic of suicide itself and the basic information is provided. Also, it briefly describes how different periods perceived it. Then, the shift towards women purely takes place and the results from the study that connects mental illness and creativity in female writers are provided and contemplated on.

The next chapter elaborates on mental illness; it focuses on the psychosis of the mind and its symptoms that are visible in all the characters created by writers who also partly suffered from them. The following passage is devoted to gender oppression and the lack of freedom that often comes with marriage and children. Those two themes are purposefully chosen because both issues are highly visible in all the books this thesis works with.

The last passage connects the suicidal acts in the books with the actual attempts from the lives of studied writers. The reasons why they decided to put an end to their days are studied and at the same time, compared to the suicidal inclinations of their protagonists.

2. The Art of Suicide

“To take one’s life is to force others to read one’s death.”

(Higonnet 68)

In the first place, according to the Dictionary of Medical Terms, the word “suicide” is defined as “the act of killing oneself” (Collin 401). The website of the World Health

Organization states, that “close to 800 000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds.” In 2016, it was the 18th leading cause of death in the world.

With this in mind, what is the point of talking about a few selected writers who committed suicide if such an act happens on a daily basis? To put it simply, because even in our age, suicide is still considered to be a taboo subject. Nobody wants to talk about it. But it seems that bringing this topic to the surface while connected to some famous person is more acceptable to the public and they are more open to consider it as an issue. When they are not personally connected to the case, they are able to discuss it and look for the reasons behind it. In such a manner, it is a way of spreading awareness, so people know how to recognize a cry for help or even save somebody’s life if needed.

The history of suicide is far-reaching. Each period takes a different approach to it; one accepts it, one forbids it. The word itself appeared presumably late, around the middle of the 17th century. Before, terms such as self-destruction, self-murder, and self-killing were commonly used to describe such an act. In the Middle Ades, suicide was seen as a horror and a moral sin. For example, Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy, puts people who attempted or committed suicide in the seventh circle of Hell, alongside murderers, sodomites, and tyrants. Hence, to kill oneself, or even an attempt to do it was treated at the

4 same level as killing somebody else. It was murder. Even if one did not succeed for the first time and he or she was caught during the non-fatal suicidal action, the result was punishment in the form of hanging. Then, as a criminal, one was buried at a crossroad, so the ghost of a dead person would become confused and he would not find the way home and hunt the household in revenge. In the Renaissance, the more open approach was taken.

Shakespeare mentions and works with this topic in several plays of his, for example in

Hamlet and Othello. Furthermore, the Romantic era saw suicide as fashionable: “to die by one’s own hand was a short and sure way to fame” (Alvarez 233). Still, among the public and according to the law, it was a criminal offense to kill oneself. Of course, those are only general observations. There is always some individual who will go against the flow and pursue his own views of a given subject.

Suicide is often seen as a predominantly female phenomenon due to frequent representations in literature and art in general. As an illustration, see Shakespeare’s

Ophelia, Sophocles’ Antigone or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Nevertheless, according to numbers on the already mentioned website, men commit suicide approximately twice as much as women on a worldwide scale. What seems to be the biggest difference between genders is the way they decide to put an end to their days:

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 in the kitchen stove, although guns are gaining. The

cynical view is that women deliberately employ ineffective methods. (Higonnet 69)

From the beginning of times, women were perceived as inferior and not important, therefore it was a heroic violent death of a man that was celebrated, so even if a man killed

5 himself, it was compared to “a lost battle” (Brown 148). It did not matter if the origin of this “battle” was heroic or economic, such as bankruptcy. Woman’s reasons to end her life was often associated with love and therefore considered frivolous. “Female deaths were attributed to disappointment in love or the loss of chastity. The latter was thus seen as shameful and sick” (Brown 148).

Nevertheless, as this thesis does take into consideration female writers only, another concern needs to be contemplated. Are female writers more inclined towards suicide than other women? In the study “Mental Illness and Creative Activity in Female Writers”, the focus is put specifically on this selected group of women and it connects mental illness with creativity. As mental illness does belong in one of the areas of research that this thesis considers, this study proved itself as very useful. The questions that this research investigates are numerous, but the one that is the most relevant is: “Are female writers more likely to suffer from mental illness than members of a suitable comparison group?”

(Ludwig 1651) The women who participated in this study engaged in different forms of writing, such as poetry, fiction, prose, etc. That is convenient as the authors studied in this paper have, as well, different approaches towards writing; Sylvia Plath wrote mostly poetry,

Virginia Woolf focused on novels and essays and Charlotte Perkins Gilman created short stories and other notable works. The results of the mentioned study are quite clear, female writers are almost twice more likely to suffer from some mental illness than the non- writers. Among the illnesses that appeared the most are depression, bipolar disorder, drug abuse, panic attacks, etc. In connection to this thesis, it needs to be pointed out that 15 percent of surveyed female writers confessed that they made a suicide attempt in their lifetime, in contrast to the other group, where 3 percent of females made the same

6 confession. Therefore, it may be concluded that mental illness and suicide attempts in female writers are more frequent than in the non-writers’ group.

All three studied writers did fight with some mental illness in their lives, they wrote about it in their works and two of them attempted to kill themselves at least once before their final successful pursuit; so the question if the people around them could have predicted their suicidal intentions comes to the surface. Al Alvarez writes in his book The

Savage God, A study of Suicide as follows:

… seventy-five percent of successful and would-be suicides give clear warning of their

intentions beforehand, and are often driven to the act because their warnings are ignored

or brushed aside …. At a certain point of despair a man will kill himself in order to

show he is serious. It is also estimated that a person who has once been to the brink is

perhaps three times more likely to go there again than someone who has not. Suicide is

like diving off a high board: the first time is the worst. (Alvarez 108)

If one does not deal with the suicide warning signs, it is always going to get worse, it is just like any other disease. Therefore, it is important to talk about it freely, without being judged. As some writers in this thesis tried to commit suicide, there was, according to

Alvarez, a very high chance of them doing it again. As it was not acceptable to talk about it, they managed to transform their experiences into their works and at least, by this way, they used their creative minds to cope with their troubles and they gave birth to some magnificent pieces of literature that live through them until this day. In like manner, it would be shameful not to at least mention some other female writers who also decided to put an early end to their lives and promising careers, respectively Anne Sexton, Elise

Cowen, Sarah Kane, Jane Aiken Hodge, Dorothy Uhnak and others.

3. Mental Illness

Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; all three of them suffered from a mental illness at some point in their lives. They projected their fight with sickness into their fictional heroes and heroines. The characters deal with various symptoms that come up in all the works, for example, depression, insomnia, hallucinations, etc. All of it falls under the sickness of the mind called psychosis. National Institute of Mental Health describes this illness as follows:

During a period of psychosis, a person’s thoughts and perceptions are disturbed and

the individual may have difficulty understanding what is real and what is

not. Symptoms of psychosis include delusions (false beliefs) and hallucinations

(seeing or hearing things that others do not see or hear). Other symptoms include

incoherent or nonsense speech, and behavior that is inappropriate for the situation.

A person in a psychotic episode may also experience depression, anxiety, sleep

problems, social withdrawal, lack of motivation, and difficulty functioning overall.

(National Institute of Mental Health)

This basic description provides several factors visible in the works of the writers mentioned above. There are many different causes of psychosis, but it commonly starts with a traumatic event or experience that disrupts the natural flow of everyday life. If treated in time and in a correct way, psychosis can be cured, and an individual does not have to go through it ever again. If not taken into consideration seriously, it can lead to self-harm and in the worst-case scenario, to suicide. The psychotic episode does not have to come into effect immediately, as a matter of fact, it can take years. The following sub-chapter

8 elaborates on the traumatic events that mark the beginnings of this illness in the lives of the main novel characters.

3.1 Traumatic event or experience

Esther Greenwood, the main heroine of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, lost her beloved father at an early age. In the first half of the book, she realizes, that: “I was only purely happy until I was nine years old. After that …. I had never been really happy again”

(Plath 78). Because her mother never let her come to the funeral, the death of her father felt

“unreal” (Plath 175) to her. She never fully made peace with it. The day before she committed an almost successful suicide was the day that she, for the first time, visited her father’s grave. She started to cry and couldn’t understand why; “then I remembered that I had never cried for my father’s death” (Plath 177). In Esther’s case, it was not only her full realization of her father’s death that started the psychotic episode; it was also the fact, that she didn’t make it to the summer writing course as she hoped while being in New York.

This meant that she had nothing else to do with her time. The idea that she will have to be with her mother in the suburbs the whole summer was simply unbearable; she hated her as stated several times in the book. Also, she “made a point of never living in the same house with my mother for more than a week” (Plath 125). Therefore, for Esther, it was the love for her dead father and the hate for her living mother that started the entire psychotic process that leads to her suicide attempt.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story called “Making a Change”, it is the birth of a child that starts the whole development of psychosis. Julia, the main heroine and a young mother, is a talented musician and she is unable to soothe her crying baby.

Julia’s nerves were at the breaking point. Upon her tired ears, her sensitive mother’s

heart, the grating wail from the next room fell like a lash – burnt in like fire. Her

ears were hypersensitive, always. She had been an ardent musician before her

marriage, and had taught quite successfully on both piano and violin. To any mother

a child’s cry is painful; to a musical mother it is torment. (Gilman 67)

Julia lives in a household with her husband Frank and his mother. Frank is not a big help at home, he just wants to drink his coffee in a quiet ambiance and he doesn’t understand why

Julia can’t manage their offspring. His mother, on the other hand, is too eager to help which makes Julia feel incompetent, her pride is hurt and that’s how her path to downfall begins.

In the story The Yellow Wallpaper, the reader finds out that the main heroine has a nervous condition, but it is not specified how it began.

In the case of Septimus Warren Smith, the leading male character of a secondary plotline in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, the beginning of his psychotic episode is more obvious than in the other books mentioned above. He is a war veteran who suffers from a posttraumatic stress disorder that often affects soldiers who fought in a war. On top of it, he lost his very close friend Evans on the battlefield and he is not able to cope with his death.

To sum up, the reasons for the start of a psychotic episode are of a different sort.

What they share in its core is a strong emotional deviation from a normal state of being. All

10 it takes is an unexpected event, such as the death of a close friend or a family member. In other cases, it may be the birth of a child that disturbs the peaceful flow of a household.

3.2 Delusions and hallucinations

As provided in the definition in the opening part of this chapter, the most common symptoms of psychosis are delusions and hallucinations. These marks of illness are visible the most in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s most famous short story The Yellow Wallpaper. The main heroine, whose name is not revealed, is forced to be inactive for three months during the summer in a rented house with her husband John and some help. The story is written in the form of diary entries; therefore, it is a depiction of reality as seen through the eyes of the leading protagonist. Right from the beginning, she can sense that “there is something strange about the house ˗ I can feel it” (Gilman 3) but John does not believe her.

The story is short, it all takes place in about twenty pages, but at least a third of it is devoted to the different perceptions of the wallpaper; its pattern, its color, even its smell is portrayed in detail. The main heroine gradually grows an obsession with it. She is able to observe it for hours and hours; she spends her nights by following the pattern and remembering all its irregularities: “This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (Gilman 6). Little by little, it is not just eyes that she sees, it is a whole person trapped behind the wallpaper. She becomes sure, that there is a woman behind it and nobody else knows it, but her. “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her

11 crawling shakes it all over” (Gilman 15). Later, she even thinks that the woman got out and she saw her in the daytime. Finally, she decides to peel off the wallpaper to free her. She locks herself in the room, so the husband and the help can’t reach her, and she begins to tear it off the walls. From that moment, she starts to identify herself with the trapped woman:

“I’ve got out at last….in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (Gilman 20) When John finally opens the door, he faints from the sight of her. The nameless protagonist succumbs to the illness and she devotes herself to her illusions.

Septimus Warren Smith deals with similar visions, however, he does not encounter with an unknown being, but he sees his dead friend Evans. “There was his hand; there the dead. White things were assembling behind the railings opposite. But he dared not look.

Evans was behind the railings!” (Woolf 18) In contrast to the woman from the story The

Yellow Wallpaper, Septimus realizes and knows that his visions are not real. He fully grasped the information about the death of Evans. Nevertheless, he keeps seeing him on different occasions throughout the novel, he talks to him and shouts his name many times.

Unfortunately, Dr. Holmes, who is in charge of Septimus, thinks that there is “nothing the matter with him” (Woolf 50), which he emphasizes several times. Being left alone with his thoughts and hallucinations, and practically chased towards some desperate act, Septimus follows his suicidal call and he jumps through the window.

The novel The Bell Jar deals with the perception of reality in a different matter than the other two works analyzed before. There is no imaginary person creeping behind the walls and trees. On the other hand, the illusion of Esther’s mind and body as being trapped under the glass bell jar, stewing on the same sour air, is present and described. “To the

12 person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream”

(Plath 250). Esther, by being corned and limited in her mind, sees herself as a meaningless inadequate being and she often falls into the repetitive notion of degrading herself. She spends a lot of time by contemplating various things she can’t do, for example, cooking, dancing, writing in shorthand or speaking German. She observes the whole world around her in misconception, so she can’t even tell if something is out of ordinary as Septimus who sees his dead friend or as the nameless woman who hunts ghosts behind her wallpaper.

Above all, she would not even care if the world around her started to fall to pieces. Her illness made her indifferent to anything except her constant interest in killing herself.

3.3 Depression, insomnia and existential ennui

Other symptoms that may appear while having a psychotic episode are numerous.

Still, three of them seem to be the most visible, specifically: depression, insomnia, and existential ennui. The characters are often trying to hide that there is something wrong with them because they are afraid of people’s reactions. The constant control that they have to maintain before others makes them tired and even more depressed because they do not see a way out of their situation. Generally, even when they are offered help from the doctors, it is in the form of a rest cure. They are forbidden to do anything, and the meaningless spending of their days draws them to madness. Therefore, they decide to end their suffering by taking their lives.

The book The Bell Jar provides the most detailed description of different kinds of psychotic symptoms. Esther confesses her inclination towards depression right from the

13 beginning when looking at New York through the window. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence” (Plath 20). She is aware of the various city sounds around her, but her inner voice is dead. She lacks the drive to exist and to enjoy her life. “I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to” (Plath

123). Gradually, she starts to neglect herself, the reader is informed that she hadn’t washed her clothes and her hair for three weeks. “The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly…. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it” (Plath 135). Besides, her insomnia keeps her up at night for days and days. At one point, she “hadn’t slept for twenty-one nights” (Plath 155) and it only gets worse because nobody cares. Her doctor diminishes her problems and he doesn’t help her deal with them, he only makes her feel underrated. His electroshock treatment leads her towards numerous suicide attempts.

Julia, from the story “Making a change”, would like to sleep on one hand, but “she had been kept awake nearly all night, and for many nights” (Gilman 66). Her ever-crying infant Albert does not let her get a full night sleep and it affects Julia in the same manner as it does Esther. “Sleep-sleep-sleep-that was the one thing she wanted” (Gilman 70). Her uneasiness grows, and she is left alone to deal with it; nobody has an idea of how bad she is. “Julia was more near the verge of complete disaster than the family dreamed” (Gilman

68). Suicidal thoughts come up to her perception and even though she tries to think of any reason why she should not do it, her mind is too exhausted to find a reason to live and so she chooses the easiest way out. Both females, Esther and Julia, were left alone when they needed help the most, so they chose the ending of it by their own means.

The nameless woman from The Yellow Wallpaper does not end up attempting to kill herself in the end, nevertheless, her ending is not enviable as well. She is also misunderstood in her state of being: “But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.

John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (Gilman 4). John does not believe that she is sick, and she is unhappy that there is nobody to talk to. The everyday tasks feel burdensome because they lack meaning. “Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, -to dress and entertain, and order things” (Gilman 5). She hates being in this state of mind and she cries often when nobody is around her. In the end, she identifies herself with her delusion and finds the satisfaction of living in it.

To conclude with the last novel Mrs. Dalloway; Septimus, as written before, is a war survivor. But the fighting affected him too deeply, he can’t feel anything. He became indifferent to every joy in his life. Even the death of his beloved friend Evans did not affect him immediately, he did not weep for his loss when it happened. His life simply lost its sense after the war. “It might be possible, Septimus thought…. that the world itself is without meaning” (Woolf 65). Septimus repeatedly offers his wife Rezia that they should just kill themselves in order to escape from this corrupted system. Rezia is trying to help him, she takes him to the doctor, but the only treatment he gets is the rest cure and it ultimately leads to his suicide. Woolf attacks this medication by words: “order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months’ rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve” (Woolf 73).

Virginia Woolf is not the only one who disagrees with the rest cure treatment and fights against it in this manner. Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated in the monthly journal The

Forerunner, which she herself created and edited, that she wrote the story The Yellow

Wallpaper to prevent doctors from applying this kind of treatment. Saying from her own experience, that by being ordered to rest without any distractions, she almost mentally ruined herself. She ends her proclamation by the following words: “[The story] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”

(Gilman, Forerunner 271) By writing about it in a truthful manner, she managed to persuade a few doctors about the insufficiency and the flaws of their treatment.

Unfortunately, the doctor who prescribed her hospitalization never acknowledged her work.

Nevertheless, Gilman saved by her story at least one girl, whose parents, after reading The

Yellow Wallpaper, were so afraid of their daughter going mad, that they let her work and do as she pleases. So, at least one life was saved by this magnificent piece of literature.

4. Gender Oppression

Gender oppression is one of the leading issues notable in all the stories. In the books selected for this thesis, women are always in the center of attention. The stories are told from their perspectives and they are the ones who attempt to kill themselves. However, the novel Mrs. Dalloway forms an exception as it is Septimus and not Clarissa who ends up being dead at the end of the story. Still, for the purpose of this thesis, this book works appropriately. In the introduction to Mrs. Dalloway written in 1928 by Virginia Woolf herself, she suggests “that in the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence, and that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party” (Woolf, Introduction 6). By taking this note into consideration, the fact that Clarissa is not the one who commits suicide does not interfere as she and Septimus are meant to be like two sides of the same coin. By creating a male character from a lower class, Woolf expanded her writing options and was able to write about posttraumatic stress disorder that afflicted many soldiers during the war and subtly express her discontent with it. With all that said, it is self-explanatory, that Septimus does not deal with the exactly same gender problems as the other women in the books, but the lack of freedom and the pressure of marriage applies to him as well.

4.1 Lack of freedom

In the first place, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is mostly known for her short stories, but the field of her interests is diverse. In her book Women and Economics, Gilman covers several topics, such as marriage, independence, motherhood, etc. Then, she applies her

17 thoughts about those themes in her other works, predominantly, the short stories. In the chapter “Family and Home as Institutions”, she writes: “The man has his individual life, his personal expression, and its rights, his office, studio, shop: the women and children live in the home–because they must. For a woman to wish to spend much time elsewhere is considered wrong, and the children have no choice” (Gilman, Women and Economics 259).

This notion is put into practice in the story “Making a Change”. Julia gives up her music for her husband Frank and she misses it more than she realizes. As soon as she changes her status into a married one, her responsibilities shift towards her husband and her needs are no longer the priority number one. When she starts to give music lessons in secret in order to maintain her mental health and her husband finds out about it, he feels “angry and hurt”

(Gilman 74). Through the eyes of the society, if one’s wife works, it suggests financial difficulties in the family as mockery of Frank’s college proves. Also, Frank does not like the idea of his wife being out of the house.

The last few pages of the story are devoted to the description of the situation where women take the lead and act towards their interests. Julia goes back to teaching music and it is suggested that thanks to that, she does not think about suicide anymore. Her mother in law opens a nursery for children and she helps mothers from her neighborhood to take care of their children and in this way, she fulfills her motherly needs. So, in the end, it is only

Julia’s husband who had to swallow his pride and let her and his mother work according to their wishes. Their marriage only prospers by this action and the story ends with Frank’s words: “This being married and bringing up children is as easy as can be– when you learn how!” (Gilman 75) Therefore, thanks to the mutual agreement, everybody ends up being satisfied.

The husbands in Gilman’s stories are shown as loving and caring men, but they do not listen to their wives properly and they think primarily of themselves. They are the heads of their families and therefore their needs matter the most. John, the husband of the unnamed protagonist from the story The Yellow Wallpaper, applies a strict set of rules on their household in order for his wife to get better. He completely cuts her out of the world and forbids her from doing anything. She has to hide her writings before him, and she cannot freely express herself. She lacks the company of people who would give her some response about her work. Therefore, she starts to occupy herself by the wallpaper in her room and the consequences of it are as already described in the previous chapter.

The novel The Bell Jar works with a different kind of restrictions as the main protagonist Esther is a single woman and she does not have to deal with a husband or children of her own. Nevertheless, she is also influenced by men around her. When she is on a date with a guy, she feels like she has to degrade herself in order for him to feel better.

For example, she always tries to look shorter to give the impression of being a humble woman. Also, she never feels truly safe around men, she keeps using false names while introducing herself to hide her identity. Moreover, Esther is oppressed by her mothers’ ideas about life. She constantly pushes her towards things that Esther does not want to do, for instance, to learn shorthand after college, so she would have some practical skills alongside her college degree. Benigna Gerisch writes about the motherly impact on Esther in her essay about Sylvia Plath as follows: “To become a woman, a girl has both to identify with the mother’s femininity and yet achieve a separate female identity” (Gerisch 739).

Esther serves as a projection of her mother’s wishes and ideals and this pushes back her own identity; she cannot be herself. It may look like a small factor to consider, but when all those little things pile up, and the mental illness fully develops, Esther does not have 19 anyone around her who she feels comfortable with and it leads to different suicidal attempts. As the book approaches towards the end, Esther finally breaks away from all the struggles that kept holding her down and she is “perfectly free” (Plath 255).

To conclude with the only male protagonist this thesis deals with – Septimus Smith

– his inability to act upon his own wishes springs from the fact that he is surrounded by men who consider him inferior in the society because of his mental illness. Dr. Holmes and

Dr. Bradshaw use their superior status to send him away from his wife. Septimus demands answers to this injustice: “Must’, ‘must’, why ‘must’? What power had Bradshaw over him? ‘What right has Bradshaw to say “must” to me?” (Woolf 107) Consequently, it is Dr.

Holmes who, instead of helping Septimus, chases him down toward suicide.

4.2 Marriage and children

In like manner, the topic of marriage and children is deeply connected to the lack of freedom displayed in the previous chapter. In the book The Bell Jar, it is the motherly influence that sharpens Esther’s way of thinking of certain topics as already mentioned. In particular, her mother is subtly trying to form her daughter’s judgment about men and marriage. As a form of prevention from having sex before the wedding, her mother sends her an article called “In Defence of Chastity” written by a married woman:

The main point of the article was that a man’s world is different from a woman’s

world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only

marriage can bring the two worlds and the two different sets of emotions together

properly….This woman lawyer said the best men wanted to be pure for their wives,

and even if they weren’t pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about

sex….Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl

felt. (Plath 84-85)

Esther has her own train of thoughts about this subject; however, this short passage shows the environment in which she had to live. In essence, it is the man-dominated world and women are expected to preserve themselves for their future husbands. This, among other things, makes Esther decide that she does not want to be a virgin anymore and the search for the right man begins. Her conditions are simple and straightforward, she wants to share her bed for the first time with somebody she never met before and will never meet again; in addition, he must be intelligent and experienced so at least one of them knows what to do. It is in its essence, an act of rebellion against the rules the society made for single women.

Equally important, Esther proclaims at the beginning of the novel that she “never intended to get married” (Plath 28). She even refuses a marriage offer made by her boyfriend Buddy. One of the reasons, as she later explains, is that as soon as she finds out more about a man she is interested in, she starts to see his faults and she is unable to ignore them. She does not lack security as other girls do, on the contrary, she wants excitement and a constant change. Esther was bored by and sick of girls who are just “hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other” (Plath 4). She sees marriage as a form of brainwashed slavery and her independent spirit cannot cope with that.

“The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way” (Plath 79). Moreover, she is a girl who had straight A’s in school for fifteen years, therefore she could not accept the thought, that it was all useless and all she is left to do now is “cook and clean and wash”

(Plath 88) for her future husband and children. Esther has a lot to say about this issue, she constantly gets back to it throughout the book.

Opposite to the husbandless and childless Esther, Septimus and Rezia from the novel Mrs. Dalloway, actually do struggle with the hardship of marriage. Septimus confesses, that “he had married his wife without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her”

(Woolf 67). But it is important to realize, that his mental illness plays a big role in this. His post-traumatic stress disorder makes him unable to feel anything. He is so unsettled when he realizes this that in order to make himself feel again; he marries Rezia. She loves him dearly, but she does not understand him, which makes their marriage hard for both of them.

She knows for certain that there is something wrong with her husband, but she is not trying hard enough to grasp the true cause of his suffering, just like the husbands from Gilman’s stories. Woolf underlines this by writing: “The people we are most fond of are not good for us when we are ill” (Woolf 107). Often, it is someone whom the character is in close relation with that makes the worst decision based on their gut feelings instead of reason. In

Rezia’s case, it is also because the doctors around her keep telling her that there is nothing wrong with her husband, and she, feeling inadequate, because she is just a woman, trusts them more than she trusts Septimus.

Seeing that, it does not come as a surprise that it is Rezia and not Septimus who insists on having children. She wants to have a son like her husband. But his views are influenced by the war: “One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that” (Woolf 66).

Septimus rejects society and he does not want to contribute by populating this corrupted

22 world. Rezia would love to have a child, in the hope that it would fill her days with some purpose and happiness; but for Septimus, this subject is not negotiable, and out of question.

In the long run, the child would not save their marriage from falling apart as Septimus can hardly take care of himself and his jump out of the window makes an early end to it anyway.

Another unhappy marriage is described in the story The Yellow Wallpaper. The plot opens up by a statement that gives away the true nature of this wife-husband relationship:

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage” (Gilman 1). The main protagonist does not have any respect from her husband. When she has doubts about the house they rented for the summer, he only laughs at her and does not take her notes into consideration. To point out, she lives in a world dominated by men and there is nothing she can do about it. “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do?” (Gilman 2) One can feel the desperation coming out of her situation. Later, she proceeds by saying, that even her own brother, who is also a man of high standing, thinks of her health similarly as her husband.

Nobody stands by her side and she has no other choice than to listen to manly figures around her. To give John at least some credit, it is emphasized several times that as a husband, he is very loving and careful of his wife; but he is not truly conscious of her. He thinks that he knows what is best and he does not listen. She can do what she likes in secret only, which also speeds up her madness. In time, she grows to be “a little bit afraid of John”

(Gilman 13). Moreover, as Beverly A. Hume proposes in her article about this short story,

“Gilman’s narrator appears both to hate-and love-not only her wallpaper, but her husband

23 and child” (Hume 7). The protagonist, by doing what she likes behind John’s back, attempts to sabotage his authority over her. She does not want to give herself away completely and at least by writing in secret, she keeps fighting against the rules of the oppressive patriarchal culture.

They have an offspring together, but only a few trivial lines are devoted to him. The woman confesses that she “cannot be with him, it makes [her] so nervous” (Gilman 5). On the other hand, in the story “Making a Change”, the whole narrative takes action because of the baby. Julia loves her child unconditionally; she devotes her days and nights to his needs.

“The child was her child, it was her duty to take care of it, and take care of it she would”

(Gilman 67). But, Julia is also just a person and she needs her own space in order to function properly. The fact that she becomes a mother does not shape her whole being, and she needs her music to balance her life.

To conclude with Virginia Woolf’s thoughts about the relationship between genders. In her book A Room of One’s Own, based on the lectures she gave, she elaborates on the fact that women in fiction are almost always shown in their relation to men.

It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's

day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And

how small a part of a woman's life is that; and how little can a man know even of

that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon

his nose. (Woolf 82)

This concept is brought up by all the female writers as shown above. Generally, women can no longer stand the idea of having only one single life devoted to the hunt for a right husband and consequently, to care of their child. Men are permitted to have interests

24 outside of their families, they go to work and meet new people on a daily basis. In the eyes of society, women are perceived only as the property of a man figure around them, such as father and husband and they are tired of it and they pursue their own interests in order to be happy.

5. The Act of Suicide

5.1. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

In the first place, Septimus Warren Smith’s views on the act of suicide are to be presented. Septimus talks about killing himself several times throughout the novel but his wife Rezia always talks him out of it, so no serious attempt happens before the actual suicide. But the fact that Septimus is thinking about it during the day suggests that his final jump was not just an impulse act of a mad person. When Clarissa, his double, reflects on the topic of death at the end of the novel, she comes to the conclusion, that: “Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death” (Woolf 134). In other words, Clarissa understands him, she does not reject Septimus as a worthless human being who decided to end his life to escape the obstacles of the world around them. She recognizes that the root of the problems was in the vain effort to communicate. He tried it and unfortunately, failed to be heard. Therefore, a beautiful connection between Septimus and Clarissa is formed. Even though they shared the same space and time before in the novel, when they were both alive, they were deeply linked only after his death.

Right before Septimus kills himself by jumping out of the window, he considers different kinds of ending his life, but he quickly realizes that if he cuts himself with the knife or poisons himself with gas, there may be a chance of saving him before he actually dies and he does not want that. Therefore, throwing himself out of the window is his only safe choice. Virginia Woolf writes about his final moments as follows:

There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury lodging-house window; the

tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window

and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she

was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.)

But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good.

The sun hot. Only human beings? Coming down the staircase opposite an old man

stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. ‘I’ll give it to you!’ he cried, and

flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs Filmer’s area railings. (Woolf

108)

Septimus did not want to die. He did it to show his point because no doctor listens to him.

Shortly before, he and his wife share a moment of a perfect idyllic marriage, they are happy together, they even joke and laugh. Nothing indicates the approaching catastrophe.

However, what is honestly regrettable is the stance of Dr. Holmes when he sees dead

Septimus. “Who could have foretold it? A sudden impulse, no one was in the least to blame” (Woolf 109). Even now, he refuses to face up his share of blame and he says that nobody could have predicted that Septimus was going to kill himself. The fact that Rezia took her husband to the doctors because he proclaimed his suicidal thoughts out loud

26 obviously slipped out of the doctor’s mind and he does not take any blame for it. In the end, it is only Clarissa who grasps the true meaning behind this act.

To draw parallels between Septimus and Virginia Woolf; they have fought with similar problems before they decided to put an end to their days. They were influenced by mental illness and the war. Both of them committed suicide, but in different ways. Septimus jumps out of the window towards the end of the novel and Virginia drowns herself in the river near her house. A point often overlooked is that Virginia tried to kill herself several times throughout her life and the jumping out of the window was something she considered and tried after one of her mental breakdowns in 1904. Amy Licence, author of the book

Living in Squares, Loving in Triangles: The Lives and Loves of Virginia Woolf and the

Bloomsbury Group, writes about this incident as follows: “This can hardly have been a serious suicide attempt, as the room was situated on the ground floor; it was more likely an act of desperation, symbolic of her frustration and sense of incarceration” (Licence 108). To put it another way, Septimus is also in a desperate situation and he is about to be locked up in an asylum by Dr. Holmes, who literally rushes into the apartment to imprison him. Woolf knew, from her own experience, how devastating and depressing such a treatment can be, therefore, she chose to give Septimus an ending according to his own wishes. Being locked up and do nothing is worse than death. Her jump out of the window was as well an attempt to communicate thought-out actions as nobody listened to her words.

Another interesting parallel between them is that they both go through a happy time in their marriage before they kill themselves. Woolf writes about her husband Leonard in the suicidal note addressed to her sister Vanessa: “We have been perfectly happy until the last few weeks, when this horror began” (Licence 289). Woolfs went through the terror of

27 an approaching war together, nevertheless, they were happy before. It is just like Septimus and Rezia when they laugh and make a funny hat right before the fatal arrival of Dr.

Holmes.

To put some light into why Virginia Woolf decided to kill herself in 1941, the events of that period need to be considered. The war influenced her last months in a disastrous way; she knew that she was on the Hitler’s “Special Search List”, in other words, the list of people whom he wanted to have killed after invading Britain. She lived in constant stress of being attacked or being taken to the concentration camp as Leonard was

Jewish. They both prepared for this situation by forming a suicide pact. “Adrian Stephen had provided the Woolfs with morphine to be used in the event of an invasion and they had also kept enough petrol to poison themselves with carbon monoxide in the garage if necessary” (Sandbach-Dahlström 177). Everything was ready. Interestingly enough,

Septimus in the novel also considers poisoning with gas right before he commits suicide by jumping out of the window.

All things considered, both Woolf and Septimus struggled with the mental illness during their lives, but it is too narrow-minded to say that that is the only reason why they decided to put an end to their days. It is true that in her suicide note written for Leonard,

Virginia admits that: “I feel certain that I am going mad again…. I begin to hear voices and

I can’t concentrate” (Licence 289). Septimus as well hears voices and he sees his dead friend Evans almost everywhere. But, in both cases, it was also the war that influenced their final decision.

5.2 Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “Making a Change”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a woman born a great deal ahead of her time. Her forward, independent and progressive thinking was encouraged by her family, she was surrounded by great liberals, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe – author of the famous book

Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As already mentioned, Gilman often uses the same topics in her fictional and non-fictional writing with the same interest, mainly to emphasize important thoughts behind it. She also uses the memorable events of her life as a basis of plots in her books. For example, Gilman fought with mental illness in her life, especially after her daughter Katharine was born. This theme is developed and worked up in her short story

“Making a Change”.

As has been noted, Julia, the main heroine of the story, is at the breaking point in her life. The birth of her child completely transformed her as a woman. She is no longer a musician with passion, she is now the caretaker of her household. She no longer sleeps, and her husband and mother-in-law do not appreciate her continual trying to make their lives better. The last straw is when Frank tells her: “my mother knows more about taking care of babies than you’ll ever learn! She has the real love of it – and the practical experience. Why can’t you let her take care of the kid – and we’ll all have some peace!” (Gilman 68) Even though Julia loves her child tremendously, she cannot stand it anymore, the care of an ever- crying infant is simply too much for her to handle and she decides to kill herself. Her non- fatal suicidal action can be seen, as well as in the case of Septimus, as an equivalent to an attempt to communicate. She simply resigns with words, nobody listens to her anyway, unless she says what they want to hear. The suicidal act is not described from the first point of view as it is in other works. When Julia gives the baby to her mother-in-law and she goes

29 away in the pretense of getting some sleep, the focus shift and the story follows the steps of the mother-in-law. She smells the gas in time, and she manages to save Julia and at the same time, she realizes her mistakes. They manage to “make a change” and all works out well in the end.

The story The Yellow Wallpaper does not work with the actual suicide attempt.

Nevertheless, the nameless woman does consider jumping out of the window in one moment. “I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try” (Gilman 19).

Also, she knows that such an act would not be seen as proper by society and that it would not resolve her problems. She was simply too curious about the woman behind the wallpaper and her madness over this subject keeps her alive during the whole plot.

To stay true to the facts, even though Gilman did fight with mental illness in her life, she never attempted suicide in her life when not taking into consideration her last and successful one. In her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she writes:

Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune or “broken heart”

is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all

usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the

simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and

horrible one. (Gilman, Living 333)

Her ideology was so strong it kept her alive even through the hard times. Nevertheless, she believed that the choice was hers and that she did social service by killing herself when her time came. Just to compare this section with the perception of woman’s suicide from the

30 first chapter, these are not words of a woman who is influenced by love and wants to kill herself out of desperation. Charlotte Perkins Gilman knows exactly what she is doing, her suicide is not an impulsive act and she is the mistress of her own life. To die by one’s own terms was, for her, a basic human right. “She viewed death – her own and others’– with a considerable amount of detachment” (Knight 139). Her attitude towards the whole process of dying was reasonable, she was not torn by emotions. Denis D. Knight, author of the article “The Dying of Charlotte Perkins Gilman” studied in detail her writings about the notion of suicide and dying. He states: “Death itself was a concept about which Gilman felt to ambivalence nor anxiety, and it was not, in her estimation, an event worthy of sentimentalization” (Knight 139). Therefore, when Gilman discovered, in 1932, that she had cancer of the breast and only a year and a half to live, she immediately knew that she would end her life by her own means. Her mother died from cancer, so she was familiar with this way of dying and she swore that she is not going to end like that. So, she chose her own way. She died in 1935, in both her biography and her death note, she stated, that she

“preferred chloroform to cancer”.

5.3 Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

“Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.”

(Plath, Lady Lazarus 245)

Sylvia Plath’s only novel The Bell Jar was published in 1963, shortly before she decided to exit the world on her own terms. The book bears semi-autobiographical features,

31 it describes Plath’s suicidal attempt she went through back in the 1950s. The life of the author is therefore deeply connected to this book.

Firstly, Al Alvarez devotes the opening chapter of his book The Savage God: A

Study of Suicide to Sylvia Plath. He got to know Plath in person in the period that preceded her sorry end and he describes her as: “one of the most gifted writers of our time” (Alvarez

11). As a literary critic, he was familiar with her earlier work as well as her later and more mature one. He was lucky enough to hear some of her poems from the first hand before they were even published; she had read them to him out loud and they had spent a number of days arguing about their structure. They spoke about other things as well, the notion of death being one of the discussed aspects, and Sylvia talked about her suicidal attempt from ten years before as described in detail in her novel The Bell Jar that was published at this time. Nevertheless, Alvarez was “convinced that at this time she was not contemplating suicide. On the contrary, she was able to write about the act so freely because it was already behind her” (Alvarez 33). Sylvia Plath did not perceive dying as other people do; “for her, death was a debt to be met once every decade: in order to stay alive as a grown woman, a mother and a poet, she had to pay – in some partial, magical way – with her life” (Plath 33).

She wrote about this cyclic notion of deaths and revivals in her famous poem “Lady

Lazarus”. In order to liberate herself from the experiences she survived, she had to write about them. Her poems were a way to escape, to be free and to transform her everyday struggles into something meaningful. That is the reason why her novel The Bell Jar was created: “she spoke of it with some embarrassment as an autobiographical apprentice-work which she had to write in order to free herself from the past” (Alvarez 35). Hence, for her,

32 writing functions as a therapeutic exercise that helps her to overcome the hardships of reality.

Plath opens her novel by writing about the electrocution and by wondering “what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves” (Plath 1). She is not the kind of writer who beats about the bush and she sets the tone of the book right from the beginning.

It is harsh, down-to-earth and realistic as it bears autobiographical features of her own life.

The reader finds out that there is something wrong with the main heroine Esther

Greenwood by reading only a few opening pages. She is supposed to be having the time of her life, she is in New York having attained a summer internship, but she does not feel as other girls do. She has no lifegoal, nothing to look forward to. Her confidence is low, she always degrades herself and she is constantly thinking about her faults.

One of the main breaking points that lead her to the suicidal path is that she didn’t make it to the writing course as she hoped to and therefore, she has nothing else to do the whole summer. The idea that she will have to be with her mother in the suburbs is simply unbearable but there is no other choice. Gradually, she is not able to sleep, eat nor read; the only things she is able to read are scandal sheets, “full of the local murders and suicides and beatings and robbings” (Plath 144).

At this point, Esther is constantly thinking about different ways of killing herself.

She is fascinated by this topic, she even talks about it with her acquaintances to find a new perspective on the subject. But she is more or less disappointed because the responses are not satisfying enough for her. She is steadily picking up the courage to just do it: “I will just sit here in the sun on this park bench five minutes more by the clock on that building over there,’ I told myself ‘and then I will go somewhere and do it” (Plath 155). One of the first

33 ways to go, that she considers, is jumping through the window. “The trouble about jumping was that if you didn’t pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom. I thought seven storeys must be a safe distance” (Plath 144). Even though she diminishes this way of killing herself, she considers it twice more in the book.

Later, Esther devotes a great train of thoughts to the act of disembowelment. She admires the courage of those who can perform such a bloody act. However, she comes to the conclusion that she would never be able to do it because she hates the sight of blood.

Ironically enough, few pages later, after her first shock treatment, it is she who is locked in the bathroom with a Gillette blade in her hand. She decides to try it because it seems to be easy; it takes only two motions and it is over. But she is not able to do it, her body is paralyzed. “Then I thought, maybe I ought to spill a little blood for practice, so I sat on the edge of the tub and crossed my right ankle over my left knee. Then I lifted my right hand with the razor and let it drop of its own weight, like a guillotine, on to the calf of my leg. I felt nothing” (Plath 156). She never finishes this attempt because she is too afraid that her mother will come home and find her in the tub before she is done.

It all escalates in chapter thirteen; firstly, she considers shooting herself with a gun, but she is too afraid to do it because there is a big chance of missing and surviving the attempt. Then she tries to hang herself, but she cannot find an appropriate place in her house. After all those failures, she is thinking about giving herself up to the doctors, but she is too afraid that they will use the shock machine on her again. Finally, she managed to create a perfect plan. She writes a note saying: I am going for a long walk. Next, she swallows fifty pills that she is supposed to take one by one every day and she crawls in the dark loft of her own house where it would be almost impossible to find her. Luckily enough, she survives when her mother finds her after a few days. They take her to the 34 mental hospital. This suicidal attempt by overdose is taken from Plath’s own life.

Therefore, the question if it was possible to predict her next suicidal intention comes to the surface. Her novel was just published and talked of in public at the time her state started to worsen again. She wrote the novel to free herself of the past and it was all around her once more. The poems she sent to the editor in this period were “strange” and “too extreme”

(Alvarez 48) and he sent them back to her thinking that she needs help.

In the end, Sylvia Plath chose the way of dying she never even considered in her novel. She died at the age of thirty by carbon monoxide poisoning. Her death affected a number of people, among them, Plath’s friend and poet Anne Sexton. She dedicated a poem called Sylvia’s Death to her memory. As both women went through a non-fatal suicidal attempt in their lives, they talked about it repeatedly during their meetings. Sexton writes in one of her letters: “often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides, at length, in detail, in depth …. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

Sylvia and I often talker opposites” (Sexton 273). In the mentioned poem, Sexton even tried to sound like Plath, but in the end, she confesses that her own style won over her.

Nevertheless, one can feel the grief and envy, both at the same time, over Plath’s death.

Sexton herself suffered from a mental illness and she also decided to end her life by her own means; she died in 1974, 11 years after Sylvia Plath.

6. Conclusion

In conclusion, this thesis displays that there are visible links between the selected works of Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Sylvia Plath. At first glance, it looks like the fact that they committed suicide is the only connection between them and it comes as no surprise. The men throughout history managed to make a sweeping generalization about all women who had killed themselves; they did it because of a broken heart and therefore they do not deserve anybody’s recognition and compassion. Fortunately, a great number of studies put the focus on the reasons why women, in general, suffer from suicidal thoughts and the results prove that mental illness of some sort is a leading factor. In addition, writers are more inclined towards having mental disorders, nevertheless, according to numbers, men are still more likely drawn towards killing themselves than women.

The analysis of the selected works shows that all three writers tried to cope with their problems through their works. They often transformed their personal experiences into words. Even if the reader is not familiar with their lives, he or she can see that the same motives come to the surface in their books. Therefore, the proposed assumption is made that there is a chance that we can predict the suicidal attempt of writers if we look closely into their works and recognize the hidden clues, or in other words, a cry for help.

As mentioned above, the fight with some mental illness connects the themes that occur in all the works this thesis works with. In this case, the illustrated symptoms indicate that psychosis is the disease that all the characters have to fight with. This illness needs some sort of a starting emotionally charged experience to launch out fully. The indications are various, but the important fact is that this disease is curable. Unfortunately, the characters in the novels are misunderstood and the treatment that is provided comes in the form of a useless rest cure that eventually leads them to end their lives. 36

As only female writers are selected for this paper, the gender theme is next on the agenda. Except for Septimus Warren Smith from the novel Mrs. Dalloway, all other works have a female protagonist who commits suicide at some point in the book. What leads them to it, except their sickness is the male oppression from their surroundings. Their problems are not seen as important because they do not have the same value as men’s according to the rules of society. Even Septimus is treated like a girl by the doctors; his trauma from the war devaluates his existence.

The last part of the thesis connects the suicidal attempts of the protagonists from the books with the actual deaths of the writers who created them. Only in this chapter, are the lives of authors taken into account as this thesis attempts to predict the suicidal inclinations by looking at the works only. All things considered; it is undeniable that the connections are present. All works do bear the same signs and the repetitive notions are hard to miss. So, is it possible that people are simply making themselves blind and they refuse to take actions before it is too late? Unfortunately, it seems so as mental illness and suicide are, even today, themes that are uncomfortable to talk about. In either case, another line of research worth pursuing further is to examine other works of female writers who committed suicide, as this paper covers only three of them. The themes of mental illness, gender oppression and the description of a suicidal attempt may be somebody’s written cry for help and the early recognition may even save the life of a still living writer.

7. Works Cited

Primary sources:

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover,

1997.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Faber & Faber, 1963.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2003.

Secondary Sources:

Alvarez, Al. The Savage God, A Study of Suicide. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1971.

Brown, Ron M. The Art of Suicide. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2001.

Colin, Peter. Dictionary of Medical Terms. London: A&C Black, 2005.

Gerisch, Benigna. ""This Is Not Death, It Is Something Safer": A Psychodynamic Approach

to Sylvia Plath." Death Studies, vol. 22, no. 8, 1998, pp. 735-761. ProQuest,

https://search.proquest.com/docview/231406223?accountid=16531.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Family and Home as Institutions.” Women and Economics, Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Wisconsin: The

University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper?” Forerunner, vol. 4, no.

10, Oct. 1913, pp. 217. Hathi Trust Digital Library,

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/download/pdf?id=mdp.39015014168648;orient=

0;size=100;seq=279;num=253;attachment=0

Higonnet, Margaret. “Speaking Silences: Women’s Suicide.” The Female Body in Western

Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, Edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman, Cambridge MA:

Harvard UP, 1986, pp. 68-83.

Hume, Beverly A. "Managing Madness in Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper"."Studies in

American Fiction, vol. 30, no. 1, 2002, pp. 3-20. ProQuest,

https://search.proquest.com/docview/274151229?accountid=16531.

Knight, Denise D. "The Dying of Charlotte Perkins Gilman." American Transcendental

Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 2, 1999, pp. 137-159. ProQuest,

https://search.proquest.com/docview/222379112?accountid=16531.

Licence, Amy. Living in Squares, Loving in Triangles: The Lives and Loves of Virginia

Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. Stroud: Amberly Publishing, 2016.

Ludwig, Arnold M. "Mental Illness and Creative Activity in Female Writers." The

American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 151, no. 11, 1994, pp. 1650-6. ProQuest,

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Plath, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus.” The Collected Poems, Edited by Ted Hughes, NY: Harper &

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Sandbach-Dahlström, Catherine. “‘In My End is My Beginning’: The Death of Virginia

Woolf.” Cross / Cultures, no. 130, 2011, pp. 161-185,315. ProQuest,

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Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1977.

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psychosis.shtml.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin Classics, 2000.

Woolf, Virginia. “Introduction.” Mrs. Dalloway. New York: The Modern Library, 1928.

8. Summary

The purpose of this thesis is to find parallels in selected works of three female authors who decided to end their lives with suicide. Specifically, Virginia Woolf and her novel Mrs.

Dalloway, Charlotte Perkins Gilman with her two short stories, The Yellow Wallpaper and

“Making a Change”, and last but not least, Sylvia Plath and her only novel The Bell Jar.

The first part of this work introduces the topic of suicide from a historical perspective and also provides basic information about the connection between writers and their tendency to end their lives before their time. Subsequently, the work is divided into three parts according to the areas of research, explicitly: mental illness, gender oppression and the act of suicide. The mental illness that dominates in all works is psychosis; the origin of this sickness is associated with a traumatic experience that has disturbed the everyday life of the characters in the books, so it is important to identify it. Furthermore, various psychosis symptoms such as hallucinations and depression are investigated. Since this work is specifically concerned with female writers and their thoughts are often transferred to their protagonists, it is important to pay attention to the issue of gender oppression and the treatment of women as inferior. Often, the protagonists have to deal with the restrictions of their personal freedom by their spouses, children or other family members. The last part of this work is the only one that explores the parallels between the suicidal attempts of characters in books and the death of the author who created them. Hence, one subchapter is devoted to each writer, and their lives are examined alongside the lives of their literary characters. In addition, the aim of this work is to point out a repetitive format in the works of these authors, which can be interpreted as a cry for help that has remained unheard of and led to the death of these gifted women.

9. Resumé

Cílem této práce je najít paralely ve vybraných dílech třech ženských autorek, které se rozhodly ukončit svůj život sebevraždou. Konkrétně se jedná o Virginii Woolf a její novelu

Paní Dallowayová, Charlotte Perkins Gilman s jejími dvěma krátkými povídkami Žlutá tapeta a „Making a Change“ a v neposlední řadě, Sylvia Plath a její jediná novela Pod skleněným zvonem. První část této práce uvádí téma sebevraždy z historického hlediska a také poskytuje základní informace o souvislostech mezi spisovatelkami a jejich sklony k předčasnému ukončení svých životů. Následovně je práce rozdělena na tři části podle oblastí výzkumu ve zmíněných dílech, a to na: duševní nemoci, rodový útlak a sebevražedný akt. Duševní nemoc, která dominuje ve všech dílech je psychóza, jejíž počátky se spojují s traumatickým zážitkem, který narušil každodenní život postav v knihách, a proto je důležité jej identifikovat. Dále jsou zkoumány různé symptomy psychózy, jako halucinace a deprese. Jelikož se tato práce zabývá pouze spisovatelkami

ženského pohlaví, a jejich myšlenky jsou často přeneseny na jejich protagonistky, je důležité vzít na vědomí otázku diskriminace žen jako méněcenného pohlaví. Protagonistky se musí často potýkat s omezováním jejich osobní svobody svými manžely, dětmi či jinými rodinnými příslušníky. Poslední část této práce jako jediná zkoumá paralely mezi sebevražednými pokusy postav v knihách a smrtí příslušné autorky, která dané dílo vytvořila. Každé spisovatelce je tedy věnována jedna podkapitola a jejich životy jsou zkoumány vedle životů jejich literárních postav. Kromě všeho je cílem této práce poukázat na jistý opakující se formát v dílech těchto autorek, který se dá interpretovat jako volání o pomoc, které zůstalo nevyslechnuté, a vedlo ke smrti těchto nadaných žen.