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INFORMATION to USERS This Manuscript Has Been Reproduced from the Microfilm Master. UMI Films the Text Directly from the Origina INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9222631 The art of dying: Suicide in the works of Kate Chopin and Sylvia Plath Gentry, Deborah Suiter, D.A. Middle Tennessee State University, 1992 Copyright ©1992 by Gentry, Deborah Suiter. All rights reserved. UMI 300N.ZeebRd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 The Art of Dying: Suicide in the Works of Kate Chopin and Sylvia Plath Deborah S. Gentry A dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of Middle Tennessee State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Arts May 1992 The Art of Dying: Suicide in the Works of Kate Chopin and Sylvia Plath APPROVED: Graduate Committee: //r^^eJ^ /V^ Major Professor rj^.^>^L^^ Head of the English Department Dean of th6e iGraduat e School Abstract The Art of Dying: Suicide in the Works of Kate Chopin and Sylvia Plath by Deborah S. Gentry Although the representation of suicide is commonplace in literature, few studies have explicitly dealt with the meaning of suicide in the works of women writers. Margaret Higonnet classifies representations of suicide as "masculine" or "feminine," and finds that since the Romantic age, literary suicides have been feminized. Masculine suicides are those where the characters, male or female, choose to die as an heroic act of protest against individual or social wrongs, while feminine suicides are the result of mental illness. Chapter I applies Higonnet's theories and those of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar concerning the division of women literary figures into angels or monsters to representative literary suicides of nineteenth century. Chapter II examines the suicide of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening by Kate Chopin, a novel that is often misunderstood by critics who read it using the Romantic paradigm. Chopin breaks that paradigm, presenting Edna's suicide as heroic. Chapters III and IV examine two works by Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar and Ariel. In The Bell Jar. Esther Greenwood survives her suicide attempt and is able to reconstruct her Deborah S. Gentry personality. However, the novel is thinly disguised autobiography, and approximately ten years later, Plath herself had a relapse and committed suicide. In the year before her death she wrote some of her greatest poems, published posthumously as Ariel. While Plath7s life and work fit more easily into the paradigm of feminine suicide than that of Chopin, many poems in Ariel portray the female speaker as a rebel against the tyranny of patriarchy. Chapter IV concludes with an extensive analysis of Plath's last poem, "Edge" which portrays the suicide of the speaker as a calm and heroic act in keeping with the tone set by Chopin in The Awakening. The Conclusion, Chapter V, explores the need that women have for self-actualization within the framework of love, marriage, and motherhood. Historically, those institutions have precluded women's self-actualization and have demanded from women a degree of unselfishness that is unnatural and harmful. Artists such as Chopin and Plath are stating that women should not have to die in order to live. Table of Contents Chapter Page I. Introduction: The Paradigm of Women's Suicide ... 1 II. Kate Chopin's Rebel with a Cause: Edna Pontellier in The Awakenincf 32 III. At Ease at the Gate: Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar 81 IV. Ariel, Plath on the Edge 122 V. Conclusion: A Room is Not Enough 161 Works Cited 174 Chapter I Introduction: The Paradigm of Women's Suicide In his best known theoretical work of literary criticism, "The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe states his theory of what constitutes good poetry: the proper subject of poetry is beauty and the most legitimate tone is melancholy. To produce this effect, according to Poe, the best subject for poetry is death allied with beauty. Thus, he concludes that "the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world" (158). Poe describes here one of the most common of literary symbols, the untimely death of a beautiful woman, and states overtly a major preoccupation of Romantic art. However resonant this symbolic death might be in Western literature, that symbolism has been principally developed in the hands of men for primarily masculine appreciation. A crucial question thus becomes: what does the death of a beautiful woman mean to women who have become artists in a trade dominated by masculine motifs? Whereas it is clear that projections of death onto women characters allow male writers to distance and objectify the experience of death, what does that same death mean in works written by women about women, especially when that death is due to suicide? The purpose of this dissertation is to answer that question at least in part by studying the works of some 2 representative women writers, particularly Kate Chopin and Sylvia Plath, to determine what role suicide plays in their work. From the very beginnings of Western literature, from Greek tragedy, women's suicides have been portrayed as central plot elements. Jocasta, a major character, kills herself in Oedipus Rex, and more significantly, Antigone, the protagonist, martyrs herself heroically in Antigone. Margaret Higonnet notes in her brilliant essay "Speaking Silences: Women's Suicide": 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 of this tradition. (70) The "masculine" tradition that Higonnet refers to is one where the act of suicide is seen as a choice made of the victim's free will and intended as a symbolic act of defiance or protest against tyranny or immorality. This kind of suicide in literature is intended to move the surviving characters to embrace strong action to remedy the perceived social or political problem. However, as Higonnet points out, with the advent of the Age of Reason in the eighteenth century, suicide 3 increasingly becomes identified with weakness and mental instability. Under this view, suicide is no longer conceived of as an heroic act of free will but an involuntary act of a weak mind. Higonnet states that "the very notion of suicide as an intentional act dissipates in the course of its scientific reassessment" to the point that by the nineteenth century, suicide has been completely "feminized" into a passive act (70) . Of this transition, Higonnet writes: In the Romantic period, the focus of aesthetics shifts from action (Aristotle) to character (Herder, Coleridge). Accordingly, in literary depictions of suicide, the focus shifts from function to motive. At the same time, the stock motives for suicide narrow in range and become more "feminine" than in classical times. After the French Revolution, voluntary death is depoliticized. This pattern is visible in the case of men as well as women. (71) Higonnet uses examples from the poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Wagner to underscore the new identification by the Man of Sensibility with the Dionysian experience of romantic love. Despite some prominent examples of male suicides in literature, Higonnet concludes that in the nineteenth- century, the literary motif of suicide features primarily 4 women victims, although in reality women commit suicide at a much lower rate than men. She states: 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. (71) The point that Higonnet is making is consistent with one of the main themes of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's monumental work The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. In this work, Gilbert and Gubar extensively explore the recurring themes in women's literature that arise from women's peculiar position in a patriarchical society. According to them, women have internalized the notion that they "exist only to be acted on by men, both as literary and as sensual objects" (8). Rather than create art, women are themselves supposed to be works of art. In order to be works of art, women must subordinate their individuality, or according to Gilbert and Gubar, kill themselves "into a 'perfect' image" (14).
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