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Reading Representations of Suicide in US Novels from the Great Depression (1929-1941)

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Reading Representations of Suicide in US Novels from the Great Depression (1929-1941) Suicide, Society, and Crisis: Reading Representations of Suicide in US Novels From The Great Depression (1929-1941) Angus Young Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English May 2020 This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Angus Young to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2020 The University of Leeds and Angus Young i Acknowledgements My most sincere thanks must go to my supervisor Professor Andrew Warnes, whose hard work, patience, and support have made this thesis possible. Andrew has provided more time and help to me and this thesis than I could have hoped for. I am also grateful to the wider University of Leeds, including the 110th Anniversary Scholarship, the support and admin staff, and the academic staff. I have learnt so much during my time here that has been proving invaluable. I would also like to thank Professor Andrew Bennett, Professor Hamilton Carroll, and Dr Denis Flannery for the comments and guidance they have provided for this thesis. Their input has made this thesis what it is today. There are several others who deserve mention, in particular, Sam Perks, Jivitesh Vashishtani, Arunima Bhattacharya, Carla Douglas, and Jiachen Zhang, but the list is too long to include everyone here. Everyone who has helped in producing this thesis and helped me grow over the past few years does, though, have my unwavering respect and appreciation. Although I note here the assistance of others, any errors or shortcomings in this thesis are entirely my own. ii Abstract This thesis argues that, in American novels of the era of the Great Depression, suicide is characteristically represented as a paradoxical act which at once defies explanation yet reveals an urgent need for social reform. The thesis, by focusing on this characteristic paradox, draws on contemporary critical theories of suicide in literature while returning to Émile Durkheim’s pioneering understanding of suicide as a social act. On the one hand, I follow the work of Andrew Bennett and other literary scholars, showing how suicide in the context of the Great Depression novel is often depicted as an act which, in Bennett’s terms, “makes and unmakes meaning.” Yet I reflect on the creative (‘makes’) as well as the destructive (‘unmakes’) aspects of Bennett’s phrase, and I do so to call attention to the fact that suicide, in this body of work, takes place within a social context. In the shadow of rising suicide rates during the Great Depression, these novels bring focus to suicide as a particular social concern and highlight the sometimes baffling and sometimes enlightening effects suicide has on others. If suicide “breaks the frames that society relies upon to produce meaning,” as Margaret Higonnet has suggested, then I argue here that a similar combination of thwarted understanding and resurgent social critique is characteristic of the novels of William Faulkner, Wallace Thurman, John O’Hara, Horace McCoy, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Carson McCullers. The numerous suicides of interwar American literature will present to us throughout this thesis acts of uncertainty as well as social commentary, which in turn encourages a revision of the apparent impasse that suicide can pose to understanding. The treatment of suicide in these texts foregrounds and realises the possibility of reading this impasse, and the paradoxes of suicide, as a means of provoking and distilling complex, ongoing, and unsettled negotiations of social failings and social change. iii Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 1. The Cadillac Suicide in John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra (1934) ................... 38 2. Social Murder and Suicide in William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) ................. 73 3. Suicide and Artistic Expression in Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932) ....................................................................................................................................... 111 4. Communicating Suicidal Desire in Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) ............................................................................................................................ 149 5. A Double Suicide in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1936) ............................. 181 6. Suicide and Jurisprudence in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940) .... 213 7. Suicide and Perseverance in Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) ....................................................................................................................................... 247 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 279 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 287 iv Introduction This thesis focuses on a range of suicides that occur in novels written in the United States during the 1930s, and places these representations into a dialogue with some of the most important ways of understanding suicide that emerge both from recent scholarship and from foundational works of European sociology. As I consider this dialogue between literary representations and a range of academic perspectives, I will argue that American authors of the 1930s characteristically, and in similarity to contemporary scholarship, negotiate suicide as an unresolvable and disrupting moment of uncertainty. Both deliberate the complexities of representing suicide by calling attention to and interrogating the crisis in understanding that this act entails. Yet I also argue that, even as they imagine the moment of suicide as a crisis of meaning impervious to final explanation, these texts continue to present this as a social crisis that must be understood in social terms, and one for which there may be social responses. They follow the pioneering sociological analysis of Émile Durkheim even as they depict it as an act of ‘unmaking’ that questions what meaning can be sustained in the social realm. The challenges of understanding the potential causes and consequences of suicide have become a point of focus of contemporary scholarship on suicide and what Andrew Bennett terms ‘literary suicidology.’1 Literary suicidology turns to the 1 Andrew Bennett, Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce to David Foster Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017), 21. 1 representation of suicide through written language and, in so doing, brings attention to a sense of ambivalence that seems inherent in suicide itself. Such scholarship regularly analyses suicide by stressing the questions the act raises, the impossibility of fully understanding its causes and consequences, and highlighting the disorientation this uncertainty gives rise to. This limit of comprehension, and the attending concern that suicide is a phenomenon that can never be finally understood in social terms, is brought into relief in US literature of the 1930s. Yet the resurgence of didactic or reformist writing that attended the political and social crisis known as The Great Depression also found reflection in these works. Contemporary discourses and commentaries on race, gender, politics, and individualism percolate throughout these novels, and not least in their representations of suicide. As a result, through an emphasis on both ambivalence and social concerns, US representations of suicide of the 1930s at once show that these acts perform a crisis in social meaning and understand this as a crisis requiring a social response. As we will see, when US authors of the 1930s respond to suicide, they often do so in a manner alert to its thwarting of social understanding, yet they place this disintegration of meaning into a context of social disorder, confusion, and change. In so doing, they elucidate the crisis of interpretation identified in literary suicidology by analysing the realisation of such crisis within a particular social moment, and present ways to continue thinking about this crisis in social terms even when any final resolution seems impossible. This introduction begins with an overview of studies of suicide and suicide representation. Here, I will read a range of key texts from suicidology and identify both what is shared and what differentiates contemporary literary suicidology from a classic Durkheimian analytical approach. I trace this development of suicidology by turning to a series of core studies from the twentieth century, including the work of Maurice 2 Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Andrew Bennett. A distinctive relationship between literature and suicide, particularly concerning challenges of comprehension and representation, emerges from this discussion. From these studies, a series of central questions for this thesis and a methodological framework through which to negotiate them come to the fore. This introduction then turns to The Great Depression in the US as a historical period. I follow a convention of using the term ‘The Great Depression’ to define a period of US sociocultural history from The Wall Street Crash of 1929 to the US entry into World War Two in 1941. This section will
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