Abstract
In North America and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, debates over the meaning of suicide became a privileged site for efforts to discover, invent, or limn the conditions of modern selfhood and society and elicited new frameworks for interpreting suicide, particularly in moral philosophy and sociology. Specially attuned to the nature and nuances of this modern conceptualization of suicide are the works of American writer Edith Wharton (1862–1937). From the first poem she ever published (pseudonymously) in 1879 to her final novel, The Gods Arrive, in 1932, Wharton weaves a thread of reflection on the question of what suicide means for modern visions of the ethical subject and of the ethical society. Focusing on three of her earliest texts—her juvenile poem, “Only a Child,” her 1899 story “A Cup of Cold Water,” and her 1903 novella Sanctuary—this chapter investigates how Wharton’s writing foregrounds the figure of the witness to suicide. In so doing, her writing casts critical light on the paradoxical consequences of turn-of-the-twentieth-century efforts to legitimize suicide and to discover in suicide forms of modern authenticity.
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Notes
- 1.
Among Wharton’s novels that include stories of suicide, whether marginally or centrally, are: Sanctuary (1903 [1970]), The House of Mirth (1905), The Fruit of the Tree (1907), Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913), The Mother’s Recompense (1925), The Children (1928), and Hudson River Bracketed (1929). Short stories in which suicide plays a role include “A Cup of Cold Water,” “The Portrait,” “The Last Asset,” and “The Day of the Funeral,” as well as the unpublished fragment “Beatrice Palmatto” (according to the plot summary of which both Beatrice and her sister take their own lives). Hermann Sundermann’s The Joy of Living, a play Wharton translated early in her career (1902), also has suicide as a central plot element.
- 2.
Minois (1999) provides a fascinating and synthetic account of cultural attitudes toward self-destruction in Europe from the middle ages to the early twentieth century. Other crucial works in the cultural history of suicide include Bayet (1922), Gates (1988), and MacDonald and Murphy (1990). A partial history of suicide in the USA is provided in Kushner (1989).
- 3.
For instance, in May, 1879, The New York Times reported 23 suicides, 4 on its front pages. Supplementing these news reports were frequent editorials on suicide, its causes, and its meanings. Apparent increases in suicide rates in the USA during the second part of the nineteenth century led to frequent reports of a possible “suicide epidemic,” for which media coverage was also often held responsible (Kushner, 1989). The most comprehensive study of the rhetoric of suicide epidemic in the nineteenth century is Lieberman (“Une Maladie Épidemique,” 1987 and Leaving You, 2003). A striking manifestation of the anxiety over a suicide epidemic in England is found in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1896 [1978]), in which the suicide of Little Father Time is immediately recognized as a symptom of a threat to the social fabric, “the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live” (p. 411).
- 4.
- 5.
Underlining this possibility is the fact that while “Only a Child” displays numerous metrical irregularities, none is as evident as one produced at the very site of the inscrutable shift from “nought” to “naught.” By repeating the one line—“His little hands had nought to do” (p. 4, line 57)—ten lines later but with an extra syllable appended—“And his little hands had naught to do” (p. 4, line 67)—the poem displays an internal metrical inconsistency discernible without reference to any external standard.
- 6.
In a letter from September 7, 1902, Wharton mentions reading, and not finishing, James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) (Menon, 2003). Later letters also give evidence of her familiarity with James’ philosophy. From the start of her friendship with Henry James in 1900, William would also be part of Wharton’s extended social circle. For a sustained consideration of intersections between James’ philosophy and Wharton’s writing, see Kress (2002).
- 7.
On the significance of the hotel as a characteristically modern space in Wharton’s writing, see Klimasmith (2002).
- 8.
It is interesting to note that a similar situation—the attempted suicide of a jilted woman in a New York hotel—prompted Baptist minister Henry Marsh Warren to found the National Save-A-Life League in 1906 (Colt, 1991).
- 9.
In this reading, Lily’s death appears as entirely unexceptional, a symptom of larger realities that produce, contain, and explain it. Spangler (1979), for instance, sees The House of Mirth as one of several turn-of-the-century American novels, along with Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and London’s Martin Eden (1909) that exemplify Durkheim’s analysis of suicide, according to which “modern society is a killer, the suicide its victim” (1951, p. 296).
- 10.
Kate’s acute sense of shame as analyzed by Raphael would therefore be the affective equivalent or consequence of this error (1991).
- 11.
This essay is substantially revised from an earlier version that appeared in The Edith Wharton Review (Stark, 2002). I am grateful to Elaine Golin, Anupama Rao, Johannah Rodgers, and Augusta Rohrbach for their astute comments.
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Stark, J. (2021). Suicide and the Interpretation of Modernity: Edith Wharton’s Early Fictions. In: Ros Velasco, J. (eds) Suicide in Modern Literature. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69392-3_2
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