Every Classic Has A Suicide

Star-crossed lovers. Let’s blame Shakespeare. He retold the tale of young lovers who could not be together, so, in a burst of high passion, they poisoned and stabbed themselves—all for the sake of love, well, more like infatuation, but let’s not dampen their “poetic” ends.

And, so, it seems a genre was born. The romantic suicide.

I love you. I cannot have you. I must drown, or poison myself, or stab myself, or hang myself, or whatever else, so that I can prove that my love was “real” and that you will be “sorry” without me. My soul mate has been denied me, so, therefore, I must end myself, too.

I watched a movie the other night where the romantic lead drowns herself with all of her garments dancing about her in the water, so elegant, so ethereal; her dress was like bloated angels’ wings. Her love had double-crossed her, duped her, and sailed off with another. Instead of showing a stronger person, who would cry, eat a gallon of cookie dough ice cream, and get bombed on rum for a week or two, our fair lead chose what, unfortunately, has become the highest form of romantic end in literary fiction—she leapt into the chilly Thames and died with a smile on her face.

The current literary canon is a veritable homage to suicide: “The Awakening,” Anna Karenina (which I didn’t mind because 800 pages was simply too long for a literary character to live), The Sound and The Fury, Mrs. Dalloway, Hamlet, Othello, “A Clean, Well-Lit Place,” The Great Gatsby, The Bell Jar, Death of a Salesman, Sophie’s Choice, Oedipus Rex, The Count of Monte Cristo, Madame Bovary, Girl, Interrupted, The Virgin Suicides, A Tale of Two Cities (though I want to contemplate the fine line between self-sacrifice and suicide in another blog), and dozens and dozens of others.

Not to mention the authors themselves. If they weren’t stuffing rocks down their blouses and drowning themselves (Woolf), they were putting bullets in their heads (Hemingway), or gassing themselves (Plath). This does not include Anne Sexton, Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace, John Berryman, Jack London, Sigmund Freud, Hart Crane, and, of course, there are many others who attempted suicide. If we added artists to the list, we’d have to double or triple it.

Much has been written about the link between mental illness (“madness”) and so-called “genius.” As it stands, we have a literary canon of mental illness.

As a college student, I just remember sitting at my desk class after class, rolling my eyes at yet another suicide either by the author or one of their typically anguished characters. Either these authors were writing out of their own fractured experiences, or they had written themselves into a corner, or they honestly believed that such a death would be tragically romantic, or that true literary stories commanded such a bleak ending.

I remember being in a fiction workshop once, listening to people criticize one of my stories for its “happy ending.” We even had a discussion about whether a good literary story can have a happy ending. I am inclined to believe that it can.

Perhaps if more did have happy endings, more people might read them.

Having experienced a suicide in my family, I can say that I find the “high romance” status of suicide in most stories disturbing.

I’d rather read about the family left behind by the woman who decided to jump in the Thames because of her heart-break. How did they feel when they heard the news? Did they feel guilty? Did they wonder why she couldn’t have weathered such an emotional storm, like so many others do?

Lovers come and go, and guess what? Most people survive. After the pain, there is, as Cher believes, “Life after love.” I felt cheated by the ending of that novel—or at least the movie adaptation. It lacked imagination, originality, and, worst of all, it once again showed how a marginalized character (in this case a gay woman) had no place in society and, therefore, had to sacrifice herself to the Oedipal order of society.

I expected more from this particular author. The character’s suicide felt like a deus ex machina.

Certainly, not all rejected lovers need to plunge themselves into a river. I think this is why Washington Square left such a strong impression on me. She goes through a great deal suffering in regards to her love for Morris. But, she stays strong and survives in the end. The individual, the cornerstone of most novels and short stories, triumphs. She does not require a soul mate. She can find satisfaction in her own day to day existence.

Suicide in stories is a deus ex machina. A person creates this perfectly complex character with an impossible conflict and takes—pardon the cliché—the easy way out.

Perhaps one day, someone will write the story of Romeo and Juliet’s families. Perhaps one day, we can reconsider a canon that does not emulate suicide, self-destruction (a slew of alcoholics and drug abusers), and slip in a few stories with happy endings--the kind of endings that make you smile and realize that life, with all of its hurt and happinesses, is so definitely worth the living.