Some great works of literature can contribute to a desperate shadow falling over the lives of emotionally vulnerable readers, says a University at Albany professor of English who has chronicled the reaction of his students to suicidal themes in literature for more than 20 years. Now, he has written a book examining the depiction and at times glorification of suicide as it is portrayed in the works of some of our most renowned authors.
Jeffrey Berman, in Surviving Literary Suicide, explores the relationship between literature and life, and asserts that teachers need to be more aware of the emotional effects that literary suicide may have on students. He also points out that teachers and critics have tended to ignore the tragedy of suicide in many fictional works, and often gone to the extreme of romanticizing it.
"For example, so many literary critics and teachers have tended to see Edna Pontellier's drowning at the end of Kate Chopin's The Awakening as an act of female empowerment - a triumph over an oppressive patriarchy -- an act of transcendence. They glorify that suicide in the same way the novel does - and by glorification I mean the presentation of it as liberating and sensuous.
"But you don't see its aftermath. You don't see the dead body. You don't see its impact upon children and spouses and loved ones.
"We give the wrong signal to people when we romanticize an act with such devastating interpersonal consequences. In a time of the Littleton massacre and other examples of young people taking desperate measures to indicate their torment, are we being responsible in ignoring the reality of such decisions in literature? The fact is that Edna's triumph over a patriarchal society comes with her awakening to her true self, not her renunciation of life."
In Surviving Literary Suicide, Berman deals with suicide's portrayal in the works of four authors who later took their own lives - Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton - and two who did not - Kate Chopin and William Styron. He points out how writing about suicide influenced the writers' emotional states and, even more, how such literature has the power of persuasion among young readers - what he calls "The Werther Effect."
Goethe's novel The Sorrow of Young Werther caused scores of readers in the 18th Century to commit suicide in the same manner as its protagonist. Berman definitely believes that today, in a society where 27 percent of students report thinking "seriously" about suicide (according to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Ga.), the writings of such talents as Sylvia Plath can have a profound and harmful influence, if not addressed responsibly by teachers.
The moving student diary selections included in Berman's book only reinforce this belief. Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, praised Surviving Literary Suicide in the most recent edition of The Wilson Quarterly, and wrote: "Most powerful for me . . . were the strength, insight, and humanity of the student responses to what they read."
Berman, whose sensitivity to lives at emotional risk began 31 years ago when his best friend, a young English professor, committed suicide, remains adamantly against censorship. "I am not for suicide correctness," he said. "I do think teachers need to be aware of the signs of suicidal tendencies in their students, and I particularly think teachers of literature need to confront the topic of suicide when it appears in literature and be honest with their students about its implications."
Surviving Literary Suicide has also been lauded by Library Journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education book review, and also by one of book's primary subjects, Styron, whose non-fictional work Darkness Visible chronicled his own victory over near-suicidal depression.
July 30, 1999 Contact: Vincent Reda, University at Albany: (518) 442-3078
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