The eighteenth century was a key transitional period in the history of self-destruction in Britain, and this study shows that suicide was thought to be, and represented as, an act stemming from a wider variety of emotional states than what we typically acknowledge today.
The eighteenth century was a key transitional period in the history of self-destruction in Britain, a time in which self-destruction was reconceptualised along a number of fronts. At a lexical level, it was a time in which older spiritual views of ‘self-murder’ were challenged by emerging secular and medical views of ‘suicide’. And despite the enlightened defence of suicide as the ultimate expression of one’s individuality and autonomy - as expressed, for instance, by David Hume’s controversial essay ‘Of Suicide’ (1777) - suicide was a paradoxically social phenomenon during this period, with the proliferation of print culture and the formation of the public sphere preventing this most individual of acts from remaining in a private dimension, and from resisting social meaning.
This study will expose the various ways in which the authority of a conservative, Christian perspective of suicide was frequently disrupted by representations founded on alternative aesthetic or ‘emotional regimes’, such as political stoicism, sentimentalism, fashion, satire, social realism and psychological realism. As such, suicide was represented as an act stemming from a wider variety of emotional states in the British eighteenth century. Case studies will also reveal how emotions were central to shaping public opinion and attitudes towards suicide, eliciting and circulating varying and often conflicting responses such as pity, sympathy, fear, rage, disgust and laughter. The result will be a study that demonstrates how fiction, drama and the popular press interact as a potent cultural force that not only reflects but transforms social norms relating to suicide, and one that is increasingly and anxiously recognized as such during this period.
Image: Thomas Rowlandson, Englishmen in November, Frenchmen in November, 1788. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittesley Fund, 1959, www.metmuseum.org
