In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Sigmund Freud suggests that when an object of love is lost, the ego recreates an image of the loved one inside the self. This image, or “shadow,” is not fully integrated into the personality, thereby enabling the ego to split off. In this “ego splitting,” a part of the ego sits in judgment on the rest of the ego, criticizing it, attacking it. Suicide is the ultimate expression of this dynamic; because one cannot kill this person, one “kills” them by destroying the internalized image of them (Freud 159). The analysis that Freud presents is part of an increasingly secularized view of self-destruction. Such analyses shape a social, legal, and cultural legitimization of suicide, and at the same time register the
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The speaker in “The Serpent is Shut out from Paradise” contemplates suicide, and in “The False Laurel and the True,” the speaker emphasizes the fact that the laurel he wears is poisonous. In 1822, Shelley asks Edward Trelawny to obtain some prussic acid for him: “I have no intention of suicide at present,” he says, “but it would be a comfort for me to have in my possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest” (Shelley xlvii). By contrast, the decision to commit suicide came to be seen, under certain circumstances, as increasingly reasonable. In addition to Wordsworth's “Ruth,” at least three poems in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads – “The Mad Mother,” “The Idiot Boy,” and “'Tis said, that some have died for love, &c.” – make a point of engaging with socially determined acts of suicide. The politically radical version of suicide is expressed in an epic poem by Thomas Cooper, which asks “Why suffer ye to fill your ears?” while arguing for political change. Suicide and attempted suicide also surface in the Victorian novel. The plot of Jane Eyre hinges on the suicides of John Reed and Bertha Mason, and suicides figure in a number of Charles Dickens' novels, including Nancy in Oliver Twist, Merdle in Little Dorrit, and Tom Jarndyce and Lady Dedlock Moreau …show more content…
Writing near the end of the 1840s, for instance, Charles Bourdin claims that someone who kills himself – regardless of his motives – is not acting in possession of his reason (Lieberman 27). In a review of Brierre de Boismont's On Suicide and Suicidal Insanity, the author commends Boismont for distinguishing between the “suicide of a madman and the self-murder of a responsible being,” commenting that “suicide . . . is . . . a manifestation of insanity” (Journal of Psychological Medicine 451). While the Romantics had a predilection for “the beauty of the horrid” (Faubert and Reynolds 642), the medicalization of suicide resulted in a reaction against the gesture. Re-conceived as a disease, suicide regained its place in the public imagination as a source of anxiety and disgrace. The typical response to suicide was to fear it, to conceal it, and to regard the act as “subversive” and “other.” The move is from despair to
The speaker in “The Serpent is Shut out from Paradise” contemplates suicide, and in “The False Laurel and the True,” the speaker emphasizes the fact that the laurel he wears is poisonous. In 1822, Shelley asks Edward Trelawny to obtain some prussic acid for him: “I have no intention of suicide at present,” he says, “but it would be a comfort for me to have in my possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest” (Shelley xlvii). By contrast, the decision to commit suicide came to be seen, under certain circumstances, as increasingly reasonable. In addition to Wordsworth's “Ruth,” at least three poems in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads – “The Mad Mother,” “The Idiot Boy,” and “'Tis said, that some have died for love, &c.” – make a point of engaging with socially determined acts of suicide. The politically radical version of suicide is expressed in an epic poem by Thomas Cooper, which asks “Why suffer ye to fill your ears?” while arguing for political change. Suicide and attempted suicide also surface in the Victorian novel. The plot of Jane Eyre hinges on the suicides of John Reed and Bertha Mason, and suicides figure in a number of Charles Dickens' novels, including Nancy in Oliver Twist, Merdle in Little Dorrit, and Tom Jarndyce and Lady Dedlock Moreau …show more content…
Writing near the end of the 1840s, for instance, Charles Bourdin claims that someone who kills himself – regardless of his motives – is not acting in possession of his reason (Lieberman 27). In a review of Brierre de Boismont's On Suicide and Suicidal Insanity, the author commends Boismont for distinguishing between the “suicide of a madman and the self-murder of a responsible being,” commenting that “suicide . . . is . . . a manifestation of insanity” (Journal of Psychological Medicine 451). While the Romantics had a predilection for “the beauty of the horrid” (Faubert and Reynolds 642), the medicalization of suicide resulted in a reaction against the gesture. Re-conceived as a disease, suicide regained its place in the public imagination as a source of anxiety and disgrace. The typical response to suicide was to fear it, to conceal it, and to regard the act as “subversive” and “other.” The move is from despair to