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The art of suicide PDF

255 Pages·2001·9.561 MB·English
by  BrownRon M
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The Art of Suicide " picturing history Series Editors Peter Burke, Sander L. Gilman, Ludmilla Jordanova, Roy Porter, †Bob Scribner (1995–8) In the same series Health and Illness Landscape and Englishness Images of Difference david matless sander l. gilman The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel Men in Black Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in john harvey Medieval and Renaissance Europe mitchell b. merback Dismembering the Male Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War ‘Down with the Crown’ joanna bourke British Anti-monarchism and Debates about Royalty since 1790 Eyes ofLove antony taylor The Gaze in English and French Painting and Novels 1840–1900 The Jewish Self-Image stephen kern American and British Perspectives 1881‒1939 The Destruction ofArt michael berkowitz Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution Global Interests dario gamboni Renaissance Art between East and West lisa jardine and jerry brotton The Feminine Ideal marianne thesander Picturing Tropical Nature nancy leys stepan Maps and Politics jeremy black Representing the Republic Mapping the United States 1600‒1900 Trading Territories john rennie short Mapping the Early Modern World jerry brotton Bodies Politic Picturing Empire Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650‒1900 Photography and the Visualization of the roy porter British Empire james ryan Eyewitnessing Pictures and Visuality in Early The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence peter burke Modern China craig clunas Mirror in Parchment The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England michael camille The Art of Suicide Ron M. Brown reaktion books Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 79 Farringdon Road, London ec1m 3ju, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2001 Copyright © Ron Brown 2001 All rights reserved No part ofthis publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission ofthe publishers. Series design by Humphrey Stone Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Brown, Ron The art ofsuicide. – (Picturing history) 1. Suicide in art. 2. Art – History I. Title 704. 9'4936228 isbn 1 86189 105 9 Title page: John Flaxman, Chatterton taking the Bowl of Poison from the Spirit of Despair,c. 1780, pen and ink and wash. British Museum, London. Contents Introduction 7 1 Representing Voluntary Death in Classical Antiquity 21 2 Self-killing from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance 49 3 Conflict and Change in Early Modern Europe 88 4 An English Dance of Death? 124 5 Preserving Life and Punishing Death 146 6 The Century of Destruction 194 Postscript 215 References 223 Select Bibliography 240 Acknowledgements 243 Photographic Acknowledgements 245 Index 247 Introduction To be, or not to be: that is the question: william shakespeare, HamletIII.i.56 Here, in one evocative piece of writing, are called up many of the issues which cluster around the notion of suicide. Hamlet’s question goes to the very heart of the matter: is there a moment when life, the most precious of human possessions, becomes a burden which is too heavy to bear? And, in that moment, does one have the right to make one’s own quietus? What stays the hand: fear of pain, of oblivion, of an unknown afterlife, of eternal damnation? And what drives the bodkin home: courage, despair or madness? Shakespeare lends his protagonist a religious sensibility: for Hamlet, suicide is a moral issue, validating the position arrived at by the Christian Church by the end of the sixteenth century. The complexity of his argument, however, has more to do with the long history of self-slaughter, ranging as it does between the binary poles of suicide as heroic and suicide as sinful, and of humankind as a ratio- nal subject endowed with ultimate free will even unto death, or as a prisoner caught in a web, woven equally of doubt and prohibition, from which only madness can offer release. The play’s two central deaths bring the oppositions together: Hamlet, by choosing confrontation, seeks out an end which is volun- tary, without being self-inflicted; thus, he avoids the stigma of self- slaughter and, in true heroic fashion, ‘flights of angels’ are invoked to bear him in triumph to the rest he has craved throughout. Ophelia, his female counterpart, validates the persistent inscription of sensibility on the body of woman: her self-chosen death stems from loss, frailty and the disintegration of reason, which demeans the act and dimin- ishes her from the tragic to the pathetic. The effective tension which surrounds the issue of self-murder in Hamlet echoes a conflict that has existed since antiquity. The status of 7 suicide has always been open to question. The historian of suicide can discern little consensus in any of the issues which emerge in the course of its ‘long history’: rather, the range of social, political and cultural responses with which it has been greeted has reflected, with uncanny accuracy, the shifting patterns of human thought over more than two millennia. Its representations: tragic, epic, heroic, pathetic, judgemental, moral, didactic, comic and satiric, paint a picture of a European culture grappling with the almost impossible task of under- standing and coming to terms with this strangest and most persistent of phenomena. The imaging of suicide can be found across a wide geography, but the parameters of the following investigation embrace a Western and specifically European cultural ambience. That my title contains a pun and an anachronism reflects on the one hand a wicked sense of humour and a particular view of art’s history, and on the other, a central and tormenting linguistic problem. Both will eventually become clear to the careful reader. My title also brings together two terms which require care, both dynamic, both abstract. How they relate to each other is a delicate question. The simple answer is that this is a story about suicide-as-represented. It is about human death as read through the myriad meanings given to self-slaughter. As an answer, I realize it is also artful, as it avoids crucial questions about the writing contained within. Suffice to say, for the time being, that given the inestimable number of contexts for the art of suicidal death, one must be highly dubious of any claims to universality. The object of this book is thus to investigate how the act and the agents of suicidal death have been described, interpreted and constructed in images from antiquity to the close of the twentieth century. The field of investigation embraces sculpture, painting, illu- mination, print, book and newspaper illustration, cartoons, and ceramics from antiquity. I have yet to come across a suicidal image on stained glass. In order to complete and close the narrative frame, I have included examples from mechanical reproduction, though I have not concerned myself with photography or television on the whole. Factual or filmic images of suicides in the age of mechanical repro- duction merit a separate study. In the course of this history I shall also examine how, from Plato and Socrates onwards, and in pursuit of its time-honoured concern for questions of life and death, philosophy has mediated suicide’s meanings in parallel with this creative process. As recently as 1940the psychiatrist Marguerite von Andics claimed that the history of suicide is part of the philosophical tradition of the ‘meaning of life’. 8

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