The art of suicide

255 Pages·2001·9.561 MB·English

by  Brown, Ron M

The Art of Suicide
"
picturing history
Series Editors
Peter Burke, Sander L. Gilman, Ludmilla Jordanova,
Roy Porter, †Bob Scribner (1995–8)
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Maps and Politics
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Representing the Republic
Mapping the United States 1600‒1900
Trading Territories
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Mapping the Early Modern World
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Bodies Politic
Picturing Empire Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain,
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Photography and the Visualization of the
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Modern China
craig clunas
Mirror in Parchment
The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of
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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
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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’.
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