Female Victimhood and Suicide in the Naturalistic Novel

Abstract

Although the scholarly literature on naturalism is extensive, a few studies have examined suicide among heroines in literature particularly in the naturalistic novel. Literary researchers relegate the study of female suicide to other fields of discipline such as Sociology, for instance, where real women and statistics are involved or confine their discussion to creative writers who committed suicide namely Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, Anne Sexton, and Ernest Hemingway to name a few who suffered from mental or psychological disorders. The research project will explore the concept of female victimhood and suicide in five naturalistic novels: The Awakening, the House of Mirth, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary. It will focus on the role of the heroine who is not only confined to someone with influence, but also to someone suicidal represented as a victim of her environment where the heroine portrays contradictory images and implying that naturalistic literature challenges the standard idea of literary heroism. Likewise, the research project will illustrate the irony of naturalism that despite its reaction against anachronistic romanticism, naturalism’s heroines inherit certain traits identified with romanticism that ushers them to self-destruction as they become victims of natural forces beyond their influence. A re-examination of the suicidal heroine in the naturalist fiction from a non-western contemporary perspective will provide new insight into an important era of French and American literature.