Rising to the surface: Suicide as narrative strategy in twentieth century women's fiction (Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Zimbabwe, Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath)

Suicide is a central narrative theme in much of women's literature, especially as it connects with female artists seeking autonomy in their personal and professional lives. Inheriting from the Victorian tradition a focus upon self-inflicted death, many of the current century's female writers incorporated this theme in a revisionist way. Their novels suggest suicide's use as a measure of defiance rather than defeat and its absence as a mark of personal ascendancy.; Turn-of-the-century authors Kate Chopin in The Awakening and Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth create characters whose self-annihilation may transcend defeatism to present a new order of personal possession even if paradoxically through death. Following this initiative but moving toward more positive resolution, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway rejects suicide in favor of life while still praising the act as heroic defiance against constricting forces. Mid-century writers Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook and Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar offer women struggling against breakdown and urges toward self-destruction but rising from this despair to a new place of hope and empowerment. Finally, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing provides a protagonist who escapes society, takes an atavistic psychological journey toward selfhood, and reemerges with resolve to move away from deadly response to personally confining prerogatives by taking charge of her life in a more proactive way.; This study's six representational novels present fertile critical ground for exploring a female aesthetic using suicide as a measure of women's search for autonomy. Analysis of key works from prominent twentieth-century female authors indicates a growing optimism against definition and control by patriarchal social forces. The study asserts a belief that as women gain more power over their life-choices, the artists reflecting these lives in fiction exhibit less tendency to employ suicide as a means of escape or self-assertion for their characters. Ultimately, tracing the gradual departure from suicide as a central subject in their works presents a path of hope and promise reflecting the authors' own more personal optimism as well.