The Fictional Suicides of Mary Wollstonecraft

Abstract

AbstractSuicide conveyed several distinct meanings in the Romantic period – unlike today, when it is most often attributed to mental illness. This meaning also existed in the long eighteenth century, but it was understood more broadly as irrationality and popularized through the emphasis on extreme passion and emotionalism as related to suicide in the literature of sentiment. William Godwin capitalized on this widely recognized and – to some extent – culturally ameliorative significance of suicide by casting his dead wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, as a character in a novel of sensibility when he reported her two suicide attempts in the Memoirs (1798). In doing so, however, Godwin fictionalizes Wollstonecraft's suicide attempts as acts of passion, whereas she explains clearly in her letters that her suicidal desires were utterly rational. Wollstonecraft further explores the concept of rational suicide by presenting it as an act of protest in her fictional works, Mary (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman (1798). In both novellas about the marital enslavement of women, Wollstonecraft draws upon the discourse surrounding slave‐suicide as a logical response to insupportable tyranny and her protagonists' death wishes as willed acts of protest.