We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States by Richard Bell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States by Richard Bell Russ Castronovo (bio) We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States. Richard Bell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. 332 pp. Even though suicide seems an intensely personal action that emerges from the depths of despair, it resounds with more public meanings about the proper balance between individual will and collective social feelings in US democracy. Richard Bell makes this argument in We Shall Be No More by refusing to psychologize—and hence privatize—the forlorn souls who took drastic steps toward self-murder. Instead, Bell reads the suicide’s final act as an elusive political expression, one that combines and confuses protest with resignation, ultimate defiance with submission, and severe autonomy with oversensitivity to cultural influence. Tracking these themes from the days of Puritan settlement to the crisis over slavery and secession, Bell covers a large swath of national history by exploring how suicide became a heated flash point in debates over novel reading, philanthropy, capital punishment, religious salvation, and resistance to slavery. This survey depends on a careful scouring of newspapers, pamphlets, and other print culture artifacts that Bell sets amid a rich backdrop of historical crisis. Many of these crises, such as the worries surrounding excessive sentimentalism or the distrust of Universalism, Bell argues, erupt from the unprecedented and ever-increasing availability of printed material in America. If suicide was an epidemic, as alarmed social observers frequently claimed, then newspaper columns often seemed to be foremost in spreading the contagion. The earliest instance of what Bell calls “suicide politics” involves a 1690 item in Boston’s Public Occurrences about a recent widower, who, deranged [End Page 771] by grief, listened to the devil and took his own life (249). Within a hundred years, such events would accrue heightened cultural significance, as American revolutionaries often found it completely understandable why cowardly Loyalists would commit suicide. The partisan view of such tragedies suggests to Bell “the connection between suicide and the disintegration of social authority” (12). Political readings of suicide are not an American invention, however. Lucretia’s act of self-murder, after being raped by Tarquin, is said to have provided the impetus for the founding of the Roman Republic. Joseph Addison’s Cato (1712), a favorite among eighteenth-century American republicans, exemplified for George Washington and other Whigs of his class just how far men of virtue were willing to go to withstand tyranny. Bell does not examine what attracted Americans to these classical topoi of suicide and the meanings they might have wrested from these myths of self-sacrifice, which befits a study that is more thematic than theoretical or critical. And precisely because he does not dwell on a few texts, he is able to range across the diverse geographies of popular print culture, from the pietistic heights of religious sermons to the sensational accounts of murder-suicides. As he sagely observes, the proliferation of newspapers in the early Republic, which increased more than tenfold between 1760 and 1814, occasioned a dramatic increase in the reporting of suicides in ways that both interested and anguished readers during this era. The danger that print could unhinge readers, especially young men and women attracted to suffering and self-consumed heroes, often centered on one particular novel in America, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Bell begins his first case study by tracking how ministers, medical doctors, and elders fretted over the influence that Goethe’s lachrymose tale of thwarted love exercised over impressionable minds. While these complaints against novels will be familiar to literary critics and book historians, Bell’s contribution lies in connecting this perceived danger to transatlantic publishing. The simile he employs to suggest the dimensions of this epidemic of novel reading—“suicide spread through the pages of fashionable fiction like yellow fever”—fits with the late eighteenth-century landscape, where cities such as Philadelphia and New York were decimated by hemorrhagic disease (60). Bell might also have spoken of a flood of teary fiction that inundated the reading public with sentimental excess, since the next chapter examines the many lifesaving and...