Passionate Inscription: Love in the Performance of Suicide

Abstract

Traditionally, suicides performed for reasons of love have been largely romanticised and more likely forgiven. This chapter compares the ways in which love, sex and suicide have been inscribed on female bodies in historical and modern times. Love suicides have predominantly concerned heterosexual love; the woman inspires the emotions, the man acts upon his desires. Consequently, religious and social theorists have warned about the dangers of love and the corresponding dangers of women. Without love, men were strong and certain, society ran smoothly. If men were made vulnerable when they loved a woman, women needed to be chaste and distant so as to become unlovable. They could not tempt men into desire; they could not positively react to male desire. This interplay between desire and denial has become a dangerous game for young women in the modern world illustrated by two teenage suicides in America. Love has been replaced with sex in meaning and in action. These suicides are not romanticised. Women have become vulnerable in a balance between shame and honour, reputation and reality. Socially-perceived goodness is considered to protect women from suicide - it appears that to lose one's goodness is to lose one's claim on life.