Picking a Fight with Gentry

I spent a few hours today considering Deborah Gentry's The Art of Dying. I enjoyed her work immensely. The first chapter was like a crash course in Suicide History and provided me with a number of other theorist's names and ideas to consider for further reading. 

Gentry quotes Margret Higonnet’s essay “Speaking Silences: Women’s Suicide”. Pointing out that “[c]lassical instances of women’s suicide are perceived as masculine” while the “ninteenth-century reorientation of suicide toward love, passive self-surrender and illness [is] particularly evident in the literary depiction of women” (2). This is an interesting notion especially if one considers Jocasta and even the later Shakespearean account of Portia. 

Further on in the text Gentry quotes Gilbert and Gubar regarding the sacrificial aspect of womanhood. “Whether she becomes an object d’art or a saint, however, it is the surrender of self-- of her personal comfort, her personal desires, or both-- that is the beautiful angel-woman’s key act” (3).

Gentry asserts that in many works of the Victorian and Edwardian period “woman’s death is important only in how it affects other characters, mostly men, who remain alive, an effect which is striking in the conclusion of Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shallot”… The poem concludes not with her death but with Lancelot viewing her corpse and stating, “She has a pretty face,” another instance of woman as symbol rather than substance” (14). This of course is totally relevant to my reading of both Chopin and JW Waterhouse.

With regard to Chopin, Gentry asserts that, “Edna’s awakening…is nothing short of an awakening to the true circumstances of existence for a woman shorn of the romantic illusions that society foists upon her-- an existence in which the deck is so stacked against women that the only true choice left to them is… to die” (22). She further states that “Chopin remasculinizes female suicide” (44).

This is the area where I cannot agree. For me Edna remains a self-delusional character until the very end. She is doubtful and confused as she goes to her death just as other Victorian heroines before her have been. 

Gentry, Deborah S. The Art of Dying: Suicide in the Works of Kate Chopin and Sylvia Plath. American University Studies 56. New York: Lang, 2006.