mystique

This page considers the mystique of suicide in cultures that, protestations to the contrary, are half in love with easeful death.

It covers -

• introduction
• representations
• examples
• suicide tourism

     introduction

Classical literature is replete with accounts of those who died exemplary deaths to avoid degradation, including Lucan, Mark Antony, Socrates, Cato, Sophonisba, Seneca and Cleopatra. Other iconic figures died because they had (or believed they had) lost their lover or their honour: Dido, Pyramus, Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, Ophelia, Lucretia. Some, such as Samson, died a hero. the death of others elicits pity for those who were so stressed, hounded or desperate that self-harm seemed preferable to continued existence or who exited during a moment of insanity.

     representations

Representations of suicide include Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, August Strindberg's Miss Julie.

Works on representations in the visual arts include The Art of Suicide (London: Reaktion 2002) by Ron Brown, Rudolf Wittkower's Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (New York: Random House 1963).

     examples

'Iconic' deaths include -

• Empedocles – jumping into volcano
• Lucius Annaeus Seneca (65) - knife
• Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (65) - knife
• Gaius Petronius Arbiter (66) - knife
• Francesco Borromini (1667) - sword
• François Vatel (1671) - sword
• Jeremiah Clarke (1707) - gunshot
• Thomas Chatterton (1770) - poison
• Robert Clive (1774) - razor
• Aleksandr Radishchev (1802) - poison
• Claude Chappe (1805) - jumped into well
• Heinrich von Kleist (1811) - gunshot
• Jan Potocki (1815) - gunshot
• Samuel Romilly (1818) - razor
• Antoine-Jean Gros (1835) - drowning
• Benjamin Haydon (1846) - razor
• Friedrich List (1846)
• Gérard de Nerval (1855) - hanging
• Robert FitzRoy (1865) - razor
• Adalbert Stifter (1868) - razor
• Adam Lindsay Gordon (1870) - gunshot
• Lucien Prevost-Paradol (1870) - gunshot
• Ernst Ahlgren (1888) - razor
• Vincent van Gogh (1890) - gunshot
• Georges Boulanger (1891) - gunshot
• Barcroft Boake (1892) - hanging
• Eleanor Marx (1898)
• Whitaker Wright (1904) - poison
• Ludwig Boltzmann (1906) - hanging
• Richard Gerstl (1908) - knife
• Paul Lafargue (1911)
• Rudolf Diesel (1913) - drowning
• Georg Trakl (1914) - opiate
• Rembrandt Bugatti (1916) - gassing
• Albert Ballin (1918) - barbiturates
• Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1919)
• Jeanne Hébuterne (1920) - jumped out of building
• Sergei Esenin (1925) - hanging
• Paul Cassirer (1926)
• Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1927) - poison
• Gertrude Bell (1927) - barbiturates
• Charlotte Mew (1928) - poison
• Jacques Rigaut (1929) - gunshot
• Vladimir Mayakovsky (1930) - gunshot
• Peter Warlock (1930) - gassing
• Christopher Wood (1930) - train
• Vachel Lindsay (1931) - poison
• Hart Crane (1932) - drowning
• George Eastman (1932) - gunshot
• Ivar Kreuger (1932) - gunshot
• Dora Carrington (1932) - gunshot
• Paul Ehrenfest (1933) - gunshot
• René Crevel (1935) - gassing
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935) - chloroform
• Kurt Tucholsky (1935) - barbiturates
• Eugène Marais (1936) - gunshot
• Wallace Carothers (1937) - poison
• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1938) gunshot
• Mark Gertler (1939) - gassing
• Ernst Toller (1939) - hanging
• Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1939) - razor
• Carl Einstein (1940) - hanging
• Walter Hasenclever (1940) - barbiturates
• Jean-Michel Frank (1941) - jumped out of building
• Virginia Woolf (1941) - drowning
• Marina Tsvetayeva (1941) - hanging
• Stefan Zweig (1942) - barbiturates
• Hugo Distler (1942) - gassing
• Drieu la Rochelle (1945) - gassing
• Bernard Spilsbury (1947) - gassing
• Arshile Gorky (1948) - hanging
• Klaus Mann (1949) - barbiturates
• James Forrestal (1949) - jumped out of building
• Francis Matthiessen (1950) - jumped out of building
• Cesare Pavese (1950) - barbiturates
• Tadeusz Borowski (1951) - gassing
• Alan Turing (1954) - poison
• Edwin H Armstrong (1954) - jumped out of building
• Nicolas de Staël (1955) - jumped out of building
• Vere Gordon Childe (1957) - jumped off cliff
• John Minton (1957) - barbiturates
• James Whale (1957) - drowning
• Ernest Hemingway (1961) - gunshot
• Marilyn Monroe (1962) - barbiturates
• Sylvia Plath (1963) - gassing
• Anne Sexton (1963) - gassing
• Paul Celan (1970) - drowning
• Mark Rothko (1970) - razor
• Yukio Mishima (1970) - hara-kiri
• Diane Arbus (1971) - barbiturates
• John Berryman (1972) - jumped off bridge
• Henry Dreyfuss (1972) - gassing
• George Sanders (1972) - barbiturates
• Henry de Montherland (1972) - gunshot
• Yasunari Kawabata (1972) - gassing
• William Inge (1973) - gassing
• Elmyr de Hory (1976) - barbiturates
• Keith Vaughan (1977) - barbiturates
• Jean Amery (1978) - barbiturates
• Charles Boyer (1978)
• Nicos Poulantzas (1979)
• Romain Gary (1980) - gunshot
• Arthur Koestler (1983) - barbiturates
• Richard Brautigan (1984) - gunshot
• Primo Levi (1987) - jumped off balcony
• Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree (1987) - gunshot
• Sándo Márai (1989) - gunshot
• Reinaldo Arenas (1990) - barbiturates
• John Friedrich (1991) - gunshot
• Jerzy Kosinski (1991)
• Michel Gauquelin (1991)
• Guy Debord (1994) - gunshot
• Gilles Deleuze (1995) - jumped from building
• Martha Gellhorn (1998) - poison
• Bernard Buffet (1999) - asphyxiation
• Sarah Kane (1999) - hanging
• Georg Tintner (1999) - jumped from building
• Bernard Loiseau (2003) - gunshot
• Iris Chang (2004) - gunshot
• Hunter S Thompson (2005) - gunshot
• René Rivkin (2005) - barbiturates
• Thomas L Disch (2008) - gunshot
• David Foster Wallace (2008) - hanging

     suicide tourism

The phenomenon of suicide tourism (mordantly dismissed by one observer with the quip that "if you can't die young and leave a beautiful corpse you can at least die somewhere beautiful") is evident in Japan (with a long tradition of suicides at scenes of natural beauty) and to a lesser extent in Europe, Australia and North America, where deaths cluster at particular locations such as The Gap, Beachy Head or the Golden Gate Bridge.

It is highlighted in works such as 'Suicide Tourism in Manhattan, New York City, 1990–2004' (PDF) by Charles Gross, Tinka Markham Piper, Angela Bucciarelli, Kenneth Tardiff, David Vlahov & Sandro Galea in 84(6) Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine (2007) 755-765, 'A tale of two bridges: comparative suicide incidence on the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridges' by Richard Seiden & Mary Spence in 14(3) Omega (1983) 201–209 and 'Suicide and accidental death at Beachy Head' by S John Surtees in 284(6312) British Medical Journal (1982) 321–324.

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