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There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury-lodging house window, the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his.
-Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (226)
Suicide is difficult to read and to mourn. It unsettles fundamental assumptions, most emphatically the assumption that life, however painful, is worth living. More precisely than any other act, it illustrates the tensions between freedom and determinism, between being an agent and being a victim.1 The body turns against itself, becoming murderer and victim simultaneously. Already these words-"murderer" and "victim"-fail to work, to signify properly. What is the outside of suicide? The inside? Andre Breton offers an understandable complaint-"Suicide is a badly composed word: the one who kills is never identical with the one who is killed" (qtd. in Boym 151). And yet, suicide brings the body terribly together: a hand cuts a wrist, legs push off a bridge, a palm lifts pills into a mouth. The appalling hurt of self-destruction seems to lie in this instant of consolidation. She died by her own hand. He took his own life.
In this essay, I examine what happens when suicide, this almost indecipherable action, is incorporated into three twentieth-century US American novels. With "incorporated," I allude to Sigmund Freud's theory of melancholy and mourning as well as to the depathologizing approach to melancholy taken by David Eng and Shinhee Han. According to Freud, the melancholic person psychically incorporates the lost object into the ego, rather than accepting and grieving the loss. Consequently, anger that would have been directed outward turns inward, shattering a solid sense of self. Eng and Han make an important intervention into this theory, drawing on Asian-American literature and their experiences with Asian-American students: "While the ambivalence, anger, and rage that characterize this preservation of the lost object threaten the ego's stability, we do not imagine that this threat is the result of some ontological tendency on the part of the melancholic; it is a social threat" (695). Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963), and James Baldwin's Another Country (1960) dramatize the force of this "social threat" and do so through what I call the queer textuality of suicide.
Suicide appears...