Suicide in Henry James's Fiction

In this compact, concisely written volume, Mary Joseph examines all occurrences of suicide in the James canon as well as a generous selection of critical commentaries devoted to them and relates the author’s handling of this taboo to what she calls “the greater Jamesian myth”—that is, a three-part amalgam of “thinly veiled autobiography, the well-known international theme and the quest for the self” (1). For this study, Joseph uses a late nineteenth-century definition of suicide that includes both active and passive modes: “those who willfully courted death at their own hands and those who died by default when they lost their will to live” (1).

Including the latter renunciatory figures, the suicides in James’s fiction amount to seventeen in sixteen of his works. So small a number suggests some significance in itself, as does Joseph’s observation that James, “who habitually illuminates the internal worlds of his characters, is strikingly reticent on the workings of the minds of his suicides” (27). Therefore her thrust in this book wisely avoids any attempt to out-James James by tenuously speculative deep analysis of these characters. Instead she focuses on the attitudes toward suicide absorbed by James from the realms of art and reality and on the ways in which he externalized these impressions in his own fictional scenarios of self-destruction.

Following an exceptionally helpful introduction that clearly charts the course and scope of her investigations, Joseph’s second chapter provides a background survey of literary, philosophical, psychological, and sociological responses to suicide as a phenomenon. Nineteenth-century speculations are stressed, particularly those of the British Romantics, because of their direct effect upon James. However a number of twentieth-century scholars are also polled, whose ideas on suicide and its causes seem to be prefigured informally in James’s fictional scenarios, a fact which Joseph regards as “the ultimate testimony to James’s realism” (51). The remaining sections of the book examine individually and with appropriate cross-overs the earlier-mentioned triad of the Jamesian mystique—autobiography, displacement, and the quest—showing how they function as limiting or expanding frames for the development of the suicide motif in the sixteen relevant selections.

The third chapter, “Autobiography,” begins this sequence as Joseph discusses a cluster of suicides that acquainted James in real life with this ultimate phenomenon. However, although three of the victims were close to him, particularly his cousin Minny Temple, “references to these suicides are scant” in his letters (54). When James does address them, his comments are fraught with his sense of the utter inexplicability of the deeds.

Joseph attributes no small part of James’s frustration in plumbing the depths of suicide to the influence upon him of what she calls “the collective unconscious of the James family,” a synonym for the will to survive that animated most of its immediate members (57). While none of them failed to engage the notion of suicide on an intellectual level, thinking about it and writing about it, not one took his or her life violently. Henry’s sister Alice, beset by overwhelming emotional problems since her youth, considered suicide often but endured the horrors of her life until its natural end. His brother William survived an identity crisis so painful that “he was constantly preoccupied with the idea of suicide,” but he too lived through and beyond his crisis and provided Henry with an exemplar of the precarious artistic sensibility (62). Their father, Henry, Sr., however, turned away from life following the death of his wife, refusing even to eat during his final illness, and thus furnished a paradigm of non-violent self-destruction.

Joseph sees Henry as the James family member least attracted to suicide, even in thought, apparently protected by his belief that a sustained life of artistic creation would be his only source of immortality. Nevertheless, being a writer on whom nothing was lost, he bore witness to the flirtations with suicide that occurred within his family and gave a respectful place...