• "I leave thee not":Felicia Hemans and Maternal Suicide
• Kelly McGuire (bio)

The history of suicide, as Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy maintain, is the "history of illusions," distorted by modern assumptions and faulty record keeping (247). The fact that these records indicate a significant gender imbalance, with men "returned as suicides twice as often as women in almost every sample of inquisitions that survive," has contributed to the gendering of suicide as a masculine act (247). Building on these preconceptions, Emile Durkheim's late nineteenth-century sociology of suicide further popularized the notion that "women were insulated from suicide to the extent that they were subsumed within the bounds of traditional family life" (Kushner 38–39). However, the stories that women tell about their capacity for suicide differ markedly from these dominant accounts. Most notably, the late Romantic British poet, Felicia Hemans, represents a starkly different portrait of suicidal women whose domestic situations pose no obstacle to their yearning for self-annihilation.

The major poet of what might be termed "Romantic death," Hemans espouses a sensibility that in some ways harks back to the graveyard school of the century prior (Kelly 27). Her preoccupation with death evokes an eighteenth-century gloom, but rather than wandering amongst the tombs like Gray's speaker or Romantic ruins in the spirit of her more immediate contemporary, Lord Byron, Hemans's poetic personae are active figures who seek out and embrace death in acts framed as heroic defiance. In this sense, they align themselves with Romanticism's openness to voluntary death, which, as a solitary and individual act, seemed to many to epitomize the sovereignty of the will celebrated by writers of this period. As Gary Kelly notes in his introduction to Hemans's poetry, "post-Revolutionary and Romantic culture assigned meaning to death by individualizing it, locating it in the individual subject, in contrast to Revolutionary death which was seen to annihilate the individual in an abyss of mass death and oblivion. . . . Romantic death served the liberal ideology of the autonomous sovereign subject" (28). However, for some Romantic writers like Hemans, suicide reflects both women's autonomy and the indissoluble nature of the maternal bond as she significantly transfigures this paradigm by rendering [End Page 121] suicide an interpersonal event insofar as it is often accompanied by infanticide in her writing.

Hemans's early nineteenth-century poems contest assumptions about the "nature of women" and their supposed immunity to self-destruction in their repeated representation of maternal suicide (Kushner 33). Contrary to Durkheim's claim that "Where the family exists, it protects against suicide," suicide in many of Hemans's poems in fact arises directly from domestic concerns, and is typically read as expressive of the poet's own melancholic reflections on her personal circumstances (462).¹ Although I am not suggesting that Hemans's poetic personae are necessarily autobiographical, her work appears especially preoccupied with suicide in foregrounding the deaths of women, specifically maternal figures who choose to expire with their children in poems such as "The Suliote Mother," "The Wife of Asdrubal," and "The Indian Woman's Death Song," among others. As such, the identities of these figures remain contingent and relational, with their deaths countering the understanding of suicide in the Western imagination as a solitary, individual, or gendered act.

The fact that the mothers of Hemans's poems insist upon sharing their fate with their children does validate one aspect of Durkheim's claim: in suiciding with their children, the women seem to preserve their connections to the domestic sphere in their inability or refusal to accept separation from their children. In the vast majority of Hemans's suicide/filicide poems, this dual act preserves the structure of the family against a threat from the outside or, in some cases, from a paternal figure whose infidelity or cowardice threaten its integrity. Hemans dramatizes this scenario in her rendering of a scene from the 146 BCE sacking of Carthage, which, like so many of her other historical "siege poems," highlights the experience of women and children in times of war. Appearing on the roof of a burning temple, the wife of General Asdrubal,² who had surrendered to the...

• “我不离开你”：费利西亚·赫曼斯（Felicia Hemans）和孕产妇自杀
• 凯利·麦奎尔（生物）

正如迈克尔·麦克唐纳（Michael MacDonald）和特伦斯·墨菲（Terence Murphy）所坚持的那样，自杀的历史是“幻想的历史”，被现代的假设和错误的记录保存所扭曲（247）。这些记录表明存在严重的性别失衡，男性“在几乎所有幸存的宗教裁判所中，自杀率是女性的两倍，是女性的两倍”（247）。在这些先入之见的基础上，埃米尔·杜克海姆（Emile Durkheim）在19世纪晚期的自杀社会学进一步普及了这样的观念：“妇女与自杀隔绝了，其程度使他们被纳入传统家庭生活的范围之内”（库什纳38–39）。但是，女性讲述自己的自杀能力的故事与这些占主导地位的说法明显不同。最为显着地，

赫曼斯（Hemans）是可能被称为“浪漫主义死亡”的主要诗人，他的情感在某种程度上回到了上个世纪以前的墓地学校（凯利27）。她对死亡的关注唤起了18世纪的忧郁，但他并没有像格雷的演说家或浪漫废墟中那样徘徊在她更近代的当代人拜伦勋爵的坟墓中，赫曼斯的诗意人物是活跃的人物，他们追求并拥抱行为中的死亡被描绘成英勇的蔑视。从这个意义上讲，他们符合浪漫主义对自愿死亡的开放态度，作为一种单独的个人行为，在许多人看来，这体现了这一时期作家所倡导的意志的主权。正如加里·凯利（Gary Kelly）在对赫曼斯的诗歌的介绍中所指出的那样，“ 革命后和浪漫主义文化通过对死亡进行个体化，将其定位在个体主体中来赋予死亡意义，而革命性死亡则被认为是在大规模死亡和遗忘的深渊中消灭了个人。。。。浪漫主义的死亡服务于自治主权主体的自由主义意识形态”（28）。然而，对于像海曼斯这样的浪漫主义作家来说，自杀反映了女性的自主权和母性纽带的不可分割的本质，因为她通过渲染显着地改变了这种范式[结束第121页]自杀是一种人际交往，因为在她的写作中常常伴随着杀婴。

希曼斯（Hemans）于19世纪初创作的诗歌质疑关于“妇女的天性”的假设，以及在她们反复代表孕产妇自杀时她们对自我毁灭的免疫力的假设（库什纳33）。与涂尔干的主张相反：“家庭存在的地方，它可以防止自杀”，赫曼斯许多诗中的自杀实际上直接来自家庭问题，通常被认为是表达了诗人对自己的处境的忧郁感（462） 。^1个尽管我并不是在暗示希曼斯的诗意人物性格一定是自传，但她的作品似乎特别着重于自杀，以预示着妇女的死亡，特别是那些选择与子女一同死于诸如《苏里奥特母亲》，《妻子》等诗歌中的母亲形象。以及“印度女人的死亡之歌”等等。因此，这些人物的身份仍然具有偶然性和关联性，其死亡与西方人对自杀的理解背道而驰，认为自杀是一种单独的，个人的或性别的行为。

希曼斯诗歌的母亲坚持要与孩子们分享命运这一事实确实证明了涂尔干的主张的一个方面：在与孩子们自杀时，这些女人似乎保留了自己与家庭领域的联系，因为她们无能为力或拒绝接受与家庭的分离。他们的孩子。在希曼斯的大多数自杀/杀人诗中，这种双重行为保护了家庭结构，使其免受外界的威胁，在某些情况下，还免受父亲的不忠或怯ward威胁其完整性的威胁。希曼斯通过描绘公元前146年对迦太基遭洗劫一幕的场景来戏剧化地描述了这一场景，就像她的许多其他其他历史性《围困诗》一样，这本书突显了战时妇女和儿童的经历。出现在燃烧的寺庙的屋顶上，²谁投降了...