"I am underneath and oxygen is running out": Suicide as Genetically Inherited or as the Melancholy Identification with the Suicidal Mother in Alice Birch's Anatomy of a Suicide
- "I am underneath and oxygen is running out":Suicide as Genetically Inherited or as the Melancholy Identification with the Suicidal Mother in Alice Birch's Anatomy of a Suicide
"Like its real-life counterpart, stage-suicide can express a wish for posthumous control over the lives and feelings of survivors. It can manifest a desire for oblivion or for reunion with the dead. It can gesture toward rebirth or even toward immortality."1
"By linking the mother to her mother, we have begun to introduce the idea of three generations to define a subject. Three generations are therefore needed to define the human subject."2
Introduction: "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"?
"On edge." No other phrase captures the precarious psychosomatic condition of the suicidal self as cogently as this. "I feel . . . I feel . . . I feel . . . I feel . . . I feel a little on edge"—so says the first suicidal character in Alice Birch's Anatomy of a Suicide (2017).3 And this familiar metaphor (used for indicating nervousness) is later literalized in her case when she commits suicide by jumping off the edge onto the railroad. "On edge"—between the theatrical stage and the auditorium, between reality and phantasy, between life and death—is also where we find the suicidal protagonist of Duncan Macmillan's People, Places and Things [End Page 490] (2018). "On edge" is, of course, a highly dramatic situation. But it is also a formidable challenge to any dramatist who tackles the issue of suicide, particularly because of the long-standing association of suicide (or suicidal attempt) with theatricality and self-theatricalization. Theatricality, in this correlation, is a double-edged term since it not only looks askance at the gravity of and manifold causes underlying suicide but also makes tacit ontological and moral judgments about theatre/drama, specifically by wedding theatre/drama with irresponsible frivolity, superficiality, inauthenticity, histrionics and, ultimately, hysteria. From such a problematic perspective, the very epistemological and ethical position of theatre/drama as a genre and cultural medium for the critical-clinical representation of suicide is partly undermined.
Suicide in Anglo-European cultural history has often been perceived not only as a site where moral, psychological or social-political crises are thrown into relief, but also as a critical juncture where the aporetic tensions and ties between the private and the public, the personal and the political, the individual and the state (or the family) surface. What distinguishes modern and contemporary engagements with the question of suicide is primarily the conception of suicide as a historical and social-cultural construct, a conception in which questions of biopolitics as well as racial, class, and gender politics determine not only the suicidal act but also social-cultural perceptions of its nature and dynamics. Equally crucial has been the self-reflexive approach of many artists and critics to the ethics as well as therapeutic efficacy of artistic/literary treatments of suicide; these artists and critics emphasize the role of narration (narrative medicine) and performance (role-playing) as a solution to the social and psychological aporias permeating the world of a play and its characters.
To writers, dramatists, practitioners in clinical-medical discourse, and the public at large, suicide has long been a compelling preoccupation. More notably, suicide has featured as a predominantly feminine act in the history of drama. Surveying the history of tragedy from ancient Greek to contemporary drama, a persistent thread is an association in the genre between female characters and transgression, liminality, spectrality, sacrifice, death, and a death-oriented or deadly desire. Margaret Higonnet cogently articulates the ambiguous status of suicide in dramatic literature: "Suicide," she writes, "like woman and truth, is both fetish and taboo."4 [End Page 491] Indeed, there has been an abundance of transgressive female characters who straddle Eros and Thanatos, heterodox and orthodox and victimhood and monstrosity, and suicide is one salient way of representing these cases of liminality on stage, from Sophocles' Jocasta and Antigone to Seneca's Phaedra; from Kyd's Isabella and Marlowe's Dido to Shakespeare's Ophelia and Cleopatra; from Strindberg's Miss Julie to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.5 Contemporary...
