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I’m Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots, and the Ecstasy of Withdrawal

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The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science

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Abstract

This chapter engages contemporary theories of biopower to track the literary participation in the politicization of life as a primary object of state management. Foucault outlines a shift in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to an “anatamo-politics of the human body” and a “biopolitics of the population” that brought life and death in relation to state control to the fore. The fiction of this period shows the uptake of the regulatory concept of life as a delimiting discourse. But plots in which suicide functions as both a sustaining fantasy and a narrative strategy offer an equally powerful narrative refusal of the medical and state mandates for the extension of life. This essay considers how Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911) and Lynda Barry’s Cruddy (1999), which, spanning the length of the twentieth century, act as genealogical nodes through which we might view the twenty-first century’s inheritance of biopolitics. Both depict self-annihilation as a challenge to the slow violence of the present, imagining suicide not as the result of individual mental decline or depressive pathology, but as giving voice to the pressing question of how one can wrest a mode of living from the negations of contemporary life.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Dana Seitler

Authors
  1. Dana Seitler
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Neel Ahuja

  2. University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Monique Allewaert

  3. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Lindsey Andrews

  4. Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Gerry Canavan

  5. Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX, USA

    Rebecca Evans

  6. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Nihad M. Farooq

  7. University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA

    Erica Fretwell

  8. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Nicholas Gaskill

  9. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Patrick Jagoda

  10. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA

    Erin Gentry Lamb

  11. Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA

    Jennifer Rhee

  12. University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Britt Rusert

  13. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Matthew A. Taylor

  14. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Aarthi Vadde

  15. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Priscilla Wald

  16. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Rebecca Walsh

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Seitler, D. (2020). I’m Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots, and the Ecstasy of Withdrawal. In: Ahuja, N., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_8

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