“WHEN I could not find her anywhere in the house or garden, I felt sure that she had gone down to the river. I ran across the fields down to the river and almost immediately found her walking-stick lying on the bank. I searched for some time and then went back to the house and informed the police. It was three weeks before the body was found when some children saw it floating in the river.”
These words are from the final volume of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, and they tell of the suicide of his wife, the great novelist Virginia Woolf. She was a beautiful woman, the daughter of a distinguished writer, possessed herself of rare talents and the creative energy to use them fully. She lived among the wittiest and most gifted people in London and her life was almost equally marked by extraordinary strains and unusual blessings.
Virginia Woolf had had bouts of madness since her youth. She had tried suicide before during periods of despair and depression. When she felt herself going mad again she weighted her skirts with stones and walked into the river—to save herself and those she loved from anguish. In a sense her suicide was cast in the heroic mold. It was a decision based upon hopelessness and with some of the Stoic’s effort to act upon rational alternatives. And yet, of course, it was tragic and moving to see one so gifted and special go down so pitifully.
Recently some interesting facts about the increasing suicide rate of young women appeared in The New York Times. There has been, according to the new studies, an alarming rise. “In Los Angeles, the suicide rate of women under 20 went from 0.4 to 9 percent per 100,000 from 1960–1970 and from 8 to 26 for women age 20 to 30.” And it is believed that the actual number is greater than that shown in the statistics.
Each suicide has its own history, its own story to tell. Suicide is always a comment upon an individual life, a particularly blurred and opaque comment in most cases. Part of the shadow a suicide casts upon the lives of those who care is just this final mystery surrounding motive and mood. We seldom ever know the details of circumstance, the scenario of the ultimate desperation. We know even less when we are confronting mere statistics. Apparently more men than women actually succeed in committing suicide. It is the attempt that is larger among women.
Suicide was previously called “self-slaughter,” a more brutal and candid Anglo-Saxon word than the later Latin sibilants. In “self-slaughter” the words force a confrontation with the action, with its willed, concentrated destructiveness. The violation of self and the distance from self are tragedies only equaled by murder, homicide, which is also increasing in America. The inability to bear one’s life has been felt by human beings since the beginning of time.
A. Alvarez’s interesting book about suicide, The Savage God, shows that society has felt differently at different times about the question. When suicide was a prime legal offense, one found men being hanged for the crime of having tried to hang themselves, and in other cases there have been suicides for noble motives—rather than submit to a tyrant, for instance—and romantic suicides, a sort of fashion in melancholy and world-weariness.
There is something sacrificial in every suicide and this is what moves us. Virginia Woolf left letters to her husband and sister, saying in the suicide’s characteristic way, “I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.” Her own suffering together with the suffering she felt her illness would cause others combined to produce the resolution that led to the action. Of course others do not wish this sort of relief and in the end it is the suicide’s own suffering and overwhelming distress that will count the most.
Suicides that come after a long struggle with recurrent depressions and mental derangement probably have some biochemical basis and can be looked at only as a bitter accompaniment to disease. It is difficult for the mind to sort out the role that general conditions in society might play. Often family histories show a disposition to suicide. Ernest Hemingway’s father had killed himself in the writer’s youth as had the father of the poet John Berryman. Each of these outstanding American writers died by his own hand. The sense of loss, so aching and pervasive in the scenery of the suicide’s life, may of course rest upon a large number of natural deaths. Virginia Woolf’s mother and father had died when she was young; her much-loved, attractive brother died suddenly; she had lost a stepsister. In addition there was the line of madness in the Stephen family. We do not know whether it is the losses, lying so heavily upon the heart, that may, even many decades later, cause the downward plunge—or whether certain families are doomed to experience suicidal despair.
Suicide is often described as a “cry for help,” a way of calling out from the abyss of misery. That seems reasonable, and yet there is so often no help for the kind of pain the stricken person is feeling. The repeated attempts made by the rescued point up the endless nature of the affliction. The causes of despondency may in certain instances be too deep and too tangled or may even be unnamable, undiscoverable except as a part of the organism itself. Those who grieve for a suicide show in their grief that they have retained hope for some abatement of the pain. Had we the suicide’s conviction that his condition was unalterable we would not grieve so fiercely.
Why should the suicide rate among young women be going up? Is there any way to take hold of the increase as a fact, to find some sort of explanation that includes the particular cases? With the old, poverty, isolation, and hopelessness are everywhere like a shroud. There is an isolation and hopelessness that invades the lives of the young, but it will, simply because of youth, be of a different nature. The failure of the will to live is a negation, but nevertheless an act of overwhelming force. A certain area of the will functions in any suicide and it is often remarked that the deepest pits of melancholy paralyze to such a degree that the resolution necessary for self-destruction is lacking.
Loneliness and loss. In suicide there is always a sense of loss. Many are skeptical about the notion of dying for love, but love is at the heart of suicide and at the very worst it is a loss of self-love that prompts it. But to lose a love and to be inconsolable are real emotions. The loss of love as a motive for suicide is often questioned because it is so contrary to the laws of self-interest. It says that one can indeed love another more than himself. So the cynical look beyond the love for a more self-serving hint and they claim to find it in the wish of the suicide to punish someone for the loss of love—the revenge suicide. To punish by creating an enormous guilt. If one has been rejected it is felt that the element of frustrated domination plays a part in leading the rejected one to suicide. In that way even death is robbed of its purity as a statement; and yet, analyze, probe, and worry it as we will, nothing takes away the overwhelming and brutal reality of this final determination.
Frequently one reads or hears that the suicide did not appear despondent, but instead went about during the time before death with a convincing cheerfulness that precluded worry on the part of friends or relatives. In many suicides one can imagine that the end comes as a relief from the charade, from the pose of accepting and coping. The need to appear “cheerful” and to disguise the ravages of inner turmoil must take their toll on a beleaguered spirit. One may be forced to the wearing of masks by the indifference of others but also by a deep shame over the very feelings of weakness and desperation. Everyone would prefer not to appear helpless. Even if a suicide is responding to a rejection, imposing his will upon the future by taking his life—even then he is in despair, convinced that time can bring no upward alteration in his heavy, painful feelings.
In what way does the life we lead and the way we feel about ourselves contribute to the suicide rate? What in the situation of young women makes them more desperate than previously? The collectivity falls like water through our fingers: and this is especially true in suicide where there is so great a degree of personal anguish. Still, even though we cannot be certain, some of the assumptions of contemporary society suggest themselves as implicated in the loss of the will to live. One of these may be that we all feel an increasing sense of humiliation and shame about our personal failures.
With women, personal failures are manifold. They wear a thousand faces. Private relations, work, family, continuity—these are devastating challenges faced constantly by every human being. To fail without hope of recovery could hardly be exaggerated as an individual catastrophe. These things count and consolations are not inevitably convincing. Life is indeed hard. When failures of beauty, of charm, of equable nature, of temperament, of endurance come, they strike down a dejected girl with an additional force. From the cradle onward everyone has made, on behalf of girls, a demand for all things bright and beautiful. Some who start out in innocent arrears—not pretty, not charming, not lucky—know from their earliest days a sort of bankruptcy. The burden of this is as old as life, it is nothing new.
What is contemporary, perhaps, is the belief in an openness, a vast ocean of possibility, of infinite combinations, mutations, new beginnings, fresh starts. We like to think there is an endless emotional frontier ahead of us, that we are never trapped, encircled. Freedom to change, freedom from inhibition seemed to demand that we find happiness and fulfillment—or else take the blame for it. An integrated spirit, an unfettered psyche, a responsive character are not only a privilege; they are a challenge erasing alibis by which people have spared their own feelings of unworthiness. When all responsibility lies on one’s own doorstep, the need for success is bitter indeed. Self-hatred, self-accusation, always so sadly pressing upon the suicide, are bound to bear down as the reasonableness of sharing blame with others diminishes. Our limitations, our chains are there for all to see—and worst of all we must look at them ourselves, without excuse or mitigation.
When everything is possible, to have little becomes unbearable. There is not only an absence then, but a cutting awareness of incapacity. Freedom has opened up new roads—and closed many of the old ones. Think of the number of respected and apparently happy spinsters in the past—school teachers, nurses, maiden aunts—and remember that their life was not always thought of as a calamity. It is not a question of marriage alone, but of renunciation, chastity, deprivation. We are no longer free to be contented old maids. The condition itself has been outlawed by critical analysis and pity.
To be left aside, or for a thousand complicated reasons to be unable, like Marilyn Monroe, to construct an existence truly satisfactory, can often be a fate, a destiny, rooted in accidents, bad luck, burdensome beginnings, or in having made bad choices. The unbearable topping to the mound of real troubles is the conviction that some unnecessary demon inside ourselves has taken control. It is the unnecessary that fills us with shame and guilt.
Dependence is scorned and it is natural to seek happiness by going away from the family. All of the arrangements and values of society move in that direction—our own desires lead us there, also. For young women this may be an imprudent risk and the luckiest are those who manage to keep some lifeline to the past, to their dependent days. No one to turn to, adrift, always having to earn the consideration of friends, lovers, fellow workers. Robert Frost said, “Home is where they have to take you in.” Very few runaways complain of having fled too much love. Parents complain of their children’s waywardness and yet many things suggest that the parents do not wish to prolong connections that require effort, compassion, sacrifice. So, when things go badly for the young there isn’t much strength to draw from. The suicide is a dependent with no one to depend on.
Suicide is more a self-hatred than a protest against a narrow life. If love or marriage or motherhood disappoint, this is most likely to lead to anger, impatience, and not to the deep underground waters of self-destruction. An unwillingness to bear pain plays a role. We are not ready to accept it and scarcely know how to deal with it. Physical and emotional pain have been the lot of mankind and, in a sense, it has been the mission of America to seek the diminishment of this pain by the use of technology, raised living standards, and urbanization.
When we travel to poor countries, the pain-loaded people seem almost like another species and we stand in awe of their sheer endurance, just as we shrink from the contemplation of what they are indeed enduring. For us, it is not a mere figure of speech to use the word unbearable. For mental pain help is not so near at hand as for the ills of the body. Excruciations attack an organism that is unprepared defenseless. Only the assurance of being loved by someone can produce the patience necessary for survival. If more young women are committing suicide it means that they are cut off” from the love of their fellow beings—or believe that to be the case.
There is something of the child in all of us that cannot accept loneliness, an abandonment to the dark. And what will the future be? The modern world places enormous demands upon the individual, requiring of him a lone, spectacular effort. You are only yourself, we say, and in some sense always alone. The question is whether we have mastered the terms of this profound singularity, this enlarging self-determination. It is clear, as the suicide figures show, that many young women have not.
1972