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State University of New York Press - Deanna P. Koretsky

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129 pages

English

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Death Rights presents an antiracist critique of British romanticism by deconstructing one of its organizing tropes—the suicidal creative "genius." Putting texts by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and others into critical conversation with African American literature, black studies, and feminist theory, Deanna P. Koretsky argues that romanticism is part and parcel of the legal and philosophical discourses underwriting liberal modernity's antiblack foundations. Read in this context, the trope of romantic suicide serves a distinct political function, indexing the limits of liberal subjectivity and (re)inscribing the rights and freedoms promised by liberalism as the exclusive province of white men.

The first book-length study of suicide in British romanticism, Death Rights also points to the enduring legacy of romantic ideals in the academy and contemporary culture more broadly. Koretsky challenges scholars working in historically Eurocentric fields to rethink their identification with epistemes rooted in antiblackness. And, through discussions of recent cultural touchstones such as Kurt Cobain's resurgence in hip-hop and Victor LaValle's comic book sequel to Frankenstein, Koretsky provides all readers with a trenchant analysis of how eighteenth-century ideas about suicide continue to routinize antiblackness in the modern world.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Program—a limited competition designed to make outstanding humanities books available to a wide audience. Learn more at the Fellowships Open Book Program website at: https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/FOBP, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/1712.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Liberty and Death

2. Chained to Life and Misery

3. Writ in Water

4. In Sympathy

5. Marvelous Boys

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Royaume-Uni

Great Britain

Stephen Ireland

United Kingdom

Ireland

Reino Unido

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 mars 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438482903
Langue	English

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DEATH RIGHTS
DEATH RIGHTS

Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism

D EANNA P. K ORETSKY
Cover art: The Suicide , Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French, 1803–1860), ca. 1836. Oil on canvas. The Walters Art Museum, Creative Commons.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Koretsky, Deanna P., author.
Title: Death rights : romantic suicide, race, and the bounds of liberalism / Deanna P. Koretsky.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020028028 | ISBN 9781438482897 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781438482903 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Suicide in literature. | Literature and race. | Romanticism. | Liberalism in literature. | Suicide and literature.
Classification: LCC PN56.S744 K67 2021 | DDC 809/.933548--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028028
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jay. Everlong.
Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Liberty and Death
Chapter 2 Chained to Life and Misery
Chapter 3 Writ in Water
Chapter 4 In Sympathy
Chapter 5 Marvelous Boys
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

I am grateful, first and foremost, to Rebecca Colesworthy, the hardest-working editor in academic publishing, and to the entire team at SUNY Press for believing in this book. I can’t thank the anonymous readers enough for their generous and thorough feedback. I owe more than I could possibly express here to the trusted friends, brilliant colleagues, and supportive mentors who patiently read and commented on parts of this project when it was in various states of nonsense. You know who you are, and I know that I couldn’t have done this without you.
This book has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This book was also supported by a UNCF-Mellon Faculty Development Award, without which I’d probably still be writing. An early version of chapter 1 appeared previously as “Habeas Corpus and the Politics of Freedom: Slavery and Romantic Suicide” in Essays in Romanticism 22, no. 1 (2015): 21–33, and parts of it are reproduced with permission of the licensor through PLSclear. An early version of chapter 4 appeared as “Unhallowed Arts: Frankenstein and the Poetics of Suicide,” in European Romantic Review 26, no. 2 (February 2015): 241–260, and parts of it are reproduced by permission of Taylor Francis, Ltd.
Introduction

Each suicide is a poem sublime in its melancholy.
—Honoré de Balzac, Le Peau de Chagrin
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death.
—John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
The Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes
Is like the Scorpion girt by fire;
In circle narrowing as it glows,
The flame around their captive close,
Till inly searched by thousand throes,
And maddening in her ire,
One sad and sole relief she knows –
The sting she nourished for her foes,
Whose venom never yet was vain,
Gives but one pang, and cures all pain,
And darts into her desperate brain:
So do the dark in soul expire,
Or live like Scorpion girt by fire.
—Lord Byron, The Giaour
S uicide is a complicated response to a broken world. The factors that motivate someone’s decision to die are personal and, to a large extent, fundamentally unknowable. But cultural narratives about suicide are ours to read and weigh; they show us what it is to live in this world. This book recalls a historical moment when stories of suicide were used to rouse the racial consciousness of a nation. It is a book about why those efforts failed and how they were eroded by a cultural narrative still in circulation today—one that idealizes certain suicides in service to ideologies of white male supremacy.
In the ubiquity of sentiments such as those expressed in the epigraphs from Balzac, Keats, and Byron, we are reminded that literary romanticism characterized itself by brooding sensuality and irremediable malaise and that these strong emotions often were understood to result in suicide. Nor was interest in suicide limited to “high” literatures during this era. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, English newspapers published suicide notes (some real, others made up for shock value), while politicians debated ancient laws dictating how people who died by suicide should be buried (at crossroads, with stakes driven through their hearts—a gruesome practice finally eliminated in 1822). 1 The subject of the last epigraph, Byron’s “Scorpion girt by fire,” led the British ethologist C. Lloyd Morgan to conduct a series of sadistic experiments on whether animals consciously kill themselves, using scorpions as his test subjects. 2 Suicide even helped to launch the modern fashion industry: the blue and gold suit worn by the title character of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired one of the first ready-to-wear styles produced for mass market consumption, and a popular perfume of the day was called Eau de Werther . 3 With suicide being such a prominent and profitable cultural phenomenon, it is surprising that, among a recent wave of scholarship on the cultural history of suicide, not a single monograph has focused on romanticism. 4
One reason for this may be that romanticism’s role in the history of suicide seems self-evident. There is little doubt as to the relationship between romantic literature and the myth of the tortured artist—implicitly white and almost exclusively male—who is tragically undone by his own brilliance. 5 This myth remains with us even today. One especially clear example is Savage Beauty , the retrospective of the work of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen that opened in 2011 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the show’s most widely publicized pieces were McQueen’s intricately constructed coats, many of which were styled for the exhibition so as to be instantly reminiscent of romantic figures like the subject of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog . 6 The show also included pieces influenced by the Flemish masters, the Scottish Highlands, the Tudors, Plato’s Atlantis, and others. 7 While McQueen cited inspiration from many historical periods and subjects, the show was organized into sections titled “The Romantic Mind,” “Romantic Gothic and Cabinet of Curiosities,” “Romantic Nationalism,” “Romantic Exoticism,” “Romantic Primitivism,” and “Romantic Naturalism,” effectively rendering McQueen’s entire corpus in terms of the aesthetic arguably most explicit in the curation and presentation of his coats. When an expanded version of the show opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2015, the association between McQueen and romanticism was scaled back in its promotion, suggesting that in 2011, the heavy emphasis on romanticism was at least partly reflective of McQueen’s much-discussed 2010 suicide. 8
There are good reasons for the myth’s endurance. Rendering suicide an extension of someone’s art dulls the unsettling violence of the act of ending one’s own life. It circumscribes its finality and quiets (however temporarily) questions that can never be answered. This, of course, is precisely the function of myth and part of why this particular myth endures so strongly: it renders the complex and inexpressible somewhat easier to grasp, if not always to accept. Romantic narratives of suicide turn worlds of private pain into something beautiful, something the public can continue to love, or at least consume. In this sense, it’s not hard to see why the myth of romantic suicide still remains with us, in every public reckoning with the artist who hanged himself at the height of his success or the rock star who shot up and then shot himself. But the story we keep recirculating about these deaths—the romantic trope of lonely, tragic genius—barely scratches the surface of the lived realities that actually lead people to kill themselves. By the same token, despite its apparent ubiquity at the turn of the nineteenth century, this trope was hardly the only way in which suicide was represented during the historical moment with which it is most associated.
The Argument
Moving beyond conceptions of suicide as an index of romanticism’s fascination with tragic or mad genius, Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism reads the trope of romantic suicide within preexisting political narratives that engage suicide to index the limits of liberal subjectivity. Suicide first appeared as an explicitly political (as opposed to a psychological or emotional) theme in British abolitionist writing. This was no mere coincidence. As the following chapters discuss, it is in the institution of racialized enslavement and its afterlives that liberalism most clearly reveals itself as a system that enables freedom for some people at the expense of others. The trope of suicide