Suicide and Social Criticism

avant-garde novelists eschew the social interests of the classic novel, sociology and serious fiction appear to be worlds apart. But at the turn of the last century, in the works of a great French sociologist and three important American writers, literature and sociology were remarkably at one in perception and purpose. Obviously differing in method-the difference between statistical analysis and dramatized fictional case-Emile Durkheim in Suicide (1897) and Theodore Dreiser in Sister Carrie (1900), Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth (1905), and Jack London in Martin Eden (1909) all reached the same conclusion: modern society is a killer, the suicide its victim. For these four writers self-destruction is one of the salient facts and the apt symbol of social conditions in Western Europe and the United States. Based more and more exclusively on the values of individualism, especially economic individualism, urban, industrial societies in their fragmentation, their lack of true social coherence, have an extraordinary capacity to cause suicide. Still a beleaguered position in territory largely occupied by psychology, the social etiology of suicide was an alarming truth for Durkheim, Dreiser, Wharton, and London. The great interest of their view of suicide, however, is not whether it is right or wrong; still less is the point to verify the novelists' insight by citing the sociologist or the sociologist's conclusion by referring to the novelists. What is most striking is their use of suicide, whether as social fact or literary image, to attack the evils they saw in society-for the purpose, that is, of social criticism

Art · Criminology · Criticism · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · American Political and Social Dynamics · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Psychology

• Bourdieu, Wharton and Changing Culture in The Age of Innocence

  Carol Singley, Carol J Singley•Cultural Studies•2003

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