SOURCE: "Suicide in Henry James's Fiction: A Sociological Analysis," in CLA Journal, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, December, 1990, pp. 188-211.

Suicide among major fictional characters of the nineteenth century—Hardy's Eustacia and Little Father Time, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, to name a few—impresses one with its pervasiveness in the imaginative world of eminent authors of the time. Writing in the period following the glorification of the suicidal deaths of Werther and Chatterton, and emphasizing the workings of the minds of his characters by working "an acre of embroidery on an inch of canvas," Henry James calls attention to the portrayal of selfwilled deaths in his fiction. Having grown up in a highly individualistic family that emphasized the exercise of free will, and being one who reveled in the probing of his character's consciousnesses, James considered important the role of will in matters of life and death. Because characters who willfully courted death at their own hands through violent means and those who died because of the more passive loss of will to live are equally self-destructive, the term suicide is used in the sense of Émile Durkheim's late nineteenth-century definition as applying to "all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result."¹ Thus, Daisy Miller's willful contracting of fatal malaria and the fatally ill Milly Theale's turning her face to the wall are as much suicidal acts as Hyacinth Robinson's putting a bullet through his heart and Agatha Grice's consumption of poison.

Ten instances of physical suicide and eight instances of symbolic suicide (death as a result of the loss of the will to live) in a total of sixteen novels and tales are closely analyzed here. Analyses of these eighteen suicides in the light of penetrating sociological studies of the phenomenon by such notables as Émile Durkheim, Louis Dublin, Edwin Shneidman, A. Alvarez, and Philippe Aries show James's fictional suicides to be reflections of the real-life phenomenon. The temporal and geographical universality, the irrationality, and the inexplicability of self-destruction make the scholarly studies and observations, irrespective of their time and place, enlightening. The comprehensiveness and timing (last decade of the nineteenth century) of Durkheim's study make his observations especially relevant to the analysis of James's suicide fiction. While reflecting the universality, the irrationality, and the inexplicability of the phenomenon, James's fictional suicides also show conformity to characteristics of the real-life phenomenon during his time. Thus, in the delineation of his suicidal characters, James shows himself to be very much a man of his times and of his milieu.

In a total of nine novels and tales, there are ten instances of obvious or suspected suicides where the concerned individuals resort to violent means to end their lives. In "Osborne's Revenge," Robert Graham, a deluded young man of literary bent, "had shot himself through the head in his room at the hotel."² Before doing it, however, he had sent to his best friend, Philip Osborne, a letter describing his mental state and his reasons for taking this drastic step. Three years later, in Watch and Ward, a widower, distraught over his financial situation, kills himself in the presence of his young daughter. When others arrive on the scene, his hand still holds the pistol from which "he had just sent a bullet through his brain."³ An 1874 story, "Madame de Mauves," is singular in having two suicides. The impoverished Baron de Mauves, husband of the innocent and wealthy American Euphemia, shoots himself in the head⁴ because his virtuous wife refuses to forgive his transgressions after he has reformed himself. The other suicide in the story, his sister's husband, having lost his fortune and fearing his wife, had earlier shot himself in the head (13:249). Roderick Hudson (1874-75), the first work which raises the question of intention, provides ample textual evidence and foreshadowing to justify labeling Roderick a suicide.

More than a decade after Roderick Hudson (1875), in The Princess Casamassima (1885-86), Hyacinth Robinson's dead body is discovered within a room locked from the inside, leaving no question as to how he came to his end: "Mr. Robinson has shot himself through the heart" (6:431). "The Modern Warning" (1888), containing one of two suicides by poisoning in James's fiction, depicts the only married woman to take her own life. Another tale published the same year, "The Patagonia," contains the other female suicide. Grace Mavis disappears one night from the Patagonia. Though her body is not recovered, she may safely be considered a suicide since no indication is given of a possible accidental fall and since we have no reason to suspect that anyone on board would deliberately push her into the ocean. "Sir Edmund Orme" (1891), the only Jamesian ghost story with a suicide, has the only male suicide who resorts to poisoning. After keeping suicide out of his fiction for almost two decades, James returns to it in "A Round of Visits" (1910). Newton Winch, depressed over his unethical financial transactions, shoots himself through his temple just as the police arrive at the door for him and as his friend Mark Monteith goes to open the door for them.

Certain interesting facts emerge from a surface observation of these suicides. Except for the two tales published in 1888, "The Modern Warning" and "The Patagonia," all of the physical suicides are men. For those who seek violent deaths at their own hands, the most often used means is the gun. Five of these choose to send bullets through their brains, while one sends it through his heart. Two choose to end their lives by poisoning, one falls from a mountaintop, and another drowns herself. The two women choose comparatively less violent forms of self-destruction: Agatha in "The Modern Warning" takes poison, while Grace Mavis aboard The Patagonia chooses drowning. All except Robert Graham in "Osborne's Revenge," Lambert in Watch and Ward, and M. Clairin in "Madame de Mauves" are protagonists or major characters. The suicides of the Baron in "Madame de Mauves," Roderick Hudson in the novel of that name, Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima, Agatha in "The Modern Warning," Grace in "The Patagonia" and Newton Winch in "A Round of Visits" are all culminating activities in the respective works. Robert Graham's suicide, which takes place early in "Osborne's Revenge," provides the background for Philip Osborne's revenge. Sir Edmund Orme's suicide, which had taken place several years before the current action, accounts for his ghostly presence in the story named after him. The suicide in Watch and Ward is unique in not having much bearing on the main action of the plot. Lambert's suicide remains in the background as the event that orphaned Nora, making Roger Lawrence's entry into her life possible. The mental stability of Robert Graham, Lambert, and Roderick Hudson appears to be questionable. All of the other physical suicides seem to be in command of their mental faculties.

In addition to the ten instances of physical suicide, there are several examples where James's characters lose their will to live and subsequently lose their lives or give up the trappings of living in the physical world. Three tales and four novels containing eight such voluntary deaths, most of them results of a combination of illness and loss of will, offer a compelling study in the psychology of self-destruction. Durkheim's definition of suicide permits us to view these deaths as suicides.

Two Civil War stories present protagonists who lose their will to live when they face rejection in love. In "The Story of a Year" (1865), a wounded young soldier has made a remarkable recovery. However, when he realizes that his "intended," Lizzie, is romantically interested in someone else, he dies after releasing Lizzie from her commitment to him. Ironically, at the same time, he utters part of the wedding vows, asking Lizzie to be his for a little while, "holding my hands—so—until death parts us" (CT, 1:97). "A Most Extraordinary Case" (1868) has another Civil War hero, Colonel Ferdinand Mason, who recovers from a grievous ailment when love nourishes him, but who suddenly makes himself a martyr at the altar of love when he realizes that the girl he adores will soon marry someone else. The narrator makes it perfectly clear that Mason dies because he loses his will to live. He bequeaths most of his wealth to Horace Knight, Caroline Hofmann's would-be-husband: "From this moment his strength began rapidly to ebb, and the shattered fragments of his long-resisting will floated down its shallow current into dissolution" (CT, 2:365). To the young doctor, Horace Knight, Mason's death is quite inexplicable; it was "the most extraordinary case" he had ever heard of. Clearly, both deaths, altruistically motivated, result from disappointment in love and consequent loss of the will to live.

"Longstaffs Marriage" depicts contradictory ways in which a man and a woman respond to rejection and acceptance of love. Reginald Longstaff, who proposes to Diana Belfield while supposedly on his deathbed, has the fortune or misfortune of being refused. The rejection, instead of worsening his condition, makes him recover. Later on, the tables are turned when Diana becomes gravely ill and proposes to Reginald. Instead of holding a grudge and refusing her, Longstaff gladly marries her. However, quite oddly and deliberately, in a paradoxical demonstration of love, Diana dies. Rejection of the deathbed marriage proposal boosts Reginald into vigor and life, while acceptance under similar circumstances kills Diana. Longstaff and Belfield exercise their wills in opposing ways. Acceptance of her love prompts Diana Belfield to will herself to die as an act of altruism.

The American (1876-77), first of the two full-length novels in this group, contains two instances of voluntary giving up of life. Stephen Spender considers the entire Bellegarde family of The American suicidal: "It repels the inflow of new American life, and it even suicidally refuses the money which might revive its splendour.⁵ The aristocratic Claire de Cintre, when caught between family loyalty and love of her American suitor, chooses to enter a convent. Insofar as it means being dead to the world, the action may be considered a symbolic suicide. In this, she may be compared to John Donne, who, according to Alvarez, "finally negotiated his middle-life crisis by taking holy orders instead of his life."⁶ That Claire views her entering a convent as a suicidal act is evidenced in her choice of words to Newman. She calls her going away "death" and adds, "Let me bury myself (2:365). When pressed about where she is going, she says, "I am going out of the world. . . . I am going into a convent" (2:418). Her words clearly do not express the enthusiasm of a person who joins a convent prompted by admirable, noble, and selfless motives. The idea of her being dead to the world is underscored by Newman's own experience of Claire's self-denial. He tells Mrs. Tristram: "I feel like a widower . . . as if my wife had been murdered and her assassins were still at large" (2:512). He further views her as entombing herself in a cell (2:419) and he refers to the convent as "the stony sepulchre that held her" (2:531). Earlier, her brother, Valentin de Bellegarde, had courted physical death in a duel over an obviously disreputable young woman.

Daisy Miller and Milly Theale stand at two ends of the spectrum of characters who die when they lose their will to live. Daisy, the earliest of James's female innocents abroad, shows that even young Americans of sturdy stock (quite healthy and planning to remain so) can suddenly lose their will to live and therefore die, while Milly Theale demonstrates how a strong will to live can sustain even a fatally ill person and how that person can die as soon as she loses her will to live. Twice Daisy declares her intention to remain healthy. First, when her mother and Mrs. Walker try to dissuade her from going to the Pincio with Giovanelli because she might catch the fever, she asserts: "I don't want to do anything that's going to affect my health—or my character either!" (18:54). Later, at the Colosseum, when Winterbourne criticizes Daisy's Italian escort for his indiscretion in taking her there, Daisy, still very much sure of herself, responds, "I never was sick, and I don't mean to be! . . . I don't look like much, but I'm healthy!" (18:88), thus arrogantly expressing her will to live.

However, repeated acts of rejection by Daisy's compatriots in Rome gradually kill her zest for life. The innocent Daisy—who, early in the tale equates the other Americans' not speaking to her and her mother with their (her family's) not speaking to the others and thus being "exclusive" (18:28)—gives up when she suspects that Winterbourne does not believe in her innocence. Despite all her innocence and bravado, the insult in Mrs. Walker's deliberately turning her back to Daisy, who was trying to take leave of the hostess before leaving the party, is not lost upon Daisy. She "turned very pale and looked at her mother" (18:73) and soon turns away, "looking with a small white prettiness, a blighted grace, at the circle near the door" (18:73). Such a reaction belies Winterbourne's suspicion that she simply does not feel and does not know about all the cold shoulders that were turned upon her (18:80).

The scene at the Colosseum demonstrates the ultimate dispiriting of Daisy. When she realizes that Winterbourne has been observing her and Giovanelli and has turned away without speaking to her, she tells her escort, "Why it was Mr. Winterbourne! . . . He saw me and he cuts me dead!" (18:86). An irate Winterbourne, having heard this, confronts her and Giovanelli about the stupidity of their being in "a nest of malaria." Giovanelli quickly exculpates himself and assures Daisy's concerned friend, "I assured Mademoiselle it was a grave indiscretion but when was Mademoiselle ever prudent?" (18:87), underscoring the defiant nature of Daisy's actions. Still anxious for Winterbourne's approval, Daisy asks him if he believed that she was engaged. Winterbourne's response, apparently expressing indifference in the matter, is the final stroke, making her declare, "I don't care whether I have Roman fever or not" (18:89).

The willful nature of Daisy Miller's death makes it conform to Durkheim's definition of suicide. Her actions as well as the observations of those who know her well testify to the active role of her will in her contracting malaria and her subsequent passivity and loss of the will to live. When she is taken seriously ill, even her brother Randolph affirms, "It's going round at night that way, you bet—that's what has made her so sick" (18:90). After Daisy's funeral, when an indignant Winterbourne confronts Giovanelli with his responsibility in taking her to the Colosseum, he again expresses the willful nature of her act by saying, "She did what she liked!" (18:92)—she caught malaria! Her death, therefore, results from a positive and a negative act which she knows will result in death. She dies as much from her Roman fever as from losing her will to live. Her surrender, while she is still very young, in the face of adverse criticism is also in the Romantic tradition.

If an otherwise robust Daisy Miller, in the face of unfair criticism, loses her vibrant interest in life to the point of losing her will to live, a fatally ill Milly Theale, in The Wings of the Dove (1902), hangs on to life by the sheer power of her will until betrayal in love provokes her to release her precarious hold on it. Much of the beauty and aesthetic value of the novel lies in James's careful and persistent delineation of the power of Milly's will in her life as well as in her death.

Milly's strong will to live is clearly evident throughout the novel in her attempt to live life to the fullest, even after she becomes aware of the fatal nature of her illness. F. O. Matthiessen points to the end of the chapter that introduces Milly as proof that James intended her to be far from suicidal.⁷ During their brief sojourn in the Alps, Milly's friend and confidante, Susan Stringham, comes upon Milly one afternoon seated on the "dizzy edge" of a precipice, on "a slab of rock at the end of a short promontory." In the passage detailing Mrs. Stringham's thought processes, James inserts one sentence that removes beyond the shadow of a doubt the fear that Milly entertained any suicidal thoughts: "If the girl was deeply and recklessly meditating there she wasn't meditating a jump" (19:23-24). Soon after this Milly reappears at the inn where Susan Stringham is still meditating on what she saw and its implications, only to conclude, "She wouldn't have committed suicide; she knew herself unmistakeably reserved for some more complicated passage" (19:125). In addition to the narrator's assurance that the "thousand thoughts, for the minute, [that] roared in the poor lady's ears" did not reach Milly's ear, we now have Susan Stringham's categorical conclusion that Milly "wouldn't have committed suicide." In view of what happens later when Milly gives up on life, Mrs. Stringham's assurance that Milly "knew herself unmistakeably reserved for some more complicated passage" is full of ironic import. Later on, Milly describes herself to Sir Luke as "a survivor—a survivor of a general wreck" (19:241). Even when she returns from the doctor's office she cannot help entertaining hopeful thoughts: "It was of course as one of the weak that she had gone to him—but oh with how sneaking a hope that he might pronounce her, as to all indispensables, a veritable young lioness!" (19:251) As Matthiessen points out, "One aspect of her situation that he [James] penetrates with psychological depth is the relation between her delicate vitality and the will to live. Sir Luke knows that she needs love to sustain her, to relax the tension of her loneliness, and . . . he urges her to 'take the trouble' to live."⁸ James devotes a scene to Milly's meditations as she returns from the doctor's office through Regent's Park. At the end of her meditations, she stands up and looks "at her scattered melancholy comrades—some of them so melancholy as to be down on their stomachs in the grass, burrowing; she saw once more, with them, those two faces of the question between which there was so little to choose for inspiration. It was perhaps superficially more striking that one could live if one would; but it was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible in short, that one would live if one could" (19:254).

After painstakingly demonstrating her intense will to live through the probing of her consciousness and that of Susan Stringham in lengthy passages, James reports her fatal resolve indirectly through the simple sentence, "[S]he had turned her face to the wall" (20:323), thus underscoring the active nature of her will in her death. Only through a symbolic act, and not through any violence, would Milly reveal the loss of her will to live. Mrs. Stringham reports to Densher, on Milly's death: "She has turned her face to the wall" (20:270). Densher repeats the phrase when he in turn reports it to Kate, emphasizing the heavy blow that Mark has given: "The way it affected her was that it made her give up. She has given up beyond all power to care again, and that's why she is dying. . . . One can see now that she was living by will. . . . [H]er will, at a given moment, broke down, and the collapse was determined by that fellow's dastardly stroke" (20:320-21). As in the case of Daisy Miller, the perception of evil in the world surrounding her puts a sudden end to Milly's life. Cargill, Bowden, and Fowler, among others, observe the element of will in Milly Theale's life and death. According to Cargill, "the whole story of Milly Theale is the story of her will to live, strengthened by love, but finally destroyed by the revelation of the plot against her."⁹ According to Bowden, "it is her will to live, her firm determination to enjoy as much of life as possible, that makes her courage attractive and her death tragic."¹⁰ Virginia Fowler sees Milly as continuing to exert an influence on the world through her bequest to Merton Densher. Fowler adds: "[B]ut she can do so only by dying. And death is, though perhaps unconsciously, to some extent self-willed."¹¹

The Pupil (1891) contains the touching story of an ailing young man who loses his will to live when he experiences what he considers the ultimate rejection by his family and, perhaps, by his tutor as well. Unlike Daisy Miller and Milly Theale in his poverty, Morgan Moreen resembles Daisy in his tender age and Milly in his serious illness. Though he dies of a heart attack, it is clear that James intended the element of will to color his death as strongly as it colors the deaths of Daisy and Milly. In his preface to the New York edition, James compares Morgan Moreen to Hyacinth Robinson of The Princess Casamassima and says, "[I]t is much in this manner [the manner of Hyacinth Robinson] . . . that Morgan Moreen breaks down—his burden indeed not so heavy, but his strength so much less formed."¹² In pointing up the similarity between Morgan Moreen's death and the death of Hyacinth Robinson, a clear suicide, James attributes a self-willed element to young Moreen's death. The Romantic notions of youth, waste, and self-willed early death come together in Morgan's premature death. In contrast to the physical suicides, women dominate the group of symbolic suicides. In this cluster of tales and novels, a combination of illness and loss of will results in the deaths of the protagonists. Claire de Cintre and her brother Valentin in The American are exceptional in being in perfect health when they will their deaths, whether physical or symbolic,

The various definitions of suicide offered by philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists underscore the multiplicity of attitudes toward killing oneself. A. Alvarez, Avery D. Weisman, and Charles W. Wahl emphasize the attention-getting, immortality-guaranteeing, and guilt-provoking aspects of suicide. According to Alvarez, "suicide is simply the most extreme and brutal way of making sure that you will not readily be forgotten. It is a question of a kind of posthumous rebirth in the memory of others."¹³ According to Avery D. Weisman, "wanting to die, crying for help, or seeking oblivion are only a few of the many motives for suicide. Just as a religious person ponders the promise of immortality, so is a suicidal person lured by the prospect of a special kind of death which only an act of self-destruction will achieve."¹⁴ Weisman sees suicide also as "only an extreme form of self-destructive behavior in which the wish to obliterate oneself happens to coincide with the wish to discover oneself through death. Suicide is a product of a mood, a time, and a season, but self-destructive acts assume many guises and may often endure throughout an entire lifetime."¹⁵ The tendency for self-destruction manifested in Roderick Hudson all through his life illustrates this. Wahl also emphasizes this aspect of suicide when he refers to the "magical" aspects of suicide and says that suicide "is not preeminently a rational act pursued to achieve rational ends, even when it is effected by persons who appear to be eminently rational. Rather, it is a magical act, actuated to achieve irrational, delusional, illusory ends."¹⁶ The completely unexpected suicides of Grace Mavis in "The Patagonia" and of Agatha Grice in "The Modern Warning," two outwardly rational women, may be explained in these terms. It is also possible, as Wahl explains to those to whom suicide appears to be against man's normal self-preservative instinct, that death by one's own hand expiates self-guilt and inflicts it on others. Voluntary death, he goes on to say, may be regarded "not only as a surcease from pain in this world . . . but also as an act whereby one acquires powers, qualities and advantages not possessed in the living state."¹⁷ Since such attention-getting suicides are also guilt-provoking, and since such a heavy burden of guilt would be destructive, an element of murder characterizes the effects of such suicides on survivors. The suicide may unconsciously believe, "like Sampson in the temple, that by an act of self-destruction he is encompassing the destruction of myriads of others. The suicide, when he dies, kills not one person, but many. He commits not only suicide but vicarious matricide, patricide, sororicide, fratricide, and even genocide."¹⁸

Love-related suicides best illustrate this murderous aspect of self-destruction. In "Osborne's Revenge," Robert Graham, though he fails to make the desired impression on his lady-love, clearly intends for her to feel responsible for his death. The desperate Baron de Mauves, through his suicide, must have sought his cruel wife's sympathy and immortality in her thoughts. Daisy Miller, in rather willfully contracting Roman fever and then losing her will to live, points her accusing finger at her harsh critics. Milly Theale, despite her noble and unselfish intentions, makes Merton Densher feel guilty enough to make him modify his marriage proposal to Kate Croy, in effect cancelling his engagement to her. In the sheer number of survivors who would feel guilty over a suicide, Roderick Hudson remains unsurpassed in James's fiction. His mother, his patron/brother, his faithful fiancée, and perhaps even his femme fatale must have felt the destructive impact of his suicide. Thus, as Weisman points out, "suicide offers both masochistic gratification and atonement for homicidal wishes. Although suicide may relieve guilt and hatred, the victim is also free to destroy others by his act."¹⁹

To Camus, "killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it."²⁰ Alvarez also points to the confessional aspect of suicide when he says, "Like divorce, suicide is a confession of failure. And like divorce, it is shrouded in excuses and rationalizations spun endlessly to disguise the simple fact that all one's energy, passion, appetite and ambition have been aborted."²¹ As such, suicide may be considered the ultimate purgation. All of the physical suicides in Henry James's works proclaim failure of one kind or another, while all the symbolic suicides in his fiction proclaim failure in love. Robert Graham, in attributing his suicide to unrequited love, proclaims his failure in that department. Lambert's suicide in Watch and Ward proclaims his financial failure. The Baron de Mauves kills himself because he fails to regain his wife's love and respect. His brother-in-law's suicide, which preceded the Baron's own, testifies to his financial failure. Roderick Hudson and Hyacinth Robinson both experience failure in love, with Roderick's failure extending into his artistic career. Agatha, in "The Modern Warning," fails to reconcile her love for her brother and country with her love for her husband and his country. Grace Mavis aboard The Patagonia jumps overboard when she fails to maintain her reputation. Failure of self-esteem provokes Newton Winch's suicide in "A Round of Visits."

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, Émile Durkheim conducted the investigation of suicide that resulted in the publication of his well-known book Suicide: A Study in Sociology. In the early chapters Durkheim tries to negate doctrines that ascribe suicide to extra-social factors such as mental alienation, racial characteristics, heredity, climate, temperature, and finally the then-popular doctrine of "imitation." Through his study, Durkheim comes up with categories of suicide. The first one, which he calls egoistic suicide, results from lack of integration of the individual into society. He supports this by pointing out that the suicide rate is lowest among Catholics and Jews, followers of religions that closely integrate the individual into the collective life. In contrast, among Protestants, because of the high state of individualism, the rate is high. However, of all great Protestant countries, England has fewest suicides, because religious society there is much more strongly constituted (D, pp. 160-61). Egoistic suicide happens also when the individual is not well integrated into the family. In times of crisis, since society naturally gets to be strongly integrated, the suicide rate falls.

Interestingly, a high rate of integration leads to the second type of suicide, the one Durkheim labels "altruistic": "If excessive individuation leads to suicide, insufficient individuation has the same effects. When man has become detached from society, he encounters less resistance to suicide in himself, and he does so likewise when social integration is too strong" (D, p. 217). Here the individual takes his own life because of higher commandments. The unquestioning obedience to authority expected of and generally given by members of armed forces, even in modern society, would be a case in point. According to William James, mankind's common instinct for reality, which makes man admire heroism, also makes sacred that supreme gesture of heroism, a person's willingness to risk death and suffer it heroically in the service he has chosen.²²

Among the self-willed deaths in James's fiction, those of Hyacinth Robinson and the protagonists of the two Civil War stories come close to being altruistic ones. The symbolic murder which the revolutionaries of The Princess Casamassima plan would require an act of obedience from a committed revolutionary. In the beginning, Hyacinth Robinson is eager to prove his commitment. However, his revolutionary allies recognize the change in him after his European travel. When Poupin accuses him of having changed and declares that that changes everything, an indignant Hyacinth retorts: "Does it alter my sacred vow? There are some things in which one can't change. I didn't promise to believe; I promised to obey" (6:371). If Hyacinth had carried out the order contained in his letter, that alone would have been suicidal because the murder would have gotten him the death penalty. His decision to murder himself rather than commit the symbolic murder planned by the revolutionaries gives his suicide an altruistic dimension because of its sacrificial nature. At the same time, in going against the command of the revolutionaries, he falls short of being altruistic in the revolutionary cause. The protagonists of the two Civil War stories lose their will to live when they realize that the girls they love would be happier with other mates. Since they are motivated by unselfish motives, their deaths approach altruistic suicide.

A lack of integration into family and society is generally considered the major cause of suicide. Several of the physical suicides in James's fiction appear to have family members and/or friends who care deeply for them. Alienation in these cases originates from inside the characters. Hyacinth Robinson, though without his natural parents, has several surrogate parents. His problem lies in his inability to reconcile within himself the pulls of opposing social strata. "[A] little bookbinder who had so much more of the gentleman about him than one would expect" (5:198), Hyacinth is "the illegitimate child of a French impropriety who murdered one of her numerous lovers" (5:36), an English aristocrat. He grows up with a loving foster mother in a lower-class tenement. As a young man, he enters upper-class society, mainly through the whim of the Princess Casamassima. The narrator tells us, "His present position wasn't of his seeking—it had been forced upon him" (6:28-29). That is not to say that he was not charmed by its glitter. At about the same time, he is also initiated by a brother-figure, Paul Muniment, into a revolutionary group in London. The revolutionary zeal burns in him for a while. After the death of his foster mother, Pinnie, he has the opportunity to tour Europe. A change in attitude toward the various classes, which had already been at work in him, surfaces strongly during his travels. He writes to the Princess about how happy he is, how guilty he feels about that happiness and about the contrast between himself and Hoffendahl, the revolutionary leader (6:143-36). Upon his return home, Hyacinth even entertains thoughts of moving upward into an elite class through writing (6:155-56). Torn between the conflicting loyalties to upper-class society and the anarchists, feeling equally rejected by the Princess and Millicent Henning, and betrayed by Paul Muniment and the Cause, Hyacinth feels all alone; and instead of murdering the enemy of the Cause, he kills himself. Hyacinth's suicide, then, in addition to being the result of a sense of alienation, may also be viewed as an example of a classic psychological type of suicide—the desire to kill someone else turned toward the self.

Among the other suicides in James's fiction, Robert Graham in "Osborne's Revenge" has a friend who cares deeply for him and would spare no expense in his service. The sense of alienation at being rejected by his wife forces the reformed but rejected Baron de Mauves to take his own life. Roderick Hudson has a mother and a fiancée who adore him, a brother-figure who patronizes him in the best possible way, and many who admire his sculpture. An obsession with the charming Christina Light makes him alienate himself from his family, his friends, and his work. Inexplicably, like Melville's Bartleby, he chooses not to belong. The transplanted Agatha, in "A Modern Warning," in spite of having a loving husband and a loving brother, had been made to feel like a traitor by the latter. Newton Winch, in "A Round of Visits," through manipulation of large sums of money entrusted to his management, naturally feels alienated. However, strangely enough, he shoots himself immediately after having found a sympathetic ear in an old friend. James's pupil, in the midst of a family he is ashamed of, feels completely alone when he feels that his tutor, the only person to whom he feels close, rejects him. Milly Theale, an heiress, has no family. Fatally ill, she chooses to travel in Europe. Betrayal in love by a young man and a young woman she trusts makes her feel even more alone in a foreign country.

A third kind of suicide, the one that Durkheim calls "anomic," comes about from lack of regulation of the individual by society. Changes in status quo, like sudden wealth or divorce, can bring about suicide. Anomic suicide is essentially passionate in nature, though the passion is ignoble, characterized by anger and all the emotions customarily associated with disappointment (D, pp. 284-85). The suicide of the man misunderstood, very common in days when no recognized social classification is left, belongs to this group. The supreme example would be Goethe's Werther, "the turbulent heart as he calls himself, enamoured of infinity, killing himself from disappointed love, and the case of all artists who, after having drunk deeply of success, commit suicide because of a chance hiss, a somewhat severe criticism, or because their popularity has begun to wane" (D, p. 286). James's Roderick Hudson clearly falls into this category.

Individual forms of suicide could be mixtures of the different categories like ego-anomic, altruistic-anomic, and ego-altruistic. With available statistics Durkheim finds a correlation between suicide and social phenomena like family, political and economic society, and religious groups. According to Durkheim, the correlation indicates decisively that each society has a collective inclination towards suicide, a rate of self-homicide which is fairly constant for each society so long as the basic conditions of existence remain the same. The American translator/editor of Durkheim's book sums up the sociological aspect of self-destruction in this way: "The individual inclination to suicide is explicable scientifically only by relation to the collective inclination, and this collective inclination is itself a determined reflection of the structure of the society in which the individual lives" (D, p. 16). He continues: "From the point of view of psychoanalytic psychiatry, it may be said that every individual has what we may call a suicide-potential, a tendency to self-murder which varies in degree of intensity from individual to individual." The degree of intensity of this potential is established in infancy and early childhood by fears, anxiety, frustrations, loves, and hatreds engendered in the individual by the family environment in terms of eliminatory processes, weaning, sex education, sibling rivalry, rejection, or over-acceptance by the parents and degree of dependence. Where through excessive mother-love, father-rejection, or inferiority induced by siblings the individual is not readied for responsible adulthood according to the customs and mores of the society in which he is to participate, the suicide potential of an individual may be very high (D, p. 23). To sum up, "[a]ll of the emotions manifested in suicides are, then, explicable in terms of the life-history of the individual, particularly the channeling of the basic psychic configurations through the family" (D, p. 24). Even in other cases, the trials and tribulations of adulthood may provoke suicide.

After dividing suicide in general into three categories, Durkheim classifies the suicides of the insane into four kinds. When a person kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, he calls it maniacal. Lambert's suicide in Watch and Ward approaches this category. A man who demands one hundred dollars from a complete stranger in a hotel lobby obviously must be mentally deranged. Lambert projects an aspect of "grim and hopeless misery" (p. 21) and an "image of fallen prosperity, of degradation and despair" (p. 22). With a face "as white as ashes" and eyes "as lurid as coals" (p. 22), to Roger Lawrence he appears "simply crazy" (p. 22). That the man considers himself thus is obvious from the words he uses to preface his abrupt demand for the money: "You'll think me crazy, I suppose. Well, I shall be soon. Will you lend me a hundred dollars?" (p. 22). His almost violent reaction to the offer of a tenth of the amount he asked for, his threat to cut his own throat (p. 24), and his eventual suicide, all testify to the deranged state of his mind. Lambert's bizarre suicide, then, might be labelled what Durkheim calls "maniacal."

Durkheim connects melancholy suicide with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him (D, p. 63). Robert Graham's suicide in "Osborne's Revenge" may be placed in this category. Though Philip Osborne and Robert Graham have been best friends, Osborne is puzzled by Graham's behavior preceding his suicide. Spending the summer at certain medicinal springs, Graham fails to stay in touch with his best friend. When correspondence is demanded, the reply reveals an unsettled mind. Graham claims that the "infernal waters," instead of doing him good, have poisoned him. In somewhat incoherent terms he refers to a young lady's charms that hold him there, while he declares his intention to return and claims that he is not "cracked" (CT, 2:13). When he appears, Osborne finds him physically improved but "morally .. . a sad invalid. He was listless, abstracted, and utterly inactive in mind" (p. 15). He dispatches another incoherent letter from Minnesota, where his best friend has sent him for diversion. The coherent conclusion to this letter proclaims his suicidal bent: "Life has lost, I don't say its charm .. . but its meaning. I shall live in your memory and your love, which is a vast deal better than living in my own self-contempt. Farewell" (p. 17). The narrator's posthumous appraisal of Graham, who is three years Osborne's senior, as "slight, undersized, feeble in health, sensitive, indolent, whimsical, generous, and in reality of a far finer clay than his friend" (p. 18), and the description of Graham by "disinterested parties" as "an insignificant, lounging invalid, who, in general company, talked in monosyllables, in a weak voice, and gave himself the airs of one whom nature had endowed with the right to be fastidious, without ever having done a stroke of work," help us make an objective evaluation of Robert Graham. His mental state before his suicide clearly blinds him to the strong bond of friendship with Osborne; therefore, he becomes obviously melancholic and attracted by the idea of death. Osborne's investigations after his suicide reveal that his best friend was laboring under delusions of betrayed love, when there actually was no love felt by the object of his affections. A third type of suicide of the insane, what Durkheim labels "obsessive suicide" or "anxiety suicide," has no relevance to James's fiction. It is caused by no motive, real or imaginary, but solely by the fixed idea of death, which, without clear reason, has taken possession of the person's mind (D, p. 64).

Roderick Hudson's suicide may be considered a combination of melancholy suicide and Durkheim's fourth category—impulsive or automatic suicide. As unmotivated as the obsessive suicide, impulsive suicide has no cause in reality nor in the patient's imagination. Instead of being produced by a fixed idea obsessing the mind for a shorter or longer period and only gradually affecting the will, it results from an abrupt and immediately irresistible impulse. "The sight of a knife, a walk by the edge of a precipice, etc., engenders the suicidal idea instantaneously and its execution follows so swiftly that patients often have no idea of what has taken place" (D, p. 65). Durkheim's description of a certain kind of suicide existing from antiquity in his chapter on "Individual Forms of the Different Types of Suicide" seems to fit Roderick Hudson's suicide. A condition of melancholic langor and general indifference characterized by heightened inner life and producing alienation typifies this type of suicide (D, pp. 278-79).

What emerges from this survey of sociological dimensions of suicide is the conviction that James portrays his fictional suicides, both physical and symbolic, quite realistically. That his suicidal characters can be used to illustrate conclusions on self-destruction reached by sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers is the ultimate testimony to his realism. Even in the matter of statistics, James's suicides parallel the trends in society. More men than women and more single people than married people will their own deaths. Durkheim points out that the suicides of women form only a small fraction of that of males (D, p. 99). Only two out of James's ten physical suicides are women. This also confirms Durkheim's observation in relation to egoistic suicides: that suicides among married persons are much fewer, though not due to the influence of conjugal society, but of the family society (D, p. 189). With the breakup of the marriage, more divorced men than women commit suicide, because men enjoy more benefits in marriage. In the total of eighteen suicides (ten physical and eight symbolic) in this study, only six have ever been married. Three of those are men who shoot themselves—the deranged widower Lambert in Watch and Ward and the desperate Baron de Mauves and his brother-in-law in "Madame de Mauves." The widowed Claire de Cintre of The American takes the veil, while Agatha of "The Modern Warning" poisons herself in spite of a happy marriage, and Diana of "Longstaff s Marriage" wills her death. There is something of Richard Cory in the unexpectedness of many of these suicides; Charles W. Wahl's view of suicide as a magical act that enables a victim to fulfill many of his unfulfilled wishes in real life offers a rational explanation for this irrational act:

[B]y equating the world with the self, [the suicide] affirms the same fallacy as the medieval mystics who said, . . ."Nothing outside my own mind is real; the world and all persons in it are, in reality, me." Therefore, to kill oneself is to kill everything that there is, the world and all other persons.²³

In conclusion, as Edel points out in the general introduction to The Complete Tales of Henry James, James wanted "to leave a multitude of pictures of [his] time, projecting [his] small circular frame upon as many different spots as possible" (p. 7). Without doubt, in the depiction of self-willed death, as in other aspects of his milieu—artistic, upper-class, leisured—he did succeed in what he wanted to accomplish.

¹Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1951), p. 44. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as D, followed by the page number(s).

² Henry James, The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1961), II, 17. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CT, followed by the volume and page number(s).

³ Henry James, Watch and Ward (New York: Grover, 1959), p. 29. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

⁴ Henry James, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 26 vols. (New York: Scribner's, 1909), XIII, 331. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by vol. and page number(s).

⁵ Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 40.

⁶ A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: Random, 1972), p. 165.

⁷ F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1944), pp. 63-64.

⁸ Ibid., p. 67.

⁹ Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York: Hafner, 1971), p. 339.

¹⁰ Edwin T. Bowden, The Themes of Henry James: A System of Observation Through the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1956), p. 93.

¹¹ Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James's American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 88-89.

¹² Henry James, "Prefaces to the New York Edition " European Writers and the Prefaces, ed. Leon Edel (New York: The Library of America, 1984), p. 1170.

¹³ Alvarez, p. 108.

¹⁴ Avery D. Weisman, "Self-Destruction and Sexual Perversion," in Essays in Self-Destruction, ed. Edwin S. Shneidman (New York: Jason Aronson, 1967), p. 265.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Charles William Wahl, "Suicide as a Magical Act," in Clues to Suicide, ed. Edwin S. Shneidman and Norman L. Farberow (New York: McGraw, 1957), p. 23.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 27.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 30.

¹⁹ Weisman, p. 266.

²⁰ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 5.

²¹ Alvarez, p. 100.

²² William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963), p. 364.

²³ Wahl, pp. 29-30.