Jared Stark

In North America and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, debates over the meaning of suicide became a privileged site for efforts to discover, invent, or limn the conditions of modern selfhood and society and elicited new frameworks for interpreting suicide, particularly in moral philosophy and sociology. Specially attuned to the nature and nuances of this modern conceptualization of suicide are the works of American writer Edith Wharton (1862–1937). From the first poem she ever published (pseudonymously) in 1879 to her final novel, The Gods Arrive, in 1932, Wharton weaves a thread of reflection on the question of what suicide means for modern visions of the ethical subject and of the ethical society. Focusing on three of her earliest texts—her juvenile poem, “Only a Child,” her 1899 story “A Cup of Cold Water,” and her 1903 novella Sanctuary—this chapter investigates how Wharton’s writing foregrounds the figure of the witness to suicide. In so doing, her writing casts critical light on the paradoxical consequences of turn-of-the-twentieth-century efforts to legitimize suicide and to discover in suicide forms of modern authenticity.