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

In the following essay, Joseph interprets the many characters in Henry James's fiction who take their own lives in terms of the classifications of suicidal behavior adduced by Émile Durkheim in his Suicide: A Study in Sociology.

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...