Author : Deborah Suiter Gentry
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9780820424965
Total Pages : 114 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (249 download)
Book Synopsis The Art of Dying by : Deborah Suiter Gentry
Download or read book The Art of Dying written by Deborah Suiter Gentry and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the representation of suicide is commonplace in literature, few studies have explicitly dealt with the meaning of suicide in the works of women writers. The Art of Dying applies theories concerning the division of women literary figures into angels or monsters to representative literary suicides of the nineteenth century, including the suicides of women characters in works by Kate Chopin and Sylvia Plath. The Awakening by Kate Chopin is often misunderstood by critics who read it using the Romantic paradigm. Chopin breaks that paradigm by presenting the suicide of Edna Pontellier as heroic. Suicide is a prevalent motif and theme in two works by Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar and Ariel. An extensive analysis of Plath's last poem «Edge» portrays the suicide of the speaker as a calm and heroic act in keeping with the tone set by Chopin in The Awakening. The Art of Dying concludes by exploring women's need for self-actualization within the framework of love, marriage, and motherhood - institutions that have always demanded from women an unnatural and harmful degree of unselfishness. The inherent message in the works of artists such as Chopin and Plath is that women should not have to die in order to live.