In their death they were not divided": literary death as liberation.(Critical Essay)

Why did so many female heroines of nineteenth and early twentieth century novels die? They drowned, withered away or committed suicide in drives. Those who lived often went insane, rattling around in attics or losing themselves in the wallpaper. Many young readers express disappointment at their fates. Feminist critics of the 1970s and 80s debated these deaths, seeing them as either failures or revolutionary gestures along the lines of of Patrick Henry's words, "give me liberty or give me death." Zelda Austen is angry with George Eliot because she does not let her characters live as freely as she did. Eva Hunter calls Doris Lessing's Susan Rawlings "self-indulgent" (102). These deaths are not failures, but should be read as a necessary step in the process of expressing female subjectivity.

When women writers move beyond masquerade as theorized by Joan Riviere as the primary means of carving a space for female subjectivity in their texts, they move from silence, hiding the gap between their specific social positioning as female persons and the figure of Woman explained in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, toward exploring and speaking from that gap. Death is a means of claiming status as Other over the figure of Woman, a means of refusing culturally enforced identities, and of exploring a way to speak from the Other position. In George Eliot's Mill on the Floss, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, and Doris Lessing's story "To Room Nineteen," each main female character finds a gap between the cultural ideology and her own lived experiences, and tries to claim it as a ground for a new identity, a provisional definition of self authorized by the historical female person in the moment, as opposed to a monolith, universal self produced and imposed by masculine culture. They move into a consciousness which they fully recognize the culture considered mad. While each character identifies an "elsewhere" to the figure of Woman, each is unsuccessful at finding a way to speak from this place or integrate it in any significant way with her culturally produced ego and identity. Instead, each of the characters dies, and I have used Eliot's phrase to express how these deaths function. Rather than continue to live in such a radically alientated position, each woman chooses the only healing she can find through death.

When a woman turns away from the social prescriptions for her identity and searches for new articulations, she faces a cultural and linguistic blank, a psychological void. Adrienne Rich describes this experience in "Transcendental Etude" which compares living as a woman to playing music which moves to a rhythm different from "the tones of what we are" (line 77). When it becomes too painful to continue within received cultural definitions, Rich describes the first step in the process of moving toward a new, more adequate definition of self:

 
   But there come times--perhaps this is one of them--when we have to take 
   ourselves more seriously or die; when we have to pull back from the 
   incantations, rhythms we've moved to thoughtlessly, and disenthrall 
   ourselves, bestow ourselves to silence, or a severer listening ... (92-97) 

When a person withdraws in this way from socially sanctioned experience, the first experience is nothingness:

 
   We cut the wires, find ourselves in free-fall, as if our true home were the 
   undimensial solitudes, the rift in the Great Nebula. (199-103) 

Although the characters I will consider in this section will die, Rich indicates this nothingness can be survived, and one of the results of the experience is speaking new language: