> From:         Jeff Berman
> Subject:      The Werther Effect
>
> Dear Anne,
>     As I note in my 1999 book, Surviving Literary Suicide, just as there
> were a number of imitation or "copycat" suicides following Hemingway's
> suicide--for example, "Upon being told of Hemingway's death, the great
> Spanish bullfighter Juan Belmonte responded, in carefully chosen words,
> 'Well done,' and not long afterward shot himself in the same way" (36)--so
> did Assia Weevil, the woman with whom Ted Hughes had an affair after leaving
> Sylvia Plath--commit a copycat suicide:  in 1969 she gassed herself and her
> two-year-old child, Shura, who was fathered by Hughes, in the kitchen of her
> flat.  Plath and the poet Anne Sexton had an "anti-suicide pact," and when
> the former committed suicide, the latter felt betrayed.  "She felt her rival
> had stolen something magical and forbidden that she herself had long
> desired" (177).  Sexton's response to Plath's suicide was the poem "Sylvia's
> Death," written a few days after the event, which unabashedly romanticized
> ther suicide.  A more recent example of the copycat or Werther effect (based
> on the Goethe novel, in which the hero's suicide at the end produced scores
> of real-life suicides) may be seen in Elizabeth Wurtzel's autobiographical
> "Prozac Nation" (1994), subtitled "Young and Depressed in America."  Wurtzel
> reports that while telling her psychiatrist about her suicide fantasies, she
> is told that she needs to be hospitalized immediately, upon which Wurtzel
> panics, thinks of the lines from Sexton's poem "Wanting to Die"--"But
> suicides have a special language . / Like carpenters they want to know which
> tools. / They never ask why build"--and then rushes to the bathroom, where
> she locks the door and swallows a full bottle of antipsychotic medication.
>
> One of the reasons I wrote Surviving Literary Suicide is because a great
> many literature teachers romanticize suicide in literature--Septimus Warren
> Smith's "heroic" suicide is one of many examples I discuss, along with Kate
> Chopin's novel The Awakening, which contains a suicide at the end that many
> readers celebrate as an act of defiance against repressive patriarchy .  My
> main point in the book is that just as suicide in real life should not be
> romanticized or glorified--almost always suicide is a result of
> depression--so should we not romanticize suicide in literature, even when
> the author manipulates us to do so.
>
>     The most recent evidence from the Centers for Disease Control is that 20
> percent of all American high school students think seriously about
> committing suicide in any one year, and 10 percent of all college students
> are seriously suicidal in any given year.  These are alarming figures.  As I
> argue in Diaries to an English Professor, Surviving Literary Suicide, Risky
> Writing, and my forthcoming book Empathic Teaching, teachers can play an
> important role in suicide intervention by knowing the signs of depression
> and suicidal thinking and by making appropriate referrals.
>
>     Warmly,
>     Jeff Berman
>     University at Albany
>
>
>
>