Sym’s conclusion—treat the causes and not the symptoms—was ahead of its time. Despite—or perhaps because of—sympathetic consideration for the suicide in Renaissance philosophy and literature, there remained a vast gap between enlightened opinion and the law. Whether a man be pushed to suicide by melancholy, by fever, or by the devil, he risked a variety of punishments. Even the benevolence of More’s Utopia extended only so far: unauthorized suicides were to be “caste unburied into some stinkyng marrish.” Their fate was mild compared to that of suicides in the real world. Facing what they believed to be a rising toll of suicides, courts invoked stiffer penalties in the hope that if fear of eternal damnation was not enough to deter the potential suicide, concern for his property, family, reputation, and corpse might be.
In fifteenth-century France the body of one Louis de Beaumont was to be dragged through the streets “as cruelly as possible, to set an example for others.” An ordinance of 1670 reaffirmed that suicide was treason against God and king. The suicide’s corpse was hauled through the streets of the city, hanged upside down, then thrown into a sewer or the town dump. His property was forfeited to the king. If the deceased was a nobleman, he was declared a commoner. His forests were razed, his castle demolished, his shield and coat of arms broken, and his memory defamed ad perpetuam rei memoriam—to the end of memory. If the corpse of a suicide could not be found, a sentence of defamation was brought in against his name. In 1582, in Scotland, where according to the law “self-murder is as highly criminal as the killing of our neighbor,” the Kirk Sessions of Perth refused to allow the corpse of a man who had committed suicide by drowning to be “brought through the town in daylight, neither yet to be buried among the Faithful—but in the little inch [island] within the water.” In 1598, in Edinburgh, the body of a woman who drowned herself was “harled through the town backwards, and thereafter hanged on the gallows.” In Finland, suicides judged insane were buried outside the churchyard without traditional ceremonies; if “of sound mind,” the corpse was burned on a pyre in the forest. Those who attempted suicide were imprisoned with a diet of bread, water, and flogging. In Italy, suicides were hanged; if the corpse could not be found, it was hanged in effigy. In Austria, a person who attempted suicide was imprisoned “until he be persuaded by education that self-preservation is a duty to God, the State and to himself, show complete repentance and may be expected to mend his ways.”
In 1601 the lawyer William Fulbecke matter-of-factly described the English punishment of the day: “The body is drawn out of the house, wherein the person killed himself, with ropes; not by the door, for of that he is unworthy, but through some hole or pit made under the threshold of the door; and is thence drawn by an horse to the place of punishment or shame, where it is hanged on a gibbet; and none may take it down, but by order of the magistrate.” Suicides were tried posthumously in the coroner’s court. The usual penalty for felo de se—property confiscation and burial at a crossroads with a wooden stake through the heart—could be avoided if the jury ruled the deceased had acted from insanity. To secure a proper burial, friends and relatives of the dead man had to persuade the court that their loved one was a madman. If the deceased was a man of wealth or position, he was more apt to be found insane and allowed burial; less fortunate suicides were usually awarded the stake and crossroads. Thus, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, although Ophelia is allowed burial in sanctified ground, she is denied full rites; the priest explains to Laertes, “We should profane the service of the dead / To sing a requiem, and such rest to her / As to peace-parted souls.”
The Colonies appear to have been no less stringent. The Puritans, who fled England, in part, as a repudiation of the social changes taking place there, believed suicide to be “the worst kind of murder,” as the Reverend Increase Mather described it in his treatise A Call to the Tempted. A Sermon on the horrid Crime of Self-Murder. A man, said Mather, “cannot disgrace himself more than by committing such a sin.” Melancholy was no excuse; Satan was behind each and every suicide. (Tormented by “Hypocondriacal affection,” Mather had himself been tempted toward self-destruction but, armed only with his faith, had kept the devil at bay.) In Mather’s Massachusetts, a 1660 edict outlawing “Self-Murther” proclaimed that those “who lay violent hands on themselves” shall be buried “in some Common High-way . . . and a Cart-load of Stones laid upon the Grave as a Brand of Infamy, and as a warning to others to beware of the like Damnable practices.” (The suicide’s property, however, was not confiscated. Attempted suicides were whipped, imprisoned, and held liable for court costs.) Thus in the spring of 1707, one Abraham Harris of Boston, a young whitewasher, having “felloniously and willfully Murthered himself, by Hanging himself with a Neckcloth—Contrary to the Peace of Our Soveraign Lady the Queen,” was buried at a crossroads near the gallows on the Roxbury Highway, and a cartload of stones was laid on his grave. The burial cost the county sixteen shillings, including one shilling for “money lay’d out in drink” for the constable and six gravediggers.
“Wheresoever you finde many and severe Lawes against an offence,” observed Donne in Biathanatos, “it is not safe from thence to conclude an extreame enormity or hainousnesse in the fault, but a propensnesse of that people, at that time, to that fault.” Clergymen were convinced that a loosening of morals during the Renaissance inspired an increase in suicide. The act, wrote an anonymous observer in 1647, “is now growne so common, that selfe murther is scarce accounted any newes.” The evidence is not conclusive. The nature of suicide, however, seems to have changed. In the early years of the Renaissance numerous suicides aspired to the classical mode. In 1538 the Florentine patriot Philip Strozzi, accused in the assassination of Alessandro de Medici, was captured; fearing that under torture he might betray the names of fellow conspirators, he decided on suicide. After carving a line from Virgil—“Arise from my bones, avenger of these wrongs!”—on his cell wall, he stabbed himself, leaving behind a note in which he asked that he be permitted to have his place with Cato of Utica and other great suicides of antiquity. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the stage abounded with classical suicides. In France there were plays about Lucretia, Brutus, Cassius, and at least two on Cato. In England, Joseph Addison’s Cato was a hit in 1713. Alexander Pope, who wrote the prologue, observed to a friend that “Cato was not so much the wonder of Rome in his days, as he is of Britain in ours.” Twenty-four years later Addison’s cousin and protégé Eustace Budgell loaded his pockets with stones and threw himself into the Thames, leaving behind a note: “What Cato did and Addison approved cannot be wrong.”
But Budgell’s suicide was hardly in the tradition of Cato’s. A writer and scholar, he had lost twenty-two thousand pounds in the South Sea Bubble speculation and died a failed, lonely man. If his death lacked the classical touch, it hinted at something more complex and more human. By the end of the Renaissance, suicides could no longer be seen simply as the result of honor, black bile, or the devil. They were the product of human struggle, of pride, loneliness, melancholy—and especially poverty. Between 1597 and 1644, of three hundred suicides in three English counties, more than half left no goods at all. The suicides included twenty-nine laborers, thirty-seven spinsters, and assorted shoemakers, tinkers, hostlers, bricklayers, and so on. Far more characteristic than the showily heroic suicide of Philip Strozzi was that of Richard and Bridget Smith in 1732.
Smith was a bookbinder who had fallen into debt after a series of losses and disappointments. He and his wife, agreeing that a life of numbing poverty had little to offer, decided to commit suicide. After cutting their daughter’s throat, they hanged themselves from the bedpost, leaving a note addressed to the public:
These actions, considered in all their circumstances, being somewhat uncommon, it may not be improper to give some account of the cause; and that it was an inveterate hatred we conceived against poverty and rags, evils that through a train of unlucky accidents were become inevitable. For we appeal to all that ever knew us, whe
ther we were idle or extravagant, whether or no we have not taken as much pains to get our living as our neighbours, although not attended with the same success. We apprehend the taking our child’s life away to be a circumstance for which we shall be generally condemned; but for our own parts we are perfectly easy on that head. We are satisfied it is less cruelty to take the child with us, even supposing a state of annihilation as some dream of, than to leave her friendless in the world, exposed to ignorance and misery. . . . We are not ignorant of those laws made in terrorem, but leave the disposal of our bodies to the wisdom of the coroner and his jury, the thing being indifferent to us where our bodies are laid. . . .
Richard Smith
Bridget Smith
The Smiths were buried at the crossroads near the Turnpike at Newington.
To Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, Richard and Bridget Smith’s decision to end their lives was perfectly reasonable, and to punish it with a stake through the heart was an outrage. In an age that scorned anything hinting of medievalism and put a premium on the rights of the individual, suicide seemed an essential human liberty. “To be happy or not to be at all,” wrote Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, reworking Hamlet. “Such is the option which nature has given to every human being.” Suicide, insisted the Rationalists, was not a mortal sin or a crime against the state—to elevate an essentially private act into a cosmic blow against the universe seemed absurd.
“When I am overcome by anguish, poverty, or humiliation, why must I be prevented from putting an end to my troubles, and harshly deprived of the remedy which lies in my power?” wrote Montesquieu in 1721. In Persian Letters the Oriental traveler Usbek, writing from Paris to a friend in Smyrna, is astonished by the “ferocity” of the European laws against suicide. “They are put to death for a second time, so to speak; their bodies are dragged in disgrace through the streets and branded, to denote infamy, and their goods are confiscated.” He argues that if life is a gift, if the gift ceases to give pleasure, why is one not free to part with it? The body is destined to perish in any case, he concludes, and the soul to live on, so how is the order of Providence disturbed? In the vast scheme of things, the persistence of a person in bearing the agonies of a hopeless illness seems merely vain. “All such ideas, my dear Ibben, originate in our pride alone.”
Fifty years later another letter discussing suicide stirred controversy. In Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, Saint Preux, a young man disappointed in love, writes an impassioned letter to his English friend Lord Bomston, explaining that suicide is neither a crime nor inconsistent with belief in God. “Every man has a right by nature to pursue what he thinks is good, and avoid what he thinks evil, in all matters which are not injurious to others,” he writes, echoing the Stoic argument. “When our life becomes a misery to ourselves, and is of advantage to no one, we are thus at liberty to put an end to our being.” God gave man reason to enable him to choose between good and evil, says Saint Preux, and reason tells us that an unhappy life must be remedied as much as a diseased body: “If it is permitted to seek a cure for gout, why not for life?” He compares the man who does not know how to relieve an unhappy life by seeking death to the man who allows his wound to gangrene rather than summoning a surgeon. As for theologians who insist that suicide disqualifies us from Providence, Saint Preux maintains that in killing ourselves we merely destroy our bodies but bring our immortal souls, in death, closer to God. Saint Preux admits exceptions: people who have duties to others should not dispose of themselves. But, he concludes, since he is not a magistrate, has no family to support, and for friends has only Lord Bomston, nothing stands in his way.
“Young man, a blind ecstasy leads you astray,” Lord Bomston begins his reply, in which he discusses the importance of remaining at one’s post and stresses the cowardice of despair. He suggests that his friend might find relief in helping others. “Each time thou art tempted to quit life, say to thyself, let me at least do one good action before I die, then go in search for one indigent person, whom thou mayest relieve; for one under misfortune, whom thou mayest console; for one under oppression, whom thou mayest defend.” While Rousseau followed this prescription in his own life, readers of La Nouvelle Héloïse felt that the passion of Saint Preux’s arguments overwhelmed the elegance of Bomston’s and indicated where Rousseau’s sympathies lay. Preachers accused him of spawning suicides; Saint Preux would become a model for Goethe’s Werther, which would in turn be blamed for a rash of self-killing. In a letter to Voltaire, Rousseau wrote that the wise man will sometimes give up his life when nature and bad fortune give a distinct order to depart. Rousseau’s own unhappy life was increasingly haunted by madness, and after his death in 1778 there were rumors that he had killed himself.
Voltaire’s position on suicide was not unlike that of many twentieth-century liberals. On one hand, as a passionate opponent of superstition and injustice, he opposed laws that degraded a suicide’s corpse and deprived his innocent family. Calling confiscation of the suicide’s property “brigandage,” Voltaire, with characteristic acidity, noted that in practice “his goods are given to the King, who almost always grants half of them to the leading lady of the Opera, who prevails upon one of her lovers to ask for it; the other half by law belongs to the Inland Revenue.” In his novels and plays Voltaire attacked dogmatism and oppression and proclaimed the individual’s mastery over his own destiny. If “self-murder” was a wrong against society, he argued, are not the voluntary homicides committed in war and sanctioned by the laws of all countries far more harmful to the human race? Like Donne, he believed that circumstance, not dogma, must be our guide in judging suicide. Every case must be weighed on its own merits—“Each one has his reasons for his behavior.” To Voltaire some reasons were better than others. He teased the hypersensitive melancholics and suggested that young girls who drown themselves for love should not be hasty—change is as common in love as it is in business. Voltaire complained that eighteenth-century suicides could learn a thing or two from the old masters: “We kill ourselves, too,” he wrote, “but it is when we have lost our money or in the rare excess of a wild passion for an object which isn’t worth it.” As for himself, the antisuicide laws made his own suicide improbable, he jokingly confessed in a letter to his friend the Marquise du Deffand: “It is a decision that I shall not take, at least not yet, for the reason that I have got myself annuities from two sovereigns and I should be inconsolable if my death enriched two crowned heads.”
The arguments of the eighteenth-century Rationalists were summed up by Scottish philosopher David Hume in his essay “On Suicide.” With the confidence of a sharpshooter he set up his targets—“If suicide be criminal, it must be a transgression of our duty either to God, our neighbour, or ourselves”—and then picked them off one by one.
Were the disposal of human life so much reserved as the peculiar province of the Almighty, that it were an encroachment on his right for men to dispose of their own lives, it would be equally criminal to act for the preservation of life as for its destruction. If I turn aside a stone which is falling upon my head, I disturb the course of nature; and I invade the peculiar province of the Almighty, by lengthening out my life beyond the period, which, by the general laws of matter and motion, he has assigned it.
A hair, a fly, an insect, is able to destroy this mighty being whose life is of such importance. Is it an absurdity to suppose that human prudence may lawfully dispose of what depends on such insignificant causes? It would be no crime in me to divert the Nile or Danube from its course, were I able to effect such purposes. Where then is the crime of turning a few ounces of blood from their natural channel?
If all events proceed from God, said Hume, then so, too, does suicide: “When I fall upon my own sword, therefore, I receive my death equally from the hands of the Deity as if it had proceeded from a lion, a precipice, or a fever.” To those who insisted that suicide was a crime against nature, Hume pointed out that man alters
nature in many acceptable ways: building houses, cultivating land, sailing upon the ocean. “In all these actions we employ our powers of mind and body to produce some innovation in the course of nature; and in none of them do we any more. They are all of them therefore equally innocent, or equally criminal.”
Turning to the argument that suicide is a crime against society, Hume maintained that “a man who retires from life does no harm to society: he only ceases to do good; which, if it is an injury, is of the lowest kind.” Furthermore, like Montesquieu, Hume believed that citizenship is a two-way responsibility; when man withdraws himself from society, is he still bound any longer? In any case, wrote Hume, “I am not obliged to do a small good to society at the expense of a great harm to myself: why then should I prolong a miserable existence because of some frivolous advantage which the public may perhaps receive from me?”
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