ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the significance of the volume of suicides in nineteenth-century American novels in terms of what it has to tell us about the social, cultural and political dynamics of the United States during the 1860s and the postbellum period. The dialectical nature of the sign of the suicide in the reform-minded realist novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended entirely on the contemporary belief that suicides frequently were catalyzed, at least in part, by environmental factors. For Lorna Ruth Wiedmann, the representation of suicide in nineteenth-century fiction is worthy of study because it is prophetic of our own culture's preoccupation with suicide. The suicides of characters are never neutral actions that function only at the level of plot; our readings of them must always be complicated by an understanding of their inherent ideological implications, as the epigraphic quotation from Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen suggests.
