Dying for Freedom: female agency and suicide in late nineteenth-century American literature

This thesis explores the issue of female suicide and agency in three novels, namely Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master. A Story of Today (1874), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905). The purpose of this thesis is to argue that female suicide in literature should be linked to free will and agency rather than female victimhood. Common readings of nineteenth-century literature suggest that female characters who do not comply with patriarchal norms have had to die. This thesis disagrees with this claim and instead argues that their suicide is a choice, rather than being their only option. Instead of interpreting the fate of transgressive female protagonists as deterministic and inevitable, my analysis will show how their suicides can be interpreted as a deliberate choice, granting the female characters agency