Silence, Power and Suicide in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours
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Chiara Battisti
Abstract
This essay aims at highlighting the particular connection between the choice of suicide, and the voices, both abstract and concrete, of power. In every era the malleable materiality of the dead body finds legitimacy in the peculiar hermeneutics of suicide, in sets of institutions, procedures, and beliefs that identify suicidal deaths and assign them meanings. In the novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham, the whole narration is permeated by a preoccupation with the meaning of death to the living, and particularly to potential suicide victims and people exposed to the experience of death. In Cunningham’s novel, suicide acquires the peculiarities of a meaningful gesture, which could then be interpreted as an expression of personal autonomy and a dissident critique of society. Cunnigham, with postmodern detachment, places suicide at the centre of the arena, shaping it within the complex interplay of political, legal, social, scientific and cultural developments. He underlines the universality and atemporality of the emotional experience, as well as the manifest implications and social communications in suicidal behaviour. The different nuances portrayed by the author regarding this aspect contribute to undermining or at least calling into question the normative conceptions of suicide.
©2015 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Shakespeare and the Law
- Weak Kings and Perverted Symbolism. How Shakespeare Treats the Doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies
- Free Will and Folly in As You Like It
- Romeo and Juliet: The Importance of a Name
- Unreliable Sources for Law: Dying Declarations in Shakespeare’s King John, Othello & King Lear
- Disruptions and Negotiations of Identity in Act 1 of Shakespeare’s Othello
- Research
- Illegal Search and Seizure, Due Process, and the Rights of the Accused: The Voices of Power in the Rhetoric of Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker
- The Judge’s Voice: Literary and Legal Emblemata
- Power and the Trial: The Tension Between Voices and Silence
- Voice, Authority and the Law in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang
- Silence, Power and Suicide in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours
- Celsus and Chatwin go Walkabout
- Representing the Unrepresentable: Making Law Anyway?
- Book Reviews
- Gary Watt: Dress, Law and Naked Truth. A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form
- José Calvo González: Direito curvo
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Shakespeare and the Law
- Weak Kings and Perverted Symbolism. How Shakespeare Treats the Doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies
- Free Will and Folly in As You Like It
- Romeo and Juliet: The Importance of a Name
- Unreliable Sources for Law: Dying Declarations in Shakespeare’s King John, Othello & King Lear
- Disruptions and Negotiations of Identity in Act 1 of Shakespeare’s Othello
- Research
- Illegal Search and Seizure, Due Process, and the Rights of the Accused: The Voices of Power in the Rhetoric of Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker
- The Judge’s Voice: Literary and Legal Emblemata
- Power and the Trial: The Tension Between Voices and Silence
- Voice, Authority and the Law in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang
- Silence, Power and Suicide in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours
- Celsus and Chatwin go Walkabout
- Representing the Unrepresentable: Making Law Anyway?
- Book Reviews
- Gary Watt: Dress, Law and Naked Truth. A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form
- José Calvo González: Direito curvo
