In the Space of Literature, the French literary theorist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot poses a series of questions that many eighteenth-century novels sought to answer: ‘Is suicide always the act of a man whose thought is already obscured, whose will is sick? Is it always an involuntary act?’ With the cultivation of the human sciences, suicide and the series of vexing questions it provokes came under particular scrutiny. Whereas early in the eighteenth century suicide was ascribed to demonic temptation, by the end of the Enlightenment this attitude had, in the view of the historian Georges Minois, ‘given way to a secularized view’ that suicide was ‘a problem that lay somewhere between society and individual psychology. Individual responsibility was diluted to become part of a complex whole in which the criminal was transformed into a victim – the victim of his own cerebral physiology’. This rhetoric of victimhood served the ends of both church and state, since it precluded the possibility of active choice in the disposal of one's life, which in theory continued to belong to the higher institutions. Thus various forms of determinism in this period all reinforce the notion that suicide never represents a completely voluntary or rational act.

Undertaking a genealogy of suicide in the eighteenth-century novel, this study attempts to elucidate how eighteenth-century suicide narratives are shaped by and in turn participate in the period's production of discourses of gender and national identity.