Where is the Decadent Suicide?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although privileged in both classical and modern literature, suicide’s role in the Decadent literature of the late nineteenth century remains an underexplored and fruitful topic. This article proposes a Decadent theory of self-destruction that decentres the physical act itself. Suicide, in Decadence, functions as a type of escapism, mobilising the idea of death without actually engaging with it. By exploring works of Decadent authors such in the French tradition, this article extrapolates a Decadent positionality to suicide; by casting decadence as indefinitely deferring the instantaneous into the eternal, suicide becomes an abstract horizon, rather than an existential threat.