Women’s Perspectives on Suicide (Roundtable)


Cultural Studies and Media Studies / Interdisciplinary Humanities

Trip McCrossin (Rutgers University)

NeMLA meets next during the centennial of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and the sesquicentennial of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’s initial serialization. Central to both storylines is their eponymous characters’ differing relationships to suicide. From a less literary perspective, the moment comes relatively quick on the heels of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, on June 24, 2022, undermining reproductive rights by undermining substantive due process rights generally, and so also euthanasic rights. The convergence is an auspicious occasion to explore women’s historical, literary, and philosophical perspectives on suicide.
During the centennial of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and the sesquicentennial of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’s initial serialization is an auspicious occasion to explore women’s historical, literary, and philosophical perspectives on suicide.