In Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, the heroine kills herself at the end of the book. Edna Pontellier is disappointed in her life. She feels trapped and she does not care to live with her husband and children any longer. She also fell in love with another man who rejected her and she is unhappy being among people who live in a way that seems strange to her. There could be many ways of interpreting Edna's suicide. It is easy to say that she was depressed, angry, insane, jealous, hurt, desperate or many other things. But Edna's suicide was not meant to be a completely negative action -- it was not just a response to her depression over being trapped in an unhappy life. Chopin did not intend that the readers understand it this way and the character of Edna wanted to do more than just escape when she killed herself. Edna was using suicide as a form of communication. This is not an uncommon situation and many writers on suicide have noted how important it can be to the person who kills herself. The problem with this is that people are not very likely to come to the conclusion that the suicidal person meant something by her actions. The person she is communicating with may just want to continue to look the other way -- he did not understand when she was alive and he will not understand when she is dead. Edna wanted to escape her life, but she wished that everyone could know exactly why she thought she had to escape.
Suicide is an important issue in today's society, but this is not new. The Journal of the American Medical Association publishes articles that were published in issues from 100 years earlier. In 1995 they published an 1895 article that tried to explain why so many people committed suicide. The author believed that certain emotional mental states could influence people to commit what he thought was an insane act. He said that "the great majority of the cases of insanity among women . . . can clearly be trace...