Representations of Female Suicide by Drowning in Victorian Culture by Valerie Meessen
[image description]: screenshot of text, some of which is highlighted. it begins, highlighted: In death, the female loses the quality of being Other, and becomes an inanimate object that no longer threatens male order. Her body, once 'a site of superlative alterity,' can now be controlled, composed, and dissected. [end highlight] In this state, the woman can be idealized. These ideas can be placed within the nineteenth century patriarchal cult of invalidism that Dijkstra has described. This cult glorified female suffering, illness, and consequently, their deaths. Women who could be defined as either faint, frail or fading away, were set as icons of virtuous femininity. The 'consumptive' look consequently became an ideal of feminine beauty, which prescribed a pale, almost translucent skin, feverish eyes, and an emaciated body. This sort of idealization went hand in hand with an [highlighting begins again] eroticization of the dead female, the ultimate object of male fantasy. [end highlight, end description].
