DAY 7: AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY...

From 9:00 to 19:00 = 1960 to ? (Postmodernist Period)
Introduction: This is the last day of our Seven Days of Suicide Tour, and we will end it with a bang: The Postmodernist Period. This could be described as the fallout of the Second World War, because the horror and violence of that war had a profound effect on the literature of the age: this literature was filled with black humour, irony, paranoia, fragmentation and the impression of lost innocence. Particularily during the seventies and eighties, the excluded groups of the time (women, racial minorities, etc) were finally brought into the heart of the literary world. The heroine of female writers everywhere was Sylvia Plath, and it is her life and death that will be the climax of this tumultuous tour, which has revolved on something that has been referred to as "The Sylvia Plath Effect." This term describes the tendency of creative writers to suffer from mental disorders, addictions and self-destructive behaviour. So, with no further ado, let us dive into Sylvia Plath's saddest story: her own.
Locations: The Life and Death of Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) Our first location in this author's life will be her childhood home in Winthrop, Massachusetts, which the family moved to when Plath was only four. The crashing waves of the close by Atlantic Ocean, which we will dip into if the weather is warm, fascinated her from a young age. But it was in this home that a tragic event that traumatised her deeply occurred: her father Otto, who had been suffering from diabetes for years, died a week and a half after her birthday. The same year, Plath's first poem and drawing was published in a Boston newspaper. Throughout the years she attended school, she was awarded scholarships and countless accolades for her budding talent in writing. Sadly, talent was not the only thing that Sylvia was slowly developing...
The second location in her life will be where she attended, and taught at one point: Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Although in her youth she appeared to be a relatively carefree student, she struggled with what we now call bipolar disorder or manic depression: frequent extreme mood swings from darkest suicidal depression to euphoric and uncontrollable mania. In the midst of her academic success in Smith College, she experienced her first mental meltdown. Institutions and EST followed. She described her hospitalisation as a "...time of darkness, despair and disillusion -- so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be -- symbolic death, and numb shock -- then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration." She tried to kill herself with sleeping pills when she was twenty one, but recovered and lived to graduate summa cum laude.
Cabridge University will be our third location, and where we will eat lunch after once again exploring the enormous library for a couple hours. It was here, while she was at Newnham College, that Sylvia Plath met British poet Ted Hughes. By then, Sylvia had begun to write in earnest, as she would throughout her life. She and Ted married when she was twenty four, but the marriage (although intense) was not a happy one. They had a one daughter, a miscarriage, then a son. Her worsening mental state and Ted Hughes' philandering ways both contributed to their seperation in 1962, and Syliva took the two children with her to...
Our fourth location: a flat (in the house Yeats once lived) at 23 Fitzroy Road, London. This is where, on the morning of the 11th of February 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself by inhaling the gas of her kitchen oven, which led to asphyxiation. Her two children were playing in the next room. She was only thirty years old.
Heptonstall church, West Yorkshire will be our last location on the tour. Here, at the end of a long and fulfilling journey, we will find the gravestone of Plath which reads: "Even admist fierce flames the golden lotus may be planted." Here, in her husband's cemetary, is where we might illegally smuggle in some candles and picnic baskets for dinner. As the sun sets in the cold English sky, we can toast to Sylvia Plath: May her memory never die.

Above: Sylvia Plath

Above: Ted Hughes

Above: The last door Sylvia Plath walked through at 23 Fitzroy Rd, London

Above: The "Hughes" that her husband ordered to be put on the grave is regularily scratched off by fans

DAY 6: OF TWO WARS AND THE WARS WITHIN

Ftom 9:00 until 19:00 = 1914 to 1960

Introduction: This second to last day of our tour will take place in the years between the Victorian and the Postmodernist Periods. This time brings to mind the greats of our language: T.S Eliot, Yeats, Orwell, Forster, and (perhaps one of the most famous manic-depressives and suicides in literature) Virginia Woolf. In this period, we see what is easily recognisable as the ascendance of literature as we know it now. But we must forego the introduction to immediately delve into the lives of Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway... and their premature deaths.
Locations: The Life and Death of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) Our first location will be the Talland House, St Ives, Cornwall: Adeline Virginia Woolf spent every summer here until she was thirteen, and this is the place of her most vivid memories. So vivid, in fact, that the impressions and landscapes found here can also be found littered in her works (The Lighthouse, in particular.) After repeated sexual abuse by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, and the deaths of both parents and a sister which led to two consequent nervous breakdowns, Virginia moved to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury: our second location. While she stayed there, she attended King's College, Cambridge. It was there that she found a group of friends, and one close friend in particular: a man called Leondard Woolf. She married him two years after meeting him, and they shared a close and intimate marriage. They even started a publishing company together. But the encouragement of her husband couldn't save this talented woman from her inner demons: her periodic depression and hypermania drove her to frequent breakdowns...and a lot of writing. Our final destination in her life will be her home in Rodmell, Sussex. It was here on the morning of 28 March 1941 that Virginia Woolf filled her overcoat pockets with stones, left a letter to her husband, and then drowned herself in the River Ouse. Here, while sitting on the green banks of the river, we can eat lunch and imagine the depths of despair into which this genius of literature plummeted.

Above: Virginia Woolf

Above: A map of the area that Virginia Woolf must've once explored

Above: Virginia and Leonard Woolf

2. The Life and Death of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) This writer was born in Oak Park, Illonois (Chicago): this upper-class, strictly Protestant suburb will be our first location. As a young boy, and all through his long life, Hemingway had an eye for adventure... always in some scrape or other. This spirit led him all over the globe: New York, Italy, Paris, Toronto, Chicago, Kansas City, Nairobi, Kenya, the Bahamas, Cuba, Spain and finally Idaho. So many locations that his presence was felt... so many memorials left where his heavy foot trod... why not visit all of 'em? We will go on a wild, wacky and wonderful worldwide tour of every strange place that Ernest Hemingway visited, wrote and got (greviously) injured! This will undoubtedly exhaust us... but perhaps we can handle one more location: where he committed suicide. Two days after being released from hospital after his first attempt, and five bouts of EST (Electroshock Therapy), he grabbed a gun from the cabinet in his home in Ketchum, Idaho and shot himself. So ended the eventful life of Ernest Hemingway: alcoholic, writer, American, adventurer, and sorely missed by his fans.

Above: Ernest Hemingway with his favourite shotgun that he used for hunting... and to kill himself.

DAY 5: OF UNHAPPY ENDINGS IN THE AGE WHEN IT WASN'T FASHIONABLE

From 9:00 to 19:00 = 1834 to 1870
Introduction: Our fourth day will be spent in the Victorian Age, which was the period of legends like Dickens, the Bronte sisters, Thoreau, Twain, Hardy, Darwin and George Eliot (who was actually a woman, ha ha HA chauvanist swine!) This time was when the novel was fully appreciated and lifted to the leading form of literature... and in these novels was the first instances of a particular idea: how even in hard lives, goodness and perseverance would win out in the end and villians suitably punished. Happy endings generally prevailed, although the dwindeled out of fiction after the death of Charles Dickens... who loved happy endings. Almost everyone likes them, yet writers sometimes didn't get them in real life: as we shall explore in our locations below!

Locations: The Life and Death of Amy Levy (1861-1889) Amy Levy was famed for her themes of feminism, suicide, and what she percieved as the "materialistic values and cultural insularity" of nineteenth century Jewish life. Our first location of the morning will bypass her birthplace in Clapham, London to Newnham College of Cambridge University. In approximately 1879, she was the first Jewish woman to ever be admitted into the University. Here, she studied philosophy, translated German poetry and read Greek and Latin. Apart from her studies, she wrote short stories in the four terms she stayed, such as "Leopold Leuinger: A study," "Lallie: A Cambridge Sketch," and "Between Two Stools." But during her twenty seven years of life, she suffered from chronic depression (which was exacerbated by her loneliness, and probable lesbianism)... and as her twenty eighth birthday approached, her slight deafness grew more and more serious. Our second location will be at her home near her parent's in London: it was here, secluded and in the grip of "melancholy", she killed herself by switching on the gas stove and inhaling the lethal fumes. A few streets away from there is where we can have a picnic in the Clapham Common where she often walked, alone in the snow. The rest of the day, our company can split up to explore this fascinating period and its inhabitants individually. We can regroup at the Bleeding Pen: a resteraunt where brooding writers once met to exchange ideas in the shadows, and drown their sorrows in drink.


Above: Amy Levy six months before her death



Above: Clapham Common in winter, the season when Levy died

DAY 4: QUOTH THE RAVEN, "NEVERMORE."

From 9:00 to 19:00 = 11798-1832 (Romantic Period)

Introduction: This explosive period in literature, which happens to be my favourite, was a direct and intense reaction to the "sensibility" and "rationalism" of the Age of Enlightenment. Writers in this period gloried in the beauty of wild, untamed and pure nature... and in the complexities of the human mind itself. Sometimes dark, always emotional and very evocative. Ah, this time period was passion: raw, painful and sometimes self-destructive passion. Everything in the arts, if it be musical or artistic or literary, was intense. And this intensity, which is most pronounced in the gifted, could push some over the edge...

Locations: The Life and Death of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) What Romantic tour would be complete without him! He is the perfect example of the tortured genius. Our first location will be where he was born in 1809: Carver Street, Boston, Massachusets (yes, he was American). His father abandoned the family when Poe was one, and his mother died of consumption (TB) when he was two. In this location, a museum for him (like in many places he lived in) has been built. The second location we visit will be the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, where Poe started studying languages in 1826. At that time, the university was in total chaos, with a high dropout rate. Poe's gambling debts and excessive drinking finally caught up with him: having no money for schooling, he left after attending for one year. It's here that we can grab lunch. Sadly, for the next location we must fast-forward over his troubled and anguished life (which included time in the army, lost love, family deaths, writing, more debt, disownment, court-martialling, more death, alcohilism, incest, popularity, two marriages and an engagement, and penury) to the streets of Baltimore. It was on those streets, in October of 1839, that Poe was found delirious and incoherent... and not in his own clothes. There is a memorial where he was found. Our last location in his life will be, strangely, where he died: Washington College Hospital on Broadway and Fayette Street. Many theories exist on the causes of death: suicide, murder, delerium tremens (caused by alcohol), heart disease, epilepsy, meningeal inflammmation and rabies. We can eat supper at the Raven's Perch along the same road that the great Edgar Allan Poe breathed his last, and discuss the links between the literature and art of the Romantic Period.

Above: Edgar Allan Poe suffered from Manic Depression

Above: Edgar Allan Poe's Birth Memorial

Above: The Memorial in Baltimore

DAY 3: REVOLUTIONS, RESTORATIONS AND THE MOTHER OF THE MOTHER OF FRANKENSTEIN

Day 3: From 9:00 until 19:00 = 1660 - 1798
Introduction: From the optimistic, baroque, Shakespearian (Christopher Marlowe wouldn't approve of me saying that!) and unashamedly "art-y" Renaissance, we travel to the years of political turmoil: The Restoration Period. Sometimes called the Neoclassical Period, this stage in our language's developement was a bit more... restrained. Society in general was busy trying to repress the memories of the nasty things that had happened in the past. Writers of the time loved the sharp pen of wit, and used it with an ordered and structured style that was a deliberate turn away from the grandeur of the Golden Age. Not to say that this period was boring: this was the time of John Milton (poor devil, ha ha), Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Writers such as those, in the midst of all the chaos that they revelled in or hated at turn, still suffered most keenly from the wounds of life... which tragically led some to attempt to or succeed (?!) in ending their own.

Locations: 1. The life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) Beginning the day bright and early, we will journey into the life of Mary Wollstonecraft: a writer, philosopher and feminist. Our first location will be where she was born... Spitalfileds, London. We will travel the streets she once did and visit the house she was forced to leave after her abusive, alchoholic father squandered the family savings. If time allows us (for we have so far to go, and so little time to get there!), we might visit the tavern he frequented for most of her youth. Jumping ahead in her troubled life, we will visit the school for young girls that Wollenstonecraft and a childhood friend set up in Newtington Green. She later abandoned the school, devastated by her friend's sudden death, for a job as a governess. Near that building, which still stands today and whose history books read fondly of "Mistress Mary", we will have a picnic in the flowering gardens.The next location will be even more grim: after multiple rejections and broken relationships, she attempted to poison herself with laudanum in her small apartment in London, which we will visit. Next, we will walk along the River Thames in which she had jumped and was subsequently saved by a stranger. But her soulmate, the solemn William Godwin, prevented further attempts at suicide: she died, at the age of thirty eight, a week after giving birth to a child called Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin... later Mary Shelly, authoress of Frankenstein! At the end of a very long and eventful day, we can eat supper at her memorial site at Old Saint Pancreas Churchyard, where this poem by William Roscoe can be read:

"Hard was thy fate in all scenes of life
As daughter, sister, mother, friend and wife;
But harder still, thy fate in death we own,
Thus mourn'd by Godwin whose heart seem'd of stone."


Above: Mary Wollstonecraft


Above: Woodcut by William Blake for Mary Wollstonecraft's "Original Stories From Real Life"



Above: William Godwin never recovered from his wife's death

DAY 2: OF A DARK STAIN ON THE HEART OF THE "GOLDEN AGE"

Day 2: 9:00 until 19:00
Introduction: On our second day of this time-travelling tour, we will be exploring the darker side of The Renaissance, often referred to as The Golden Age. This was the time when things were changing, and changing fast. This was the world of Shakespeare, Galileo, Elizabeth I, the Spanish Inquisition (shudder), Leonardo da Vinci, Michealangelo, and colonization... which led, acknowledging the cannabilistic traits of our language, to a growth spurt in the development of English. In this time period, which was perhaps filled with more vibrancy and intensity than the others before it, suicide was for the first time given a more romantic (and less hell-fire-and-brimstone) spin to it by playwrights and writers... Shakespeare being a perfect example. In the time of optimism and new beginnings, the determined act of suicide amongst writers was rare... but the hedonistic and often reckless lifestyles they led (which we will be exploring) undoubtedly insured that geniuses died tragically young... as is sadly the general tendency, as we shall discover in our journey through time, of those especially creative.


Above: Poor Christopher Marlowe



Above: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge



Above: "Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight" it says at the bottom: Did Chris strike you as the straight branch type?

Locations:
Years of 1564 to 1593, England: Our first locations will circle around the (in)famous writer, Christopher Marlowe. We'll first tour his birthplace in the town of Canterbury, 1564... this year was, coincidentally, the same year that his great rival Shakespeare was born. Here, we'll be visiting his early school King's School, which was barely paid for by his father's poor earnings as a shoemaker. Tracing his life story, we'll then visit Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: in pariticular, we'll comb through the expansive library which Marlowe as a young man must have explored in his studies of philosophy, theology and history.
At midday, we'll eat in Cambridge: a veritible mine of literature, goods and souveneirs.
Our next stop in his life, however, will be far less pleasant: the Newgate Gaol he stayed in in 1589 on charges of murder (but was let off on account of his political connections...). Sadly, this kind of behaviour was prevalant in his life: people suspected him things ranging from heresy to homosexuality to atheism (the ultimate crime...). And Marlowe wasn't a likeable man: with a quick temper and unexplainable mood swings, it has been theorised that he suffered from a mental disorder. His lifestyle finally led him to his death: he was stabbed in the eye in a tavern in Deptford, while he and his equally intoxicated companion fought over the bill. This destination is where we'll take our supper at eight o'clock : looking at what had, perhaps, been Christopher Marlowe's last sight... lighted by authentic lanterns and thrumming with music.

DAY 1 CONTINUED: OF SLIGHTLY LESS MOULDY OLD MEN WHO WERE'NT MARTYRS

DAY 1: FROM 14:00 until 19:00 = 1350 until 1500 AD

Introduction: After finishing off lunch in the Rome of the Dark Ages, we can zoom off to our next time period... The Middle Ages. This time was brimming with suicide, although perhaps not as obvious as that of modern-day times. Nobles didn't poison themselves (although murder by poison was very popular then) or impale themselves on swords, but they had plenty other ways of self-homicide: the crusades, jousting, duelling, war, etc etc. Peasants, also known as serfs, had less noble options... they committed suicide in secret, and generally by hanging. But the most well known suicides are again of religious nature: monks and nuns ended their lives both in groups or individually, inspired by mysticism or despair. These isolated people still remained the few privelidged enough to read, write and teach.



Locations:

1. Year of 1412, Northern France, City of Rouen, Church of St. Ouen: This is where the cleric, artist and architect John Mignot hanged himself. To stifle the scandal, the judge of the diocesan court ordered that his body be buried in the cemetery at night. This proved useless, because when the affair was discovered, the cleric's body was reburied in unconsecrated ground at crossroads. The cemetery, then believed to have been "polluted by his sin", was reconsecrated. At this Church, which took a little less than two centuries to build, we can wander through the gardens and meandering corridors, and visit his small room... where his body was found swaying from the rafters by his fellow clerics.
2. Year of 1351, France, Paris, Building overlooking Les Halles: This is where Phillipe Testard, a man over a hundred who had been prevot to the archbishop of Paris, threw himself out of the window in the middle of the night after getting up to go to the bathroom. He survived the fall to the street below but, while recovering, stabbed himself. To avoid confiscation of his estate, his heirs pleaded insanity: "He did so many silly things that everyone said he was out of his senses."
Here, we can end our first day of the Seven Days Of Suicide Tour by partaking of supper under the stars and discussing the examples of suicide in literature of the Middle Ages.