Conclusion

Summary

All nationalisms are gendered and all are invented and all are dangerous

Anne McClintock

Although viewed today as an exploded myth and a stale relic of the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century national cliché of English suicide has a longevity exemplified in a 1814 French caricature with the caption Amusements des Anglais a Londres. The cartoon depicts Englishmen engaged in various forms of suicidal practice. In the picture's foreground, a rather merry John Bull holds open a copy of Edward Young's Night Thoughts, a mid-century poetic meditation on mortality intended to serve as a deterrent to suicide. In this context, Young's poem in French translation appears both to afford a stimulus to voluntary death and to confirm the English melancholic disposition. The scene behind this disconcertingly jovial figure features a veritable festival of voluntary death, with one figure engaged in hanging himself, his neighbour on the right poised to execute himself with a pistol, another drinking himself into the grave courtesy of English ale, and yet another plunging into the Thames, which was represented throughout the century in French and English texts as a popular destination for people seeking to end their lives.

Apart from the evident glee with which the various figures execute their self-destructive designs, the lack of female participation in these ‘high jinks’ constitutes a conspicuous feature of the image.