ABSTRACT
The romantic heroines in Ivo Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina, Fata, and Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Anna, both commit suicide. This chapter examines the cultural and literary significance of their suicides from different angles: In terms of understanding the female characters themselves, the other characters’ behaviour toward the heroines and, finally, the relation of the male authors to the characters they created. Andrić and Tolstoy cut short the lives of their heroines before we could fully understand and witness their inner excellence, spurning the Aristotelian notion of entelechy for understanding the female characters. Their promise as human figures decompensates. The argument of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex that men define women not as autonomous actors but as relative to themselves provides an apt and critical frame to understand the heroines’ suicides. The heroines’ sexist life-world, its male logic that humanity is male, move the strong female characters to end their own lives.
