For centuries, artists have attempted to make sense of suicide by using it as a central thematic structure in their dramatic works—as something that either drives the narrative forward or serves as its tragic culmination. While many causes of suicidal ideation have been explored on a global scale, economic strains play a particularly strong role in the portrayal of suicide within twentieth-century American dramas that deal with the business world. This focus on suicide, while often misguided and lacking in compassion, reveals a desire to understand an underlying psychological imbalance created by the capitalist mass culture of American society and a fascinating contradiction wherein an act of “ultimate individualism” also often serves as a defiance of capitalism. While scholars have engaged with the use of suicide within these works separately, there has been little done to provide a comparative or comprehensive analysis of this concept within twentieth-century America. This project confronts the focus on suicide during this era of literature and film alongside the development of suicidology in sociological scholarship, looking at creative works like Death of a Salesman, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Meet John Doe, among others. Ultimately, in literary and filmic works from twentieth-century America, the representation of suicide takes three vastly different forms—tragedy, comedy, and the famous “Capra-style” film—to provide ranging perspectives on the same concept: that business culture and mass consumerism corrupt that which we are meant to hold most dear, our lives.

Sarah Steen would like to thank their faculty sponsor Joya Uraizee for their support of this project.