Individual presentation:
• Nina Pelikan Straus:
Male and Female Archetypes and the Question of Ernest Hemingway’s and Virginia Woolf’s Suicides
(60 min)

Abstract:

For an individual presentation on Understanding Individual and Collective Psychology I submit a talk on the self-aggressions represented by Virginia Woolf’s and Ernest Hemingway’s suicides, a study of two instances where psycho-sexual impulses and fantasies suggest different gendered and social-class contexts: Hemingway’s all-American addiction to tough-guy masculine archetypes and Woolf’s upper class Bloomsbury resistance to but also repression of heterosexually “bourgeois” female norms. Raised in different worlds, forged by different sexual and social expectations, the question shared by this approach to their suicides is: what makes “going on with life” impossible in relation to fixed notions of the self, in both cases exacerbated by terrible anxiety about not being able to write after mental breakdowns.

Keywords: Ernest Hemingway, gender, literary psychobiography, psychohistory, self-aggression, social class, suicide, Virginia Woolf

Short Bio:

Nina Pelikan Straus is a Professor Emeritus, Comparative Literature, Co-coordinator of Creative Writing, Humanities Division Purchase College, State University of New York. Her recent book is The Novel and Neuroscience from Dostoevsky to Ishiguro (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). She can be reached at .