"Protagonist Edna Pontellier, heartbroken and hopeless, swims out into the Gulf of Mexico until her body tires and the water swallows her up. The act is impossibly sad, but it also feels as if it's not about itself. Or rather, it expresses something about the act, choice, of suicide that so often remains out of focus: how hard our world is to live in."
"In "If I Had Legs," a film about a mother at her wits' end as she looks after her child alone, Rose Byrne's Linda runs into ferociously foaming waves in an effort to erase herself, and in "Die My Love," Jennifer Lawrence's Grace walks into velvety flames with all the leisurely grace of a sleepwalker, killing herself. Water or fire, these suicides are too similar to ignore."
"Chopin's, Bronstein's, and Ramsay's stories are about women, and they're about mothers, specifically women who are also mothers and mentally unwell. Bronstein's and Ramsay's films meddle with our traditional ideologies and narratives, our familiar ways of framing the good and the bad. The traditional "other" is centered, made a protagonist, and the traditional hero is revealed to be the monster."
Edna Pontellier drowns, Linda charges into foaming waves, and Grace walks into flames; each suicide functions as an expression of unbearable living conditions rather than a purely private act. These narratives center mothers who are mentally unwell and under extreme caregiving strain, using their self-destruction to signal systemic failure. The films and novel invert familiar moral framings by positioning the traditionally marginalized woman as protagonist and exposing supposed heroes as complicit or monstrous. The works operate as feminist critiques that name societal structures—misogyny, isolation, and dehumanizing expectations of motherhood—as causes of profound despair.
Read at Roger Ebert
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