Romanticizing Suicide in Thirteen Reasons Why

This blog post is a response to the prompt "Select an assignment that reveals your ability to develop and sustain an argument". This essay compares Toni Morrison's chapter in The Origin of Others, Romanticizing Slavery, to the romanticizing of suicide in the book-turned-tv show, Thirteen Reasons Why. I believe this essay relates to the prompt because I'm arguing that suicide is glorified in television and movies similar to how slavery is glorified in the aforementioend entertainment platforms. Some may say that comparing these two very different topics are a stretch but I believe that they deserve to be talked about and acknowledged.

Depression is a taboo topic that people tend to avoid discussing due to not understanding the reality of what it means to live with the mental illness. When discussing depression, self-harm and suicide are often brought up because individuals who are going through it may cut themselves or inflict pain upon themselves to temporary relive their pain or may go to the extremes and end their lives. There are several tv shows and movies that address depression and/or suicide such as a recent episode on Blackish about post-partum depression, the book-turned-movies The Perks of being a Wallflower and It’s Kind of a Funny Story, and the television movie Cyberbully. While there are some shows and movies that accurately portray the hardships of dealing with depression, there are some that aren’t quite true to reality and create stigmas about the disease. One show that caught the attention of many young adults and their parents would be the book-turned-show, Thirteen Reasons Why written by Jay Asher.

Thirteen Reasons Why tells the story of why a young woman named Hannah Baker committed suicide. Before she kills herself, she created a set of thirteen tapes and thirteen people were “responsible” for her death. The show begins with her classmate Clay Jensen heading home from school. He found the box of tapes and when he listened to the first one and found out that was one of the thirteen reasons why she killed herself, it shook him to the core. As the season progressed, the audience learned the reasons why she took her life such as being slut shamed, losing her friends, causing the downfall of her family’s business, seeing her ex-best friend get raped by a classmate and ultimately being raped by the same classmate. After seeking help for the first time from her guidance counselor, he dismissed her problems and that was final straw for Hannah. A few days before her death, she created the tapes and got help from her neighbor to distribute them to the people who hurt her.

Although Thirteen Reasons Why is a beautifully written story about the importance of acknowledging how your words and actions can positively or negatively affect someone, the main character’s portrayal of her depression and suicide romanticized the taboo topics. Throughout the show, the audience learned that Hannah was lying about some of the things she was going through. There was an instance where she got into a dispute with a classmate because he was taking “compliment notes” from her basket in English class. She said on tape that he didn’t care that those compliments were the only things keeping her happy and continued to the do it but, it is later revealed that the student indeed stopped taking away her notes and wrote her letter where he apologized for his actions. After discovering that she lied about that, viewers began to question if her reasons for her death were falsified to gain attention or that she wanted to blame every mean person in her life for what she did to herself.

Another instance of romanticizing suicide in Thirteen Reasons Why would be the reaction from her classmates when discovering that she took her life. Students decorated her locker, the school threw a pep rally in her name, and students shared their memories with her. Through those occurrences along with the sharing of the tapes, these events were attempts to keep Hannah alive throughout the show. It glorifies her suicide because it may cause individuals who are considering suicide that once they die, they will be immortalized, and everyone will feel bad for what they made them do. It is true that people in their lives will remember them and some may feel bad for how they treated the deceased, but it shouldn’t be one of the leading reasons why they kill themselves.

In chapter one of The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison, she talks about how people romanticize slavery. She begins the chapter sharing a story from her childhood where her grandmother argued that Morrison and her sister were “tampered” with because they were light skin and she’s a deep-dark skin tone. As stated later in the text, “...rape is the ownership romance of droit du seigneur. For Stowe, slavery is sexually and romantically sanitized and perfumed. The relationship of little Eva and Topsy…is so profoundly sentimentalized that it becomes another prime example of the romance of slavery.” (Morrison 14). Morrison’s grandmother’s statements about her grandchildren’s skin tone implied that they have white ancestors. There are several works of literature about slavery that contain storylines about a slave and their master falling in love with each other. It’s problematic because there were actual occurrences where slaves were raped by their master and forced to have their kids. Once these children were born, genetically they would have Caucasian genes mixed with African-American genes and pass it down throughout generations.

Romanticizing slavery and romanticizing depression & suicide in literature, television, and movies is dangerous because it diminishes the reality of these events/diseases and how it affects the lives of others. Through romanticizing slavery, people forget that blacks were enslaved for decades and treated horribly through abuse, rape, and murder. The aftermath of slavery still affects the lives of many minorities through acts of racism and discrimination. Through romanticizing depression & suicide, characters may not portray realistic symptoms of the disease and the audience may believe that they’re sad or just want pity from others. They may see suicidal people as attention seekers and not take their actions seriously.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. The Origin of Others. Harvard University Press. 2017

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