This paper will consider the key role played by the space of mental health institutions in aiding and abetting suicide in American realist YA novels. Building on Durkheimian theories of suicide, Abrutyn and Mueller (2018) observe how highly integrated and tightly clustered spaces like psychiatric hospitals and schools are more likely to form “suicide clusters” (57) that influence/provoke an adolescent towards suicidal ideations. Social network theories suggest, however, that “homophily” – the clustering of like-minded people in a space (Mueller et al. 2021) – can generate feelings of likeness or sameness in a space, thus reducing the chances of suicidality (4). These theoretical approaches underscore the importance of examining suicide through an analysis of space and an adolescent’s reaction to certain spaces that configure suicidality.
My study undertakes a textual/narrative analysis of the representations of suicide and mental illness institutionalisation in Felicia Johnson’s Her and Ellen Hopkins’s Impulse, to show that a temporal sequence of pre- and post-suicide shapes and produces alternate meanings of the hospital space. I argue that the characters’ use of the hospital space, and the narratives produced in it because of the event of suicide generate ‘suicide-scapes’ – a dynamic space within the narrative that aids and abets the adolescent characters towards suicide. Furthermore I suggest that the suicide-scape become a mode that works in the process of aestheticisation of suicide in these novels, thereby defining/shaping the larger narrative framework of the adolescent realist novel on mental illness.