The dead female body served as one of the most important sources of inspiration in nineteenth century Western art. In this period, countless romanticized representations of this kind surfaced. This morbid fascination has been traced back to nineteenth-century patriarchal ideology through feminist analysis: this ultimate objectification of woman strongly appealed to male artists and their audiences. At first glance, this feminist reading, however, does not seem to apply to representations in which a female victim of suicide is depicted. Suicide is traditionally linked to autonomy, an association which seems to be inconsistent with the process of objectification. This thesis investigates this paradox from a feminist perspective and focuses on Victorian representations from the period 1840-1880 which feature death by drowning by the stereotypical 'fallen woman'. The aim of this thesis is twofold: first, it examines how this kind of imagery can be related to patriarchal ideology, and secondly to what extent is this iconography present in the selected works of four prominent writers of this period, namely Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (1849), Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1853), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (18