• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

INFORMATION TO USERS This was produced from a copy of a document sent to us for microfilming. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the material submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or notations which may appear on this reproduction. 1. The sign or “target” for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is “ Missing Page(s)”. If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting through an image and duplicating adjacent pages to assure you of complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a round black mark it is an indication that the film inspector noticed either blurred copy because of movement during exposure, or duplicate copy. Unless we meant to delete copyrighted materials that should not have been filmed, you will find a good image of the page in the adjacent frame. If copyrighted materials were deleted you will find a target note listing the pages in the adjacent frame. 3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., is part of the material being photo­ graphed the photographer has followed a definite method in “sectioning” the material. It is customary to begin filming at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. If necessary, sectioning is continued again—beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete. 4. For any illustrations that cannot be reproduced satisfactorily by xerography, photographic prints can be purchased at additional cost and tipped into your xerographic copy. Requests can be made to our Dissertations Customer Services Department. 5. Some pages in any document may have indistinct print. In all cases we have filmed the best available copy. University Microfilms International 300 N. ZEEB RD„ ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 8222149 Owens, Eloise Suzanne THE PHOENIX AND THE UNICORN: A STUDY OF THE PUBLISHED PRIVATE WRITING OF MAY SARTON AND ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH The Ohio Slate University Ph.D. 1982 University Microfilms International 300 N . Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, M I 48106 THE PHOENIX AND THE UNICORN: A STUDY OF THE PUBLISHED PRIVATE WRITING OF MAY SARTON AND ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Eloise Suzanne Owens, B.A., M.A. ***** ' The Ohio State University 1982 Reading Committee: Approved By: Professor Daniel Barnes Professor Morris Beja a __ , -rg Professor Richard Martin ---- Advisor Department of English In memory of Daniel J. Owens and Blanche Rittmaier ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to thank Professors Daniel Barnes, Morris Beja and Richard Martin for their reading of this study. Appreciation is also extended to Mr. Dan Daraerville for his reading of Chapter 2 and to Miss May Sarton for her encouragement and cooperation during the writing of this study. VITA March 6, 1955 ........ Born - Cleveland, Ohio 1976 ................ B.A., Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 1976 ................ Undergraduate Fellow in English, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 1977 ................ M.A., College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia 1977 ................ Virginia State Graduate Fellow, Research Assistant in English, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia 1977-1979 ............ Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio PUBLICATIONS "House, Home and Solitude: Memoirs and Journals of May Sarton." May Sarton: Woman and Poet, ed. Constance Hunting. Orono: U. of Maine (1982). "Gilded Ladies: A Study of Decorative Art in the Works of Edith Wharton and Mary Cassatt." Presented at "American Women in the Arts 1880-1980." University of Pittsburgh, March 18, 1980. "A Survey of Grading Practices in English 110." Moreover, vol. 8, no. 1, 1977. "Lmagist" (poem). The William and Mary Review, vol. 15, no. 1, 1976. FIE IDS OF STUDY Major Field: American Literature to 1900. Professor Daniel Barney Nineteenth Century British Literature. Professor Richard Martin Twentieth Century Literature. Professor Morris Beja Interdisciplinary Study of Literature and the Fine Arts. Professor Barbara Grosseclose iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................ iii VITA ............................................ iv CHAPTER 1 ........................................ 1 CHAPTER 2 ........................................ 17 CHAPTER 3 .................................... 92 CONCLUSION ...................................... 160 NOTES .......................................... 168 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................... 173 SECONDARY SOURCES................................ 176 V Everything today has been heavy and brown. Bring me a Unicorn to ride about the town. Anne Morrow Lindbergh Now I become myself. -It's taken Time, many years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people's faces... May Sarton Chapter 1 The 1980-81 publishing season is notable for the number of journal/diaries published. During this period, the publication of private writing, whether by famous or little-known writers, suggests that as a literary form the journal is enjoying a particular popularity today. A checklist of the year's "best" publications as judged by the New York Time Book Review, lumps the journal/diary/letters together under the broad category "autobiography & biography," though there are important distinctions to be made between the forms. However, a dozen titles appear which represent some form of diary and letters, most notably Cosima Wagner1s Diaries (Volume 11) ; The Diary of Richard Wagner; Henry James1 Letters (Volume III); Self-Portrait of a Hero: The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu; Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony; Correspondence, Writings, Speeches; Letters From Africa by Isak Dinesen; The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien; and the "imagined reconstruction" of Louise Bogan's diaries and letters, Journey Around My Room (ed. Ruth Limmer). The publication of numerous memoirs has prompted new critical evaluations of that form as a literary genre. Critical commentary on the subject is piece-meal, spread out as it is in reviews here and there, but such attention points to a growing interest by writers and critics in the subject of private writing "made public." How do we assess the form? What critical criteria 1 2 can we develop to address it as a literary form? Can we assemble critical discussion of this kind of work in the same ways we evaluate other forms— fiction and poetry in particular— or is private writing a "literary" event at all? Such attention is warranted not only by the sheer number of works appearing in print, but also by the quality of the work. Irving Howe, in his review of Native Realm; A Search for Self-Definition by the 1980 Nobel winner Czeslaw Milosz, notes that "Almost all good writers...improvise a terrain of memory or imagination set at a distance from the intolerableness of our world."1 The "terrain of memory" is, in fact, the landscape of private writing. "Memoir" is a looking back, a selection and recreation of experience. Whatever the distance between the events told and the act of telling, the form assumes two things: the life is worth recounting and the story of some value as story (or why begin such a project at all?); the events recorded (typically, the life is retold through the chronicle of "events") are selected for some reason, some purpose other than simple chronology. The recorded life is shaped by the writer's choice of material and, of course, by what he or she excludes. The distance between the material of memory and the act of storytelling and record filters the supposedly significant material from the insignificant. 3 Donald Hall describes two familiar types of memoir as he considers Charles Tomlinson's Some Americans: A Personal Record . Some writers erect monumental autobiographies that detail childhood struggles for identity, failures and achievements, until— 600 pages later— a hand describes itself writing a final page. To the side of such pyra­ mids stand the smaller houses of memoir, in which modesty is a method if not a conviction, in which writers concen­ trate on one area of their lives, or ostensibly on people other than themselves. It is a sneaky form of autobiography.2 Another form of memoir may be simply, "a miscellaneous book that rambles from personal history to cultural essay," as Patricia Harapl's A Romantic Education is described by Paul Z w e i g . 3 in either case, the writer's memory may be misleading. As Barrett J. Mandel cautions in his study of misconceptions about autobiography ("Full of Life Now"), "I can 'remember' whatever I like about my life and then find 4 as I write my autobiography that the truth which ultimately discloses itself has little to do with these initial memories."4 The diary or journal is distinct from memoir, or the more general term "autobiography," because it is not a "memory" book. While the diarist may not choose to write daily, he or she is committed to a progressive chronology, life recorded as it happens rather, than as it is shaped by memory. The diarist is certainly selective in preserving experience but because such writing is likely to represent spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment selectivity, it censors less and "remembers" more than the memoir. Francis Russell Hart, in "History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoir," gives one definition of memoir that suggests further distinctions between this type of writing and the journal or diary. Memoir is the autobiographical mode that thwarts generic expectations in readers who go to auto­ biography for "that extra degree of privacy." Memoir: personal history; the personalizing of history; the historicizing of the personal. Memoir: the personal act of repossessing a public world, historical, institutional, collective. Titles such 5 as memoirs of my times, memoirs of San Quentin, memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts, reflect on that ambiguous genitive.

Load more

  187

Copy Link