“That Weeping Constellation”: Navigating Loss in Women's Memoirs of Textured Recovery

LANCASTER UNIVERSITY “That Weeping Constellation”: Navigating Loss in Women's Memoirs of Textured Recovery Amy Prodromou M.A. English MLitt. Creative Writing Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 7/30/2010 ProQuest Number: 11003601 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 11003601 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Prodromou i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I acknowledge that this is my own work. An article (with the same title as the thesis) taken from sections of Chapters 1,3, and 4, is due to be published in Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies (forthcoming 2012). An essay (taken from Chapter 3), “Writing the Self Into Being: Illness and Identity in Inga Clendinnen’s Tiger’s Eye and Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost” is due to be published in a collection of essays on “Identity and Form” by Sheffield Hallam University. Many thanks to my supervisor, Tess Cosslett, for her patience and insights. Prodromou ii ABSTRACT This project explores the writing of grief within women’s narratives of loss. It is concerned with the question, “How does one honour, in grief, all that up-rises? And how then does one write of it?” (Gail Jones 149). In Joan Didion’s The Year o f Magical Thinking, she laments the absence of any significant body of literature that will help her through her grief. I propose that the grief memoir—a term new enough not to have been included in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s 52 genres of life narratives (in Reading Autobiography )—fills this gap left by professional literature of bereavement and itself contributes to “that weeping constellation” (Jones 147) or community of mourners missing from contemporary grief practices as identified by Sandra Gilbert and Darian Leader. This genre, new to literary analysis, provides fertile ground for the discussion of recent literary and psychoanalytic analyses of mourning that have resisted the neat split Freud draws between normal and pathological grief. My chosen texts deliberately complicate “packaged and frozen” (Ellmann qtd. in Payne et al. 78) notions of recovery while honouring what Jenny Diski calls the “texture of experience” (Skating 185). I’m essentially identifying a sub-genre of the grief memoir which I call “memoirs of textured repo very.” What sets them apart is the performance of complex “recovered” selves that show how “recovery,” ambiguous and shifting in nature, calls for more complicated theories of mourning able to accommodate an understanding of grief not in terms of Freud’s absolute recovery nor Tennyson’s “loss forever new” (qtd. in Krasner 226), but rather, a space located somewhere in between. In their refusal to conform to the compensatory paradigms of the grief memoir, these texts contribute to “a dialogue of mournings” (Leader 85) and encourage us to think in a new ways about loss. Prodromou iii T a b l e of C o n t e n t s Table of Figures ...................................................................................................................................................v PREFACE................................................................................................................................................................ vi Impostor of Loss............................................................................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................................................................1 The Grief Memoir and a Theoretical Prism ...........................................................................................7 The T e x ts..........................................................................................................................................................9 CHAPTER I: Life W riting and The Literature of G rief ................................................... 24 Freud and the Standard Model of Grief .............................................................................................. 24 "New Wave" Theories of Grief ............................................................................................................... 26 Theorising "Textured Recovery"............................................................................................................36 Grief in L iteratu re ....................................................................................................................................... 41 Death-Denying Society........................................................... 45 The Rise of the Memoir ............................................................................................................................ 53 CHAPTER 2: Trout Tickling For Truth in N arratives of Loss ................................................................. 65 Loss in N onfiction ....................................................................................................................................... 67 The "Creative Nonfiction Crisis" and The Culture of Truth ........................................................... 68 The Space Between Fiction and Nonfiction .................................. 76 Trout-tickling for Truth ............................................................................................................................. 79 M em o ry......................................................................................................................................................... 80 The Anxiety of Memory....................................................................................................................... 83 The "Facts" VS. The "Truth" ....................................................................................................................87 Imaginative Truth-Telling .........................................................................................................................90 Fiction and Truth in Fay Weldon's M antrapped................................................................................96 Exposing th e T ruth...................................................................................................................................101 Complex R ecovery....................................................................................................................................110 CHAPTER 3: "Writing the Self into Being": Narrative Identity in Memoirs of Loss ...................116 Women's Autobiography and the Self .............................................................................................. 118 The Stable Self of the Autobiographical Act .....................................................................................121 The Self Destabilised .............................................................................................................................. 128 "The Olympian Authority of Writing" ................................................................................................ 136 "Writing the Self Into Being" ................................................................................................................138 Prodromou iv Problematising the Narrative Self ....................................................................................................... 151 Complex Recovery.................................................................................................................................... 160 CHAPTER 4: "No Bones Broken": Embodied Experiences of Loss.................................................. 168 Loss of Beloved's Body............................................................................................................................174 Loss of the Mourner's Embodied Subjectivity ..................................................................................179 Jenny Diski'sSkating to Antarctica...................................................................................................... 180 Entry into the Body Through Childhood Recollection .............................................................. 189 Complex Recovery............................................................................................................................... 191 Embodied Loss and Complex Recovery in Gordon, Barrington, and M ahood...................... 202 Movement Back into the Body........................................................................................................ 205 Permission to Suffer: The "Slow Waltz" of Embodied Recovery in Autobiography of a Face and Tiger's Eye........................................................................................................................................... 220 CONCLUSION: "W eeping C onstellations" .............................................................................................. 228 Limitations and

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