Damned Good Daughter. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May
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DAMNED GOOD DAUGHTER Karen Rachel Yeatts, B.A., M.A Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2003 APPROVED: Barbara Rodman, Major Professor Kathryn Raign, Committee Member Jenny Adams, Committee Member Brenda Sims, Chair of Graduate English Studies C. Neal Tate, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Yeatts, Karen Rachel. Damned good daughter. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2003, 236 pp., references, 11 titles. My dissertation is a memoir based on my childhood experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother. She exhibited violence both passive and aggressive, and the memoir explores my relationship with her and my relationship with the world through her. “Damned Good Daughter” developed with my interest in creative nonfiction as a genre. I came to it after studying poetry, discovering that creative nonfiction offers a form that accommodates both the lyric impulse in poetry and the shaping impulse of story in fiction. In addition, the genre makes a place for the first person I in relation to the order and meaning of a life story. Using reverse chronology, my story begins with the present and regresses toward childhood, revealing the way life experiences with a mentally ill parent build on one another. Copyright 2003 by Karen Rachel Yeatts ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface................................................................................................................................. v CHAPTER 1 .......................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 ..................................................................................................................... 14 CHAPTER 3 ..................................................................................................................... 18 CHAPTER 4 ..................................................................................................................... 23 CHAPTER 5 ..................................................................................................................... 28 CHAPTER 6 ..................................................................................................................... 31 CHAPTER 7 ..................................................................................................................... 35 CHAPTER 8 ..................................................................................................................... 44 CHAPTER 9 ..................................................................................................................... 50 CHAPTER 10 ................................................................................................................... 54 CHAPTER 11 ................................................................................................................... 57 CHAPTER 12 ................................................................................................................... 62 CHAPTER 13 ................................................................................................................... 70 CHAPTER 14 ................................................................................................................... 82 CHAPTER 15 ................................................................................................................... 91 CHAPTER 16 ................................................................................................................... 98 CHAPTER 17 ................................................................................................................. 108 CHAPTER 18 ................................................................................................................. 119 CHAPTER 19 ................................................................................................................. 127 CHAPTER 20 ................................................................................................................. 137 CHAPTER 22 ................................................................................................................. 152 iii CHAPTER 23 ................................................................................................................. 163 CHAPTER 25 ................................................................................................................. 168 CHAPTER 26 ................................................................................................................. 177 CHAPTER 27 ................................................................................................................. 185 CHAPTER 26 ................................................................................................................. 189 CHAPTER 27 ................................................................................................................. 200 CHAPTER 28 ................................................................................................................. 208 iv Preface Memoir as Self Construction When I say I have written a memoir, one reaction is surprise. I am not old enough to be able to write my memoirs, one man said. Another reaction is suspicion. At lunch with a mutual friend, a woman old enough to be my mother wanted to know if my memoir was a happy one. When I told her that not all of it was, she avoided speaking to me even though I was seated across from her. The implication of both reactions reflects misconceptions about memoir and inhibits its acceptance as a literary genre by many critics. Accusations of egotism and revenge still require a defense of the memoirist, even after the current rise in popularity of this genre. Why does memoir elicit such responses? To answer this question broadly I will use critical theory of life narrative found in Sidonie Smith’s and Julia Watson’s 2001 book, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, to explain the history of autobiography as a genre and point to possible original prejudices that effect opinion today. To move beyond the subject of prejudices I will examine the memoirs of two respected writers, Patricia Hampl and Mary Karr, to address what memoirists are writing today and what that says about current literary aesthetics. Finally, as a memoirist, I must resolve for myself the conflict between the criticism of the genre and my motive for writing in it. To do this I will examine my process of writing and evaluate its result. Autobiographical writing existed long before it was categorized as what is now known as creative nonfiction. Smith and Watson offer a brief overview of autobiography with many references in the fourth chapter of their book. Although the writing of “Socrates and his self-interrogatory understanding,” the “funerary inscriptions about feats v of battle,” and to the “lyrics of Sappho of Lesbos” use first person singular point of view, it was not until the turn of the last century that autobiography became a field of its own. Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian in the second half of the nineteenth century who admired autobiography “and called for its use in the writing of history” (112). George Misch was Dilthey’s student and son-in-law. In 1904 “George Misch, an eminent early- twentieth-century German scholar of autobiography” published a “multivolume history translated in part as A History of Autobiography in Antiquity” (84-85). Smith and Watson write that he, “inaugurated the first wave of modern criticism of the field” (113). Because Misch admired autobiography as did his father-in-law, he read many autobiographies and characterized the autobiographers’ lives as exemplary. This first impression of life narrative points to the modern notion of the universal man, one who can stand in as an example for many and to the impression that to write autobiography one must live an exemplary life. Even now people unfamiliar with creative nonfiction imagine that to write a memoir, first, you must be over sixty-five years old and, second, you must have lived a remarkable life. In this view, memoir writing is pretentious but excusable as long as you are already famous and respected. I wonder about Dilthey’s fascination with autobiography. If he saw it as an insightful way to read history because it added a sense of immediacy and intimacy to dates and names, perhaps he was feeling something like we feel now when we read autobiography. History happens around someone. Facts and dates record the history of action. Memoir and autobiography record the action of history. According to Smith and Watson, Dilthey communicated his enthusiasm for autobiography to his student and son-in-law Georg Misch, and Misch read Western vi history through the autobiographies of its leaders, noticing characteristics in them that he considered “representative” of the culture (113). It was Misch’s notion of the cultural representative that carried forward fifty years as Misch’s work was translated into English and was “invoked in scholarly definitions of ‘autobiography’” (117). This, however, did not happen until the second half of the twentieth century when New Criticism began to fade. Modernism crowded autobiography out of the literary picture. Until the late 1950s New Critics rejected any biography of a writer as something that would compromise study of the art of a literary work and disrupt the reader’s ability to objectively evaluate the work. To New Critics an author’s biography