Marcelline Hutton [email protected]
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University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Zea E-Books Zea E-Books 10-2-2019 Blessed Assurance: A Postmodern Midwestern Life Marcelline Hutton [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook Part of the European Languages and Societies Commons, Slavic Languages and Societies Commons, Women's History Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Hutton, Marcelline, "Blessed Assurance: A Postmodern Midwestern Life" (2019). Zea E-Books. 77. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/77 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Zea E-Books at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Zea E-Books by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Blessed Assurance A Postmodern Midwestern Life Marcelline Hutton In this book, a historian of women’s lives turns the lens on her own experience. Her story is “Midwestern” for its work ethic, modesty, faith, and resilience; “postmodern” for its sudden changes, strange juxtapositions, and retrospective deconstruction of the ideologies that shaped its progress. It describes a life in and out of academia and a search for acceptance, recognition, equality, and freedom. The author of three books on women’s experiences in Russia and Europe, Dr. Marcelline Hutton traces her personal journey from traditional working-class La Porte, Indiana, through college, graduate school, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and independence in Iowa City, Southampton, Kansas City, El Paso, and ultimately Lithuania. She arrives at a place of “blessed assurance,” recognizing who she was, what she has done, and what she most valued. The book is a testimony of life found and treasured and shared. We are privileged to see her world through this honest, perceptive, and insightful recollection. Zea Books Lincoln, Nebraska ISBN 978-1-60962-155-1 doi 10.328.73/unl.dc.zea.10903 Blessed Assurance A Postmodern Midwestern Life Marcelline Hutton Zea Books Lincoln, Nebraska 2019 Copyright © 2019 Marcelline Hutton All rights reserved ISBN doi Set in Callisto, Myriad, Vladimir Script, and Castellar initials. Zea Books are published by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries Electronic (pdf) ebook edition available online at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/ Print edition available from http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/unllib UNL does not discriminate based upon any protected status. Please go to http://www.unl.edu/equity/notice-nondiscrimination When I am writing, then I am being most of all. Fyodor Dostoevsky The past is never dead. It’s not even past. William Faulkner The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. Virginia Woolf Man is born broken. He lives by mending. Eugene O’Neill Marcelline Hutton, with mother Madeline, and sister Kathryn, c. 1960. 4 Contents Acknowledgments . 6 Introduction. .7 I. Childhood. .12 II. Youth: Joy and Alienation, 1950s . 51 III. College, 1958–1962 . 65 IV. Graduate School at Iowa, 1962–1968 . 82 V. Married Life in Kansas City, 1976–1979 . 146 VI. Divorce: Finding My Own Voice in Graduate School . 162 VII. Teaching: 1980s and 1990s . .187 VIII. Life in Lithuania . 214 IX. Blessed Assurance: Retirement and Old Age. 275 X. Mother’s Cooking Legacy . 318 XI. Conclusion . 328 5 Acknowledgments I am grateful to the following people for their friendship, support, love, prayers, and encouragement as I wrote this autobiography: Mary Roseberry Brown, Gwen Colgrove, Madhumita Gupta, Marg and Chuck Felling, Linnea Fredrickson, Miriam Gelfand, Kent Nelson, Elly Hart, Beth Hemmer, Kathryn Hutton, Walter Hutton, Birgitta Ingemanson, Michael Johnson, Faye Kartrude, Elaine Kruse, Robbin Lowe, Paul Royster, Donna Swischer, Martin Stack, Tom Tiegs, and Jerry Thompson. 6 Introduction n writing my autobiography, I have come to realize that while the crises in my life were personal, they were also part of a larger cultural shift in I America from traditional to postmodern, with its lack of authorities. I was born into a simple but democratic working-class environment in La Porte, In- diana, in November 1939. I went to college from 1958 to 1962, when history was still taught from the viewpoint of male political elites. I lived through sev- eral cultural revolutions: an academic revolution when women’s history, work- ing-class history, and black history became new forms of study and research; a feminist theological revolution; and the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Taking account of postmodernism makes my personal struggles more un- derstandable. Initially, I thought a simple chronological explanation of my life as a woman moving from working class to middle class academe would suffice as a document for future historians. As I began with this approach in mind, I soon found that life was more dynamic and writing, life, and love messier than I expected. None of these are neatly experienced or expressed. So when my friend Elly Hart observed that my life is an improvisation, I was surprised. Then I thought that improvisation is a bit like Hegel’s dialectic: thesis, antithe- sis, synthesis. However, instead of seeds of destruction initiating this process, I think it was seeds of dissatisfaction that led to change in my life. While Hegel posited the Zeitgeist moving the historical process along, I think it’s been the Holy Spirit nudging me. We become conscious of something and then begin to change our minds and actions. Since I am a historian, I organized my mem- oirs as chronologically as possible. However, sometimes a theme wanders into later decades. I hope the terms improvisation and dialectic allow for and facilitate these diversions and digressions. Or perhaps it’s as Virginia Woolf suggests: we realize the importance of an emotion or event only much later. Memories for this autobiography have come in a variety of ways, some un- solicited. For years I have been awakened by Clio, the muse of history, in the middle of the night with an idea for a paper or book. I have learned to keep a pad of paper and pen next to my bed so that when I am “kissed by Clio,” a phrase coined by Goethe, I don’t have to get out of bed but can just reach up, turn on my light, and write down the insight that has come to me. If I don’t 7 8 I NTRODUCT I ON do this, I often can’t retrieve it in the morning. Of course, I prefer having these ideas in the daytime when I am writing at my table, but writing, like life, is un- predictable. Intuitions and interpretations don’t always come on command. Yet the computer makes writing additions and subtractions easier. Life and writing can be mysterious and messy. I usually write the outline of a book on a yellow legal pad and develop it in detail. I work this way as long as I can. Then, all of a sudden I find myself in- serting new material into the text that I have already typed into the computer. For example, at a concert one evening, I found myself musing about the nur- turing role of trees. So, I turned to the section about growing up in La Porte and added material about the trees sheltering our home. This idea was not on my mind when I initially wrote about my childhood. It came later. As Faulkner said, the past really isn’t even past. It sneaks into the present. With the aid of my computer, I can make these changes. As a historian, I was trained to write impartially in the third-person singu- lar: it, he, or one, and it has been a considerable shift writing “I,” first-person singular, in this memoir. I found it almost impossible to do this when an edi- tor suggested I do it for my book Falling in Love with the Baltics: A Travel Memoir a decade ago. Today it is easier but still a stretch. Some years ago when I told a friend about my dilemma of using “I” instead of “she,” my friend gently re- minded me that I could do this because I do it every day in my journal. This was true, but my journal was for private consumption, not public, as memoirs are. I may have felt emboldened to write up my story because I had assembled the accounts of many Russian women in my last two books Remarkable Russian Women in Pictures, Prose and Poetry (2013) and Resilient Russian Women in the 1920s and 1930s (2015). In these works I used the memoirs, diaries, and reminiscences of many Russian women to show what their lives were like. At some point, I realized that future historians won’t know how women lived in twentieth-cen- tury America unless women write down our stories as evidence. Looking back over my spiritual life, I can see that it too has been influential and dynamic. In the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, there’s a phrase in the communion service of God’s offering us “new and unending life,” and today I am grateful for this. However, this was not always the case. Looking back on my life, I can see that while God was continually offering me new life in terms of personal growth, study, relationships, jobs, adventure, and travel, I didn’t al- ways accept it or appreciate it. I was sometimes frightened of the new and clung to the old familiar ways. Reared during the 1940s and ’50s in a working-class household, I imbibed traditional culture and remained a traditional person in I NTRODUCT I ON 9 many ways.