Grief and the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson by Lucy Clarke

Ordinary sanctity: grief and the fiction of Marilynne Robinson by Lucy Clarke Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the award of a Doctor of Philosophy by Oxford Brookes University Oxford, UK Supervisor: Daniel Lea December 2016 Acknowledgements Countless people have supported this project from its inception to its completion. In roughly chronological order, I’d like to thank the following: Clare Robertson for Gilead, Kate and Tariq Husain and Simon and Jenny Court for critically timed acts of hospitality throughout, and for supporting the idea of a PhD from early on; Avril Alba, Amy Merone, Mo Henderson and Dan Silverstone for being advocates of a PhD lifestyle; Simon Kovesi for taking a punt on my ‘dewy- eyed project’ and heading up the Oxford Brookes Studentship interview panel who kindly agreed to fund me for three years; Daniel Lea for friendship and expert, emotionally insightful supervision; Eric White for enthusiasm and close reading; Charmian Hearne, Jill Organ, Christiana Payne, Nicole Pohl, Tom Crook and Martin Groves (all of Oxford Brookes University) and my peer postgraduates, particularly Mary O’Neill and Mary Gifford for providing an informed, encouraging and enthusiastic emotional and intellectual community; Pat O’Shea for early readings; Pete Williams for bible study; Clare and John Prangley for the Tablet and other tips; Vyv and Mike Salisbury, Belinda Coote and Tom Leech for generous house-sits and writing time; Vik Sullivan, and Elly Salisbury for texting to check on progress and Oli and Katherine Court for laughing at my death jokes and for making many of their own. Thanks also to Meg and Ros for intermittent refuge, Jeff Phelps for sunny sanctuary; Mum, Dad, Sean, Katie, Si, Gemma, Hannah, Bob, Sarah, Desiree, Jan, Bea, Gam, Laura and Jana for my daily life; and to Edie, Beau, Maggie, Silas, Seb, their parents Jo, Matt, Tom and Jen and my dear friends Kate, Tariq, Bernie, Fran, Leslie and Jack for being vivid reminders of “real” life and the vital, loving world outside academia. Extra thanks to Stevey, Malcolm and (especially) Matt Hart, Ossie Rose, Chris McDonagh and Katie and Simon Phelps for the shed which made one dream come true and which facilitated another by making the last phase of the PhD possible. Finally, thanks to Carole D. and Khadija for enthusiasm, Bea for help with the bibliography and to Emily for a generous final reading. 2 This thesis is for Anthea and Bernard Clarke who make all of life rich and whose ability to find joy everywhere – even in grief – inspires me and countless others every day. It is also for the inimitable Sean Pratley who said he’d see me through it and has and whose gift for ‘being-with’ is second to none. The thesis is dedicated to our unborn baby, busy beginning life; and to the memory of friends and family of mine who died during both times of gestation and creation, and to their many, unnamed, bereaved. In particular, I dedicate it to my sister Emily, who, while ‘doing dead’ for over a decade continues to be a vivid and vital presence in absence. This and other palpable daily felt realities are her legacy to me and to a great many others. In Memoriam: Derek and Jean Robinson (age 75 and 69) Susie Smith (age 55) Emily Clarke (age 34) Frances Court (age 98) Ste Taylor (age 31) Molly Stones-Collins (age 1 day) Jay Parker Salisbury (age 1 day) Michele Puccio (age 38) Olivia Barker (age 40) Hattie Rowlands (age 60) Anice Paterson (age 74) Edna May Clarke (age 102) Kay Lawson (age 102) 3 Abstract Academic research on grief in the West is a twentieth-century phenomenon and until recently has been conducted almost exclusively in the psy- and cognate disciplines. One consequence of this is theory-led scholarship and a persistent set of erroneous assumptions which now pass for clinical lore. These include the presumption that grief is amenable to comparison and measurement, that it occurs in chronological time, that it is a process which ends and, if it persists or remains absent, that it can be treated and recovered from like an illness. Since the late- twentieth century, critical grief scholars from across disciplines and bereaved people themselves have argued that this does not reflect the lived experiences of those who grieve. Demands have been made for a far more expressive discourse which acknowledges grief’s texture and open-endedness and seeks to depathologise bereavement, grief and mourning; however, problematic assumptions about bereavement persist. This thesis argues that adequate descriptions of grief can only be achieved if researchers privilege the poetics of loss over and above the logic of theories of loss. American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson has long been critical of the over-reliance on scientism that has evacuated contemporary knowledge of the felt experience of human lives. This thesis argues that felt experiences of intimate bereavement are at the core of her four novels, Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008) and Lila (2014), and as such that Robinson’s fiction and thought can fruitfully expand knowledge about grief. Focusing in particular on her textured evocations of the first-person experience of grief; grief and timelessness; and grief and sociality, this thesis treats Robinson’s novels as vivid and ethical thick descriptions of grief and griever consciousness. It reads her work within and against the critical context of recent grief scholarship across a variety of disciplines in order to challenge prevailing wisdom and to position her fiction as a critical and highly legitimate source of emotional epistemology on loss. It concludes that her revisionist approach to human suffering provides a profound and productive intervention in a field troubled by the rationalization of human experience, and confused by both its uncritical secular scientistic legacy and the early twenty-first- century search for a secular ethics. Contents Preface…………………………………………………………………………………….6 Chapter One – Introduction: The Problems with Grief………………………………14 Chapter Two – Grief in the first-person: autodiegetic narration, dwelling in –algia, and the ‘felt experience’ of bereavement in Housekeeping and Gilead…………...85 Chapter Three – ‘Homeless at home’: grief as sacred ‘timespace’ in Housekeeping and Home……………………………………………………………………………….148 Chapter Four – Transfictionality, the parabolic imagination and the sociality of grief in Housekeeping, Gilead, Home and Lila……………………………………………209 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...262 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….268 5 Preface This thesis is about the experience denoted in the English language by the word grief, a word widely used (alongside bereavement and mourning) to signify the human response when someone (or something) known or loved dies or is lost. My principal focus is the loss incurred by death and the vehicle for my exploration of this topic is the fictional oeuvre of American writer Marilynne Robinson. Consequently, although this is a work of literary criticism, the novels of Robinson and the topic of grief are equally weighted in my thinking. Although her fiction operates within the tradition of literary realism, mainly I treat Robinson’s four novels metaphorically. I situate my analyses of her work in, and against, the academic traditions of studying grief across a range of disciplines, traditions which have neglected the fact that grief is itself a metaphor. I take it throughout that death is commonplace and thus that grief – however it might manifest itself – is an everyday or ordinary phenomenon. I also take it for granted that grief, like, for example, love, exists in the human realm, such that anything abstract can be said to exist and, as these things are duly divided up in the Western, post-Enlightenment world, that grief is principally an emotional phenomenon. Given that almost every person will experience bereavement in life, it is also a core assumption of this thesis that the ways in which grief is understood (and indeed might be understood differently) have something approaching “universal” applicability and relevance. My primary interest, however, is not in grief as “an” emotion or, when understood more broadly, in any of the constituent emotions of grief, but in the idea of grief as a human experience from which (and about which) much knowledge can be gained. I therefore treat grief and Robinson’s novels philosophically to the extent that they create knowledge about bereavement. My overarching aim and central research question throughout this thesis has been to consider what can be learned about grief as the metaphor designated to the experiential response to the losses of bereavement from Robinson’s fictional representations of grief and grievers. More precisely, I have asked how her depictions of grief can be refigured as vivid and ethical descriptions from which mainstream bereavement scholarship and everyday bereaved people can benefit. In the writing of this thesis, I have consistently asked myself how, as a consequence of the close scrutiny of Robinson’s fiction, grief – the word and the experience – might be fruitfully reconsidered and re-imagined. 6 What is the problem? A reconsideration of grief is necessary because, in the contemporary moment, academic bereavement scholarship is in a confused state. In light of this, my thesis undertakes to respond to four problems, all refracted through the lens of Robinson’s work. Problem one is that grief as a topic of research is a twentieth- century phenomenon and that research has been conducted

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