TOWARD A MATERIAL ACCOUNT OF BABYLOSS NARRATIVES: AUTHORSHIP, IDENTIFIABILITY, AND EMBEDDEDNESS IN COLLECTIVE STORYTELLING by Janel C. Atlas A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Summer 2020 ©2020 Janel Atlas All Rights Reserved TOWARD A MATERIAL ACCOUNT OF BABYLOSS NARRATIVES: AUTHORSHIP, IDENTIFIABILITY, AND EMBEDDEDNESS IN COLLECTIVE STORYTELLING by Janel Atlas Approved: ______________________________________________________________ John Ernest, Ph.D. Chair of the Department of English Approved: ______________________________________________________________ John Pelesko, Ph.D. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Approved: ______________________________________________________________ Douglas J. Doren, Ph.D. Interim Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education and Dean of the Graduate College I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed: _____________________________________________________ Stephanie Kerschbaum, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed:_____________________________________________________ Melissa Ianetta, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed:_____________________________________________________ Sean Zdenek, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed: _____________________________________________________ Jessica Restaino, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest appreciation to Stephanie Kerschbaum, who not only chaired my dissertation committee but also mentored me my very first semester of graduate school and taught a course on narrative and disability studies that opened a new way of looking at things to me. I am also deeply indebted to Melissa Ianetta, who I had the privilege of working for in the University of Delaware Writing Centers and also under her editorship on College English. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the other members of my committee, Sean Zdenek and Jessica Restaino. Their patience, support, and expertise helped make it possible for me to complete my dissertation; they both asked productive, engaged questions that forwarded my thinking about babyloss stories. I appreciate the support, guidance, and scholarly wisdom of Joe Harris and Joan DelFatorre, both of whom generously agreed to do independent study projects with me that gave me the space earlier on in my Masters and PhD coursework to lay the groundwork for this project. I cannot express enough thanks to Caitlin Larracey, my colleague who started graduate school with me and over that time has become a friend who I can turn to for personal, professional, and writing advice. +++, for always. I also appreciate Carolyne King for always being alongside me (or a few steps ahead) and Tiffany Goldy Brake for caring and listening and being a driven and brilliant woman. Long before I studied women’s stories about their pregnancy losses, I collected a group of these stories and edited them in They Were Still Born: Personal Stories about Stillbirth. To the contributors to that book who entrusted me with their babies’ stories and with their words, I owe a debt of gratitude. I had no idea, when I solicited those essays, that the privilege of working with them would culminate in this dissertation. I also want to thank my friend Vicki Culling for facilitating my connections in the New Zealand babyloss community, as well as the chairs of the New Zealand Sands Convention for inviting me to give a keynote address in 2019, which provided the opportunity to speak to bereaved parents and also health and caring professionals about the importance and impact of babyloss storytelling. That keynote planted seeds for the concluding chapter of this dissertation. I also extend my thanks to too many loved ones to name who asked interested questions and gave affirmations when I felt tired or discouraged by the task at hand. Some of them provided quiet places to write, use of their printers or charger cables when mine were defunct, hugs, encouraging emails, and listening ears when I needed to talk through part of my argument. You know who you are; thank you and I love you. And last but not least, so much love and gratitude from my heart to James and to our three living children for understanding why the kitchen table was often covered with books about dead babies. I cherish the love and encouragement and patience you gave me as I completed this study. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES…………………………………………………………………….....vii LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………..viii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...ix Chapter 1 HOW BABYLOSS MATTERS…………………………………………………...1 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………….26 2 WRITING IN THE BODY………………………………………………….…….30 3 COAXING, CO-TELLING, AND EMBEDDING BABYLOSS STORIES: PRINT TEXTS ABOUT MISCARRIAGE AND STILLBIRTH.……...………………....37 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………76 4 POST-EPISTEMIC NOSTALGIA…………………………………………….….81 5 INDIVIDUAL LOSS NARRATIVES, COMMUNAL LOSS NARRATIVES, AND COUNTERING THE REALNESS PROBLEM ONLINE……...…...……..84 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………124 6 TELLING A STORY OF STILLBIRTH: ACCEPTING THE LIMITS OF NARRATIVE………………………………………………..………132 7 “PERFECTLY HEALTHY, JUST DEAD”: DISABILITY AND ABLEISM IN BABYLOSS STORIES……………………………………………………………143 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………189 8 WHAT NOW? IMPLICATIONS FOR BABYLOSS STORYTELLING…...…194 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………….213 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………215 LIST OF TABLES Table 1: The print books in this study…………………………………………...……45 Table 2: Print books in their quadrants………………………………………………..73 Table 3: Keywords in the FOL corpus……………………………………………….170 Table 4: FOL stories using defect* to refer to baby……..…………………………..186 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Parent stories embedded in Jiménez………………………………………………...56 Figure 2: DeFrain et al.'s parent stories are more discrete…………………………………….57 Figure 3: Davis (2016) sets parents’ words apart with margins and italics…………………... 58 Figure 4: Atlas's collection separates each parent story into its own chapter…………………59 Figure 5: Davis's 2nd edition puts white space around parent words…………………………62 Figure 6: Davis's 3rd edition italicizes parent words, marking them visually………………...63 Figure 7: Davis' third edition includes parent names in the index…………………………….70 Figure 8: Banner at the top of Facesofloss.com……………………………………………...107 Figure 9: Individual post image from Faces of Loss………………………………………... 109 viii ABSTRACT This dissertation takes up the rhetorical and social interactions through which stories about pregnancy loss—babyloss—emerge. How are the stories people tell about their miscarriages and stillbirths invited in different situations and then shaped through the relationship with the interlocutors/listeners who are present? There are two main corpora that I take up to examine: print books about pregnancy loss and a public-facing website where women can share their babyloss experiences. I take up E. Ochs and L. Capps’ framework for narrative dimensions of identifiability and embeddedness to consider how co-telling and authorship are instantiated in babyloss storytelling that happens in different spaces, with particular attention to the difficulty babyloss narrators face in talking about a taboo subject. Describing babyloss can be challenging and complex, and people who try to talk about a baby who died before they were born face what anthropologist and feminist researcher L. Layne calls “the realness problem” of pregnancy loss (2003). When they tell a story about their babyloss, a bereaved narrator must, knowingly or unknowingly, position themself in opposition to a popular dominant cultural narrative that pregnancy loss is a minor and short term kind of grief. I argue that the act of telling about a babyloss constitutes a feminist rhetorical practice and that it is eminently social and made to matter through individual and collective portrayals of this kind of loss ix Chapter 1 HOW BABYLOSS MATTERS I unwittingly stepped onto the path to studying babyloss stories and the places where people tell them in February 2006 when my second baby was stillborn at 36 weeks’ gestation. At the time, of course, I was focused simply on surviving my own shock and grief about a totally unexpected end of my pregnancy with no living baby and the physical recovery from delivering her body. But it was not very long after burying Beatrice that I noticed my need to write about what had happened, and along with that how much I craved access to others’ stories. I wanted to read other people’s words about how their pregnancies had ended in miscarriages or stillbirths. I wasn’t particularly interested in medical facts—I wanted stories from others who had “buried a baby