MEMORY AND CONNECTION IN MATERNAL GRIEF: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, EMILY DICKINSON, AND THE BEREAVED MOTHER Retawnya M. Provenzano Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of English, Indiana University December 2017 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Master’s Thesis Committee _________________________________ Jane E. Schultz, PhD, Chair _________________________________ Missy Dehn Kubitschek, PhD _________________________________ Megan L. Musgrave, PhD ii Acknowledgements With gratitude to the faculty of the IUPUI English department, especially my committee chair, Prof. Jane Schultz. You have consistently given both sharp criticism and thoughtful encouragement. Megan Musgrave and Missy Kubitschek, you’ve both exceeded my requests and expectations. All of you have taught me to think more deeply and write more clearly. Thank you. To have had the honor to interact with and learn from three such brilliant and humane women is the most important benefit I’ve received from my education and work at IUPUI. Many thanks, also, to the much-loved Brian McDonald. I wish I could thank you once more for your kind words and faithful support. Memory Eternal, dear friend. iii Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Maternal Grief as Extension ............................................................................ 21 Chapter 2: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Maternal Memory as (Com)passionate Action ... 53 Chapter 3: Emily Dickinson and Maternal Grief as Unknowing Knowing ...................... 77 Concluding Thoughts: Memory and Comprehension ..................................................... 100 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 105 Curriculum Vitae iv Introduction “[He] had not outlived his sorrow,” writes George Eliot of her eponymous character Adam Bede, “had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God forbid. It would be a poor result of our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it . let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force” (Eliot 507-8). The work of modern psychology, psychiatry, and social work, where efforts are made to ensure highly functioning individuals who move past sorrow, provides a stark contrast to Eliot’s nineteenth-century view of suffering. More specifically, modern approaches to grief demand that in response to the disruption of death, the bereaved should bring an end to grief stricken thoughts, behaviors, and emotions and return to previous levels of functioning within one year after the death of the beloved.1 Because of a focus on coping, closure, and functionality, these disciplines regularly, if perhaps unintentionally, discredit the validity of mothers’ responses to infant and child death, which tend to display long- term, high-intensity grief.2 Bereaved mothers exhibit extreme and long-lasting 1 The section for “Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder” in the DSM-V provides both definitional constraints and a time frame of six months to a year to delineate normal grief from persistent grief. Likewise, current proposed guidelines for the diagnosis of “Prolonged Grief Disorder” in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision gives six months as the limit for normal grief response, while allowing for “longer periods in some cultural contexts” as defined by the individuals in the patient’s environment (definitions provided by G.M. Reed in M. Katherine Shear’s article “Complicated Grief” in The New England Journal of Medicine). Also see, for example, Psychology Today editor Carlin Flora’s effort to present the APA’s position on disordered bereavement: “some people feel consistently upset and preoccupied with the person who has passed away, to the point where their relationships and work suffer for months on end. Such a reaction is known as ‘complicated grief’” (“A Complicated Grief” in psychologytoday.com). 2 In an article questioning the validity of defining prolonged grief as a mental disorder, Birgit Wagner, professor of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy at the University of Leipzig, points out that as many as seventy-eight percent of bereaved parents appear to retain intense grief reactions beyond one year. By contrast, M. Katherine Shear, director of the Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia University, suggests that about two to three percent of the population worldwide is affected by complicated, or prolonged, grief (see her article “Complicated Grief”). 1 emotionality, “neuroticism,” and “negative bereavement outcomes.”3 Yet, literature throughout the ages presents such maternal responses as emotionally logical, while approaches to suffering and bereavement in the nineteenth century, as epitomized by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Emily Dickinson, allow for a positive assessment of mothers’ long-term and passionate grief. The death of a young child violently reveals a mother’s own vulnerability, upsetting assumptions about safety and well-being and awakening an uncomfortable awareness of mortality.4 Writers who employ this storyline closely examine the bodily and spiritual realities of humanity through the mother’s experience of her child’s death. By doing so they also illuminate maternal grieving practices. Some authors frame the narratives within a pilgrimage motif,5 or reveal the destructive consequences of rejecting the validity of this pilgrimage narrative in regard to grief.6 Other writers employ ancient grief narratives, reaching back to classical stories and poems where the mother’s dangerous passion and defiance are highlighted. Demeter is a classic image of fury in maternal grief. Authors who employ this ancient storyline mark it with wildness or insanity and frequently employ images of a journey, whether that journey involves a search for the lost one, physical or mental escape, or another form of flight. Stories that represent maternal grief link fury to the vulnerability or powerlessness of the bereaved, which other characters may define as madness. Poets engage ideas of fury and madness 3 See T. Robinson and S.J. Marwit, “An Investigation of the Relationship of Personality, Coping, and Grief Intensity Among Bereaved Mothers,” for an example of this common perspective. 4 Beyond the philosophical understanding that the death of the other is linked to one’s own death, research on bereavement reveals a connection between grief and personal fear of death (Barr & Cacciatore). 5 For example, James Joyce in Ulysses and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. 6 e.g., the destructive consequences of the husband’s response to his wife’s grief in Robert Frost’s narrative poem “Home Burial.” 2 within grief, often directly referencing Demeter,7 while novelists contrast mannered silencing with maternal grief’s natural violence.8 Some authors emphasize the mother’s response of defiant vigilance in memory and love as a contrast to Demeter’s dangerous and destructive grief.9 For all of these authors, the mother’s continued vigilance is treated as expected, if not virtuous, while intensity, violence, and even madness are represented as ordinary responses to a child’s death. While many of these authors treat grief as a forced pilgrimage, they also question the possibility of returning to a previous state of psychological balance,10 and, by contrast, the mothers in their stories and poems resist external pressure for closure and silence.11 7 e.g., Eavan Boland (“The Pomegranate,” “And Soul”), Anne Sexton (“The Abortion,” “Praying to Big Jack,” “For God While Sleeping”), Alfred Tennyson (“Demeter and Persephone”), A.E. Stallings (poems about Persephone in Archaic Smile and Hapax), Gabriela Mistral (“The Hollow Walnut,” for example), Kathleen Raine (“The Transit of the Gods”) and Barbara Crooker (“Demeter,” among others). Some poets focus in on the tragic loss of the innocent child, assuming, but eliding, the mother’s response, or otherwise entering more fully into the child’s experience, either the process of dying, the experience of Hades, or within a Christianized afterlife, i.e., the child at Christ’s knee. See, for example, Maria White Lowell (“The Morning Glory”) Emily Dickinson (“Because I could not stop for death”), Christina Rossetti (“Holy Innocents” and “Unspotted lambs to follow the one Lamb” from Some Feasts and Fasts, and “Young Death”) and Carolyn Kizer (“Persephone Pauses”). 8 e.g., Hannah Foster (The Coquette), Fanny Fern (Ruth Hall), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Poet Kathleen Raine points toward this in “The Transit of the Gods,” and Phillis Wheatley uses the story of Niobe to examine the motive for silence in the bereaved mother in her poem “Niobe in Distress for her Children slain by Apollo, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book V1. and from a view of a Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson.” 9 As in Anna Ahkmatova’s Requiem, especially “X Crucifixion,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the mother,” William Wordsworth’s “Maternal Grief,” and Maeve Brennan’s “The Eldest Child” and “The Springs of Affection.” In his poem “Niobe” Alfred Noyes, echoing Tennyson (“Demeter and Persephone”) and Shakespeare (The Winter’s Tale), links