Writing Widowhood

Jeffrey Berman

Description

The death of a beloved spouse after a lifetime of companionship is a life-changing experience. To help understand the reality of bereavement, Jeffrey Berman focuses on five extraordinary American writers—Joan Didion, Sandra Gilbert, Gail Godwin, Kay Redfield Jamison, and Joyce Carol Oates—each of whom has written a memoir of spousal loss. In each chapter, Berman gives an overview of the writer's life and art before widowhood, including her early preoccupation with death, and then discusses the writer's memoir and her life as a widow. He discovers that writing was, for all of these authors, both a solace and a lifeline, enabling them to maintain bonds with their lost loved ones while simultaneously moving on with their lives. These memoirs of widowhood, Berman maintains, reveal not only courage and resilience in the face of loss, but also the critical role of writing and reading in bereavement and recovery.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: “The Most Life-Changing Event”

1. Joyce Carol Oates: A Widow’s Story

2. Sandra M. Gilbert: Wrongful Death

3. Gail Godwin: Evenings At Five

4. Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights

5. Kay Redfield Jamison: Nothing Was the Same

Conclusion: Mourning Sickness

Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• Child
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 06 octobre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438458212
• Langue: English

Extrait

WRITING
WIDOWHOOD
WRITING
WIDOWHOOD
THE LANDSCAPES OF BEREAVEMENT
JEFFREY BERMAN
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berman, Jeffrey, 1945–
Writing widowhood : the landscapes of bereavement / Jeffrey Berman.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5819-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5821-2 (e-book)
1. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Widows in literature. 3. Bereavement in literature. 4. Widows’ writings. 5. Widowhood—Psychological aspects. 6. Autobiography—Authorship. I. Title. PS152.B47 2015 810.9'9287—dc23 2014045579
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
By the Same Author
Joseph Conrad: Writing as Rescue
The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis
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Diaries to an English Professor: Pain and Growth in the Classroom
Surviving Literary Suicide
Risky Writing: Self-Disclosure and Self-Transformation in the Classroom
Empathic Teaching: Education for Life
Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning
Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure (with Patricia Hatch Wallace)
Death in the Classroom: Writing about Love and Loss
Companionship in Grief: Love and Loss in the Memoirs of C. S. Lewis, John Bayley, Donald Hall, Joan Didion, and Calvin Trillin
Death Education in the Writing Classroom
Dying in Character: Memoirs on the End of Life
Confidentiality and Its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy (with Paul Mosher)
To the Memory of My Brother, Elliot
People in grief become more like themselves.
—Roger Rosenblatt
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “The Most Life-Changing Event”
1 Joyce Carol Oates: A Widow’s Story
2 Sandra M. Gilbert: Wrongful Death
3 Gail Godwin: Evenings At Five
4 Joan Didion: The Year Of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights
5 Kay Redfield Jamison: Nothing Was the Same
Conclusion: Mourning Sickness
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
Just as caring for a dying spouse is a sacred duty, an act of love and devotion, so is writing a book about the landscapes of bereavement. I have done my best to do justice to the five memoirists here: Joyce Carol Oates, Sandra Gilbert, Gail Godwin, Joan Didion, and Kay Redfield Jamison. Their memoirs are deft tutors to the landscapes of bereavement awaiting widows and widowers.
Of all the truths I discovered while researching and writing this book, none was greater than Eleanor Bergstein’s prescient observation to the newly widowed Joyce Carol Oates: though you loved your spouse deeply and could not imagine life without him, you may fall in love again with another person, though you might not think so now. That observation came true for me. I am grateful for my wife, Julie, who has tolerated good-naturedly my decade-long preoccupation with writing about love and loss. Julie has helped me maintain a continuing bond with the past and forge a new bond with the present and future, allowing companionship in grief to transform mysteriously to companionship in joy.
I am deeply grateful for the help of James Peltz, co-director of SUNY Press, whose support and enthusiasm for this project never wavered. James patiently stood by my side as this manuscript slowly evolved to its present form. Special thanks to Jenn Bennett, who supervised the production of the manuscript, and to Laura Tendler, for her superb copyediting skills. I am also grateful for the perceptive criticisms and generosity of spirit of three of the SUNY Press anonymous evaluators who revealed their identities to me after the manuscript was accepted for publication: Dawn Skorczewski, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Virginia Blum. Their suggestions for revision immeasurably strengthened the manuscript; I am alone responsible for lingering weaknesses.
Special thanks to Chris Mangini for designing the striking book cover.
“Widows’ Stories of Love After Loss” was given at the 29th International Conference on Psychology and the Arts in Ghent, Belgium, on July 8, 2012.
Finally, I dedicate this book to the memory of my brother, Elliot. Rated one of Connecticut’s best dentists, he was loved and admired by his family, friends, and patients. No one enjoyed life more than Elliot did; his courage, humor, and kindness were inspirational. He was fearless in the face of approaching death.
Introduction
“The Most Life-Changing Event”
The death of a spouse, Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe report, is the most life-changing event that one is likely to experience. A life-changing event may not necessarily be the most devastating event: there is no hierarchy or calculus of loss, and the death of a child or parent may awaken in some people the most intense grief. Nevertheless, most researchers believe that the death of a spouse—the person with whom one has lived for a lifetime and whom one knows (and is known by) better than anyone else—is the most life-altering event. No matter how independent one is, living with a beloved spouse for many decades is like living with the better part of one’s self. Life without that other becomes unimaginable. When the unimaginable occurs, one may not wish to remain alive—that’s why widowhood is so harrowing and destabilizing. Robert C. DiGiulio, a professor of education whose wife, oldest daughter, and in-laws were killed in a car accident, agrees with Holmes and Rahe, adding that spousal loss is “more stressful than serious personal illness, separation, or divorce; being sentenced to prison; or living through the death of a parent or child” (57). The shock of widowhood is greater when the loss is sudden and unexpected. People are now living longer than decades ago, but the shock of widowhood remains.
There is no shortage of self-help books to assist widows and widowers with their grief. These books often serve a valuable if limited role—limited in that they sometimes dispense formulaic advice that fails to capture the complexity of grief and the difficulty if not impossibility of recovery. In their desire to be helpful, therapists sometimes speak about the resolution of grief, or “closure,” to which some readers may find themselves resistant. Laura A. Tanner observes, for example, that in the years following her father’s death she turned to “theories of mourning” but came away feeling “unsatisfied” (84). As Amy Katerini Prodromou observes about what she calls “memoirs of textured recovery,” “grief is not an event that we must ‘get over’ quickly, though neither must it last forever” (personal communication, August 19, 2014).
To understand the reality of bereavement and the authenticity of lived experience, one may turn to widowhood memoirs written by many of the finest writers of our age. These stories dramatize love and loss in ways that compel the reader’s sympathy and identification. Widowhood memoirs, a term synonymous with spousal loss memoirs, appeal to a large audience, particularly to an ever-widening community of mourners. These stories demonstrate that bereavement is largely a function of the personality of the bereaved and the specific nature of the relationship lost. Unless an elderly couple dies at the same time, as Ovid describes in his touching story of Baucis and Philemon, two devoted lovers who are granted their wish by the gods to die simultaneously and are transformed into trees entwined in each other’s branches, one partner will almost always predecease the other—and usually it is the widow.
Spousal deaths vary greatly, ranging from the sudden and unexpected, on the one hand, to the expected and protracted, on the other hand. But even the agonizingly slow death of a spouse is a shock, resulting in a startling shift from presence to absence of the beloved. As Virginia Blum remarked when reading an early draft of this manuscript, “the marriage-plot novel might end in marriage, but long marriages end in death, one before the other. Someone is always left behind to grieve.” Widowhood memoirs avoid sugarcoating the truth but hold out the possibility of hope, not that one’s deceased spouse will magically return to life, but that life will sooner or later become meaningful again.
The Shock of Widowhood
Nowhere is the shock of sudden widowhood more apparent than in Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story , published in 2011, which chronicles the death of her husband, Raymond Smith, on February 18, 2008, at age seventy-seven. Smith appeared to be recovering from pneumonia at the Princeton Medical Center when he developed a virulent secondary infection in his “good” lung that did not respond to medication and quickly became deadly. A Widow’s Story describes Oates’s forty-eight-year marriage and her panic, confusi