Writing Widowhood

The Landscapes of Bereavement

Jeffrey Berman

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781438458212
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

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.

1

Joyce Carol Oates

A Widow’s Story

Joyce Carol Oates is the most prolific major American author of the last half-century and among the least autobiographical novelists, but the appearance of two books within four years, her Journal and A Widow’s Story, gives us unprecedented insight into her life. These two texts are in many ways bookends. The publication of The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973–1982 in 2007, when she was sixty-nine, reveals a young woman deeply in love with her husband and even more deeply in love with writing, her life’s greatest passion. There are, to be sure, a few entries in the 509-page journal where she allows herself momentarily to imagine what life would be like without her beloved husband, but she cannot bring herself to consider this possibility. And why should she? Little on the horizon in the 1970s and 1980s seemed ominous. But when disaster struck, Oates responded in the way she knew best: by writing about it.

A Widow’s Story is longer, more detailed, and more emotionally charged than any other memoir written by a widow or widower. It’s also darker in tone, mood, and characterization than any other spousal loss memoir, presenting us with a stunning taxonomy of grief. The memoir offers us a radically different view of Oates: a portrait of a woman deranged by grief and fixated on suicide. The story abounds in surprises, contradictions, ironies, and paradoxes that have captivated the public’s attention in a way that is unprecedented in Oates’s career. A Widow’s Story is not a traditional memoir; only after its publication did she admit in several interviews that she based it on her journal. The journalistic form of A Widow’s Story makes possible the use of the historical present, giving the story a dramatic intensity and spontaneity that might otherwise be impossible.

Oates’s Journal and A Widow’s Story offer us a unique opportunity to see the continuities and discontinuities between a major writer’s early life and her “posthumous” life. Few authors have claimed a more radical split between their private and public lives than Oates. And few writers have created such an aura of invisibility in their private life while at the same time commanding so strong a public identity. This split, apparent in her early journal entries, has become more pronounced over the years. Oates asserts repeatedly that as a novelist she has no fixed identity; instead, she takes on the lives of her fictional characters. She thus regards herself, more seriously than not, as a multiple personality, a writer whose ability to imagine a myriad of male and female speakers creates a vast cast of characters. Yet despite the fact that she is a master of impersonation and compartmentalization, Oates is the same person who wrote Journal and A Widow’s Story, books that have more in common than may first appear evident. Of the many intriguing characters Oates has imagined in scores of novels, none is more fascinating than the one she creates in A Widow’s Story. Oates’s self-portrait as a widow becomes even more complex when we compare it with the writer who emerges from the pages of the Journal.

Oates’s Journal covers the years when she had already achieved early fame from her 1969 novel them, which won the National Book Award. The Journal is only a small fraction of the more than 4,000 single-spaced pages (as of 2007, and growing every day) housed in the Joyce Carol Oates Archive at Syracuse University, where she did her undergraduate work. Presumably, other volumes of her Journal will appear, constituting one of the most comprehensive records of any major writer.

The Motives Behind Journal Writing

In the introduction, Oates points out the ironies and paradoxes of undertaking such a project. One of the reasons she keeps a journal is to preserve the past, though she rarely rereads her entries because it’s “excruciating” to revisit the past. “I haven’t the words to guess why” (xii), she confesses, a startling statement from someone who is seldom defeated by language. She then wonders, parenthetically—many of her most important statements are expressed in parentheses—whether the “uncensored” journal may reveal too much about herself or, alternatively, reveal a self “with which I can’t any longer identify or, perversely, identify too strongly” (xiii). She makes no effort to conceal the risks of personal writing or her ambivalence about self-disclosure.

Oates offers other explanations for keeping a journal. “Is the keeping of a journal primarily a means of providing solace to the self, through a ‘speaking’ voice that is one’s own voice subtly transformed? A way of dispelling loneliness, a way of comfort?” (xiii). She concludes that homesickness, which involves both “mourning and memorialization,” is a powerful motive behind much literature. She recognizes a major paradox: “the more we are hurt, the more we are likely to take refuge in the imagination, and in creating a ‘text’ that has assimilated this hurt; perversely, if we choose to publish this text, the more likely we are to invite more hurt in the way of critical or public opprobrium” (xiii). She admits that writing a journal is the “very antithesis of writing for others.” She doesn’t entirely reject the idea, advanced by a “skeptic,” that the writer of a journal is creating a “journal-self, like a fictitious character,” but she insists that it would be impossible to maintain such a pose for several years. Like “our fingerprints and voice ‘prints,’ our journal-selves are distinctly our own” (xiv). The implication is that Oates’s Journal represents her inner self, the self with which she most strongly identifies, at least during the time when she wrote a particular entry. Her views, values, and perceptions are remarkably consistent throughout the ten-year period covered by her journal, suggesting the stability of her character and identity. Her decision to use her journal entries as the basis for A Widow’s Story highlights her desire to represent her inner, core self.

Throughout her journal, Oates is relentlessly self-analytical, questioning everything, including the process of self-interrogation. She makes a statement, then immediately qualifies it, exploring the ambiguities of both statement and counterstatement. She never mentions John Keats, but she would wholeheartedly concur with his belief in negative capability: “That is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (261). Committed to both her inner and outer lives, she nevertheless realizes that the private nature of journal writing encourages a subjectivity that may fail to capture the writer’s intense involvement with the world.

Oates admits, without defensiveness, that journal writing encourages narcissism. All people, she asserts on May 13, 1977, are narcissists, including the journal writer. “But the journal-keeper, unlike other people, confronts his or her narcissism daily. And—it’s to be hoped—conquers it by way of laughing at it” (194). Keeping a journal is not always pleasurable, but Oates’s sense of order, obligation, and curiosity compels her to keep writing regularly even when she is tempted to skip an entry. Greg Johnson’s observation in his biography Invisible Writer has proven uncannily prescient: “One key to Joyce’s intense productivity had always been her ability to continue writing even in times of exhaustion, illness, or depression” (291). It would be hard to imagine a more prophetic statement in light of A Widow’s Story.

Reading Oates’s Journal, one is struck by the intelligence, fairness, and compassion of her judgments and perceptions. Her journal sometimes has a gnomic quality, as when she writes on February 28, 1980: “I oscillate between thinking I am crazy and thinking I am not crazy enough” (358). Nearly always a reliable narrator, she is less reliable when she refers repeatedly, without irony, to her “idleness,” “laziness,” and “unworthiness.” She claims she is “inclined toward laziness” (99), “haunted by a sense of laziness or unworthiness” (171), struggling against a “profound feeling of unworthiness” (194), and “astounded” at her “laziness” (362). She contends her “true self is staggeringly indolent … for which I sometimes feel genuine shame, & sometimes amusement, bemusement” (454). Readers will shake their heads in disbelief, for only in terms of godlike perfection are these merciless self-accusations true. In Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates, she admits to her “laughably Balzacian ambition to get the whole world into a book” (5), but this has been a lifelong aim about which she has been deadly serious.

For whom does Oates write her Journal? She never directly confronts this question, but she implies she writes mainly for herself. She feels no obligation to maintain the reader’s attention. “The value of this journal for me,” she writes on July 26, 1978, “is that, strictly speaking, it makes no pretensions about being ‘interesting’ ” (264). And yet Oates also writes for posterity, for readers who will be interested in her growth and development as a writer. She may not have known, when she first began keeping a diary, that it would one day be housed in a university library, but she certainly realized this at some point, probably sooner rather than later. It is unlikely Oates would spend so much time writing her journal if she didn’t imagine eventual publication. In Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going, she takes a dim view of the possibility of achieving biographical truth, but she makes one important qualification: “Unless the subject is a fanatic diarist, the greater part of his or her inner life will be lost, not simply to the biographer but to the very subject” (231). Oates is herself a “fanatic” diarist whose daily and weekly entries provide an indispensable account of her inner life. Writing a daily journal entry kept her anchored even during those crises when she found herself unmoored.

Anorexia

Oates writes guardedly about anorexia, a conflict she has struggled with for much of her life, including during her widowhood. The first time she implies having an eating disorder occurs on September 18, 1976, when she gazes at recent photographs of herself appearing in People magazine: “I came to the conclusion that I am awfully thin … though when I look at myself in the mirror it doesn’t seem so, I seem merely normal” (145). On March 4, 1977, she refers to Simone Weil’s suicidal self-starvation. “She successfully killed her body. Which she would have interpreted as ‘triumphing’ over it and achieving union with ‘God.’ Having felt such temptations … having been visited by them … I understand what they are from the inside. And they are terrible. Terrible” (177).

In an entry written on April 5, 1979, Oates, who is five feet nine inches, recalls how in 1970–1971 she experienced the “early stages of what was probably anorexia … when I weighed 95–98 pounds for a while, and had no appetite: or, rather, what should have been an appetite for food went into an ‘appetite’ for other things,” adding, in a significant parenthesis, “(I say for a while but it was a considerable period of time. And I’m not free of the old psychological aspects of that experience … about which I can’t talk altogether freely)” (297–298). She then offers a psychologically astute interpretation of the “appeal” of anorexia: “A way of controlling and even mortifying the flesh; a way of ‘eluding’ people who pursue too closely; a way of channeling off energy in other directions. The mystic ‘certainty’ that fasting gives … a ‘certainty’ that isn’t always and inevitably wrongheaded.” In another entry penned on the same day, she suggests that anorexia is a “controlled and protracted form of suicide, literally. But figuratively & symbolically it means much more. No one wants to be dead—! But there is the appeal of Death. The romantic, wispy, murky, indefinable incalculable appeal … which seems to me now rather silly; but I remember then” (298).

Most clinicians would agree with Oates that underlying anorexia is the need for control, though they would also suggest the related need for perfectionism. Oates refers in a September 29, 1981, entry to her own perfectionism, though she doesn’t use this word. “I have wanted to be a model wife; and a model daughter; and a model professor; and a model friend (this, in limited doses); and a model writer (in the sense that my writing doesn’t drive me mad, or turn me away from others, or become the very means by which I am laid waste). I wanted all along to lead a model life by my own standards of fairly conventional morality” (Journal 436).

Perhaps one of the reasons Oates judges herself so harshly in A Widow’s Story is because she wants to be a model widow, a goal that no one can achieve, not even a perfectionist. There are only a few references to eating (or not eating) in A Widow’s Story, but they suggest that Oates had little appetite for food—or for life. “So long as I have one meal a day with people—at an actual table—with the social protocol of courses—the logic of ‘eating’ make perfect sense,” she writes to Richard Ford and Kristina Ford on February 22, 2008; “alone, with no spouse, with no wish to sit at the familiar table, it seems faintly repellent. … My favorite time now is sleeping—but it doesn’t last long enough” (116). At the end of the month, she visits her physician and describes her anxiety over being weighed. She refuses to watch the scale as he adjusts the little weight. Consulting his notes in her folder, the physician observes that she has lost eight pounds since her last visit a year earlier.

Literary historians have explored in detail the pervasiveness of eating disorders in fictional female characters and their female authors. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar note the many thematic parallels between Catherine Earnshaw’s speeches in Wuthering Heights and Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Gilbert and Gubar point out how masochistic or suicidal behavior, especially among adolescent girls and young women, is symptomatic of powerlessness, an interpretation with which Oates would almost certainly agree.

Raymond Smith

Based on the extensive evidence of her journal—and there is no contradictory evidence anywhere—Oates’s marriage to Raymond Smith was close to idyllic for both wife and husband. The dozens of references to her husband portray the marriage as warm, close, trusting, and respectful—in short, an excellent match for both of them. In a November 15, 1974, entry, she writes about the balance between “private, personal fulfillment (marriage, friendship, work at the University) and ‘public’ life, the commitment to writing,” adding that the “artist must find an environment, a pattern of living, that will protect his or her energies: the art must be cultivated, must be given priority” (Journal 31). Oates never worried about finding the right balance between love and work, and there is little evidence that her husband resented her fierce commitment to writing. She often quotes approvingly Flaubert’s insistence that “you must live like a bourgeois so that you save all your violence for your art.” No artist has taken these words more to heart than Oates—and few serious writers have surpassed her legendary productivity.

Domestic harmony is what Oates wanted, and domestic harmony is what she received throughout her forty-eight-year marriage to Smith. On her sixteenth wedding anniversary, January 23, 1977, she notes that she and her husband “are so close that I suspect neither of us can guess how utterly dependent we are upon each other” (Journal 166). Not being married, she adds, is unfathomable. Thinking like a writer, she knows she cannot adequately convey marital happiness in literature because fiction demands conflict. In one of her most candid descriptions of married life, she observes on August 2, 1978, that because there is “nothing dramatic” about “marital happiness,” it rarely finds its way into literature. “One takes a happy relationship for granted. There is no need, really, to comment on it. Like the air we breathe: only when it’s contaminated do we notice it” (266–267).

Raymond Smith was eight years older than Oates and, like her, an academic. He sensed early in their marriage her prodigious talent and spartan self-discipline, and he prided himself on helping to nurture that talent by taking care of most of the domestic chores. In many ways he resembled Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf, also a distinguished editor and publisher. But whereas Woolf was dependent both financially a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• 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
• Back Cover