Finding a voice: Mourning in women's religious autobiographies

My analysis of women's religious autobiographies reveals the strategies by which four recent American women attempt to overcome their voicelessness. Culture's silencing effect on women requires female autobiographers to find a strategy with which to challenge cultural oppression, and to discover a writing voice—which is both a psychological identity and a literary style. These four autobiographies—Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography (1952); Nechama Tec's Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1986); Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991); and Kim Barnes's In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country (1996)—exhibit a range of strategies, and a range of relative successes at “mourning,” reinventing their lives, and finding an autobiographical voice.;Traditional religious autobiography proposes as its subject an exemplary self. But this literary tradition, influenced by the Bible and by Augustine, makes women second-class citizens, effectively invisible and unheard. Christian religion has followed Augustine and St. Paul in portraying the model believer as male, and women as less than fully human.;In the twentieth century, the sexism of Freud and his followers made women's dismal autobiographical situation even more problematic. The more recent psychologies of Heinz Kohut and D. W. Winnicott affirm women's experience and provide appropriate tools for analyzing the religious struggles of these women.;Using feminist literary, theological, and psychoanalytic critical methods, I do a close reading of four twentieth-century women's religious autobiographies. These autobiographies range from the self-consciously religious to the unconsciously religious, and they demonstrate the growth of the soul or the growth of the interior self. The reassessment of one's experience during the writing of autobiography entails a process of “mourning.” Mourning is the reassessment and reinterpretation of one's experience, including reconciling oneself to losses, that results in individuation and maturity.;Terry Tempest Williams and Dorothy Day are the most successful of the four at mourning and at finding their writing voices, Williams more so than Day. Kim Barnes and Nechama Tec are less successful at reinterpreting their lives and reforming their identities, Tec even less so than Barnes.;Since the 1980s, women's formation of self and their struggles with religion as part of that formation have found a more distinct voice in autobiography. Recent developments in literary and psychoanalytic theory enable a nuanced interpretation of these strategies for “finding a voice” in women's religious autobiographies.