Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1994

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

William H. Shurr

Committee Members

David Goslee, Allison Ensor, Russell Buhite

Abstract

Anne Morrow Lindbergh is best-known as a writer for her Gift From the Sea (1955), an extended philosophical essay on the stages of a woman's life. As an artist, however, her most significant achievements were the little-known 1944 novel The Steep Ascent and the 1962 novel Dearly Beloved. In her first two volumes, North to the Orient (1935) and Listen! the Wind (1938), Lindbergh began to develop the themes and voice and control over material that culminated in her novels. One can also see throughout the body of her work a development of her thinking in stages corresponding to epistemological categories of understanding described by William Perry in Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years, by Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development and by Mary Field Belenky and her co- authors in Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind. These epistemological positions–silence, received knowledge, subjective knowledge, procedural know- ledge, and constructed knowledge--correspond to a woman's perspective, her ability to know and view the world.

The patterns in her writing which Lindbergh began developing in her earliest diaries and letters show her attempts to define her identity, to resolve conflicts between different ways of viewing the world, and to demonstrate her understanding through a variety of genre--essays, travel narratives, poetry, and novels. This study traces her growth as a writer, demonstrating her movement through the stages of knowledge that Perry, Gilligan, Belenky and others have described. Drawing also on the work of feminist critics such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Adrienne Rich, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Linda Pannill, and others, I will examine what Lindbergh's development as an artist has in common with earlier women writers. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in her attempts to realize her ambition to be a writer, explored a woman's search for identity, the search for perfection, a sense of loss, and the need to control time, and she provided descriptions of the stages in a woman's life. Although she has not achieved significant critical recognition, Lindbergh felt confident that her voice could speak for others, as in The Steep Ascent, which she called "the story of a woman's life and ordeal--any woman and any ordeal" (vi):I have put everything in it--everything I learned from that life in the past. It is a flight over the Alps but it could be anything. Childbirth or getting married, or the mental and moral struggles one has.... It is my whole life. (War Within and Without 331)

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