Textual Confessions: Narcissism in Anne Sexton's early poetry

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2004 by Jo Gill

It is the contention of this essay that narcissism, rather than exemplifying the difference between confessional and postconfessional forms of poetry, represents its potential convergence. By exploring the mythical and psychoanalytic roots of narcissism and examining recent readings of the term's place in contemporary literature and culture, it is possible to recuperate the adjective narcissistic and demonstrate its importance in apparently divergent poetic traditions. Narcissism is to be understood not as a limiting and inadvertent error peculiar to confessional poetry (and acute in the work of Anne Sexton) but as a sophisticated and productive strategy employed by confessional and avant-garde poetries alike in their negotiation of such shared preoccupations as language, subjectivity, representation, and referentiality.

What appears to be authorial self-absorption in Sexton's work may, then, be read and defended as a sophisticated textual narcissism of the kind delineated by Linda Hutcheon in Narcissistic Narrative and more typically identified with the "radical poetries" mentioned above. In Hutcheon's analysis, it is "the narrative text, and not the author, that is being described as narcissistic" (1). She concentrates on a writing that is textually rather than biographically "self-reflective, self-informing, self-reflexive, autoreferential, auto-representational" and that, above all, contemplates and interrogates its own "narrative and/or linguistic identity." Sexton's confessional poetry demands to be read in these terms. It foreshadows, in more fundamental ways than has been recognized, the markedly self-reflexive tendencies of more recent American poetry. This is not to assert that it represents a proto-postmodern rejection of authenticity, referentiality, or expression but rather to suggest that it is skeptical, knowing, and inquisitive about the status of these and about the processes by which they are established and understood.

Since Hutcheon's Narcissistic Narrative mainly concerns fiction, many of her examples and conclusions derive from a comparison of contemporary or postmodern novels with those of the dominant (that is, realist) tradition. Indeed, Hutcheon makes a point of distinguishing between poetry and fiction, arguing that, in this context, poetry is in advance of the novel: "Of all the literary genres, the novel is the one which has perhaps most resisted being 'rescued' from the myth of the instrumentality of language. Poetry escaped with the aid of the Symbolists, the New Critics, and others" (87). Further, she suggests that "whereas poetic language is now more or less accepted as autonomous and intransitive, fiction and narrative still suggest a transitive and referential use of words" (88). In both respects I would disagree with Hutcheon. Confession, unlike much other modern poetry, has not been entirely liberated from this "myth of the instrumentality of language." The language of the confessional text continues often to be read as "transitive and referential," as a truthful representation of the lived experience of the author. Confessional poetry, unlike other postmodern poetry, persists in being read as an expressive/realist mode, offering privileged and reliable insight into personal experience.