Textual Confessions: Narcissism in Anne Sexton's early poetry

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2004 by Jo Gill

Yet Sexton's form of confession, like "narcissistic narrative," resists such readings. Her apparent self-absorption masks a knowing and theoretically astute textual engagement with the problematic processes of writing and representation. Her poetry is keenly aware--and indeed flaunts its awareness--that its truths are arbitrary and its authority disputable. Crucially, it is aware that its putative originality is displaced by a discursive and productive relationship between text and reader. Just as narcissistic narrative thematizes or mirrors its own processes of reception (Hutcheon, Narcissistic xvi), so too the confessional text takes as one of its subjects the complicity of its own audience in the generation of its meaning--in the "completion" of its truth (Foucault 66).

In The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams distinguishes between expressive and mimetic theories of art. While conventionally, confessional poetry belongs to the expressive realm (it is the "internal made external" [22]), it is also, as I have suggested, possible and persuasive to read it as mimetic, as textually narcissistic, as mirroring its own aesthetic processes. Indeed, the image of the simultaneously luminous and reflective glass bowl that dominates Sexton's poem "For John Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further" (hereafter "For John") is important in encapsulating both of these possibilities--a point to which I will return. With this in mind, one might argue that Sexton's writing looks both inside and outside simultaneously and to that extent is always doubled, split, or fragmented in its perspective.

The early poems discussed here--"An Obsessive Combination of Ontological Inscape, Trickery and Love" (hereafter "An Obsessive Combination") and "The Double Image," both written in 1958, and "For John," written in 1959, are narcissistic in the sense that they are intrigued by and reflect on how, exactly, their meanings are realized and shared. (1) They seek to reach and convey a better understanding not of the experience ostensibly at the source of each but of the way in which they themselves work as confession. Mirrors and other reflective surfaces (windows, glass bowls, portraits) are fundamental to this enquiry, either covertly--as in the case of "An Obsessive Combination," where mirroring processes are "structuralized, internalized" (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 7)--or overtly--as in "For John," where they are "explicitly thematized." The textual narcissism that we see here forms the foundation of Sexton's exploration of the dynamics of confession in later poems such as those in the "Letters to Dr.Y" sequence (1960-70), with their sophisticated analyses of their own linguistic processes, and in "Talking to Sheep" (1974), which displays an acute consciousness and condemnation of its own audience. Throughout, narcissism is presented as both strategy (reflection as process) and object (the reflection as material subject of enquiry) and, while generous in proliferating meanings, is also always shown to be susceptible to error, to be potentially distorting and distorted.