Textual Confessions: Narcissism in Anne Sexton's early poetry

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2004 by Jo Gill

In Freud, then, we find what might be described as the first of several psychoanalytic defenses of narcissism--a defense that Jacques Lacan was later to take up. (2) For Lacan, narcissism--the gaze in the mirror--initiates the infant child's realization and confirmation of his or her identity. The mirror is vital to the two finally inextricable processes of finding and naming (or textualizing) the self. In Lacanian terms, it is by means of the mirror stage ("le stade du miroir" [2]) that the aspiring subject leaves the realm of the imaginary and gains access to the symbolic order of language--a journey that is invoked in Sexton's poem "The Double Image," discussed later.

Richard Sennett and Christopher Lasch, writing about contemporary American culture in the 1970s--the period that had, contentiously, been labeled the "me decade" (Lasch 238)--study the growth and dominance of narcissistic "personality traits" in the "prevailing social conditions" (239). Sennett identifies a problem with the erosion of boundaries between public and private life, between external and internal worlds--a concern that is also voiced in Sexton's writing. He argues that "cultural forces [...] have produced this narcissistic self-absorption" (333) and insists that it is the "social environment" (12) that is at fault and must be changed. Lasch discusses narcissism--the extreme consequence and end of modern society's "logic of individualism" (xv)--in the context of changes in American domestic, cultural, and political life. Narcissism, he suggests, represents a reaction to and retreat from a general loss of faith in contemporary society, in the lessons of the past, and in the promise of the future (xvi-xvii). For Lasch, it is a limiting, impoverished (xviii) stance, one that exemplifies the individual's inability to "make connection with the world" (240).

For Sexton, however, as in Freud and Lacan, narcissism is broader, more complex, and finally more productive. Paradoxically, the self-disclosure in her work is made always with a view to its reader; while ostensibly focusing inward, it also looks outward and turns away from the self. Crucially, Sexton's poetry is predicated on restoring the "connection with the world" that Lasch sees as absent in narcissism (whereas Freud, as Jeffrey Berman explains, sees narcissism as precisely engendering a "relationship between the self and the object world" [10]) and on flamboyantly laying bare the processes by which this connection is established. This communicative impulse has tended to be lost in many readings of what narcissism signifies.

In Sexton's "An Obsessive Combination," "The Double Image," and "For John," the I can only be comprehended, the self only known, by placing itself in conjunction with an other. The I alone is not self-sufficient and cannot be expressed without a you. Thus all three poems are predicated on a persistent and sustaining dialogue. In this context, a narcissistic perspective denotes not a solipsistic devotion to the self but recognition that the self can only be perceived as part of a larger social context, as one among many. Narcissism here is an outward-looking gesture or process representing not stasis (Lasch's "diminishing expectations" [8]) but change, not silence (Plath's "shut box") but dialogue and communication--it engages the Echo at the heart of Ovid's tale. (3)