Confessionals by Franki Barker-Johnson

Confessionals

BY FRANKI BARKER-JOHNSON ILLUSTRATED BY MIRIAM GAROFALO

“I am the only Confessional Poet” – Anne Sexton.

An effective poet, playwright, actress and model, born in 1928 in Newton, America to parents of a violent and abusive nature, Sexton was a multi-talented individual who used various art forms to break from her childhood trauma that lead to mental illness, by escaping into different personas and characters. A celebrity to the literary industry in the 1950’s, Sexton became one of the most honoured poets in American literary history within twelve years of her writing. Sexton’s subject matter and raw, explicit deliverance is precisely what makes Sexton’s work so compelling.

The Confessional poem became “an instrument that mirrors and critically diagnoses the culture”. Informed by Freud’s unconscious and Sexton’s own experiences, Sexton’s poems host an uneasy duality of the physical and the psychological; each toying with time, disrupted by memory and informed, yet dislocated by place. Sexton’s Self in 1958 concerns the subject of domesticity; the first half of this essay discusses Sexton’s exploration of the subject using structure, stanza and image. The second half will focus on how Sexton uses voice and style to explore and illuminate the subject matter of mental illness.

“The use of le moi,” the self, “was being cultivated in fashionable literary journals everywhere”. Confessional poetry encompasses the socially excluded and observes a

world that is kept behind ‘closed doors.’ These doors are many, however, first opening for us is the “big front door” of the doll’s house, the domestic home, in ‘Self in 1958’, one of Sexton’s early poems.

‘Self in 1958’ offers the reader the self-exposure attached to much of Mid-20th century American poetry. The subject matter and its frustrations are immediately available to the reader by use of form and structure. Anne Sexton highlights the domestic life and the role of a woman through characterizing the speaker into a “plaster doll”. The figure of the housewife “is marked by a similar uncanniness in women’s confessional poetry, where she is variously identified with dolls, puppets and other forms of automata”.

Sexton uses four stanzas of ten lines each which conceivably signifies the ‘four walls’ that the domestic woman has the privilege of beholding; the even numbers display balance and order to the reader, note Sexton’s “Radical Discontent with the Order of Things”, each stanza has the same amount of lines. The architecture of the piece connotes the repetition of the household routine and the monotony it projects upon its offspring. “Sexton again investigates the destructive effects of women’s over identification with the home on their ability to achieve and narrate a coherent sense of self-hood.” The reader is confronted by the four walls and the same again-ness of domesticity prior to reading the poem.

Sexton plays on the Victorian ideal of the Domestic woman with the words “black angel” used twice to describe the plaster doll, the speaker. Subverting the conventional Angel by using the opposite colour creates an interesting juxtaposition that haunts the reader and symbolizes death; this resonates with the second, slower; “black-angel”. A scorned and unhappy woman – the domestic setting is the cause of the darkness which blackens the prior innocent, pure and worthy Angel. The domestic home makes a mockery of the speaker, manufacturing and producing the “plaster doll” denoted before us.

Aesthetically, the ‘simple’ imagery used is resonant and obtrusive, Sexton gives the reader further clues to the subject matter as the reader departs from each stanza. In the first stanza “some advertised clothes,” cries consumerism. All that the “plaster doll” can see in the domestic home is material, and for the speaker, there is nothing else there. Spoken in a spondaic voice, the dreary list of shop-bought items encourages the reader

to feel the emptiness of the domestic setting, its unfulfilling compromise for the contemporary woman and the emptiness of the speaker. The speaker is dressed as a product of the home; part of the furniture, the only living thing. Simple, actual and physical - the doll and its accessories are described; “four chairs, a counterfeit table, a flat roof and a big front door”. The listing emphasizes the flat, two-dimensional life which is so mundane that its flatness becomes desperate, satirical and almost hysterical. These lists of household items deliberately ignore the speaker’s presence – heightening the lack of ‘self’ felt throughout the piece.

The penultimate line of the second stanza continues with “windows that flash open on someone’s city,” which is bitter and quick caused by Sexton’s use of sibilance. It is brutally dislocating; the city is not the speakers; therefore, the domestic wife is not free. It is apparent that the figure of the housewife “is marked by a similar uncanniness in women’s Confessional poetry, where she is variously identified with dolls, puppets…”.

The third ‘simple’ image is “stale bread”. If this poem were to be considered biographically, one would wonder; Why a middle-class woman with children has no fresh bread? “Confessional works is regularly assumed to correspond, straightforwardly to the facts of the poet’s life”. This may be a sign of Sexton’s inability to stick to a routine, unable to purchase the basic essentials, too anxious to go to the shop perhaps. However, symbolism and intertextuality beckons one to consider the bread in terms of Christianity. Bread means life; the bread is “stale,” the speaker is conscious of the end of life and watches a living-death commence around her – the reader identifies Sexton abandoning the colour white and its associations in this poem and in others. Sexton carefully destructs each domestic item stanza by stanza.

The final image projected upon the reader is tears, however they are absent; “if I had the tears” verifies the resounding numbness and lack of self-expression of the Domestic woman. “Domesticated femininity is regularly evoked by Plath and Sexton as a means of examining the limited opportunities for self-expression afforded to women in the post war period.” Being unable to react to your surroundings or circumstances could be labelled passive and self-consumed and then perhaps oppressed. “Judgments of confessional poetry… Detractors have read the poems as naïve, autobiographical utterances… exhibitionist, sensationalist, self-serving performances.” Consider paralysis. Is Sexton suggesting that the domestic home paralyses the woman? That the four walls,

the material items, the entrapment and lack of life are causes for extreme mental and emotional paralysis? Sexton uses structure and strong yet simple images to consume the poem, indicative of a lack of self, perhaps it was this idea which founded the title. Confession is the revelation of a shameful secret; stepping into a closed box and confessing your sins to a priest; a Christian exercise. Unmasking secrets and moral problems, “the confessant unveils secrets despite the stigma of shame and reveals the moral problem of judgement”. The solo act of Confession is transposed into the poem through voice; - “Anne Sexton often employed the first-person voice to explore transgressive autobiographical subjects including mental illness, family trauma, gender…” the origins of Confession indicate the extremity of Sexton’s work as a poet. Ironically, a priest refuelled Sexton’s drive for writing, if not for life; “the psychiatrist and then the priest put an imprimatur on poetry as salvation, as a worthy goal in itself”. The Confessional poem, in all its ruin, gave Sexton a life line despite “the voices that urged her to die”.

The Confessional Movement was greatly affected by the development of psychoanalysis, however, Sexton’s poetry focuses on the mechanics of institutionalization and of fighting mental illness rather than the dynamic of Freudian analysis. Despite being “Accused of exhibitionism (Sexton) was determined only to be more flamboyant”. Maxine Kumin recollects “how… she worked to achieve through rhyme and the shaping of the poems three parts a direct rendition of the actual experience”. In “The Operation” unlike other poems where “the poet and the speaker are not synonymous, no matter how effective the poem might be in generating this illusion”, Sexton writes herself into the narrative, which becomes a mode of psycho-biography. Sexton attempted suicide, was institutionalized at Westwood lodge Mental Institution and diagnosed with what is now known as Bipolar Disorder and Hysteria. Sexton wrote of her experiences in a conscious female voice which amounted to the bold master narrative of psychoanalysis, of which is presented through non-rational modes of understanding the world.

Fighting mental illness for most of Sexton’s adult life, having her first manic episode at the age of twenty-six, Sexton explores the physical realms of the experience and treatment of mental illness; of convulsive therapies and tranquillizers; particularly in The Operation, which was an “arduous struggle to complete”. In an unornamented style, doctors are notably described as powerful monsters, who dominate Sexton’s physical body and reassure her in a patronizing and naive ways. The lack of power in

understanding Sexton’s mental illness is indicated through description with “almost mighty”, and sardonically “The great green people”. Sexton, despite a desperate wish to be cured, mocks their inability to cure her. “The close identification of the body of the speaker with the body of the confessional text; both are sites of expert interpretation over which speakers and poets exert little or no final control”.

The reader falls witness to an extremely vulnerable person, sleeping in an “aluminium crib”, like an infant placed in a hostile environment, which harks back to Sexton’s childhood, perhaps. Problematically; the doctors example of successful treatment is a physically compliant patient who is silenced by medication which suppresses the body. Sexton demonstrates the frustrations of experiencing symptoms of Bipolar Disorder; a racing mind and pacified body; through animalistic language; “I wait like a kennel of dogs jumping against their fence”. The reader is suffocated and disturbed by the static yet chaotic, noisy metaphor.

The subject matter of mental illness is brought to life through voice; focusing solely on the sounds of the words; Sexton’s use of tough and hard words that spit from the tongue as one speaks them. Creating a numb and bitter tone, the speakers observations of her surroundings include the; “sterile sheet,” the “fat and female” character, in “blue-struck days”. The speaker explodes with observational excess combined with a lack of bodily action which exemplifies the silent panic felt throughout the piece and in much of Sexton’s work. The reader can hear the “boots slapping,” hear the speaker “scuffing a raw leaf, kicking the clumps of dead straw”; these emphatic sounds disturb and attack the reader, as we are burdened with helpless frustration, entering a physically pacified body adjoined with an erratic and imprisoned mind. The self-watching, ghost-like register is direct yet displaced, the reader is pushed and pulled in several directions. The speaker (Elizabeth? Anne?) thumps back down to reality and the reader hears this with a thud; “tied where it was torn”.

Killing herself at the age of forty-five, Anne Sexton is now understood as a prominent historical female figure and heroine, remembered as “flamboyant, proactive,” bold and raw; a woman who “wrote the largest, most sustained body of poetry our literature offers on what this culture calls ‘mental illness”. Sexton is described by Maxine Kumin in The Complete Poems as and “a gifted, ghosted woman’’. Confessing, to the reader, without hanging her head in shame; “I am queen of all my sins”.