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The Self in the Poetry of Anne Sexton Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1984 The Self in the Poetry of Anne Sexton Katherine Frances McSpadden Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation McSpadden, Katherine Frances, "The Self in the Poetry of Anne Sexton" (1984). Dissertations. 2327. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2327 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1984 Katherine Frances McSpadden THE SELF IN THE POETRY OF ANNE SEXTON by Katherine Frances McSpadden A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 1984 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the members of my dissertation committee for their generous assistance: my director Dr. Harry T. Puckett, Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University, for his insightful guidance and patient support; Dr. Paul R. Messbarger, Associate Professor of English at Loyola, for his kind and enthusiastic praise of my work; and Dr. Rosemary C. Hartnett, Assistant Professor of English at Loyola, for many years of professional and personal friendship. All three members of my committee have shown a spirit of colleagueship and of eagerly sharing the experience of learning which will serve as a model for my own teaching experiences. I must also thank all of my friends for their acceptance and encouragement, which are truly the sustenance of my life. My regret is that my parents are not alive to share the joy of this accomplishment. ii VITA The author~ Katherine Frances McSpadden, is the daughter of the late Mildred (Allen) McSpadden and John Hehir McSpadden. She was born November 13, 1941, in Niagara Falls, New York. Her elementary and secondary education were completed at St. Mary of the Cataract Grammar and High Schools in Niagara Falls. She received a New York State Regents Scholarship upon graduation from high school in 1959. In September, 1959, Ms. McSpadden entered Niagara University, receiving the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English and Modern Languages in June, 1963. In 1961, while attending Niagara University, she was editor of the student newspaper, the Index. In 1962 she was elected to Sigma Alpha Sigma Honor Fraternity. In September, 1963, Ms. McSpadden entered the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago. From 1964 to 1968 she held a teaching assistantship in the English Department. She completed the Master of Arts degree in 1967 and was admitted to Ph.D. Candidacy in 1968. Since September 1968, the author has taught in the Communications Department at Truman College (formerly Mayfair College), one of the City Colleges of Chicago. She holds the rank of Associate Professor of English. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii VITA iii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION 1 Biographical Sketch • 23 Sexton and Her Critics 31 II. THE CHILD SELF •.•. 36 III. WO~~NHOOD AND SELFHOOD IN SEXTON'S POETRY . 72 IV. THE SELF IN THE RELIGIOUS QUEST 96 V. THE SELF AS POET 137 VI. CONCLUSION 167 WORKS CITED . • 175 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I come like the blind feeling for shelves, feeling for wood as hard as an apple, fingering the pen lightly, my blade. With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made. (Anne Sexton, "Mother and Jack and the Rain," (Complete Poems 109) These lines express the central action of Anne Sexton's poetry, the exploration of the multiple selves and roles which she experiences. Sexton's concern with her identity centers around a desire to rid her- self of an unsatisfactory, negative identity that has led her to an ex- istence in which she is constricted and limited, alienated from other human beings, from nature and her own body, and from God. Rather than moving confidently out of herself to embrace and explore the wonders of the universe, thereby experiencing the full possibilities which she knows the human self to be capable of, she feels confined within a narrow range of roles and negative selves that constrict her naturally expansive self. Moreover, though she longs for this more vital level of existence, she is "hexed" as we all are -- by these unwanted, narrow roles and selves that do not yield easily to her will to rid her- self of them. Thus, as suggested by her use of the word "grapple," in the poem heading this chapter, to describe the poetic act, Sexton's poetry is combative. The battle to achieve a more satisfactory identity is waged before our eyes. Sexton's poetry and her self are one and the 1 2 same, not in the literal sense of absolute truth to life, but in the sense that her poetry is a means of working out her identity, and that identity, finally, is her poetry. We see the poet sometimes coming to terms with and sometimes defeated by her recalcitrant "dead disciples." In the process of this struggle for a new self, Sexton reveals intimate details of her own life and the lives of members of her family. Because of this personal dimension of her poetry, she has been con- sidered a "confessional poet," and most critics have focused on her quest as a private and individual one. But the battle lines in her poetry are drawn far wider than these personal and family struggles. Sexton sees her quest for a new self as making her an extension of major quest figures, both real and mythical. Such identification ap- pears in her first public statement of purpose, in which she makes clear the nature of the truth that she seeks about the self. The epi- graph to her first volume of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, is taken from a letter of Schopenhauer to Goethe: It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles's Oedipus, who, seeking enlightment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most .of us carry in our heart the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God's sake not to inquire further •••• (Complete Poems[2]) In suggesting that the quest for the truth of the self which she embarks upon is that of Oedipus, she sets up an identification with this ~rchetypal figure that is reiterated many times in her poetry and prose. The mythical reference takes her poetry beyond the realm of individual confession and places it in a literary tradition of self-understanding 3 that reaches back to Sophocles. Some negative criticism of Sexton's poetry argues that such naked and direct truth-telling falls into the realm of psychoanalysis rather than poetry. Her own association of her poetry with that of Sophocles tells us that her intentions are pri- marily literary. That she sees her struggle for truth about the self as principally that of the poet and not the psychoanalyst or patient is also made clear in a prose statement of her truth-seeking motives in a letter to Frederick Morgan, editor of The Hudson Review, dated 6 May 1960 and included in Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. She also reiterates here the internal combat between the self who would know the truth at all costs and the self who would run from that truth: I think that writers. • .must try not to avoid knowing what is happening. Everyone has somewhere the ability to mask the events of pain and sorrow, call it shock ••• But the creative person must not use this mechanism anymore than they have to in order to keep breathing. Other people may. But not you, not us. Writing is "life" in capsule and the writer must feel every bump edge scratch ouch in order to know the real furniture of his capsule •••• I, myself, al­ ternate between hiding behind my own hands, protecting my­ self anyway possible, and this other, this seeing ouching other. I guess I mean that creative people must not avoid the pain that they get dealt. I say to myself, sometimes repeatedly "I've got to get the hell out of this hurt" •.• But no. Hurt must be examined like a plague. (105) In acknowledging here that "most of us" must struggle with the Oedipus and Jocasta within us, she declares again that the quest for self in which she is engaged is not just her own struggle, but an archetypal battle which concerns us all. In doing so, she puts forth a view of the human self as essentially disturbing, though only the "philosopher" is likely to be disturbed; in most of us, Jocasta has her way. Thus the "accidents" of her own personal existence are persistent- 4 ly universalized through archetypal perception of the human condition. Though Sexton is dogged in her search for truth, she occasionally fears that the truth-evading, Jocasta self has triumphed and that her inability to face the truth has affected her poetry; in "The Hoarder" (CP 319-320) she writes, I am a hoarder of words I hold them in though they are dung, • • • This poem is an anxiety attack, in which she uses the metaphor of dig- ging to describe her frantic efforts to get at the truth inside her: There is something there I've got to get and I dig down and people pop off and muskrats float up backward and open at my touch like cereal flakes and still I've got to dig because there is something down there.
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