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Confessional Poetry and Blog Culture in the Age of Autobiography Deidre Dowling Price

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Confessional Poetry and Blog Culture in the Age of Autobiography Deidre Dowling Price Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2010 Confessional Poetry and Blog Culture in the Age of Autobiography Deidre Dowling Price Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES CONFESSIONAL POETRY AND BLOG CULTURE IN THE AGE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY By DEIDRE DOWLING PRICE A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2010 The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Deidre Dowling Price defended on March 22, 2010. __________________________________ Andrew Epstein Professor Directing Dissertation __________________________________ Aline Kalbian University Representative __________________________________ Kathleen Blake Yancey Committee Member __________________________________ Paul Outka Committee Member __________________________________ Leigh Edwards Committee Member Approved: ____________________________________________ Kathleen Blake Yancey, Chair, Department of English The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members. ii For Jonathan and Daina iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I am grateful to Andrew Epstein for directing my dissertation. It is only because of his advice and support that this project was possible. I credit him with teaching me how to really write. I also owe a debt of thanks to those who have served on my committee in the past two years. Kathleen Blake Yancey has proven herself one of the smartest, most useful people I know; her practicality inspires me. I am grateful to Leigh Edwards for her help in shaping what I wanted to say and helping me to find a voice with which to say it; I envy her academic creativity. Three special thanks go to Paul Outka, Susan Wood, and Aline Kalbian for graciously signing on; I am indebted. I also appreciate the support from my colleagues and friends at Northwest Florida State College: to Beverly Holmes, for diving in first to say the water was choppy but swimmable; to Patrice Williams, for being my healthy competition; to Joyce Goldstein, for believing I would finish; to Amy Junger, for making tuition and travel magic happen; and to Pam Hynes, for being my personal interlibrary loan genie. A thousand thanks go to Isaac and Alison Bloxson, Tom and Louise Coulter, and D. J. and Stephanie Stone for their friendship, patience, and prayers; they have been too good to me. Finally, the largest debt of gratitude is due my family who has sacrificed endlessly for my sake. I share this accomplishment with my mother Kathy, who let me go in her place. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract vi 1. INTRODUCTION: BLOGS AND THE CULTURE OF CONFESSION 1 2. MEET “HENRY”: POETIC PERSONAS AND ONLINE AVATARS 9 3. “EVERYONE AND NO ONE”: PLATH’S “PEANUT CRUNCHING CROWD AND AUDIENCE AWARENESS IN THE CONFESSIONAL BLOG 37 4. “MY KITCHEN, YOUR KITCHEN”: ANNE SEXTON AND DOMESTIC IDENTITY FROM HOME TO HOMEPAGES 66 5. “MY BARBARIC YAWP” AND THE VOICE OF THE SELF: READING CONFESSIONAL BLOGS AS AN AMERICAN LITERARY GENRE 99 REFERENCES 122 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 130 v ABSTRACT M. L. Rosenthal’s 1959 labeling of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies as “Confessional,” initiated a debate about the literary value of autobiographical writing. At the center of this controversy was the taboo subject matter explored by the confessional poets: madness, sexuality, alcoholism, depression, and suicide. Another form of autobiographical writing which similarly polarizes audience despite being born in 1999 is the blog. In this study, I explore various shared traits between confessional poems of the 1960s and modern-day personal blogs and aim to demonstrate how we might read them both as part of the larger conversation about the culture of confession and the age of autobiography. This dissertation looks closely at works by three confessional poets, all of whose writing have recently experienced resurgence in popular culture—John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton—and draws a parallel between characteristic traits in their works and contemporary blogging practices. I borrow Berryman’s “Henry” from Dream Songs to illuminate the similarities between a poetic persona and an online avatar and argue that Berryman’s broken syntax foreshadows the fragmentation of language at work in modern-day blogs. I regard Plath’s contemporary cult following as an indicator of her acute audience awareness and explore how various Plath poems function as highly performative works of art intended to elicit a desired effect from readers. I compare Sexton’s writing about taboo marital and maternal subjects to the recent phenomenon of mommyblogging and explain how Sexton’s subversive poems paved the way for later women to engage in open, unapologetic life writing in blog communities. Ultimately, I argue for the reading of personal blogs as cultural artifacts and for the consideration of confessional blogs as a remediated American literary genre. vi INTRODUCTION BLOGS AND THE CULTURE OF CONFESSION The beating of a horse fouled Nietszche’s avatar, thereafter never said he one sane word, Henry is not like that but the fear. —John Berryman, Dream Song 378 I know now that my voice is not a liability. It's not something to spray chemical death on. [….] I was lucky, thirteen years ago, to be introduced to Berryman (and a lot of other writers and poets) by a poetry teacher who prized the voice: "Berryman's the finger, not the moon, if you feel me." —Dr. Desiree, Em Dashes & Crazy Love, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 In “Why Contemporary Poetry Is Not Taught in the Academy” Michael McIrvin dismisses confessional poetry as irrelevant, claiming, “Poetry that is solipsistic and banal and masturbatory (i.e., seems to assume no reader, and speaks to little beyond the poet’s own tiny life) demands at best a voyeuristic reading or, more likely, a completely passive one in which no meaning is achieved for anyone except, maybe, the poet.” Blogs have been similarly discounted and sidelined as undeserving of scholarly attention. Irish journalist Ed Power rightly claims, “Nobody denies that 99% of blogs tend towards indulgent dross, churned out by writers who remain amateur for the straightforward reason that they aren’t very good” and also rightly adds, “The bloggers who matter may comprise only a tiny percentile, yet the breadth of their achievements . the possibilities raised by those achievements . justifies the hyperbole” (10). Power’s justification of a serious look at blogs might also be used as we look at confessional poetry and “the possibilities raised by those achievements.” Criticism like McIrvin’s suggests that poets’ confessional subject matters have distanced them from contemporary audiences and rendered scholars unable to see their poems as part of 1 the larger tradition of American poetry. Additionally, Power’s commentary provides insight into the limited ways in which blogs have been examined from scholarly perspectives. Both confessional poetry and blogs have been pushed to the margin of literary studies by those who deem them too emotional or reactive. In some cases, confessional poetry and blogs have been unjustly dismissed as inapplicable to others’ lives. As this dissertation will demonstrate, these two forms of writing have much in common, and by looking at them alongside one another, we might garner a better, fuller understanding of them both, as well as the twentieth century as an age of autobiography. I disagree with assessments like McIrvin’s and see confessional poetry instead as a nexus in twentieth-century American poetry that bridges the gap between Whitman’s effort to make the public private by sounding that “barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world” and the first weblog in 1999, the virtual roof of the world wide web. More than simply acknowledging “the breadth of their achievements,” as Power writes, this dissertation seeks to define the confessional blog as a new literary genre, although with roots in a tradition of confessional writing, to explore similar works in confessional poetry which have profoundly shaped the way we write about the self, to situate confessional blogs within the larger scope of American literature and the age of autobiography, and to ultimately legitimize a deeper, more scholarly look at new media within a larger literary tradition. To demonstrate how the complexity of shaping one’s online identity and being a member of an online network, such as a blogging community, makes some blogs more than “indulgent dross,” as Power notes, I have outlined a number of traits confessional blogs share with confessional poetry. The idea is that by understanding confessional blogging through the lens of confessional poetry writing, scholars might build on an established conversation about confessional poetry to talk about confessional blogs and borrow from the language used to discuss poetry to now discuss blogs. Here are the shared traits I will explore in the following chapters: 1. Autobiographical content, often initiated by crisis and resulting in catharsis through the divulgence of the crisis to a community of participative and passive readers through the creation of a persona and a performance. 2. A common form identifiable by its fragmentation of personal identity by the discarding of some personal traits and amplification of other characteristics (see 2 Kirsch 125). For our selected Confessional
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