Parodying Childhood Trauma in Sylvia Plath and Louise Bourgeois

Reframing Confession: Parodying Childhood Trauma in Sylvia Plath and Louise Bourgeois Natasha Silver UCL Thesis Submitted for PhD in Comparative Literature Declaration I, Natasha Katie Silver, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 1 Abstract This thesis examines how childhood trauma is aesthetically mediated in the works and ego documents of Sylvia Plath and Louise Bourgeois, departing from a biographical approach in order to reconceive confession as an aesthetic genre. In particular, I explore the extent to which parody — as an intertextual, self-reflexive and playful mode — provides a means of framing an experience that resists symbolisation. Equally, I consider how the parodic mode might enable the artists to situate themselves in the male canon. Giving a cultural history of confession, Chapter 1 identifies a convergence between confessional practices and narratives of victimhood in contemporary western discourse. However, the art forms analysed in this thesis (namely, journal, poem and sculpture) actively manipulate confessional strategies, inviting critical reflection on audience enjoyment of the aestheticisation of suffering. Chapter 2 discusses how trauma can distort linear time and memory, drawing some key distinctions between traumatic temporalities that are frequently elided in trauma theory. By contrast, I propose that parody may enable the traumatised subject to establish reflective distance from overwhelmingly painful affect by localising the experience in time. Arguing that Plath’s journals produce (rather than reveal) a traumatised subject, Chapter 3 explores how they both inhabit and exceed the figure of melancholic poet, ironising the conception of trauma as a wellspring of genius. Chapter 4 situates Plath’s so-called ‘Holocaust poems’ in the context of debates about the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz, showing how they parody cultural assimilation of the Holocaust and engage critically with the potential allure of victimhood narratives. Reading Bourgeois’ archival documents as a multivalent and figurative art form, Chapter 5 analyses how the Freudian Oedipal complex (as it is applied to the little girl) is constructed and critiqued via identification with literary daughters in the French canon. Chapter 6 observes how Bourgeois’s ‘cell’ installations deploy Gothic narrative techniques, foregrounding the fundamental epistemic uncertainty at the heart of Freud’s theory of the ‘primal scene’ and mocking the viewer’s desire to uncover a secret trauma. 2 Impact Statement This thesis hopes to bring benefits to the disciplines of Literary Studies and History of Art by opening up new approaches to the oeuvres of Sylvia Plath and Louise Bourgeois. Presenting an alternative to interpretative strategies founded on reading the works of Plath and Bourgeois autobiographically, I focus on a range of aesthetic techniques by which they fabricate rather than unveil a subject. More widely, my study seeks to contribute towards scholarship that re-conceptualises confessional art as a discursive and self- reflexive genre, particularly drawing attention to the overlooked dimension of parody. My project also contributes to debates about the representability of trauma in Literary and Cultural Trauma Studies. In line with emerging scholarship challenging the widespread assumption that trauma is inherently unrepresentable, my analysis of the works of Plath and Bourgeois highlights the ways in which traumatic experience is culturally and symbolically mediated. In particular, I aim to bring greater clarity to theoretical discussions about the relation of trauma and time, with a view to emphasising the particularity of traumatic experience. Moreover, I suggest the pertinence of analysing the ways in which traumatised subjectivity is constructed in a culture that makes increasing reference to the language of trauma and victimhood. The potential academic impact of my thesis could be brought about by publication, either in the form of journal articles or a monograph. This thesis may have benefits that extend to theoretical literature relating to clinical practice, especially within discourses of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. As I propose, confessional art offers a reflexive and multivalent aesthetic object that permits an examination of the complex relation of language and trauma, and the ways in which childhood traumatic experience might be incorporated within a temporal framework. Performing how parody might contribute towards processes of mourning or working through childhood trauma, the works of Plath and Bourgeois produce insight that might fruitfully be explored with therapeutic practitioners. Such an interdisciplinary dialogue could be promoted through a conference, round table discussion or seminar series bringing together clinicians and academics. Finally, my research might also be put to beneficial use through public engagement events. For example, the works of Plath and Bourgeois could provide a productive departure point for thinking collaboratively about the ways in which we build narratives about our childhood experiences. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgments 5 Introduction 6 Chapter 1: The Art of Confession 18 Chapter 2: Trauma, Time and Parody 49 Chapter 3: Melancholy and Self-Parody in Sylvia Plath’s Journals 85 Chapter 4: Parodying Victimhood in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Holocaust Poems’ 133 Chapter 5: Girlhood Trauma in Louise Bourgeois’s Writings 196 Chapter 6: Scenes of Childhood Trauma: Gothic Literature in Louise Bourgeois’s Cells 251 Conclusion 295 Bibliography 299 4 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my brilliant supervisors, Mererid Puw Davies and Stephanie Bird, for giving so generously of their time, expertise and advice. I have greatly enjoyed working with you on this project and benefitting from your exceptional eye for detail. I would also like to thank everyone at the Sylvia Plath and Louise Bourgeois archives for their invaluable assistance, and my tutors at the Tavistock and Portman and British Psychotherapy Foundation for sharing their wealth of clinical experience. I am very grateful for the unceasing support of my therapist, Julie Walsh, and of my wonderful family and friends. Finally, thank you to Andy for bringing me tea in the morning and generally keeping me sane; and to Mara, for your company during the final phase. 5 Introduction Appropriating the Bell Jar The image of the bell jar features in the work of both Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), independently so far as we know.1 A culturally rich symbol, the bell jar evokes associations of scientific experimentation and the preservation of objects for study or display. Here, I would like to suggest that it offers a preliminary approach to conceptualising confessional art. As a transparent container, the bell jar signifies a lack of privacy, even a submission to surveillance through self-exposure. However, the way in which Plath and Bourgeois appropriate the means of display, actively manipulating the rhetoric of revelation, offers a feminist renegotiation of the private-public divide. In Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963), references to the bell jar chart the narrative arc of the protagonist Esther Greenwood’s depression. The first mention appears when Esther is travelling from a psychiatric ward in a city hospital to a private asylum: Wherever I sat […] I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. […] The air of the bell jar wadded around me, and I couldn’t stir (2005: p. 178). The narrator again refers to the bell jar after her first session of electric shock therapy. Feeling ‘surprisingly at peace’, she describes how: 1 While Plath and Bourgeois spent a period of overlap living in the US, there is not (yet) evidence to suggest that the two artists were aware of each other’s work. Bourgeois is more likely to have encountered the work of Plath than vice versa, since she was a peripheral figure in the art world until a major retrospective of her oeuvre at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1982. Coincidentally, 1982 was also the year in which Plath became the first person to win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. 6 The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air (p. 206). Then, towards the end of her six months at the asylum, Esther reflects on her mother’s remark that ‘“we’ll act as if this were a bad dream”’: To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream (p. 227). The bell jar is mentioned a final time as Esther leaves the hospital: How did I know that someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere — the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again? (p. 230). Significantly, this question is immediately followed by the narrator’s memory of Buddy, Esther’s former boyfriend, saying ‘“I wonder who you’ll marry now, Esther”’. The association is just one example of the way in which the novel shows how mental illness is inextricable from the social expectations on women in nineteen-fifties America. Indeed, Sarah Churchwell characterises The Bell Jar as ‘an acidic satire […] exploring the impossibility of living up to the era’s contradictory ideals of womanhood’ (2016). As Esther had told Buddy earlier in the novel: If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days (p. 90). During Esther’s internship with Mademoiselle in New York, when the bell jar begins to descend, this impossible predicament of women is figured by the analogy of a fig tree: 7 I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor […] I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose (p.

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