Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton Jessica Mccort Washington University in St

Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) January 2009 Getting Out of Wonderland: Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton Jessica McCort Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation McCort, Jessica, "Getting Out of Wonderland: Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton" (2009). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 234. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/234 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Department of English Dissertation Examination Committee: Vivian R. Pollak, Chair Robert Milder Sarah Rivett Miriam Bailin Stamos Metzidakis Gerhild Williams GETTING OUT OF WONDERLAND : ELIZABETH BISHOP , SYLVIA PLATH , ADRIENNE RICH , AND ANNE SEXTON by Jessica Hritz McCort A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2009 St. Louis, Missouri COPYRIGHT BY JESSICA HRITZ MCCORT 2009 ii DEDICATION To my mother, for introducing me to many of the books I return to here. To my father, for teaching me determination. To my brother, for his strength. To my husband, for giving me the will to finish. To my daughter, whose love of books returned me to my first loves. To my advisor, for all of her support. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Washington University in St. Louis for the support I received during the completion of this project, namely the Dissertation Fellowship that permitted me to focus entirely on my scholarly work. iv Table of Contents Preliminary Material……………………………………………………….. i-v Introduction………………………………………………………………… 1-35 Chapter I: The “interrupted story”: Children’s Literature and Elizabeth Bishop’s Exploratory Aesthetics …………………………………………………… 36-106 • Introduction…………………………………………………….. 36-49 • “Open the book”: Bishop’s Re-visioning of Children’s Texts… 49-54 • Twice-Told Tales………………………………………………. 54-84 • The Diary of Elizabeth Bishop, or Her Life as a Little Girl……. 84-102 • Wonderlands……………………………………………………. 102-103 • Endnotes………………………………………………………… 103-106 Chapter II: Sylvia Plath through the Looking-Glass ....…………………… 107-211 • Introduction…………………………………………………….. 107-110 • Down the Rabbit Hole: Falling into Consciousness…………… 110-144 • Fragmentation and Collage: Broken Identities and the “Humpty-Dumpty” Self …………………………………………………………….. 144-180 • Sleeping Beauty Awake ……………………………………….. 180-202 • The Magic Mirror ……………………………………………… 202-203 • Endnotes ……………………………………………………….. 203-211 Chapter III: Adrienne Rich’s and Anne Sexton’s “Unspeakable” Fairy Tales …………….………………………………………………………………… 212-300 • Introduction …………………………………………………….. 212-219 • “Shedding the innocence”: From Objective Secrecy to Subjective Honesty in Adrienne Rich ……………………………………………….. 219-248 Between Realism and Poetry …………………………... 219-230 The Evolution of Rich’s “Tale” ………………………... 230-247 Toward a “Politics of Location” ……………………….. 248-249 • “What voyage this, little girl?”: Anne Sexton’s Stylized Self-Portraits ………………………………………………………………….. 249-293 “Princess Anne” and “[M]iddle-aged witch” …………… 249-261 The Evolution of Sexton’s “Tale” ……………………… 261-293 The Fairy Tale as Confessional Portal ………………….. 293 • “I am the Story”: Writing and Revising Experience …………… 293-295 • Endnotes ………………………………………………………… 295-300 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………….. 301-305 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………… 306-324 v Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies” (1564) As long as we continue to read these books, we can be ever again young and innocent, ever again older and wiser. Perry Nodelman, “Pleasure and Genre: Speculation on the Characteristics of Children’s Fictions” (6) 1 Introduction In the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton, the image of a young girl reading regularly recurs. In most cases, the reading girl is an earlier version of the author herself. In Bishop’s oft-cited 1976 poem “In the Waiting Room,” for example, a curious young “Elizabeth” pours over a 1918 issue of National Geographic while waiting for her aunt, who is being treated in the next room by a dentist. 1 This process of reading introduces the pre-adolescent girl to the terribleness of femininity and her multivalent existence as “an I, […] an Elizabeth , […] one of them ” (The Complete Poems 160). Here, reading leads to both the girl’s discovery of the anxiety of gender and, paradoxically, her own inherent individuality. Adrienne Rich’s reading girls experience a similarly ambivalent process of discovery. In her landmark 1971 essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” for instance, Rich describes the “peculiar confusion” girls experience when reading as they discover “the image of Woman in books written by men” (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence 39). As the girl becomes increasingly aware of the characterization of girls/women like “Juliet or Tess or Salome” as both “a terror and a dream,” she also becomes increasingly aware of her difference (39). She is, in contrast, an “absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together” (39). In both of these instances, the reading girl becomes a fledgling example of Judith Fetterley’s “resisting rather than […] assenting [feminist] reader” – a site of contestation between society’s texts, the girl’s textuality, and the girl’s own desire to write and speak for herself (xxii). 2 The reading girl, as such, marks the intersection of two important areas of literary, personal, and political inquiry in the work of Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton: girlhood 2 and the texts girls read as they come of age and enter young womanhood. Influenced by the cultural fixation on the child and the increasing popularity of Freudian discourse in American culture, the rise of confessional poetry, and second-wave feminist interest in female socialization, Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton pursued in their poetry and prose an investigation of self and social formation that was simultaneously rooted in the public exhumation of the personal past and the personalized exploration of dominant public narratives of girlhood. Preceded in the American canon by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, each of whom wrote fictions about the American girl that characterized her as a figure representative of her society’s problems and promise, Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton helped to transform the way women in particular write about coming of age, using their own past experiences, intertwined with public ideology of “the Girl,” to transform their past selves into revisionary loci of poetic and political investigation. In the chapters that follow, I examine Bishop’s, Plath’s, Rich’s, and Sexton’s representations of childhood, adolescence, and womanhood in conjunction with their use of forms, motifs, themes, plots, and symbols drawn from children’s literature and popular girls’ fictions in order to illuminate further the strategies each author used to develop her uniquely introspective poetics. 3 Demonstrating how inextricably girls’ childhood and adolescent experiences are intertwined with women’s perceptions of themselves, Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton develop personal histories which are constantly revised over the course of their oeuvres and are deeply interwoven with the mythologies of the culture at large. Inspired by patterns in American culture and literature, their representations of themselves as children, adolescents, and women are recognizably shaped by the 3 constructs of the childhood fictions and the cultural fictions of girlhood that were dominant in North America as they came of age, a period in American history spanning the years between 1911 and the 1950s. 4 As they sought to develop these representations and bring their own tales to life, Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton intertwined threads of popular children’s stories, particularly those in which girls played starring roles, into their highly autobiographical poetry and prose. In other words, children’s texts, most often fairy tales, serve in their work as personal and cultural artifacts that dredge up the past and help to make the newly created personal narrative resonate with readers. Building upon trends in English and American literature and culture that had developed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and became amplified during the twentieth century, Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton regularly place the gendered experience of childhood under the microscope. By the twentieth century in both England and America, the child and, in turn, childhood had become prevalent sites of “social construction” that, as Daniel Thomas Cook describes in his introduction to Symbolic Childhood , could be “taken apart and reconstructed in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes” (1). In English literary tradition, the images of the child and the adolescent were regularly used

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