ELLEN GILCHRIST AND ANNE SEXTON: SYMPATHY AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE, REVISION AND REDEMPTION by LYDIA WHITT RICE (Under Direction the of HUGH RUPPERSBURG) ABSTRACT Ellen Gilchrist's work, in its images, themes and techniques, responds to the life and work of Anne Sexton. Using Gilchrist's own comments, as well as extensive textual evidence from Gilchrist's poetry and fiction, I argue that Gilchrist's work is, at least in part, motivated and sustained by her interest in creating a critical space in which Sexton's work can be re-evaluated. Although Sexton was only seven years older than Gilchrist, the timing of their careers is crucial to their success: for Sexton, who began writing in 1956 and committed suicide in 1974, the second wave of the American Women's Movement and the raising of the collective cultural consciousness that it brought came too late. In contrast, Gilchrist began her professional writing career in 1978, just in time to experience the benefits brought by the movement that Sexton had missed. Throughout her work, Gilchrist pays homage to Sexton and illuminates the contexts in which Sexton's works were created, offering the contemporary reader fresh insight into what Gilchrist perceives of as the previously-dismissed works of Sexton. Gilchrist's writing works toward this end in a variety of ways. In her first novel, The Annunciation, Gilchrist imaginatively recreates many of Sexton's experiences, leading the reader to identify and sympathize with a woman in Sexton's historical milieu as she emerges as a writer. In much of her subsequent fiction, Gilchrist proceeds to explore several of the darker issues that led to Sexton's demise and ultimate critical dismissal, including the debilitating nature of mental illness and the inefficacy of psychotherapy and patriarchal religion to respond. To counter such darkness, both Sexton and Gilchrist emphasize the experiences of writing as a means of self-knowledge and survival. Both authors examine the lives of women throughout their life-cycle in a patriarchal culture, focusing on their often conflicting roles as daughters, lovers, wives and mothers. Later in their careers, both women exercise and strengthen the power that such self-knowledge brings by rewriting existing (male) texts. In examining Gilchrist's work as a whole, I offer the reader an opportunity to consider Gilchrist's poetic lineage and to reread her poetic foremothers, specifically Sexton, in the light Gilchrist's work provides. INDEX WORDS: American Women's Literature, Ellen Gilchrist, Anne Sexton, American Poetry, Feminism, Feminist Theology, Psychoanalysis ELLEN GILCHRIST AND ANNE SEXTON: SYMPATHY AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE, REVISION AND REDEMPTION by LYDIA WHITT RICE B.A., MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY, 1992 M.A., UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, 1996 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2006 © 2006 Lydia Whitt Rice All Rights Reserved ELLEN GILCHRIST AND ANNE SEXTON: SYMPATHY AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE, REVISION AND REDEMPTION by LYDIA WHITT RICE Major Professor: Hugh Ruppersburg Committee: Tricia Lootens Hubert McAlexander Susan Rosenbaum Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2006 iv DEDICATION For Clai v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For my successful completion of this dissertation, I owe much to those who provided their generous support throughout all of its stages, including my family, friends and teachers. I thank first of all my husband Clai, whose assistance in every step of this project was invaluable. From singlehandedly taking over the domestic duties of our household, to reading and rereading numerous drafts, Clai has made my work possible. I thank my children, Sam Whitt and Will Rice, as well, for their patience and their understanding during the many days I spent at my desk, while they waited. I also thank my parents for their sacrifices to ensure that I received the best education available early in my life. I also thank Doctors Mary Ann Wilson, Lisa Graley and Holly Schullo for their generous support and encouragement as they read drafts and offered both their expertise and their loving friendship. To my director, Professor Hugh Ruppersburg, I extend warm thanks for his generosity in working with me long-distance and for his careful editing and thoughtful suggestions that helped me to shape this project. I also thank Professors Tricia Lootens, Susan Rosenbaum and Hubert McAlexander for sharing their insights about this project with me and for serving on my committee. Finally, I thank Anne Sexton and Ellen Gilchrist, for their contribution of such rich, engaging texts to the tradition of American women’s writing. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................... v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1 2 RECONSTRUCTING THE LOST MOTHER: ANNE SEXTON’S CONTINUING PRESENCE IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF ELLEN GILCHRIST ................... 26 3 LIFE AT THE LEVEL OF LANGUAGE: POETRY AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE 77 4 SEXTON, GILCHRIST AND THE GREAT DIVIDE: PSYCHOTHERAPY, CHRISTIANITY AND SECOND WAVE FEMINISM ................................... 140 5 ANABASIS, AND TRANSFORMATIONS: RECLAIMING WOMEN’S LITERARY HISTORY ....................................................................................................... 193 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................... 219 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Although the fiction of contemporary Mississippi writer Ellen Gilchrist has received much mainstream critical praise and a modest amount of serious scholarly attention, her poetry has remained largely uncelebrated and unexamined. Gilchrist, best known as a writer of fiction, initially developed her talent writing poetry. “I learned how to be a writer by writing poetry a long, long time before I ever wrote fiction,” she says. “Maybe I didn’t know how to structure and plot yet—and I still don’t know how to plot—but I knew how to write the sentence and the paragraph. And you learn that being a poet” (Interview with Jon Parrish Peede 2). Moreover, Gilchrist often points out that her primary influences have been poets, rather than fiction writers. According to Gilchrist, even her earliest childhood literary influence was poetry: “I taught myself to read poetry. Long before I could read prose I could piece together the words of nursery rhymes and poems. Long before I went to school I knew passages of Wordsworth by heart” (Falling Through Space 70). In an interview with Mary McCay, Gilchrist describes her reading habits when she was growing up: “I loved good books of all kinds and especially poetry. I adored Edna St. Vincent Millay and memorized most of her poetry from reading it so often. Also, Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot and huge reams of British poetry. God knows what that poetry did to me, but it certainly made music in my head” (109). In discussions of herself as a creative writer, Gilchrist consistently identifies herself primarily as a poet, rather than as a writer of fiction. For example, Gilchrist begins an interview with Kay Bonetti by asserting her identity as a poet: “I’ve been all my life a poet and a 2 philosopher. Those are the things I read. I don’t read fiction. I haven’t read fiction in years. I read poetry and philosophy and I read books by scientists.” In fact, Gilchrist didn’t write her first piece of fiction until she was forty-one years old and enrolled at the University of Arkansas Creative Writing Program where she went to study poetry with Jim Whitehead and Miller Williams. As part of the program there, she took a fiction-writing workshop with Bill Harrison. Gilchrist describes this experience: My ambitions were always to be a poet. [The] thing Bill Harrison taught me . [was] that you can contain poetry within fiction. That fiction contains poems, that it can contain poems. He told me that you have to write the libretto before you can write the aria. (interview with Melissa Biggs 88) For Gilchrist, the movement from poetry to the short story seems natural. Gilchrist explains: “I was a poet before I was a fiction writer, and one reason I like stories so much is because they are close to poetry”1 (interview with Nicholas Basbanes). As Gilchrist has stated many times, her poetry and fiction are closely related, and, in many cases, poetry has served as a springboard into fiction; ideas conceived in poems came to fruition in the short stories and novels written much later. For instance, Gilchrist rewrote several pieces from her first collection of poetry, Land Surveyor’s Daughter (1979), as fiction for her first collection of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981).2 However, with the exception of Mary McCay’s brief discussion of Land Surveyor’s Daughter and Riding Out the Tropical Depression (Gilchrist’s first and second volumes of poetry, published in 1979 and 1986, respectively) in the Twayne’s United States Authors Series volume Ellen Gilchrist, there has been no substantial critical examination of Gilchrist’s poetry or of her poetic foremothers. 3 A study of the poetry seems called for, not only to fill this critical gap, but also to expand the discussion of Gilchrist’s fiction. Until very recently, most scholarship has focused on Gilchrist’s identity as a Southern fiction