Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2018 The Personal, the Political, and the Confessional: Confessional Poetry and the Truth of the Body, 1959 to 2014 Natalie Perfetti-Oates Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE PERSONAL, THE POLITICAL, AND THE CONFESSIONAL: CONFESSIONAL POETRY AND THE TRUTH OF THE BODY, 1959 TO 2014 By NATALIE PERFETTI-OATES A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Natalie Perfetti-Oates defended this dissertation on March 23, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were: Joann Gardner Professor Directing Dissertation Reinier Leushuis University Representative Linda Saladin-Adams Committee Member Robert Stilling Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee chair Dr. Joann Gardner, who above all knows poetry. The depth and breadth of her wisdom were infinitely helpful, along with her patience and willingness to work with me across barriers of time and space. I am also grateful to my committee members Dr. Linda Saladin-Adams, Dr. Robert Stilling, and Dr. Reinier Leushuis for their support—in the form of their enthusiasm about my work, their time spent reading and commenting on my drafts, and their treatment of me as a scholar. I would also like to thank my friend and colleague Patrick Osborne, for the many hours spent listening to me articulate my argument, for the advice about research and writing, and for the confidence in me throughout this project. Lastly, I would like to thank my family. I am grateful to my mother Sheree Perfetti for her endless encouragement, and her willingness to help at a moment’s notice; my father Dominic Perfetti for his unfailing understanding and empathy; and my siblings Sarah, Nic, and Emily for encouraging me not to give up. I appreciate my husband Michael Oates for more than I can articulate: for his love, for listening, and, for over and over, allowing me a room of my own to write. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ............................................................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1. THE CONFESSIONAL POETRY MOVEMENT AND THE (UN)HAPPY AMERICAN DREAM: SOCIAL CLASS AND THE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN LOWELL AND SEXTON ..............................................................................................................................17 CHAPTER 2. INVISIBILITY AND MASCULINITY: TRUTH AND THE MALE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN SNODGRASS AND LOWELL ....................................................38 CHAPTER 3. UNDERWRITTEN BY WHITENESS: THE CANON AND THE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN LORDE AND RICH .....................................................................56 CHAPTER 4. BEYOND THE AMERICAN DREAM: THE SUFFERING OF OTHERS AND THE GLOBAL CONFESSIONAL BODY IN FORCHÉ AND OLDS ........................................76 CHAPTER 5. (STILL) UNDERWRITTEN BY WHITENESS: THE RACIAL POLITICS OF THE CONFESSIONAL BODY AND CONFESSIONAL POETRY OF COLOR IN CLIFTON AND OLDS ...................................................................................................................................93 CHAPTER 6. SUFFERING, SEXUALITY, AND MASCULINITY: TRUTH AND THE MALE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN OLDS AND MOSES...................................................................109 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................127 References ....................................................................................................................................133 Biographical Sketch .....................................................................................................................139 iv ABSTRACT The power of Confessional poetry derives in large part from its reputation for telling the truth. Indeed, the very term “confessional” indicates the genre’s status as a discourse of truth. Recent scholarship on Confessional poetry has focused on revealing how the genre is not as authentic or truthful as readers have assumed, and has countered assumptions from earlier critics that Confessional poems are uncritically autobiographical. The relationship between Confessional poetry and truth does not entail the facts of the authors’ lives as previously assumed, yet, rather than disassociate Confessionalism from truth altogether, I seek to redefine the relationship. Instead of regarding Confessional poetry as a collection of individual confessions, we should understand the genre more broadly in terms of what U.S. culture considers to be confessional. The truth at the heart of Confessional poetry lies in its revelation of culturally significant information: the sites of our deepest emotions, the topics we vehemently disagree on, the places we feel most vulnerable, and the matters we really care about. Confessions often have cultural significance as they tap into the systems of power that intimately shape people’s lives. The continuing genre of Confessional poetry in the United States reveals the truths of the body, and how the personal is political over generations. I carry out this argument through the poems of several generations of Confessional poets, and through the lenses of class, gender, and race, in order to find what we consider worth confessing, what we do not, and how the content of our confessions evolves or remains over time. v INTRODUCTION Since its beginning in 1959, the genre of Confessional poetry has been intimately entangled with the notion of truth. Many of its first critics associated Confessional poetry with autobiographical truth, the unreserved expression of the poet’s personal experiences, and read it vis-à-vis the honesty of diary writing. M.L. Rosenthal’s 1959 review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies asserts that “Lowell removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal” (154). However, contemporary scholarship on Confessional poetry focuses on revealing how the genre is not as authentic or truthful as readers have assumed, and counters assumptions from critics that Confessional poetry is uncritically autobiographical. Examples include Miranda Sherwin (2011), Lisa Narbeshuber (2009), Jo Gill (2007), Clare Pollard (2006), and Gale Swiontkowski (2003). Referring to Anne Sexton’s lectures, Sylvia Plath’s diary entries, or John Berryman’s preface to The Dream Songs, their research points out that the Confessional poets themselves rejected identifying with this genre, and the autobiographical readings it tends to inspire. Indeed, according to Sherwin, “Without exception, the confessional poets despised and resisted the label of ‘confessional,’ and all argued that their work was only nominally autobiographical” (7). This trend continues in contemporary Confessionalism, such as that of Sharon Olds, who prefers to classify her work as “apparently personal poetry” (qtd. in Farish 61) rather than Confessional in order to distance her work from the diary writing associated with the term. Scholars critical of the conflation between Confessional poetry and autobiographical truth advocate for a distinction between the “I” of the poem and the “I” of the poet. Gill’s study of Sexton’s oeuvre asserts that “Sexton’s manipulation of the persona ‘I’ raises crucial questions 1 about the authenticity and credibility typically regarded as characteristic of confessionalism. It becomes impossible to read her poems in order to identify or evaluate the degree of (particularly biographical) truth implicit in each. Instead, we must acknowledge that, just as there are many ‘I’s, none of which is to be identified with the historical author, there are multiple truths” (444). Narbeshuber makes a similar statement about scholars who read for an autobiographical self, or any single poetic persona, in the works of Plath: “despite the fruitfulness of these critics’ projects, they read for a unified consciousness in Plath’s poetry, a trend I additionally challenge” (xi). In addition, Swiontkowski, whose research examines the theme of incest in the poems of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Sharon Olds, spends the first four pages of the book’s preface explaining that the Confessional poetry she analyzes should not be read autobiographically, but as a motif. She specifies that “In each and every case, I am examining the poem and not the poet. Even when I refer to the speaker of the poem by the author’s name, I am referring to the author’s persona, her created voice in that poem, and making no claim for autobiographical truth” (12). These scholars recognize the craft and complexity of Confessional poems. Although the power of Confessional poetry derives in large part from its reputation for telling the truth, its representations of life remain as constructed and stylized as that of any poetic genre. I consider not why the term “Confessional”