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Ann Aibor, MI 48106 Reading Feminist Poetry: A Study of the Work of Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and,Olga Broumas DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Estella Kathryn Casto, A.B., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1990 Dissertation Committee: Approved by: Anthony Libby Marlene Longenecker Jeredith Merrin Advisor Department of English To Mary Casto and Tim Miller 11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Anthony Libby for his insight and patience throughout my doctoral program. I have benefitted as well from the careful reading and commentary of Dr. Jeredith Merrin and Dr. Marlene Longenecker. Finally, the support of Susan Sweeney, Kim Montague, Debian Marty, and Robin Casto has been invaluable to me. iii VITA April 30, 1959 . .Born, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina 1982 .............. A.B., Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 1985 .............. M.A., Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 1986-1989 .... Teaching Assistant, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Department of English and Center for Women's Studies. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Area; English; Contemporary American Poetry. Dr.Anthony Libby. Minor Areas: Feminst Criticism. Dr. Marlene Longencker and Dr. Jeredith Merrin. Composition Studies. Dr. Sara G a m e s and Dr. Suellyn Duffey. XV TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION............................................ il ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................... ill VITA .................................................. iv INTRODUCTION ......................................... 1 CHAPTER PAGE I. "To speke of wo that is in mariage": The Family Dramas of Anne S e x t o n ............. 34 II. Political Necessities and Personal Desire: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich ...... 88 III. Crashing Through the Margins: Audre Lorde's Myths of Power.................. 144 IV. Olga Broumas' Feminist Inheritance . 198 CONCLUSION.............................................. 248 WORKS C I T E D ............................................ 266 INTRODUCTION The Politics of Misreading Except for the indubitable talents of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and, of course, Emily Dickinson, Harold Bloom cites "problematic aspects" in the work of writers included in his American Women Poets. one volume of the Critical Cosmos writers series that he has edited. /!/ Justifying the inclusion of "these others" in the series as well as their separation from the larger body of American poets, he remarks that their work has value "rather different from the qualities of their strongest male contemporaries," and that "some of these differences do ensue from a vision, an experiential and rhetorical stance, that has its origin in sexual difference" (2). His understated defense of separate consideration of women's writing suggests that though feminist poetry and criticism have not been without effect, both remain somewhat hysterical, their excesses overshadowing critical common sense. Such common sense tells us, for example, that to evaluate poetry according to its politics either simplifies the complex ambitions of good work or magnifies the significance of the mediocre. And Bloom gently admonishes those of us still harboring such wrongheaded notions of what poetry should do. "That polemic and ideology should be so overt in much feminist literary criticism is understandable," he says, "and unfortunately aesthetic considerations are sometimes submerged in political and programmatic designs, but nothing is got for nothing, and I foresee that the emphasis of feminist criticism will be modified by the success of that criticism" (2). Bloom's concern that art not be feminist cannon-fodder is reiterated by writers whose cultural critiques exclude consideration of the complex demands that a feminist politics can make upon women's art. Thus, while Charles Molesworth finds much to praise in Robert Lowell's and Allan Ginsberg's efforts "to batter the language" in order to "buy back some authenticated version of the contemporary conscience" (41), he argues that Anne Sexton's examination of domestic life is at once too strident and too much confined to private, personal experience to win merit as social criticism or public art: the very proclaiming, histrionic prosaicism of her language keeps her poetry from having the artistic "rightness" of Plath's or Berryman's, and her increasing reliance on a flattening irony . becomes increasingly less rigorous. In a sense she was from the first the most "confessional" of the four poets tPlath, Berryman, Snodgrass and Sexton] discussed here, if by that word we mean a commitment to recording as directly as possible the shape of a private pain and an intimate sickness, without regard to artifice or aesthetic transcendence (73). Charles Altieri rescues Adrienne Rich from drowning in political prosaicism by subsuming her "particular responses to woman's plight in our time" within his own "general human concerns for identity and community" (167). "Thus," he says the power of her poetry resides not in ideas, which remain somewhat simplistic, but in the poet's grasp of what it is like to try to live in accord with an explicit body of ideals and commitments. So the greatness of such poems lies less in how they structure experience than in how they dramatize capacities to reflect on and within it as the poets try to keep themselves from hardening into their ideas or using their poetic powers to create alternative worlds (180-81). Though he is willing temporarily to suspend aesthetic criteria and base critical judgment on this drama of self-construction, in avoiding "the Scylla and Charybdis of reductionism . and blind self-staging" (20) that "limit" politically committed criticism, Altieri overlooks the specific context that feminism and a feminist community provide for Rich. In fact. her own self-consciousness grows from the marked absence of powerless groups from her predecessors' "general human concerns for identity and community": her community is grounded in the experience of exclusion and the need to find language that disrupts visions of humanity in which women's specific identities are either denigrated or ignored. Altieri defends what Helen Vendler has identified as Rich's "public poetry of protest," a part of her canon weaker than the "introspective and psychologically framed poetry which retells, many times, the story of her own rebellion and struggle for self-liberation" (371): the two strains, he would say, work together to "produce and to test a set of character traits exemplifying a woman's power to create an identity in touch with plausible sources of strength and capable of responding forcefully to an oppressive sociopolitical order" (167). But "woman's" here denotes no particular power, no necessary set of ideas. Vendler's sympathy for poets' private voices, Altieri argues, "lacks firm intellectual or cultural contexts" (4). Yet he, too, insists upon his ability to sympathize with Rich's vision and so both distances himself from her politics and removes the possibility of recognizing the difference between her context and his own. Though I agree with some of their conclusions— though Sexton's irony is debilitating and Rich's process of negotiation with her community merits attention— 1 question these critics' insistence that women writers' attention to their private lives and feminist communities either doesn't matter or weakens their poetry. For feminist critics and writers, defining the self through poetry is a political act. A poetics that fails to take into account political ambitions motivating the work pastes a generic label on poems whose key ingredients— the foregrounding of women's muted experience, the articulation of suppressed female desire—