Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (review)

In high modernist culture, the personal "I" all but disappeared. It was an age of invisible poets, impersonal theories, personae, and anonymity. And yet, even then, poets produced their "dark confessions," as Hart Crane put it, in language that complexly warded off any facile sense of an empirical "identity," though not a nuanced awareness of a textual "immanence." ¹ After World War II, conditions famously changed. The personal "I" reemerged with a vengeance. As Deborah Nelson explains in her pioneering new book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, "the sudden visibility of privacy was produced by the excesses of cold war security . . . The cold war provided a language and a narrative to the dilemma of privacy in modernity more generally" (xii). Thus, privacy arose as a new Constitutional right in legal discourse at almost the precise moment it appeared as a vital new topos in lyric poetry. An anxiety about governmental intrusions on privacy permeated such landmark Supreme Court cases as Griswold v. Connecticut (the birth control ruling of 1965) and Roe v. Wade (the abortion ruling 1973), with Bowers v. Hardwick (the sodomy ruling of 1986) depressingly ending the era's establishment of privacy rights. A contrary wish to expose privacies transformed lyric poetry in such landmark volumes as Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) and The Dolphin (1973), Sylvia Plath's Ariel (1966), and Anne Sexton's Live or Die (1966).

Nelson argues that there is "a powerful relationship between the Supreme Court's fashioning of a right to privacy and the extravagant self-disclosures of the confessional poets" (xiv). Cold War intrusions into the private life and the simultaneous leaking of intimacy into public discourse (in the form of HUAC confessions, Confidential magazine, and so on) combined to highlight privacy issues. Both law and poetry began to re-situate their discourses in the home and specifically the bedroom. Nelson admires both discourses, but she ultimately places more stock in poetry than the law because the former offers a "space of contradiction and ambiguity, of improvisation and paradox" that more easily accommodates complex conceptual changes (xx). Of course Nelson works in an English Department, and the ideology of her workplace inevitably speaks through her. However, this condition does not make her conclusion any less gratifying to those of us who chose the pleasures of literature over the rewards of the law.

Nelson suggests that the cultural rise of voluntary confession in the Cold War era precipitated fears that complemented anxieties about governmental and corporate surveillance. Voluntary confession "offered a conceptual double bind, claiming the value of the private self while simultaneously destroying the privacy that made it possible" (19). Confessional poets maintained an openness suggesting that "there is nothing to hide," but they also turned "this openness inside out," using it as an effective disguise (89). One limitation of Nelson's analysis is that, while it is highly attentive to legal precedent, it does not pay similar attention to the literary. The paradoxes she identifies in Lowell, Plath, and Sexton can be traced back through Paul Laurence Dunbar to the mid-nineteenth-century poetics of Whitman and Dickinson and perhaps even as far back as Anne Bradstreet. Whitman, for example, claimed that his poems put "a human being . . . freely, fully, and truly on record," but he also expunged some of his most revealing confessions, declaring in one apparently confessional moment that "Here I shade and hide my thoughts . . . / And yet they expose me more than all my other poems." ² Like Sexton, he pretended he had nothing to hide ("Unscrew the locks from the doors!"), but he carefully staged, calibrated, and revised his self-disclosures. ³ In a similar way, Emily Dickinson toyed with her privacy, revealing many intimate details, then refusing to publish yet carefully saving her poems so that her privacy might be breached for posterity. Thus, the ambivalences felt by the confessional poets were...