Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, and: Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (review)

These two radically different books address pressing postmodern questions of identity, history, and the kind of subjectivity that depends on narrative discourse. Patrick O'Donnell's Latent Destiny doesn't mention privacy, the term and concept that frames Deborah Nelson's study. And while Nelson, in Pursuing Privacy, does mention paranoia, O'Donnell's primary concern, she invokes it to argue that "[n]o era is more in need of reparative rather than paranoid reading than the cold war" (xix). For Nelson, postwar nostalgia for an assumed distinction between public and private, as well as a fear of losing such distinctions, limits the critical and social possibilities of her subject—confessional poetry and doctrines of constitutional privacy that emerge simultaneously at the end of the 1950s. O'Donnell, on the other hand, argues in his readings of contemporary film and fiction that the paranoia he views as characteristic of the Cold War era persists in contemporary culture. Ultimately, Nelson and O'Donnell each suggest that white, heterosexual men are still anxious—even paranoid—about losing their stable, powerful, and seemingly fixed subjectivities.

"Privacy, it seems, is not simply dead. It is dying over and over again" (xi), Nelson claims, noting that since the Cold War, the changing boundaries between public and private spheres have become an obsession in U.S. politics, aesthetics, and intellectual life. The death of privacy signals the end of elite, patriarchal notions of property, bodily integrity, and family, promising to generate new kinds of privacies that do not deprive people who are not heterosexual and male of their personal autonomy. More than a domestic right, privacy came to be understood as a political right when the sanctity of the home became a crucial locus in the fight against what was perceived as potentially totalitarian, intrusive police tactics. In the Cold War era, privacy allowed a free citizen to refrain from speaking and to defend himself against coercion as well as the political and metaphorical violation of his political personhood. The postwar liberal struggle against forced disclosure led to the "right to silence," which, in Nelson's analysis, makes the contemporaneous transition from forced disclosure to voluntary confession the critical, and perhaps definitive, tension in postwar debates about privacy. In close readings of confessional poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Paul Monette, and others in the context of their engagements with specific legal debates about privacy (notably Roe v. Wade and Bowers v. Hardwick), Nelson explores how these poets' willingness to confess—and therefore publicly expose—details of their private bodily, sexual, and gendered identities radically alters the rhetorical and practical terms of the privacy debate. In her discussion of Roe v. Wade, for example, Nelson shows the ways in which "[w]omen, especially mothers in cold war culture, often functioned as metaphors of a highly unstable border between public and private, a possibly treacherous incapacity to defend the boundaries of home and nation" (114). By law, a pregnant woman had to confess her personal decision to terminate her pregnancy and only if her doctor deemed her reasoning legitimate could she be granted an abortion. Women's fates thus hinged upon their ability to narrate their personal stories so that "their ability to be private lay not in their bodies, which could not be withdrawn from the scrutiny of the doctor, but in their language" (116). Nelson cogently details the emergence of women's privacy as an act of confession—the literal and rhetorical repositioning of the female body within the public sphere—and examines confessional poets such as Plath and Sexton, whose personal self-disclosures anticipate the Supreme Court's emerging interpretation of privacy...