Confessing Cultures: Politics and the Self in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath by Lisa Narbeshuber (review)

Finally a common-sense and brilliant study of Sylvia Plath’s work. Long overdue, Confessing Cultures (2009) takes issue with our common critical views of her early and especially her late poems, which often label her works as ‘confessional,’ ‘autobiographical,’ or ‘feminist.’ Narbeshuber states, ‘[c]ompared to the existentialist (confessional) approach which privileges the individual consciousness trying to make meaning in a meaningless world, Plath looks positively structuralist (or better, a Foucauldian genealogist), bracketing the individual consciousness and analyzing the constituent elements of social life and the self.’ Narbeshuber convincingly supports this point in her book, although she doesn’t quite say that Plath is our female Sancho Panza in her later poems, especially when she undermines our ideals about love, marriage, religion, and politics. However, she comes close to saying this: ‘even when Plath plays the part, dresses up, and puts on her make up, she is never entirely complicit. Despite her investment in fashion, romance, and even fame, Plath always goes too far, painfully dissecting and ridiculing even her own deepest desires to conform, undercutting any stereotypes. Her critical eye, along with self-discomfort – always willing to run the feminine stereotypes, glamour, or marriage into agonizing freak show – thrusts her beyond ambivalence or conservatism.’

Even more to the point, Narbeshuber shows how Plath undercuts the ‘American dream.’ ‘Again and again Plath inventively reframes and destabilizes cultural idols, including the most central of all idols in western culture, the category of the individual.’ She proves this point in chapter 1 while taking issues with our current Plath critics.

Narbeshuber’s book is essential reading for our current Plath critics. She concludes with one of her major points: Plath ‘exposes and critiques the serial, functional, cultural field of 1950’s and early 1960’s America and her place within it as a young, white, middle-class woman. In most of her late poetry, she situates the self within, and rarely transcends, the cultural background. For this reason, I have advocated reading Plath’s poetry as cultural critique, rather than as self-actualization or individual psychological critique – still the most usual method of analysis applied to a reading of Plath.’