"Confessional" Writing and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination (review)

The gist of Miranda Sherwin's tightly-argued study is that the term "confessional," introduced by M. L. Rosenthal and thenceforth regularly applied to the poetry of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath, has been misleading in two respects. It skews understanding of the nature of that poetry, suggesting poets are offering autobiographical testimony in order to work through guilt, rather than using confession as a trope that they can manipulate to create poems. But the label also obscures the way these 1950s and 1960s poets drew on earlier "confessional" forms—as well as how the controversies over their work are echoed in recent scandals over autobiographical hoaxes.

A first chapter, on Sexton, lays out what Sherwin calls "the Autobiographical Fallacy." One of her striking observations is how all of the major poets given the label "confessional" actually explicitly rejected the idea that their work should be read autobiographically. Yet the coexistence of the use of the first-person with the raw accounts of substance abuse, marital and mental breakdowns, and madness, inexorably drew critics to read—and often condemn—the poetry as if it were mere confession. Sexton is a crucial figure to the discussion not only because of the apparent intimacy of her writing, including its discussion of psychoanalysis—there is a fine reading of her poem "Said the Poet to the Analyst"—but also because of the controversy stirred up by Diane Wood Middlebook's 1991 biography, which made use of confidential medical records and tape recordings of Sexton's therapy sessions that were made by one of her psychiatrists.

This engagement with psychoanalysis is developed in the chapter on Berryman. The "confessional" poets did have something in common, Sherwin argues, but it wasn't confession. What it was was the attempt to imagine what she calls a "Psychoanalytic Poetics." Freudian ideas had permeated culture, and an earlier modernist hostility to them was now replaced by a more exploratory approach, by writers who underwent psychoanalytically-inflected forms of treatment.

At this point the story jumps back in time. Despite its title—"The Madwoman in the Asylum: The Confessional Writer and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination"—the third chapter juxtaposes Charlotte Perkins Gilman's well-known nineteenth-century story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," with a much less familiar 1930 novel, The Shutter of Snow, by Emily Holmes Coleman. In the wake of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilman's story has acquired the status of a canonical feminist work, owning its madness as a resistance to an infantilising patriarchy. Sherwin reads Coleman's novel in similar ways. Its story of an asylum patient who believes she's a female Jesus is seen as an allegory of the canny preservation of an identity that social institutions are attempting to quash.

And that, for Sherwin, is what's fallacious about readings that try to tie the texts to personal confession. They imply the problem is individual: a form of personal guilt that public confession might salve. In doing so, they deny the political dimension. Whereas the force of "confessional" poetry lies in the way its candor about personal crisis reflects insight about social crisis, and also represents political resistance—whether to sexism, conservatism, or racism. Rather than seeing poems "confessing" to marginal experiences so as to recuperate the subject back into hetero-conformativity, Sherwin wants to reclaim the poetry's counter-cultural energies. Allen Ginsberg and the Beats are invoked, as writers drawing on equally autobiographical material, but whose more explicit political stance ensured a reception less fixated on the idea of autobiography.

This is all admirable, and one of the book's strengths is in Sherwin's excellent close-readings, which assemble a persuasive case that the poets in question are not just confessing, but putting confession itself on the couch. Yet strains in the argument begin to appear. When Ginsberg begins Howl with the line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," the...