Getting Out of Wonderland: Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton

329 Pages·2017·1.14 MB·English

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All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)
January 2009
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Jessica McCort
Washington University in St. Louis
Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd
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McCort, Jessica, "Getting Out of Wonderland: Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne
Sexton" (2009). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 234.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/234
This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has
been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington
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WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Department of English
Dissertation Examination Committee:
Vivian R. Pollak, Chair
Robert Milder
Sarah Rivett
Miriam Bailin
Stamos Metzidakis
Gerhild Williams

GETTING OUT OF WONDERLAND:
ELIZABETH BISHOP, SYLVIA PLATH, ADRIENNE RICH, AND ANNE SEXTON
by
Jessica Hritz McCort

A dissertation presented to the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
of Washington University in
partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
December 2009
St. Louis, Missouri
COPYRIGHT BY
JESSICA HRITZ MCCORT
2009

ii
DEDICATION

To my mother, for introducing me to many of the books I return to here.
To my father, for teaching me determination.
To my brother, for his strength.
To my husband, for giving me the will to finish.
To my daughter, whose love of books returned me to my first loves.
To my advisor, for all of her support.

iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Washington University in St. Louis for the support I received during
the completion of this project, namely the Dissertation Fellowship that permitted me to
focus entirely on my scholarly work.

iv
Table of Contents

(cid:1) Preliminary Material……………………………………………………….. i-v

(cid:1) Introduction………………………………………………………………… 1-35

(cid:1) Chapter I: The “interrupted story”: Children’s Literature and Elizabeth Bishop’s
Exploratory Aesthetics …………………………………………………… 36-106
• Introduction…………………………………………………….. 36-49
• “Open the book”: Bishop’s Re-visioning of Children’s Texts… 49-54
• Twice-Told Tales………………………………………………. 54-84
• The Diary of Elizabeth Bishop, or Her Life as a Little Girl……. 84-102
• Wonderlands……………………………………………………. 102-103
• Endnotes………………………………………………………… 103-106

(cid:1) Chapter II: Sylvia Plath through the Looking-Glass ....…………………… 107-211
• Introduction…………………………………………………….. 107-110
• Down the Rabbit Hole: Falling into Consciousness…………… 110-144
• Fragmentation and Collage: Broken Identities and the “Humpty-Dumpty”
Self …………………………………………………………….. 144-180
• Sleeping Beauty Awake ……………………………………….. 180-202
• The Magic Mirror ……………………………………………… 202-203
• Endnotes ……………………………………………………….. 203-211

(cid:1) Chapter III: Adrienne Rich’s and Anne Sexton’s “Unspeakable” Fairy Tales
…………….………………………………………………………………… 212-300
• Introduction …………………………………………………….. 212-219
• “Shedding the innocence”: From Objective Secrecy to Subjective Honesty
in Adrienne Rich ……………………………………………….. 219-248
(cid:2) Between Realism and Poetry …………………………... 219-230
(cid:2) The Evolution of Rich’s “Tale” ………………………... 230-247
(cid:2) Toward a “Politics of Location” ……………………….. 248-249
• “What voyage this, little girl?”: Anne Sexton’s Stylized Self-Portraits
………………………………………………………………….. 249-293
(cid:2) “Princess Anne” and “[M]iddle-aged witch” …………… 249-261
(cid:2) The Evolution of Sexton’s “Tale” ……………………… 261-293
(cid:2) The Fairy Tale as Confessional Portal ………………….. 293
• “I am the Story”: Writing and Revising Experience …………… 293-295
• Endnotes ………………………………………………………… 295-300

(cid:1) Conclusion ………………………………………………………………….. 301-305

(cid:1) Works Cited ………………………………………………………………… 306-324

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Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Childhood is the Kingdom
Where Nobody Dies” (1564)

As long as we continue to read these books, we can be ever again young
and innocent, ever again older and wiser.
Perry Nodelman, “Pleasure and Genre: Speculation on the
Characteristics of Children’s Fictions” (6)

1
Introduction
In the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton,
the image of a young girl reading regularly recurs. In most cases, the reading girl is an
earlier version of the author herself. In Bishop’s oft-cited 1976 poem “In the Waiting
Room,” for example, a curious young “Elizabeth” pours over a 1918 issue of National
Geographic while waiting for her aunt, who is being treated in the next room by a
dentist.1 This process of reading introduces the pre-adolescent girl to the terribleness of
femininity and her multivalent existence as “an I, […] an Elizabeth, […] one of them”
(The Complete Poems 160). Here, reading leads to both the girl’s discovery of the
anxiety of gender and, paradoxically, her own inherent individuality. Adrienne Rich’s
reading girls experience a similarly ambivalent process of discovery. In her landmark
1971 essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” for instance, Rich
describes the “peculiar confusion” girls experience when reading as they discover “the
image of Woman in books written by men” (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence 39). As the girl
becomes increasingly aware of the characterization of girls/women like “Juliet or Tess or
Salome” as both “a terror and a dream,” she also becomes increasingly aware of her
difference (39). She is, in contrast, an “absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired
creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together” (39). In both of these
instances, the reading girl becomes a fledgling example of Judith Fetterley’s “resisting
rather than […] assenting [feminist] reader” – a site of contestation between society’s
texts, the girl’s textuality, and the girl’s own desire to write and speak for herself (xxii).2
The reading girl, as such, marks the intersection of two important areas of literary,
personal, and political inquiry in the work of Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton: girlhood
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and the texts girls read as they come of age and enter young womanhood. Influenced by
the cultural fixation on the child and the increasing popularity of Freudian discourse in
American culture, the rise of confessional poetry, and second-wave feminist interest in
female socialization, Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton pursued in their poetry and prose an
investigation of self and social formation that was simultaneously rooted in the public
exhumation of the personal past and the personalized exploration of dominant public
narratives of girlhood. Preceded in the American canon by such authors as Louisa May
Alcott, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, each of whom wrote fictions about the
American girl that characterized her as a figure representative of her society’s problems
and promise, Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton helped to transform the way women in
particular write about coming of age, using their own past experiences, intertwined with
public ideology of “the Girl,” to transform their past selves into revisionary loci of poetic
and political investigation.
In the chapters that follow, I examine Bishop’s, Plath’s, Rich’s, and Sexton’s
representations of childhood, adolescence, and womanhood in conjunction with their use
of forms, motifs, themes, plots, and symbols drawn from children’s literature and popular
girls’ fictions in order to illuminate further the strategies each author used to develop her
uniquely introspective poetics.3 Demonstrating how inextricably girls’ childhood and
adolescent experiences are intertwined with women’s perceptions of themselves, Bishop,
Plath, Rich, and Sexton develop personal histories which are constantly revised over the
course of their oeuvres and are deeply interwoven with the mythologies of the culture at
large. Inspired by patterns in American culture and literature, their representations of
themselves as children, adolescents, and women are recognizably shaped by the
3
constructs of the childhood fictions and the cultural fictions of girlhood that were
dominant in North America as they came of age, a period in American history spanning
the years between 1911 and the 1950s.4 As they sought to develop these representations
and bring their own tales to life, Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton intertwined threads of
popular children’s stories, particularly those in which girls played starring roles, into their
highly autobiographical poetry and prose. In other words, children’s texts, most often
fairy tales, serve in their work as personal and cultural artifacts that dredge up the past
and help to make the newly created personal narrative resonate with readers.
Building upon trends in English and American literature and culture that had
developed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and became amplified
during the twentieth century, Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton regularly place the
gendered experience of childhood under the microscope. By the twentieth century in both
England and America, the child and, in turn, childhood had become prevalent sites of
“social construction” that, as Daniel Thomas Cook describes in his introduction to
Symbolic Childhood, could be “taken apart and reconstructed in a variety of ways for a
variety of purposes” (1). In English literary tradition, the images of the child and the
adolescent were regularly used to critique the society in which the author came of age
and to examine the patterns of social and psychological development within that society.
The child as social construction appeared throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, for example, in the work of such authors as Blake, Wordsworth, Dickens,
George Eliot, the Brontës, and Lewis Carroll, who each used the child, in his or her own
fashion, as a vehicle for “the subjective investigation of the self” and the individual
“protest against the Experience of society” (Coveney 32). As Peter Coveney explains in
4