Body images in the poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich

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Body images in the poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich

Svitlana Honsalies-Munis

Досліджено образи жіночого тіла в поезії Енн Секстон, Сильвії Плат та Едріенн Річ. Особливу увагу приділено проблемам жіночого письма та питанням тілесності, сексуальності та мови як характерним рисам жіночої поезії другої половини ХХ століття.

Теоретичною базою розвідки стали роботи Е. Сіксу, Л. Іріґаре, Ю. Кристєвої, Дж. Ґеллоп, А. Острайкер, К. Брітзолакіс, Ж. Роуз, які дали можливість визначити поняття жіночого письма та тексту, жіночого суб'єкта та тілесності. Проаналізовано цілу низку пов'язаних між собою питань: по-перше, визначено, як відомі теорії жіночого письма узгоджуються з особливостями жіночого досвіду та реалізуються в поетичному тексті, особливо на рівні тематики та проблематики; по-друге, обговорено, як зображується жіноче тіло в поезії Е. Секстон, С. Плат та Е. Річ, у чому зображення образу тіла у трьох авторок є схожим, а у чому різниться. Вивчаено проблему тілесності як способу жіночої самореалізації, вивчено художні засоби, які використані американськими поетесами для зображення жіночого тіла в їх поезіях. В роботі розглянуто сучасні роботи феміністичних студій та напрацювання у руслі ґендерних досліджень.

Ключові слова: тіло, образ тіла, тілесність, сексуальність, ґендер, жіноче письмо, фемінність, маскулінність, жіночий суб'єкт, жіноча ідентичність, ліричний суб'єкт.

Рассмотрены образы женского тела в поэзии Энн Секстон, Сильвии Плат и Эдриенн Рич. Особенное внимание уделено проблемам женского письма и вопросам телесности, сексуальности и языка как характерным чертам женской поэзии второй половины ХХ века.

Теоретической базой статьи стали работы Е. Сиксу, Л. Иригаре, Ю. Кристевой, Дж. Геллоп, А. Острайкер, К. Бритзолакис, Ж. Роуз, которые дали возможность изучить и уточнить понятия женского письма и текста, женского субъекта и телесности. В статье рассмотрен целый ряд связанных между собой вопросов: во-первых, определено, как известные теории женского письма согласуются с особенностями женского опыта и реализуются в поэтическом тексте, особенно на уровне тематики и проблематики; во-вторых, рассмотрено, как выражаются образы женского тела в стихотворениях Э. Секстон, С. Плат и Э. Рич, в чем их схожесть, а в чем отличие. Проанализированы современные работы феминистической теории и наработки в русле гендерных исследований.

Ключевые слова: тело, образ тела, телесность, сексуальность, гендер, женское письмо, феминность, маскулинность, женский субъект, женская идентичность, лирический субъект.

The research is an attempt to analyze female body images in the poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. Special attention is paid to the concept of women's writing, modern theories of corporeality, sexuality and the problems of the body and the language, which have been considered as major features of women's poetry in the second half of the 20th century.

The theoretical background of the article is based on the works of Hйlиne Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jane Gallop, Alicia Ostriker, Christina Britzolakis, Jacqueline Rose, in which they defined the concepts of women's writing and language, women's subject, bodiness and corporality. The article analyzes a number of related issues: firstly, it determines how well-known theories of women's writing are consistent with the peculiarities of the female experience and its realization in a poetic text, especially on the level of the themes and motifs; secondly, it studies how the female body images are expressed in the poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, what are the similarities between their corporeal imagery and what are the differences. The article analyses modern feminist works as well as gender studies.

Keywords: body, body image, corporeality, sexuality, gender, `women's writing' (`йcriture fйminine'), femininity, masculinity, feminine subject, feminine identity, lyrical persona.

The article is dicated to the analysis of the body images in the poetry of the well- known 20th century American poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. The poetry of these authors is characterized by the self-defining confessional genre with its emphasis on identity, corporeality and sexuality.

American poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich were among the first women to openly write about female body, corporeality and sexuality, exposing the reader to the most mysterious places not only of the female but also of the male body, confessing their hidden sexual desires (forbidden love to a father in Sexton's and Plath's poems, lesbian relations in Rich's poetry). Unlike their predecessors, they wrote much more frankly about the body, calling their names what was previously described using ambiguous words, quotations, metaphors, or symbols. The image of the body in their poems is often a challenge to the entire patriarchal culture with its limitations and prejudice towards women; therefore, the feminine corporeality and sexuality are transformed into a metaphor of desire for spirituality, the desire to go beyond the body limits and, through the sphere of irrational, to master the sphere of the spiritual.

The concept of corporeality is the one upon which feminist literary criticism is often based in the analysis of women authors' writings. Hйlиne Cixous in her well- known work, " The Laugh of the Medusa", wrote that the dark continent of femininity remains unexplored because women were convinced that it was too dark for research. "Woman must write her self: - writes Cixous, - must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text - as into the world and into history - by her own movement" [2, p. 875]. She comes to conclusion that not only female body has always been censored, but also the language. Thus, Cixous encourages women to write themselves and in this `self-seeking text' they will get to know themselves, their bodies and get free from the load of the patriarchal society. body image poetry

Another feminist theorist Luce Irigaray in her work “This Sex Which Is Not One” critiques the hidden male bias in Western philosophical systems and attempts to develop new forms of writing and speaking that reflect women's specificity. Central to this undertaking is her call for a theory of sexual difference in which femininity and masculinity would indicate autonomous, qualitatively different models of subjectivity, or consciousness. She makes a clear distinction between male and female body, between male and female type of pleasure, which also reflected in writing. The male body is centered on phallic pleasure and has one center of (bodily) pleasure - phallus. A woman feels her body as an integral erogenous surface, its libido is not concentrated in one place - the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined [7, p. 28]. A woman always breaks the boundaries; she never knows what's inside and what's outside. The usual limits cease to exist. So the binary opposition "external / internal" with respect to feminine corporeality loses its meaning.

Ideas suggested by Cixous and Irigaray stand to reason while analyzing the poems of Sexton, Plath and Rich. They often blur measures between outer and inner worlds of their lyrical personae. For instance, in poetry collections "Leaflets''(1969) A. Rich dwells on a number of political issues such as the Cold War with the USSR, the war in Vietnam, segregation of Afro-Americans and Jewish people etc. In "Night break" the author embodies the idea that public problems cannot but affect the inner world of a person, thus combining public and private life.

Another feature of women's poetry, according to Jo Gill, is the fragmentation of the female body, its full exposure to the inquisitive view of the public [6, c. 112]. The range of attitudes a female persona takes toward the body in women's poetry is startling. In S. Plath's poems the body is subjected to laceration, mutilation, operation, disease, paralysis. Thus, female body is described through the images of passivity and pain. In “Lady Lazarus'”, using the tropes of a strip tease, Plath presents not the luscious illusion of naked availability but pure hard voyeurism: the crowd is “peanut-crunching,” shoving in “to see” Lady Lazarus: “unwrap me hand andfoot - / The big strip tease. /Gentlemen, ladies / These are my hands /my knees. /1 may be skin and bone...” [9, p. 245]. Here Plath's need to free herself from the male gaze conflates with the drive for literary longevity - the only way to triumph over “Herr Doktor, Herr Enemy” is to transfigure the mortal female body through a series of poetic/actual deaths and resurrections: “Out of the ash /1 rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air” [9, p. 247].

Ann Sexton also creates a fragmentary image of the female body, depicting it as a set of bones, arms, neck, and hips, the leading motif in her poetry is the superiority of the male element over the female: “Women have lovely bones, arms, neck, thigh / and I admire them also, but your bones / supersede loveliness. They are the tough / ones that get broken and reset” (“The Fury of Beautiful Bones”) [14, c. 372]. What is more, the author is convinced that women's inferiority to men is biologically determined and thus cannot be changed: “The trouble with being a woman, Skeezix, / is being a little girl in the first place. / Not all the books of the world will change that» (“Hurry Up Please. It's Time”) [14, p. 410]. Though frankly depicting female sexuality, Sexton is convinced that it is rather a limitation than a means of feminine liberation. Moreover, Sexton sees a woman only in the unity (often sexual) with a man: “She is the house. / He is the steeple. / When they fuck they are God» (“The Furry of Cocks”) [14, c. 386]. But this unity is fragile and not constant, very soon a woman becomes a useless thing which a man throws away without regret:

She is his selection, part time.

You know the story too! Look, when it is over he places her,

like a phone, back on the hook (“You All Know the Story of the Other Woman”) [14, c. 30].

Comparing a woman to an inanimate object (a phone receiver, a doll, a roast beef, a boat, a glass), used carelessly by a man, is a typical feature of the poems by Sexton, Plath and Rich. For example, in “Buying the Whore” Ann Sexton reveals the thoughts of a man about a prostitute (or any woman in general): “You are the roast beef I have purchased / and I stuff you with my very own onion. / You are a boat I have rented by the hour / and I steer you with my rage until you run aground. / You are a glass that I have paid to shatter / and I swallow the pieces down with my spit” [14, c. 570]. Actions of a man are presented through a number of verbs of action (stuff, steer, shatter, swallow), which increase the image of violence against a woman's body.

In Sylvia Plath's poems we often find an image of a woman as a passive, inanimate object. For example, her `sweetie, out of the closet' in the poem “The Applicant“How can we give you a thing? <...> Will you marry it? / It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof' [9, p. 221]. By comparing a future bride to a thing, calling her it like an object, Plath criticizes a passive role of a woman in the society. Adrienne Rich in her early poetry also stresses the superiority of a man over a woman, but it is often intellectual rather than physical: “She who has power to call her man / From that estranged intensity / Where his mindforages alone, / Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free. / And when his thoughts to her return / Stands where he left her, still his own, / Knows this the hardest thing to learn” (“An Unsaid Word”) [10, c. 5]. The image of a man who is developing intellectually provides a striking contrast to a woman who is standing where he left her, passive property of her husband.

Unlike postmodern aesthetics, which separates the notion of corporeality from the real body or the image of the body (Gilles Deleuze), all three American poets tried to reveal in their poetry a physical body, which is changeable, sexual, with all its flaws and "dirty" anatomy. Sexton, Plath and Rich began to inscribe the female body into the text before the emergence of feminist manifestos, thus trying to reconcile themselves with their sexuality, to explore previously prohibited topics and motifs associated with the intimate aspects of women's lives. The woman's body for them, especially for Sexton and Plat, is, above all, an object of suffering. The pain, both physical and mental, is an integral part of a woman's life, it begins with a cradle (“...pain /1 would sell my life to avoid / the pain that begins in the crib / with its bars or perhaps / with your first breath” - says Sexton in “The Big Boots of Pain”) [14, p. 552]. Body images are often closely connected with motifs of physical pain, illness, operation, childbirth, abortion and other typically female anatomic peculiarities. But for a woman pain is a part of her life and it is something that makes her a woman, unique and special, she just have to accept this pain and learn to live with it: “As for the pain and its multiplying teaspoon, / perhaps it is a medicine / that will cure the soul / of its greed for love” (“The Big Boots of Pain”) [14, p. 552]. The language of the body is a special, different language, and, at the same time, the language of the Other. The body and its experience become the basis of feminine identity, the authority of the truth, because only by speaking the language of the body a woman can pass on her experience to her descendants, because she is always limited by the language which is hostile, alien to her.

Despite the similarity of the authors in reflection of feminine identity, they create the image of the body in different ways. For example, in relation to Sylvia Plath's poetry, in modern literary criticism, there are different interpretations of the corporeality and body image. Say, Alicia Ostriker considers her poetry an attempt to go beyond the boundaries of the burden, which has always been regarded as the true manifestation of femininity, other researchers such as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Van Dyne explain corporeality of Plath's poems as an attempt to endow a female body with power in masculine culture. In the recent research by Jacqueline Rose “The Haunting of Sylvia Plath" states that Plath denies the existence of authentic feminine self and often criticizes this idea in her late poems [13]. Christina Britzolakis in her work “Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning” agrees with Rose that in Plath's poetry we don't find a quest for the authentic feminine subject, on the other hand, we read about self-reflective creativity, which is a parody on cultural stereotypes including marriage, family, confession, rampant consumerism etc. [1]. The body transforms from the physical object to the symbol of the femininity which goes through a crisis of it cultural belonging.

We believe that such controversial points of view regarding the body image in Plath's works are the result of the fact that some literary critics define the body as a biological object, while others, as discourse, or representation. In our study, we have used a multiple vision of the body and identity which brightly reflects the principles of gender theory - human identity is formed under the mutual influence of biological and cultural factors. For Sylvia Plath, as well as for Sexton and Rich, body and culture play an important role in shaping an identity, which is not the product of these two phenomena, but its formation is tightly interconnected with them.

In Anne Sexton's poetry there is no criticism of the authentic feminine self. Unlike Plath, she has always wished to unite the two parts of her identity: the spirit and the body. This tendency is especially reflected in her late religious poetry (`The Book of Folly', `The Death Notebooks', `The Awful Rowing Toward God') where she insists that we must search for God through our bodies and our land, and not beyond them [3, p. 220]. Sexton's persona learns how to love her body, her `animal loveliness'. In her poems appear a lot of integral and healing images that symbolize renewal and revival: “Because of this the ground, that winter nightmare, / has cured its sores and burst with green birds and vitamins” (“It Is A Spring Afternoon”) [14, c. 185]. Sexton believes that a woman, who lives in harmony with her own body, who is able to get rid of prejudices about her own sexuality, imposed on her for years, will find her authentic self. “Oh, darling, let your body in, / let it tie you in, / in comfort" - writes A. Sexton's persona to her young daughter in “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman”. “Darling, / stand still at your door <..> /you will strike fire, / that new thing!” [14, c. 160].

Adrienne Rich, who, being one of the most enthusiastic representatives of radical feminism, had her own vision of the place and role of women in society. In the poem "Twenty-One Love Poems" the author writes that she does not want (unlike Sexton) to create a "career of pain", she is convinced that women must remember that the pain was left to them as an inheritance from their mothers and grandmothers, but when a woman frees herself of male domination over the body, she may get rid of pain and humiliation that have always been associated with it: “Well, that's finished. The woman who cherished / her suffering is dead. I am her descendant. /1 love the scar-tissue she handed on to me, / but I want to go on from here with you / fighting the temptation to make a career of pain" [10, c. 77-86]. Adrienne Rich introduces in her poetry a new tendency to `speak the body", which, according to Michael J. Collins, is a certain compensation for the `muteness' of the female body in her early poems [4]. Appealing to the Irigaray's views on Western linguistic and philosophical traditions, A. Rich uses the pain, which was inherited from the female ancestors, to reconstruct the female body and the true identity of her lyrical personae. She encourages women authors to think through the body, writhe through the body and by doing so destroy a masculine discourse, which has been marginalizing the feminine.

American literary critic Jane Gallop in her work “Thinking Through the Body” (1988) used Adrienne Rich's quotation in its title. By `think through the body' notion A. Rich, using the ideas of R. Barthes, emphasizes that the entire world around us is corporeal as well as people who live in it. She places the body in the same group of abstract notions as the soul and the spirit [5]. Thus, body image in her poems is both an earthly and an abstract object.

Being a highly active literary theorist and American citizen, Rich often draws a parallel between the body and politics, the body and history, the body and language. For example, in poem “Leaflets” a lyrical persona hands out political pamphlets, while the author is speculating on the fact that these pieces of paper are absolutely of no value without tears shed by people, without the body warmth and feelings of the person who hands out the leaflets and the emotions of the person who receives them. In the poem with similar motifs “Tear Gas"" Adrienne Rich writes: “The will to change begins in the body not in the mind /My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding with every act of resistance and each of my failures"" [12, c. 140]. Subjective feminine identity becomes the center of a radical political change for the author. The female body, which has always been a political object, controlled by men, religion, and government, is given a particular importance, since, according to A. Rich, a woman must gain both physical and psychological control over her own body, and this process demands major changes in the Western culture itself. In order to achieve these goals, a woman needs a language, a corporeal one, which is essential for the woman to hear and see herself, and to be heard, seen and understood by others: “a language to hear myself with / To see myself in / A language like pigment released on the board / Blood-black, sexual green, reds / Veined with contradictions” (“Tear Gas”) [12, c. 140].

So, speaking of women's poetry, we again return to the problems of the language: women's writing, which allows women authors to convey the sensual and bodily character of their inner self, as the reader immerses in "semiotic pre-linguistic erotic energy" (Julia Kristeva). Kristeva calls this type of text `genotext'. It includes semiotic processes but also the advent of the symbolic ones [8, p. 120]. According to A. Rich, this task is extremely difficult, because a woman author must change not the words, but the concepts that they convey, and it will take years until women find the images necessary to complete such a transfer.

Summing up, in the research we come to conclusion that the body, corporeality and sexuality that were marginal in the poetry of the predecessors were frankly depicted in the works of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. We have concluded that these three American poets have much in common in how the image of the body is interpreted in their poetry. All of them try to include the feminine bodily experience in their poetry, although with some differences: A. Rich is mostly concerned about the struggle for women to restore control of their bodies, language, culture, and she tries to "write directly and frankly as a woman, through the female body and experience" [10, p. 314]. S. Plath believes that the identity of a woman is formed in close connection with biological experience and culture. For her, not an abstract, but a real body of a woman is of great importance, the body which is always changing, unstable, striving to go beyond the limits and rules imposed upon it by society. A. Sexton draws a parallel between a female body and the hidden, latent creativity, the poet is convinced that a woman should be proud of her body, because only in harmony with it she will find her authentic self.

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