The Textual Confessional
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overcoming the shadow—that is, the dark, negative aspect of human personality
that resides in the netherworld of the subconscious. Hombacher admits that in
the years following her release from Lowe House, she has had relapses and she
considers her battle with her disorders to be a day-to-day affair. But, shades of
Amy Wilensky, she concludes her memoir feeling empowered by the insight of
identifying the demons that reside at the core of the disorders.
The memoirs of Harrison, Wilensky, and Hombacher reflect a
longstanding tradition of confession in literature, with Augustine’s Confessions
(circa 397) providing a fictional beginning for this literary phenomenon.
Augustine writes that he must mediate his sense of self through language,
offering his experiences to mankind rather than an absent God as portrayed in
his book that is in the form of a prayer (1979). Tambling (1990) observes that
literary confessional practice, as a means of probing the interior of the mind of
the confessor by creating it textually, since Augustine has involved addressing
people whom the author hopes will learn from the experiences described.
Confessional discourse is a fragment of autobiography, and Rousseau’s
Confessions stands on the threshold of this modern genre. Brooks (2000) notes
that Rousseau’s practice owes much to the tradition of auricular confes