Under Construction @ Keele 2018 Vol. IV (II) | Page 49

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Sexton’s ‘The Breast’ are potent because they confess to feelings that American women, who
were privileged in many ways according to the American dream, ‘should not’ feel. Ideas of
death by suicide feature heavily in both poets’ work as an escape from needing to confess, to
admit. Both Plath and Sexton committed suicide and so their poems were ultimately true to
life.
Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ explores the suicidal feelings of a young woman, ‘And I a smiling
woman./I am only thirty./And like the cat I have nine times to die.’ 13 Suicide becomes an ‘art’
for the narrator in this poem and something she can at least control, ‘Dying/Is an art, like
everything else/I do it exceptionally well.’ 14
The lineation of this stanza is intriguing. Death, or dying, is isolated, giving it a
prominent association with art. Yet these lines appear quite centrally in the poem, the first and
last stanzas seem to act as a shell where the inner sanctum, the heart of the poem, is pivotal
and stunning. This stanza contains lines which befit the modern usage of ‘narcissism’: ‘like
everything else/I do it exceptionally well’. But like Outsider painting, this arrogance is illusory.
If ‘Dying/Is an art’, it is precise (she does it well) yet intentionally chaotic; the seemingly random
strokes of the outsider artist flood the page – whether it is visible or not. The falling trickle of
paint on the page or canvas is mirrored by the word ‘Dying’ in Plath’s poem. Rather than write
‘death’, Plath uses the consonant ‘y’ with the suffix ‘-ing’ to spell out that she is not dead but
suffering, she is attempting to grasp her ego – in psychoanalytical terms. This acrylic fluidity
is a continuity in the narrator’s life.
In a similar vein, the narrator of ‘Woman(?) in mirror i’ writes ‘impulsive sentences […]
remembered – dismembered’. Both the narrators of ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Woman(?) i’ have
memories of ‘dying’ ‘[a] death of some sorts’. 15 For Plath, at times, death is out of her control.
It is the dominance of ghostly, but not egoless, men in her life (Daddy, God) who, she believes,
contribute to her depressive illness.
Another ‘confessional’ poet, who wrote about the concerns of women in a phallocentric
world was Anne Sexton. The poet wrote about the physical concerns of women more so than
Plath (‘The Breast’, ‘The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator’). Her body does not ‘measure up’
compared to those ‘movie stars’ 16 . But both poets are protesting patriarchy and the image of
woman as ‘smiling’ or happy with her lot. Although Sexton ‘confesses’ to sadness in her poem,
‘Said the poet to the analyst’, she states that ‘My business is words […] But I admit nothing’ 17 .
The poem itself, and her oeuvre show that there is something to say rather than ‘admit’. Sexton
Sylvia Plath, Ariel (London: Penguin, 1999).
Anne Sexton, The Compete Poems (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
15 See above, Woman(?) in mirror ii, 35-36.
16 See above, Woman(?) in mirror ii.
17 Ibid.
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