Confessional Mode in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das

Introduction

The prominent poets of the school were Robert Lowell, the acknowledged father of the movement, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgras, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Kamala Das etc. The term was later applied by M. L. Rosenthal to a certain inward moving tendency noticeable in the works of these poets. The Confessional poets allow no veil of ‘Objective Correlative’ or ‘Negative Capability’. They employ experience in all its rawness and directness allowing it to acquire meaning and form in the imagination. This mode dispenses with a symbol or formula for an emotion and gives the naked emotion direct, personally rather than impersonally. In this sense Confessional Poetry is an expression of personality rather than an escape from it. They did not follow any tradition nor respected any conventions.

Although Sylvia Plath is an American and Kamala Das an Indian by birth, they have close affinity in their confessional style of writing. As both of them express their lives caused by the existential crisis of living.  All ‘confessional’ poetry springs from the need to ‘confess,’ and so each poem cast in this mode is in some way, according to Robert Phillips, “a declaration of dependence, or of guilt, or of anguish and sufferings”. ² Both Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath confess their anguish and anxiety in their poetry. A ‘confessional’ poet places no barriers between his self and direct expression of that self. The ‘confessional’ poet does not accept restrictions on subject-matter, though they are usually Persona. He may write as freely about his hernia as about his sweet-heart. Anything within his private experience may form his theme. Both Plath and Das express their private experience in their poetry. He takes the help of an open language for an uninhibited expression of his emotions, and by ‘open language’ is meant free verse or blank verse, as opposed to rhymed verse (which is so much restricted). It does not suggest, however, that the ‘confessional’ poets are wild in their emotional outbursts. Furthermore, a ‘confessional’ poet courts death and destruction in order to arrive at a higher level of perception. The protagonist in a poetic piece feels quite alienated from the surroundings. Personal failure as well as mental illness is his favourite theme. These themes are dominated in the poetry of both these poetess.

            The Confessional poets employ the self as sole poetic symbol in their poetry. They are artists whose total mythology is the lost self. They prefer to live as lost men. Even a casual look at the major Confessional poems will substantiate the statement. A Confessional poem is surely not a mere recitation of losses, but it springs from the need to confess. Each poem is in some way a declaration of dependence or of guilt, or of anguish and anxiety. Thus the writing of each such poem is an ego- centered, though not an egocentric, act. Its goal is self-therapy and certain purgation. These all elements are found in Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath. Robert Phillips says that these Confessional poets give to the public those outpourings previously reserved for the Father Confessor or the analyst .According to Thurley, in the absence of the true self and the support of the Church, the Confessional poets of America turned to Freud who became their God. He believes that what is analysed in Confessional poetry is not the true self but a conventionalized.

            Both Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath represent their pent-up, inner anguish and anxiety of their hurt mental state in the confessional style. It is found to be a convenient form of expression for the two poets who are keenly sensitive to the delicate.  Plath was just eight years old when her first publication appeared in ‘Boston Newspaper’. Kamala Das was barley six, when she started writing her poetry. This chapter is a comparative study of the poetry of Kamala Das with that of Sylvia Plath in relation to their confessional style of writing. The main aim of the study of comparative literature in relation to the poetry of Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath is an attempt to produce more genuine and more truthful appreciation of their works. They both express their personal lives directly with their own language without hesitation. So their main source of poetry is their own inner self. Their poetry is closely related with their life. Their poetry is their life. They expresses in their poetry pain, confusion, inner turmoil and severe disappointment which was root cause for their anguish and anxiety in their life.  So they are confessional poets since there are all the essential features of a true confessional poet in their works. Although there is no sign of insanity or madness in Kamala Das’s verse, there is an insistent voice of melancholy, her upbringing by careless parents, her marriage with an egoistic and vainglorious man, her disappointment in love and her illegal affair with other men in order to remove her anguish and anxiety.  Sylvia Plath is one of the noted figures of this genre. Kamala Das, a popular Indian poet was not influenced by Plath or any other confessional poet.  Thus these two women responded in a similar way to similar themes. Both have chosen poetry as their genre to express feminine anguish and anxiety as it gives them a lot of scope. Both of them have an autobiographical novel to their credit. Plath wrote Bell Jar, under the pseudonym of Vicotria Lucas and Kamala Das wrote My Story.

The confessional mode has become an effective technique in modem times because it enables the poet to unleash the psychological pressure that overrides his sensibility. Thus confessional poetry, now, is “an attempt to present the poets own naked self and unralionalised, uncensored actual feelings and behavior”.³ The poet is engrossed in an urge to peel off the layers of his self to reveal the terror, pain, miseries, vexations and frustrations that engulf it Sometimes reticence and social propriety are thrown to the winds in the attempt to be shockingly frank. Both Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das confess to drug habit and extra-marital affairs. In confessional poetry the poet assumes that his woes and vexations, sense of violence and guilt express the world and its malignancy. According to Rosenthal “confessional poetry puts the speaker himself at the centre of the poem in such a way as to make his psychological vulnerability and shame an embodiment of his civilization.⁴   For instance, Sylvia Plath assumes that her mental disorders necessitating frequent hospitalisation and problems connected with her divorce and unhappy married life express the crisis in American civilisation. Similar visualisation of personal woes as the outcome of a crisis- ridden civilization is found in Kamala Das’s poems also. She distances herself from such a civilization.

The confessional mode is usually associated with rendering in the first person. Such a technique imparts a sense of immediacy and genuineness to the sentiments expressed. However, confessional poetry cannot succeed unless it transcends the simple autobiographical mode. To achieve the goal of going beyond what is explicitly stated, the confessional poet employs a language that affects rather than means. Innocuous but abrupt beginnings, use of imagery and symbols that operate simultaneously at more than one level, arrangement of lines in appropriate length to carry nuances of passion and emotion, disregard for syntax and meter and a deliberate adherence to rhythm and movement are some of the devices confessional poets use to overcome the limitations of the first person rendering. In the process the “symbol ‘I’ becomes something other through the medium that absorbs its associations; it becomes a magnetic cohesive centre for all the emotional and subjective currents running through the work.”⁵ Sylvia Plath’s poem Mirror opens thus:

I am silver and exact I have no preconceptions

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike

I am not cruel, only truthful

                                           (Crossing the Water: Mirror, p. 15)

Here, at first the poet establishes a vague identification with the mirror because if reflects, but later she identifies herself with the woman reflected in the mirror while growing old. In the eighteen lines of the poem ‘I’ and its derivative forms appear seventeen times. In Kamala Des’s short poem of twelve lines, A Holiday for Me, the first person ‘I’ and its derivative forms appear twelve times.

Confessional poetry is marked by a strong urban sense. Despair, frustration, anguish, anxiety and protest are associated with the vagaries of urban life. Volatile urban values have invaded the sanctity of family life and man-woman relationship. Stoic invulnerability is impossible in a milieu of social aberrations. The confessional poet finds emotional refuge in distancing himself from the turmoil of involvement. Confessional poetry derives its tone from the conflict between the awareness of the present malady and the inexorable urge to seek joy through reminiscences of past experiences. There is a feeling of the absurd in confessional poetry. All these features are depicted in the poetry of Das and Plath. A threat of disintegration of the self and an attempt to put together the broken pieces inform most confessional poems. Such a working-out of trauma results in the confessional poets’ interest in death and suicide. It is a way of demonstrating that the perils and pains of life are too much for one to understand or undo. In such a predicament death or suicide only makes sense. Suicide is more attractive because it displays determination and protest. Albert Camus said once, ‘killing yourself amounts to confessing’. The confessional poet’s fascination for suicide is not a pretense; both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton committed suicide. In Kamala Das the suicide-wish has always been strong but not precipitate because of her essentially spiritual psyche and deep sensitivity.

             Robert Lowell once described Sylvia Plath’s confessional poems as the ‘autobiography of a fever’. This is true of Kamala Das’s poems also. Her fever can be traced back to the adolescent fear about her frigidity, the complex about her dark skin and ordinary features, the suspected unconcern of her husband and her neurotic loneliness. Her obsessive preoccupation with her favourite theme of love-lust-frustration began with the poems in the first volume, Summer in Calcutta. A tropical sun-scorched world of harsh sensuality and emaciated emotions is presented. The torpid world of heat, dust and death reflects the sexual disgust experienced by the poet. “While her sensibility seems to be obsessively preoccupied with love and lust, it finds love invariably petering out into lust, and lust merely eating itself to the point of nausea.”⁶ Freaks is one of the early testaments of despair the poet announces in Summer in Calcutta. The poem is conjured up within the fierce boundaries of despondency. The several harsh metaphors enact the meaning of the poem. The lover can excite only physical passion, nothing more than the ‘skins lazy hungers’. While ‘a sun-stained cheek’, mouth like ‘dark cavern’ and ‘puddles of desire’ suggest the lustful nature of male love, ‘coiling snakes of silence’ at the end sums up metaphorically the poisonous and revolting nature of lust. The theme of love-lust-frustration is developed in several other poems in Summer in Calcutta and notably in The Testing of the Sirens which is a landmark in its progress. The suggestion of an extra-marital affair with a man of ‘pock-marked face’ gives an added sharpness to the theme. The sound of the sirens becomes a symbol for the wailing of the poet’s depressed soul. This is one of the early poems in which the eternal search for an ideal lover begins; the eternal tragedy of love turning into lust at every encounter between the lovers is forcefully suggested by the phallic symbol of the rusty nineteen thirty four guns. The search for the unknown lover continues in ‘The Stranger and I’, a poem with a phantasmagoric touch. ‘An Introduction’ which is only a half successful attempt to analyse the growth and nature of the poet’s self, touches upon the love- lust-frustration theme incidentally. ‘I am every woman who seeks love’ is an augury of the inevitable compulsions of the poet to go through the several phases of love’s torment until she finds in her maturity at least a ‘clotted peace’ in her devotion to Lord Krishna.

 In a poet like Sylvia Plath, the autobiographical details cease to exist merely as facts of the poet’s life. Her way of talking about her Poetry is usually to pretend that it is not autobiographical at all; it is as if the speakers of even her most ferociously confessional poems were mere personal. Introducing Daddy at a reading on BBC, she said:

Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra

Complex. Her father died while she thought he was

God, Her case is complicated by the fact that her

 father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly

 part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry

and paralyse each other—she has to act out the

awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.

                                                            (Brestin, p .47)

The themes of mental illness, depression and exhilaration, emotional intimacy with friends or family, self-doubt and self-abasement, suicide and death seem to be an obsession with the Confessional poets. Usually the death is the death of a dear one, sometimes of a friend. Roethke, Berryman, and Plath lament the loss of their respective fathers. Lowell speaks of the death of his uncle, grandfather, and mother. Anne Sexton mourns the death of Sylvia Plath. Kamala Das has passionate expression of the universal experience of love, despair anguish, anxiety, and failure apprehended though a feminine Indian sensibility.

Confessional poets’ anguish and anxiety is often accompanied by a father- complex. This is to say that having a father-complex and the willingness to write openly about it are necessary qualifications for one to become a Confessional poet. We find Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das obsessed with their love-hate relationship with their fathers or with the necessity for their atonement. But nowhere does the father complex find as much prominence as in the works of Sylvia Plath. In almost all her later poems and in some earlier ones, her deceased father is referred to as a presence which haunts her continuously. The Bee Poems are an invocation of her father who was an authority on bumble bees; in Daddy she conjures up his ghost in order to produce herself on him. Allied to her father-complex is a sense of failure in love, in marriage, in career. Plath speaks of the failure of marriage. The rift between husband and wife is described in ‘Event.’ This disillusionment brought about by marriage is also referred to in The Couriers.

Another common characteristic of Confessional poetry is the theme of death. ‘Death’ is the common theme where both the poets meet, though, in their own different way.  The idea of dying is so attractive that Plath and Kamala Das often think of self-destruction. Of course, Plath valiantly met her goal and Das was saved. In Lady Lazarus, Plath says:

Dying is an art, like everything else

                        I do it exceptionally well.

                                                                        (Ariel: Lady Lazarus, p. 2)

Kamala Das considers death a reward for all her pains in surviving upon the earth. Her autobiography gives ample evidence to her idea of death by water, drowning oneself in the sea. The relevant passage of her My Story reads thus:

Often I have toyed with the idea of drowning myself

 to be rid of my loneliness which is not unique in any

way, but is natural to all. I have wanted to find rest

in the sea and an escape from involvements.

(My Story, p.210)

            Kamala Das, for the first time introduced a strong personal voice in Indian English poetry as no other woman poet had done earlier. Her themes go beyond the traditionally accepted thought modes and embrace vast hidden areas of experience and complexity of feeling. Her Poetry is not merely Indian like others but a passionate expression of the universal experience of love. Her concern has been the existential anguish and anxiety of humanity as revealed mainly through woman’s relationship with man and the male-dominated society. There has been poetry in Kamala Das since childhood. She used to watch her mother spend time laying on her belly on a large four-post bed, composing poems in Malayalam. She knew that the time would come for her to begin writing because even in her teens she recognised a ‘beautiful turbulence’ insi]de her which cried for poetic expression. In the article ‘I Have Lived Beautifully’ published in May 1974, Kamala Das recalls the sweet creative unrest that began to haunt her even when she was only a dreaming adolescent. ‘Like music in a koel’s egg there was poetry in my veins although clotted for wan of words to express it’. She searched for words in the enveloping tension that surrounded her childhood. Thus Kamala Das was nurtured in an atmosphere of poetry. Poetry came to her effortlessly and in later life she had only to decider the medium of its expression. In her partially auto biographical fantasy My Story she says that she was writing poems at the age of six.

I wrote sad poems about dolls who lost their heads and had to remain headless for eternity. Each poem of mine made me cry

                                                                  (My Story,   p .8)

Kamala Das writes with a frankness and openness unusual in the Indian context. Most Indian poets in English do not have the candour of Kamala Das in creativity analysing and evaluating their experience. She exploits the confessional mode in order to discover the images that evoke the joy and frustration of achieved womanhood. Kamala Das, who writes in the tradition of confessional writers, indulges in a great deal of heart baring. Kamala Das seems to be profound when she makes loneliness and despair come through There is too much of anguish and anxiety in the verse of Kamala Das. It colours her poetic body through and through. The adverse circumstances have rendered her vision tragic and melancholy, her upbringing by careless parents, her marriage with an egoistic and vainglorious man, her disappointment in love, and her illicit love-affairs with other men in order to remove her anguish and anxiety. Added to this, she is a very sensitive and unconventional woman, who is not prepared to be dictated terms. Her dissatisfaction in marriage and life sharpened her consciousness, and she possibly decided to air out her grievances through the poetic medium, because many unpalatable things can be said in this medium without incurring the wrath of powerful persons. 

 “Kamala Das’s autobiography in prose is more baffling and dazing than her poetry, though both speak about the same person and her woeful situation”.⁷She confesses in her autobiography, My Story all her frustrations, doubts, and anxieties stem from her early marriage. Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home gives ample evidence of her enthusiasm and excitement. She used to send her mother a poem instead of a letter or write to her brother how sunny was her life at Smith’s. Her mother leaves the readers to analyze it for themselves and fells how the incident took place:

Propped against a bowl of flowers on the dining

Room table was a note in Sylvia’s hand writing.                       

Have gone for a lone walk, will be home

tomorrow.

                        (Letters Home. p.25)

And she continuous:

The report of Sylvia’s disappearance which I

phoned to the police was issued over the radio.

Then I discovered that the lock to my steel case had

been broken open and the bottle of sleeping pills

was missing.

(Letters Home, p.408)

One might continue the episode in Sylvia’s language:

My brother finally heard my weak yells, called the

ambulance and the next days were a nightmare of

flashing lights, strange voices, large needles, an

overpowering conviction that I was blind in one

eye and a hatred toward the people who would not

let me die, but insisted rather in dragging me back

in to the hell of sordid and meaningless existence

and hopes the worst was over.

 (Letters Home, p.132)

Sylvia Plath has successfully fantasized this stage of her life in her novel The Bell Jar. Her self-discipline and confidence were steadily developing. Her ambition to become a creative writer had started paying dividends. She had felt “great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.(Letters Home, p157) The two Fulbright years stand out as the most exciting and colorful events in Sylvia Plath’s life. In a fairly short time, she adjusted to the multiple changes and challenges of the university environment in Cambridge. She reasoned that a life of ‘reading widely’ talking deeply with all types of people and living fully would give her the background necessary to enrich her creative writing.

 In February, 1956 Sylvia Plath found herself a ‘life partner’ in Ted Hughes, a British Poet, and got married to him at a secret wedding ceremony in the church of St. George the Martyr, London on Jane 15th 1956.  Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother proudly, “I have everything in life I’ve ever wanted, a wonderful husband, two adorable children, a lovely home and my writing” (Letters Home,p.438) Sylvia Plath’s mother could sense a tension between the couple. The marriage was seriously troubled, and there was a great deal of anxiety in the air. Ted Hughes had been seeing someone else, and Sylvia’s jealousy was justifiably very intense. In the month of August, she announced her legal separation form Ted and lived separately with her children. She wrote to her mother:

I am enjoying my rather frustrating exile now.

I am doing a poem a morning, great things

and as soon as the nurse settles, shall try to

my second novel.”

(Letters Home, p. 537)

Sylvia Plath refused all helps from her mother, and wanted to show the world that she can lead an independent life. Her physical energies had been depleted by illness, anguish, anxiety and over-work, and although she had for so long managed to the gallant and quall to the life-experience, some darker day than usual had temporarily made it seem impossible to pursue. She committed suicide on February 12, 1963.

Most of the poems by Kamala Das are explorations of the gender roles an Indian woman plays — the embarrassment they involve, the resistance they provoke, and the pain they cause. The confessional mode in Kamala Das is a dramatisation of the self, to place itself in focus with itself. The confessional mode becomes a device to formalize the process of analysis and adjustment of the problems that crop up from arranged marriage at an early age. Kamala Das’s poetry has a strong note of subjectivism, — the same sort of subjectivism as we witness in the Romantic poets of England. The poetess is mostly concerned with herself as a victim of circumstances and sexual humiliations.

A desperate obsession with love is one of the prominent features of Kamala Das’s poetry. The failure to arrive at it leaves her in the claustrophobic world of the self, the wounded self. The Freaks, The Old Playhouse, An Introduction, The Looking Glass, are some poems in which the wounded self, which has to struggle hard to achieve its own identity, is not only the central theme but the principle of organisation as such. Erotic indulgence keeps the self within the orbit of a relationship without making it lament over its wounds. Isolation leads to despair through fear. In The Freaks, the speaker says: ‘who can help us who have lived so long and have failed in love.’ The speaker says that she is a freak and the freakishness is an internalization of the speaker’s urgently felt need to save her face. In one place in My Story, she says, ‘In the orbit of illicit sex, there seemed to be only crudeness and violence.’ All her quest for true love lands in disasters of love.

All the poetry of Kamala Das is an expression of her private experiences in matters of love and sex. It operates from the level of the personal and the particular rather than from that of the general and the universal. There is a strong autobiographical touch in it. Thus, in Summer in Calcutta, we have the poem The Dance of the Eunuchs which corresponds to her own feeling of persecution and inadequacy. The eunuchs are depicted as under:

 Some beat their drums; others beat their sorry breasts

                         And wailed, and writhed in vacant ecstasy. They

                         Were thin in limbs and dry; like half burnt logs from

                         Funeral pyres, a drought and a rottenness

                         Were in each of them

 (Summer in Calcutta: The Dance of Enuchs, p. 9)   

The poem The Freaks highlights Mrs. Das’s predicament as married woman, who does the following on getting no true love:

It’s only

To save my face, I flaunt, at

Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.

 (Summer in Calcutta:  The Freaks, p.  10.)

 In The Descendants, we have the following poetic passage wherein her subjective feelings are predominant

But,

I must pose,

I must pretend,

I must act the role

Of happy woman,

Happy  wife.

 (Descendants: The   Suicide, p.2)

The lengthy poem Composition also abounds in personal emotions and assumed roles. Herein Kamala says: 

What I am able to give

 Is only what your wife is qualified to give.

We are all alike,

We women,

In our wrappings of hairless skin.

(The Old Playhouse and Other Poems: Composition, p. 31)

The poem Glass states clearly that finding no emotional identity or satisfaction with her man, Kamala is driven into others’ arms:

I enter other’s

Lives, and

Make of every trap of lust

A temporary home.

(The Descendants: Glass,p.21)

Consequently, her pure love degenerates into unwarranted ‘lust,’ and her emotional urges remain unfulfilled. Again and again, she focuses our attention on herself; again and again, she resorts to ‘I’ and ‘my’ and ‘mine. What can be a stronger proof of her ‘subjectivism’ than this?

Although a ‘confessional’ poet that Kamala Das is can make use of any subject for his treatment, he mostly confines himself to the regions of his own experience. By so doing he becomes very frank and honest, close and intimate, in his details. He hardly ever writes about ‘old, unhappy, far-off things.’ That’s why ‘confessional’ poetry sounds so appealing and so convincing. It frequently takes resort to personal failures and mental illnesses of its composer, and Kamala’s verse is a brilliant illustration of it. In My Grandmother’s House, the following lines click:

I who have lost

My way and beg now at strangers’ doors to

Receive love, at least in small change?                                                                                             (Summer in Calcutta: My Grandmother, p.15)

The poet’s failure in love is displayed in them. The poem The Bats brings out Mrs. Das’s sense of sorrow and exhaustion in a striking manner:

From stranger to guest, from guest to

Lover, my beloved, when you take,

When you at least win, ignore the stain

 Beneath dead eyes, the fatigue in my smile.

                                       (Summer in Calcutta: The Bats, p.46)

The Sunshine Cat is a poem of her mental illness in the company of a cruel husband. In it we have:

Her husband shut her

In, every morning; locked her in a room of books

 With a streak of sunshine lying near the door…

……………………………………………………

………………………………………………when

He returned to take her out, she was a cold and  Half-dead woman, now of no use at all to men.                                                                             (Summer in Calcutta: The Sunshine Cat, p.49)                                                                                                             

Her hollow marital relationship comes under fire in the poem Captive:

My love is an empty gift, a gilded

empty container, good for show, nothing else.

                                                       (The Descendants: Captive, p.17)

Composition brings to the fore the rottenness of her body and the uselessness of her love-pranks. In it she states:

To be frank,

I have failed.

I feel my age and my

uselessness.          

(The Old Playhouse  and Other Poems :Composition, p. 34)

In short, the confessional mode of writing finds its boldest champion in Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das. Their poetry does not depict only their   personal suffering, humiliation, betrayal, sexual guilt, alcoholism and psychological breakdowns but also general feminine anguish and anxiety. They were modern poets in the true sense of the term. It may be concluded that both the poets find the confessional style of expression to be the most appropriate form for their rebellious, dissenting voice and surreal imageries in order to describe their physical and emotional wounds inflicted upon their personal lives by the steel-hard codes of patriarchy.

References:

1. M.L, Rosenthal. The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960, p.9.
2. Robert, Philip. The Confessional Poets.1973, p.8.
3. M.L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall. The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genesis of Modern Poetry. New York : OUP,1983, p.393. 
4. M.L. Rosenthal. The New Poets. London,: Oxford University Press, 1967.p.79.
5. M.L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall. The Modern Sequence: The Genesis of Modern Poetry. New York : OUP, 1983,p.394.
6. R. K. Srinivasa  Iyengar. Indian Writing  in English. 3^rd  ed . New Delhi: Sterling Publisherfs  Pvt. Ltd. , 1983, P.679.
7. Keki N. Daruwalla. Introduction, Two Decades of Indian Poetry. Sahidabad  :Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd. 1980,p 60.
8. Ted Hughes. Tri-quarterly, 1966, p.81.