Compelled to write: Crisis and self-constitution in the work of Susan Warner, Edith Wharton, and Anne Sexton

Michel Foucault said that individuals have an ethical responsibility to create themselves as works of art. One vehicle that people have used for this act of creation or self-constitution is writing. But many critical approaches claim that the biography of the author is irrelevant, ignoring the influence of biography on the writing because the relationship between life and art is too problematical to be definable. Some critics interested in feminism have determined that ignoring the life of the author because of the problems it imposes is no longer an adequate response to the question of the relationship between life and art. Susan Warner, Edith Wharton, and Anne Sexton have all been marginalized by critics who evaluated their work without giving attention to the lives that produced those works.;Following the collapse of her family's fortune, Susan Warner becomes a Christian and tries to re-constitute herself as a woman without expectations of luxury and romance. She discovers, however, that she cannot suffocate all of her desires, so through her fiction she tries to reshape her passions, constituting herself as a wealthy Christian woman who also finds romance.;Edith Wharton is not so successful in her struggle for self-constitution because she is unwilling to commit herself to the task. She is divided between wanting to be taken seriously in a world that gives more respect to men's writing and wanting to explore women's needs and concerns in her fiction. This division makes it impossible for her to sustain the struggle for self-constitution and, thus, to achieve a unified self.;Anne Sexton takes on the task of self-constitution with more awareness of what she is doing than either Warner or Wharton. In her poetry she overtly addresses the question of how to constitute herself, "confessing" how difficult is the task. Ultimately, however, she constitutes herself as a woman who must die by her own hand.;Because the trace of an author is always apparent in his or her writing, the struggle for self-constitution may be read there, especially when that writing is illuminated by the author's biography.