The Fictionality Of Anne Sexton’s Confessional Poetry

Anne Sexton,a female poet,was one of the representative figures of the mid-20th-century American confessional poetry.She created confessional poems with the purpose of psychotherapy,which in a sense healed her mental illness and effectively postponed her date of death.The traditional view holds that confessional poetry is a first-person autobiographical text of the author.However,Sexton’s confessional poetry is not a real reproduction of personal experience but explores the form of reconstructing the self through fictional writing techniques.Currently,most scholars still equate Sexton’s confessional poetry with the poet’s own poetic autobiography,and there is insufficient research on analyzing the fictional characteristic of her confessional poetry.This paper uses the "performance" theory as a basis and textual analysis as an interpretive method to analyze Sexton’s confessional poetry,attempting to explore the fictional techniques and dimensions of her confessional poetry and analyze the realistic significance of these techniques for Sexton’s relief of mental pressure and reshaping of self-identity.The research of this paper can break the "autobiographical" characteristics of Sexton’s confessional poems and reappraise the literary value of her confessional poems from the level of literary fiction.The main body of the paper includes three chapters:The main focus of the first chapter is on Sexton’s playful poems.Sexton deliberately shifted her attention to the language itself in her writing,from early self-referential and playful texts,to mid-career texts that explore structure and sound meanings,to later poems that imitate and adapt other works.She used language’s self-referentiality to engage in playful exchanges with her readers,and in doing so,she experienced the pleasure of fictional writing with a strong sense of authorship.Chapter Two mainly discusses Sexton’s concept of "poetic truth" in writing and her practice of writing poetry on family themes.Sexton believes that the fictional nature of poetry can create textual truth,which she brings into a constructed world of language by incorporating the complexity of her relationships with her parents.In this space where reality and text coalesce,she constructs scenes of herself and her parents using language,thereby reconciling her identity as part of a family in the text.The third chapter mainly discusses Sexton’s "mask" fictional writing skills and poetry practice.This chapter begins with a discussion of Sexton’s fictional idea of the"mask",affirms that "mask" writing explores the "plasticity" of life in "performance"and enhances the understanding of self.Secondly,it analyzes Sexton’s experience of transcendence identity of asexual others,witches and God through masquerades in creation,so as to realize self-expansion in the fictional world and gain the rich possibility and freedom of female life.