Fame at last

Letters

Vol. 13 No. 24 · 19 December 1991

From A. Banerjee

Elaine Showalter’s assertions (LRB, 7 November) about the importance of Anne Sexton’s work remain just that: assertions, unsupported by critical argument or analysis. Among Sexton’s ‘credentials for acceptance in poetry’, Showalter cites her salesmanship and marketing, together with her mental illness: her ‘having graduated from a number of Boston’s finest mental establishments and finally, with the class of 1973, becoming an alumna of McLean Hospital, alma mater of Lowell and Plath’. This strange reasoning is perhaps meant to be understood in the context of Showalter’s apparent acceptance of the biographer’s diagnosis of the cause of Sexton’s illness: ‘the social confusions of growing up in a female body and of living as a woman in post-war American society’. But even those poets of the time who grew up in ‘male bodies’, people like Lowell, Berryman and Jarrell, also suffered from mental illnesses, and two of them committed suicide. So the problem asks to be seen in terms of the contemporary cultural situation, which the poets found inimical, rather than in terms of gender.

A. Banerjee
Kobe College, Nishinomiya,