Self-Reflexivity in Anne Sexton’s Early Poetry

The aim of this paper is to explain the theory of self-reflexivity in some of the early poems of the American poet, Anne Sexton (1928-1974). Self-reflexivity and narcissistic narrative were identified and the role of the mirror stage/image was highlighted based on in the French theorist Jacques Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949) and Linda Hutcheon’s Narcissist Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1980).
          Focus was on Sexton’s poems “The Double Image” (1958), “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further” (1959) and “An Obsessive Combination of Ontological Inscape, Trickery and Love” (1958) illustrating the role played by the mirror and reflective surfaces in identifying the self in relation to the other. Moreover, interaction between composing the poem and reading it and the textual nature of this narcissism were highlighted.
          It became evident that through her reflexive poetry, Sexton emphasized the relationship between the subject and the object world and that the self and the role of the reader/other in determining the meaning of the narcissistic text. Thus, Sexton’s poetry is self-reflexive and auto-representational. It also reflects the mimetic and expressive theories of art as it is concerned with both the inside (self) and the outside (reade( .
Key wordsconfessional poetry – mirror image – self-consciousness – self-reflexivity – textual narcissism