The work of American writers Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton is often described as 'confessional' writing. How do these texts complicate the idea of confession?

In his essay ‘The World and the Jug’, Ralph Ellison asserts, ‘being a Negro American involves a willed (who wills to be a Negro? I do!) affirmation of self against all outside pressure.’ This resistance summarises the unapologetic quality of the apparently ‘confessional’ writing of Ellison in Invisible Man, and in the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. These writers undermine the confessional potential of language by emphasising the way in which language performs identity in their work, and instead invoke that which is not disclosed as closer to what might be considered personal truth or true confession.
Ellison’s novel Invisible Man problematises the idea of ‘confession’ as disclosure by emphasising the constructed and performative nature of any speech act through intense repetition, doubling and patterning of motifs, such as the recurring ‘red eyes’ and the constant presence and inversion of ‘white’ and ‘black’. However, one image that itself speaks to the inauthenticity of every supposed ‘confession’ is Clifford’s ‘grinning doll of orange-and-black tissue paper’ which performs a ‘spiel’; the doll a clear parody of the human form. It is ‘a construction’ of the flimsy, insubstantial materials of ‘tissue, cardboard and glue,’ yet the narrator feels ‘a hatred as for something alive.’ However, it is only later in the novel that he comes to realise that the doll is a double for himself: ‘I was just awakening from a dream. I had boomeranged around.’ This extends to the structure of the whole novel. M. C. Bradbook argues that the repetitive nature of the novel’s ‘cumulative plot’ is a ‘constant technical flaw…Ellison is put at every point to a greater muscularity to make the next scene more intense, more thoroughly revealing of what has already been largely revealed.’ Yet in fact it is this repetitive patterning of the novel’s structure that casts doubt onto its own authenticity and renders every part a performance; it quickly becomes unclear whether a recurring motif foreshadows a later event, or if the later event is a echo of the first. William J. Schafer describes this as ‘that shattered effect of death, rebirth and redeath’. Indeed each episode begins with the narrator’s renewed hope: ‘the thing to do was to keep faith. I’d start out once more in the morning.’ However, the fact that each new chapter is the start of a new performance is not only brought to light in the context of the repetitive structure, but also through the device of clothing as costume, from the ‘new suit [that] imparted a newness to me’ when he joins the brotherhood, to the hat and glasses that allow him to be mistaken for Rinehart. Attempts to express the true self, to have it validated by others, is in some way distorted, aborted, or misunderstood, resulting in the ‘death’ of each assumed personality at the end of each cycle.
Similarly, Plath use the inherently repetitive nature of performance to undermine any ideas of disclosure that might be suggested through the label of ‘confessional’ poetry. Suggestions of dolls and puppets appear throughout Plath’s work, and, like Ellison, problems of authentic expression (here of gender rather than race) appear to be self-perpetuating. In ‘The Disquieting Muses’, family members such as the ‘Mother’ to who whom the poem is addressed follow the voice from birth, ‘unasked to my christening’. Again, repetition becomes synonymous with performance and withholding. Plath equivalent to Ellison’s high patterning of motifs is perhaps what Tim Kendall describes as ‘an approach to poetic language as something ritualised, rhetorical and incantatory’, focusing with the repetition of words themselves. The repetition of the opening stanza, ‘to nod / And nod and nod’, linked to the ‘illbred aunt / Or what disfigured and unsightly / Cousin’ places and emphasis on the familial relationships and the unnaturalness of this exact replication, undermining any ideas of variation through the paradoxical: ’I learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere’. David Shapiro criticises Plath for ‘harping upon a word…rather than giving us through the repetition the playful poetics of its new position’, yet as Kendall illustrates, this ‘harping’ reveals Plath’s poetry to be ‘conscious as its status as performance.’ Just as Ellison does, Plath uses patterns of death and resurrection as well as images of (un)clothing, most notably in the poem ‘Lady Lazarus,’ where ideas of performance are explicitly evoked in ‘The big strip tease,’ conflated with the grotesque image of flesh being stripped down to the bone.
More than Plath or Ellison, Sexton’s writing was that which was identified as ‘confessional’ in her own time, and perhaps this is why her writing so strongly suggests of the power of silence, which is figured through the dead. Again constructing a cycle of death and rebirth, Sexton dwells on and takes solace in the silent power of the dead in the poem ‘The Truth the Dead Know.’ Here Sexton constructs a world without death (‘In another country people die.’) associated with ‘touch’ and social connection, requiring the voice to ‘cultivate / myself’ as communication in social interaction necessitating performance. Yet she is unable to ignore death: ‘Men kill for this, or for as much.’ The final stanza returns to the ‘grave’ of the first stanza, and presents death as a solid space disconnected from everything else (‘without shoes’), ‘stone’, unable to be penetrated: ‘They refuse / to be blessed, throat, eye, and knucklebone.’ The refusal and rebellion that death signifies here is linked to the idea of silence in Sexton’s poem ‘All My Pretty Ones’: I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept for three years, telling all she does not say of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept, she writes.The contradiction of the prefix ‘over’, that extends the word ‘slept’ and indicates too much of something, and the short phrase ‘telling all she does not say’ portrays what the poem itself describes: how silence can communicate more truthfully than language. 
Thus, rather than what is said, it is that which is withheld in confession that is authentic; as Sexton puts it in ‘The Room of My Life’, ‘nothing is just what it seems to be.’ Jo Gill argues, ‘the power to refuse to perform or to remain silent are fundamental to the delineation of female subjectivity’, and indeed many feminist critics have identified the problem of speaking a subjective truth within a language that denies this subjectivity. However, Ellison’s nameless narrator surely undermines the idea that this is purely a sexism issue. The narrator’s double Ras plague the novel from the prologue, which reiterates the novel’s enveloping death-rebirth-death structure. However, something that does distinguish Ellison’s novel from the poetry of Plath and Sexton is its final outlook: ‘The hibernation is over. I must shake off the old skin and come up for breath.’ The narrator resolves to re-enter the world, aware that another death will follow (‘there is a death in the smell of spring and in the smell of thee as in the smell of me.’), yet also aware that something, even if it is untrue, must be confessed in order to access the truth of what is not said. And it is this that resonates with others, portrayed through effect of the anonymous old man’s song at Clifford’s funeral: ‘I looked into that face, trying to plumb its secret, but it told me nothing. I looked at the coffin and the marchers, listening to them, and yet realizing that that I was listening to something within myself, and for a second I heard the shattering stroke of my heart.’ The problem with confession is that it is shameful, and thus divisive, such as Norton’s rejection of the narrator after Trueblood’s confession. The ending of Sexton’s ‘All My Pretty Ones’ is able to find forgiveness in that which is unspoken: ‘Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.’ The poetry of Plath and Sexton can be read as episodes of a larger body due to the emphasis placed on their autobiography, but in contrast to Ellison’s novel, there is no final effort towards rebirth. Plath’s last poem, ‘Edge’, describes the total stillness and emptiness of the dead woman as a completed action, an ‘accomplishment’; there is no longer any will to perform.