ions must be complicated by the messiness of the experience if the law is to continue to adjust to changing practices: this sense, poetry offers the space of contradiction and ambiguity, of improvisation and paradox that privacy depends (xx). Nelson's narrative is immensely complex, braiding a social history of the last fifty years with landmark legal decisions into a framework for a particular kind of autobiographical lyric that is, moreover, evolving differently for women than for men, differently for gays than for straights. Privacy gets redefined after World War II when cold war rhetoric insists that the potency of America was its cultivation of a vibrant and free public discourse but its vigilant protection of private (xiii). But as Nelson explains in her first chapter, this made privacy so important, so politically central, that it fell under government surveillance: for that immensely valuable privacy to be protected, the government had to violate it, to monitor our activities. Not coincidentally, at the same time, new standards for self-disclosure encouraged frank talk, openly airing that which had formerly been held in secret. All at once, there was too much so much now was being divulged in public (in tell-all narratives by movie stars, in sensational concoctions in magazines like Confidential). But there was also too little privacy: everywhere one looked there were coercive government agencies at work (HUAC investigations, the McCarthy subcommittee hearings, the Kefauver commission on organized crime). When the Supreme Court was called upon to clarify a to privacy, what its decisions revealed was not a clear-cut expansion of rights but an ever more finely tuned set of adjustments in which, for example, a woman's privacy in Roe v. Wade depended upon the advice of a physician, or the privacy of homosexuals in Bowers v. Hardwick was not protected at all. Nelson wants this narrative to be fully understood: Because privacy's deprivations belonged primarily to women and its autonomy primarily to men, because privacy offered sanctuary to heterosexuals and only secrecy to homosexuals or other sexually marginalized people, the crisis of the exposure and mediation of these boundaries, fragmented the concept (30). What constitutes a poem, then, varies markedly (but This content downloaded from 207.46.13.172 on Sat, 15 Oct 2016 04:24:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 388 C O N T E M PO R A R Y L I T E RAT U R E predictably) depending upon the gender and the sexual orientation of its speaker. At the end of the nineteenth century, the right to privacy was rarely discussed because it was guarded by a gentlemanly code of self-restraint. That such a code was now faltering can be glimpsed in Lowell's Life Studies, in which, in Nelson's bracingly original reading in her second chapter, reveals the ineffectual dithering of his father, recognizes the brash incursions of his mother, and realizes that he has inherited problems of emasculation that may not be unique to him: even the man / scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, / has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, / and is a 'young Republican.' 7 Nelson sees most sharply when he compulsively divides the sonnets he had first written for Notebook (1970) into the public poems of History (1973) and the private poems of For Lizzie and Harriet (1973): [F]or some he is fundamentally a historical poet, for others essentially a confessional poet. It seems crucial... to hold these two configurations of his career in tension, to resist any attempt to resolve them in favor of one or the other classification (67). Saying little about himself that is damning, giving away little of his own is quick to withhold privacy from others. After leaving Elizabeth Hardwick for another woman, he included verbatim chunks from Hardwick's angry letters in The Dolphin (1973). By penetrating Hardwick's retains a vestige of the authority no longer available to him: Lowell used the absolute 'privateness' of Hardwick's coerced collaboration to secure the publicness of his own voice (73). In two chapters on confessional poetry written by women, Nelson positions their work in a time when the home that the Court viewed so fondly as the man's castle was maintained by the little woman who stayed within it. For women, then, [c]onfessional poetry's contribution to public discourse was dismantling domestic ideology through the act of exposure itself, through the self-disclosure of that which should have been the subject of (77). Poems by Plath (The Other, Eavesdropper) and Sexton (Self in 1958, Live) record such surveillance or expose the coercive aspects in 7. Robert Lowell, Memories of West Street and Lepke, Life Studies (New York: Farrar, 1959) 85. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.172 on Sat, 15 Oct 2016 04:24:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms