The Persistent Scaffold Revisited: Confessional Shame and Racialized Spectacle in Plath and Morrison

Author(s)	Sudeshna Chakraborty, Prof. Dr. Savita Goel
Country	India
Abstract	This article extends an ongoing inquiry into the transhistorical spectacle of female public shaming by turning to twentieth century American literature, specifically the confessional poetry and prose of Sylvia Plath and the fiction of Toni Morrison. Building on the governing metaphor of the persistent scaffold, understood as the apparatus that renders women's bodies visible for disciplinary consumption, the article argues that mid to late twentieth century American writing splits the shame spectacle along racial lines. In Plath's work, shame is privatized into a psychiatric and confessional register, even as its publication returns it to public view. In Morrison's fiction, shame remains an embodied, communal inheritance of slavery and segregation. Drawing on Michel Foucault's account of discipline and confession, Erving Goffman's theory of stigma, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's affect theory, and Sara Ahmed's model of sticky emotion, the article proposes that these apparently divergent modes rest on a single underlying structure of gendered visibility, refining rather than abandoning the scaffold thesis.
Keywords	Confessional Poetry, Racialized Spectacle, Public Shame, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Performativity, Surveillance, Gendered Visibility
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 9, September 2026
Published On	2026-09-02

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