18 pages • 36 minutes read
Geraldine ConnollyThe Summer I Was Sixteen
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
“The Summer I Was Sixteen” is situated in a long literary history of confessional poetry—a style of poetry centering the intimate personal world of a speaker who is interchangeable with the poet. Connolly’s poem is specifically concerned with explicating moments from her own childhood as a way of understanding herself and the wider world through the medium of writing, and, while the highly particular autobiographical details of a confessional poem tend not to lend themselves to symbolizing universal realities, “The Summer I was Sixteen” transcends these boundaries with themes like childhood innocence or the feminine experience.
Connolly’s work exists alongside fellow women poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, both of whom used poetry to expose the most intimate and oftentimes profoundly vulnerable versions of themselves. Sexton and Plath insisted that the subjects of personal trauma and gender inequality ought to be a concern of poetry; this not only widened the discourse of confessional poetry, but also paved the way for Connolly’s work decades later. Connolly exemplifies the contemporary woman poet, using influences from confessional poetry to discuss modern issues surrounding women’s experiences.
Historical Context
While “The Summer I Was Sixteen” was written in the 1990s, the memory originates in the 1960s, a period of great societal unrest in the United States. The 60s were dominated by conflicts such as the Vietnam War (1954-1975), Civil Rights protests, and the assassination of prominent figureheads, President John F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (“The 1960s History,” The Editors of History.com, History). Connolly establishes the poem’s setting as the summer of 1964, using her age within the poem’s title to indicate the time period. However, the poem never directly references 1960s turmoil. The poet’s purposeful elision of this element emphasizes how youth is a shield from the outside world; so often, children needn’t look beyond their immediate surroundings. At the same time, the poem’s omission of the historical cultural turbulence also reflects a degree of privilege; in that same decade, children of color often lost their innocence at younger ages than white children, as they were directly impacted by national racial conflicts. It was often only white children who had the luxury of viewing the world as “improbable” (Line 20), and this particular decade is so overwhelmingly associated with Civil Rights conflict that this contrast of racial experience is hardly a peripheral detail.
Even though the poem does not directly address 1960s turmoil, it does gesture toward aspects of it; part of the ferment of the decade arose from revolutionary activism, and, in addition to the Civil Rights movement, this included Second Wave Feminism. Beginning in the early 1960s and spanning roughly to the 80s, the movement critiqued a cultural pervasion of patriarchal values. This feminist enterprise frequently involved scrutinizing media and artistic portrayals of the female body, and Connolly’s poem reflects this preoccupation with the theme of the ”male gaze,” a concept popularized during the Second Wave.
