Sexton Sources
Attardo, Salvatore. "Sexton's Cinderella."
"Cinderella" Structure Sexton's reinterpretations are organized similarly throughout the collection. Each piece begins with a prologue, identifiable to the audience by one of several clues (once, there once was, etc.) which signify entrance into the mythical world. An epilogue, in which Sexton reenters the modern world, closes each piece. Often the prologue and epilogue serve to emphasize the relationships between reality and the fairy tale.
Fukuda, Shiho. "The Hesitancy of a 'Middle-Aged Witch': Anne Sexton's Transformations."
"Cinderella" and Feminism Sexton's retelling of "Cinderella" provides another notable example of the gloomy fate that awaits women in the patriarchal society. First, the poem starts with amazingly caustic remarks uttered by the "middle-aged witch" You always read about it: the plumber with twelve children who wins the Irish Sweepstakes. From toilets to riches. That story. Or the nursemaid, some luscious sweet from Denmark who captures the oldest son's heart. From diapers to Dior. That story. Or a milkman who serves the wealthy, who goes into real estate and makes a pile. From homogenized to martinis at lunch. Or the charwoman who is on the bus when it cracks up and collects enough from the insurance. From mops to Bonwit Teller. That story. (53-4) Studded with modern idioms which are quite familiar to the poet's contemporary Americans, the poem wryly continues to delineate how Cinderella and the other women in the story are entrapped by patriarchal ideology. According to traditional concepts of male/female relationships, the primary role of the male is to be a decent husband and father. By seeming to fulfill that role powerfully and ideally on a regal scale, the prince in the Grimm's Brother "Cinderella" is seen to be eminently attractive to women. And yet, in Sexton's poignant explanation, the figure of the prince is trivialized. The ball that takes place at the prince's palace is compared to "a marriage market" (54) with the women in attendance being exchanged as if they were profitable products. The prince frantically seeks the hand of Cinderella "for keeps" (56) for fear that such an excellent commodity will otherwise be snatched away by a competitor. And when the struggle for "the shoe" becomes self-destructive among Cinderella's stepsisters (one of them "slice[s] it [i.e. her big toe] off" to "put on the slipper" and another "cut[s] off her heel"), the prince comes to "feel like a shoe salesman" (56). Being so self-centered that he regards his future bride as simply a commodity indicates he lacks not only the ability to offer sincere love but also the thoughtful consideration necessary to understand and preserve her dignity. In spite of this, however, Cinderella and her stepsisters unwisely continue to admire him simply because he is a powerful male—a royal personage. Here, Sexton expresses her feminist message that it seems totally ridiculous that all the women in this story become confused and are wrecked as a result of seeking a successful marriage by blindly adhering to the tenets of a patriarchal society. Of course, it cannot be overlooked that a significantly large proportion of the subsequent stanzas remain relatively faithful to the conventional patriarchal structure of the original Grimm tale—including the moral lesson that virtue is always rewarded: Once the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed and she said to her daughter Cinderella: Be devout. Be good . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, [. . .] (54-6)
Fukuda, Shiho. "The Hesitancy of a 'Middle-Aged Witch': Anne Sexton's Transformations."
"Cinderella" and Gender Roles With such subtlety—by incorporating mischievous idioms—Sexton presents and ridicules the seemingly ludicrous elements in "Cinderella." Note the author's excellent usage of tricky expressions in the last stanza: Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice, never getting a middle-aged spread, their darling smiles pasted on for eternity. Regular Bobbsey Twins. That story. (56-7, emphasis added) Cinderella and her prince are not obliged to experience actual domestic tribulations or death. The poet appears to laugh accusingly at the fact that the only function of "That story" is simply to enchant the reader—even if it is a momentary or fleeting experience. A significant gender issue also arises from the fact that no matter how bitterly the witch/poet criticizes the absurd "Cinderella," she is ultimately unable to subvert the male-orientation of the male-authored original story. The coercive voice of the Grimm Brothers concerning the couple's everlasting happiness is too overwhelming to be disapproved by Sexton. To put it another way, Sexton's witchcraft is virtually powerless to overcome their pervasive discourse. Herein she demonstrates the difficulty of deconstructing the stereotypical gender roles found in the original "Cinderella" by showing that—no matter how iconoclastic the witch/poet may be—nothing can be revised. This is so because in Sexton's view, they—people, including the Grimm Brothers, who are caught up in a male-centered viewpoint regardless of their gender—remain content with the patriarchal way of thinking and have no will to change their minds. In their determination to preserve their traditional stance, such people believe, Sexton contends, that Cinderella and her prince are destined to live "happily ever after" so that even her caustic remarks against the patriarchal system cannot change the pattern of the original story. Sexton retells the tale of "Cinderella" in her distinctive manner in order to reveal how ingrained the sexual stereotypes are. They believe that a woman who marries a rich, handsome man like the prince will feel happy and fulfilled and that a man who marries a beautiful, virtuous woman like Cinderella must experience total contentment as long as he lives. In spite of the poet's objection, therefore, the narrative continues to insist that the marriage extricates the innocent and defenseless Cinderella from drudgery in the end. The total of what is happening is praised as "That story" exactly like the episodes—most certainly American success stories—which are presented in the prologue. This does not mean, however, that the perpetuation of sexual stereotypes preoccupies Sexton. Rather, in the closing stanza, she inquires even further into how a belief in the everlasting existence of stereotyped romance is perpetuated. By freezing the prince and his bride in time and space "like two dolls in a museum case," in the last part of the poem, the couple is dehumanized and thereby able to maintain their patriarchal gender roles due to the fact that stagnation becomes their reality. The stagnation in the couple's life is further emphasized when the couple is compared to "Regular Bobbsey Twins"—the principal characters of a series of children's novels written by several authors under the pseudonym Laura Lee Hope from 1904 to 1979 reaching a total of seventy-two volumes—who repeatedly "live happily" over and over in people's minds. What the "middle-aged witch" succeeds in revealing through her witchcraft is the fact that males are also prisoners of the patriarchal system. The warning being issued is that anyone, whether female or male, can be captured and held in thrall by the traditional patriarchal view; and that not only women but also men are denied to live on their own terms as long as they continue to read the Cinderella story retaining their views of its tenets unchanged from the first reading. Indeed it is required that both women and men discard their faith in patriarchal sexual stereotypes so that they can then live on their own terms.
"Passivity and Rebellion in Anne Sexton's." Unadulterated Text.
"Her Kind" - Whole The poem begins with a very regular rhythm, though without a traditional normative meter. It is reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon poetry. It has an accentual meter of four beats; the majority of the lines are broken up in to distiches separated by a caesura; and some of the lines even have the appropriate accentual alliteration (e.g., "black air, braver" and "dreaming evil, I have done"), further reinforcing the cadenced feel. "'Her Kind' employs a rhythmic, incantatory stanza and refrain" (Kammer 128). This chanting rhythm is quite appropriate considering the otherworldly topic. Although she loosens the strictures of the form very quickly, one is nevertheless induced to almost chant it in the mind as it is read. This meter, the end rhyme (i.e., ababcbC dedeceC fgfgcgC ), and the stanza ending repetends tighten the ties between the stanzas, and force one to examine the poem as a themed whole, rather than as several disparate pieces. Jeanne Kammer says: "The endings of Sexton's poems are for the most part unmemorable, except for a few that set up a complex resonance and mark the best pieces" (130). "Her Kind" is one of those memorable "best pieces." Additionally, the poem is presented in a temporal sequence, following the woman's life from youth to death (or at least acceptance of death). The completed woman is presented as outcast and alone throughout her life. First "not a woman, quite," then "misunderstood," and finally "not ashamed to die." In each summary line, the woman is presented as separate — from society, from her family, and from the world. At the same time, there is a contrasting thread of unity that is brought out by the three distinct, though undifferentiated, voices in the piece. Many critics have noted this multiplicity of voices.4Diane Middlebrook sees only two personas or viewpoints, the two Is, but I think that a case can be made for a third ("Poet" 114). The first voice is the voice of the outcast, the madwoman, a self-descriptive and self-abusive character who rants through the first five lines of each stanza. The second voice is the voice of judgment or conscience or society that makes a value call about the previously described woman in the sixth line. And finally the last line is the voice of the reader or the narrator or even, this being confessional poetry, the author, who ultimately identifies with the outcast. "'Her kind' contains its own perfect reader, its own namesake, 'I'" (Middlebrook, Anne 114). In so doing, the poem creates a kind of society of outcasts of everyone who reads and identifies themselves with that line. It creates a synthesis of acceptance and passivity with rebellion and unconformity and announces this synthesis as survivorship. The ability of the outcast to come to terms with her own estrangement and to accept death "not ashamed" is in fact a victory of sorts over the repressionist society that has rejected her.
Attardo, Salvatore. "Sexton's Cinderella."
"Cinderella" Repetition/Links [LM Meaning --> ] The [Logical Mechanism] parameter presupposes and aemobies a "local" logic, i.e., a distorted, playful logic, that does not necessarily hold outside the world of the joke. [...] LMs can range from straightforward juxtapositions...to more complex errors in reasoning, such as false analogies...or figure-ground reversals.... [...] One of the most significant strands in the poem emerges from parallelization. The LM strand, "parallelization", features two substrands, "that story" and "...never..." (both of which consist of the verbatim repetition of a fragment of text). The "that story" substrand distinguishes a parallelism between the prologue and the four individual stories contained therein which appear, at first glance, to have little or nothing to do with the tale of Cinderella and the fairy tale proper. This strand further emphasizes the parallelisms between reality and the fairy tale. In other words, while reading the prologue the audience is reminded after each new tale is introduced (the plumber's, the nursemaid's, the milkman's, and the charwoman's tales) that the story they are about to hear is not all that novel ("that story"), that they have heard it all before. [...] it is not until the last few lines of the poem that the reader is reminded of the prologue and thus the link between prologue and tale is revealed. Finally, in the closing of the poem, Sexton illustrates that Cinderella's tale is no different from those we read in the prologue, that it is after all, "that story". Like the aforementioned substrand, the "...never..." substrand serves as an echo to the tales in the prologue. Thus, line 103 recalls both the nursemaid and the charwoman ("...diapers or dust..."), line 104 recalls the milkman ("...the timing of an egg..."), and 105 reminds us that we have heard these stories before ("...telling the same story twice..."), thereby establishing a link between the contemporary characters and Cinderella, the real world and the fairy tale. [...] The first "metanarrative commentary" identifies those humorous instances wherein the author either addresses her audience directly or interrupts the fairy tale to comment sardonically on the events taking place. For example, Sexton uses phrases like "my dears" (40) and "you all" (41) to speak to her audience from within the fairy tale. Likewise, she comments drolly on events and characters like the evil stepmother (55) and amputation (86). This technique affords Sexton a narrative distance which, when combined with the ridiculousness of the events being described, results in a humorous contrast. The second... "framing device" includes two classes of items: "that story", and "...never..." Both classes serve as framing devices because the occurrence of "that story" links the prologue to the epilogue (via echoic repetition) while also linking the Cinderella narrative to both the prologue and the epilogue, by explicitly introducing a similarity between the fairy tale and the read world. The "never" substrand functions similarly by echoing features related to the characters found in the prologue, e.g., "never arguing over the timing of an egg" (104) and the milkman character (16), or "never bothered by diapers or dust" (103) and the nursemaid (9) and the charwoman (20), respectively (diapers/dust).
"Passivity and Rebellion in Anne Sexton's." Unadulterated Text.
"Her Kind" Intro In her poem "Her Kind" originally published in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Anne Sexton paints a picture of woman as an outcast in youth, marriage, and death. First, she presents the woman as a rebellious youth, "not a woman, quite," "dreaming evil," "haunting the black air, braver at night." In the second stanza, she presents woman as a passive housewife. Still, at least for her speaker, there is no connection with society: Her house is found in "warm caves in the woods." Her husband and children are "worms" and "elves." She is misunderstood. Finally, in the third stanza, having survived adversity, she is at last "learning the last bright routes." Approaching death, she is still separate and outcast from society, this time because of the path she is on (i.e., the cart she is riding), and can only wave "at villages going by." In the end though, the poem transforms this rejection by embracing it in a sort of active passivity, "not ashamed to die," and claiming it triumphantly, "I have been her kind."
"Passivity and Rebellion in Anne Sexton's." Unadulterated Text.
"Her Kind" Stanza 1 The witch, an archetypal feminine outcast, is presented boldly and possessively from the very beginning. "Witches (always female, of course) are by nature alienated, different, shunned by society" (Hall 90). The descriptions of an outcast pile up quickly. The speaker is "braver at night," whereas most people are braver during the day. The speaker dreams of evil, indicating a rebel attitude, a desire to throw off the shackles of conventional morality. When she speaks of having done her "hitch over the plain houses, light by light," we can see two things. First, she is not in the houses, and she considers the houses to be plain. Second, she is over them, above them, aloof from them. We begin to see a possibility that this rejection is not necessarily externally enforced; nevertheless, we are presented with a character that is not happy with her situation. She is "a lonely thing," — desirous of company; she is twelve-fingered — different, possibly a monstrosity; she is out of mind — unattended, unnoticed, unworthy. Indeed, she is somehow less than a woman. Kay Capo notes, "Even amid cries for indulgence and passive imagery, a resistant tone keeps emerging" (26). This tension between helplessness or passivity and resistance or rebellion is mirrored in the rhymes (e.g., between witch representing rebellion, and hitch, a required term of service, representing passivity).
"Passivity and Rebellion in Anne Sexton's." Unadulterated Text.
"Her Kind" Stanza 2 The second stanza describes a housewife who is so cut off from society that she places herself not in a house in suburbia, but in "caves in the woods." It is important that we see that this is only a metaphor, so she tells us that she has all the trappings of civilization, indeed, "innumerable goods." In this stanza the tension between passivity and rebellion is further heightened as passivity gains the upper hand. She passively conforms by cooking and cleaning, yet the resistance is still there, for she does not cook for her husband and children: She cooks for "worms and the elves." Even the dominant vowels in this stanza have shifted from the hard resistant i and o of night, light, mind, quite, out, possessed, over, lonely in the first stanza to the softer more passive and i of woods, filled, skillets, silks, goods, fixed, worms, misunderstood in this one. It does not take much to understand how this woman is "misunderstood," but it does require some work to connect her to the witch of the previous stanza. The relationship is certainly a temporal one, between the middle-aged housewife, hiding in fantasy, and the young rebel, flirting with evil; however, the relationship is also a progressive one as the passivity builds unacceptably. This connection is confirmed when we move on to the depiction of the woman facing (or flirting with) death.
Middlebrook, Diane Wood, Greg Johnson, and Jane McCabe. "On 'Her Kind'."
"Her Kind" Tone Does Sexton imagine any way out of this impasse, any way to escape the debilitating terrors of a consciousness plagued by a conviction of its own evil? One possibility is to replace self-loathing with an open acceptance of evil—even admitting the likelihood that she is "not a woman. " What is remarkable, however, is not this admission itself but the lively, almost gleeful tone in which it is uttered: I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming of evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. "A woman like that is misunderstood," Sexton adds wryly, but the poem is a serious attempt to understand such a woman--her sense of estrangement, her impulse toward death--by internalizing evil and giving it a voice: a chortling, self-satisfied, altogether amiable voice which suggests that "evil" is perhaps the wrong word after all. Sexton's witch, waving her "nude arms at villages going by," becomes something of value to the community, performing the function Kurt Vonnegut has called the "domestication of terror." Unlike Plath's madwoman in "Lady Lazarus"--a woman at the service of a private, unyielding anger, a red-haired demon whose revenge is to "eat men like air"--Sexton's witch is essentially harmless. Although she remains vulnerable--"A woman like that is not afraid to die"--she rejects anger in favor of humor, flamboyance, self-mockery. She is a kind of perverse entertainer, and if she seems cast in the role of a martyr, embracing madness in order to domesticate it for the rest of the community--making it seem less threatening, perhaps even enjoyable--it is nevertheless a martyrdom which this aspect of Sexton accepts with a peculiar zest.
Middlebrook, Diane Wood, Greg Johnson, and Jane McCabe. "On 'Her Kind'."
"Her Kind" Written by a Woman Anne Sexton was brought up to be an affluent, middle-class, suburban housewife. In a 1968 interview, she said, All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out. And I think that Sexton differed from most of her successful female peers in that when she wasn't in the hospital, she lived in comfort behind the white picket fences. She was not urban; she was not an academic (her formal education ended at Garland Junior College); and she was not really an intellectual. She lived very comfortably--a sunken living room, a swimming pool--in suburban Weston, Massachusetts: the look of the country, the convenience of town. But this life worried her; she felt personally at odds with its rather dismal comforts. And although she played her part--"I ... answered the phone,/ served cocktails as a wife/ should, made love among my petticoats,/ and August tan . . . "--she was also concerned with the pressure of isolation and uneasy with the particular kind of social expectation that faces a suburban housewife, especially one who is also a poet. She defined her alienation as witchery, and as a "middle-aged witch" she had the magic of words with which to transform even the calmest and most orderly of suburban lawns into a landscape of both nightmare and vision. And this often led her to explore the dangerous borderland between imagination and insanity: I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. And that kind is "a woman who writes." So, although I would not suggest that Anne Sexton is a feminist poet, I think that her poetry catches the feminist's eye and ear in special ways. Many of her experiences and feelings are the product of a society that oppresses women. The anger and excess that run through so much of her poetry are uniquely hers, but there are echoes of the same kind of rage in the poetry of many of her more explicitly feminist contemporaries.
Cribbs, Jennifer. "Darkness in the Vicious Kitchen: An Analysis of Feminist Themes and Suicidal Imagery in Anne Sexton's and Sylvia Plath's Poetry."
"IN Celebration of My Uterus" ANalysis In the first stanza, Sexton's persona addresses her uterus directly: "they wanted to cut you out / but they will not" (3-4). Sexton's use of enjambment creates tension between the medical establishment and the poem's female persona. The emphatic "they will not" asserts a woman's sense of control over her own body and challenges the authority of the (presumably male) doctors who recommend a hysterectomy. Sexton further develops the tension between these two opposing forces with the lines: "they said you were immeasurably empty / but you are not" (5-6). The structure of these lines parallels the dichotomy between medical knowledge, which diagnoses the uterus as unhealthy and useless, and self knowledge, which asserts that the uterus is neither torn nor "empty" (182). In the lines "they said you were sick unto dying / but they were wrong," Sexton first questions the doctors' diagnosis, then more directly undermines their authority by asserting "they were wrong" (7-8). The poem goes on to become a "celebration of the woman I am / and of the soul of the woman I am," a celebration that helps create a feminist identity, an identity that unites "many women [who] are singing together" in "Arizona," "Russia," "Egypt," "Thailand," and across the world (12-13, 27, 32-34, 37). This new female identity, represented by the image of women's voices coming together and the resistance to the authority of the male-dominated medical institution, reflects the feminist objectives of women's empowerment and organization of resistance into a unified voice. Sexton's method of describing women's bodies as part of the female identity led writer and critic Muriel Rukeyser to conclude that "In Celebration of My Uterus" is "one of the few poems in which a woman [has become] the center [of the poem] after many years of silence and taboo" (qtd. in Kumin xxi).
Elson, Jean. "'To Have and Have Not' Perspectives on Hysterectomy and Oopherectomy."
"In Celebration of my Uterus" Overview [First two stanzas of Anne Sexton's "In Celebration of My Uterus" cited] These lines celebrate the poet's relief at discovering that she will not have to undergo hysterectomy, the surgical removal of her uterus. The rest of the poem celebrates womanhood in many forms. Appropriately included in a collection entitled Love Poems, it expresses a woman's love for a valued part of herself. According to another feminist poet, this poem "finds unity where the culture propagates division: between a woman's sexuality and her spirituatlity, her creativity and her procreativity, herself and other women, her private and public self" (Ostriker 1986, 111).
Wagner-Martin, Linda. "Anne Sexton's Life."
Anne Sexton's Life Sexton, Anne Gray Harvey (9 Nov. 1928-4 Oct. 1974), poet and playwright, was born in Newton, Massachusetts, the daughter of Ralph Harvey, a successful woolen manufacturer, and Mary Gray Staples. Anne was raised in comfortable middle-class circumstances in Weston, Massachusetts, and at the summer compound on Squirrel Island in Maine, but she was never at ease with the life prescribed for her.
George, Diana Hume, ed. "Anne Sexton (1928-1974)."
Audience Many of Sexton's readers have been women, and she has perhaps a special appeal for female readers because of her domestic imagery. She also found a wide readership among people who have experienced emotional illness or depression. But Sexton's appeal is wider than a specialist audience. She is exceptionally accessible, writes in deliberately colloquial style, and her diversity and range are such that she appeals to students from different backgrounds.
Colburn, Steven E., ed. Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale.
Confessional Poetry Def. Confessional poetry is a poetry of suffering. The suffering is generally "unbearable" because the poetry so often projects breakdown and paranoia. Indeed, the psychological condition of most of the confessional poets has long been the subject of common literary discussion--one cannot say gossip exactly, for their problems and confinements in hospitals are quite often the specific subjects of their poems. It is not enough, however, to relegate the matter to the province of the mentally disturbed. A heightened sensitivity to the human predicament in general, for reasons developed in the first chapter, has led to a sharper sense, as a by-product perhaps, of the pain of existence under even "normal" conditions. Sentimentality, self-dramatization, and the assumption that universal feelings are the private property of the poet himself as a uniquely seismographic instrument are among the manifest dangers of this situation. It is probably inevitable that many of the best practitioners in this age should at times fall into these traps, and that many of them pay for their gifts of sympathy and perception by mental illness. We must, in any case, finally read them as artists.
Ostriker, Alicia. Writing like a Woman.
Critique -- Femininity First of all, Sexton's material is heavily female and biological. She gives us full helpings of her breasts, her uterus, her menstruation, her abortion, her "tiny jail" of a vagina, her love life, her mother's and father's "serpect, that mocker, woke up and pressed against me/like a great god" when she danced with him after much champagne at a wedding, even the trauma of her childhood enemas. Preoccupied with the flesh, she wsings between experienceing it as sacred and fertile and experiencing it as filthy and defiled. This distinguished it her from Plath, for whom the body is mainly an emblem of pain and mutilation. But the distinction will not be an interesting one to the timid reader. Far more than Plath, Sexton challenges our residual certainties that the life of the body should be private and not public, and that women especially should be seen and not heard, except among each other, talking about their messy anatomies. We believe, I think, that civilization will fall if it is otherwise.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. "Anne Sexton's Life."
Decline/Suicide Estranged from many of her former friends, Sexton became difficult for her maturing daughters to deal with. Aware that many of her readers did not like the religious poetry that she had recently begun writing with her more personal themes, Sexton became nervous about her poetry. Readings had always terrified her, but now she employed a rock group to back up her performances. She forced herself to be an entertainer, while her poems grew more and more privately sacral. In 1972 she published The Book of Folly and, in 1974, the ominously titled The Death Notebooks. Later that year, she completed The Awful Rowing toward God, published posthumously in 1975. Divorced and living by herself, Sexton was lonely and seemed to be searching for compassion through love affairs. She continued to be in psychotherapy, from which she evidently gained little solace. In October 1974, after having lunched with Maxine Kumin, Sexton asphyxiated herself with carbon monoxide in her garage in Boston.
Sexton, Linda Gray. "A Tortured Inheritance."
Effects of Suicide As my mother wrote in one of her most famous poems: "I have gone out, a possessed witch... lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind./A woman like that is not a woman, quite./I have been her kind." All of us who follow that depressing family path — from suffering to suicide — have known what it is like to be her kind. Nicholas Hughes's mother, and mine, succumbed to the exhaustion of unrelenting depression. They self-destructed. And we grew up in the wreckage of their catastrophe. Their deaths took away from him and his sister, Frieda, and from me and my sister, Joyce, the solace of a mother's love. And worse, all four of us, I imagine, had to live with the knowledge that our mothers had quite willfully abandoned us. Understanding and accepting this is heart-wrenching, but it is a necessary part of healing. I have wanted to kill myself, but I survived, and so can attest to what Dr. Hughes, like my mother, probably must have felt — that there was no other alternative. Studies show that some kinds of depression are hereditary, and suicides tend to run in families. But even if there isn't an absolute genetic component, there certainly is an emotional one. When I turned 45, the age at which my mother killed herself, I too began to be drawn to suicide as a way to escape pain. This was my inheritance. My guess is that I wasn't alone: hundreds of thousands die by suicide each year. And hundreds of thousands of families are damaged by that loss. Of course, not everyone reacts in the same way. My sister doesn't like to speak publicly about our mother, and she doesn't think she is "her kind." Perhaps Frieda Hughes is more like Joyce, perhaps her brother once was as well. Or maybe they were more like me, trying to recover by talking about what happened. My mother always said, "Tell it true," and I believe she thought, as I do, that it is important to share the experience of depression with others, who may be suffering in the same way.
Amabile, Theresa M. Creativity in Context: Update to the Social Psychology of Creativity.
External Constraints: Money Throughout her career as a writer, Sexton struggled (usually with success) against several types of external constraints, including evaluation, competition, and rewards. She once wrote to her psychiatrist, for example, that she had become a "cheap artist" since winning a Radcliffe grant, that success of this type was not good for her. At times, though, she was so obsessed with making as much money as possible that she would consider doing projects only for their commercial value: About the little whiz-bang piece (book, whatever) on psychiatrists [...] a desperate attempt on my part to write something that will make me some money [...] it is supposed to be funny and awful and a little nutty, i.e., not literature but rather a cheap but possibly commercial thing, supplemented with cartoons and all. I don't want my name on it. Not that my name isn't good enough but the book isn't good enough for my name... (Sexton & Ames, 1977, p. 241) Sexton seemed to be generally aware, however, of the detrimental effects that excessive concern with reward could have on creativity. When her friend W.D. Snodgrass won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, she cautioned him against losing his original intrinsic motivation for writing: So okay. "Heart's Needle" is a great poem. But you have better than that inside you. To hell with their prize and their fame. You've got to sit down now and write some more "real" [...] write me some blood. That is why you were great in the first place. Don't let prizes stop you from your original courage, the courage of an alien. Be still, that alien, who wrote "real" when no one really wanted it. Because, that is the only thing that will save (and I do mean save) other people. Prizes won't. Only you will. (Sexton & Ames, 1977, p. 109-110). Sexton's cautious and ambiguous attitudes toward reward for creative work are captured well in this assage from a letter ot her agent: "I am in lvoe with money, so don't be mistaken, but first I want to write good poems. After that I am anxious as hell to make money and fame and bring the stars all down" (p. 287-288).
Wagner-Martin, Linda. "Anne Sexton's Life."
Familial Relationships Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother's literary aspirations had been frustrated by family life. Anne took refuge from her dysfunctional family in her close relationship with "Nana" (Anna Dingley), her maiden great-aunt who lived with the family during Anne's adolescence. Sexton's biographer, Diane Middlebrook, recounts possible sexual abuse by Anne's parents during her childhood; at the very least, Anne felt that her parents were hostile to her and feared that they might abandon her. Her aunt's later breakdown and hospitalization also traumatized her.
Brizee, Allen, and J. Case Tompkins. "Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)."
Feminism Goals Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the primary means by which they are kept so In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is other: she is marginalized, defined only by her difference from male norms and values All of western (Anglo-European) civilization is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideology, for example, in the biblical portrayal of Eve as the origin of sin and death in the world While biology determines our sex (male or female), culture determines our gender (masculine or feminine) All feminist activity, including feminist theory and literary criticism, has as its ultimate goal to change the world by prompting gender equality Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production and experience, including the production and experience of literature, whether we are consciously aware of these issues or not (91).
Middlebrook, Diane Wood, Greg Johnson, and Jane McCabe. "On 'Her Kind'."
History of "Her Kind" Bedlam was due at the printers on 1 August. [...] In arriving at the final manuscript, she shrewdly discarded work that she had been proud to send out for serial publication just a few months earlier. [...] She divided the book into two parts, roughly of early and recent work. That first section worried her, because it lacked a keynote, a dominant image, a theme. Riffling through what she called her "bone pile" of discarded efforts, she picked up a piece of sentimental verse that had started life in December 1957 as "Night Voice on a Broomstick" and that she had sent to literary journals without success. In July 1959 she retitled it "Witch" and reworked it into a sixteen-line quasi-sonnet form. Then she broke those lines up into very short pieces with irregular but striking rhymes; in that thirty-eight-line version, "Witch" ended Who see me here this ragged apparition in their own air see a wicked appetite, if they dare. This is the sort of poem Sexton had been writing for workshops throughout her apprenticeship. ..."Witch" is spoken through a mask by a dramatic persona and offers a psychological portrait of a social type. Sexton polished the poem through several revisions, but something about the short lines bothered her. She lengthened them again, this time trying another structuring principle, punctuating the stanza breaks with a refrain: "I have been her kind." The poem now began this way: I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. Through the use of an undifferentiated but double "I," the poem sets up a single persona identified with madness but separated from it through insight. Two points of view are designated "I" in each stanza. The witch (stanza one), the housewife (stanza two), and the adulteress (stanza three) are those who act, or act out; in the refrain, an "I" steps through the frame of "like that" to witness, interpret, and affirm her alter ego in the same line. The double subjectivity of "Her Kind," as Sexton now called the poem, cleverly finds a way to represent a condition symbolized not in words but in symptoms that yearn to be comprehended. "Her Kind" contains its own perfect reader, its own namesake, "I."
"Passivity and Rebellion in Anne Sexton's." Unadulterated Text.
In the final stanza, we see a woman who is "learning the last bright routes." That is to say that she is facing death. Of paramount importance, and often ignored, is the question of the identity of the new character introduced in this stanza, the driver.3 This stanza differs from the previous stanzas, both in that it is directed at a particular recipient and in that it is projected as an outcry rather than as a passive description. The driver, I believe, is a symbol for society, which drives the woman to be something she cannot be in the first two stanzas, forcing her to rebel and live as an outcast. She is, of course, still an outcast. She can only wave her "nude arms at villages going by." Now, though, she is stronger; no longer does she need to be "braver at night." She has survived the aspersions of a society whose wheels have cracked her ribs. No longer does she seek to bring the trappings of society into her exile, or to pretend to be that which she is not. She will no longer fix "suppers for the worms and the elves," nor can she any longer be misunderstood, for she is at peace with herself and with her outcast status, "not ashamed to die." While society has not reconciled itself to her ("[its] flames still bite my thigh"), she has at last reconciled herself to society or, rather, out of it. The tension in the piece, built up through the first two stanzas between passivity and rebellion has reconciled itself into the ultimate form of passive rebellion, death.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. "Anne Sexton's Life."
Media & Public Ideals In 1957 Sexton joined several Boston writing groups, and she came to know such writers as Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, George Starbuck, and Sylvia Plath. Her poetry became central to her life, and she mastered formal techniques that gained her wide attention. In 1960 To Bedlam and Part Way Back was published to good reviews. Such poems as "You, Doctor Martin," "The Bells," and "The Double Image" were often anthologized. Like such other so-called confessional poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell, Sexton was able to convince her readers that her poems echoed her life; not only was her poetry technically excellent, but it was meaningful to the midcentury readers who lived daily with similar kinds of fear and angst. [...] In 1962 Sexton published All My Pretty Ones. So popular was her poetry in England that an edition of Selected Poems was published there as a Poetry Book Selection in 1964. In 1967 Sexton received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Live or Die (1966), capping her accumulation of honors such as the Frost Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (1959), the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (1961), the Levinson Prize (1962), the American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship (1963), the Shelley Memorial Prize (1967), and an invitation to give the Morris Gray reading at Harvard. To follow were a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ford Foundation grants, honorary degrees, professorships at Colgate University and Boston University, and other distinctions. Sexton's reputation as poet peaked with the publication of Love Poems (1969), an off-Broadway production of her play Mercy Street (1969), and the publication of prose poems inTransformations (1972). Clearly her most feminist work, the pieces in Transformations spoke to a different kind of reader. The Sexton voice was now less confessional and more critical of cultural practices, more inclined to look outside the poet's persona for material. [...] Other posthumous collections of her poems include 45 Mercy Street (1976) and Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978), both edited by Linda Gray Sexton. The publication of Sexton's work culminated in The Complete Poems in 1981. Sexton also wrote important essays about poetry and made insightful comments in her many interviews. She understood the fictive impulse, the way the writer uses both fact and the imagination in creation; and, like Wallace Stevens, she saw her art as the "supreme fiction," the writer's finest accomplishment. Much of what Sexton wrote was in no way autobiographical, despite the sense of reality it had, and thus criticisms of her writing as "confessional" are misleading. She used her knowledge of the human condition--often painful, but sometimes joyous--to create poems readers could share. Her incisive metaphors, the unexpected rhythms of her verse, and her ability to grasp a range of meaning in precise words have secured Sexton's good reputation. Though comparatively short, her writing career was successful, as was her art.
"Wnne Sexton Dies; Pulitzer Poet, 45; Bad Case of Melancholy'." The New York Times
Obituary Anne Sexton, the poet who won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for her volume "Live or Die," was found dead yesterday inside an idling car. parked in her garage. "It was either suicide or natural causes," Lieut. Lawrence Cugini, a police detective, said.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. "Anne Sexton's Life."
Onset of Depression/Start of Writing Depressed after the death of her beloved Nana in 1954 and the birth of her second daughter in 1955, Sexton went back into therapy. Her depression worsened, however, and during times when her husband was gone, she occasionally abused the children. Several attempts at suicide led to intermittent institutionalization, of which her parents disapproved. During these years, Sexton's therapist encouraged her to write.
Brizee, Allen, and J. Case Tompkins. "Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)."
Overall Feminism Feminist criticism is concerned with "...the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women" (Tyson). This school of theory looks at how aspects of our culture are inherently patriarchal (male dominated) and "...this critique strives to expose the explicit and implicit misogyny in male writing about women" (Richter 1346). Feminist criticism is also concerned with less obvious forms of marginalization such as the exclusion of women writers from the traditional literary canon: "...unless the critical or historical point of view is feminist, there is a tendency to under-represent the contribution of women writers" (Tyson 82-83).
Kakutani, Michiko. "Books of the Times: A Poet's Life through a Sexual Lens."
Psychiatrist Gives Tapes-- Anne's Purpose Hint In a foreword to the book, he writes: "Although I had many misgivings about discussing any aspects of the therapy, which extended over eight years, I also realized that Anne herself would have wanted to share this process -- much as she did in her poetry -- so that other patients and therapists might learn from it." Ms. Middlebrook echoes his observations in her own preface: "Everything I have learned about her suggests that she would not have held back from the archive of her manuscripts and private papers the full collection of tapes. Sexton was not a person with a strong sense of privacy. She was open and impulsive: many people found her exhibitionistic, and some of the people who lived with her found her outrageously, immorally invasive. But her lack of reserve had a generous side as well, which was, I think, connected to her spirituality. If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others. I have tried to honor that attitude of Sexton's in writing about her life."
Kakutani, Michiko. "Books of the Times: A Poet's Life through a Sexual Lens."
Psychiatrist Relinquishes Tapes for Biography Sexton, who committed suicide in 1974, saw the psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne, from 1956 to 1964 (the period in which she first began writing poetry and swiftly gained public recognition), and in 1960 he began taping their sessions as a means of helping her deal with her frequent memory lapses. With the permission of Sexton's older daughter and literary executor, Linda Gray Sexton, Dr. Orne turned over more than 300 tapes (as well as some unpublished poems) to Ms. Middlebrook for use in this biography.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. "Anne Sexton's Life."
Relationship with Husband Anne's beauty and sense of daring attracted many men, and at nineteen she eloped with Alfred "Kayo" Sexton II, even though she was engaged to someone else at the time. Then followed years of living as college student newlyweds, sometimes with their parents. Later, during Kayo's service in Korea, Anne became a fashion model. Her infidelities during her husband's absence led to her entering therapy. In 1953 Anne gave birth to a daughter, and Kayo took a job as a traveling salesman in Anne's father's business. [...] In 1959 Sexton unexpectedly lost both of her parents, and the memory of her difficult relationships with them--so abruptly ended--led to further breakdowns. Poetry seemed the only route to stability, though at times the friendships she made through her art, which led to sexual affairs, also were unsettling. Her marriage was torn by discord and physical abuse as her husband saw his formerly dependent wife become a celebrity. [...] In 1963 Sexton had traveled in Europe, and in 1966 she and Kayo had gone on an safari. In 1970 she had helped him start a business of his own after he broke associations with her father's former company. Contrary to her seemingly confident public manner, however, Sexton was heavily dependent on therapists, medications, close friends--particularly Maxine Kumin and, later, Lois Ames--and lovers. Continual depressive bouts, unexpected trance states, and comparatively frequent suicide attempts kept her family and friends watchful and unnerved. Finally, in 1973, Sexton told Kayo she wanted a divorce, and from that time on a noticeable decline in her health and stability occurred as loneliness, alcoholism, and depression took their toll.
Brizee, Allen, and J. Case Tompkins. "Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)."
Second Wave Feminism - early 1960s-late 1970s: building on more equal working conditions necessary in America during World War II, movements such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), formed in 1966, cohere feminist political activism. Writers like Simone de Beauvoir (Le deuxième sexe, 1972) and Elaine Showalter established the groundwork for the dissemination of feminist theories dove-tailed with the American Civil Rights movement
Amabile, Theresa M. Creativity in Context: Update to the Social Psychology of Creativity.
Starting Purpose In Anne Sexton's letters to friends, colleagues, and relatives (Sexton & Ames, 1977), one attitude toward her writing is prominent: a consistently high level of intrinsic motivation, a motivation to write poetry primarily because it was something she loved to do. perhaps this should be expected of someone who, as a housewife at the age of 28 watched an Education Television program called "How to Write a Sonnet" and decided to give it a try. She enjoyed it so much that, for the rest of her 46 years, she never stopped writing poetry. It became her passionate avocation and then her vocation, carried out over obstacles that included a traveling-salesman husband, two young children, a household to run, and repeated bouts with serious depression. In an introduction to Sexton's letters, her daughter says, "Very quickly she established a working routine in a corner of hte already crowded dining room. Piled high with worksheets and books, her desk constantly overflowed onto the dining room table; she wrote in every spare minute she could steal from childtending and housewifely duties" (p. 29).
