Anne Sexton
Confessional Poetry, Self Image &
Fairy Tale
A WOMAN WHO WRITES FEELS TOO MUCH,
THOSE TRANCES AND PORTENTS!. . .
SHE THINKS SHE CAN WARN THE STARS...
Biography
college dropout turned housewife,
fashion model, and jazz singer, Anne
Gray Harvey Sexton is an unusual
source of self-revelatory verse that
prefaced an era of Modernist
confessional.
An ambivalent feminist, she spoke
for the turmoil in women who
despised the housewife’s boring fate,
yet she suffered guilt over ventures
into angry complaint and personal
freedom.
A confessional poet traffics in intimate, and
sometimes unflattering, information about him or
herself, in poems about illness, sexuality,
despondence and the like.
The Confessionalist label was applied to a number
of poets of the 1950s and 1960s. John Berryman,
Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath,
Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and William De
Witt Snodgrass have all been called “Confessional
Poets.”
Sexton’s major themes

religious quest,
 transformation and
dismantling of myth,
 the meanings of gender,
 inheritance and legacy,
 the search for fathers,
 mother-daughter relationships,
 sexual anxiety,
 madness and suicide,
 issues of female identity
Style & Form
Sexton's early poetry was
preoccupied with form and
technique; she could write in tightly
constrained metrical forms.
She wrote in free verse during the
middle and late phases of her poetic
career. Most important is her gift
for unique imagery, often
centering on the body or the
Terri Brown-Davidson,
household.
http://tbrowndavidson.blogspot.com/2009/11/anne-sexton-2.html
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 readers from different
backgrounds.
Her Kind
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.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
1960
Video clip
Sexton reading “Her Kind”
How is Sexton’s persona developed
through this clip?
How does she project her image, how
does she perform this poem?
Questions to Consider:
What does the repeated
phrase “I have been her
kind” mean? Does the
phrase have universal
significance for Sexton?
In “Her Kind,” how does
Sexton characterize
loneliness? Is being
lonely a positive or
wholly negative quality?
Suicidal Self-Image
Sexton, wrapped in her mother’s fur
coat and clutching a glass of vodka,
ended a troubled, chaotic life. She
died just as she was emerging as a
champion of self-fulfillment. At a
memorial service, Adrienne Rich
decried the self-indulgence of
suicidal personalities; Denise
Levertov noted in an obituary that
Sexton had “confused creativity with
self-annihilation.”
Fairy Tales: “Cinderella”
Sexton's style is sarcastic and curt.
Phrases like "that story" (5, 10, 21,
109), "as you all know" (41), "that's
the way with stepmothers" (55),
"rather a large package for a simple
bird" (62), "blood told as blood will"
(89), and "darling smiles pasted on for
eternity" (107) convey a kind of
disdain for the overly pretty,
sentimental world of fairy tales. It's
like Sexton is saying, sort of under
her breath, "That's not how the world
works. The world is way uglier than
that. Deal with it." And we have to.
Slides on “Cinderella”: Shmoop Editorial Team. (November 11, 2008).Cinderella.
Retrieved March 17, 2013, from http://www.shmoop.com/cinderella-sexton/
Cinderella Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay:
Consumer Culture
Consumer goods, mostly for
women (clothes, shoes, bags) are
strewn throughout the poem and
help anchor the speaker's cynicism
about what money can really buy.
The poem revolves around stuff,
but in the end (as we can tell from
Cinderella's doll-like fate), the stuff
just doesn't matter.
Examples: Dior, Bonwit Teller,
Bread, Gold Clothing & slippers.
Cinderella Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay:
Dirt
In contrast to all the finery (expensive stuff) that
appears in the poem, there is, of course, dirt—
lots of it, and not just in the Cinderella story. The
poem is constantly comparing images of dirt with
images of lovely clothes and jewels. By making
these comparisons, the poem seems to say that
to not have money is to necessarily be dirty.
Given the cynical nature of Sexton's version of
the fairy tale, she seems to think that this
viewpoint is ridiculous.
Examples: plumber, nursemaid, milkman,
charwoman.
At the end of the story, when the prince and
Cinderella are living "happily ever after," we have
a pronounced lack of dirt: no "diapers" or "dust."
Cinderella Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay:
Blood & Injury
Although injury makes an indirect
appearance near the beginning of the
poem, things really get gory toward
the end, when the stepsisters are
brought to gruesome justice. Many of
these bloody events are told in a
really casual, almost nondescript kind
of way, which in a way makes them
even more startling. After all, if
somebody says something really
shocking in an offhand way, don't you
kind of do a double take?
Note: this version is way closer to
the original Grimm’s version of the
story.
Cinderella Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay:
Service Industry
This particular series of images is closely related
to the "Dirt" imagery we talked about above. All
the images that detail poverty and a generally
miserable existence seem to have to do with
service-related jobs: cleaning, delivering, tending
to other people's stuff. These are no luxurywedding planners, and the contrast between
working (which the poem frames as a demanding
burden) and being royalty (in which you don't
have to do anything) is set up by a series of
images and plot points that feature poor people
serving the rich
Questions to consider:
There’s not just one right answer.
1. Which do you think is the better story: this version of
"Cinderella" (basically the Grimms') or the Disney version?
What makes it better or worse?
2. Do you think everyone deserves what they get in this story?
Why or why not?
3. What effect does turning "Cinderella" into a poem have on the
whole story? Why bother turning a fairy tale into a poem in the
first place?
4. Do you believe you can really get something for nothing? Do
you think that's what the poem is suggesting? Why or why
not?
5. Why do you think that money doesn't automatically make
everyone happy in "Cinderella"? What do you think the point of
that message is?