Childhood: A Journal for the Study and
Research of Children’s Culture
‫ כתב עת לחקר תרבות ילדים‬:‫ילדּות‬
1 ‫גיליון מספר‬
Volume No. 1
‫ ד"ר גליה שנברג‬,‫ ד"ר שי רודין‬,‫ ד"ר שרה מאיר‬:‫מערכת‬
Editorial Board: Dr. Sara Meyer, Dr. Shai Rudin,
Dr. Galia Shenberg
Academic Council: Professor Tamar Alexander,
Professor Miri Baruch, Professor William Freedman,
Professor Uzi Shavit, Professor Aliza Shenhar
,‫ פרופ' מירי ברוך‬,‫ פרופ' תמר אלכסנדר‬:‫מועצה אקדמית‬
‫ פרופ' עליזה שנהר‬,‫ פרופ' עוזי שביט‬,‫פרופ' ביל פרידמן‬
‫ המכללה לעיצוב‬,‫ באדיבות מכללת תילתן‬,‫ קסניה לוגובסקי‬:‫איור הכריכה‬
‫ולתקשורת חזותית‬
Cover Drawing: Ksenia Lugosky, by courtesy of Tiltan College for
Design & Multimedia
‫אלול תשע"ה‬
2015 ‫אוגוסט‬
August 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Gordon Academic College of
Education
All Rights Reserved
‫כל הזכויות שמורות למכללה האקדמית לחינוך גורדון‬
‫לדרמה רב שכבתית האורגת בתוכה את הזכרון האישי‪ ,‬הפנטזיה‪,‬‬
‫הרומן המשפחתי הפרוידיאני וסיפור המעשיה של גרים‪.‬‬
‫תקצירי המסות והמאמרים‬
‫"הספר הזה של סיפורים מוזרים"‪ :‬קריאה מחודשת של‬
‫מעשיות האחים גרים דרך שירת הווידוי של אן סקסטון‬
‫שרה מאיר‬
‫ניתן לקרוא את ספרה של אן סקסטון (‪ )1928-1974‬טרנספורמציות‬
‫כהרחבה של שירת הוידוי שלה‪ .‬בעוד שכתיבה אוטוביוגרפית לרוב‬
‫מתוחמת על ידי החיים הפרטיים של של אינדיבידואל מסוים‪,‬‬
‫סקסטון כותבת מחדש את מעשיות האחים גרים בחיות‪ ,‬הומור‬
‫ותחכום אופייניים ההופכים את הטקסטים שלה לטקסטים‬
‫"סקסטוניים" החודרים לנראטיבים המקוריים ומאירים את‬
‫הרלונטיות שלהם לאני שלה‪ .‬לסוביקט המוצג בשירים שלוחות‬
‫המגיעות למסגרת התרבותית של המעשיות לילדים וממסמסות את‬
‫הגבול בין התוכן המוכר והידוע כל כך ובין קולה המיידי‬
‫והאוטוביוגראפי של הדוברת‪ .‬נקודת הפתיחה של סקסטון היא‬
‫בדיוק המקום בו האחים גרים חותמים את האוסף שלהם – הסיפור‬
‫הקצר "מפתח הזהב" – סיפור מסקרן עם סוף פתוח‪ .‬סקסטון‬
‫פותחת את ספרה בגירסה משלה ל"מפתח הזהב" כשהיא נכנסת‬
‫למרחב הפתוח שמשאיר סיפורם של גרים ומציעה לקוראיה את‬
‫המבט האידיוסינקרטי שלה על המעשיות שלהם‪ .‬קריאה מעמיקה‬
‫בשיר הסיום של הספר‪" ,‬שושנת החוחים" (היפהפיה הנמה)‪ ,‬מדגימה‬
‫לא רק את הקשרים ההדוקים בין המעשיות המקוריות והנראטיבים‬
‫האירוניים של סקסטון – נראטיבים שופעי הומור שעברו‬
‫אמריקנזיציה ומודרניזציה – אלא גם את האופן שבו סיפורים‬
‫מוכרים אלה מגיחים כשירי ווידוי‪ ,‬כאשר מה שנראה כתלוי זמן‬
‫ומרחב מתמזג עם מה שנתפס כעל זמני ועל מרחבי‪ .‬שיר הוידוי‬
‫הקוצני והמדמם של סקסטון מפגיש את היפהפיה הנמה לא עם נסיך‬
‫גואל אלא עם אב קנאי בסצינת גילוי עריות וסוחף את הקוראת‬
‫‪8‬‬
Sara Meyer
demonstrate not only the tight connections between the
original fairytales and the ironic, Americanized,
modernized, and extremely funny narratives of Sexton, but
ultimately, the ways by which these all too known plots
emerge as confessional poems, where what seems to be
contingent on time and space conflates with what is
otherwise space less and timeless.
Abstracts
“This Book of Odd Tales”: Revisiting Grimms'
Fairytales through the Confessional Mode in
Sexton’s Transformations
Sara Meyer
Anne Sexton’s Transformations may be read as an
extension of her confessional writings. While
autobiographical poetry is often contextualized by the
private life of a particular individual, Sexton’s vibrant,
witty, sardonic revisions of the brothers Grimm does not
merely Sextonize the all too familiar tales but rather probes
their relevance to the narrative of her own self. The
subjectivity here presented extends into the cultural
framework of the fairytales, blurring the boundary lines
between the familiar old stories and the immediate,
autobiographical voice of the speaker. Sexton’s point of
departure is precisely where the Grimms seal their
collection with “The Gold Key” – an open ended curious
short tale. Her own introductory poem “The Gold Key”
walks into the space left by the brothers Grimm as she
offers to her readers her unique reading of the tales and
subjects them to her idiosyncratic gaze. A close reading of
“Briar Rose,ˮ Sexton’s final poem in the book, helps
17
Sara Meyer
Because I wanted to… because it made me happy.
…I would like my readers to see this side of me,
and it is not in every case the lighter side. Some of
the poems are grim. In fact I don’t know how to
typify them except to agree that I have made them
contemporary. It would rather be a lie to say that
they weren’t about me, because they are just as
much about me as my other poetry (Letters 362).
The articles
“This Book of Odd Tales”: Revisiting Grimms'
Fairytales through the Confessional Mode in
Sexton’s Transformations
And
Sara Meyer
I don’t see Transformations as confessional but
perhaps it is indeed. At one time I hated being
called confessional and denied it, but mea culpa.
Now I say that I am the only confessional poet. No
matter how hard you work at it, your own voice
shows through (Letters 372).
In her biography of Sexton, Middlebrook comments that
“With Transformations, [Sexton] observed, she had moved
as far as possible from confessionalism” (338). Yet reading
the poems in this book which is a revisiting of the Brothers
Grimm fairytales in a modernized, sardonic way, one
cannot but constantly see the confessional Sexton emerging
through the stories of witches, princes, and sleeping
beauties. “The old themes are all here, even in new guise;
the dynamics of relationships between men and women,
mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, “gods” and
mortals, madness and sanity, conscious and unconscious”
(George 37). Sexton’s words about the book reveal her own
awareness of the confessional thread in the poems despite
the apparently non-confessional cover.
What are the specific qualities achieved through this
mode of poetic writing? For one thing, it allows a greater
sense of distance from what might be otherwise overtly
personal and revealing. Yet since reticence was not one of
Sexton’s qualities, one wonders why would the poet who
could freely write about “Menstruation at Forty” (CP 137)1,
shy away from the exposure of her intimate life and “hide”
behind the all too well-known “Cinderella” or “Red Riding
Hood?”
Perhaps it is precisely that quality of the fairytale –
the all too known characters that have become popularized
Transformations are a departure from my usual
style. I would say that they lack the intensity and
perhaps some of the confessional force of my
previous work. I wrote them because I had to…
1
157
CP is short for The Complete Poem by Sexton and will be used as such
throughout the paper.
“This Book of Odd Tales”:
Revisiting Grimms' Fairytales through the
Confessional Mode in Sexton’s Transformations
mythical figures – that attracted Sexton in the first place.
Sexton wrote on mythical characters such as Oedipus (“The
Legend of the One Eyed Man,ˮ CP 112). Yet by drawing on
children’s fairytale figures who had already been
"Disneyfied” in her time, Sexton seems to dig deeper into
very early forms of subject constructions through popular
culture.2 Interestingly, Bettelheim, author The Uses of
Enchantment, an authority in the field of Freudian reading
of the fairytales, makes a comment about Sexton in his
book, praising her insight over the more reductive Disney
adaptations of the fairytales.3
The mythical childhood figures are associated with
early training and it is obvious that Sexton, as a devoted
Freudian, realized that it is those childhood heroes which
help create a socialized constructed subjectivity. She goes
beyond the more established classical myth makers4 we
usually get to know later in life to a very early phase of
development, when we “were read to” (CP 231) rather than
actively read ourselves. To be read to is to assume a passive
stance. One major stride Sexton takes in the opening of
Transformations is assuming the role of the “middle aged
witch / ready to tell you a story or two” (“The Gold Key,”
CP 223). Rather than being read to, this is Sexton’s turn to
“tell” – and it is not merely reading to, but rather an act of
reawakening, as we are soon going to see. Ironically, while
fairytales are part of bedtime rituals, here the witch purports
to do the opposite and stop the “comatose” (CP 231) state –
much like the prince in “Briar Rose.” Even before digging
into the various facets of Sexton’s ironical use of the
original texts, one must realize that these are as far as one
can get from bedtime materials. If anything, they will
disrupt the happily ever after to introduce disturbing
possibilities.
DeVito’s contends that Sexton alerts us to the
impossibility of happy endings, a form of totalizing single
perspective rather than the fluid poststructuralist stance
which destabilizes any claim for a single, omnipotent view.
Sexton evades the happily ever after endings by allowing us
to see that which lies between the lines – a deconstructive
perspective which “interrogate[s] the story” by making us
“aware of how the story interrogates itself.” In Devito’s
reading, Sexton’s aim is to alert us to the connection
between “the problematic tendencies of reading the
fairytales in terms of the absolute” as a “reflection of larger
problems in how we read life.” One may argue against this
view by claiming that it seems to endow the Grimms' texts
with what they inherently lack, and that indeed any
rewriting of a text is already a revision. Deconstruction
implies exploding the surface meaning to uncover other,
subversive possibilities. But it seems to me that rather than
deconstructing the original tales to expose the ways by
2
On the role of fairy tales in the formation of gendered subject position,
see Donald Haase’s (ed.) Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches.
3 See comment about Sexton on page 210.
4 On the difference between fairytales and myth, see Bettelheim’s
chapter: “Fairytale versus Myth; Optimism versus Pessimismˮ in The
Uses of Enchantment (35-41).
158
Sara Meyer
which they point at what is already part of their texture,
Sexton surpasses the texts. In his letter to Sexton, Stanley
Kunitz says:
aspect of the fairytale, not swerving from some of its well
known, “revision resistant” ingredients only to find her own
point of departure, even though the very quick recovery of
the old contents is already a farce, a work of irony and
criticism.
But the cherishing of the original “trademarksˮ of the
fairytales may ultimately mean that some stories or plots
cannot be revised. These traces of the old narratives do not
serve merely to present a recognizable context. Their
persistent existence – despite Sexton’s act of “swallowing”
the original narratives – attests to their deeply engraved
qualities. No “eraser” (“Briar Rose,” CP 291) may uproot
or alter them. In quite a similar way, the voice narrating
those tales, the poet who seems to swerve from the habitual
confessional mode, is forever “nailed into place” (“Briar
Rose,” CP 294), the site of the self narrating the fairytales,
falling time and again on the old familiar past traumas
which cannot be “erased.” Put differently, I would argue
that while Sexton’s Transformations is often discussed as a
reaction to the Brothers Grimm, we should perhaps see how
it reconstructs the confessional stance, situating subjectivity
not in a sealed biography, but rather in the broader context
of multiple cultural connections.5
You have swallowed the tales alive and carried
them in the belly of your imagination until you
were ready to disgorge them like a whole
brotherhood of bug-eyed Jonahs (Letters 373).
Kunitz’s words indicate the act of transformation in
the book, the sense of the reader that the poem she reads
springs genetically from the Brothers Grimm but has its
own entirely fresh characteristic as it seems to create a
rather new thing. Or in Sexton’s own words:
I take the fairytale and transform it into a poem of
my own, following the story line, exceeding the
story line and adding my own pzazz. They are very
wry and sadistic and funny (Middlebrook 336-7).
Sexton’s take on the fairytales is such that it allows
her a restructuring of a new tale on the skeleton of the all
too known old one. The tales read quickly, very quickly.
Sexton seems to rush through the plot lines and embrace the
epilogue which is often full of the personal or the broader
view of human society in America of the 1960s and the
1970s. The swift movement over the bones of the skeletal
fairytale is part of the irony created in the text. Often, it robs
the narrative of its original explanatory arrangement, and
presents only the highlights of “that story” (“Cinderella,”
CP 255). In that sense, it is as if she cherishes the “given”
5
159
Commenting on this work in the framework of what she calls
"revisionist mythmaking," Alicia Ostriker alerts us that while the plots
are fixed the teller is mobile (27). As in other cases of such
reversionary mythmaking by women poets, the poems “challenge the
validity of the "I," of any "I" and their multiple voices “evoke divided
“This Book of Odd Tales”:
Revisiting Grimms' Fairytales through the
Confessional Mode in Sexton’s Transformations
The speaker in this case
is a middle aged witch, me tangled on my two great arms,
my face in a book
and my mouth wide,
ready to tell you a story or two. (CP 223).
I would like to Focus on “Briar Rose” and see it in
relation to the poem “The Gold Key." which is an
introduction to the book and where the original skeletal
fairytale is hardly seen. Like DeVito, I think that “Briar
Rose” also works as a bookend, as a companion piece to her
introductory poem, “The Gold Key.ˮ “Both are concerned
with awakening.” Although all the poems are divided into
prologue, story and epilogue, digressing from the Brothers
Grimm’s narratives mostly in their epilogues and prologues,
the body of narrative allocated to the original story in “The
Gold Key” is indeed marginalized. Because the
transformation in this case is so radical, and because the
original narrative is very short, I will refer to both texts.
Indeed, the boundary lines between the original tale and
Sexton’s poem seem to dissolve almost entirely. By
opening her book with such a powerful departure from the
original story, Sexton already signals to her readers that the
book is indeed “part of my life’s work” (Middlebrook 338).
What seems to serve as an introduction to the
transformations of the original fairytales is yet another
transformation. In other words, Sexton begins and ends
with the Grimms, even when the text seems to serve
purposes other than “transformation.” The transformational
dynamics in the book are always at work.
The witch, a common fairytale character, is not alien
to Sexton’s self-imagery in her oeuvre. One may be
reminded in particular of “Her Kind” (CP 15):
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. (CP 15)
Unlike the witch in conventional fairytales, this witch
is a “freak” of urban scenery, a dreamer of evil who flies
over the “plain” homes of the all too normal American
town, damned by her “out of mind” “twelve-fingered
“mode of existence – a woman who is not a woman.”
Perhaps it is this urban, alien figure of a witch who
steps forward to tell us “a story of two” in the introduction
of Transformations, thus creating a liminal space where
both worlds actually meet, where the poet is a kind of a
witch. “‘Her kind’ served as the poem with which [Sexton]
began her readings, telling her audience that it would show
selvesˮ (29) presenting not a unitary sense of subjectivity but rather a
fructured one.
160
Sara Meyer
them what kind of woman she was, and what kind of poet.
It was a most dramatic gesture… it was the way she stepped
from person to persona” (Middlebrook 115). The witch is
therefore part of Sexton’s role as a poet-reader. Thus,
already from the outset, Sexton treats Transformations as an
extension of her other work. In a twisted way, as is true of
all the following narratives, the role of this storytelling is
not part of a bedtime ritual assisting children in their
journey towards sleep, but rather a journey of awakening:
into these stories, capable of vexing her audience with her
visions and reminding them of the truth” (Joyce 35).
Curiously, the speaker then presents to the readers
“this boy” who is sixteen, looking for answers.
He is each of us.
I mean you.
I mean me. (CP 223)
Sexton goes “halfway” back to childhood, stopping at
adolescence. The sixteen year-old boy finds a gold key “and
he is looking for what it will open.”
This is yet another twist. Usually one looks for a key
for a specific door or box that is already there, rather than
the other way around. In a similar way:
Alice,
at forty-six do you remember?
Do you remember when you
were read to as a child?
…
Are you comatose?
Are you undersea? (CP 223)
This boy!
Upon finding a nickel
he would look for a wallet.
This boy!
Upon finding a string
he would look for a harp. (CP 224)
The transformed fairytales may be presented as a way
to stop that long sleep in which the audience is caught,
metaphorically speaking, so as to alert them to new contents
or meanings in the old tales. Indeed, the poems in the book
continually tease the old narratives of innocence and place
them in the modernized urban environment of midcentury
America, stripping them of their original naiveté and
illuminating the darkness from which they may have
distracted our attention by their shining surface. “Rather
than a sibyl or a goddess who tells the tales, Sexton declares
herself a witch, a madwoman, crazed by her ability to see
The exclamation mark may suggest a note of
complaint or adoration. This boy does things differently. He
finds a key before having the object that needs to be
opened, a rather absurd sequence of acts. Furthermore,
finding a nickel and only then looking for the wallet to
which it may belong seems to suggest yet another
impossible way of getting “there.” To understand Sexton’s
161
“This Book of Odd Tales”:
Revisiting Grimms' Fairytales through the
Confessional Mode in Sexton’s Transformations
act of swerving here as well as its implications, we should
examine the original text:
key, the boy looks for a chest, reasoning the existence of the
chest as a function of the proximity of one to the other, just
as in the psychoanalytic practice of free association the
seemingly thoughtless movement from stimulus to
response, the almost automatic transition from word to
word is actually a result of unconscious processes leading to
the unveiling of “wonderful things” which have been lying
under the iceberg (or snow) for a long time. A trained
analysand, Sexton might have easily come across the
familiar Freudian imagery, where the tip of the iceberg
symbolizes the thin surface under which a massive
impenetrable bulk of unconsciousness lies almost
untouched. The famous quotation of Kafka’s words that
Sexton cites as the epitaph to All My Pretty Ones –
“literature should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within
us” (CP 48) – becomes highly relevant in this context. But
in her own poem, there is no “deep snow” and no proximity
(or association) between key and “what it will open.” The
boy’s task in her version is far more demanding as there is
no “common ground” to the key and “what” it may open.
They are not found in the deep snow as in the Brothers
Grimm’s tale and one does not lead to the other as in free
association because of some proximity. It may be argued
that in Sexton’s poem, rather than being presented with a
riddle to be solved, the boy has a key to a solution of an
unknown riddle. In that context, the miraculous finding of
“this book of odd tales” is indeed surprising and cannot be
explained away as in the Grimms’ fairytale.
Once in the wintertime when the snow was very
deep, a poor boy had to go out and fetch wood on a
sled. After he had gathered it together and loaded it,
he did not want to go straight home, because he was
so frozen, but instead to make a fire and warm
himself a little first. So he scraped the snow away
and while he was thus clearing the ground he found
a small golden key. Now he believed that where
there was a key, there must also be a lock, so he
dug in the ground and found a little iron chest. "If
only the key fits!" he thought. "Certainly there are
valuable things in the chest." He looked, but there
was no keyhole. Finally he found one, but so small
that it could scarcely be seen. He tried the key, and
fortunately it fitted. Then he turned it once, and
now we must wait until he has finished unlocking it
and has opened the lid. Then we shall find out what
kind of wonderful things there were in the little
chest. (Web)
Grimms' “The Gold Key” is a fairytale about
accidental discovery, a narrative of some miraculous
digging into cold layers of ground and the sudden emerging
of unexpected “key” for yet another dug “chest.” Among
other things, the tale may invoke the psychoanalytical
process where one finds a “key” to a hidden content quite
by chance and also by way of association. Upon finding a
162
Sara Meyer
“catatonics” in “Briar Rose,” who are “stuck in the time
machine,” “all... in trance” with her for a hundred years (CP
292).
Perhaps the most intriguing part of the original tale is
the direct call to the reader to “wait” until the unlocking is
complete before realizing the “wonderful things” in the
little chest. Manipulating the reader’s sense of time by
asking her to transform from narrative time to chronological
time tugs her out of the narrative, as it were, unable to
complete the act of unveiling the chest. Once the Brothers
Grimm introduce this passage from one set of temporality
to another, a huge hiatus is formed in the body of the text.
In a very uncharacteristic way,6 the fairy tale elegantly
evades closure, or rather introduces us to a very uncommon
open ending. Ignorant of the contents of the iron chest, we
are forever deferred from a site of plenitude, a kind of Eden
barred from our grasp. Moreover, since the “wonderful
things” could translate to just about anything, the chest
signals an empty space, or a space of absence, as its play of
signification leads nowhere or everywhere. It is too abstract,
too vague and thus unattainable. We may argue that the
closing narrative of the Brothers Grimm disallows ending,
bars our way to the destination point and, as such, it is the
opposite of the more common happily ever after narrative,
which seems to put, quite clearly, a full stop at the end of
the story. Once we come across the all too known happily
ever after, we withdraw from the scene. Here, we may be
said to be “stuck” in the fabric, indeed much like the court
6
Sexton’s choice of “The Gold Key” as an opening
poem is brilliant as it opens the lid, after all, presenting the
readers with her own take on the (not quite) “wonderful
things” to be found in the chest. The original “iron chest” in
the Grimms' version whose contents remain unknown at the
end of the story (in quite a frustrating way) is replaced by
Sexton with “this book.” Agency is in the hands of the
“boy” – although the witch is ready to tell us a story or two,
there is yet a key required for the opening of the book. That
way the book is no longer a simple volume of narratives but
rather a kind of a Pandora's box, waiting to be opened by a
special key.
He turns the key
Presto! It opens this book of odd tales
which transform the Brothers Grimm.
“This book of odd tales” crawls into the texture of the
original story, placing Sexton’s text inside the realm of the
fairytale, making it yet another entity to be transformed. If
Sexton’s book is part of a text by the Brothers Grimm, then
the act of transformation exceeds the binary division of
origin and revision or adaptation. Rather than seeing
Sexton’s text as an external body of words which
manipulate a given, autonomous body of tales, the book
See a similar manipulation in the Grimms’ “The Fox and the
Geese” (Web).
163
“This Book of Odd Tales”:
Revisiting Grimms' Fairytales through the
Confessional Mode in Sexton’s Transformations
seems to slide beyond the boundary line, suggesting a
complex process by which it reads both the other and itself
simultaneously. As it reads the other text, Sexton’s book
becomes the other, that “chest” whose contents are never
revealed to the reader. In other words, reading itself, the
book may be said to offer A reading of the mysterious
chest. It is a reading contingent on the identity of the
specific reader. Observing both Sexton's book and that of
the Grimms, the speaker relates to the act of transformations
in her book:
retelling one may speak here of "fleshing out" the tale,
adding complexity and problematizing the somewhat flat
stories.
Or, possibly, Sexton is highly ironic here, poking fun
at her own art, doubting it as it were. In modern art, an
enlarged paper clip could indeed become a “piece of
sculpture.” Pop culture and conceptual art definitely thrive
on magnifying the objects of everyday usage,
defamilarizing it in bright, huge museum halls and
endowing it with the properties of a sculpture. Sexton may
be raising this question about her own art in the book – is
her own act of transformation, of defamiliarizing the raw
materials of the Grimms' narrative yet another way of
making it look like a piece of sculpture – an objet d'art? Or,
is the modernization of the old tales an acceptable form of
art? With a “paper clip” one deviates from the internal
wisdom and contents of the tales to a merely external
manipulation of texts by technical means. We are not
dealing with narrative but with manipulation of textual
productions as bodies which need to be handled and cared
for. By enlarging the paper clip, one focuses on a marginal
irrelevant or extra textual phenomenon, one that is already
at the outset not inherent to the text itself but to modes of
representation and marketing or circulation. The “enlarged”
state of the paper clip and its optional status as a work of art
invite a self-referential reading of Sexton of her own texts
in relation to those of the original Brothers Grimm.
Transform?
As if an enlarged paper clip
could be a piece of sculpture
(And it could).
Transformation then may be read as a kind of
witchcraft or magic. If a paperclip can become a piece of
sculpture – both magnified and perhaps assuming more
depth and volume, offering the presence of an objet d'art
rather than that of a merely “technical” paper clip whose
function is to hold pages together, or create some sort of
division between bulks of text – then, similarly, the book
which is opened by a gold key is a transformation of the
somewhat “raw,” skeletal, two-dimensional work by the
Grimms into a “three dimensional” work of art. Is it this
extra dimension, absent from the original works, that
Sexton seems to try and construe through her sardonic
modern retelling of the tales? Or perhaps rather than
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The “enlarged paperclip,” much like the golden key
in the tale of the Brothers Grimm, leaves out the very
contents of the “book” (or the chest in the original text). As
readers, we may feel impeded by the brevity of the Grimms'
narrative – one expects to hear more, to go beyond the
unlocking phase and to be granted a glimpse inwards.
Curiously, the fairy tale seems to thwart our hopes, to leave
us in an ever suspended field of action, where what is yet to
be found will never quite be there. The fairytale ends
precisely at the most dramatic point of discovery, but offers
only suspense and emptiness. In Sexton’s case, however,
the introductory position of the tale evades this frustration
as the book is not a disappearing origin but an actual
narrative to be unfolded in the poems to come. The
“paperclip” attaches the first poem to others in the volume,
stripping it of any claim for autonomy as it can make sense
only when read in its current position as an introductory
piece. Sexton’s act is curious – not only does she snatch one
of Grimms' tales and transform it into an introductory piece,
but she ventures to create “paperclips” that attach texts to
each other, maintaining a sense of cohesion that is absent in
the original stories which live on isolated territories despite
the underlying similarities of recurrent symbolism and
archetypes.
But the connection between texts is even more telling
when we consider the fact that “The Gold Key” is the last
tale in the collection by the Brothers Grimm. Sexton walks
in precisely where the Grimms depart, as if their act of
(incomplete) closure opens up a space in the narrative for
her text. Thus, the end becomes the beginning and a cycle
of narratives takes place, continuously disrupting the
cohesive structure of any given narrative. In other words,
Sexton’s text may be seen as an extension of Grimms' and,
as such, it does not merely mirror the original tales but
rather continues them. In doing so, Sexton alerts us to the
on-going existence of past narratives, to the continuous
sense of an evolving narrative which cannot quite depart
from some past sources. In confessional terms, Sexton’s
book may be said to present a fluid sense of subjectivity;
one that is forever contingent on multiple forms of subject
formation, such as the early childhood emotional dynamics
we may glimpse in Grimms' tales. The permeable boundary
lines between Grimms' tales and those of Sexton suggest
extensions on both sides of the divide. While
Transformations opens the lid of the iron chest, it seems to
reread both the Grimms' text by allowing a glimpse inside,
and itself, as the confessional mode transcends biography
and ventures to read subjectivity through the grid of the
fairytales.
The Grimms' call to the audience to keep “waiting”
resonates the (mitigated) curse of the thirteenth witch in
“Briar Rose”7 which puts the princess and the whole court
7
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My analysis focuses on Sexton’s “Briar Rose” and disregards the
original Grimms' tale. The scope of the essay disallows a comparison
between the two texts. In this passage, although I use quotations from
Sexton’s poem, the plot details are common to Sexton and Grimm –
“This Book of Odd Tales”:
Revisiting Grimms' Fairytales through the
Confessional Mode in Sexton’s Transformations
her sleep, what precisely is “lost” here? But this is a very
misleading perspective for although “in due time / a
hundred years passed / and a prince got throughˮ (CP 2923), the seemingly frozen scene of Briar Rose and her
surrounding is actually disturbed by “a bunch of briar
roses” which “grew / forming a great wall of tacks / around
the castle” (CP 293). In other words, while Briar Rose, her
parents, and the servants are exiled from the world of time
and process, a dangerously, cutting, painful wall of tacks
does keep growing around. Metaphorically speaking, this
prickly wall of thorns, a kind of extension of the pricking
spinning wheel, suggests the growing presence of a darker
mode of existence which has its own dynamics of growth
regardless of the life at court. Such a parallel mode of being
points at the existence of painful “thorns” which cannot be
stopped or evaded. Moreover, it is precisely this phase of
sleep which turns into a suffocating, threatening thorny
mode of being that Briar Rose tries to avoid at all costs.
Thus, in Sexton’s poem, the happily ever after is
immediately tainted by insomnia.
with her into a hundred years' hiatus of deep sleep; this is
the witch's revenge on the king for not inviting her to the
christening of his daughter. Sleep is another form of
“waiting” for something to happen, of passive existence
which awaits the next day. In a similar way, both states of
absence from the scene are correlated with a form of
curiosity. As readers, we would like to peep inside the iron
chest found by the boy, just as the princess would like to try
out the spinning wheel she finds in the attic8 – an exotic,
unknown object which has been barred from her knowledge
because of her father’s concern and order that “every
spinning wheel” be “exterminated or exorcized” (CP 291),
following the fairy’s prophecy that the princess shall fall
dead after she pricks herself on a spinning wheel at the age
of fifteen.
In Sexton's “Briar Rose,ˮ the notion of hiatus is
closely connected to the dynamics of sleep and awakening.
One may argue that the poem has its own “gold key” to
penetrate this hiatus and see through what is normally
perceived as a homogeneous body of “sleep.” Several
questions surface: what exactly is the significance of this
hiatus? If the whole world around “Briar Roseˮ joins her in
All went well
except for the fear the fear of sleep.
Briar Rose
was an insomniac...
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
they may be said to be part of those deeply engraved fairytale contents
which will allow no revision.
8
I refer here to the Grimms' version. In Sexton’s poem, the whole attic
episode is missing. I would argue that most readers read Sexton with
Grimms’ narrative in mind and fill in the gaps.
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Sara Meyer
mixing her some knock out drops. (CP 293)9
In sleep, the image of the thirteenth witch replaces
that of the dreamer at the table, thus reawakening a sense of
guilt or fear over the act of her father’s betrayal. Indeed, the
image of the “faltering crone” is that of a victim who “eats
betrayal like a slice of meat.” The dream seems to “correct”
the absence of the thirteenth witch from the christening of
Briar Rose by placing the witch back at the table. The
witch, we are reminded, was not invited because the king
had “only twelve gold plates” (CP 291), and in the dream
she is eating from the plate of the princess. The king’s
betrayal somehow makes the princess see herself as the
faltering crone as they both are prey to the same perpetrator.
Furthermore -
By explaining Briar Rose’s fear of sleep, the speaker
seems to penetrate the thick, numb unknown country of
unconsciousness and peer into the abyss of its darker,
painful powers. In other words, by digging into the tunnels
of what is otherwise dismissed as inaction or a form of
absence and withdrawal, Sexton seems to suggest that it is
precisely this hiatus where the demons are active and where
one may be cruelly violated and abused. It is
That brutal place
where I lie down with cattle prods,
the hole in my cheek open.
Further, I must not dream
for when I do I see the table set
and a faltering crone at my place,
her eyes burnt by cigarettes
and she eats betrayal like a slice of meat. (Sexton
293)
9
I must not sleep
for while asleep I’m ninety
and think I’m dying.
Death rattles in my throat
like a marble. (CP 293).
The nightmarish reality of sleep, and the fear of death
can be avoided if the speaker stays awake; her control over
her life is contingent on states of awakening. Asleep, she is
exposed to the brutal abuse of those around her.
We may, in comparison, look at an earlier poem where Sexton
describes her addiction to sleeping pills.
It’s a ceremony
but like any other sport
it’s full of rules.
It’s like a musical tennis match where
my mouth keeps catching the ball,
Then I lie on my altar
Elevated by the eight chemical kisses. (“The Addict,” CP
166)
This trance girl
is yours to do with.
You could lay her in a grave
an awful package
and shovel dirt on her face
and she’d never call back: Hello there! (CP 294)
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Revisiting Grimms' Fairytales through the
Confessional Mode in Sexton’s Transformations
Sexton conflates sleep and trance states; what seems
to characterize both is a kind of duality. These phases allow
one to depart from here and now and recreate other points
in time, dreamed, memorized or hallucinated as in fantasy.
Time forms a kind of a pocket, where the present moment is
suspended and one may plunge into other moments of her
life. Such plunging marks Sexton’s swerve from the
original tale by the Brothers Grimm and it is made possible
through “opening” the “lidˮ of time and exploring multiple
layers of happenings.
Although the middle-aged witch says “in due time”
in Sexton’s “Briar Rose,” ironically, almost nothing
happens “in due time” in the poem. To begin with, while
Sexton says in her letters that she wanted to make the
fairytales “contemporary,” it is clearly not the case. Rather,
we may note her creation of a hybrid temporality where the
typical fairytale details are caricatured by being presented
through the prism of modernity. Such hybridity accentuates
the sense of anachronism and defamiliarizes the all too
known skeletal fairytale. The effect is comic. Another effect
is the destruction of the “feeling of timelessness.”10
Lacking any form of self-defense, or even a way of
protesting against her perpetrator, the woman in sleep is as
far as one can get from the Grimms' notion of the sleeping
beauty that sleeps intact in the palace waiting to be rescued
by a passing prince. Among other ironies, Sexton alerts us
to the understanding that since everything is decreed, the
prince is not a special hero who manages to struggle
through the thorns. Rather, he happens to be there “in due
time” and thus can “get through.” But the thorny edge of
the irony cuts even more deeply when we realize that what
seems to suggest a peaceful or deathlike mode of being is in
fact a torturing reality. If that is the case, one may wonder
what happened during those hundred years of sleep. Or
perhaps this is Sexton’s way of expressing the never-ending
tortures of night time, the horrific nightmares and fears
which seem indeed to last forever. It is particularly painful
as one realizes that beneath the placid mask of inaction a
whole underworld of brutal aggressors keeps working
uninterrupted.
By elaborating on the hellish existence in sleep,
Sexton tears off the mask of sleep and exposes an
alternative reading of that hiatus. It is not a phase of
emptiness but rather an explosive nightmare. This is
Sexton’s transformative reading of the thorns growing
around the palace. They embody the painful realities which
cannot be put to sleep and which keep growing and hurting
her even when she seems to be “intact.”
10
168
I borrow this phrase from Bettelheim’s comment about Perrault’s
detractive description of details of the dress of Sleeping Beauty which
“destroys that mythical, allegorical, and psychological time which is
suggested by the hundred years of sleep by making it specific
chronological time. It makes it all frivolous – …By such details which
were meant to amuse, Perrault destroyed the feeling of timelessness
that is an important element in the effectiveness of fairytales.” (230N).
Sara Meyer
The tale is continuously defamiliarized from its
traditional tone by a modern set of images drawn from the
reality of mid-twentieth century American life and spiced
with interesting cultural connections. Thus the thirteenth
fairy who is not invited to the christening of Briar Rose has
“eyes burnt by cigarettes,” and her “uterus is an empty
teacup.” After delivering her prophecy that “the princess
shall prick herself / on a spinning wheel in her fifteenth year
/ and then fall down dead. / Kaputt!” the alarmed king is
described as someone looking like “Munch’s Scream,”11
because “fairy prophecies, / in times like those / held
water.” Luckily, the twelfth fairy “had a certain kind of
eraser” and death was changed to sleep (CP 291).
“Eraser,” “tacks,” “safety pin,” “cigarettes,”
“Novocain” and other twentieth century items create a sense
of anachronism, destabilize the fairytale, transporting it
time-wise to a different context where it cannot quite sound
“itself,” as it seems to belong to “specific chronological
time” (Bettelheim 230). But anachronism seems to pervade
the two poems discussed here in many ways. To begin with,
in the introductory “The Gold Key” the speaker addresses
adults rather than children, waking them up from a
prolonged slumber. The narrative is deferred in time; it is
repeated albeit through transformations to an audience
which has already lost the “right” moment for being
narrated to. It is true that the purpose of this belated
bedtime story ritual has been altered from the original one.
Now it is aimed at educating the listeners about other
aspects of the fairytales which were not exposed earlier, but
even then this exile to later historical time of early bedtime
rituals is not quite “in due time.” Moreover, the whole idea
of “Briar Rose” revolves around anachronism, as her life
and the life of those around her is coming to a halt while the
rest of the world and the important briars keep existing in
their “real” time. In other words, the fairytale suggests a
reawakening into a world a hundred years removed from
the actual world of Briar Rose and her surroundings.
The lack of harmony between the subject and the
time she moves through has already been introduced in the
prologue of the poem, where the confessional voice
presents the readers with acts of trance-formations created
through a voyage back in time.
The poem starts with a call to the reader to “consider
/ a girl who keeps slipping off… / into the hypnotist’s
trance.” (CP 290). This state of “tranceˮ appears in other
poems by Sexton,12 and is closely connected with her
therapy. Curiously, the “girl” – and, in keeping with the
fairytale tradition, we have no specific information about
Curiously, Bettelheim account of Perrault’s handling of the fairytale
may remind us precisely of what Sexton is doing.
11 One of Sexton’s drawings entitled “Self Portrait” also bears a strange
similarity to Munch’s Scream. (Letters 115).
12
169
See , for instance In trance I could be any age,
Voice, gesture – all turned backward
Like a drugstore clock. (“Flee on Your Donkey,” 101).
“This Book of Odd Tales”:
Revisiting Grimms' Fairytales through the
Confessional Mode in Sexton’s Transformations
who the girl is,13 though we may assume this is part of the
confessional stance – “is stuck in the time machine, /
suddenly two years old sucking her thumb / as inward as a
snail, learning to talk again / she is on a voyage.” (CP 290).
Both “trance” and “voyage” are key terms which also
appear in the epilogue. The “voyage” takes her back as she
swims “further and further… / up like a salmon / struggling
into her mother’s pocketbook.” (CP 290). Thus the voyage
is simultaneously “upward” “inwards” and backward. The
mother’s pocketbook may suggest a kind of womb imagery,
and we may assume that in trance, the girl reclaims her past,
or is rather “stuck” in her past, perhaps not quite able to
outlive it.
The “pocketbook” as a womb imagery is curious
because it suggests, among others, the world of writing and
books. But while the “girl” is struggling back to the womb,
a sudden shift in voice introduces the repellent sound of her
father who initiates an incestuous “voyage” as he asks her
to be his “snooky”14 before he gives her his “root.” “That
kind of voyage / rank as honeysuckle” (Sexton 291) may
indeed be the trigger for the other voyage “up like a
salmon” to the mother’s “pocketbook.” It is as if the “little
doll child” embarks on two different voyages, as both the
Oedipal dynamics and the womb imagery seem to capture
her “spirit world” (CP 290).
The motherly “pocketbook” fails to offer any
protection. Similarly, the father’s attempts to seclude his
daughter from the “odor” of all other males in the kingdom,
and his call to “exterminate” all the spindles in the kingdom
– lest the prophecy of the thirteen fairy comes true and
Briar Rose pricks her finger and falls asleep – ends in
failure. The inevitable moment of “pricking,” clearly a
sexual image, does come around, as Briar Rose reaches
sexual maturation at the age of fifteen, and just a “little
while” afterwards (a hundred years!) she finds her prince.
As George alerts us, while “in her version of ‘Briar Rose,’
Sexton plays out the effects of [a] smothering and
overprotective love on the part of the fathers for the ‘purity’
and ‘safety of their daughters’:” finally “Briar Rose
manages to get in trouble despite her father’s obsessive
restrictions on her activities” (38).
Although valuable and protected, the “doll-childˮ is
yet prone to what is called in the epilogue “a theft.”
There was a theft.
That much I am told.
I was abandoned.
That much I know.
I was forced backward.
I was forced forward
I was passed hand to hand
like a bowl of fruit. (CP 294)
See Bettelheim’s discussion on the use of titles and names in fairytales
as referring to “everyman, people very much like us.” (47).
14 “To snooker someone is to deceive them, while ‘snookums’ is a slang
expression for a loved one or partner” (Skorczeweski 314)
13
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Sara Meyer
protected by a jealous father who makes her dwell in his
odor by making “every male in the court / …scour his
tongue.” (CP 292). It is a narrative of graphic, disturbing
rape-like sexuality where the speaker describes –
The bowl of fruit transforms the speaker into an
edible object, bound to be devoured by whoever has a hold
on her. Within this system of exchange, the value she
represents leading to a “theft” makes her yet another
commodity in the modern American society of
consumerism.
…my father drunkenly bent over my bed,
circling the abyss like a shark,
my father thick upon me
like some sleeping jellyfish. (CP 294)
each night I am nailed into place
and I forget who I am (CP 294)
The poem ends with a question which has already
been answered in the prologue:
The identity confusion is a direct result of being
“forced backward” and “forward” – probably forced to
move in time, expected to behave both as a little girl and as
a woman simultaneously. Surely the incestuous episodes
which the poem so clearly delineates present the most
painful form of dissociation from “due time” as sexuality is
“forced” prematurely, thus creating more confusion and
dissolution of boundary lines between self and other.15
With incest looming at the center of the plot, one
wonders how, indeed, as Bettelheim suggests, “as with all
great art, the fairytale’s deepest meaning will be different
for each person and different for the same person at various
moments in his life” (12). Sexton’s reading of “Briar Rose”
inclines toward the story of father-daughter incestuous,
suffocating relationships, where the daughter is over15
What voyage this, little girl?
This coming out of prison?
God help-this life after death? (CP 294, my
emphasis)
In the prologue the incestuous episode ends with
That kind of voyage,
rank as honeysuckle. (CP 291, my emphasis).
As in “The Gold Key,” the answer precedes the
question of the epilogue. The prologue and epilogue seem
to mirror one another as the most painful locus of the
voyage into the past surfaces not as a destination point but
rather both as starting and ending points. The voyage
backward traverses the fairytale only to reemerge at
(seemingly) the same place. The sense of being “forced
backward” and forward may very well relate to the
movement of the reader in the poem, as the accumulating
For a detailed analysis of the poem’s dealing with incest and the
history of failing to read this as incest because of cultural barriers see
Skorczewski’s “What Prison is This? Literary Critics Cover Incest in
Anne Sexton’s ‘Briar Rose.'”
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Confessional Mode in Sexton’s Transformations
Daddy! Daddy! / Presto / She’s out of prison” (CP 294, my
emphasis).
The word “Presto” which suggests a very swift
moment, like the blink of an eye, seems to offer an
immediate magic-like response. Twice the same ritual
appears, suggesting a form of some compulsory act, a kind
of an automatic syndrome leading from sleep to awakening
through the agency of a kiss, followed by the cry “Daddy!”
and the immediate sense of release from “prison.” Prison
here refers to the state of sleep or trance. It is as if the very
cry “Daddy” is a kind of incantation; one wonders whether
the father has actually to be there or whether the mere
calling of his name is sufficient to dispel the trance. Indeed,
as in a hypnotic trance, “Daddy!” seems to be a key word
used to awaken the girl in trance. In “Self in 1958” Sexton
presents a similar doll-like woman “with eyes that cut open
without landfall or nightfall… / eyes that cut open, blue,
steel and close.” The passive speaker, much like the “trance
girl,” who is “yours to do with” and who passively accepts
various horrific forms of abuse, is manipulated by others –
painful realities do not unveil a hidden truth but swim
through the all too overt trauma back and forth rather than
from beginning to end or from ignorance to knowledge.
What seem to change, after all, are the automatic syndromes
of sleep and awakening as well as the speaker’s sense of
anger which finally surfaces in the last lines.
In looking at how the introductory poem and “Briar
Rose” work together, we may note some similar dynamics.
When “This boy” finds the gold key and the book matches
it, Sexton uses the word “Presto” to indicate the moment of
magic –
He turns the key
Presto!
It opens this book of odd tales. (CP 224, my
emphasis)
In a similar way, the word “Presto” introduces us
twice to the magical moment of Briar Rose’s reawakening:
She woke up crying:
Daddy! Daddy!
Presto! She’s out of prison! (CP 293, my emphasis)
Someone plays with me,
………………………….
Someone pretends with me
I am walled in solid by their noise –
Or puts me upon their straight bed.
In the section which already exceeds the fairytale and
may be part of the epilogue, the insomniac Briar Rose, “all
shot up with Novocain / This trance girl…” will finally
awake from her “trance” if “you kissed her on the mouth,”
“her eyes would spring open” and she will “call out:
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Sara Meyer
The sense of acute unreality and self-alienation is
expressed in the speaker’s words: “They think I am me!”
(CP 155).
However, in the final section of “Briar Rose,” the
voice in the poem – a composite voice of the middle-aged
witch, the princess, this “girl” in a trance and the
confessional poet – finally gathers force and protests
against the abusive father. The incestuous scene ends with a
question indicating self-awareness. The exclamation mark
which followed “Daddy!” in the first two cases is now
replaced with a question mark –
fables. I feel my Transformations needs an introduction
telling of the value of my (one could say) rape of themˮ
(Letters 367). With “rape,” a particularly apt word in the
context of “Briar Rose,” one senses Sexton’s defiance of the
fairy tales’ promise of a happy ending; her pressing need to
defile their surface and impregnate them with the seeds of
the painful knowledge of the “middle-aged witch.”
But Sexton’s introduction to her own book may
indeed be read as a form of “rape.” “Presto” mimics the all
too easy flat act of transformation, doing away with any
kind of hiatus which may be filled with blackness and
horror. By repeatedly using that word in “The Gold Key”
and in “Briar Rose,” Sexton seems to stress the artificiality
of such swift dynamics. We may be reminded of the
original text of “The Gold Key” by the Brothers Grimm,
where, in stark opposition, the unattainable contents of the
iron chest and the never-ending hiatus fix us in place,
frustrating our need for completion and resolution. We are
asked to “wait” and it is in the waiting that each one of us
may venture to find their own narrative in the chest.
In Sexton’s poem, the opening of the “book of odd
tales” is instant. Rereading the Grimms' text we notice that
the boy finds a tiny keyhole and it is hard for him to turn
the key. In Sexton’s version, the boy is already an
adolescent of sixteen, and he has no problem turning the
key. Perhaps we should pay attention to Bettelheim’s
suggestion that “turning a key in a lock often symbolizes
intercourse” (233). Indeed, the very thin keyhole may
Daddy?
That’s another kind of prison. (CP 294).
The magic word does not quite work anymore and,
although out of her sleep, our speaker realizes she is
switching one kind of prison with another. The incestuous
scene right after that may suggest how every relationship
with any “prince” is forever tainted with the earlier memory
of the oedipal romance. The “root” (clearly a phallic image)
presented in the prologue turns out to be the root for a
prolonged history of maimed sexuality.
The anger in the last lines of the poem leaves no
doubt as to the change that takes place, after all. And
indeed, it seems that the emotional core of “Briar Rose”
(and of other poems in the book as well) is rage. Speaking
of this book in her letters, Sexton says: “The better books of
fairytales have introductions telling of the value of these old
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Revisiting Grimms' Fairytales through the
Confessional Mode in Sexton’s Transformations
suggest the boy’s difficulty in penetrating a too tight vagina
and the inability to look inside the chest may be read as a
way of barring the readers from looking into the abyss of
the female sexual organ. “We must wait” may be read as a
call to the child to be patient before entering the realm of
sexual maturity. In other words, the fairytale may well be
about the frustrating phase of puberty.
Sexton’s boy is already sixteen. He has passed
puberty and his instant “opening” of the book may indeed
point at Sexton’s reading of the original text as one about
sexual maturation. But what seems to capture Sexton’s
imagination is the “Presto” act of the boy. It is indeed
almost rape-like, as it needs no hiatus before opening the
“book.” Consummation wins the game. In other words,
Sexton’s version of Grimms' fairytale speeds up the rate of
“openingˮ the book, and may therefore suggest various
levels of rape – the “rape” of the original text, and the
incestuous oedipal rape as one of the book’s “odd stories.”
While some critics venture to probe the authenticity
of the incestuous act, my reading discards that question as
totally irrelevant to the reading of the poem. As in other
confessional poems, one does not speak of history but
rather of poetic representation of personal dynamics. Sexton
herself often alerts us to how her poems construct a self (or
selves) through manipulation of what may be perceived as
biographical materials. Rather than hunt for what may never
be realized, I think we should read Sexton’s work in light of
her own quotation from an essay by Yeats, placed as an
epitaph to her Love Poems –
One should say before sleeping, “I have lived many
lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a
beloved has sat upon my knees and I have sat upon
the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has
been shall be again.” (CP 173).
These words point at Sexton’s wish to move beyond
the solipsistic cage of autobiography and embrace a more
universalized scope of narrative. While the painful site of
past traumas is a form of imprisonment which keeps
throwing her backward, the multiple personae in
Transformations provide a familiar cultural context, shared
by many others. The act of transformation is double-edgedon the one hand it manipulates the Grimms' narratives so
that they become Sextonized and, on the other, it allows
Sexton to see her own past and the formative traumas that
forever haunt her imagination as yet another Grimm
narrative. Although “everything that has been shall be
again,” it may never be quite itself.
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176