Anne Sexton the Feminist

I was very pleased to see that Anne Sexton was included in our reading selection this week. The indomitable Anne Sexton is a shining example of the feminist spirit in the postmodernist era. She displays a heavy dependence upon oral tradition and the spoken word in her poetry—along with almost every major aspect of feminist tone and style from that profound period of American history. As was the case with the section on the Beats, I enjoyed the poems included in our anthology (especially the profound The Addict), but my favorites were not included here. I believe her most poignant poem is Self in 1958, but Her Kind is also an excellent example of her best work and strong feminist stance.

Sexton’s poems simultaneously express biting wit, repressed fury, and excruciating loneliness, along with the private, “confessional” tone popular with the Beats. In fact, Sexton’s contemporary was Allen Ginsberg, who often contemplated in his own poems her apparent fear that human feeling and natural wonder at the world were being stifled to the point of nonexistence. Sexton picks up this line of thought and carries it forward in a distinctly feminist tone with Self in 1958—her own reaction to the uniform “plasticness” of the people and the world around her, and to her life as a woman trapped in a stifling gender role. In this poem, Sexton seems to yearn for a real world, a real life, and freedom, but she is not able to even summon the emotions necessary for such an awakening anymore: “I would cry / … if I could remember how / and if I had the tears.” She is bearing witness to the so-called “death of feeling,” a fear that the drive toward power, outward success, and the accumulation of wealth were stifling the truth of domestic feelings and personal emotions. Sexton is trapped in an unreal world; perfect in all appearances, but actually a sham—a cover-up so powerful that it becomes ultimately inescapable. She is the fragmented woman described by Betty Friedan, experiencing the “schizophrenic split”: angelic outside and monstrously torn apart inside.

In her other poems, Sexton continues to write powerfully as a response to the pressures of gender role conformity. She uses a kind of heated irony and dark humor (demonstrated piercing in Her Kind), and she often reveals the Freudian influence of imagining a horrific inner life, which she couples with confessional, “therapist’s couch” overtones (painfully illustrated in For My Lover, Returning to His Wife). She is also beautifully talented at utilizing her own, personal “voice” in natural American vernacular and intimate sounding speech (portrayed with heartbreaking exquisiteness in The Truth the Dead Know).

In an important contribution to the emerging admiration and respect for women in the literature world, Anne Sexton gives a brutally honest, painfully self-aware account of a woman’s life in “picture-perfect” 1950s and ’60s suburbia. Opening the secret gates that kept the female sex locked into a mold of male-envisioned womanhood, Sexton reveals complex layers of excruciating confusion, stifled emotion, and suppressed needs: “What is reality / to this synthetic doll / who should smile, who should shift gears, / … and have no evidence of ruin or fears?”