Analysis Of Her Kind By Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was a junior-college dropout who, inspired by emotional distress, became a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize as well as three honorary doctorates. Her poems usually dealt with intensely personal, often feminist, subject matter due to her tortured relationships with gender roles and the place of women in society. The movies, women’s magazines and even some women’s schools supported the notion that decent women took naturally to homemaking and mothering (Schulman). Like others of her generation, Sexton was frustrated by this fixed feminine role society was encouraging. Her poem “Cinderella” is an example of her views, and it also introduces a new topic of how out of touch with reality fairy tales often are. In “Cinderella”, Anne Sexton uses tone and symbolism to portray her attitude towards traditional gender roles and the unrealistic life of fairy tales.

Anne Sexton was a poet and a woman, but most importantly, she was an outcast. Subjected to nervous breakdowns and admitted to a neuropsychiatry hospital, Sexton must have been all too familiar with the staring eyes and the judging minds of the public. Just being a woman in today's world often can be enough to degrade a person in the public's eye, let alone being labeled as a crazy woman. But Anne Sexton did not let society remain unchallenged in its views. She voiced a different opinion of women through poetry. In Anne Sexton's "Her Kind" the speaker of the poem embraces society's negative stereotype of modern, liberated women and transforms it into a positive image. Two voices, the voice of

In Anne Sexton’s poem “The Abortion”, she uses literary devices to reflect her heart wrenching decision of whether or not to abort one of her children, which reflects the style of confessional poetry because she is sharing her personal feelings and experiences. Anne Sexton was a famous poet of confessional poetry, where the poets write about their private experiences with feelings about death, trauma, and depression in their lives. Anne Sexton wrote from the point of view of an upper middle class woman. She had two children, and the stress of having them, gave her life long depression. Sexton was sent to a psychiatric hospital after the birth of her second child. “The Abortion” displays all of Sexton’s feelings that she has about her abortion.

Anne Bradstreet was not the typical Puritan author. She wrote sweet and loving poems that greatly contrasted from other writers of her time. She did not write the ever so popular sermons that told people that they were going to hell and there was nothing they could do about it. Bradstreet was a rarity in Puritan times, she was a very educated woman that worked on something other than being a woman in the household. She was one of a kind and the beginning of an era. Using literary criticism when reading Anne Bradstreet’s poems adds a deeper understanding of her character and difficulties in life.

able to get rid of. At the end of the poem Sexton admits the thoughts of suicide are something you can never get rid of, “and yet she waits for me, year after year” (line 25). Sexton justifies the reasons for her suicide by saying that her thoughts and bad memories will never stop coming back because this has been happening for years and years now there is no going back for Sexton. She leaves us with the last stanza filled with unfinished things. This could be a metaphor for her life that is unfinished because of her death occurrence.

By analyzing the construction of gender roles and transformation within the poetic retelling of Snow White by Anne Sexton, we are able to think about these topics in a more honest way that reveals their troublesome nature. First, by connecting presents themes and elements in this modern day version that don’t appear in more classical versions, we are immediately given a more vivid depiction of how characters function. Descriptions of cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper, dwarfs being described as little hot dogs and czars, and the queen eating the boar's heart like a piece of cube steak, are just a few examples of the vivid descriptions that lace this poem. These descriptions pull meaning from more modern day topics, they objectify characters,

Society’s stigmas about mental health tell people to bury their issues in the cracks of their house, behind locked doors, and under their floorboards. When dealing with depression, feelings often seem surreal. If one’s secret escapes, society often tells them that what they feel is made up. It is something that exists only in their head. Other times it feels like a demonic spirit is inflicting the pain. Anne Sexton felt possessed by the “Witch” inside her. She thought of her depression as the witch of mental illness, but like witches and elves, it was just a bad fantasy. In the poem “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton, the author writes about the witch inside her and how the voices amongst women with mental illness are buried along with their problems. Using symbolism, imagery, and repetition Anne’s work illustrates the ideas behind depression, society's disbelief, and how women struggling and blatantly misunderstood.

The speaker is deduced as a woman from the first stanza’s feminine references to “Dolls” (5) and “threading” (7). Immediately, the narrator is placed in a role that stereotypes her to be a woman. Dickinson does this to

The poem starts with the statement, “a woman who loves a woman is forever young” (Sexton 1-3). These beginning lines set a common theme of eternal youthfulness and lesbian desire. In her introduction, Sexton also plays on the imagery of old versus young in her descriptions of “old breast against young breast”

George Gascoigne’s sonnet, “For That He Looked Not upon Her,” portrays a sullen man, hurt by the woman he loved. Through the uses of form, diction, and imagery, the sonnet evokes a complex attitude in each quatrain elaborating on the stages of torment the speaker receives from his ex-lover. By using these literary devices, the speaker portrays the dangers of desire and the conflicts that arise from within it. Gascoigne conveys a solemn and melancholy complex attitude developed throughout the use of such literary devices. The attitude of the speaker, expressed through the form of the sonnet, explains the dangers of gazing at the woman who burned him.

She enforces this idea onto the narrator tirelessly regardless of actually considering her daughter’s outlook of the mother’s idea. This shows that the narrator’s mother has taken another extreme to be too involved and controlling her life. Next, is the time and age the speaker and narrator are from the poem, “Hanging Fire”, and the story, “Two kinds”, are currently in. For instance, in Lorde’s poem, the speaker says she is fourteen, and she has various ordeals to do. Due to constant pressure and confusion and the lonesome environment she lives in, she questions whether she would come out of it alive and how would people finally understand her. This depicts that the speaker is currently a teenage girl who shall live the moment to then eventually confront and solve her

Here, we are able to see that the misinterpretation among women, and in general all humanity, is the problem. It is not the other itself but more, the act of othering without acknowledging the misinterpretation. It is this act, whether knowingly there or disruptively by means of social training that allows for distance and separation. Lorde alludes to the fact that this separation is in fact more importantly the problem to overcome. Most people would hope that by ignoring what is, “different,” difference would altogether just go away and not affect them. In this specific essay, Audre Lorde however, demands one to do just the opposite, recognize it and deal with it. One can be aware of what is different but it is not until one accepts the difference and declares understanding of it that one can act upon it to remove the barrier of separation and ignorance. In this reading along with other reading we have done in class as well, the process of other has taught us that if it doesn’t fit the norm, it does not necessarily mean it is any less worthy than what does fall under the

Another useful tool in analyzing a poem is to identify poetic devices, meter, and a rhyme scheme. Through her deft use of extended metaphor, Bradstreet weaves an intricate web of parallels between parent and author and between child and book--both relationships of creator to creation. This use of metaphor allows the reader to relate emotionally to Bradstreet’s situation. In line seven, we see the uses of litotes, “At thy return my blushing was not small,” to express the depth of her embarrassment. She also uses metonymy in line eight to express her pain more clearly, “My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.” The simile used in line nine stresses her objection to the published work, “I cast thee by as one unfit for light.” Then in line 19, the poetic device of consonance is used which provides emphasis on her warning, “In this array ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.” In this poem, through the use of personification and apostrophe Bradstreet conveys her feelings and emotions. Anne Bradstreet ensures her poem’s success by linking the triumph and tragedy of authorship with the pain and pleasure of creating and nurturing human life. The meter used is

The poem “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton describes different scenarios of a woman. In the poem, Anne Sexton uses three different characters to explain that she has been each of them in some way. Society places a gender role on what women are allowed to be and how they should behave, condemning the women who do not conform, trying to change them into society’s perfect view of what a woman should be. While this poem shows the author describing herself in terms of the supernatural, it ultimately shows that rebellion against societal norms for women comes at a cost, sparking judgement from a society that sees women as common housewives. Her imagery in the poem represents how she is seen as a disfigured and

From Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or Bronte’s Jane Eyre, from Homer’s Penelope to Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara, authors have portrayed powerful personalities, and endowed their feminine characters with wisdom and fragility, giving us what we call today