Anne Sexton

Anne Bradstreet was born in 1612 in Northampton, England. She was the daughter of Thomas and Dorothy Dudley. Despite the fact that she did not attend school, she was well educated compared to other girls in her time period. She received this education from her father, Thomas. At the age 16, she got married to Simon Bradstreet. Simon Bradstreet graduated from Cambridge University and assisted Anne’s father with the management of the Earl’s estate in Sempringham.

The poem Her Kind by Anne Sexton is a story regarding the past. The narrator is explaining significant dark moments in her life. She briefly explains who she has been in her past life, which is structured into three stanzas. First, she depicts herself as a lonely witch, then a misunderstood cavewomen and lastly a victimized villager. However the most important characteristic of the speaker is that she is a woman and that is not something she is ashamed of, as she makes it clear in the last sentence of every stanza that she identifies herself as a woman. The tone of this poem is very calm and not at all angry. She is not upset about her life she is simply just telling the readers her story, which happens to be very disturbing and not at all normal. The tone is also quite haunting due to the author’s use of imagery to describe witchcraft. In the first stanza the author describes the narrator as a witch and how she is “dreaming of evil (3)” she starts to state true characteristics of what this witch looks like “twelve-fingered, out of mind (5)”. In the second stanza the author continues to use a twisted fairytale image when she states that the woman “fixed suppers for the worms and the elves (11)”. Since elves do not exist in the world which humans adhere to know this gives the reader an extended image of witchcraft and fairytales. In the third stanza the narrator implies that she is dead when she states, “where your flames still bite my thigh (18)”. This leads the reader to

In the poem Old by Anne Sexton, the narrator is presumably in a hospital setting as she says she is afraid of “needles” and tired of “rubber sheets”, “tubes”, and “faces that I don’t know”. This choice of setting is most likely a result of Sexton’s own stays in mental hospitals because of her depression and addiction troubles. After the setting is established the narrator says that she thinks “death is starting” and that is starts “like a dream”. Dreams are seen as a positive thing where people experience their inner most desires. By equating death to a dream, Sexton is saying that she sees death as a place of peace and solace from unhappiness. The suicidal tendencies expressed in the poem as well as the narrative voice remind me of conversations

In detail, Anne Hutchinson was first born as Anne Marbury, and she was a daughter of an Anglican clergyman and an herbalist. In 1591, Anne Marbury was born in a town named Alford in Lincolnshire, England. However, according to Biography.com, her birth date was not exact, and the only evidence of her birth was her a record of her baptism on July 20, 1591. Anne Marbury grew up in an usual environment for a little girl. “Her father instilled her

More specifically this tale takes place in the Victorian Era, in which many of the characters do not reflect the values that were taught open them this time period. Where aggressive and dominating behavior is seen as masculine, and sensitive and submissive acts are considered feminine, Carroll paints a picture of a society where these qualities are switched. The Victorian Era was a strict time for women, where they were expected to act “proper” at all times, especially in public and in the presence of men, emphasizing that a woman was expected to be innocent and almost completely arrogant of intellectual opinion at all times. Additionally, Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, demonstrates the traditional expectations upon males at the time, portraying masculine characteristics through the prince. He is shown as a power figure, as his relationship with sleeping beauty expresses his need for dominance as she is the damsel in distress. The tale reads, “A young and gallant prince is always brave, however; so he continued on his way, and presently reached a large forecourt” (Perrault 51). Due to the expectation of bravery, independence and assertiveness upon males, the prince had saved the princess from the 100-year slumber, satisfying his masculinity. Furthermore, an English poet named,

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,

As a child, I was told fairytales such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs every night before I went to sleep. Fairytales are an adventurous way to expand a child’s imagination and open their eyes to experience a new perspective. Modernizations of fairytales typically relate to a specific audience, such as adolescence, and put a contemporary spin on the old-aged tale. Instead of using whimsical themes heavily centered in nature, the contemporary poems connect with the reader in a more realistic everyday scenario. Also, many modernizations are written in poetic form to help reconstruct a flow in the piece and to develop or sometimes completely change the meaning from that of the original fairytale. Comparing Grimm’s Fairytale Snow White

Many great literary and artistic geniuses have been troubled with deep melancholy and phrenic illness. Anne Sexton is an example of a poet with such quandaries who utilized her personal despair to inspire her poetic works. Sexton’s raw material on the inequality of women in a flawed society has sprouted an uproar for change.

Unlike any other form of literature or entertainment, Fairy Tales help children to discover their identity and suggest experiences needed to develop their character. In Bruno Bettelheim’s “Life Divined from the Inside” Bettelheim states that “Fairy Tales intimate that a rewarding, good life is within one’s reach despite adversity-but only if one does not shy away from the hazardous struggles without which one can never achieve true identity (Bettelheim 106). Anne Sexton’s “Cinderella” is a perfect example of Bettelheim’s definition of a Fairy Tale.

Every author, poet, playwright has a subtle message that they would like present to their audience. It may be a lifelong struggle that they have put into words, or a multiple page book that took a lifetime to write. A poet by the name of Anne Sexton sought out to challenge society’s views of women by writing “Her Kind”. A poet, a playwright, and an author of children’s books, Anne Sexton writes about the conflicts of a social outcast living in modern times. She voices the hardships she faces through three different speakers in her poem. At the end of the poem, the woman is not ashamed nor afraid of whom she is and is ready to die in peace. In Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind”, the main idea the speaker is depicting is the multiple stereotypes placed on a woman, by society. Sexton’s vivid use of imagery paints a picture of the witch, house wife, and mother cliché, while also implying the poem is autobiographical as Sexton went through her own personal struggles during her life.

Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928. She spent her comfortable but possibly abusive childhood in Weston, Massachusetts, with her maiden great-aunt as her closest confidante. She attended one year of boarding school and one year of Garland Junior College which she considered to be a finishing school. Anne Sexton married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II when she was 19, but he had to serve in Korea shortly after their marriage, so Sexton became a fashion model. When she was 25, in 1953, Sexton gave birth to her first child and in 1955 to her second. After the birth of her first daughter, Anne Sexton suffered her first breakdown and was admitted to a neuropsychiatric hospital (a hospital that treats mental disorders caused by the nervous

Heavy drinker as he was, Anne's father neglected his parenting duties, whereas her mother, an elusive and indifferent person, would have rather passed on the care of the children to nannies. Craving for her attention and acceptance, Anne would become receptive to her mother's moods and extremely susceptible to criticism, which would shape the poet's future character, as well as enhance her inferiority complex. Taking into consideration the confessional nature of Sexton's poetry, critics and readers have been suspecting other pathologies in her family history, for some poems deal with the problem of incest. Nevertheless, Anne's relatives and later psychiatrists have unanimously denied these assumptions indicating that her numerous mental disorders caused memory failures. The poet's forging of her biography and her psychiatric ailments will be elaborated on in the chapters to follow. As an outsider and rebel, Anne received wide recognition among peers in her teenage years. She became attractive and thoroughly aware of her sexuality which, together with her biting language, was considered inappropriate in a conservative circle and caused her troubles. To make her time pass more pleasantly, Anne was busy with fleeting flirtations, but did not engage in any artistic activities or other interests. In fact, she led a type of life she despised; her youth was shallow and all she had in prospect was the lot of a housewife. Little did she know, however, about this role in 1948 when she met her future husband, Alfred Sexton, whom she married in the fear of being pregnant. As she later admitted, “Before I was married I had never washed one dish or seen how you fried an egg or baked a potato” (Middlebrook 1991: 23). Anne had had some minor professional experience in modeling, but being a wife, she was spending her time idly, overwhelmed by listlessness and exasperation. To alleviate her boredom, she became

Anne Sexton, an author of confessional poetry lived a short, traumatizing life. Writing poetry was a way to express her deep suppressed emotions. Sexton is untraditional and inconsistent in the formation of poems, yet she is able to create impeccable imagery, criticize and challenge the minds of her readers. Through further analysis, one can see the connection of her past experiences to her cynical attitude of the realistic events outlined in her writing. Sexton gives her poem, Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) an interesting obscure twist, exposing a perplexing interpretation to the renowned Brothers Grimm tale. She freely explores

When reading children’s literature/ fairy tales it becomes apparent that many female protagonists share similarities. Whether superficially or specifically, many qualities, personalities, and traits match up between the characters. Dorothy (Bauman) and Snowdrop (The Grimm Brothers) demonstrate this perfectly, as the two girls are very much alike. Evidence of this is found in the similarity of their lives, how their ‘stories’ pan out, and their personalities.

“Life is like the stanzas of a poem.” Anne Sexton is unlike any other poets, her life, not only influences her poems, but her poems are part of her life. Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty), Baby picture, and Music Swims Back To Me are three examples in which sexton describes her life as poems. The troubled childhood and the depressed adulthood of Anne Sexton lead to the depressed and dark nature of her writing.