Context: Anne Sexton was an American poet born on November 9th, 1928 in Newton, Massachusetts and raised in Weston. Her family was successful economically wise and Sexton was raised in a middle-class environment; however, Sexton’s relationship with her parents were extremely strained and perhaps abusive; her father was an alcoholic. It was suggested that Sexton may have been sexually abused by her parents and felt that they were hostile to her. As such, Sexton sought refuge in her close relationship with Anne Dingley, her maiden great-aunt, as an escape from her broken family, which further lead to Sexton’s traumatization after Dingley’s mental collapse and subsequent hospitalization. After the birth of her first child in 1953, Sexton …show more content…
For example, in the first stanza of the poem, Sexton invokes the objects that women are classified into, such as “my mouth and my breasts … [and] the cosmetics and the silks” (3-4). Sexton furthers this with how she was “tired of being a woman” (1) and “tired of the gender things” (10). As the poem progresses into the second stanza, Sexton’s dream sequence, the theme of gender roles remains prevalent. The poem delves into the injustice that women face in a world controlled by man, citing the martyr and Catholic Saint, Joan of Arc, who was put to death with one of the charges being wearing men’s clothes. In addition, Sexton’s will to rid herself of gender is also clear in the third stanza, which she writes “I lost my common gender and my final aspect. / Adam was on the left of me / and Eve was on the right of me” (28-30). This may be interpreted as a metaphor, as Adam was the first male and Eve the first female human created by God as told by Christians, by placing Sexton between them, it could be said that Sexton is neither male nor female, but one who is freed from gender. The entire poem and many of its literary devices resonates strongly with the poet’s message; her hate of gender roles and identities. As such, Sexton effectively sent her central argument to her reader.
Tone & Mood:
Consorting With Angels begins with a frustrated and angry tone, with Sexton describing the stereotypical gender roles that she is forced
Anne Bradstreet was America's first noteworthy poet in spite of the fact that she was a woman. Both the daughter and wife of Massachusetts governors, Bradstreet suffered all of the hardships of colonial life, was a mother, and still found time to write. Her poem, "The Author to Her Book," is an example of Bradstreet's excellent use of literary techniques while expressing genuine emotion and using domestic subject matter.
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
Jews have perished because of their beliefs since the beginning of time but never have so many Jews been persecuted worldwide as they were in World War II. Anne Frank’s diary reaches a place within all of our hearts because it reminds us how easily the innocents can suffer. Sometimes we may choose to close our eyes or look the other way when unjustifiable things happen in our society and Anne’s tale reminds us that ignorance, in part, claimed her life. Sadly, her story is but one of many of those who died in the Holocaust and as with other Jews, her fate was determined by the country she lived in, her sex and her age.
The reason I picked this topic is because I admire Anne Hutchinson and the history of her
The authors use of imagery paints a disconsolate scene of the struggles of young women. Anne Sexton grew up in a rather dismal home, noting abuse and neglect. Her parents were moderately wealthy, but mentally unavailable. Her depression took a turn for the worst after the birth of her first child. Since that severity wasn’t always there to haunt her, it
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”
women are still fighting for equality every day. In the time of Anne Bradstreet, women had few
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.
She seems to be unhappy with the long-established, traditional image of a woman: One who “fixes the suppers” for her family, “rearranges the misaligned” in her domicile, and who is “whiny” and repining (Sexton, lines 11-13). In the same way that the witch is isolated because of the stigmas annexed to her lifestyle, Sexton is verbalizing that a housewife can be solitary and misunderstood as well because of the isolation that emanates from her subordinate role in society. Just as the “witch” or outcast is misconstrue as malevolent or manipulating, the housewife can be misread as a nonessential or lesser
There is some evidence that Sexton's mother was jealous about her very early writing (Long). Sexton did not have obvious creative aspirations, but instead seemed to think more about a family of her own. At one point her mother accused her of plagiarism and had that particular writing examined. It was deemed to be original, but many scholars suggest this incident affected Sexton's relationship with her mother. Sexton's aunt on her father's side attempted suicide in early childhood, lived several decades in an apparently stable marriage, and eventually committed suicide just before she turned seventy. The family believes that if her aunt's suicide had any sort of influence on Sexton, it was probably informational (e.g., the aunt modeling suicide) rather than genetic.
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
Women in 2018 are fighting for the power and equality between men and women, but the world was not always like this in the past. Women who are strong willed and powerful are often seen as witches or self-centered. Her Kind by Anne Sexton is a powerful poem that engages the reader on an intimate level. The poem has a fairytale like persona, but it has death and sexuality weaved throughout. This poem captures a woman’s role in life and the alienation that comes along with being a woman.
As the poem progresses, Sexton’s further allocates different experiences into the constant theme of oppression in her life.
This biographical information is essential to understanding Anne Sexton’s influence on the fairy tale because her "transformations" of the Grimm Brother’s work rises out of her personal turmoil. Most of Sexton’s works before and after Transformations are of the confessional style, but through her poetic transformations of fairy tales, Sexton gives herself a more discrete outlet for her passions (Ostriker 255). Her biographer Diane Middlebrook notes that "the poems were a way to place her struggles ‘in legend rather than personal history" (37). The intensely metaphorical characters of Sexton’s fairy poetry are one example of this. For instance, Judith the cold and neglectful mother in "Snow White" surely represents Sexton’s own callous mother (Middlebrook 37). Sexton’s father is also recognizable in her work as