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The Female as the Eternal Pariah in “Her Kind” Essay

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Everyone has once been someone that they aren’t necessarily ashamed of, but something they aren’t anymore. When you’re in school, everyone is different; between the popular kids, the jocks, the cheerleader, the dorks, the Goths, and all the other “types” of people. In “Her Kind,” Anne Sexton shows that she has been a lot of different women, and she is not them now. In this paper we will be diving into the meanings behind the displaced “I,” the tone and reparation, and who Anne Sexton really is and how that affects what she is trying to let people see through this poem. The double “I’s” are the most important aspect of this poem and need to be understood. Everything in this poem is revolving around them. These “I’s” are undifferentiated, …show more content…

They are separated by a vast difference of insight and this is where the confusion is. “A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.”(13-14) As you can see, the second “I” steps out using “like” as to say she is the storyteller and is on the outside looking in. Middlebrooke goes to say this when she is explaining the difference between them, “…[the second]”I” steps out through the frame of “like that” to witness, interpret, and affirm her alter ego in the same line.” This is where the “I” goes from victim to witness and where she wishes to be understood. Another aspect of this poem is the repeation and tone. In every stanza the last two lines is where the second displaced “I” is set. “I have been her kind,” this is repeated all the way through the “Her Kind”(7,14,21). Tone in this poem is also very important. If you were to lay a lot of the words down randomly they come of nearly disgraceful; However Sexton’s tone in this poem is very close to blissful. She puts the words down in a near evil, but more towards a self satisfying voice that you wouldn’t expect to be coming from someone who is going out “a possessed witch, haunting the black air..”(1-2). As Johnson says, “Initializing evil and giving it a voice: a chortling…voice which suggests the “evil” is perhaps the wrong word after all.” Altogether this means that the first “I” is relatively harmless and is actually very vulnerable. You would thing that someone like this

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