Anne Sexton the Feminist

A shining example of the postmodernist era, Anne Sexton displays a heavy dependence upon oral tradition and the spoken word in her poetry—along with almost every other major aspect of postmodernist style and themes.  Her poems express irony, anger, and loneliness, and she takes on an intimate, almost confessional tone—popularized by the apparent movement of writers in the ’50s first to the psychiatrist’s office and then directly to the typewriter to share their most private findings with the world at large. 

When Sexton’s contemporary Allen Ginsberg writes, “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love,” he is reflecting the postmodernist feeling that our most human values—love, compassion, wonder—are threatened and even on the verge of extinction in our unfeeling, impassive modern culture. Sexton picks up this same line of thought and carries it further in the poem Self in 1958—her own reaction to the uniform “plasticness” of the people and the world around her.  In this poem, Sexton seems to yearn for a real world, a real life, but 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 very real postmodernist 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.

            Sexton writes powerfully as a response to the pressures of gender role conformity (as in Self in 1958). 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 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?”